Epilogue
MOLLY
Six Months Later
Hot coffee is a luxury item. I never knew that before becoming a mom.
I get to enjoy it this morning because Carrie Ann is here to backstop our parenting, but Pavel is somewhere in the house with both of the girls strapped to his chest in the double baby Bjorn.
He ordered it after approximately two days of online research, and has worn it with the unselfconscious confidence of a man who has decided this is simply what he does now and requires no commentary from anyone.
The Bjorn is black. He specified black when he ordered it, because it matches his holster.
The house sounds alive these days. From somewhere down the hall, Pavel’s voice is doing the thing it does when he’s talking to the girls.
At first, I thought that tone was him talking to his men, but then I heard him describing a butterfly in his work tone, and I was caught off guard.
What I realized is that he talks to our girls with the full engagement of a man who considers his audience capable of receiving the information he is delivering.
Today, it’s politics. “The geopolitical situation in the early twentieth century was considerably more complex than the standard narrative suggests. You will want to develop an independent framework for evaluating primary sources.”
I put my coffee down and press my hand over my mouth.
Carrie Ann, who has appeared with the expression she gets when Pavel is explaining things to the babies, looks at me. I look at her and say, “He’s been lecturing for about an hour.”
“He does it every morning.”
“Yesterday, he explained the structural weaknesses of the Bretton Woods system. I have no idea what that is, and tuned him out completely when he was going on about it, but they seemed very engaged.”
“They were asleep.”
“He knows that. He doesn’t consider it relevant. I think he thinks he can educate them subconsciously.”
Carrie Ann comes the rest of the way into the kitchen and pours herself coffee with the ease of a woman who has finally made herself at home. I am glad for it. Hiring her remains one of the better decisions I have made in a year of consequential decisions.
She came initially for a few weeks, and she’s still here in August, which is not how a few weeks works, but is how things work when you are Carrie Ann Kohler. I suspected she’d linger. Planned on it, in fact.
She has discovered that the Hamptons in summer are beautiful, and our professional kitchen is everything she imagined. And of course, the theater scene in New York has more opportunities than Manhattan, Kansas, ever offered.
She has been on nine auditions in the past two months. She hasn’t booked anything yet, but that’s a part of the business, according to her. Each rejection is met with cooking elaborate meals, reading in the library, and occasionally going very still in the hallway when Igor passes through.
I have not said anything about that in several weeks.
I’m letting it develop at whatever pace it develops at, which is grating.
They are two extremely self-contained people who are both very aware of the other person, and neither of whom is going to do anything about it until they have decided to do something about it.
It has been difficult to remain silent and neutral and let it play out, but I’m determined to give them their space. No matter how much I want to lock them in a room together until they’re a couple.
“He’s not going to let us take them today,” Carrie Ann says, sitting across from me at the table with her coffee.
“He will. I’ve already told him.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he would consider it.”
“That means no.”
“That means he’s going to agree after we have a conversation about the security protocols for the afternoon, and then he’s going to spend forty-five minutes verifying that you know all of them, and then he’s going to call Igor three times in the first hour we’re gone.
” I look at her over my coffee cup. “It’s fine. He comes around.”
Carrie Ann tilts her head. “You’re very good at managing him.”
“I’m very good at knowing when to let him have his freak-outs and when to skip them.
This one gets the time because we’re leaving the babies, and the freak-out will actually make him feel better.
” I pause. “The trick with Pavel is figuring out which things are about control and which things are about love. They look the same from the outside.”
She looks at me with the green-eyed attention that has been assessing me since the third grade. “You really love him.”
“Yes, and it’s extremely inconvenient.”
She snorts at that. “Is it?”
I think about this honestly, the way I’ve been thinking about things since the girls arrived and rearranged my interior landscape along with everything else. “No. Actually, it’s the least inconvenient thing in my life. Everything else is inconvenient. He’s the part that makes sense.”
Carrie Ann absorbs this, and we drink our coffee in pleasant shared quiet.
Pavel continues his explanation, having shifted to something about monetary policy now, I think, which the babies are receiving with whatever the six-month equivalent of profound interest is.
Which is to say, total silence. They’re probably asleep by now.
Eventually, Pavel comes to the kitchen with both of them still in the Bjorn, because he doesn’t take them out of the Bjorn unless there’s a specific reason to take them out of the Bjorn, and he looks at me with those pale blue eyes that I have fallen in love with every day. “You truly want to go out tonight?”
“We are going out tonight. Dinner and dancing. I made a reservation.”
“Dancing.”
“I want to dance with my husband in a room with other adults. While wearing a dress that doesn’t have any biological material on it.” I look at him steadily. “I have earned this.”
He looks at me for a moment, and I see the thing in his expression that is always there when the subject of leaving them comes up.
The reluctance of a man who has discovered that the babies are the most interesting thing in any room they occupy, and thus has difficulty with the concept of voluntarily being in a different room.
Then he looks at Carrie Ann, who is standing beside the counter. “You know the protocols.
“I know the protocols,” she confirms.
“Dmitri is on the east entrance, and Sasha is on the north—”
“Pavel,” I say.
“Sasha rotates at three-hour intervals—”
“Pavel.”
He looks at me. Something in his expression adjusts—Pavel the pakhan making room for Pavel the man. “Fine.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m calling Dmitri.”
“You can call Dmitri as many times as you want from the restaurant,” I say. “That is within the agreed parameters.”
He looks at me with the look that means he knows he’s being managed and has made peace with it. “You are very organized about this.”
“How do you think I managed the office for all those years?”
He smiles a little at that. “I’m glad you decided to remain home. For now.”
That’s what I keep telling myself. It’s temporary. But the longer I stay home with our girls, the more I want to keep doing it.
Not tonight, though. We leave at seven.
The car comes around, and Pavel hands the girls to Carrie Ann, and they don’t fuss over it. My girls love Carrie Ann. He looks at them for a moment after the transfer, their faces, the duck-printed onesies, and I put my hand on his arm, and he looks at me and does the adjustment.
“Dmitri knows to—”
“He does,” she patiently says.
“And if either of them—”
“Carrie Ann has the number,” I cut in. “Three numbers. She’s very prepared.”
He looks at the door, and then at me. “Alright.”
“You can remove the Bjorn now.”
There’s a brief look of pain in his eyes as he does so and passes it to Carrie Ann. His throat rasps. “Take care of them with your life.”
“Always.”
We go. I’m honestly shocked he managed to get in the car, and even more so when we walk into the restaurant.
It’s everything a restaurant should be in the summer—warm and unhurried, full of the ambient sound of people having the ordinary extraordinary experience of a good meal, the clink of glasses, and the smell of something with butter and herbs that reaches us before we’re even seated.
Pavel is, as he always is in public, contained and attentive, and dressed in a way that makes the room take a small collective breath when he walks through it. He’s a very large man in an exquisite tuxedo. He’s gonna get looks.
He pulls out my chair, and I sit, glad to be in an equally nice dress instead of sweatpants and a tank top. When he sits, he notes, “You look beautiful.”
“You always say that.”
“You always are,” he says, without any performance, the way he says things that are simply true.
It’s strange to think of how far we’ve come.
From the office on the eighth floor and the quarterly projections to the evening that I walked in on him without knocking, and the world I’ve been living in since.
I think that, if I had known everything that would follow, I would have run in, not walked.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
“That I would do it all again.”
He looks at me across the table, and the look is the one I have no clean word for. “So would I.”
We eat, and we talk about the babies, the garden, books, the thing Igor said at breakfast that was almost certainly about Carrie Ann. Pavel has noted with quiet satisfaction that his sovetnik is finding his way back toward something, and so am I. They both deserve happiness.
We both avoid a possible topic—the girls’ names. It was demanded that we name the girls. Apparently, it’s a legal issue otherwise, so we put on their birth certificates Jane and Jen. But we agreed those names are not permanent. We had lists back then, but we couldn’t settle on them.
The lists have grown.