4. Raven
Raven
Andrei Dudin walks me through the house the way a man walks a dog he did not agree to look after.
He's enormous. Six four, maybe more, and built like a door, with ink running up out of his collar and down over the backs of both hands, and he has said perhaps forty words to me since he collected me from the cabin at half eight.
"Kitchen." Forty-one.
"I can see it's a kitchen."
"Camera there. There. Nothing in the pantry." He's already walking. "Dining room."
"Also self-evident."
He doesn't slow down.
The house is bigger than it looked from the tree line — the front is cedar and stone and country charm, and about sixty feet back it stops being charming and starts being a building somebody thought about.
The rear windows are triple-glazed and set in steel.
The doors are steel. There's a room off the utility corridor with no handle on the outside that he walks straight past without comment, and I don't ask, and he knows I noticed, and that's fine.
"Upstairs." He takes them two at a time. "Boy's room. Your room, next to it. Connecting door. It stays unlocked."
"Whose call is that?"
"His father's."
"And if I want it locked?"
Andrei stops on the landing and looks down at me for the first time since the kitchen.
"You want a locked door," he says, "between you and the thing you are paid to stand in front of?"
Point taken.
"Fair."
He resumes walking pointing as we go. "That’s my study. You don’t open that door. Office, same thing. Basement, same. Everything else, you may go, I don’t care."
"That's three doors. Last night's tour was implied to be more comprehensive."
"Last night you were in a hostage in a shed."
"It had a toilet.” I point out.
Something happens in the vicinity of his jaw that might, in a more generous man, have been the beginning of an expression. But it doesn't survive long.
"Cameras," he says, resuming the tour. "Forty-one inside, and more outside. There are no blind corners in this house, don't even bother looking for them."
“How many outside?”
“What makes you think I’d tell you?”
So that mean’s a lot. Noted.
He turns and starts back down the corridor forcing me to keep moving to keep up.
"The east door and the utility door open only from the inside.
The gate needs a code and has a retnal scanner.
There is no vehicle on this property with a key left in it.
And your phone is in a drawer in Moscow – more or less. "
"Where are the dogs?"
That gets me a genuine pause. Half a second if that, but I saw it.
"Kennel on the east side of the property," he says. "How did you know?"
"The wind last night, I could smell them from the cabin. Also there's a chewed lead on a hook by the boot room, it's too heavy for anything under ninety pounds." I shrug. "Two I’d guess from the chew patterns on the lead."
Andrei looks at me for slightly longer than is comfortable, and almost smiles.
"Three," he corrects.
"Then one of them's new."
"One of them is new." He confirms and he starts walking again. "You will be four steps behind me or I will be four steps behind you for ninety days. Choose which you prefer, it makes no difference to me."
"You're going to follow me around the house?"
"I am going to follow you everywhere."
"For the entire three months?"
"Yes."
"That's a hell of a use of a senior man.
" I keep my tone light, because I'm about to ask the question I've been building the whole tour toward and I don't want him to see it coming.
"Which raises a question I've been pondering.
You're the best hand on this property. You've clearly been with him a long time. So why aren't you the kid's bodyguard?"
He stops.
And this time the pause isn't half a second. It's four, five, standing in a corridor with his back half-turned to me, and I can see the exact moment he decides not to hit me with the truth.
"I can't," he says in a low voice. Then he walks on.
I let it go. For now.
Sergei's room is at the end of the corridor and Andrei knocks — actually knocks, and waits — before he opens it.
"Sergei. Remember Raven? She works here now."
The boy is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a half-built model in front of him, and he looks up, and his whole face reorganises itself. "You're the new nanny?"
"I'm the new bodyguard."
"Papa calls them nannies." He says with a scrunched nose.
"Sounds like he’s being polite. I've got a gun and no idea how to make a sandwich, so let's not oversell it."
He laughs. It's a startled, unpractised noise, and behind me I feel Andrei become very still.
"Do you want to see my room?" Sergei asks.
"That's why I'm here, kid." I say with a smile. “Give me the tour, would ya?”
It's a solid room and a strange one. Models everywhere — ships, mostly, a couple of aircraft — all of them built with more patience than I had at any age.
Books in Russian and English. A window seat with a cushion worn down in one specific spot, which tells me where he spends his afternoons and exactly what angle he watches the driveway from.
And a shelf.
I clock it about ninety seconds in because it's the only thing in the room with dust on it. Four framed photographs, a hairbrush, a small ceramic dish with two rings in it, and a folded silk scarf, arranged with care that no ten-year-old should ever apply to anything.
The woman in the photographs is dark-haired and beautiful. But she isn’t smiling in any of them.
"That's my mother," Sergei says, from behind me.
"She's lovely."
"Don’t touch it. Ok? Nobody's allowed to move it. Not even Karina." A beat. "I did it myself."
"Deal. I won’t touch any of it. Eyes only ok?"
He seems satisfied with that. Nodding, before he goes back to the model and starts explaining the rigging to me in the exhaustive, uninterruptible way children explain things.
I sit down on the floor because standing over him feels wrong, and the next few minutes he hands me various pieces, telling me to hold it steady while he attaches others.
"You're doing it wrong," he finally says with mild frustration.
"I'm holding a stick."
"You're holding it at an angle. It has to be at ninety degrees or the whole thing—"
"It's ninety degrees."
"It's eighty-five."
"Sergei, I swear, if you—" I stop dead. Laughing through my own frustration. "—if you. Correct me. One more time."
I’ve never been that great with kids.
There's an audible pause about a foot behind my left shoulder that has weight in the room, and I straighten, clearing my throat.
Sergei is delightedly amused. "You almost said a bad word."
"I did not."
"You nearly did."
"I nearly do a lot of things. I nearly punched a man at breakfast." I don't turn around. "Nobody in this room is counting."
"I'm counting," says Andrei, from the doorway.
The rest of the day is like that. Lunch, which Karina makes and I do not help with. Two hours of the boy showing me things. An hour where he goes quiet with a book and I stand at the window and map the tree line, and he looks up at me twice to check I'm still there, and pretends he isn't doing it.
I learn a lot in a day, and almost none of it is what I'm supposed to be learning.
I learn he doesn't go outside. Not can't — the doors aren't locked and there's a whole lawn out there and a tilted swing set going green at the joints.
He just doesn't, and when I suggest it around three he gets very interested in the model and says maybe tomorrow in a voice that has said maybe tomorrow a great many times.
I learn there are no other children in any of the photographs in this house.
I learn he's been taught in this building since he was six, by a rotation of tutors who come Tuesdays and Fridays and are gone by four, and that he is about two years ahead in mathematics.
Already reading at an adult level in two languages and yet cannot tell me the name of a single person his own age.
And I learn the staff situation, which takes me most of the afternoon to piece together and then sits in my chest like a stone.
Karina cooks and cleans and goes home at seven.
Bogdan comes when called. There are six men on this property and every one of them is armed and not one of them is here for the boy — they're here for the house, and the house contains the boy, and there is a difference between those two jobs that nobody but me appears to have articulated out loud.
So: one child, one nanny-who-is-a-bodyguard, and a father who is in the city.
The woman before me lasted eight months and got fired for being in the wrong wing on the wrong night, and I'd bet the forty-one dollars I haven't stolen yet that nobody ever gave her a brief either.
By nine he's asleep, and I go into the room they've given me, and I lie on top of the covers fully dressed with the connecting door open and build the property in my head.
The perimeter is a fence, not a wall. Nineteen exterior cameras with four unlogged. Three dogs, east side, prevailing wind west. No vehicle keys, no landline, gate on code and biometrics. Generator shed, four minutes, eight p.m.
Karina drives in and out. There's a delivery on Thursdays. Andrei sleeps somewhere on the ground floor and nobody sleeps well.
Ninety days.
Ninety days is a test in patience. You have never once in your life been patient.
I'm still awake at two.
Which is why I'm through the connecting door about a second and a half after the screaming starts.
It's a bad one. He's sitting straight up in the dark with his eyes open and not seeing anything, both hands locked in the blanket, making a sound that isn't crying and isn't words, and the first thing I do is put a lamp on low, because dark is the enemy in this, and the second is get down beside the bed so I'm below his eye line.
"Sergei. Hey. It's Raven. You're in your room." I keep it flat and slow. "Two hands. Look at them. Count them for me."
Nothing. Then: "—two."
"Two. Good. Now four things you can hear."
It takes him a while. The clock. The heating. The dogs, faintly, off east. Me.
"You're breathing," I tell him. "You're doing it already, you just haven't noticed yet."
He notices. His hands come out of the blanket by degrees. He's soaked through and shaking and about eight years old in the lamplight, and after a minute he says, in a very small voice, "Sorry."
"For what?"
"For waking you up."
"Kid, this is literally my job now." I sit back against the bedframe. "How often does this happen?"
"...Two or three times a week."
"Since when?"
"Since … as long as I can remember."
I don't push it, because it's ten past two and he's still shaking, there is a version of me that would push it and that version can go to hell.
"Does anybody come?"
He takes a long time with that one.
"Andrei stands outside," he says. "And Karina used to, before she stopped staying nights." A pause. "It's better if nobody comes in. It's worse if somebody comes in."
"Why's it worse?"
"Because then I have to be okay so they can go back to bed."
I sit on the floor of a strange room in a strange house and take that one directly in the chest.
Because I know it. I know it precisely, from the inside, at twelve years old in a house in Rockville with a mother who came apart in the next room every night for two years — the specific arithmetic of a kid who learns that the fastest way to end an adult's distress about your distress is to stop having any.
You get very good at it. You get so good at it that fifteen years later somebody asks how you are and you answer before you've checked.
"Right," I say. "New rule. When I come in, I don't need you to be okay so I can leave. I'm not going anywhere until you're asleep, and if that's an hour, it's an hour, and I'll be extremely annoying the whole time."
He almost laughs. It's mostly a hiccup.
"That's a bad rule."
"It's a great rule. I made it up myself."
Two or three times a week, for four years, in a house with no mother in it and a father who won't come in.
He goes back down about twenty minutes later, all at once, the way kids do. I stay until his breathing evens out and then another five minutes on top, and then I get up and go to close the door.
And find Ilya is standing in the corridor outside.
Fully dressed. Coat still on, keys in his hand, a man who has come in from somewhere in the last few minutes. Standing about six feet from his son's door with the flat of one hand against the wall.
He looks at me and I look at him and neither of us says anything at all, I watch him assemble himself in real time — the hand comes off the wall, the shoulders reset, and by the time he speaks he's the man from the cabin again, entirely.
"Is he asleep?" He asks in a near whisper
"He's asleep." I tell him.
"Good." He turns to go.
And I don't know what makes me do it. Thirty-one hours in a shed, maybe. Or the shelf with the dust on it, or four years at two or three times a week, or the fact that I have watched this man take a room apart with his voice and he is standing in a hallway unable to walk through an open door.
"He wasn't asking for you," I say. “Why not?”
Ilya stops.
"When he was screaming. He wasn't asking for anyone. That's what it is — there's nobody there." I keep my voice level. "It takes about nine minutes. You put a light on, you get low, you make him count things. That's all of it. That's the entire technique."
The corridor is very quiet.
"You have known my son for one day," Ilya says. “How can you be so certain?”
"Yeah?" I hold the door frame. "And in that one day I've been in that room twice. Where were you?"
He looks at me for a long moment, and there's something working behind his face that I'd give a great deal to read, and then he says, perfectly evenly:
"Goodnight, Miss West."
He walks away down the corridor. I watch him go. And it isn't until I'm back in my own room with the connecting door open and the lamp off that I run the last three minutes again and find the piece that doesn't fit.
He came home at two in the morning.
He came up here still wearing his coat, with his keys in his hand, and stood outside that door — and he didn’t ask what the nightmare was about, or whether it had happened before, or how often.
He didn't ask because he already knew.
Which means the man in that corridor has done this before. Many times. Standing exactly there, just outside his sons reach, for however long it takes. And every single time, he has waited until it stopped, and then gone back to business.