Monarch

1. Elena Zelenska

1

ELENA ZELENSKA

I hope I recognize my fiancé. Faces have never stayed still in my mind, and I’ve only seen him once in person.

I scan the forest of figures in the airport baggage claim, looking for someone with untidy brown hair and a big, bright American smile.

Unfortunately, now that I’m in America, that describes a lot of people.

He sent me three photographs, but they all looked slightly different. I pored over them with my cousin on her phone with the cracked screen. In the first, his hair was longer, almost touching the collar of his shirt, the backdrop dark like a studio portrait.

“From school?” I said confusedly.

Mina, eighteen months older and wiser, said, “It’s his author portrait. You know, for the back of his books.”

In the second, he wore outdoor clothes, jaw unshaven, pine trees all around.

“Hiking,” Mina explained.

She’s been on the Sunflower Brides site for two years now. She knows everything about American men. Brits and Canadians, too. She doesn’t trust the Australians.

“I’m not living on the upside-down part of the world, not for anything.”

When I said we were upside down to them, she shivered in horror. “ Exactly. ”

In the last photograph, my fiancé stood with his hands on the shoulders of a small girl with hair as pale as a dandelion puff.

That time, I supplied the answer: “His daughter.”

The trouble was, I couldn’t decide which of those images—serious academic, rugged outdoorsman, or hesitant father—most represented the man I’d met at the wife swap. Then, he’d seemed shy and nervous and sweet.

And so I couldn’t fix any image of his face in my mind, and now I don’t know what to look for.

I wish I had my camera on me today. Mina said it was too big and clunky to bring along. “You hide behind that thing.”

So I left it at home in our tiny, shared room and then regretted it bitterly when I couldn’t snap a picture of him.

The airport seems crowded because it’s small, smaller even than the one in Lviv. I don’t think anybody else who rode the transatlantic jumbo jet into the Portland airport switched to the rickety little Grimstone puddle jumper with me. My fellow travelers all seem to be coming home, ready for the brisk weather in their boots and scarves, plaid shirts, and heavy jackets.

Americans don’t dress up to travel; I’m realizing that now. Most wear jeans or sweatpants, and at least one girl seems to have rolled straight out of bed in her pajamas. I’m the only one in my best dress and heels, sticking out like Minnie Mouse at a hayride.

An older man catches my eye, but not the one I’m looking for. Faces blur like smeared thumbprints. My heart jitters.

If I knew he was going to bring Ivy, his daughter, I wouldn’t worry. Pale and wispy as a winter’s moon, I couldn’t miss her in a crowd. But he already told me he’s coming alone.

I’m glad it won’t be both things at once: meeting her and the reunion. Either one on its own is a lot.

None of this felt real until I stepped off the plane. Then I breathed air that smelled nothing like I’d encountered before: sweeter, thinner, damper, with threads of smoke and pine. No hint of diesel or that fried scent from home.

The dreamlike, floating feeling that propelled me all the way from Lviv popped like a bubble and I realized, Oh my god, I actually did it. I flew nine thousand kilometers to marry a man I’ve met once.

And now I’m standing here freaking the fuck out.

So it’s a good thing the kid won’t be here to witness it. As long as I can calm down, paste a smile on my face, and remember what the hell my future husband looks like, everything will be fine.

I catch the eye of a tallish man in a tweed jacket with hair almost long enough to touch his collar. His hair is a bit lighter than I remember, and his face is cleanly shaven, but when he smiles at me, I’m pretty certain…

“Lorne,” I say, stepping forward.

He smiles, displaying a set of impossibly perfect teeth, and I become sure. Just in time to tilt up my lips to receive his kiss.

His mouth is soft, extremely soft, no prickles around the edges like he had in in Lviv. Then and now, he tastes minty and fresh. I hope I do, too, after a quick rinse in the airport bathroom. I should have brought a toothbrush in my purse.

“God, you look incredible!” He holds the outsides of my arms, leaning back to look at me.

The couple passing by turns their heads because he said it pretty loudly.

I’m embarrassed even though I spent a lot of time getting ready, hoping to elicit exactly this sort of reaction. It’s just that a Ukrainian man would never say it like that for everyone to hear. He probably wouldn’t say it at all; he’d just give me a certain kind of smirk.

But we’re not in Ukraine anymore. That was the whole, entire point.

So I look downward and smile and say, “Thank you,” even though Lorne slides his hands down my arms, grabs my wrists, and pulls my hands outward like a butterfly, which is even more embarrassing.

“I can’t believe you’re here!”

“Me, too.” This seems like a good time to step forward for a hug to stop everything else that’s happening.

I slide my arms around his waist. He’s warm and firm. When I press my palms against his back, I can feel that he works out.

I’m hugging him. I’m hugging my fiancé.

I turn my face against the side of his neck where the hair curls a little and breathe in his smell, pleasant and clean. Soap, pine, and pencil shavings. It’s a nice smell. I could love this person.

The fact that I don’t yet is okay. Love takes time; everyone says so. And I’m patient.

Lorne has everything a girl needs to fall in love. Mina was madly jealous when I told her all about him–fit, fortyish, attractive, well-read, well-spoken, successful enough to wear a Breitling.

“And you just met him in the café? Not even inside the swap?” she squawked.

At the very first event I attended. Even I had to admit, it wasn’t fair.

But Mina’s too generous a soul to be overly envious. “About time you got lucky, Sprout,” was all she said.

Mina calls me Sprout, and I call her Bean. I’ve always been tall, and she likes jellybeans. We were six when we came up with it, and we thought it was genius.

As further evidence of my undeserved good fortune, Lorne isn’t short, which means I won’t have to scrunch in photos. Even in Mina’s stilettos, we stand eye-to-eye.

It seems perfect to me.

But Lorne steps back, squinting slightly. “You’re taller than I remember. What kind of shoes are you wearing?”

I twist my foot to show him.

“You won’t be able to wear those here. Not in winter.”

His dismissive tone makes my face hot. I only wore these heels again because he complimented them last time. But then, I was sitting down.

It doesn’t matter; he said I look pretty. No, better than pretty—incredible.

So I smile back at him, even though he isn’t smiling right at this moment. “That’s okay. I have other shoes.”

Only one pair, actually. But that’s fine; they’re sneakers.

The rigidness in Lorne’s face melts away like it was never there at all. “Why don’t I just take you shopping? You want to fit in.”

I do want to fit in, desperately. But I’m not stupid enough to think it will be that easy.

I’m noticing all kinds of things I did wrong already. Like, I’m wearing way too much makeup compared to the other women in the baggage claim. It’s less than Mina wears to her waitressing job and a fraction of the full-face paint job she spackled on for the wife swap, but I don’t see a single other person wearing lipstick, blush, shadow, and liner at two o’clock on a Tuesday.

Also, my suitcase looks tacky tumbling down the conveyor belt: dirty purple nylon with a strip of duct tape sealing the pocket that lost its zipper.

Lorne doesn’t seem to notice. He hauls it off the belt for me, waiting for more.

“That’s all I have.”

He looks at me in surprise. “You only brought one suitcase?”

I shrug, not entirely sure how to respond. It’s a big suitcase, and it wasn’t that hard to fit all my clothes inside. I’d have liked to bring more books, but then it would have been too heavy.

To my relief, Lorne just laughs. “That’s what I love about you, Elena—you’re so practical. If an American woman were moving halfway around the world, she’d need ten of these.”

I nod, smiling. Really I’m thinking that an American woman would never trade places with me precisely because of her ten suitcases of luxuries. She’s already got everything she needs right here.

And soon…so will I.

I’ve been drooling over the American life since I was six years old and I found my aunt’s old stash of Sweet Valley High books. I learned English purely to devour the adventures of those outrageously blessed California twins who swam in their own backyard pool in a land of perpetual summer and drove a cherry-red convertible to school.

Lorne can try to scare me about Oregon winters all he likes—there’s no way it gets as bad as Lviv, where cold fronts roll down from Siberia. If you take a glass of water outside, it freezes solid in your hand in minutes. Summer is the rainy season.

So, I’m not worried about the weather.

It’s the man leading me by the hand who concerns me.

We exchanged forty-two emails and spoke on the phone seventeen times. But I only saw his face during that one conversation, across a café table at the Ambassador Hotel.

Mina dragged me along to what Sunflower Brides calls a “romance tour” and the locals call a “wife swap.” Mina attends all the time, not hunting for an actual husband, but for more of a raunchy pen pal who will send her money for laptops and purses.

I had never been to a wife swap before. Never even considered it. But I had to get out of Lviv quickly and could only think of one way to make that happen.

I met the foreign men and gave up after an hour. No matter how Mina dolled me up, I’m shit at flirting. I’d never had a local boyfriend even once in my life, so I don’t know how I thought I was going to charm some exotic doctor.

Also…most of them were strange. Not awful, exactly, but you could tell there was a reason they had to board a plane for a date. One guy was just pouring sweat, shirt soaked through. I could imagine that being slightly alarming on a normal sort of date. Instead, he was sharing a small sofa with four voluptuous twenty-year-olds.

That’s the other thing I learned: there’s no way I could compete with the girls who’d already attended dozens or even hundreds of wife swaps. One day of work with Mina could never match their level of investment.

I’m twenty-seven, not twenty. A twenty-seven-year-old virgin. Over the hill in the Lviv dating market, and apparently on romance tours.

I felt relieved but then depressed. Without a quickie marriage, I hadn’t solved my problem. So I bought a pastry at the café on the ground floor of the hotel and sat down to stew.

I hadn’t noticed the man already taking a seat at the one and only open table—or he hadn’t noticed me. After a moment of confusion, he gave me a nervous look, sweet and awkward, saying, “We could both sit. I won’t bother you; I was planning to read anyway.”

I didn’t realize he was from the wife swap, silly as that might seem. A lot of tourists come to that café. He seemed so different from everyone upstairs.

He’d left the romance tour for the exact same reason as me, out of disgust.

“At them or yourself?” I said.

He laughed. “Both, absolutely. The whole human race, actually—what are we doing?”

He was so easy, so funny. I hardly noticed how we started talking or how we continued on. He never did open that book.

It seemed we had everything in common. I mean, he’s an author and my favorite thing in the universe is books…everything else was just the frosting on the cake.

It was almost too romantic, too perfect, the hours flying away unnoticed. When it was all over, I had to give my head a shake. I thought, He’s already married. Or he was lying the whole time, making things up to impress you…

But Mina looked him up online, and everything he said was true. His books, the award he won, even his daughter, all there in black and white on his Wikipedia page. The man has his own Wikipedia!

Author Lorne Ronson lives in the American West with his daughter Ivy Ronson, 9 (Mother, Linda Lovelace, d.).

Neither the Wikipedia page, nor Lorne himself, had explained how he came to have a daughter with a woman who was now dead and apparently hadn’t shared his last name.

Through all our emails and phone calls, the closest I got was asking after Ivy’s mother. Lorne sighed and said, “She’s not in the picture.” Since I already knew she was dead from my snooping, it felt tacky to press for more information, and possibly cruel, though my curiosity was killing me.

Lorne told me all about Ivy. “ The good and the bad, ” as he put it. I hope he did the same for himself. I hope I did.

I really tried to be honest. About everything. Almost everything. I mean, would it be so crazy if this could actually work out?

When Lorne smiles at me, it doesn’t seem so nuts.

I want it to work out. I want to build a life here. That’s what he wants, too, right?

Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m holding the hand of a stranger.

We cross the parking lot, Lorne lugging my suitcase easily, though the lot is unpaved and my suitcase is janky.

Grimstone is remote; Lorne warned me of this. But he promised the house he’s building will be really nice. “ Luxurious, even. ”

I don’t want to be materialistic. Or a hypocrite—I flew in with single suitcase. But Lorne told me he does pretty well for himself, and we’re coming up to the first test. Does this guy exaggerate?

I scan the bumpers of the cars, trying to guess which is his. I’m hoping it’s at least a Toyota. Please, just not that truck held together with twine…

Lorne stops behind a shiny BMW.

Something in my brain relaxes like a rubber band. Okay. So he’s not a total liar.

If anything, he undersold it. This car is really nice. The trunk whooshes up before we touch anything, like it saw us coming. When I slip inside, the leather smells brand-new. Does his kid even ride in here?

I sink into the cloudlike front seat. Lorne slides in beside me, donning a pair of sunglasses that also look pretty expensive. I start to get a weird feeling. How much do authors make?

It’s disorienting. If he were a teacher, I could have looked his salary up online. How much does a teacher make in Oregon, USA?

I told him what I earned at the bookshop.

“I know it’s pitiful,” I said when his laugh came snorting over the phone. “I’m there for the discount. If my uncle made me pay full rent, I’d have to get some other job.”

That would have broken my heart. I loved working at the bookshop. Besides Mina, it was the best thing in my life.

I worked there for almost eight years, from the time I was a teenager. The discount let me build the best little library in Lviv.

But that was all coming to an end, one way or another.

I sold my beloved library for cash before I left because I knew I couldn’t bring it, and god, it hurt more than I expected.

If I think about it now, I might bawl, and then Lorne will think I’m one of the girls with a secret child back home. I’m a shithead for even thinking it, but that’s how it feels in my heart. That library was my child. I protected it, nurtured it, grew it for years.

That was the price of coming here, paid with my dearest treasure. If life were a fairytale, that sacrifice alone would guarantee my success.

But I don’t think I’m in a fairytale.

I’m hoping for a nice, boring memoir. I’ll write it when I’m a hundred. Maybe Lorne can help me.

I smile at him.

“What?” he says, smiling back.

“You’re a good driver. Careful.”

“Precious cargo,” he says, and he puts his hand on my knee.

His palm fills the whole bare space below my skirt. His skin is warm and dry. His thumb presses in just a little.

My heart rate shoots up like a strongman dinged it with a hammer at a circus. Lorne is behaving so easy and natural, while my head fills up with sirens.

I’m realizing that this man conceived a child with somebody named Linda, while I’ve never put a toe on third base.

Lorne knows I’m inexperienced; I’ve told him. But there’s no way he remembers what it was like the first time someone slid their hand up your bare thigh.

Now I’m that dude from the wife swap who couldn’t stop sweating. If Lorne puts his hand all the way up my skirt, will I feel sweaty down there?

I catch his wrist. I don’t mean to; my hand jerks out and grabs him.

Our eyes meet. Whatever Lorne reads there, he grins.

He swerves the wheel, pulling off on a small side road. All the roads have been winding and narrow since two minutes from the airport. This one is only a single track through the trees.

It’s dark here beneath the pines. When Lorne stops the car and kills the engine, it’s silent, too.

Wild thoughts fill my head—the worst things you see on the news that happen to trusting and adventurous girls.

“What are we?—”

“I thought since Ivy will be back at the hotel, maybe we should…” Lorne gives me a significant look. Actually, he gives his groin a significant look, which makes me do the same. It’s quite apparent how much he enjoyed touching my bare leg.

I’m flattered. I was worried I wouldn’t know what to do—looks like I might not have to do much.

But also, I was hoping for something a little more romantic for my first time.

I bite my lip, wondering if that’s okay to say to Lorne. Wondering how he’ll take it.

Some guys are patient when it comes to sex.

But some get mad.