9. Lena
LENA
I should have killed him when I had the chance.
I really should have.
That’s all my head can think every morning when I wake up, it’s almost like a routine now.
And I know it’s toxic and crazy as hell but that’s what keeps me going.
Five years of mornings and it hasn’t changed, hasn’t softened, hasn’t become any less sharp around the edges. If anything it’s gotten sharper.
I…I had a knife.
I had it in my hand. I stood over him in the dark while he slept, I had every reason in the world to drive it home but no…no, I put it down like a fool and ran, like a pathetic fool.
And somewhere out there Razvan Volkov is alive and breathing and probably not thinking about me at all.
I think about him every day.
I hate that I think about him every day.
“You’re doing the face,” Nadia says, without looking up from the stack of returns she’s sorting.
I look up from the book I’ve been staring at without reading for the last ten minutes. “What face?”
“The one where you’re thinking about something that makes you want to stab something.” She sets a book on the cart with a decisive click. “You were fine two minutes ago. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I’m reading.”
“You’ve been on the same page for eleven minutes. I’ve been counting.” She finally looks at me over the top of her glasses, which she started wearing two years ago and which she chose specifically because they make her look, in her own words, like an intellectual weapon. “Was it the dream again?”
I don’t answer, I can’t. I don’t even know what to say.
Nadia makes a sound that is not quite a sigh.
She goes back to her sorting with the ease of a woman who has learned exactly how much to push and exactly when to stop, which is one of approximately forty reasons she is my best friend and the reason I am still alive and functional in Budapest instead of dissolved somewhere into nothing.
Her library is small, warm and smells like old paper and the cinnamon tea she brews every morning in the back office.
She opened it three years ago with money she’d been saving since before I knew her and she runs it with the focused intensity she applies to everything, which means it is meticulously organized and aggressively cozy and the kind of place that makes people feel, when they walk in, like they’ve been permitted entry to someone’s living room.
There are plants everywhere. A reading corner with armchairs that have seen better decades but are comfortable in the specific way that old things are comfortable. A children’s section in the back that Theo has personally reorganized twice.
Theo.
I feel the familiar complicated pull in my chest when I think about him. I let myself feel it for exactly two seconds the way I always do then I redirect.
“The Horvath order came in,” I say.
“I know, I signed for it this morning.”
“The Pet?fi collection needs re-shelving.”
“Also know. Also morning.” She sets down the last book and turns to face me fully, crossing her arms, which is Nadia’s physical vocabulary for I am about to say something you don’t want to hear.
“Lena. You’ve been here for five years and you haven’t gone on a single date and you flinch when men stand too close to you in the market and every time you have that dream you spend the whole next day looking like you’re being followed.
” She tilts her head. “I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying all of that.”
“That’s a lot of not saying anything.”
“I contain multitudes.” She picks up the cart and starts pushing it toward the shelves. “How’s Theo?”
The pull in my chest again, warmer this time. “He’s currently a self-appointed bodyguard for the ants in the driveway. He spent forty minutes yesterday trying to feed them a single Cheeto, but he was worried it was ‘too spicy’ for them, so he licked all the orange dust off first.”
Nadia laughs, the real one, not the polite one. “He’s four and he licked the spice off for the ants? That’s true service.”
“He’s five next month.” I smile at the book in my hands. “He also decided that chairs are ‘tricky’ today. He’ll only eat his cereal if he’s crouching on the floor like a gargoyle because he says his legs feel ‘too jumpy’ for furniture.”
“He’s not wrong.” She disappears around a shelf. Her voice floats back, muffled by paper and distance. “Furniture is overrated. Are you bringing the gargoyle to the reading hour on Saturday?”
I check my watch.
Shit.
“I have to go.” I’m already standing, already reaching for my jacket from the hook behind the counter. “I’m late for pickup. He’s probably trying to convince his teacher that his pockets are actually portals for his rock collection.”
“Go, go.” Her hand appears around the shelf, waving me off.
I grab my bag and I’m out the door.
The car is parked two streets over, which is two streets further than I’d like on a Tuesday afternoon when school lets out at three and it is currently four minutes to three.
I walk fast and then faster and then I’m half-jogging down the street with my keys already out, the particular controlled panic of a parent who is about to be the last one at the gate.
The car protests when I start it, the way it always protests, a sound like someone clearing their throat very loudly and with great feeling.
I pull out into traffic, taking the route I know by heart now, two years of school runs having worn it into my navigation like a groove.
Left at the pharmacy, straight through the market street, right at the church with the green door, then the school gates at the end of the residential road with the chestnut trees.
I find a space. I get out. I walk to the gate.
The other parents are clustered, the ones who know each other talking, the ones who don’t are checking their phones, and I stand slightly apart the way I always stand slightly apart because five years of being careful has made proximity to strangers feel like a choice I need to consciously make.
The gate opens. Children begin to pour through.
I watch for him. Dark hair, his height, the specific way he walks that is so precisely not mine that sometimes looking at him is like being handed something I don’t know what to do with.
The stream of children thins.
I watch the gate.
The gate stays open and no more children come through then I notice Mrs. Farkas standing just inside, and I raise my hand to wave at her the way I always do.
She doesn’t wave back.
She’s looking at me. Just standing there looking at me with both hands pressed flat against the front of her dress, and even from here, even through the gate, I can see that her face is the color of old paper.
I’m through the gate before I decide to move.
“Mrs. Farkas.” I put a smile on my face that doesn’t reach anything. “Where’s Theo? Did he go back for his bag, he always forgets his—”
“Mrs. Ko—” She stops. Swallows. Her hands are still pressed against her dress. “Mara.”
The smile falls off my face. “Where is my son?”
“But the paperwork…” Her voice is barely above a whisper and it’s shaking, actually shaking. “His name was on the pickup list, with your signature. I—”
No. No, no, no.
What the fuck is going on? Where is my son?
The world is tilting. The colorful drawings pinned to the school fence, sunflowers, houses, a lopsided blue dog, are blurring into smears of meaningless color.
My lungs have turned to lead. I can’t get air in.
There is a high, thin ringing in my ears that sounds like a tea kettle screaming in an empty house.
“Mrs. Farkas.” I step closer. I have to.
If I don’t move, I’ll collapse. I lower my voice because there are still children nearby, their laughter coming from the sandbox like a cruel soundtrack to the end of the world.
My heart is pounding so hard I can feel the pulse in my back teeth. “Tell me right now. Where is Theo?”
“Some men came.” She can’t hold my eyes.
She looks at my chin, my shoulder, anywhere that isn’t directly at me.
“About an hour ago. They said they were his uncles. They had a car outside and they said you’d sent them, they said you’d had an emergency and you asked them to collect him, and I told them I couldn’t, I told them I needed written authorization, I have a policy, I’ve always had the policy—”
“Mrs. Farkas—” His uncles? I don’t have brothers. I don’t have anyone left.
“But when I checked the authorization list, one of their names was there. With your signature.” The words come out in a rush like she’s been holding them behind her teeth and they’ve finally broken through.
“You’d never mentioned him in person, but he was on the list. We couldn’t deny him checking Theo out. I couldn’t—”
I stop hearing her.
Not because she stops talking. She keeps talking, I can see her mouth moving, but the sound of it goes somewhere far away and what replaces it is a roaring in my ears that I recognize from a hallway in Moscow five years ago, from a closet door and a shot and boots on marble.
Theo.
My son. My mind flashes to him—his sticky fingers, the way he insisted on wearing his left shoe on his right foot this morning because it felt “more adventurous,” the tiny, soft mole on the back of his neck. He’s so small. He’s so impossibly small against a made man.
My five-year-old son with his dinosaur books and his serious eyes and the way he holds my face in his small hands when he wants me to pay attention to something important.
Someone took him. Someone came to his school with forged paperwork and took my child.
The courtyard tilts. I’m dimly aware of the sun on my neck, the smell of woodchips, the mundane reality of a Tuesday afternoon, while my soul is being ripped out through my ribs.
“Mara.” Mrs. Farkas grabs my arm. I realize I’ve put my hand out against the gate because my legs are turning to water.
Don’t fall. If you fall, he’s gone. If you break, he dies. I swallow the bile rising in my throat. I force the panic into a small, dark box at the base of my brain and I lock it.
I can feel the shift, the terrifying, familiar hardening of my spine.