The only one who wasn’t there was Elena.
When I still couldn’t reach her by phone, I went to her hospital. It was just as busy, but the staff looked four times as tired—even the new girls in their white uniforms and done-up hair that said they didn’t have enough experience to give up on their looks yet. I didn’t recognize anyone until I made it all the way to pediatrics.
“Forgive me, is Elena Olegova here?” I asked, chasing an older woman through the hallway. She had her arms wrapped around a stack of linens and paid me very little mind as she dumped them onto a cart.
“She quit,” she said.
“What?”
“She quit. Just like all of them quit.”
I got nothing out of her aside from that, and made it a point to go to her mama’s place in a few days, after the weekend. But, as things go, I had bigger problems to worry about when the time came.
The swelling was almost completely gone by Saturday,although the scar on my cheek would remain on my face forever, as it turned out. Vitali took me to a spa inside a fancy hotel an hour away, and that’s where we spent the morning. I left with an armful of beauty products and soap from the Black Sea.
Just you and I, like the world was formed around us,Chloé Dae sang on our way back.
“Kotik,” he said as we pulled up to yet another illuminated storefront. “We’re going to get you some things for tonight. I want to celebrate your birthday the way you deserve. It is a very special day.”
Beyond the tinted window of his favored Mercedes were the columns of a luxury trade center. I wouldn’t have dreamed of going there unless Elena wanted to stroll past the lit-up stores we couldn’t afford to enter. I wasn’t shopping with his money yet, at that time, and the only additions to my wardrobe were things he bought me on his own, so being there was still surreal.
Without makeup to cover the bruises, I raked my hair over as best I could, but Vitali tucked it back in place.
“You are beautiful,” he said. “Nothing can ever take away from that.”
“I suppose the only person whose opinion matters thinks so.” I smiled, even though I didn’t believe it. You can’t just say something like that and have it be true. I’d always care what people thought, because presentation mattered. How you are in the public eye is how you are seen by the world. To be naked of these things was intimate. Reserved for those who got to see all of you, no matter what. But I kept my hair back anyway.
We strolled past stores, and I examined their displays, but unless he stopped, we didn’t go in. The first he chose to enter had an impossibly skinny mannequin in a black dress standing among golden ribbons arranged to look like flowers.A matching pair of heels was on display on the other side of the door.
There, a stony-faced middle-aged woman in a fitted suit led us around until Vitali chose a silky, open-backed scarlet dress. Of course, it was perfect. I would have never looked at it by myself because red drew too much attention, but the thought of him seeing me wear it could get me drunk.
He waited outside as the nice lady marked down where it would need to be taken in. She told him it would take an hour, and we kept walking.
Similarly, he got me heels. The bruises on my legs limited me to comfortable options, but we found a pair with high-set straps to keep the pressure off tender places. They immediately ended up in a red, velvety, structured bag with ‘Salvatore Ferragamo’ written in white script through the middle. Vitali didn’t let me carry it.
I couldn’t look at the price tags because I already felt sick thinking about my old neighborhood and Mama’s plastic pearls. It didn’t end up mattering anyway, because no prices were displayed in any of the stores. These weren’t for the type of people who worried about money.
Our last stop before circling back around to pick up the dress stopped my heart.
Tiffany & Co.
The world quaked, or maybe my insides did. Keeping myself together as we strolled the displays was hard enough, but impossible as we reached the rings.
If I threw up on their floors, it would probably cost me five years’ salary.
Or more. Certainly more.
In my old life, I would have never moved into his apartmentuntil after marriage. It’s not like the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but the way you daydream about it is different than being right there—next to the person who you hope to be your forever. It’s scary, and it’s dizzying. And you second-guess every aspect of your life—of yourself. Because it will never be just you again. To choose someone, to truly choose someone, was to become a half of a whole standing on the hairpin that was life. Knowing that their hardship became yours, and sometimes you’d have to take the bulk of the burden to maintain the balance. Vitali’s life was heavier, and even if he insisted on carrying it, that’s not how the world worked. You couldn’t just take away someone’s’unlocked door privileges’when it came to raising a family. But he’d probably still try.
He paused and scanned the gold bands with the ice-like set stones without any obvious emotion. I didn’t dare look at him in case we made eye contact, as that would be too much for my fluttering stomach.
Oh God, he said it was a very special day.
Then, he moved on.
My stolen necklace was replaced by one the attendant brought from the back. Silver chain and a diamond-set heart with a small inscribed lock. He didn’t look happy about it and muttered something about it being temporary, but put it on my neck anyway.
The idea stuck. I was convinced he would propose, and the embers of those thoughts were only stirred and fed into blazing flames as I got my hair done and bruising covered with fragrant makeup. By the end, only the texture of the scab remained, making me pretty as long as I didn’t look at myself in direct sunlight.
