29. Epilogue #2
We'd have stayed there in the wreck of the bed all morning if his phone hadn't gone off on the nightstand.
He didn't move for it, which for Aleksi meant something. It went off again. On the third buzz, I reached over him, because one of us had to be a functioning adult, and it clearly wasn't going to be the man holding his dead father's jacket like it might fly off.
"It's Niko," I said, reading. "Where are you?" Another one came in while I held it. "Your brother is driving me crazy."
Aleksi took the phone from me and thumbed back a reply one-handed without sitting up properly, and I read it over his shoulder.
He's your half-brother too, idiot.
"Where're we meant to be, then?" I asked, handing the phone back. "Since ye've apparently got my whole day booked and didnae think to mention any of it."
"It's Pop's birthday." He said it to the ceiling. "Niko wanted to go out to the grave. Bring a bottle. Show EJ."
He finally sat up the rest of the way, scrubbed both hands over his face, and looked at the jacket where I'd laid it across the foot of the bed. "Get dressed. It's two hours to Athens County, and Niko'll have the boy fed to the dogs by the time we get there."
So that was the day. A wedding I hadn't been asked about, a ring on the hand they'd maimed, a dead man's jacket made whole, and now a two-hour drive to drink vodka over a grave with the wreckage of the family that man had left scattered across two countries.
I got dressed.
I didn't ask whether he was bringing the jacket. I just watched him lift it off the foot of the bed, careful as anything, and lay it over his arm.
Irina was in the kitchen when we came out. She always was, before any of us were properly awake, and she'd have heard the bed go and drawn her own conclusions and said nothing about them, which was more grace than Niko had ever managed.
She took one look at the pair of us, dressed and bound for the door at an hour that meant we'd be gone past lunch, and set down her spoon.
By the time we had our coats on, she'd wrapped a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese, and a stack of the cold cuts Aleksi liked.
She pressed the lot into my arms in a cloth bag and said something low and Russian and not gentle, pointing the spoon at me, then at Aleksi, then at the door.
"She says eat in the car," Aleksi translated. "And that I drive too fast. And—" His ears went red. "The rest doesn't translate."
I didn't need it to. She'd put a plate in front of me the first morning I was in this flat, a half-dead stranger her boss had dragged home in cuffs, and she'd been putting food in my hands ever since.
A ring that morning changed none of it. She pinched my cheek on the way past, hard, same as that first day, and went back to her stove.
The cemetery was a small one off a county road in the hills, the kind of place with more trees than headstones and no sound but wind in them.
Gregori took us up the gravel track, and there was the other car already parked crooked across two spaces, and Niko leaning against it looking like a man who'd survived a disaster.
"Never again," he said as soon as Aleksi and I got out.
"Never again do I get in a car with that—that—" He gestured at EJ, who was coming round the bonnet looking pleased with himself.
"He drives like the road owes him money.
Ninety on the county route, Aleksi. Ninety.
Around hairpin curves! Like he does it every Tuesday! "
"I do do that every Tuesday," EJ grumbled. “Except I’m usually on a bike.”
“A bike?” Gregori’s eyebrows shot up. “Sweet. What do you ride?”
“A 2008 Suzuki Hayabusa,” he said with a shrug. “Rebuilt it after some asshole totaled it and wrote it off as a loss.”
“Sick.” Gregori stuck his fist out for a fist bump.
Aleksi glared at him, and he retracted it before EJ could hit it, and I swear the big Russian driver shrank two inches.
"All right," Aleksi said, and that was all it took. The bickering went out of the air. He had the jacket over one arm and a bottle in his other hand. I hadn't even seen him take it from the car. He started up the slope without waiting to see if we'd follow, because he knew we would.
The grave was near the top, under a tree. It was good granite, modest in size, far from the gaudy thing I’d been imagining. The stone bore the man’s name, two dates, and the line: BELOVED FATHER AND brOTHER.
Niko’s expression sobered when he saw it, and he stopped about a foot and a half behind Aleksi. “It’s a good stone,” he said. “Did you pick it or did Uncle Yuri?”
“I did.” Aleksi crouched down in front of it on his bad knee and laid the jacket across the top of the stone. The bullet hole sat there, dark against the granite.
Then he cracked the bottle and poured a measure straight into the cold, hard ground, saying something quick and plain in Russian. Then he took a drink straight from the bottle and passed it to Niko.
Niko stepped up to the grave, bottle in hand. “à toi, Papa,” he said. “Even dead, you somehow manage to steal the show.” Then he took his drink and offered the bottle to EJ.
EJ’s cheeks flushed. “Oh, um… I’m only twenty.”
“Ah, Americans!” Niko declared. “Old enough to bleed, but not to drink? What kind of poor country is this?” Then he picked up EJ’s hand and put the bottle in it. “Drink. You need more chest hair, mon gars.”
EJ took the bottle in both hands like it might go off, looked round at all of us watching, and tipped it back.
He got about a mouthful down before his whole face caved in. He came off the bottle coughing, eyes streaming, thumping his own chest with a fist.
"Christ—" he wheezed. "That's—that tastes like rubbing alcohol—"
The laugh that went round the grave was the first easy thing that had happened on that hill. Niko howled. Gregori took the bottle off the kid before he dropped it and clapped him on the back hard enough to put him forward a step, grinning, and even Aleksi's mouth turned up.
"That," Niko said, wiping his eyes, "is the finest vodka in the state of Ohio, and you have insulted it, and your punishment is you're going to drink the rest of it with me.
" He got an arm round the kid's shoulders and steered him back down the slope toward the cars.
"Come. I will teach you how a Laskin drinks.
Badly and in great quantity. Gregori, bring the other bottle, the good one's in the boot—"
And then it was just the two of us at the stone, and the wind in the old tree, and Sacha's jacket lying across the granite with the hole in it.
Aleksi stayed crouched in front of the stone. I came and lowered myself down beside him on the grass, close enough that our shoulders touched, and I didn't say anything, because I'd learned by now that the surest way to get nothing out of the man was to ask for it.
For a while there was just the wind.
"He'd have hated you," Aleksi said.
"Cheers."
"Not like that." The corner of his mouth moved.
"He'd have hated that I found something that fit.
He never did. Two wives, the woman at the Foxhole, God knows who else, and not one of them ever sat right on him, so he just kept getting more.
Like if he had enough of it, it'd add up to the thing he was missing.
" He looked at the jacket. "It never added up. He died still short."
He turned to me. "And here you are," he said. "One mouthy Scottish bastard with nine fingers, and I'm not short anymore. He'd have hated that. That I managed it and he never could."
He was quiet for a while. The wind worked the trees over our heads. I waited.
"I came home, and she was at the machine," he said, and his voice had changed, gone flat like he was somewhere else. "I told you that part. What I didn't tell you was that I was glad it was her and not him."
I turned my head.