Chapter Five
Alina
We adults tell ourselves children don’t understand. That we can hide pain behind a smile, blood behind closed doors, tears behind a false I’m fine.
But children see everything.
They absorb our pain the way a sponge absorbs water, and it eats through them from the inside, turning them into tiny, broken adults. The confusion and fear in my children’s eyes frightened me more than any sentence a judge could have handed down.
Two weeks had passed since the funeral.
Fourteen days in my parents’ house, where every corner reminded me of childhood—of the innocent life I’d lived when a failed math test had felt like catastrophe.
Fourteen nights spent awake, counting hairline cracks in the ceiling and listening to Annie cry on the other side of the wall.
Fourteen mornings when I forced myself out of bed, put on my everything is fine mask, and got one child to elementary school and the other to preschool.
Nothing was fine.
Max broke first.
I knew the moment I arrived to pick him up from school. The assistant principal, a tired-looking woman in her fifties, met me near the main office with an expression that made my heart stumble.
“Mrs. Lansky, we need to have a serious conversation.”
Serious.
That word never brought good news.
She led me into her office. Max sat in a chair by the window with his back to us. His knuckles were scraped and bloody. A bruise was darkening his cheek, and his shirt had been torn at the shoulder.
“What happened?” I rushed to him, but he recoiled. He wouldn’t even look at me. He only turned farther away.
“Your son started a fight during recess,” the assistant principal said, folding her hands on the desk. “He assaulted another student. The injuries are fairly serious. The boy has a broken nose and two damaged teeth.”
The words turned my stomach.
Max? My quiet, gentle Max, who used to be afraid of hurting a fly?
“There must be some mistake. He couldn’t have—”
“I could,” Max said, his voice flat and dead. “And I did.”
I stared at my son’s rigid, unfamiliar back and felt everything inside me tighten into one frozen knot.
“Why?” I whispered. “Max, why?”
At last, he turned. His eyes—brown like Russell’s—held so much rage and hatred that they frightened me.
“He said our family was broken. He called Dad a cheater and said you were a stupid woman who got dumped. I didn’t let him finish.”
My throat went dry. A shrill ringing filled my ears.
Gossip. Of course.
In a city like Riverbend, everyone knew everyone else’s business. And children were always the first to repeat whatever they overheard at home.
“Mrs. Lansky,” the assistant principal said carefully, “I understand your family is going through a difficult time. But we cannot allow violence at school. Max is suspended for one week, and we strongly recommend that you arrange counseling for him.”
Counseling.
My seven-year-old son needed counseling because his world had been destroyed. Because my pain had become his pain. Because I had failed to protect any of my children.
We left the school together. Max walked beside me with both hands shoved into the pockets of his coat. He said nothing. Neither did I.
What was I supposed to say? How could I explain that violence solved nothing when I was falling apart myself?
“Was he lying?” Max asked suddenly. “That boy. Was he lying about Dad?”
I stopped on the sidewalk. People streamed around us, gray February shadows hurrying through the wind. The cold sliced beneath my collar, but I barely felt it.
It was colder inside me.
“No,” I breathed. “He wasn’t lying.”
Max nodded as though I had merely confirmed something he already knew.
“Then I was right to hit him. You shouldn’t hit someone for telling the truth. But you can hit him for saying it in front of everybody.”
His logic twisted something inside me. It was childish and brutal, wrong in a way that almost made sense.
“Max, you can’t solve things with your fists.”
“Then how?” He turned on me. His face was pale, his lips trembling—not from the cold, but from the tears he was trying not to shed. “How else am I supposed to protect you? Protect us? Dad didn’t, so I have to. I’m the man now. I have to.”
And then he broke.
My seven-year-old boy, who had tried to be a man, who had held himself together for two weeks, collapsed onto the sidewalk and sobbed.
Great, desperate, helpless sobs. The kind only children make when their whole world is crashing down and they are powerless to stop it.
I dropped beside him and pulled him against me. I held him as tightly as I could, as though my body might shield him from the entire world.
It couldn’t.
I was broken too.
“I want Dad,” Max choked out. “I hate him, but I want him. I want to go home. I want everything to be like it was. I want my baby brother. I want you to smile again. I want... I want...”
Every word cut another piece out of me, slow and precise, each one a knife driven into my heart.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, kissing his hair. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you from this. I’m sorry your life was destroyed.”
“You didn’t destroy it.” He raised swollen, tear-reddened eyes to mine. “Dad did. Right?”
What could I say?
Lie to him again? Tell him no, it was fate, it was something that had simply happened? I had already told him enough lies. That everything would be all right. That the baby was fine. That his father loved us.
“Yes,” I said. “Dad did.”
In that moment, I turned Russell into a monster in our son’s eyes.
I knew it. I understood exactly what I had done.
But I couldn’t say anything else, because a monster was all I saw when I looked at him too.
* * *
With Annie, it was different.
My five-year-old daughter didn’t become aggressive.
She became invisible.
She stopped crying. Stopped asking for attention. Stopped fussing at bedtime. She became the perfect child—quiet, obedient, convenient.
It frightened me more than any tantrum could have.
I realized how bad it had become when I picked her up from preschool. Her teacher, a young woman with kind eyes, drew me aside.
“Mrs. Lansky, I’m worried about Annie.”
My heart dropped.
Again. Another conversation about how badly I had damaged one of my children.
“What happened?”
“She doesn’t play anymore. At all. She sits in the corner all day and draws the same picture over and over. Here.”
The teacher handed me a stack of drawings.
I looked down, and my knees nearly gave way.
Every page showed the same thing. A big house with a red roof—our house in Sunnybrook Estates. Four people stood beside it: a father, a mother, a boy, and a girl.
And there was a fifth figure.
Tiny. Colored white.
Her baby brother.
Annie had drawn our family—the family that no longer existed—again and again, dozens of times, as though crayons and construction paper could bring it back to life.
“Does she say anything?” My voice shook.
“Almost nothing. When I asked who this was—” Her teacher touched the little white figure. “—she said, ‘That’s my baby brother. He’s in heaven, but I draw him with us so he won’t be lonely.’”
The pain bent me in half. My stomach churned, chills raced along my spine, and every bone in my body seemed to ache with strain.
My little girl was trying to glue her shattered world together with colored pencils.
“Where is she?”
“In the playroom. She’s sitting... well, you’ll see.”
I went in. Children ran and shouted and laughed all around me. Annie sat alone in the corner by a window, clutching her stuffed rabbit against her chest. She didn’t move. She only stared outside.
“Annie, sweetheart.” I crouched beside her. “Ready to go home?”
She turned her face toward me. She looked pale and pinched. Her enormous blue eyes held a grief far too old for a child, and I forgot how to breathe.
“Mommy, can the baby see us from heaven?”
“Yes, honey. He can.”
“Can Daddy see him?”
My stomach cramped.
“No, Annie. Daddy... Daddy can’t.”
“Why?”
Why.
That cursed question again. A child’s simple question with no answer.
“Because Daddy is far away, and your brother flew very high.”
Annie nodded and held the rabbit tighter.
“Mommy, when are we going home? Back to Daddy?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
“I want to go home. Grandma’s house is scary.”
“Scary? Why?”
She looked at me with those huge eyes.
“Because you cry there at night. You cry really quiet, but I hear you. And I’m scared you’re going to fly away too. Like the baby.”
The world stopped.
My five-year-old daughter was afraid I was going to die. That after losing her brother, her father, and her home, she would lose me too—the only thing she had left.
I wrapped my arms around her so tightly she squeaked.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I whispered into her hair. “Never. Do you hear me? I will always be with you. Always.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
We sat in that corner surrounded by shouting children and indifferent toys, and I understood that I had broken them. Max and Annie. My grief, my hatred, my weakness had turned them into small, shattered versions of me.
Children don’t know how to pretend. They can’t bury pain beneath a false smile, a busy schedule, or a glass of wine. Their pain is pure and undiluted. It crystallizes inside them and devours everything alive.
I was their mother. I was supposed to protect them.
Instead, I had become another source of their suffering.
* * *
That evening, as I put the children to bed, the doorbell rang.
Mom answered it. A familiar voice drifted down the hall.
“Good evening. May I see Alina?”
Mrs. Lansky.
My mother-in-law. Russell’s mother. The woman who had once been a second mother to me. She had taught me to make her favorite apple pie. She had watched the children when Russell and I traveled. She had cried with happiness at our wedding.
Now she was the mother of the man who had betrayed me.
I stepped out of the children’s room. Mrs. Lansky stood in the entryway wearing an elegant black coat, her hair carefully styled, an expensive handbag hooked over one arm.
But her face—God, her face.