Chapter 27Ana
Ana
Artom stays the night with us before Camilla takes him home.
I guess she concocted a lie about it all being too much for her to handle, my death coupled with Vasily’s, knowing Artom would be an orphan.
We already knew she wouldn’t be able to stay long before it was going to look too suspicious— unsurprisingly, Tony wants my body in the grave as soon as possible— but Tony’s already calling her trying to figure out where Artom is before we even get into bed.
All three of us in a bed. It’s too small for us all, what with the way Artom sprawls and Vasily is just Vasily, but when I issue a stern warning that no funny business is going to happen, Vasily looks at me like I’m crazy for even mentioning it.
I wake in the middle of the night to discover Vasily is curled up around Artom, Artom all snuggly with him. I’m not jealous of either of them and I’m happy that so far, they’re two peas in a pod, but oh my God, what a traitor.
It’s a reminder, though, that this is it, this is what I chose. Vasily is inextricably in our lives now. And as much as I keep falling for him like a sex-addicted dimwit, I can’t just move on like everything is fine, all’s well that ends well.
It’s another teary goodbye when Dima loads everyone up in his car, promising Vasily repeatedly that he’ll drive ten miles under the speed limit as Vasily fusses with the seatbelt on the booster seat even though he’s never touched a booster seat in his life.
His son is five, but we’re giving him all the new dad allowances.
I even give him the forty minutes it takes Dima to drive them to the airport and then let us know they arrived safely before I say, “We need to talk,” with a crook of my finger for him to follow me into our bedroom.
My tone is enough for him to grope his pockets for his pills, but he’s wearing pocketless board shorts despite the arctic temperatures of Denver in February.
It’s as good a place as any to start when the door clicks behind him.
“Dima says that after you took over Flagstaff, you quit all the drugs and the smoking.”
“Oh. Yeah,” he says hesitantly, clearly surprised that this is the private conversation.
Because it isn’t, not really. It’s just a starting point. “So you could run things better?”
“Yeah, I guess.” That doesn’t sound honest, though.
“You’re not schizophrenic anymore?”
There’s a barely perceptible grimace. I don’t need to believe everything Dima says; I just need to bring it back to Vasily to watch his face for confirmation .
“I was schizophrenic,” he says firmly. “I had schizophrenic episodes. But I haven’t had any in a long time. I think I’m past that now.”
I nod. Whether having episodes is the same as having the actual disorder, I don’t know and it doesn’t matter now. “But you have migraines?”
“I have shots for that. They work really well.”
“But you took heroin, instead.”
“Right, right, right, but not like that,” he says urgently, his hands waving like the very question has put him in a panic.
He likes to do this thing with me where he walks toward me just right that I instinctively step back.
I try it on him now, knowing that the full foot height difference makes me far less intimidating.
Still, I crowd him with enough conviction that he takes one step back, then two, then bumps into the bed and automatically sits.
Super effective. Huh.
“I promise I’m clean.” He swallows. “I—I’ve felt some withdrawal from it, but I can’t help that. I just...” He gropes his pockets again, showing me that he doesn’t have the tin of pills he always had in LA.
“And those pills?” I prompt.
“They’re all prescribed.”
“I know. I do. But does your doctor know you walk around with them all the time, that you pop them like candy? That the second you start to feel the slightest twinge of stress, you take one?”
He scowls. “They’re as needed. And it’s not the ‘slightest twinge.’ Shit is falling apart, and I’m talking like our plan to take down Kostya and Tony is going to work, but maybe it won’t, maybe I’m... maybe I’m going to die in Flagstaff. ”
I step back, my arms crossed over my chest, ready for this reality check.
“Vasily, even if the whole family curse thing is real, you just died in Flagstaff. And you survived. We’re past that.
And I already know you won’t let me put stipulations on if you’re in Artom’s life going forward, so I’m not going to put stipulations on this: you’re not going to carry pills in your pocket anymore. ”
He scowls at me, but he doesn’t immediately respond. His toe taps; his hand, too. Nervous energy? The twitch of a junkie needing a fix? He knows he’s doing it, too, but I get the feeling that calling him out has him suddenly convinced he’s worse than he is.
I’m being harsh. In this one thing, I know I’m being harsh.
It’s a demand impossible for most addicts, and I’m not unsympathetic.
I get this feeling that working in restaurants and doing community service has giving me exposure to far more addiction than just Vasily’s.
“I’m not telling you to stop. I’m telling you that Artom is a good kid, but he’s a kid .
They get in everything, and they do what they see the people they love do.
Hell, I had to ban Dima from drinking in the house because I caught Artom pouring juice into shot glasses. ”
Vasily snorts.
“It’s not funny!” But then I’m struggling not to laugh either, because yeah, that memory just smacked me in the back of the head, and the problem wasn’t even the shot glass.
It was the twelve ounces of juice it took Artom to get an ounce and a half into the glass.
I was going to go broke on cran-apple if he kept it up.
“If there’s something else you’ll have to do, if it means you have to go to therapy every single day or hike up to the top of the mountain to scream at the world or bathe in oatmeal or—”
“Bathe in oatmeal? ”
“I don’t know! Seriously, I am so freaking proud of you for quitting all the drugs, but I just need to make sure it’s safe for Artom, and little tins of pills aren’t safe.
If you get stressed out with Artom— and you will, trust me— and you end up taking too many or just something that makes you loopy or–or–or I don’t know—”
“I quit for you.”
I tilt my head to the side, unsure if I heard him right. After all, he quit at a time when he thought he’d never see me again. Dima and I told Artom he would, but he didn’t know that.
He reaches up, not to grab me but to run a fingertip across my forehead and down my cheek.
“My memories of you. Artyom, too. And what remained of my mom, my dad. Brooke. I don’t know if you remember this, but my girlfriend died with my dad.
I was going to marry her. I think everything worked out the way it.
.. the way it had to? But suddenly, I was in control of the lives of everyone I cared about, and all the people I’d lost along the way, they lived in my brain.
I started with all the drugs to silence the voices telling me I was going to die, but then I needed the voices telling me how to protect everyone still living.
And I needed the memories of you and everyone else to last the rest of my life. That’s really why I quit everything.”
He ruined everything.
Dima called him a coward. I called him a coward. We were both right. I know straight to my bones that he would take a bullet for me. He would step in front of a bus for Artom. He’d fight off wolves for Kseniya. But he is a coward.
I keep thinking I’m the weak one, I’m the one who’s living in my wallows, but nope, it’s Vasily.
“You are so stupid. ”
He nods as though agreeing with me.
“No, you are so stupid!”
He smiles. It’s not particularly luminescent, but it’s as agreeable as that nod. “I am.”
“No!” I yell more loudly, not caring that his sister and Alex are out there, probably listening through the door. “You don’t get to say that. I do, not you!”
“Okay.”
I shove him. I’m not a violent person. I may have the tiniest fragments of myself, but I know I’m not a fighter.
I’m not a runner either. I’m quick to cave because I just want simple and quiet.
I want to work hard and make people happy and be safe and warm in my corner of the world. Still, I shove him.
“Stop!” I shriek, shoving him again and again until he falls back on the bed, and then I climb up on him, straddling his thighs so I can shove him again.
“You ruined everything! We could have been happy. I loved you so much, and then you didn’t even say goodbye to me, did you?
Did you watch my brother drag me off? Did you know full well that he was going to suck every penny he could out of me until I was nothing, a nameless thing shoved in a. .. in a... oh no.”
I want to be mad at only Vasily. That’s the only feeling I deserve to have right now. I want to scream and hit and blame and vent it all on him. I want him to hurt.
But my brother sold me to sex traffickers.
He sold me.
He sold me twice, and thank God Almighty that the first time he sold me, it was to Vasily’s brother, but Vasily took over, and he was so good to me. He loved me in Flagstaff.
But the second time Tony sold me? The amnesia was the best-case scenario, and the only thing I think that’s protected me from dwelling on the other scenarios is the amnesia.
And as the memories come back, so do all the things I know to happen to women who get sold, all the things I don’t know but I can imagine.
My sobs come so hard I can’t breathe. My diaphragm clenches hard enough to make me sick. It’s brutal, it’s ugly, it’s overwhelming. I have to anchor my forearms on Vasily’s chest just to hunch my back and curl in on myself.
“Why?” I wail. “He’s my brother. He’s all I have and he’s only ever hated me and why? What did I do to him? I just wanted him to love me, and why— don’t you touch me!” I shriek at the graze of Vasily’s fingers on one of my hands.