Chapter 82 Lukas
LUKAS
CITY OF NEW YORK — DEPT. OF BUILDINGS
SITE NOTICE: CEASE WORK ORDER
Status: ACTIVE CRIME SCENE — All construction halted
The construction site in Astoria is cordoned off with police tape that snaps and flutters in the winter wind. Red plastic barriers ring the excavation pit where they found Elena’s remains. The ground is still torn up and tire tracks from forensic vehicles have churned the perimeter into icy mud.
I park on the street and kill the engine.
I don’t get out right away, though. For a moment, I just sit here, hands on the wheel, engine ticking as it cools. Staring at the place where I buried my wife eighteen years ago.
It doesn’t look the same as it did last time I was here. Half-built luxury condos rise up on either side. Jutting, exposed rebar, acres of glass, steel piling. It’s gentrification unfolding before my eyes, though the discovery of human remains has, understandably, stalled construction for a while.
A weathered sign near the gate reads RIVERVIEW RESIDENCES — LUXURY LIVING COMING SOON. Someone has spray-painted MURDERER across it in red.
I don’t flinch at that. I’ve been called worse by better.
But I know this ground. Beneath the construction equipment and the police tape and the mud, I know it. I dug into it with my bare hands while my back bled through my shirt and Elena grew cold in her blanket. I know every last inch of this cursed earth.
The wind picks up. A sail of plastic sheeting billows and cracks against a concrete pillar. Rats and dogs in the alley bark and squeak and scamper around.
With a sigh, I open the car door.
The cold hits me hard. December in Queens is its own kind of freezing, a violent, wet chill that crawls inside your skin and sets up camp in your bone marrow. I pull my collar up and stride toward the pit.
There’s no fence anymore. The police cut through the original one during the excavation and replaced it with a temporary barrier that’s already sagging on its posts. I step over it without breaking stride.
My shoes sink into the cold muck, and the sound it makes, that slurping, sucking crunch, sends me hurtling backward through time so violently that I have to stop walking and press my hand against a concrete pillar just to stay upright.
That sound. The shovel biting into frost-hardened ground. The grunt of effort. The hot, sick trickle of blood down my spine where the extraction sites had torn open.
I breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
When I’m ready, I move again.
The excavation pit opens up before me, ten feet of sheared sides going straight down towards hell. The walls are crude where backhoes and forensic tools have chewed through layers of soil, exposing cross-sections of clay and gravel and tree roots severed clean.
And there, sitting on the edge with his legs dangling into the hole, right where I was so certain I’d find him, is Kir.
He’s shed his suit jacket. His white shirt is dirty, streaked with grime and God knows what else, the sleeves shoved past his elbows, the tail untucked and hanging limp. His dark hair stands up in wild tufts. Even from twenty feet away, I can see how his shoulders shake.
He’s not crying. Kir learned a long time ago not to cry where his father might see. That’s a lesson I taught him, whether I meant to or not. One of a thousand unintentional cruelties I’ve committed against my own blood.
His feet swing slowly above the void where his mother’s bones laid for eighteen years. He looks like a boy. Not the furious prince who tried to steal my kingdom. Not the anguished son who despises me.
Just a boy who lost his mother all over again.
I make my footsteps heavy so he can hear me coming, same as I used to do in the hallway outside his bedroom when he was small enough to be afraid of the dark.
It’s just me, Kirill.
No monsters.
Just Papa.
He doesn’t acknowledge me at all. Just keeps staring down into the pit. His legs swing in that same slow, absent-minded pattern. Back and forth. Back and forth.
I stop a few feet behind him, hands thrust deep in my pockets. “Kirill,” I say.
He still refuses to look up. The wind snaps that plastic sheeting against the pillar again. Seconds stack on top of each other like bricks in a wall neither of us knows how to tear down.
Then my son speaks. “She asked you to let her die. And you did.”
“Yes,” I say.
Kir’s laugh comes out of him like something foul dredged from a drain. “For eighteen fucking years, you let me believe you were a killer.”
I watch his hands curl into fists against the muddy ground. “Yes,” I say again.
What else can I say? I did exactly what Elena asked. I honored her dying wish and it destroyed my relationship with my son, and I’d do it again if she asked me to.
Every time. Without hesitation.
That’s what love is, isn’t it? Carrying someone else’s pain so they don’t have to? Swallowing the poison yourself so their cup stays clean?
Even when it breaks you.
Even when it breaks everyone around you, too.
Once again, a long silence falls between us. The pigeon that fled a moment ago returns to land on the edge of a concrete barrier. It cocks its head, decides our misery is uninteresting, and leaves.
I wait. I’m good at waiting. I’ve spent eighteen years waiting for this moment, this reckoning, and now that it’s here, I find myself strangely calm. Whatever Kir needs to say, I will stand here and take it.
It’s the least I can do for my boy.
Finally, Kir speaks again, so quietly that the wind nearly steals it before it reaches me. “I don’t know how to stop hating you, Papa.”
I say nothing yet.
“I’ve hated you for so long,” he says. “It’s the only thing that made sense. And now, you’re telling me it was all… nothing.”
My ruined knee protests as I lower myself to the ground beside him. The mud soaks through my trousers immediately and the cold seeps into my bones like it’s been waiting here for me all along, as patient as death.
I sit shoulder to shoulder with my son on the edge of his mother’s empty grave.
I don’t reach for him. If I did, he’d flinch away, and that flinch would gut me worse than anything he could say.
So I just sit close enough that our shoulders brush and he can feel the heat of another body beside him.
Close enough that he knows—even if he can’t accept it yet—that he’s not alone. He never has been.
“You don’t have to stop tonight,” I say. “You don’t have to forgive me tomorrow, or next week, or ever. I’m not asking for that.”
Kir turns to look at me. Everyone has always said he and I look alike, but it’s his mother’s nose he has, thin and proud.
“Then what are you here for?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Nothing. I’m not asking for anything, Kirill.
I’m just telling you that I’m not going anywhere.
” I gesture at the pit. “Your mother is gone. She’s been gone for eighteen years.
But I’m still here. And whether you want me or not, whether you hate me or not, I am your father. I’m not going anywhere.”
We sit there as gray clouds swallow the pale winter sun.
The cold gets colder. The wind blows harder.
We’re on the edge of a grave that isn’t a grave anymore.
Now, it’s just a hole in the ground, emptied by forensic teams who bagged and tagged and carted away whatever the earth hadn’t already reclaimed.
Kir’s breathing evens out beside me, and his legs stop swinging. After a while, his hands unclench against the frozen mud and lie flat, palms down.
When he finally talks, he says, “I’ve been carrying this for so long.
Watching you at her funeral. Watching you go back to work like nothing happened.
Watching you become this… this thing that everyone fears.
Me included.” He shakes his head in weary amazement.
“And the whole time, I thought I was the only one who knew what you really were.”
I close my eyes. “I’m sorry, son.”
It’s pathetic to expect those meek words to convey the enormity of what each of us is feeling, but they’re all I have.
So I say them again.
“I’m sorry, Kirill.”
He doesn’t accept the apology or tell me to go fuck myself, though either one would be justified. Kir’s head simply drops against my shoulder.
His temple rests there, and I feel a shudder that runs through him, the full-body tremor of a man releasing something he’s been clenching since he was twelve years old.
I wrap my arm around my son, and we sit there and stare into the shadows in the cavernous hole.
As we do, I think about empty spaces. There’s a pit beneath us where my wife once was. There are pits on my back where I carved out pieces of myself to try to save her. There’s a pit in Kir’s heart where acidic hate has lived for a long, long time now.
It’s what we do as a species. We tear ourselves apart trying to fill what’s missing in the people we love. We hollow out our backs, our hearts, our graves, and say, Here, take this.
It never works. The pieces never quite fit. The donor tissue gets rejected. The rage doesn’t heal. The dead stay dead.
But we keep digging anyway.
It’s so human to try.