2. Ariel
2
ARIEL
Her apartment is a few blocks down from the music school. When I’m ready, we lock up the studio, then go there, holding hands the whole way. It smells like her when she opens the door and welcomes me in. Like jasmine .
“Cute place, Jas.” I mean it. It’s tiny, but drenched in sun. Window boxes spill rosemary down stucco walls.
She sets about making us two cups of tea while I wash off the grime of airplanes and taxis in the sink. She presses a mug into my hands when I emerge. Both of us settle at her kitchen table.
“I can’t stop looking at you,” she gushes. “You’re a woman now.”
I scowl at her. “Don’t start. It’s not like I was a baby when you were— when you left.”
“Not that far off!” She reaches out to pinch my cheeks. “Little baby Ari. Couldn’t stand being left out of the fun. Always wanted to play dress-up with her big sissy.”
“More like ‘big sissy always wanted to use me like a mannequin.”
“Mhmm.” Jasmine sips her tea. “And then you’d throw a fit and I’d have to go steal cookies from the pantry and force-feed you until you calmed down.”
“And then Baba would—” I freeze before I finish the sentence, because a rush of such thorny, twisted, complicated pain hits me that my mouth momentarily stops working.
Baba, slumping to his knees. The hole in his forehead weeping blood. Then crumpling, tumbling, like a wadded-up receipt, and falling into the orchestra pit.
Suddenly, nothing seems quite so funny.
I look up at Jasmine. I can tell there are a million and one questions burning on the tip of her tongue. I can hardly blame her for that. Why am I here now? What’s happened? What changed?
But the thought of unloading it all is so much. I don’t even know where to begin. Which loose thread do I pull on? Will the story unravel first, or will I?
I suck in a deep breath. Jas, sensing what I’m going through, reaches out to cup my wrist in her delicate fingers. “Take your time,” she says. “We’ve got that now.”
I nod, swallow, and start. “Baba’s dead.”
Jasmine goes still.
“Dragan shot him.” Then, because if we’re doing this, we might as well rip the Band-Aid clean off, get all the trauma unbagged and laid out in front of us as soon as we can, I add, “And I’m pregnant with Sasha’s baby.”
She looks at me for a long, long time.
Then she turns to look out the window.
I follow her gaze. She’s got a decent view from here. Half of it is blocked by a neighboring building, and she’s only on the fourth floor, but there’s still a beautiful slice of the city to be seen. Marseille sprawls down the coastline like a dropped dollar-store necklace—tawdry and harmless and bright. Beyond it, the sea beckons.
Finally, she sighs and turns back to me. “How… how are you here right now, Ariel?”
I shrug helplessly and let out a laugh to match. “I wish I knew. I mean, the x’s and o’s of it are pretty straightforward. But it just… It’s all spiraled out of control so fast.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Kosti,” I tell her. “You called him; he gave me the tickets and told me where I could go. Honestly, I just didn’t know what else to do. So I came.”
She shakes her head in disbelief. “I didn’t know what I was doing, either, when I called. I just saw that newspaper article and I freaked.”
“That makes two of us,” I mumble. “Honestly, it’s felt like a bad dream ever since Baba told me what he’d done. About the marriage.”
“Like mine?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “He wanted to do it just like yours.”
Her lip twists in a disgusted sneer. “He didn’t learn anything, did he?”
“No. No, he didn’t.”
Another lull follows before she looks at me again. “Why are you here, though? If you’re pregnant, that means you must have?—”
“I’m here because I can’t be there.” It’s hard enough to say the words. I feel like I’m betraying something, although I have no idea what that something might be. Sasha? My baby? Myself? “I can’t be with him. Not after…”
Not after everything.
Jasmine studies me—the reporter-turned-runaway, the little sister she left behind. Her eyes narrow. “What did he do to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“He saved me, in a way,” I croak. “Over and over. But he lied, too—over and over. And… and…”
The apartment goes hazy at the corners. I grip the table’s edge.
“Ari?”
“I can’t.” I press my forehead to the cool wood. “Not yet.”
Silence. Then her chair scrapes back. She rounds the table and crouches beside me. Her hand finds my hair—gentle, like when I was a little girl with a skinned knee. My big sister again.
“Just tell me this: Did he hurt you?” she asks.
At that, I recoil. “Sasha? No. God, no. He just…” My words falter again as I search for what to say and how to say it. “He was supposed to be better than them.”
Jasmine shakes her head as she returns to her seat. She runs a finger round and round the lip of her tea mug. “They’re all like that, Ari. Even the ones who play hero. Maybe even especially those ones.” She frees a long, shuddering exhale. “I’ve had a long time to think about everything. It’s hard to hate them. Well, hard to hate Sasha and Baba. Dragan is pretty easy to hate.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, feeling at my throat where he’d held me in that alley, before Sasha came to the rescue. “I don’t have any problem hating that one.”
“He’s a violent, cruel, sadistic son of a bitch,” Jasmine snaps. Hints of venom seep into her face and the whites of her knuckles where she’s clutching the table’s edge. “If he’d had it his way, he would’ve beaten me senseless, then hung me out to dry. Just a used-up husk of myself that he could move here and there like a doll. I’d have been a leash in his hand that connected to a noose around Baba’s throat. That’s what Dragan wanted.” Her eyes flit to mine. “If it weren’t for Sasha, he would’ve gotten it.”
It’s my turn to close my eyes. That prickly, complex pain is rinsing through me again.
You knew.
You knew and you lied.
“He’s not a good man, Jasmine. Better than Dragan, maybe, but if that’s the standard of comparison, Satan’s not so bad, either.”
She laughs bitterly. “‘Good’? Maybe not. Not in the ways we’re used to thinking about that kind of thing.”
“Not in any way.”
“In at least one way. He saved me, Ariel. He?—”
“And lied about it!” I cry out. I leap to my feet, and the motion makes tea go sloshing over the edge of my cup. It puddles and starts a sad, brown waterfall off the lip of the table, but I don’t care. “I’ve spent fifteen years thinking my sister was fucking dead, Jasmine! We had a funeral! Did you know that? Baba even insisted on a goddamn casket. I sat in the front pew in a dress I stole out of your closet and looked up at an empty fucking wooden box covered in flowers. There’s a graveyard in Brighton Beach right now that has your name on a headstone. And yeah, sure, Sasha didn’t know me until this whole marriage deal became a thing. But once he did, he could’ve told me at any time. When I was falling for him—when he was twisting and manipulating me and playing me, because apparently, that’s just so fucking easy for him—he could’ve told me and ended fifteen years of my heart hurting so bad that there were nights I thought about trying to rip it out of my chest. But he didn’t. He lied. So no, Jasmine, he’s not a good man. I don’t care if he saved you. I don’t care what he did, what he’s doing, or what he ever does again. Sasha Ozerov is not a good man.”
I’m sweaty and breathless by the time I’m done. Jasmine, in classic big sister fashion, is unfazed by my eruption. She sits there the whole time, calm and cool as could be, nodding until I run out of steam and sink back into my chair, still jittery at my fingertips.
Sighing, she reaches behind her to pluck a dish rag off the counter. She bends over and dabs up some of the spilled tea. “Is— was —Baba a good man?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“No.” She stoops to mop up the rest of the mess I made. “I’m asking if he was all good or all bad.”
“He married you to a monster and then tried to do the same thing to me. He chased Mama out the door and broke her heart too many times to count. Which part of that is supposed to be ‘good’?”
She keeps nodding for a while. Then she returns the rag to the counter and laces her hands in front of her. “When you were four, you fell off your bicycle. I was supposed to be keeping an eye on you, but I got distracted doing I-don’t-even-know-what. He saw, though. He came charging out of the house—I remember because he’d been in the middle of shaving, so half his face still had foam on it—and he scooped you up right off the asphalt. You were throwing one hell of a tantrum, so he sat down with you on the stoop and sang you a lullaby until you calmed down. You don’t remember that, do you?”
I hesitate before shaking my head.
“I know what Baba did to me, Ari. It horrified me that he thought he could get away with doing the same thing to you. That’s why I called Kosti. I knew it was a risk—but at least I tried to say something.”
“What’s the point of all this, Jas?” I wipe my nose and try to sip at what’s left of my lukewarm tea.
“The point, nera?doula mou, is that no one is all good or all bad. We’ve all got a little bit of everything in us. Even Baba. Even Sasha. If I’d tried to hate either of them, I’d have been dead a long time ago. Fifteen years of clinging onto something that poisonous just eats a person from the inside-out.” She reaches over the table to squeeze my hands again. “Hating them lets the bad stuff inside you win. Don’t do that. It’s such a terrible way to lose the war.”
I want to believe her, but it’s not that easy. Every time I picture Sasha, I get filled with such a burning sense of overwhelm that I have to change the mental channel or else I’ll go insane.
He ruined my life in ten short days. I hated him, then I wanted him, then I loved him, then he broke me.
Now, my big sister is here, telling me to simply… let that go?
Maybe the last decade and a half has wizened her a hell of a lot faster than it did me. If I was that enlightened, there’d be religions with my face on their altar.
Her face, though, is full of such patient hope.
“I’ll try,” I croak. “No promises.”
“You always were stubborn,” she laughs. “Just like Mama.” She rolls my knuckles between her palms, then sets my hand back down gently on the tabletop. “Go take a shower. Let me make you something to eat. We can talk about everything once you’re fed and clean and rested. We’ve got a lot of time for that now.”
“But—”
“No buts,” she says with a wink. “Honestly, you smell like B.O. and airplane pretzels. It’s hard to have a serious conversation.”
I snort a teary, snotty laugh and flash her a middle finger. “Still a bitch,” I murmur.
“Still a brat,” she replies, winking.
But she’s right about one thing: we do have a lot of time.
We have the rest of forever.