Chapter 17
ISAAK
Dima arrives two days early, because he has never in his life done a thing at the time he said he would. He does it by walking into my kitchen at seven in the morning while I'm reading the kitten's breakfast schedule off a sticky note Nora left on the fridge.
"Big brother." He drops a duffel on my floor like he pays the mortgage. "You look domesticated. It's horrifying. Is that a cat in your shirt?"
"Yes."
"You hate cats."
"I do." Waffle is asleep against my sternum, where he has decided he lives. I don't explain it, because there is no version of the explanation that survives my brother. "You said Friday."
"I lied. I always lie about the day, you know this, it's how I beat your security.
" He's already in my refrigerator to the shoulder.
He comes out with the leftovers Vera labeled for me, peels the lid, eats cold plov standing up with his fingers like we're still nineteen and twelve in a flat with no heat.
"Where is she?" He's already eating standing up, plov on his fingers, nothing urgent about any of it.
"The wife. The brave one. I want to meet the woman who looked at you and said yes on purpose. "
"Asleep. It's seven."
"On a ranch she'd have been up three hours." He points the fork he found at me. "She's going to be more interesting than you, I can feel it. I drove out here for her, not for you, I want that on the record."
"Noted."
This is how it goes with Dima. He is the one person on earth I would die for, and also the one who can make me want to put my own head through drywall. He arrives carrying both at once, the love and the noise, inseparable, the way they've always come.
He gets to her before I can warn her.
I hear her on the stairs, and I already know what's coming. Last night we had words about a man who works through breakfast, and she promised me she'd make me regret it. She comes down to collect on the threat, and she has dressed for war.
She's in the dark green set she knows what it does to me, the bra cut low and the lace see-through across the top of each breast where the fabric gives up, a thin band of it riding the crease under, the matching scrap below tied at each hip with a bow a man could pull with one finger.
Bare everywhere else. Her hair's still loose from bed.
She comes around the bottom of the stair with her chin up, one hand already going to her hip, loaded, every soft curve of her lit by the kitchen window.
For half a second I forget my own name, forget the cat asleep on my chest, forget there is a single problem in the world that isn't the bow at her left hip.
Then she sees Dima.
Her whole body locks. The hand drops off her hip. Every drop of blood she owns goes up into her face at once, and I get to watch her realize, in real time, that she has just walked half-naked into a kitchen containing my brother.
"You must be Dima," she says, in the voice of a woman who has decided to die standing up.
"I must be." Dima doesn't look away from his plov. He is a gentleman exactly once a decade and he is spending it now, eyes down, fighting a grin that's going to take the top of his head off. "Lovely to meet you. I've heard nothing. I'll be in the other room."
He doesn't move. He's enjoying it too much to move.
Nora retreats up the stairs with the dignity of a queen and the speed of a woman who would set the house on fire to escape it.
I spend thirty seconds with a cock that has no sense of timing.
I remember, eventually, what we were talking about.
The second she's gone, Dima looks up at me, radiant, the happiest I've seen him in a decade.
"I'm staying a month," he says.
She comes back down in one of my hoodies that swallows her to the knees, hair shoved under a band. She takes one look at the enormous stranger still grinning at his breakfast and decides, visibly, that the only way through this is to never acknowledge it happened.
"You've got Isaak's exact face," she says, "but it looks like it's having a better time."
Dima lights up like she's handed him the deed to the city. "Oh, I like her. I like her enormously. Isaak, she's perfect, where did you find her, return policy?"
"There isn't one," Nora says. "He checked."
"He checked." Dima puts a hand to his chest. "Sit. Sit down, brave one, let me tell you everything. We have so little time and he has so many secrets."
And there it is, my morning gone, the two of them at my own table deciding to like each other over my objections, which I should have seen coming the second I told her she'd like him more than me.
I sit at the head of my own table like a hostage and let it happen.
The alternative is leaving the room, and I find, to my disgust, that I don't want to.
"He had a bowl cut," Dima says, "until he was fourteen."
"I knew it." Nora points at me, vindicated. "I told him. Weeks ago, driving back from the dress shop. I said he had a bowl cut, cried over some sad movie as a kid. He went stone-faced and wouldn't confirm or deny a thing."
"There was a dog." Dima's face goes briefly, surprisingly soft, then recovers. "We'll get to the dog. The dog is a whole afternoon."
"Don't," I tell him.
"He doesn't want me to bring up the dog because the dog makes him a person." Dima steals my coffee, drinks it, makes a face, sets it back. "You take it black like a prison sentence. Fine. The poetry, then. Has he done the poetry for you yet?"
The kitchen goes still in a way only I notice, because I'm the only one who knows what's coming.
"What poetry?" Nora says.
"Dima."
"He memorized a poem." Dima is delighted, lit from inside, twelve years old and ratting me out to the only person whose opinion I've ever cared about. "An entire poem, this long thing, Akhmatova, at fourteen. You know why?"
"Dima, I will end you."
"To impress a girl." Dima delivers it like a punchline, because to him it's one.
"A neighbor girl, older, gorgeous, completely out of his league.
And our Isaak, who had nothing, no money, no name, decided the way to her heart was Russian poetry.
So he learned the whole thing, recited it to her on a stairwell, and do you know what she said? "
"That's enough."
"She asked if his brother had any money." Dima laughs, big, helpless, wiping his eye. "She wanted the allowance. She heard a fourteen-year-old pour his entire soul out in iambic whatever and she asked about the family finances. It's the funniest thing that ever happened to anyone."
He thinks it's the funniest thing that ever happened to anyone.
He has thought so for twenty-six years. He doesn't know, because I have never told him, because you don't tell Dima a thing you want kept, that it's also the morning I learned the rule I've run my whole life on.
I was fourteen and I found out what I was for.
The poem was free. The allowance was the price.
Nobody's looked at me since without my finding the second one.
I wait for Nora to laugh. It's funny. She should laugh.
She doesn't laugh. She's looking at me across the table with the plov going cold between us, her face gone quiet and furious on my behalf, the way it went the night the coyotes came. It's aimed now at a girl on a stairwell twenty-six years and an ocean away.
"Stupid girl," Nora says.
That's all. She doesn't make it a thing.
She picks her fork back up, reaches over, steals plov off Dima's plate like she's known him her whole life.
The moment closes over. I'm left holding the fact that my wife heard the worst story about me my brother owns, and the only thing she took from it was that the girl was stupid.
I have been priced by experts. I have never once been defended for free.
"He's also weirdly good with the kid," Dima says through a mouthful, ruining it, blessedly. "The young one. The soldier. What's his name?"
"Yuri." Nora's whole face changes. "Have you met Yuri yet? Isaak, has Dima met Yuri?"
Yuri is in the yard, where Yuri usually is, throwing a ball for two protection dogs who have forgotten entirely what they were bred for and now live for the ball.
I watch through the glass. The boy winds up, the dogs lose their minds, the ball goes wide into the hedge.
Yuri says something to them, stern, a man correcting his hounds, and both hundred-pound animals sit instantly, quivering, because the nineteen-year-old told them to.
"He's good with them," I say, before I think about whether to.
"You taught him." Nora says it like she's caught me at something. "The handling. That was you, wasn't it?"
"He asked." I don't look away from the glass.
The boy came to me eight months ago not knowing how to make an animal respect him, the way I came up not knowing, and I showed him, in the yard, at dawn, the same hour I do everything I don't want witnessed.
"It's not difficult. You stand like you mean it. The dog does the rest."
"That's not nothing." She's still looking at me. "Teaching a kid something for free."
"Stop," I tell her, but there's no weight in it. She hears that there isn't. She lets the corner of her mouth go and looks back out at Yuri, which is its own mercy, one I'd thank her for if thanking her wouldn't make it worse.
Dima's already moving for the door. "I want to meet the dog whisperer."
He's out in the yard before I can decide whether to stop him. Nora goes after him. I follow them both, because leaving the three of them unsupervised is how households fall.
Yuri sees us coming and goes stiff. He's the boy who's decided I hung the moon, who is terrified the moon will notice him.
"Sokolov." Dima sticks out a hand. "You're the one keeping these two beasts in line. My brother can't manage a houseplant. How'd you do it?"
Yuri shoots me a panicked look, checking whether he's allowed to answer.
"Tell him," I say.