Chapter 19 #3
For a few seconds I could hear the restaurant below us. A chair moving. Someone laughing near the bar. Ksenia’s fingers slid between mine beneath the table.
We drank.
Anton sat down. His eyes met his sister’s.
“He’d have loved seeing your name on that building,” he told her.
She nodded, looking down into her glass.
“He’d have said the sign was too small.”
Anton smiled.
“Probably would have ordered a bigger one.”
“Without asking me.”
“Naturally.”
She laughed, though her eyes were wet, and leaned into my shoulder. I kissed her hair.
“You took a photograph,” she said to me.
“Two.”
“Show him.”
I handed my phone to Anton. He looked at the picture for a long time before passing it around the table.
Arkady studied it, then looked at his sister-in-law.
“Much better without the apprentice in it.”
“Everything is,” she said.
I squeezed her knee. She turned and kissed my cheek, shamelessly pleased with herself.
The evening went on. Nobody hurried it. When Sal asked for coffee, everyone ordered some, including people who had just claimed they were leaving.
Arkady told a story about Nikita getting locked out of his own apartment. Nikita corrected three details and conceded the fourth. Kiryl laughed until Yelena threatened to take his wine away purely to save the tablecloth.
I had never seen this room look so much like somewhere people belonged.
At the end, I found Arkady by the coat rack, helping Ksenia into her coat. He was listening while she told him something about Kiryl’s lamp, his head bent towards her.
Whatever she said made him shrug.
She kissed his cheek anyway.
He caught my eye over her shoulder, faintly alarmed.
“She’s been drinking,” he informed me.
“She’s very affectionate when she likes someone.”
“An unfortunate habit.”
He held the door for her, then checked that Kiryl had remembered the box before letting him follow Nikita downstairs.
Yelena and Sal left together. Anton called for his car. Arkady lingered, hands in his pockets, apparently in no particular hurry to get anywhere.
“Come back with us,” Ksenia offered.
“And listen to him explain architecture to me? His new passion? I’ve suffered enough.”
She laughed. He winked at her and headed down the stairs.
I watched him go. He had remembered a broken lamp, visited an injured guard, made half the table laugh. I hoped that one day someone would make him impatient to get home.
Ksenia found my hand.
“What?” she asked.
I looked down at her.
“Nothing. Ready?”
“Very.”
She tugged me towards the stairs.
I let her.
Ksenia stopped in the kitchen doorway.
I switched on the new light.
Warm light spread across the table. No buzzing. No flicker. The room looked softer, and I was irritated to discover that she had been right about more than the noise.
She stood very still.
“Well?” I asked.
“I’m listening. Give me a second.”
“There’s nothing to hear.”
“I know. It’s lovely.”
She turned and put her arms around my neck.
“Thank you.”
“You chose it.”
“You got it done.”
I bent to kiss her, and she stayed against me afterward, her cheek on my chest. I rubbed my hand slowly over her back. Neither of us had taken off our coats.
“We should move,” she said eventually.
“We should.”
She didn’t.
I was content to wait.
Upstairs, she changed into the cartoon-cat pyjamas and washed her face. I was pulling a T-shirt over my head when she appeared beside the wardrobe holding a paper bag.
“For you.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Only if you don’t like it.”
I sat on the bed. Inside the bag was a sketchbook and a canvas roll tied with a green ribbon. I undid the ribbon. Drawing pencils, each in its own narrow pocket. An eraser. A sharpener.
I looked up at her.
“This afternoon,” she said. “After the bathhouse. I went to the art shop.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I know. I wanted to.”
I took out a pencil. The wood was smooth, the point freshly sharpened.
She sat beside me, one knee folded beneath her.
“You enjoyed it today.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you might want to do it again.”
I turned the pencil between my fingers. There had been plenty of gifts in my life. Watches. Cufflinks. Bottles that cost more than anyone should pay for a drink. Things chosen for a man whose name appeared at the top of a document.
Ksenia had watched me draw a crooked line and gone out to buy me pencils.
“Come here.”
“I’m already here.”
I put down the sketchbook and pulled her into my arms. She came willingly, laughing a little as she settled across my lap.
“Oh. Here.”
I held her until her hand came to rest at the back of my neck.
“Thank you,” I said.
She kissed my cheek.
“You’re welcome.”
I should have said more. I wanted to. But she leaned her forehead against mine, and for once I let what I had said be enough.
We went downstairs for tea. She carried the sketchbook; I brought the pencils.
At the kitchen table, she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders while I filled the cups. She watched the new light as though it might change its mind.
“It’s staying,” I told her.
“I don’t want to get attached too quickly.”
I put her tea in front of her and sat down.
“Sunday,” she said.
“Sunday.”
Our check-in. We had kept it through the first weeks after the kidnapping, when some evenings she wanted to talk and others she only wanted me beside her. We had kept it when work ran late, when we were tired, when everything was going well and it would have been easy to decide we didn’t need it.
The original four-week agreement was in a drawer upstairs. We had renewed it together, changed things, kept talking. I still liked knowing there was time set aside when neither of us had to guess.
“Anything you want?” I asked.
“Tuesday evenings.”
“What happens on Tuesday evenings?”
She touched the sketchbook.
“This. You come into the studio. We draw. No work calls for an hour.”
I looked at the book.
“You’re assuming I’ll improve.”
“I’m assuming I’ll like sitting with you.”
I reached across the table and took her hand.
“Tuesday evenings,” I said.
“And I like how things are with us. The Daddy things.” She smiled. “I like that I can ask. I like that you notice when I need looking after, and you listen when I tell you what that means.”
“Even when it means standing on furniture?”
“That was professional development.”
I laughed, and she turned her hand beneath mine, linking our fingers.
“What about you?”
I watched her for a moment. The loose hair around her face. The blanket slipping off one shoulder. My wife, asking what I wanted as though the answer belonged entirely to me.
“When my father died, I thought I knew what the rest of my life would look like.”
She waited.
“His desk. His decisions. Getting older in that room.”
“You’ve changed the chairs.”
I smiled.
“I have.”
“It’s a start.”
“It is.” I ran my thumb over her fingers. “Today, I left because I wanted to see a building with you. My brother handled things. Nothing collapsed.”
“Except your resistance to the hard hat.”
“A calculated sacrifice.”
She grinned.
“I want more days like this,” I said. “I want to come home while you’re still awake. I want to know what you did before I got here. I want to sit in that ridiculous little chair while you draw.”
“It fits perfectly.”
“I’ve been informed.”
Her smile softened.
“I thought the job would take everything else,” I said. “I didn’t know I could have this.”
She got up, bringing the blanket with her, and sat sideways on my lap. Her arm went around my shoulders.
“You have it.”
I put my hand against her back.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
She kissed me. A quiet, familiar kiss that still made me want to draw her closer. Then she reached for the sketchbook and opened it on the table.
“Go on.”
“With you sitting here?”
“Is it affecting your concentration?”
“Considerably.”
She settled more comfortably against me.
“You’ll have to learn to work under difficult conditions.”
I picked up a pencil.
The first line was too heavy. I eased the pressure and drew another beside it. A window. The edge of a table. A chair small enough to fit beneath the sill.
Ksenia stopped teasing me. She watched, her chin resting near my shoulder, while I drew the room I had stood in that morning.
Her studio. Our house.
I was still no good at it. The chair looked as though it might collapse. I erased one of its legs and tried again.
“That’s better,” she murmured.
I believed her.
“You know,” I said, “it could be interesting to draw what’s under those clothes.”