When they released me from the hospital, Vitali had moved my things to his apartment. I didn’t argue, but I did make him promise that his guys would watch Mama’s place and help her move back across town when she asked.
His home caught me by surprise. Compared to what it’d been when I first visited, the place had come alive. There was a different, nicer plush couch, and the curtains turned to heavy velvet drapes. A bigger mattress on an iron bedframe replaced the low, single-person sleeping space, and the big mirror previously leaned up against the wall hung next to a wall-length wardrobe treated with glossy enamel. Expensive, nice things. For me.
My face still looked very moon-like and swollen, so I avoided going outside where people would stare. Instead, I spent my days watching TV, cooking, and vacuuming, just like a good housewife in the black and white movies.
And I wrote.
I used to write short stories, mostly inspired by Nikolai Gogol because I loved satire. Elena pointed out how pretentious it sounded to draw inspiration from literature published more than a hundred years ago, and maybe she was right, but I liked the idea that the core of an author’s work could still touch me even if I didn’t completely relate to their world.
With every new page I added sitting at Vitali’s kitchen table, my writing shifted and took on a life it never had before. When I sat back after a couple hours and four cups of tea, before me was a love poem.
It should have made me gag. Not because I was against love, I wasn’t. I loved‘love,’ but didn’t write about it. Mama was the one with the harlequin romances decorating her shelves. And yet, I thought of Ivan Bunin as I did the dishes, and the kind of love he wrote. There was a sadness to his stories, and it made me feel better knowing it wasn’t all sunshine and kisses by the pond.
Yet, when I tried to give my little stories a tragic ending, I couldn’t.
This Katya hadn’t shown herself in quite a while, and I made a mental note to remind Vitali he still owed me Doctor Zhivago, and because we already discussed it, it wouldn’t count as a birthday gift.
How things had changed. How I had changed in such a short time.
It’s a wonder what became of a person once daily hardship wasn’t burdening their back. Instead, I got to carry the weight of what happened to me in the other apartment. Everything I already knew at the back of my mind, and tried so hard to ignore. I wasn’t a bystander, and I hadn’t been in a long time—but the idea that Katya Petrovnawas a part of this world proved hard to accept.
I certainly accepted it now, but that hardly made things better. There was ugly, and it was everywhere. At least it meant I could give my family a different life, all I had to do was push aside the thoughts of where the money came from, and remember that it would still sit in the accounts even if I wasn’t using it. Using it wasn’t a sin.
When I wasn’t writing, I began to snoop around, and found exactly what I expected. A few guns, money, neat stashes of documents for rental spaces and high-cost purchases. No personal items—no photographs, letters, or mementos. Hard to blame him, considering his life thus far. I thought to take pictures together, then thought of someone breaking in and seeing them hung up.
And that was life now, wasn’t it? What had I unknowingly sacrificed to be there? When we eventually had a family (oh God), would we hang our kids’ pictures on the wall?
…Would I have to‘make soup’with them there?
The thought stuck in my throat like coal. I would never be in that position again. I might have denied certain aspects of who Vitali was, but it only took getting hospitalized once to see the reason he wanted a loaded gun in my drawer.
But that was confusing too. Vitali had been very quiet about what happened. He was attentive, and I always had what I needed—the painkillers were truly a God-send after the first couple days. But I expected him to get angrier. Or, at least something. But every time I tried to mention it, he gently shut the subject down, saying that he would never, ever let such a thing happen again.
I believed him.
In the evenings, we watched a Mexican Telenovela abouta beautiful woman being courted by two men who seemed determined to destroy her view of happiness. Vitali fell asleep with his head in my lap almost every time, and that became my favorite part of the night.
He always braced himself against something with me, conscious of my smaller and weaker body, but in those moments, he couldn’t. The heaviness of him opened up a different kind of intimacy. His shoulder dug into me, and my leg fell asleep, and that was perfect in every single way. No restraint, no responsibility, just him—lying on me, loving me. Trusting me. Giving up control and allowing me to see the scars buried so deep they pulsed in tandem with his heart.
At that moment, he was just Vitali, the little boy who never got to be a boy, seeking and accepting love as he never could before. Love he didn’t have to buy. Love he’d always deserved.
The first time, I cried. The salty tears burned my stitches, but I grit my teeth and kept my core from shaking—careful not to wake him. How cruel was the world that denied him such affection? The world that took a brilliant young boy and put him through the depths of hell, where its ashes forever marked another’s sin under his skin.
But now, he chose me, risking an already broken heart for a chance at something beautiful. And that meant he was mine to love and show that the world doesn’t have to be so awful. A sadness giving birth to our‘happy.’
Ourhappy.
I bent down and kissed him. He didn’t flinch; he was asleep. But I like to think he felt it, and that kiss held at least some years of care and tenderness he had missed.
* **
For my birthday, Vitali gifted me a pair of diamond earrings, which was a nice gesture, but far from his usual thoughtful gifts.
Spoiled Katya. Ungrateful Katya.
Then, all of us went to Mama’s—and I mean all of us. Boris, Ivan, Pavel, and Misha were there with flowers and chocolates (I’d leave those for Mama) and several bottles of things I couldn’t drink. An intimate gathering consisting of his friends.
Promises were made that they would throw me a‘real’ birthday a week later when my swelling wouldn’t be so bad.
