I shrugged half-heartedly. “I know one of them was a policeman. Baranov, I think. The other didn’t introduce himself, so I called him Clipboard.”
Misha scratched his head.
Vitali’s face was stone-still and unreadable. He took the cellphone out of his pocket and stared at it for a few seconds. “I have to make a call. Misha, stay with her.”
“Did I say something wrong?” I asked as he disappeared out the door.
“No.” Misha sighed and rubbed his neck. He was watching the doorway with an increasingly worried expression. “Listen, Katya—”
“I won’t tell him about the soup,” I said. “But you have to tell me why I’m not telling him about the soup.”
“Ah. Well.”
“Misha.”
“I forgot something,” he muttered in a very not-Misha tone. “There’s a space behind the stove. It slipped my mind. Had tobe hot, so they couldn’t get back there… it might have been why they came.”
My mouth fell open. “I’m here because you…”
Wild eyes found me, and I gulped. But they weren’t angry.
“Katya,” he said slowly, driving his point home. “If you tell Vitali, hewillkill me. I don’t care if you believe what I said about him—I don’t give a shit if you think I’m the one who’s nuts. But if you tell him, hewillkill me.”
“I won’t tell him,” I repeated, fingering my water glass. “My head really hurts.”
“Yeah, I imagine it does,” he said, and perched on the far corner of the mattress—if one could ever say Misha ‘perched’ anywhere. My end of it lifted by at least six centimeters. “None of us liked seeing you that way.”
I snorted, much like a horse would if it were in a hospital bed with a concussion. “How ugly am I?”
“That’s not what I meant,” he grumbled, then appraised me, “but fairly ugly.”
Of all the things to be worried about, Vitali seeing me at my worst shouldn’t have been one of them. But it was. I groaned.And then, I asked something I didn’t want answered, but asked anyway, “Is this what life is going to be like, Mish? Is this the life you told me to flee from?”
Exhaustion slumped his shoulders, and he said nothing for too long. In that time, the man aged a dozen years.
“No. The life I told you to flee from is worse.”
* * *
My injuries weren’t as bad as I initially believed.
The only real concern was the laceration on my face and what they deemed to be a mild concussion. No broken bones, although the bruising said otherwise.
Vitali insisted I stay at the hospital for two days, which I thought to be ridiculous, but much like every other area of my life, there was no arguing with Mr. Konstantinov.
Mama saw me, but she didn’t bring Maxim. Things had changed; I expected that. What I didn’t expect was how quiet she would be about it. Mama usually yelled about everything, or at the very least gave her excessively loud opinion, but now she hardly said anything on the subject. We talked about Maxim and his schooling, and how he ran wild in the streets with the other boys and got into petty trouble. He was nearing the age where it would become a problem. Something Misha said about the company young boys keep when getting mixed up in this stuff settled badly in my stomach, and that was all I could think of now every time she mentioned my brother.
We discussed my birthday and what I wanted her to cook. Honey cake had always been my favorite, so she agreed to make that. She asked what Vitali liked.
She hadn’t spoken about him much. He had been right, the‘real’person I saw in my mama was more complicated and experienced than she ever let on in front of her children. Her eyes said she knew, and that was an ice pick to my heart. It was naive of me to think the good would last forever.
And, she understood something else, too. I chose Vitali. It would never be another man. Whatever dreams she had for me, the future she’d worked so hard to provide, they all included him. And the reality of that choice lay shredded at her feet amid the glass, couch stuffing, and ripped photographs.
My bloody bandages were her broken heart.
28
Our Happy
