Page 51 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

Lev speaks then, to me, not to him, and my father hears every syllable because he was always meant to.

“Say what you want done with him. Anything you say tonight happens tonight, whether you watch or not, and there’s not a man in two countries who’ll ask me a question about it after.”

My father goes gray under the shave. His eyes come to me, his daughter, his whole heart, the best thing he’s got left, and he understands for the first time in his life that he’s standing in a room where his life is on a table, and the person holding it is me.

I take the minute. He’s got nowhere else to be, and I’ve waited two years for a fact I could put my hands on.

“No,” I say.

“Vasya.”

“Not for your sake, so don’t do the face. I teach six-year-olds to use their words, and it would be embarrassing to have a father killed.” I set my hands on the rims. “Here’s what happens instead. You go tonight, and not out of the borough, out of the country. You take what you’re wearing. No money from him, none from me, no allowance, no envelope at Christmas, no address anybody gives you. You don’t write. You don’t turn up at my school or my building, you don’t send a man to tell me you’re sick, and if you say my mother’s name out loud to another human being for the rest of your life I’ll hear about it, because it turns out I married into an organization with excellent hearing.”

He’s weeping properly now, the ugly kind, mouth square.

“And when you die, wherever you die, you go into whatever ground you’re standing on. There’s a space beside her in Queens that’s been sitting twenty-six years with your name in a book. I made the call this afternoon. It isn’t your name in the book anymore.” I turn the page face down so he doesn’t have to keep looking at it, because I’m my mother’s daughter and apparently I can’t stop doing that even tonight. “You sold her daughter twice. You don’t get to be buried near her.”

“Vasya, please. I’ve got nobody. I’m an old man.”

“You’re fifty-eight. You’re not old, you’re finished.” I take a last look at the clean shirt, the combed hair, the oranges. “I forgave you for the rent. I forgave you for my childhood. I forgave you across a card table for selling me to a stranger, and I did that one in about four days, which is a personal best. This is the one I keep. Goodbye, Papa.”

Lev has the door. My father says my name twice on the stairs, and I hear both of them. I go out through the lobby into the cold with my hands trembling, and I make it to the car under my own steam like I have every day since I was twenty-four years old.

Then I stop on the sidewalk, and I break.

It comes up out of the fused place and takes all of me, no dignity anywhere in it, my face in my hands and a sound coming out of me I’ve never heard from myself, twenty-six years of a charming grin and my own stupid, expensive, unkillable kindness. Lev goes down on one knee on a filthy Brooklyn sidewalk in a coat worth more than my car, gets his arms around me, and lifts me out of the chair. I let him take my whole weight.

He doesn’t tell me it’s all right. He holds the back of my head with one hand and puts the other flat across my spine, dead over the scar, hard enough that I feel every finger through the coat, and he says my name into my hair in the middle of a sentence in Russian I don’t have. My body picks that exact moment to remind me it’s alive, all of it, everything below the scar switching on at once, the heat off his throat, his heartbeat going under my palm, and I’ve never been less able to do a thing about it and never wanted to more.

“You’re going to have to say it,” I get out into his collar. “Because I’m ten seconds from saying it first, and I’ve had a terrible week.”

“Say it first,” he says.

“You absolute bastard.”

“Say it first, Vasilisa.”

“I love you.” My hand makes a fist in the front of his shirt, over the pocket. “God help me, and I want it on the record that I hate the timing.”

He pulls back far enough to put his eyes on mine, and the flat gray drops out of them, all of it, and underneath is a man I’ve never once been shown in eleven weeks of marriage.

“I love you, too,” he says. “You were supposed to be a crown, Vasilisa, but you turned out to be the whole kingdom.”

22

Lev

“You’ve been awake an hour, and you haven’t moved, which means you’re running through the list of things. Stop it.”

She says it into my chest with her eyes still shut, hair everywhere, one leg hooked over both of mine because that’s how she landed at five in the morning and neither of us has renegotiated it since. There’s yellow enamel dried on two of her knuckles and a stripe of it up the inside of her forearm where the brush got away from her.

“I’m not running a list.”

“You’re running a list in alphabetical order, and it has subheadings.” She gets one eye open. The light’s coming off the water and up the glass, and it’s doing the thing to her freckles I’ve never had a word for, bringing them all the way up out of her skin. “I’m a first-grade teacher, Lev. I can tell when a body in front of me is thinking instead of listening. Louis does the exact face.”

“Then you’ll know I’ve stopped.”

“You haven’t. Your hand’s been in the same place on my back for forty minutes. You’re guarding, not touching.”