Chapter 25
MILA
His voice. Through my door.
Quiet. One sentence.
“Poydem so mnoy.” Come with me.
He doesn’t knock. He says it once and waits.
I cross to the door.
I open it.
He’s in the hallway.
He hasn’t slept. His hair is rough. His jaw is tight. He hasn’t eaten. The mask he wears at dinner is off. The eyes underneath it are the ones looking at me now.
His hands are at his sides. His jaw is tight.
“I should have brought you here the same day I told you.” His voice is very low. “You had a right to it then. I kept it too long. I’m sorry.”
He stops. He knows I heard everything he already said in that room.
“There’s something that’s yours,” he says. “Come with me.”
I don’t speak.
I look at his face.
He waits.
I nod. I step into the hallway.
He walks half a pace ahead of me. Not leading. Not hurrying. The half-pace of a man who has learned where the edges are.
Through the central guest wing. Past Sofia’s door, closed. Past the corner that turns toward his side of the house.
I haven’t been down his hallway since the morning I walked out of his bedroom in his shirt.
His bedroom door is open.
It’s been open the whole time I haven’t been here.
We go through it.
His bed is made. The lamp on the desk is on. The drawer of the nightstand is closed. I don’t look at the drawer. I won’t.
He keeps walking.
To the far wall of his bedroom.
There’s a door on the far wall I haven’t noticed.
The door is painted the same color as the wall. The wood is the wood of the wall. The handle is plain brass, set flush. You wouldn’t see it unless you were looking.
I’ve been in this bedroom many nights and I’ve never seen this door.
He puts his hand on the handle.
He looks at me.
His eyes hold mine and he waits.
I nod.
He opens it.
The room inside is small.
Smaller than my bedroom. The size of a closet that was given a window. The window is high on the far wall, north-facing. The light through it is the late afternoon light I haven’t seen in this part of the house. The rest of his suite faces east.
Canvases stacked against the long wall. Faces against the wood. I count them without meaning to. Eleven canvases.
Brushes in jars on a small wooden table. The water has gone the wrong color. The brushes haven’t been washed in a long time.
Tubes of paint in a wooden box. The caps are dusty. The tubes crinkled. The paint inside has gone hard.
The smell is linseed oil and turpentine and the dust of a sealed room that just got opened.
An easel in the center.
One canvas on the easel.
The canvas faces the wall.
The back of the canvas has a strip of masking tape across the upper edge. His hand on the tape.
A date.
Three years ago.
He stays at the door.
He doesn’t come into the room with me.
Voice low.
“Eto byla ona.” This was her.
He walks to the easel.
His back to me for the time it takes him to put his hand on the corner of the canvas and turn it around.
He steps back.
Stays by the door.
The painting is Yelena.
I haven’t seen my sister’s face in years.
I’ve been imagining her face for years.
The face I’ve been imagining is a face I built from a child’s memory. Yelena before. The older sister in a yellow dress in our mother’s kitchen.
The face on the canvas is Yelena at the end.
The face I didn’t get to imagine.
She’s sitting at a small table. Bottle of bad wine in front of her. Hair down. The wooden cross at her throat. Her mouth is open in the shape of a sung note. She’s drunk.
She’s singing. Nico has painted her singing.
The bow of her upper lip. Her jaw, sharper than mine. Gray-green eyes like mine but with the smile in them mine hasn’t had. The hand that has been resting on the bottle is half-lifted. Yelena’s gesture, before she said something serious.
The painting isn’t a memorial.
The painting is alive. She’s alive on this canvas. Like she was in our mother’s kitchen singing Tonkaya Ryabina to me when I was small.
I don’t cry.
My hand goes to my collarbone. Through the fabric of my shirt. My fingers spread. The same spread under green wool in front of Marguerite’s mirror.
I can’t breathe right.
The hand drops.
I take one step toward the canvas.
I stop.
I look at it for a long time.
Nico doesn’t speak or approach.
Nico stays in the doorway. Hand on the doorframe. Weight on his back foot. Three years. Nobody else has stood in this room.
The light from the high window moves a quarter inch on the floor.
I open my mouth.
My voice is rough. The vowels are rough. I’m not sure my voice is going to work until it does.
“Ona poyot.” She’s singing.
Nico, quieter than I’ve spoken:
“Ona pela.” She was singing.
“Tu noch’.” That night.
“Tonkuyu Ryabinu.”
I reach out my right hand.
I touch the wood frame of the canvas.
Not the painting.
The wood at the corner of the frame.
The wood is warm where the late afternoon light has been on it.
I keep my hand there.
“She was like this,” he says from the doorway. “A few nights before. We had bad wine in the safehouse. She couldn’t sleep.”
I keep my hand on the frame.
“She sang. She didn’t know I was watching.” His voice is quiet in a way that means something is still in him. “She sang your song’ She got to the middle and stopped. Lost the second verse.”
My hand tightens on the frame.
“She laughed.” He pauses. “Started over from the beginning.”
“She could never remember the second verse,” I say.
“No.”
“She always laughed.”
“Yes.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“She talked about you that night,” he says. “She put her hand on the bottle and she said —”
His throat moves.
“Milochka. Ya pela eto yey, kogda ona ne mogla spat’.”
Milochka. I used to sing this to her when she couldn’t sleep.
The sob comes before I can stop it. One. Hard. I press my hand flat to my mouth.
“She hummed it,” he says. “At the end. When the blade was at her throat.”
The air leaves me completely.
He told me in that room she was brave. He told me she didn’t give him up. He didn’t tell me she hummed. He didn’t tell me she hummed this song. The song she sang when I was small and the dark was too big and she was the only thing between me and it.
“She hummed it for you,” he says. His voice goes wrong on the last word. “I don’t think she cared whether I understood. She hummed it and I already knew who she was singing it for.”
My forehead goes to the frame. I press it hard against the wood.
She hummed my name when she died. Not in words. In the only language she was sure I would still have.
“I couldn’t paint her the other way,” he says. “I painted her the way she was when she was still alive and didn’t know what was coming. Laughing at herself. Forgetting the second verse.” A pause. “That’s who she was. Not the end of it. That’s who she was.”
I’m crying. I’m not stopping it. I cry with my forehead on the frame of her face until my body has nothing left.
He doesn’t come into the room. He doesn’t speak. He stays in the doorway and lets me be in here with her.
After a long time I straighten. I wipe my face. I turn around.
His hands are at his sides. The set of his shoulders has changed. Something put down.
“You kept your promise,” I say.
He nods. Once.
“Stay as long as you need,” he says quietly. “I’ll wait outside.”
“Don’t.” Rough. “Don’t go.”
He stays.
I stay in the room for a long time.
I don’t know how long.
The light moves a quarter inch. Then another. The smell of linseed oil is the smell of a room my sister has been alive in for three years.
She didn’t die unwitnessed.
The man who couldn’t save her painted her face in the dark for three years.
He has shown her to me.
Gratitude.
I don’t have anywhere to put it yet.
I lower my hand, and the breath comes out of me all at once, and I turn and walk to the doorway.
Nico steps back to let me through.
He looks at the floor as I pass him. He keeps his hands at his sides.
I walk through his bedroom.
The bed. The desk. The nightstand. The drawer.
I walk into the hallway.
I walk back through his side of the house. Through the connecting hallway. Past Renzo and Izzy’s door, closed. Past Sofia’s door, closed, the line of light under the gap on. To my own door.
I open it.
I go inside.
I close the door behind me.
I put my hand on the lock. I don’t turn it.
I lower my hand.
I walk to the window.
The garden is going dark.
The iron bench his Papa proposed to his Mama at is in the corner. Empty. Nico isn’t in the garden tonight.
I stand at the window.
She didn’t die unwitnessed.
I press my forehead to the glass. The glass is cold against my skin.
I close my eyes.
Yelena’s face is the first thing I see.
Hair down. Mouth open in the shape of a sung note. Gray-green eyes alive in oil.
He gave her back to me.
I cross to the bed.
I lie down.
I close my eyes.
I sleep.
For the first time since the morning he told me.