Chapter 19
It was about a fifteen-minute walk along the boardwalk from Coney Island to Brighton Beach. The restaurants began to change from hot dog stands and seafood shacks to Russian restaurants that appeared—at least from the outside—to strike a cross in tone between hotel banquet rooms and nightclubs.
Sawyer had begun to quietly freak out about meeting Nick’s mom.
“Are you sure she won’t mind?” Sawyer asked nervously. “She isn’t expecting us. Maybe she’s resting and doesn’t want company around.”
“She’ll be glad to see us,” Nick insisted.
“We’re bringing a complete mess of soggy sand right to her doorstep.” Sawyer continued to fret.
“We’ll shower. We’ll wash our clothes. We’ll say hi to my mom—who I’ve been meaning to visit anyway. We’ll make sure to clean up after ourselves.”
“But…”
“But what?”
“I don’t know.” Sawyer squirmed. “I just…feel bad.”
“You feel bad about everything,” Nick quipped. “You’re too nice.”
Sawyer frowned. Nick noticed her expression and chuckled.
“Look, it’s part of your charm. But it’s OK to avail yourself of others every so often.”
Sawyer repressed a dubious sigh.
Eventually, after passing several Russian restaurants clustered together in a row, they turned and left the boardwalk. Nick continued to lead the way deeper into Brighton Beach proper, past Russian bookstores and butchers and convenience stores and even a Duane Reade bearing the Cyrillic letters “аптека.” It was like entering a different nation, but without a passport.
Finally, Nick turned onto a street mostly lined with the kind of brick-and-siding two-story row houses that characterized most of Queens and outer Brooklyn. The majority sported little metal awnings over the front porch. The yards in front of them were mostly paved over with concrete or gravel. A few houses sported gaudy touches, with ornate wrought iron fences or front doors that boasted cut-glass windows.
Nick drew up short on the sidewalk outside one of the houses.
“This is it,” he said.
No ornate wrought iron or stained-glass door. It was clean and cheerful in its simplicity, with brick that looked like it had been power-washed and regrouted, and white siding that looked like it had been freshly painted. To the right of the house was a narrow driveway and what looked like a beat-up old Mercedes-Benz from the 1970s.
“C’mon,” Nick urged, taking the stoop two stairs at a time.
What am I doing here?Sawyer thought to herself. If someone had asked her earlier this morning, Hey, what are you doing after work?, never in a million years would she have been able to guess it would be this. Any of it, really.
Nick knocked and shouted something in Russian. A faint response came back from within. He produced a key, unlocked the door, and let himself in, waving for Sawyer to follow. She obeyed, still feeling timid.
Once inside, Sawyer looked around. The main living room was clean, the walls were Spartan and white, but the room was dominated by otherwise weighty things: a thick Oriental rug; a big, bulky maroon sofa set; and a heavy, round, ornately carved wooden coffee table. A couple of very green spider plants hung from a pair of 1970s-style macrame hanging planters on either side of the bigger of the two sofas. And in the middle of the sofa sat a diminutive older woman, her hair dark as a raven’s wing, a cannula tube connecting her nose to a low-hissing oxygen tank. She put the newspaper she’d been reading aside and smiled.
Sawyer’s mind flashed back: I know someone with respiratory problems, Nick had said about not smoking, that night they first met.
Nick’s mother didn’t get up from the sofa, but threw her arms wide to Nick. He perched next to her and gave her a hug and a kiss, then pointed to Sawyer and said something that sounded vaguely like Eto moya podruga, followed by something she did recognize: “Sawyer.”
His mother looked at Sawyer and without missing a beat proclaimed, “Welcome!”
Sawyer started to say a formal hello, but Nick’s mother waved her off. “Lena, Lena!” she corrected. “You are friend of my son—call me Lena.”
Nick switched to English, and explained about what had happened at the beach, their need for showers, and to use the washer and dryer.
Lena clapped her hands and laughed.
“So then,” she said to Sawyer. “You are also just like my son!”
“I’m sorry?”
“You are just like my son,” Lena repeated. “When he was small boy, he would see water, he would jump in with all clothes on. I had to make sure if I take him anywhere near water, he has swimming shorts on, or else he jump in, doesn’t matter what he is wearing!” Lena laughed, thoroughly amused. “All these years, and nothing changes,” she said, very pleased by this idea.
Sawyer had no clue how to respond, and wound up simply laughing along with Lena.
Lena grabbed her arm. “He love swimming,” she insisted.
“I love swimming, too,” Sawyer agreed.
Lena smiled. “Swimming is great pleasure of life.”
“Yes,” Sawyer agreed. “It is.”
Nick showed Sawyer to a bathroom and brought her a fresh, fluffy towel. He offered her a few items of clothing.
“A T-shirt,” he said, looking a little sheepish. “And a pair of boxer shorts. To wear while I run our clothes through the washer and dryer.”
She accepted the towel and the T-shirt and shorts, then closed the bathroom door and slipped out of her sundress and underthings, wrapped herself in the towel, and cracked the door open enough to hand her wet garments out to him.
“Thank you…for doing all this…” she managed to say.
Their hands touched briefly in the exchange.
The door closed.
When Sawyer emerged from the shower, she wrapped herself in the fluffy towel, then put on the T-shirt and boxers…which were obviously from a stash of clothing that Nick kept at his mother’s house. She knew he’d picked them because of the summer heat. But they were so light as to make her feel almost naked. There was also a strange and unexpected thrill in having Nick’s clothes so close to her.
Sawyer thought about this for a moment, shivered, and then shook herself back to reality.
Nick took a quick turn in the shower, and the next thing Sawyer knew, the three of them were sitting around Nick’s mother’s kitchen table, drinking from a pitcher of iced tea that had been soaking in a copious mixture of sugar, lemons, and cherries.
“I have some potato salad!” Lena said, a finger in the air as though she’d just had an idea. “Are you hungry?” she asked Nick. “Will you eat?” she asked Sawyer.
“I…uh…sure…” Sawyer said. Even after the corn dogs and slushies, the impromptu swim and the walk and the shower had made her strangely hungry again.
“I’ll get it,” Nick said, putting a gentle hand on his mother’s arm to stop her from getting up. Lena was still tethered to the oxygen tank, which rode along in a wheeled basket of sorts wherever she went, but seemed a cumbersome anchor nonetheless.
Nick pulled a big glass bowl out of the fridge and peeled off the plastic wrap covering it.
“When did you make this?” he asked his mother, as though surprised.
“This morning,” she answered. “I don’t know why I made it—and made so much. Maybe I knew you would come. Maybe I am psychic.”
Nick laughed. “I wouldn’t put it past you.”
He pulled out three plates from a cupboard. They were white but very thin, and painted with tiny delicate pink roses. He put a scoop of potato salad on each plate, then passed them around the kitchen table and set down three forks.
Sawyer accepted her plate and fork and took a bite. A mix of cubed potatoes, carrots, onions, hard-boiled eggs, pickles, and salty ham, tossed in a healthy coating of mayonnaise and sour cream, and infused with a surprisingly heavy amount of dill. It was heartier, sweeter, saltier, and creamier than the usual potato salad that Sawyer’s own mother had always thrown together for picnics and PTA meetings.
“Do you like it?” Lena asked, eagerly watching Sawyer’s face as she chewed her first bite.
“Very much,” Sawyer replied.
“It’s Russian potato salad,” Lena emphasized. “Salat Olivier! Good for holidays.” She nodded and chuckled. “Here we have potato salad for summer…but in Russia we have salat Olivier on New Year’s Eve.”
Lena grinned, the apples of her cheeks showing her high cheekbones. She was such a petite woman—small boned, birdlike. Sawyer could see now that the glossy black hue of her hair was likely the result of dye, but it was tastefully done, as was the cut of her bob. And although age and her poor health had put a few lines around Lena’s, she and Nick shared the same bright, clear blue eyes.
“Well, this is delicious anytime,” Sawyer said, taking another bite of the potato salad. “I like the dill.”
Nick laughed. “Don’t you know?” he teased. “That’s the way to make any dish ‘Russian’—stir in a bunch of sour cream and mayonnaise, and throw in a ton of dill.”
“That’s not true!” Lena protested. But she laughed, clearly not offended. “OK,” she said, wheezing a little into the cannula, “is maybe a little true.”
They all chuckled and tucked into the potato salad. After a few bites, though, Lena laid down her fork and reached for Sawyer’s hand. She gave Sawyer’s left hand a gentle pat where it rested on the table.
“You are the first girl Nico has brought home,” she said. “And his face…his face is so happy.”
Sawyer looked at Lena, blushing with a bit of shock, and dreading having to let the woman know she’d gotten the wrong impression.
“Oh…” she said awkwardly, trying to find the words. “I’m…I’m not his girlfriend,” she explained.
Lena’s face fell.
“But—he does have a girlfriend,” Sawyer added quickly, unwilling to disappoint Lena. “Yes,” Sawyer continued. “Nick’s girlfriend is a very pretty blond woman, named Kendra. She is very nice…very…pretty…”
Sawyer quickly ran out of things to say about Kendra.
Nick cleared his throat.
“Actually, Kendra and I broke up,” he said, correcting Sawyer.
She looked at him, surprised by this nugget of news, and more surprised that he hadn’t thought to mention it all day, until now.
“What?” Sawyer uttered, blinking at him, and feeling more than a little disoriented.
“Yeah,” Nick said to her. “I have no plans to see her again.”
“Oh…” Sawyer murmured. “Nick…I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Sawyer became aware that during this entire exchange, Lena had been looking between their faces, her eyes flicking to Nick, then Sawyer, then back to Nick.
Lena smiled to herself as if she had just decoded a secret. But then…her hand was still resting on top of Sawyer’s. She glanced down now, as if suddenly aware of something she’d been touching.
Lena lifted her hand and observed Sawyer’s ring. She let her eyes linger there, frowning, not saying anything. Then she appeared to gather herself. She put on a smile again.
“Well, it is nice to have you here,” Lena said kindly.
“Thank you—really,” Sawyer replied, smiling back, suddenly nervous again.
Lena nodded, smiled warmly, then turned her attention to take a tiny bite of the potato salad. She glanced up briefly, and shot a slight look of concern in her son’s direction.
After they’d eaten, Nick buzzed about, fixing a few things around the house: a light bulb that needed changing, a towel rod that had come a little loose in the bathroom, locating a TV remote that had gone missing, and resetting a TV menu of options that had somehow gotten tangled in commands. He took care to hunt down and vacuum up any sand he and Sawyer may have tracked into the house, then exchanged a few words in Russian with his mother.
He turned to Sawyer. By then, they had redressed in their clothes, clean and crisp from the dryer.
“Ready to go?”
“Oh, sure,” Sawyer agreed. “Actually, if you want to spend more time with your mother, you can just point me in the direction of the train.”
“Cut it out,” Nick scolded. “I’m not letting you ride the train back alone. And besides, we’re not taking the train. I’m driving us.”
“Driving us?”
“Yeah. It’s late, and that’s a really long ride.”
Sawyer laughed nervously. “And your mom doesn’t mind you borrowing her car?”
“Of course not!” Lena piped up. “Anyway, the car belongs to Nico.”
“I bought the car for you, Ma,” Nick reminded her. “It’s yours.”
Lena turned to look at Sawyer and shrugged. “We only use it to go to doctor, and always Nico drives. I never drive it.”
“Well, my point is,” Nick said, “it belongs to her, but she says we can borrow it. We’ll use it to drive back to Manhattan tonight, and then tomorrow I’ll drive back out to return it to her.”
Lena grinned at both of them. “Is good for me—I get double blessing of double visit from my son,” she said, happily signing off.
“So, ready to go?” Nick repeated.
They said goodbye to Lena, who hugged them both. Sawyer was a little awkward, taking extra care to make sure she didn’t disturb the woman’s cannula or oxygen tank, and feeling the delicate weight of Lena in her arms.
They made their exit. Nick waited to hear his mother turn the dead bolt before going around the side of the house where the dilapidated Mercedes was parked.
“I bought this off one of my mother’s friends in the neighborhood. I’m pretty sure the guy used to be in the Russian mob. It runs just fine but stinks of diesel. My mom always says that’s the smell of the Old Country. That, and Russian cigarettes—which, according to her, smell like perfume and are so strong they can kill non-Russians with two inhales.”
They got in and pulled the doors shut. Nick started the engine, then worked the clutch and gears, putting the car in reverse to back out. The car was old in an oddly comfortable way—the seats dipped low on their springs, the sunroof sported the kind of tinted glass that had been popular in the seventies, and there was a very lived-in smell that resembled the smell of the sand at the beach.
“She’s why you don’t smoke,” Sawyer said, as Nick steered the car through the streets of Brighton Beach. “That thing you said about knowing someone with respiratory problems—you meant her.”
“Yeah.”
“Was it from smoking?”
Nick shook his head. “She did use to smoke, and I don’t think smoking helped, that’s for sure. But the issues with her lungs came from her work as a chemist.”
“What…happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“No. You can ask,” Nick said. But his body language definitely stiffened. “I’ll try to give you the abridged version of the whole thing.”
Sawyer humbly waited.
“My mom was a research chemist. She was assigned by the government to work in Kremlyov, one of the so-called ‘closed towns’ a couple hundred miles outside Moscow, where everyone who lives in the town basically works for the lab. Many important chemists worked there, but there weren’t a lot of freedoms.
“One day, she found out she was pregnant. She told no one. Instead, she put in an application for special permission to attend an academic conference in Belgium. She says she was surprised when she got approved—she felt that someone had made a clerical error, or else God had intervened.
“She went. Once in Belgium, she made contact with the American embassy. They were sympathetic to her story…and interested in the fact that she was a high-ranking Soviet chemist who wanted to defect.
“When the plane that was supposed to take her back to Moscow began to board, she was already on a plane bound for America.”
Nick paused, redoubling his concentration on the road. By then, they’d joined the Belt Parkway and they’d run into traffic.
“What about…” Sawyer ventured, but trailed off.
“My dad?” said Nick.
“Yes.”
“My mom says she was genuinely in love with the man who was my father—a fellow chemist—but that their affair was on-again, off-again, and he was deeply patriotic. And very proud. He never would have come with her, and she believed he might have even stopped her. Anyway, for all of those reasons, she never told him about the baby. About me.”
“Wow,” Sawyer said, solemn. “That’s got to be hard, Nick,” she added softly.
Nick shrugged. “It is what it is,” he said, his voice flat. “I admire my mom for her courage. And I’m happy I grew up in America, free to be a wannabe-musician-turned-junior-ad-exec.” He glanced at her. “The American Dream,” he joked.
“What did your mom do when she got to America?”
“Well, given her background, they wanted her to come work for the big lab in Brookhaven.”
“That’s…Long Island?” Sawyer asked, still getting used to New York’s geography.
“Yep. By Stony Brook University. The lab is by far the area’s biggest employer. She really liked it at first; said it was different from the town where she’d worked in Russia, more relaxed and open. And to tell the truth, I really liked growing up in Stony Brook. It’s got a kind of small-town charm to it that I miss. That whole area is old-school Long Island—lots of colonials, churches with little white steeples, a quaint little Main Street in Port Jefferson, an old stone lighthouse…oh, and going to Cedar Beach in the summer to swim, of course.”
“Or—according to your mom—taking an impromptu swim anytime of the year,” Sawyer teased.
“Yeah, or that,” Nick agreed affably. He smiled at Sawyer. “To be honest: my mom rarely tried to stop me.”
“She seems big on joy. Especially for her son.”
“She is.”
Sawyer tried to piece everything together. “Stony Brook, huh? For some reason…I thought you grew up in the city. Or, well—in Brighton Beach.”
“We moved there when I was thirteen. So…it’s home, too. But in a different way.”
“Why did you move?”
Nick stiffened again. “Well, I guess that’s the not-so-great part,” he said. “My mom was working at the lab in Brookhaven when she started having respiratory issues. She went to the doctor, and after a whole bunch of tests to try to determine a diagnosis, they believed her lungs had been damaged by exposure from working in the lab. Brookhaven kind of freaked out, insisting her exposure wasn’t from their lab and must have come from her time in the lab in Kremlyov—which, who knows, maybe it did. Either way, the whole thing made my mom a pariah to them. They gave her severance, sent her packing, distanced themselves from her. So my mom was faced with starting over, with lungs that were starting to fail her, and trying to keep up with health insurance premiums that the lab was no longer covering.”
He paused. Sawyer could see his clenched jaw in profile. He took a breath.
“Anyway, I think there was a time there when my mom’s personal American Dream turned into a nightmare.”
Sawyer was quiet, taking this all in. The pieces of Nick she’d been steadily gathering were all falling into place now. The reasons he’d worked so hard to get into an Ivy League school and attend on scholarship. The reason he worked in advertising even though he seemed to disdain it a little. The reason he held down a nine-to-five despite the fact that he was a talented musician. The reason he lived in a walk-up in Alphabet City with a bathtub in the kitchen, instead of blowing a bunch of rent on a doorman building in order to keep up with his colleagues at work.
“It was weird,” Nick mused now. “Because it kind of happened in reverse order. Growing up, I felt like I was an all-American kid…then, at thirteen, I was suddenly very aware of the fact that I was the son of an immigrant, and what that meant.”
“I’m sorry,” Sawyer said.
Nick’s jaw clenched again and he shook his head. “Don’t be,” he insisted. “I’m not. It was one of the most important lessons life has ever taught me.”
Sawyer fell quiet, respectfully contemplating his words. Nick continued to navigate the Belt Parkway, upshifting and downshifting as the traffic lurched forward, stop-and-go-style. Finally, the Verrazzano Bridge came into view, the flow started to pick back up, and they began cruising slowly but steadily along.
The sun had begun to set in the west, and the sunset was putting on yet another spectacular summer show. Driving along the water’s edge, with the brilliant colors dancing in the sky, was surreal and unexpectedly beautiful.
“Wow. It’s like we’re literally driving off into the sunset,” Sawyer joked.
She expected Nick to laugh, but he glanced at her with a mixed expression she couldn’t quite read, then turned his eyes back to the road.
An awkward moment passed.
Sawyer cleared her throat.
“When did you break up with Kendra?”
“That night at the club.”
“Oh.”
“I’d wanted to talk to her in private sooner than that,” Nick said. “But I never was able to get her alone.”
“And then she invited Charles and me out to sushi and to hear you play.”
“Yes.”
Sawyer fell quiet again, thinking. She still wasn’t sure whose attention Kendra had wanted most that night, Nick’s or Charles’s. She found her brain turning its focus in an unexpected direction.
“So, I guess now that you’re single again, the girls at the club will be happy.”
Nick looked at her. He didn’t deny it.
“How will you vet them?” Sawyer teased. “By applying more of your ‘math’? Only, with an extra emphasis on hotness?”
“C’mon,” Nick said. “I’m not that bad.”
“Yeah, but something tells me you’re not that good, either.”
Sawyer laughed, but again, Nick refrained.
He was quiet for a long moment.
“I think I’ve made it pretty clear what I want, Sawyer,” he said finally, in a low, steady voice.
Sawyer felt a jolt go through her, shocked. She wanted to say something in return, but found herself tongue-tied.
“But I’ve said it before…I know your situation is far more complicated than mine,” Nick said.
They fell back into silence. When he went to shift gears, his hand grazed the side of her leg. It didn’t seem purposeful, but…Sawyer felt her heart pounding again, an excruciating battering beat under her ribs, the whooshing of her pulse filling her ears. The car had grown warm and muggy, despite the air-conditioning. The sunroof was adding a kind of greenhouse effect, and their intense conversation had somehow only magnified it further.
Nick seemed to read Sawyer’s thoughts.
“Here,” he said, pressing a button to open the sunroof, then another to drop the windows.
A rush of fresh air instantly filled the car. Sawyer’s long dark hair—still damp from the shower—began to blow and twirl in the wind.
They continued to drive, passing the Verrazzano and winding along the Belt Parkway as it turned parallel to the setting sun. Sawyer was reminded of the sunset they’d witnessed on the Staten Island Ferry—also a crazy riot of blazing orange and vibrant purples. Then they reached the tunnel and dipped underground…eventually popping up again near Battery Park and making their way over to the West Side Highway.
When they drew closer to Sawyer’s neighborhood, she gave Nick lefts and rights to get them to her Upper West Side walk-up.
It was a relatively quiet street, sandwiched between two otherwise busy avenues. Nick was able to pull over in front of Sawyer’s building and idle. The proximity to her apartment had a strange effect on her; she dreaded leaving Nick, but being so close to her own home—the home she shared with Charles—made her feel peculiar and jumpy.
Nick seemed to read this in her body language.
“Earlier, on the pier, you said you wanted me to do what I wanted with my summer Fridays,” he said. “But the same goes for you, Sawyer—you should do what you want…with your summer Fridays, and with your life.”
Sawyer was quiet.
“That’s just my opinion,” Nick said.
Sawyer nodded.
She lingered.
“I should go find a place to put the car for the night,” Nick said.
“Oh. Of course. OK,” Sawyer said in a rush, awkward. “Well, thank you for today. And tell your mom thanks, too.”
“My pleasure. And I will.”
Sawyer reached for the door handle and hopped out quickly, almost as if the seat had burned her. She swung the door shut, waved, and ran up the steps of her apartment building’s stoop.
Nick waited until she had gotten the door open, then drove away.
The TV was on and Charles was sitting on the couch when Sawyer keyed into the front door. Sawyer froze, surprised. It wasn’t quite nine o’clock. She hadn’t expected Charles to beat her home.
Actually, she hadn’t expected anything either way, really—the truth was, she hadn’t thought about Charles the entire day.
“Hey,” he said now, aiming the remote with a raised arm to mute the TV and turning toward her. “Where were you?”
His tone was friendly enough. More curious than accusatory.
Sawyer didn’t answer right away. She dropped her keys in the dish on the little hall table and started slipping off her shoes. What could she possibly say?
“Did your coworker—what’s her name? Kelsey? Kaitlin?—want to hang out again?”
Sawyer opened her mouth to reply…but then realized: she didn’t want to lie.
“Kaylee,” she corrected Charles. “But no—she didn’t ask me to hang out.”
“Oh. Who were you hanging out with?”
Suddenly, Sawyer felt overcome by a surge of guilt. But as swiftly as the guilt came rushing in, it transformed into something else. She was suddenly irritable and angry.
“Most nights, you come home later than this,” she pointed out, “and I don’t drill you about where you were or who you were with.”
Charles blinked, looking utterly stupefied by the combative turn the conversation had taken.
“I’ve been working long hours because of this case. You know that.”
Sawyer stared at him, critical. He seemed so earnest. She sighed.
“We haven’t even talked about Chicago,” she pointed out.
“What about Chicago?” Charles said, a defensive note creeping into his own voice now.
“Two weeks,” Sawyer said.
“Two weeks is not that long.”
“Two weeks with—”
She was interrupted when the phone rang. Sawyer glared at it in disbelief, still full of outrage.
“It’s probably my mom again, with some wedding stuff,” Charles said.
Sawyer knew he was right.
“Charles,” she said, before he could reach for the phone. “Would we still be getting married if we weren’t always saved by the bell?”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Would we still be getting married, if Kathy didn’t always interrupt us with nonstop wedding planning…and we actually got to finish one of our conversations?”
“Of course,” Charles insisted. Then he stiffened, as though offended. “What kind of question is that?”
He hurried to grab the phone before the answering machine picked it up.
Sawyer listened to Charles murmuring replies of “That’s great” and “Thanks, Mom” and “We appreciate it” into the receiver, as Kathy no doubt delivered more wonderful news about their impending nuptials in October.