33. Mikhail
MIKHAIL
The day after I bring Taylor home, my mother is waiting for me in my study.
This is not unusual. My mother has never believed doors apply to her, particularly doors inside a house she considers hers despite reminding me regularly that she hates nearly everything I have done with it.
What is unusual is that she is seated in my chair.
She is looking out the window with her hands in her lap, a mug of tea in front of her that has long since gone cold.
When I open the door, she wastes no time with pleasantries. She simply says, “You brought the girl back, I see.”
Sighing, I close the door behind me. “Good evening, Mother.”
“Good evening. Is she a prisoner? I see she has no marks on her wrists this time. I need to know whether or not to adjust my tone when I speak to her.” She straightens her back when she uses her biting sarcasm, looking me straight in my eyes, her mouth a thin straight line, her lip liner crumbling and dark. She blinks slowly and angrily.
“Are you sure that the doctors are correct about your cataracts? You have excellent vision, I notice.”
Her eyes narrow. “Do not be irritating on purpose. You have never been charming enough to get away with it.”
“She is not my prisoner, Mother. I am protecting her.”
“Yes.” She says it softly. “That is what your father always called it.”
I turn away from her and pour myself a drink. My mother does not let silence save anyone.
“Protection and possession look very similar in our family, Mikhail.”
I set the bottle down harder than necessary. “Taylor’s apartment is no longer secure.”
“Then secure it.”
“I intend to.”
“Good. Then she can return to it.”
“No.” The word leaves me too quickly.
Her smile is smug and unhappy. She knows who she raised, who my father raised, and she knows it is too late. There are moments when my mother does not need to speak. She can pull a confession from a man simply by watching him resist it.
I lift the glass but do not drink. “She is safer here,” I say.
“You already said that.”
I look at her. “Taylor is not a prisoner.”
“Does she know that?”
“She can leave.”
“Without one of your drivers?”
“Yes.”
“Without one of your guards?”
“If she insists.”
“Without your permission?”
My jaw tightens.
My mother sighs. “There,” she says. “That is the problem.”
“I would not stop her.”
“No. You would only make leaving feel foolish. Dangerous. Ungrateful. You would place men around her, decide which threats she is allowed to know about, and call every restriction temporary until she forgets what unrestricted feels like.”
“You think I am my father.”
“I think you are his son.”
I take a drink.
My father loved women like he loved countries. He wanted their loyalty, their beauty, their softness, their surrender. Then he locked every ugly truth outside the room and seemed surprised when it found another way in.
“He destroyed every woman he loved,” my mother says.
“I am not destroying Taylor,” I say through gritted teeth. “She is not part of this world.”
“She is living in your house.”
“For her safety. She is in my house to keep her out of it.”
“Do you hear yourself? Does that make sense to you? Safety is not the same thing as freedom. You should send her home to her own mother.”
“No,” I say. “Safety keeps people alive long enough to complain about freedom.”
For the first time, anger flashes openly across her face. “And that,” she says, “is exactly what he would have said.”
We seethe equally as only mother and son can, and after a moment, I say through clenched teeth, “Well, Mother, it must be partially true as you are alive to complain about him.”
She stands up angrily, and I sigh and roll my eyes. “Where are you going?”
“To send for the girl. She is eating with me tonight.”
“Suit yourself, but it makes you no better than me ordering her around.”
She pauses at the door and considers, then decides against whatever she was going to say and slams the door so hard that the art on my walls and my glass bottles of liquor rattle.
I don’t expect Taylor to submit easily to an invitation from my mother simply because it is phrased more politely than one of my orders. My mother is a tough woman, but Taylor is a tougher nut to crack. I might be hungry too, with all the food analogies floating in my own head.
Eventually I wander down to the smaller kitchen in my mother’s wing to see if she actually managed to convince Taylor to eat with her or if Taylor is still moping in the guest room and only accepting tray meals.
She has been slightly depressed as the awareness has settled in that she no longer lives with Anya and I cannot tell her when she can return.
I cannot tell her because I do not know.
And because returning safely will likely mean Orlov is dead. That a man is dead because of her.
Not really because of her, of course. Because of me. Because of him. Because he made the mistake of threatening something that belongs to me. But Taylor is a better person than I am, and unfortunately that distinction will probably cause her distress rather than comfort her.
But I find Taylor at the center island, her knees in a stool, leaning over the counter, wearing one of my mother’s aprons over her pajamas.
It says KISS THE COOK in English. My mother got it at a yard sale years ago, and it made her laugh so hard that my father bought it for her immediately. It is one of her prized possessions.
I stop and watch in silence. They are both rolling dough, but Taylor’s keeps sticking to her rolling pin. “It keeps sticking,” Taylor says, waving her rolling pin in the air.
“Because you are afraid of it. Dough can sense fear.”
“I’ll just use my hands,” Taylor groans and gathers it off the pin, but when she presses both palms into it, the dough sticks to her fingers. She lifts her hands. “This feels personal.”
My mother laughs, and it is not the thin, elegant laugh she uses for company. It is a real one. I cannot remember the last time I heard it. “You are lingering. Pull back after you knead,” she says. “Again. Here.” My mother dabs a few drops of oil onto Taylor’s hands.
Taylor breathes an audible sigh of relief when she’s finally able to roll the dough out thin.
My mother begins cutting circles from the dough with the top of a mason jar.
Taylor tries to copy her and groans when the dough gets stuck in the top.
She tries to scrape it out and ruins the circular shape.
I stifle a laugh.
“What do you want from your life, Miss Taylor?” my mother asks. “Are you doing it?”
Taylor looks up, a ruined ball of dough in her hand that she flattens on the counter. “That’s a heavy question for dumplings.”
“Food is when people tell the truth. This is why politicians prefer drinks.”
Taylor glances at me. I say nothing. She looks back down at the dough. “I thought I knew,” she says. My mother waits. Taylor presses the edge of a dumpling closed with careful fingers. “I thought I’d finish school. Get a good job. Help my family. Go home eventually.”
“What do you want now?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“That is dangerous.”
“I’m aware.”
“No. You think danger is men following you or breaking into apartments. That is simple danger. The worse danger is waking one morning and realizing your life has been decided by people who claimed to love you.” Taylor’s cutting of dumplings slows, and she looks off into the distance, listening without looking at my mother.
“Women in our world survive by knowing what they will not surrender,” she says.
“You do not need to know everything you want. But you must know what no man gets to take.”
After a long moment, Taylor looks back at my mother and asks, “What did you refuse to surrender?”
My mother smiles, sharp and private. “I lost my son. That is when I learned the lesson.”
Her words sink in my chest, and I look down at the ground for a moment, feeling the gravity of everything my father has taken from my mother. Feeling the gravity of what she thinks of me.
Taylor nods slowly. Then she looks at the ruined dumpling in her hand. “I think I may have sacrificed this one.”
Nikita examines it. “It is beyond saving.”
“Finally, something in this house is allowed to leave.”
My mother laughs again. Taylor does too.
The sound fills the little kitchen as naturally as warmth from the stove.
My mother bumps Taylor’s hip aside and demonstrates how to fold the dough.
Taylor protests that she was doing it exactly that way.
My mother tells her she has the hands of a bureaucrat.
Taylor says that is offensive to both her and bureaucrats.
They fit. Taylor belongs nowhere in this house.
She is too bright for it. Too loud. Too American.
She insults the furniture, argues with the guards, and refuses help even when she is hopelessly lost. And yet here she is, standing beneath my grandmother’s copper pots with flour on her face, making my mother laugh.
Not visiting. Not intruding. Fitting. The sight reaches somewhere inside me that I have kept locked longer than Taylor has been alive. My mother looks over Taylor’s shoulder and meets my eyes. Her expression changes. Only slightly. Enough.
She knows what I’m seeing. She knows what it costs me.
I clear my throat. “What are you doing?” I ask.
Taylor looks toward the doorway and sees me. Her smile changes. It becomes more cautious, as though some part of her remembers that she is in my house because someone has taken an interest in hurting her.
“Apparently losing a fight with flour.”
“She is making pelmeni,” my mother says.
Taylor holds up one misshapen piece between two flour-covered fingers. “That’s optimistic.”
“It is recognizable,” I tell her.
“Thank you,” Taylor squeals happily.
“As food,” I clarify. “Not as pelmeni.”
“Oh. Well, you know, in America we have this saying: if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I think you should adopt something like that here maybe.”
“In Russian, we have a saying, too: “Vrag soglasitsya, a drug sporit.”
“‘Enemy will agree, but friend argues’?”
“A foe will flatter you, but a true friend will tell hard truths.”
Taylor ignores me, smiling down at the dumpling in her hand, pleased because this one has finally held its shape. I could do something like that with her: make a family that keeps its shape.
Then my stomach growls. I shake my head. The food metaphors are never-ending.
I really am hungry.