Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
Alexei
I awoke to dawn’s early light peeking through the blinds and Lauren, dressed and sitting on my side of the bed. She was leaving but had apparently decided to grace me with goodbye. Such progress.
“What time is it?”
“Alexei, the front door is open.”
The words were a jolt to my senses. “My father?”
“Not in his room. I checked the house and garden. There’s no sign of him.”
I stabbed my legs into sweats and grabbed my sneakers. “What time is it? Did he take the car?”
“It’s just before six a.m. I’ll check.” She headed downstairs and called out just as I descended the steps. “It’s still parked outside. Do you have another one?”
“Yes, but it’s garaged. He wouldn’t know how to get it out.” I spied my car keys on the foyer table, along with my house keys. What a horny fool I was. I had forgotten to lock up.
“So he’s on foot,” she said. “He can’t have gone far.”
She was right, but knowledge didn’t lessen the terror. I grabbed both sets of keys and hurried out while Lauren closed the door behind me. The sun was coming up, but the frosted light was just dim enough to make visibility difficult. If he stepped into the path of an oncoming car …
“Maya will be here soon. I can ask her to check the streets on the drive over.”
She held out her hand for my phone. “I’ll text. You drive.”
I pulled out and hovered at the entrance to the paved driveway.
Which way would he have gone? The street was tree-lined in both directions, and at this time, completely devoid of life.
Soon there would be dog walkers and joggers, but for now we had luck as there were few cars driving at this early hour.
“Where might he have gone?” Her soft words cut through the muddiness of my brain.
“He hasn’t been out that much. I’ve taken him on walks around the neighborhood. To the coffee shop.” He liked the flaky almond croissants. Turning left, I headed toward downtown Riverbrook.
“Don’t go too fast,” she said, her hand on my arm, reading my mind.
We drove a few minutes until we reached the High Street. The coffee shop we had frequented before wasn’t open yet. All that was missing on the ghostly street were tumbleweeds.
“What did he like to do in Seattle?”
I blurted out everything I could think of. “Coffee. Exploring Pike Place. He liked the fishmongers and their show with the fish. Meeting with friends. Playing chess.”
“When I was here last, Maya said she had taken him to the park. Did he play chess in the park in Seattle?”
“Yes, but there is no one here doing that.” Realizing how foolish that sounded, I turned the car around. My father did not know that chess was no longer happening. He would see a park and think this was where to go to find his friends and the life he had been forced to leave behind.
I headed back the way we came. The entrance to Founders’ Park was on the other side of my house.
“But the parks are not usually open so early, are they?”
“We’ll see,” Lauren soothed.
We parked outside the entrance, which was miraculously open. This was a big space that would be hard to cover.
She handed me my phone. “I’ll go right, you go left. I’ll text you if I find him.” Her instincts were better than mine, which had been dulled by panic.
I rounded the lake with its paddling ducks, looking for signs, praying that my father had not tried to feed them and fallen in. I had gone no further than the park’s gazebo, when I got a text.
Silver Eyes
Over at the bandstand!
I raced back the way I had come, tracing Lauren’s path. Charging up the steps, I knelt in front of my father. He was in his pajamas but had maintained sufficient self-preservation instincts to put on slippers.
“Papa, are you okay?”
“Where are they?”
“Where is who?”
“Charles and Josef.” His chess friends in Seattle. “Are they dead?”
My heart cracked wide open at witnessing his frailty.
Lauren sat beside him, holding his hand, and I contemplated the decision to take him away from Seattle, where he had built a life.
Now his world had become so small. The house, the yard, the occasional walk around a neighborhood he did not recognize.
I had done this. Circumscribed his life so I could follow this woman.
“They are not dead. It is too early for them to be here.”
He nodded, but he didn’t understand.
“You haven’t even had your breakfast yet, Sasha,” Lauren said in a soft tone.
He looked at her. “You are a good hockey player.”
She chuckled. “And you’re a sharp one.”
“My son plays hockey.”
“Is he any good?” Lauren peered up at me.
“He is. But he is also lazy. His mother has to yell for half an hour to get him up for practice in the morning.”
I swallowed my emotion, and with it the pain of witnessing the disappearance of another piece of him. “Come on, Papa. We should head home for coffee.”
“With an almond croissant,” he said absently.
“With an almond croissant.”
When we returned to the house, Maya was waiting in the driveway. She rushed forward to open the back seat door.
“The adventurer returns!”
“We found him in the park. I didn’t lock up properly last night.”
Maya smiled at me, all sympathy. “It happens. And the park is one of his favorite places.”
“He wanted to play chess.” I whispered to her. “He played with his friends in the park back in Seattle.”
“Ah, that makes sense. People often return to the places that hold a semblance of familiarity. Sasha, you must be starving.”
He didn’t respond, just waited for Maya to guide him. She spoke over her shoulder. “Do you play chess, Alexei?”
“The stereotypes are not all true.”
“Oh, pardon me!” Grinning, she led my father into the house.
As I watched him trudge away, Lauren came around the other side of the car to stand by me. I rubbed my mouth, conscious of how close to disaster we had come. “Thank you for remaining so calm.”
“I feel like I’m partly to blame. I distracted you last night and you didn’t go through your usual routine.”
“This is true. You wiped my brain, but then you always do, zhena.”
She placed a hand on my chest. “What does that mean? Or maybe I don’t want to know.”
“It is ‘wife’ and I think you do want to know.”
She patted my chest. “Not sure I’m interested in a Russian husband who can’t even play chess.”
Words failed me. Not because of my inability to know a knight from a rook, but because I suspected I was losing the battle here. My job was to keep him safe. It was why I had insisted he come with me to Chicago, but now I wondered if I had made a huge mistake taking him away from the world he knew.
Not only that, but I had resolved to keep Lauren insulated from all of this.
That had been my goal all those years ago.
Protect her from the drama and danger surrounding my family.
Now a different sort of drama created new burdens.
New threats to my end game. To expect her to take a relationship with me seriously when my attention was so divided was surely too much.
“I like to keep you on your toes, but this …” I gestured toward the house. “This is not something you should be concerned with.”
“We’re friends, Alexei. And one of the benefits is helping each other out. Keeping all this inside, not calling on people you know to be there for you, is not good for anyone. For you or your dad.”
I knew in my heart she was right. “He is slipping away a little more each day. Did you hear him earlier? He thinks my mother is alive and trying to get my lazy ass out of bed.”
She placed a hand on my chest and rubbed in soothing circles. “So his memories are mixed up. This is a typical prognosis, at least according to Gunnar. He went through it with his mom.”
“If he doesn’t remember my mother past a certain point, he won’t forget that he lost her.” A cold comfort, perhaps. “Eventually he won’t even remember who I am. Or who he is.”
Before he became truly ill, he had told me, I don’t want to forget you. Or your mother.
I had told him he wouldn’t. That everything he loved would stay inside him. In his heart.
What I didn’t know was that it would be trapped there, in a place neither of us could find.
That the pain of forgetting might be a blessing, but that the pain of being forgotten might be even worse.