Chapter 19 - Darya #2
And then, just a beat after, my sister-in-law’s face does something I wasn’t prepared for. It lights up. Completely, unguardedly, with the kind of effusive joy that arrives before a person can even consciously decide how they feel about something—the involuntary kind, the uncomplicated kind.
She closes her medical journal with a deafening slap of pages. She reaches across the loveseat and takes both my hands in hers. And she says, so tenderly, “Darya,” and pulls me into a hug.
It rips me open at the heart. Personally, I blame the hug.
I don’t know why. I’ve been hugged plenty over the past three days—by Janella, by Iosif, by Miron, who is terrible at it and pats my back like he’s burping an infant, by Trifon, who held on long enough that I had to be the one to pull away first. But something about Yulia’s hug—about the way I can feel her smiling against my hair, and I know that the smile is for me, for this news, for the mere fact of it—something about it breaks open in my chest.
Everything inside me floods out, like a broken dam.
I burst into tears.
How fucking mortifying.
Completely, catastrophically mortifying.
I sob helplessly into the shoulder of my sister-in-law’s blouse, ugly crying, the graceless kind with sounds involved, and I cannot seem to stop. She doesn’t let go. She just holds on and lets me, which is somehow simultaneously the kindest and most devastating thing she could do.
“Is this the hormones?” I manage, between what I can only describe as sobs. “Is this what the next eight months are going to be like? Because I have to tell you, I find this extremely objectionable.”
Yulia laughs into my cheek and gives me a comforting squeeze.
“Sometimes,” she admits. “But I do wonder if that’s all it is.”
She’s right. I know she’s right, because I know exactly what this is.
It crystallizes in the middle of my crying, with the horrible clarity that tends to arrive at the worst possible moments: I know why I’m crying.
I know what I needed, and what I didn’t get, and I know that Yulia’s face—her open, uncomplicated joy over a piece of news that scares the shit out of me—is the face I’d wanted to see on Anton.
It’s the reassurance I’d needed.
That’s what this is.
That’s all this is. I’m sad. I’m so, so sad, and exhausted, and disappointed, because I wanted to trust him and he’d shown me why I’d been right to keep him at arm’s length. He’d proven my worst fear right.
I hadn’t known, until he asked me what I wanted to do about it, how badly I’d needed him to be happy.
Hadn’t known, until the ground dropped out from under me in that office, that the idea of anything other than the three of us—Anton and me and this baby, a family, improbable and chaotic and entirely unplanned—had simply never occurred to me.
Tears aren’t the only thing that pour out of me.
The truth does, too. Some of it, at least. I don’t have the words for all of it yet, and some of it belongs to Anton and me before it belongs to anyone else.
I hate, more than anything, that any part of this history he and I have been writing together still feels sacred to me.
I can barely stand to tell her about the happenings of the evening; it all went wrong: the text exchange, and the dinner, and how he’d defended me to Boris with more heat than I’d ever heard him use with anyone.
I tell her about the office, and the mezcal I didn’t take, and the specific hollowness of his voice when he’d asked me what I wanted to do about it.
I tell her—and this is the part that costs me the most, the part I have to look at my own hands to say—that I’d spent two weeks carrying this alone because some part of me had been waiting for the right moment, and that the right moment I’d been imagining had looked nothing like what actually happened.
In the right moment, he would have laughed jubilantly and looked at me with a broad, sparkling grin. He’d have reached for me instead of pulling away. Grabbed me instead of whiskey.
“I wanted him to be glad,” I say, and the plainness of it, out loud, is almost unbearable.
Yulia is quiet for a moment. It feels like the moment of silence people preserve for those who have died.
“Did you tell him that?” she asks.
I open my mouth. Close it. “I told him other things,” I say finally.
She listens the way good doctors listen, and good sisters listen, and when I’m done, she’s quiet for a moment before she says, “Maybe he’s scared?”
“Oh, and I’m not?” I demand.
“I’ll bet you are,” she says. “But one doesn’t cancel out the other. Which, by the way, isn’t me making an excuse for him, sweetie. It sounds like he was horrible about it.”
Horrible is a small word. But it isn’t like I’ve got better ones.
Still, I think about what she says for a long time after she leaves.
I sit in the small sitting room with the ancient loveseat and the afternoon light going amber through the curtains, and I think about Anton’s face in that moment before he spoke—the shock, and then the door behind his eyes closing—and I try to find the scared man behind the closed door.
I try, and mostly I manage it, and sometimes I can’t, because the hurt keeps getting in the way.
I still don’t call him. I can’t.
But that night, in my childhood bedroom with its window seat and its particular darkness, I lie awake for a long time before sleep takes me.
And what I can’t stop myself from thinking about are all the times I’ve made him laugh.
The times a smile has broken across his face like something he hadn’t planned on, sudden, real, a little abashed.
I think about the first time I saw him, across a ballroom, standing alone in the middle of a crowd, and how even then, before I knew him, before I had any reason to, I’d thought he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
I’d walked right up to him.
In spite of everything, I’d walked right up to him.
Do I regret it now? Can I, with everything that’s happened since? Would I take all of it back if I could?
Sleep, when it comes, is what I look forward to, no matter how fitful it is. My dreams are the closest I can get to him now.