19. Lydia
Lydia
“Oh my God, Yommie. Did you really not tell her about me?”
The gorgeous Northwestern volleyball player plopped her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes at the boyfriend who—no, had not told me about her. In fact, I could only hope we hadn’t overlapped in any way when I almost hooked up with him in Berlin.
Guilt—and a whole lot of resentment—cramped my stomach at just the thought of that.
Artyom’s expression remained guilt-free, though, and completely unapologetic. “Puppy is needing good home. You have good home. I making you two meet. What else is there to be saying before you are meeting?”
“Oh my God, why are you such a robot?” The young goddess slapped his arm. “I swear, you’re worse than my dad sometimes. After everything Lydia went through to save P.M., do you really think she’s just going to send her home with anyone? I mean, did you even tell her why you picked my family to adopt this particular baby?”
There was no longer any question about it. These two had known each other for a long time if she was comfortable enough to hit him on the arm and even dare to check him.
A pang of guilt shot through me. Here Ruthie was, advocating for my feelings against her thoughtless boyfriend, and she had no idea about what had transpired in Berlin—or about the “anything” deal that had gone down before her arrival.
Artyom just cranked his head, like Ruthie was a pain he was trying to work out of his neck.
“Ruthie is from good, loving family,” he informed me in a dead-eyed Russian monotone. “They will give P.M. the best home and take excellent care of her.”
So, Artyom’s girlfriend was ethereal, smart, and had a loving family willing to adopt a pittie.
I thought of my mother, who’d responded with an “ Absolutely not, and don’t you even think of bothering your father with this!” when I texted her about the idea of maybe driving P.M. down to our Minneapolis mansion. What would that even be like, I bitterly wondered, to have a family who wasn’t annoyed with you all the time and actually supported your endeavors?
But I pushed down my intense burst of jealousy to ask the same questions I would if Ruthie had walked into the shelter off the street, looking to adopt. “So, you live in Chicago with your parents? In a house or an apartment?”
“Indiana, actually,” Ruthie said, wrinkling her nose. “At least until I bounce in September.”
She grinned and gave her purple hoodie a proud tug. “I just got accepted early decision to Northwestern.”
“So, you’re a senior… in high school.” I looked between her and Artyom, alarm bells going off in my head. “And you and Artyom are dating?”
“Eww, no!” Ruthie made a disgusted face.
Artyom furrowed his heavy brow at me.
“Yommie’s my cousin!” she said at the same time he said, “Rusha is my cousin!”
“Also, Rusha is much too young for a boyfriend,” Artyom added with a downright offended look, as if I should’ve known that the vision of perfection he hadn’t bothered to introduce was yet another relative of his who could easily double as a supermodel.
Ruthie glared at him. “If by ‘too young’ you mean only a couple of months away from being a consenting adult, I agree. Besides…”
She glanced between me and her apparent cousin. “I thought the two of you were dating. Are you, like, in an open relationship or something?”
“ Nyet ,” Artyom answered. Just that one word.
So it was on me to finish explaining. “We’re not dating. We’re just…”
I struggled for the right label. “Sworn enemies” wouldn’t make sense to someone who hadn’t seen how he’d treated me since the start of winter semester. But “friends” would be way too much of a stretch. In the end, I went with, “…acquaintances. Artyom is an acquaintance who happened to be in the right place at the right time to help me with P.M.”
Ruthie narrowed her eyes at me this time. “So, Yommie made us drop everything to fly out here with a side quest to get your car from the mechanics because you’re—let me check my notes.” Ruthie pantomimed a pad with her hands. “Just acquaintances.”
She didn’t put the last two words in air quotes, but her tone made them clear.
I opened my mouth to defend myself, but then the rest of her words caught up with me. “Wait, you got my car?”
I glanced toward the carport on the other side of the bushes. Sure enough, there was my sunny-side yellow Mini Cooper—not Artyom’s truck. And it looked way shinier than when I’d parked it in front of Tommy Hanson’s house, which made me ask, “Why did you have to take it to a mechanic?”
Ruthie’s eyes became slits, and she looked up at Artyom to ask, “Seriously?”
Artyom shifted from foot to foot, looking more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him.
Before he could answer, another car appeared—Artyom’s big black truck, rolling to a stop beside my much smaller Mini Cooper.
He must have had those two guards of his—or whatever they were—drive his truck while he brought my car back himself.
But instead of one of his college-aged goons, two middle-aged adults stepped out: a curvy Black woman and a muscular White man wearing nothing but a t-shirt, even though it couldn’t have been more than 25 degrees outside.
The gray in their hair suggested they were at least in their late-40s, but they looked much younger. Both were attractive in a way that was clearly genetic—not the result of biweekly Botox appointments and annual plastic surgeries, like my adopted mother.
I didn’t know the woman, but, even as the worst hockey fan ever, I instantly recognized Nikolai “Mount Nik” Rustanov, the former star hockey player who’d bought the Indiana Polar a couple of decades ago.
It wasn’t hard to guess that these were the two adults whose DNA had combined to create the perfect girl standing in front of me—Ruthie’s mom and dad.
“Is that her?” Ruthie’s mom ran around the bush divider even faster than her daughter, and she fell to her knees in front of P.M. even more dramatically. “Oh, baby. What did those terrible people do to you?”
P.M. just licked her face in response.
The woman blinked in surprise, then burst into laughter.
“Oh, you’re such a sweet girl! I will never let anything bad happen to you ever again,” she vowed, hugging the dog she’d only just met around the neck.
But then her laughter turned into another sound. A harsh one that I didn’t realize was sobbing until her husband drew her away from P.M. into his arms so she could cry into his chest.
P.M., proving just how loving dogs of every breed could be, nudged at, then licked her denim-clad legs, as if to comfort her, too.
“You will forgive her,” Mount Nik, who was nearly as tall as Artyom, said in a slightly less thick Russian accent.
His voice turned somber as he spoke to me over his wife’s head. “She still misses our other pit bull, Backup, very much, even though she died a few years ago.”
“Totally understandable. That’s not the kind of pain that ever goes away,” I replied. Then I turned to the crying woman in his arms to gently say, “Backup is a great name, by the way… Was she named after the dog from Veronica Mars ?”
“You know Veronica Mars ?” Suddenly, the wife stopped crying and pulled out of Mount Nik’s arms to regard me with wide brown eyes.
“It’s one of my favorite vintage shows,” I answered.
She let out a watery laugh. “Okay, well, I’m going to have to forgive you for calling it vintage . But other than that…”
She beamed up at Artyom. “I could not approve of your girlfriend more. Big heart, great taste, and not that it matters, but she is stunning. How did you get so lucky with that perma scowl of yours?”
My cheeks flamed. “Oh, we’re not… He’s not…”
“Looking for your approval,” Artyom finished before I could.
“Oooh, I can’t wait to tell your Aunt Eva all about this on our Monday call!” Ruthie’s mom declared, as if she hadn’t heard either of us.
My heart dropped. There was only one Eva I knew of in the Rustanov family. But surely she didn’t mean that Eva. Eva Rustanov St. James, the vice president of the freaking United States.
Artyom stepped in front of his aunt, blocking my view of her before I could answer. “Puppy is tired. Take her inside so she can rest,” he commanded. “Then you will meet with my family in the living room to discuss what they need to do to complete adoption.”
As much as I wanted to aggressively clarify our relationship status before any VPOTUS was called, Artyom was right. P.M., though happy to meet all these new people, was starting to sag against the harness I’d made. All this excitement most definitely went against Dr. Kovacs’s instructions to keep her still and quiet. So, I took her back into the guest room, as ordered.
Proving Artyom’s point, P.M. plopped down and immediately fell into a deep, snoring sleep as soon as I unharnessed her over the improvised doggie bed of pillows I’d made for her.
Which left me with nothing to do but meet Artyom and his absurdly attractive family in the living room to talk.
I felt crazy self-conscious as I walked into the front room after peeling off my coat, wrangling my dreads into a ponytail, and French-tucking the oversized UMG Hockey t-shirt—delivered along with the doggie pee pads and a package of underwear—into the front of my jeans.
They were all sitting on a leather sectional, and everyone but Ruthie’s mother was having a low conversation in Russian.
However, that conversation came to an abrupt stop when I appeared.
“Oh, look,” Ruthie said, giving me a smirking up-and-down look. “It’s Yommie’s associate , wearing one of his t-shirts after spending the night.”
My face burned, and Artyom said something harsh to Ruthie in Russian before standing up and commanding me, “Sit down here.”
“Here” was one of two large leather armchairs I hadn’t noticed directly behind me.
I gingerly sat down, only to jolt when Artyom took the chair beside me and said, “Tell them what they are needing to do to adopt P.M.”
It made me feel like we were some kind of queen and king presiding over an important conversation as a unit, even though I hadn’t been lying to Ruthie about Yom and I only being associates.
Anyway…
I cleared my throat and told Ruthie and her family, “There’s not much to say here. Um, obviously, you all have experience with raising pit bulls and would never hurt or neglect P.M. the way Tommy did?—”
“Never!” both Ruthie and her mom assured me in unison.
Another good sign that the decision I’d made after putting P.M. to bed was the right one. “So, I see no problem with you adopting P.M., especially since we haven’t officially put her in the system. The only issue is she’ll need an intense amount of round-the-clock care over the next few weeks….”
“We can do that,” Ruthie’s mother answered before I could finish. “I oversee a nationwide network of domestic abuse shelters, so I mostly work from the house these days.”
“And I get home from school at, like, two, now that the volleyball season is done,” Ruthie added. “I can take over in the afternoons.”
“And if neither of them is available, I will hire someone to oversee her care,” Mount Nik added.
I nodded, a little shocked but so, so happy for P.M. I couldn’t imagine even a cute and fluffy golden doodle receiving the kind of enthusiastic attention that this mangled pit bull was getting from Mount Nik’s family.
But then I had to scrunch my forehead. “The only issue is that you live in Indiana, so I’m not sure how we can transfer her to your place in her current condition.”
They stared back at me in blank shock.
Then Ruthie turned to Artyom and said, “Wow, Yommie, you told her absolutely nothing about us. Way to make your family feel loved.”
“The world is not revolving around your feelings, Cousin Rusha,” Artyom sneered from his seat beside me.
“See, that’s probably why Lydia doesn’t want to claim you as her boyfriend.” Ruthie sucked her teeth. “Maybe if you were nicer to folks…”
“He’s been nice enough where P.M. is concerned.” Without thinking, I rushed to Artyom’s defense. “He not only got her the medical help she needed, but he made sure she was matched with the perfect family.”
Ruthie abruptly went from glaring at Artyom to smirking at me. “So, your associate is growing on you, then?”
“Ruthie, stop,” her mother said. She shook her head and threw me an apologetic look. “I swear, the only thing worse than a Rustanov man is a Rustanov teenager. I’d say they’re like a dog with a bone, but I could always get Backup to drop her bones.”
Good joke. I laughed. Weakly.
Then Mount Nik added, “What my daughter is trying to say is, you do not need to worry about getting P.M. to our home. We will, of course, take care of it.”
And take care of it, they did. It turned out that Mount Nik and his family were the opposite kind of rich from my father, who always needed a reason to spend even a dollar on what he called my “literal pet projects.”
I guess this was the difference between millions and billions because this branch of the Rustanovs didn’t mind burning through tens of thousands of dollars to arrange for a special ambulance to take P.M. to the medivac plane they had ordered to Gemidgee Regional Airport.
Ruthie’s mother, who insisted I call her Sam, got on the phone, and in less than three hours, not only was a beautiful and delicious brunch delivered to the lake house, but also, a veterinary flight nurse showed up about an hour after we finished eating.
He’d already been briefed by Dr. Kovacs, and unlike me, the nurse came equipped with a special doggie stretcher and plenty of sedatives for P.M. to make the three-hour trip to Indiana.
“Don’t worry,” the nurse assured me as I stroked the black pittie’s uninjured leg while we both waited for her to pass back out on the bed he’d rolled in behind him. “By the time she wakes up, she’ll be fully situated in her new home.”
Her new home...
I wasn’t in a relationship with Artyom, but I’d grown to love the family who took P.M. in by the time a car arrived to ferry them to their own private plane.
“Thank you,” I whispered to Ruthie as I stood on my tiptoes to hug her goodbye.
“No, thank you . You have no idea how happy you’ve made my mom,” Ruthie answered with a laugh. But then she pulled back to say, “And just a word of advice about your boyfriend….”
“Seriously, he’s not my boyfriend—” I started to explain. Again.
“Yet,” Ruthie cut me off to add. “Ask my mom and just about every woman who married into this family, including the current vice president of the United States. The harder you fight a Rustanov who’s in love with you, the harder they’ll make you fall.”
For a moment, I could only stare at her in shock. “Where did you get the idea that he was...? He’s totally not in?—”
“Okay, girl, bye,” she said with a dismissive wave, as if I didn’t know what I was talking about. “Can’t wait to see you at the next family wedding. Just make sure you two use protection. We don’t need any more secret babies in our family line!”
What?
The bold teenager walked off before I could ask any of my follow-up questions, and then Sam swooped in with another hug—and her business card.
“Yommie told us you’re on your way to becoming an animal advocate. If you ever need funding for any of your endeavors, make me your first call. And Yommie…”
I didn’t realize Artyom was standing behind me until she looked over my shoulder to address him. “Don’t mess this up. She’s perfect.”
A strange mix of emotions swirled through me. After years of struggling through fancy private schools and having to get accommodations just to make it through college, “perfect” was not usually a word used to describe me.
I didn’t try to correct her this time, though. None of what they were saying was true, but for some reason, it was starting to feel strange to keep pointing that out.
So, I just waved goodbye as they all piled into the black SUV that had come to pick them up.
Then Artyom closed the door.
And suddenly, we were alone. Without an ailing dog or a colorful family to act as a buffer.
Fear clogged my throat, but I had to give Artyom his due. “Thanks so much for everything. I couldn’t have asked for a happier ending for P.M.”
Long. Silent. Look. Then: “You are welcome so much for everything.”
It was a technically nice answer but delivered with a sneer that hit me like a cold wind. Could his family truly not see how much he disliked me?
“So… I guess since you were nice enough to get my car, I should, um, get my stuff and go,” I said, heading toward the guest bedroom.
But then he caught me by the wrist and said, “Remember your promise. Anything.”
Yes, I had promised that, hadn’t I? And as terrible a bully as he’d been over the last few weeks, he’d more than delivered on his side of the bargain.
So, with a huge gulp, I turned back around to ask, “What do you want from me?”