14. Raven
Raven
Icount nine exits before I put my bag down.
That's the first thing I do in the house on the hill, standing in a room with two walls made of glass and the Pacific going orange out beyond them, and I hate it on sight for entirely professional reasons.
Front door. Kitchen service door. The garage, internal.
Two sets of sliders onto the terrace. The pool house, which has its own gate onto a service path.
A staff stair down the north side of the hill that ends at a road.
The garden door off the utility room. And the window in the corridor at the back that isn't a window; it's a full-height pane that swings, and somebody put it in for the view without once thinking about what it is.
Nine. In a house where the last one had one door in and one out and a fence built by a man who has been shot four times.
"You are counting," Ilya says behind me.
"Nine."
"Eleven. You have missed the wine cellar hatch and the roof access off the second landing."
"That's a hatch—"
"It's an opening in a building. You said nine.
" He goes past me with a bag in each hand, and there is something almost cheerful about him, which is unnerving.
"Andrei has already given me the whole list twice.
I bought this house in 2018 because I liked the way the light came into it, and it was, I'm told, the worst decision of my professional life. "
"It's a beautiful house."
"It's an indefensibly beautiful house."
"So why are we in it?"
He stops at the foot of the stairs and looks back.
"Because the fortress was a building four people knew about," he says. "This is a bad building that nobody knows about at all. I will take the second one every time."
The first week is a lie, and I know it's a lie while I'm inside it and I stay in it anyway.
Here's what happens. Nothing happens. That's the whole of it — for six days, absolutely nothing happens, and it turns out that's the most dangerous thing that has occurred to me since the corridor.
Sergei goes into the ocean.
Not the first day. The first day he stands at the top of the steps in swimming shorts with a towel around his shoulders like a man contemplating a tax bill, and tells me at length about rip currents, which he has read about, obviously.
The second day, he goes on his knees.
The fourth day I get about eleven feet out with him, and he goes under a wave he didn't see and comes up screaming — and for a full second my heart stops, and then I realize he's laughing, screaming and laughing at the same time, coughing and shouting about salt, and he does it four more times on purpose.
He is a boy who has been in a locked house since he was six, and he is standing in the Pacific Ocean being knocked over by water, and I have to go and stand in the shallows with my back to the beach for a second, and if anybody asks I'll tell them it was the sun.
We train on the terrace in the mornings. Falling, still, and then the beginnings of a straight punch that he loathes with his whole soul.
"Why do I have to?"
"Because I said."
"That's not a reason."
"It's the reason you're getting." I put the pad up. "Again."
"I don't like it, Raven."
"I know."
"It's — " he's going pink, and struggling for it, and when it comes out it's the truest thing he's said in a week " — it's for hurting people. That's what it's for. That's what it's for, and you're teaching it to me, and I don't want to know how."
And I put the pad down because that deserves an answer, not a drill.
"Okay. So here's the arithmetic, and I'm going to give you the adult version because you're going to work it out yourself in about two years anyway.
" I sit down on the step. "You're right.
It's for hurting people. There's no version where it isn't. What I'm actually teaching you is the thing that happens in the eleven seconds before — how to see a room, how to get to a door, how not to be where the trouble is.
The punch is what's left over when all of that has failed.
It's the worst option on a list of options, and you're learning it last, and I hope to God you never use it. "
He thinks about that for a long time.
"That's still teaching me to hurt somebody."
"Yes," I say. "It is."
He picks the pad back up, holds it out to me, and doesn't say anything else. We do twenty more, and he does every one because I asked and for no other reason on earth.
That's the thing. That's the thing I should be paying attention to. He does it because I asked him.
Ilya comes home at six on a Wednesday.
Not eleven. Not midnight. Six, with the sun still up, and finds the three of us on the terrace eating badly and doesn't say anything about it, just takes a plate and sits down.
He does it again on Friday.
Andrei catches my eye across the table on Friday, and something happens in his face that on any other man would be an entire paragraph.
There's a night that week where I'm standing at the kitchen island with a glass of wine, and Ilya comes past behind me to get something, and he puts his hand flat on my lower back as he goes — briefly, absently, the way you'd steady someone in a doorway — and keeps walking.
Karina isn't here. It's Andrei, and Sergei at the table with a book.
Neither of them says a word.
And I stand there with my whole spine lit up and understand that we have, at some point in the last week, stopped pretending in front of the household and nobody held a meeting about it.
I stop counting the exits on the ninth day.
I didn't notice at the time. That's the part I'll think about later — I don't notice, because you don't notice when you stop doing a thing; that's the entire nature of stopping.
What I notice is the fourteenth day, standing on the terrace at six in the morning with coffee, when it occurs to me that I could not currently tell you the state of the north fence, that I haven't walked the service path since Tuesday, and that I have not once in a week checked whether the gate on the pool house is locked.
Fourteen days.
I go and check it. It's locked.
That doesn't help at all.
The attack comes at two in the morning on a Sunday, and it is a bad one.
I'm through my door and halfway down the corridor before I'm properly awake, and I get to Sergei's room, and he's sitting bolt upright in the dark making the sound that isn't crying, and I put my hand on the lamp—
—and stop.
Because Ilya is already in the doorway.
Not six feet back in the corridor with his hand flat on the wall. In the doorway, one hand on the frame, and he's looking at his son, and his whole face is a man standing at the edge of very cold water.
He looks at me.
And I do the hardest thing I have done in this house.
I step back.
I take two steps backward out of that doorway, and I put my shoulder against the corridor wall, and I fold my arms, and I say nothing at all, and I let him go in.
He is terrible at it.
He puts on the wrong light — the overhead, the hard one — and Sergei flinches like he's been hit, and Ilya says something under his breath in Russian, turns it off, and gets the lamp instead.
He's too loud. He says the boy's name three times at a volume you'd use across a car park, and every one of them lands like a slap.
He asks a question. "What is it, what happened?" — which is the single worst thing you can say to a child who can't get air, because it demands a sentence from somebody who doesn't have one, and I get half a step forward before I lock my feet down.
Let him.
He stands there for a second, and I watch him realize he's failing. I actually watch it happen — the shoulders come down, and something in his face gives up on being the man who fixes things.
And then he gets down on the floor.
He gets all the way down, onto his knees beside the bed, so he's looking up at his own son, and he puts both hands up flat and empty.
"Sergei." Quiet, this time. "Two hands. Count them."
Nothing.
"Two hands. Count them for me."
"...two."
"Two." His voice cracks in the middle of the word, and he keeps going anyway. "Now five things. Five things you can see. Say them."
And Sergei counts. The lamp. The window. The model on the shelf. His father's hands, which he says as two separate things, and Ilya lets him have it — doesn't correct him, doesn't say that's the same thing, says "good," and waits, and asks for four things he can hear.
It takes nine minutes.
At the end of it, the boy is breathing, shaking, and soaked through, and Ilya is still on his knees on the floor, and neither of them seems to know what happens next.
Sergei leans forward and puts his forehead against his father's shoulder.
I watch Ilya Yaroslav sit absolutely rigid for about a second and a half with his hands hovering four inches from his son's back, and I think: don't you dare.
Then he puts them down. Flat, the whole weight of them, no delicacy anywhere.
I go and stand at the end of the corridor because I have absolutely no business watching any more of this.
He comes out twenty minutes later and doesn't see me at first.
He gets four steps down the corridor, and then his back goes against the wall, and he slides down it and sits on the floor with his forearms on his knees, and stays there.
I sit down next to him.
Not touching. About six inches. Both of us on the floor of a hallway at half past two in the morning with our legs out in front of us like a pair of teenagers.
He doesn't say anything for a very long time.
"Nine minutes," he says finally.
"Nine minutes."
"You said nine minutes. In the corridor. Eleven days ago, in a house on the other side of the country, you told me nine minutes, and I did not believe you."
"You got the light wrong."
"I got the light wrong."
"And you asked him a question."
"I asked him a question." He puts his head back against the wall. "I have run a company for eleven years. I have negotiated with men who would have killed me for a syllable. I have never in my life been as frightened as I was standing in that doorway, and I could not have told you of what."
I look at the ceiling.
"Of getting it wrong," I say. "Same as everybody."
"Four years."
"I know."
"Four years I stood in that corridor. He is ten, and he has had two hundred of those, perhaps three hundred, and I have been present for almost all of them and inside the room for none." His hands are flat on his thighs. "You did it on your first night."
"That's not the same, and you know it."
"It's the same. It's worse. It took you an hour to be willing, and it took me four years." He turns his head. "How."
"How what?"
"How did you know to do it? On the first night. Nobody taught you that."
And I sit on the floor of a corridor in a house on a hill above the Pacific and consider lying to him, which would be easy, and don't.
"My mother," I say. "After my father. She came apart every night for about two years, and I was twelve, and there was nobody else in the house, so I worked out the pieces of it because I had to.
Get low. Kill the light. Give them a job.
It's not a technique, it's just — it's what's left when you're too small to do anything else. "
He is very quiet.
"Twelve," he says.
"Twelve."
"And who did it for you?"
I don't answer that.
And Ilya doesn't push it — he lets it sit there in the corridor between us.
After a while he reaches over and takes my hand off my own knee and holds it, badly, like a man handling something he's never been given before, and we sit on the floor until nearly four in the morning without saying one more word.
The drawing arrives on a Tuesday.
Sergei hands it to me at breakfast, his ears going red, face down, then leaves the room entirely, which is not something he does.
It's the beach. Rendered with the exhaustive accuracy of a boy who reads about things — the actual shape of our cove, the rocks at the north end in the right place, the steps.
Four figures.
He's labeled them, because of course he has, in careful block capitals under each one.
PAPA. ANDREI, who is holding what appears to be a rifle at the beach and is drawn considerably larger than everybody else. SERGEI.
And on the end, with her hair going sideways in a wind, he's drawn as four grey lines:
RAVEN.
I stand in the kitchen and look at it for a long time.
And what I think — the thought that arrives complete, before I can put anything else in front of it — isn't that I shouldn't be in this picture.
I've been here for a month.
A month. Thirty-one days out of ninety, and I have not touched a fence line in two weeks; I have not run a route since Kansas, and I know two gaps at the south corner of a property two thousand miles away that I never wrote down and never told anybody about.
You're not waiting out ninety days, I think, standing in a kitchen holding a child's drawing with my hands not entirely steady. You stopped counting them.