“Do you have anything left in there?” Vitali asked.
I didn’t, but it turned out the question wasn’t for me.
“No. If Olga Nikolaevna found something, she’d kill me,” Misha said. “What do you need?”
“Siphon some gas out of this thing. Kotik, does Mama use lye? Upholstery stain remover?”
“Uh…”
“Vitali,” Misha said very seriously. “You expect they’ll come after us tonight?”
He grunted and looked out the window at the dark podyezd. The melancholy silence cut through my sickness, revealing histone for what it was.
“There is no way they didn’t notice us coming out of the hospital parking lot. You’ll take her to the airport, Mish,” Vitali said, his fingers drumming on metal. “I know you have spare plates in here.”
“What…” I sat up, and his dark silhouette turned its head toward me. “Who is‘they?’ You can’t be serious… you’re not staying…”
“Just until your plane takes off, Kotik. Through the night, so I know they didn’t follow you.”
“Then I’m staying with you!”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Misha said, the plume of smoke billowing through the car with no windows open to relieve my heavy breathing. “Do what he says, Katya. This isn’t some movie where you come out of the explosion unscathed and ride off in a convertible.” He looked to Vitali. “Thereisgoing to be an explosion, huh?”
“Probably,” he said, too softly to be my Vitali.
“No!”
“Katya, go get Mama,” he said.
“I’m not—”
“Katya.” This time, Vitali’s stone-hard voice weighed across Misha and me both, crushing us into our seats. “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. Go wake Mama and Maxim. They have twenty minutes to pack, preferably for cold weather. No more than $500 a person—that’s what you can carry through customs. Ask her about lye and stain remover—set it out on the kitchen table if she has it. I’ll be right up.”
I stared at his shadow for a moment, but then crawled out of the car on my knees. It was the one occasion I didn’t expect him to open my door for me, and the only time he didn’t.
I leaned on the buzzer hard. There was a keypad, but I needed them to wake up before I got up there. There wouldn’t be a harder conversation to have, and it would have to be a fast one, because I wasn’t sure how many brains I had left over after all that.
It wasn’t fast. Everyone cried. Mama rocked back and forth on the couch, holding her head. Maxim hid his tears behind the closet door, because that was the only place he thought to hide.
I helplessly stood in the middle, swaying and not knowing who to comfort or if I could comfort anyone. And then, the door clicked, and Vitali was there.
And everything would be alright.
Mama never actually stopped crying. I think the only reason she complied at all was that she still thought herself to be sleeping—and this was all just a nightmare she could wake from, later, when her alarm rang.
I hoped so too, because what Vitali asked of me was impossible. Leaving Russia was one thing, who knew for how long or if I would be back at all, but I couldn’t leave him. Screw what he said—he mostly wasn’t the boss of me most of the time sometimes.
My head’s incessant spinning turned into the godmother of all headaches. I didn’t even have anything to pack—it was all at our place. So I listened to Vitali list off what he needed for God-knew what, and tried to figure out what to do with only $500 in a foreign country when we landed.
And all of it was absurd and not happening.
Not happening…
But it happened. Just past 1:00 AM, Misha took Mama and Maxim downstairs to the newly re-plated Lada, and left Vitali and me to say what couldn’t possibly be our goodbyes.
The moment was unreal enough that I had no tears to cry, and still he put his arms around me as if I were a sobbing child, and held me tight. It didn’t occur to me until later that it wasn’t a means to comfort me, but him.
“Listen to me, Kotik,” he said quietly, fingers tangling in my hair in slow strokes. You’re going to the United States—”
