15. Grisha
GRISHA
The stone under my palm was cool even though the morning had already turned warm, the kind of cool that never fully leaves granite no matter what the sun does to it.
I had come alone the first hundred times.
This was the first time I had ever brought anyone with me, and I let the strangeness of that settle in me a while before I let myself feel anything else.
Tasha didn't say anything. She stood a step back and to the side, not crowding the plot, not filling the silence with the kind of nervous talk most people reached for in a cemetery.
I noticed that about her before I noticed anything else that morning, the way she seemed to understand that some quiet doesn't want company, it just wants a witness.
MARIA GRISHOVNA PETROVA, the stone read, and under it the dates, and under those a line in Cyrillic that Baba Olya had chosen because I couldn't bring myself to choose anything the week we buried her.
The grass around the plot was neat, trimmed close, someone from the parish kept after it, and beyond the rows of stones a few old birches stood with their leaves just starting to turn at the edges, more gold than the season had any business showing yet.
"She used to make me count the stones on the walk in," I said. "From the gate to her mother's plot first, then to this one. She said a boy who couldn't sit still needed something to do with his hands and his head at the same time, or he'd end up doing something worse with them."
"Did it work?"
"I still count things. Frames. Exits. Seconds. So I suppose the answer is yes, in the sense that it never stopped." I crouched and brushed a few stray clippings off the base of the stone, more out of habit than necessity. "She would have liked you."
"You don't know that."
"I know she liked people who told the truth even when it cost them something.
You've done that in front of me more than once.
" I stood back up and looked at the stone a moment longer, feeling the old familiar ache settle into its usual place, dull now, worn smooth by all the years of visits since.
"She'd have fed you until you couldn't move and then told you exactly what she thought of the men in my life, starting with me. "
Tasha smiled at that, small and real, and reached over to take my hand without making anything of it, just her fingers finding mine and staying there while the birches moved overhead in a wind I hadn't noticed until her hand was in mine.
We stood like that for a while. I didn't count the seconds.
That, more than anything else that morning, told me something had shifted in me that I wasn't going to be able to argue myself out of later.
"Thank you for letting me come," she said eventually.
"I've never brought anyone here before."
"I know." She said it simply, without making me explain what that meant, and I loved her a little for that too, though I wasn't ready yet to use that word even inside my own head.
We walked back toward the gate together, past rows of stones with names in three alphabets, past a woman on her knees pulling weeds from a plot two rows over who nodded to me the way people who have seen a man grieve regularly nod to him, familiar and undemanding.
I felt something loosen in my chest as we cleared the gate, not sorrow lifting exactly, more like a held breath letting out slow.
"Where to now?" she asked, once we were back at the car.
"Someplace loud," I said. "I think we've both had enough quiet for one morning."
The boardwalk at dusk was nothing like the cemetery, and that was the entire point.
Neon signs came up pink and gold against a sky just starting to purple at the edges, and the whole stretch of it smelled like salt and fry oil and someone's cigarette three stalls down, an assault of a smell that somehow worked exactly because none of its parts belonged together.
Kids ran past us with cotton candy already collapsing off its paper cone.
A radio somewhere played something with too much bass for the speaker carrying it.
The ocean threw its noise underneath all of it, steady, indifferent to the chaos happening twenty feet above the sand.
I had walked this boardwalk a thousand times as a boy and a few hundred more as a man doing rounds for the family, and it had never once felt like this, wide open and unweighted, nobody to watch except the woman next to me eating fries out of a paper cone like they were the finest thing she'd had all year.
"You scouted the benches," she said, out of nowhere, watching me steer us gently but unmistakably toward one near the railing.
"I scouted nothing. I picked a bench."
"You picked a bench the way you pick everything, which is to say with your entire professional history behind the decision.
" She sat down anyway, tucking one leg up under her, and looked at me with the particular expression she got when she'd caught me at something and intended to enjoy it fully.
"You picked this bench because you can see both exits. "
"It's a good bench," I said, unbothered, and sat down beside her.
She laughed, a real one, loud enough that a passing family glanced over, and the sound of it did something to the tight place behind my sternum that even the ocean hadn't managed. "You're impossible."
"I'm off duty. This is what off duty looks like for me. I still notice the exits. I just don't act on it unless I have to."
"That's not off duty. That's just duty with the volume turned down."
"Maybe." I stretched my arm along the back of the bench behind her, not quite touching, close enough that she leaned into it a moment later without either of us remarking on it. "Twenty years is a long habit to break in one evening. Give me time."
"I intend to," she said, and something about the plainness of it settled into me more than any softer version of the sentence could have.
We sat and watched the water for a while, the fries disappearing between us at a rate that suggested neither of us had eaten properly that day, and somewhere between the third and fourth handful I found myself watching her face in the neon light instead of the water, the way the pink sign three stalls down kept catching the edge of her jaw and letting it go.
"Can I tell you something," I said, "that I probably should have told you a while ago?"
She went still in the particular way she did when she sensed a real thing coming, setting the fries down between us on the bench. "Always."
"A couple of weeks ago, something fell out of your bag.
In the hallway outside the gallery wing, before any of this started between us.
A folded piece of paper. You gathered it up fast, faster than you gathered anything else that fell, and I didn't say anything because it wasn't mine to ask about.
But I saw it before you had it back. A list. Twelve cities, in your handwriting, the first three faded like they'd been written a long time before the rest."
She didn't say anything right away. Her hand had gone still on her knee, and in the sideways light off the water I watched something move behind her eyes that I recognized because I had felt its twin often enough myself, the particular vertigo of being seen somewhere you thought was locked.
"You never said anything," she said finally.
"It wasn't my place to. It still might not be. But I've thought about it since, more than I probably should have, and I don't want to be a man who knows something about you and never tells you he knows it. That felt like its own kind of lie, even if I never said a false word."
"What did you see?"
"Enough to notice two of the cities had circles around them.
Lisbon was one." I watched her carefully as I said the next part, because I wanted to get it right and I wanted her to hear that I had.
"The other was in Georgia. A port city on the Black Sea.
You'd circled it twice, which none of the others had.
I didn't recognize the name at first, so I looked it up later. Batumi."
Her breath caught, audible even under the boardwalk noise, and for once in the weeks I had known her she had absolutely nothing ready to say back.
I had watched her meet threats, lawyers, men circling paintings worth more than most houses, always with something quick loaded and ready.
She had nothing now. She just looked at me, and the streetlight caught the shine gathering along her lower lashes before she blinked it back.
"I looked up the ferry schedule," I said, quieter now.
"To the one you circled twice. There's a boat that runs out of Batumi twice a week in the season, along the coast. I don't know why I looked it up.
I told myself I was just curious. I think the truth is I wanted to know what it would take to get you there, in case you ever asked me to. "
"My grandfather used to say that name," she said, when she finally found her voice, low and unsteady in a way I had never heard from her. "The way you'd say a woman's name you still loved. I still can't say it right. I've tried."
"You said it fine just now."
"I was just parroting you. That's not the same as knowing it myself.
" She wiped under one eye with the back of her wrist, quick, almost angry at herself for needing to.
"Nobody's ever noticed that list. Frankie's seen the wallet a hundred times and never asked.
And you saw it fall out of a bag once, weeks ago, and you remembered which two cities had circles on them. "
"I remember most things about you. It isn't a skill I chose. It just started happening somewhere around the second week, and I stopped fighting it a while ago."