Afon
SIX MONTHS LATER
Café Volna sits on a corner in Brighton Beach, half a block from the boardwalk. It hasn't changed in thirty years. Same chipped tile floor. Same old men playing cards in the back. Same smell of black tea and fried dough and the ocean leaking in every time the door opens.
I used to come here with Gervasii. A lifetime ago. Now, I come here with his son.
Matvei sits across from me in the window booth, a cup of coffee going cold in front of him.
He looks good. The bruises healed months ago.
The limp is gone. He's back to being the slick lawyer who can talk his way out of anything, dark suit, dark hair, an easy way about him that he didn't get from me or his father.
He got that from his mother, maybe. I don't remember her well enough to say.
"You're not drinking your coffee," I tell him.
He turns up his nose. "That's because it takes like ass."
"You've gone soft," I say. "Living in the city, drinking your fancy foam drinks."
He grins. "And you've gone what? Domestic? I heard you have a vegetable garden now."
"Caroline has a vegetable garden," I correct with all the seriousness in the world. "I merely dig the holes she tells me to dig."
Matvei laughs. I don't take that sound for granted. For a long time after his father died, the kid didn't laugh at all. He just got quiet and hard and put as many miles between himself and this life as he could.
Now, he's back, and he laughs, and his wife is friends with my wife, and we can sit in a cafe by the ocean drinking bad coffee like two normal men.
I think about that more than I should. How strange it is. How good.
"So," he says. "Six months since you tied the knot. How's married life treating you, old man?"
I turn the cup in my hands and look at the ring on my finger. Plain gold, simple. It still feels new on my finger, though it's been there half a year. I keep waiting for it to feel like the old one did, worn into the skin, a part of me. It doesn't yet. Maybe it never will. Maybe that's the point.
"It's good," I say.
"That's it? Good?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know. Something with a little oomph in it. You're a married man now. You're supposed to have feelings."
I look out the window. It's bright and sunny out, high summer, seagulls wheeling in the thermal drafts.
We're a world away from that snowy, ashy heap in the Catskills I thought I'd call home for the rest of my life.
And we're even farther from that desolate stretch of county road outside Saratoga Springs.
In some ways, I'm glad that Reznik resurfaced. I got the closure I needed. It was me. I killed her. I waited twenty years to hear it. And when I finally did, it didn't fix anything, but it did end something.
The not-knowing. The wondering.
Reznik is dead now. Lukas took care of that. I didn't watch and I don't ask. Unusual for me, but then again, I'm doing lots of uncharacteristic things these days.
Like forgiving myself—that's unusual, too. Caroline said a long time ago that she forgave me for being her father's entry point into the underworld that eventually claimed his life. She's just been waiting on me to let it go.
"It's good," I say again. Then, because it's Gervasii's son sitting across from me and I know damn well that Matvei won't let me get away with another half-assed answer, I add, "I didn't think I'd ever get this.
Any of it. I thought I had my year, a long time ago, and that was the whole allotment.
I made my peace with that. Or I told myself I did. "
Matvei nods and gestures for me to say more.
"And then she walked out of the trees," I say. "And ruined the whole plan."
He shrugs. "I think we've both learned that plans are overrated."
"I've given up on them," I agree. "I'm plan-sober now."
We both chuckle. "Cass insists Caroline's the only one of us who could've gotten you to take that ring off," Matvei says. "Says you'd have worn it into the ground otherwise."
She's not wrong about that. I wore that thing for twenty years, because I thought taking it off would mean I was leaving her behind, putting her in the dirt a second time.
But that's the thing I didn't understand for the longest time, because I'm slow about anything that lives in the chest. Caroline didn't ask me to bury Yelena.
She only asked me to let her in—into the grief, into the part of me that screamed in the night.
She didn't want me to wall it off and hand her some clean, empty, incomplete version of a man.
She wanted the real one. Ghosts and all.
So I took the ring off. Not because I was done with Yelena. Because I was done being a man who carried his dead alone.
"Caroline didn't get me to take it off," I explain to Matvei.
"She got me to understand I didn't have to take it off to let her in.
So I did both. Took it off, and let her in.
" I twist the gold band around my scarred finger.
"The grief's still there. It always will be.
But it's not a door I keep locked anymore. "
Matvei nods again, thoughtful and observant. Then he says, "My dad would've liked her."
The gut punch of emotion that follows that surprises me. I have to look back out the window for a second.
"Yeah," I say. "He would've. She talks too much and she never does what she's told. She'd have driven him crazy." I clear my throat. "He'd have loved her."
"Definitely. Stupid, brave idiots flock together." He follows my gaze out the window and sighs. "You ever think about him?" Matvei asks. "Dad?"
"Every day," I say truthfully.
"Me, too." He sips his coffee and pulls a sour face. "Less, now. That's the part that gets me. It used to be all the time, every minute. Now, though, it's a little less claustrophobic. Like he moved off a little ways."
"He didn't move," I say. "You did. You went and built a life. That's what he wanted."
Matvei nods slowly. He doesn't trust his voice for a second; I can see it. We're the same that way. Two men who'd rather take a beating than say the sappy shit out loud.
We sit in the silence as the sounds of the cafe bubble around us. The card game in the back, the clack of dominoes, an old man saying something in Russian and another one wheezing a laugh. The door opens, lets in the cold and the smell of salt, closes again.
"Anyway," Matvei says, shaking it off. "Cass wants to do a dinner. All of us. You, Caroline, the dog—"
"Wolf's not coming to a dinner."
"Cass says the dog's coming. She usually wins."
"Dammit," I growl, because he's right about that. He married a stubborn one. Then again, so did I.
The bell over the door rings again. I don't pay it any mind at first. People come and go. But then I feel that old prickle on the back of my neck, the one that kept me alive for thirty years and never quite shuts off. I look up.
Alexei Ivanov is standing inside the door.
He's the same as he always is. Sharp face, clever eyes, the lithe build of a man who's never been caught because he's never stopped moving.
But there's something off. I've known Alexei a long time.
I know what he looks like when he's working an angle and what he looks like when he's between jobs and what he looks like when he's tired.
This is none of those. This is something I've maybe seen on him once, twenty years ago, and never since.
He's spooked.
He spots me in the window booth and crosses quickly to us. Matvei half-rises out of habit, the lawyer's reflex to greet, but Alexei waves him down with a flat hand.
"Satyrins," he says to greet us.
"Alexei," I reply, pretending to pout. "What's this? You don't write, you don't call? I'm starting to think you're mad at me."
He doesn't smile or crack back. That disturbs me as much as his haunted expression does. Alexei always has a line ready, a quip, a barb. It's how he tells you he loves you. But there's no joke in sight right now.
"Can we talk?" he says instead.
Matvei reads the room faster than I do. He slides out of the booth. "I'll get coffee. For everyone. Though I'll warn you, Al, it tastes like shit." He claps a hand on my shoulder as he goes.
Alexei takes the seat across from me. He sits near the edge, angled toward the door, like he might bolt at any minute. That's not so strange for a man in his profession. But I don't like it any more than the rest of the bad vibes he's giving off.
"Bad day?" I ask to open the conversation.
"It's been a bad month," Alexei says.
I wait. You don't push Alexei. He'll get there.
"That favor," he says finally. "The thing I did for you. Calling around, finding Lukas, the lodge address, all of it." He raps his knuckles on the table.
"I know," I say. "I owe you for it."
He waves a hand. "Nah, forget it. I'd have done it for free. Bill Oglethorpe did me a good turn once. You're the closest thing I've got to a friend who isn't dead or in prison. I did it because I wanted to. That's not the problem."
"What's the problem?"
"Well," he says, still glancing toward the door repeatedly, "I had to call in some favors in order to do you that favor, you know what I mean? And one of those favors… it pulled a thread. You know how it goes. You reach for one thing and you wake up something else." He meets my eyes. "Newark."
I go still.
There are things you don't talk about. Every man like me has a few. Alexei and I have one between us, a thing from years back. That thing in Newark we don't talk about. We've kept it buried for a long time. It was safer that way for everyone involved. So if it's being dragged back into the light…
That's bad fucking news.
"What got dragged out of it?" I ask through gritted teeth.
"Enough that the wrong people are starting to ask the right questions," he says. "It's not coming for you. I made sure of that. Whatever's coming, it's coming for me." He pauses. "But it came loose because of what I did to help you. So…"
Alexei Ivanov fixes things. That's his whole deal.
People in trouble call Alexei and he makes the trouble go away.
He does it clean, and he never asks for anything but money and to be left alone after.
He's the man other men go to when there's no one else.
The man who stands between people and the deep, dark woods.
In all the years I've known him, I have never once seen him need help.
To be clear, he hasn't actually asked yet. I'm not sure he even knows the words. But if he's here and telling me this… I'm not gonna force him into it. I'm just gonna do what he did for me: anything the man requires.
So I don't make him ask.
"I owe you one," I say again, simple as that.
Alexei's eyes flick up.
He holds his breath for a second. A second more. One more…
And then he exhales, a relieved whistling sound. "You sure? You've got a lot more to risk now. A wife. A home. A flourishing patch of azaleas, from what I hear."
"All true," I agree.
"And you'd still climb into it?"
"Yeah," I say. "I would."
I look down at my gold ring. When she finds out what I've offered to Alexei, Caroline is gonna kill me. But she'll understand. She'll just read me the riot act and then say, So what do we do next?
Alexei grins. "They don't make men like you anymore, Afon Satyrin."
"No," I say. "I'm one of fuckin' one."
Matvei comes back then with three cups of coffee balanced in his hands, sets them down, and slides into the booth beside me. He looks between us, reading the air, but whatever he sees, he doesn't comment on. He just slides Alexei a cup.
"It's terrible," Matvei warns him.
"It always is," Alexei says, and wraps both hands around it like he's cold, like he's been cold for a while. "That's how you know it's the real thing."
Outside, the ocean rolls in gray and slow, and the old men play their cards on the cafe tables.
I'm sitting between my brother's son and my oldest friend in a cafe that hasn't changed in thirty years, and I think: This is life.
Friends who know they can count on you. Debts that aren't chains.
A hand to put out when somebody needs it, freely, without a price stapled to it.
I spent my whole life being the man who stood between people and the woods, alone, asking nobody for anything.
Turns out you can do it standing next to someone instead.
"Alright," I say, and pick up my coffee. "Tell me what came out of Newark."