Page 22 of Merciless Daddy

I didn’t turn around. I had a washcloth in my hand and I was scrubbing my mouth—my jaw, really, the place where Gianni’s kiss had landed—and I had been scrubbing it for a while, apparently, because in the mirror the skin had gone red and raw and I hadn’t noticed. Kiryl crossed the bathroom, and his reflection joined mine, and I watched my little brother look at my mouth, and my wrist, and the wet cloth, and put two and two together.

“Give me that,” he said, and took the cloth out of my hand. Gently. He was gentle with everything; he apologized to doors. He wet the cloth with cool water, wrung it out, and took my wrist—the one with the fading white ring of Gianni’s fingers layered under the fresher red of his grip from the dressing table—and cleaned it as though the marks were something that could be cleaned. As though they were dirt and not history.

“There’s a guard outside your room,” I said. “Since eleven.”

“Foreg that.” His voice was steady, doing a very good impression of steady, and then it wasn’t. “What happened.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Lena.”

“Gianni came up to say good night. He was oafish about it. I discouraged him.” I retrieved my wrist and my face and assembled both. “That’s all. It’s handled.”

He looked at me with doubt in his eyes.

“It’s handled,” I said again, softer. “I promise you. Look—no bruises. Nothing my father would even blink at. I stuck him with his own brooch and quoted his contract at him and he left like a lamb. It was almost funny.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It was a little funny.”

His throat worked. He wanted to argue and he wanted to believe me, and belief won because I have been teaching it to win his whole life. “Nursery,” he said finally, in the tone of a doctor prescribing. “Now. Non-negotiable.”

So we went. Down the hall in socked feet, through the three blind feet by the stairwell the camera couldn’t see, into the northeast room where the empire ended and we began.

I went to the shelf under the window and changed behind the old dressing screen into the pajamas that lived up here and nowhere else—soft blue flannel gone pale with a hundred washings, printed with tiny silver stars, bought three sizes ago in every sense. Downstairs I wore silk chosen by committee. Up here I wore stars. Then I pulled the scratchy blanket off its shelf and wrapped it around my shoulders, and reached into the back of the cabinet for Misha.

Misha was a rabbit, or at least once he had been. Now he was gray-brown velveteen worn to the weave, one ear reattached in my mother’s small even stitches, a seam along his belly redone in her thread the winter I was ten and loved him too hard. She’d repaired him twice and told me both times, Everything worth keeping needs mending, Lenochka, and I had kept him under this roof for twenty years past any age that could explain him, because a family that took inventory of everything I owned had never once thought to count him.

I sat on the floor with the rabbit in the crook of my arm, and something in my chest came down out of my throat and back where it belonged.

I got out the pencil tin and opened the coloring book—not the centerfold, not the map, just an ordinary page near the front, the firebird small and singing in a painted tree—and began to fill a feather in slow orange strokes, and my shoulders let go by degrees, one vertebra at a time.

“Read it,” I said. Casually. Very casually. I had spent some effort on the casualness. “The story. My hands are busy.”

“Your hands are busy,” Kiryl repeated, with the solemnity of a man honoring a treaty, and took the book of tales off the shelf and folded himself into the armchair and read to me.

He read about the tsar’s garden and the golden apples and the bird made of fire that no net could hold, and I colored, and for a quarter of an hour I was not the anticipated share transfer or the untouched merchandise or the woman who put her hand between an old driver and a bad man’s anger. I was nobody at all. It was the best thing I owned, being nobody, and it fit in one room and had to be hidden under the floor.

He finished the chapter and closed the book, and he was quiet for a while, and then he ruined it.

“The Sicilian,” he said. “Tonight. The one Papa met.” He picked at the chair’s worn arm. “The drivers were talking when they brought the cars around. I heard them, when they thought they were alone. They said he watched you the whole dinner. They said he made Gianni look like a fool at the table and left something behind for you.” He looked up. “The way they told it—Lena, it sounds like he wanted to help you.”

The orange pencil kept moving. Slow strokes. The bird doesn’t fly if you rush her.

“He noticed me,” I said. “That’s not the same thing.”

“He stood up to Gianni—”

“He disliked Gianni before I existed. I was standing near his target.” I set the pencil down and looked at my brother. “Kiryusha. Listen to me. Gianni is a monster. You can see his teeth, his claws. You know exactly how dangerous he is. In a terrible way it’s honest.” I pulled the blanket tighter. “A man like the Sicilian — controlled, patient, watching everything—a man like that doesn’t show any of his weapons. But he does have them.” I picked the pencil back up.

Kiryl was quiet. Misha regarded the ceiling with his lopsided mended ear, keeping his opinion to himself, the way our mother had taught him.

“That’s the bleakest thing you’ve ever said in the nursery,” my brother said at last. “And you once explained probate to me in here.”

“Make some chocolate,” I said, and colored the feather to its edge, slowly. I didn’t tell him that the Sicilian’s voice had followed me all the way home along the water, saying I didn’t mistake you for a woman waiting to be rescued, in a tone I was still, hours later, trying to understand.

After he’d made and drunk another sickly sweet hot chocolate, I took the folded paper out of the pencil tin.