Iskra
My head ached as I moved. I began to reach for it until I remembered.
Runa.
I shot up, ignoring the pain.
My clothes and other items from the suitcase were scattered across the floor. I searched the room. The bed we shared. Her toys and chair overturned in the middle of the room.
A long and pitiful wail ripped through my chest before the sound made its way out of my throat. Tears blurred my vision. I didn’t need to stand or search the bathroom or the closet.
He had taken her.
They had taken her.
Gut-wrenching sobs followed. Ones I couldn’t control. More animal sounds burst from my lips—the kind that come from somewhere beneath language, beneath thought, beneath everything.
Dark red on the floor.
I crawled toward it, dragging myself across the cold tiles.
The scarf. The burgundy cotton scarf she loved to play with while drinking her milk. The one that helped her sleep as she suckled at my breast. I gripped the soft cloth and pressed it into my face, trying to find her in the fabric.
I howled into it.
Uncontrollable sobs for an inconsolable moment. The sound of a woman who had survived everything and had not been able to survive this.
My worst fear.
Him.
His cruelty.
His hatred.
They would be on their way to Russia if not already there. I thought of her on a plane without me. Without my smell. Without the rhythm of my heartbeat that she had fallen asleep to every night of her life.
You can go. She is mine.
The memory of his words landed like a fist.
I couldn’t lose another child. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t.
But I held her scarf and curled up on the floor and I sobbed until there was nothing left.
He took my baby.
The ray of sparkling light in my life. The small warm weight of her against my chest. The fist that gripped my finger in the dark. The gurgles and the hiccups and the milk-drunk eyes drooping like a drunken old man’s.
Gone.
In the evening light the apartment held every memory of her—the floor seat, the toys, the blanket folded at the end of the bed, the freezer still holding the remaining milk she would never drink here.
I shut my eyes and her smiling face appeared, clear and immediate, the way she looked at me when I walked into the room as though I was the only fixed point in her entire world.
No.
The tears began again.
My baby.
My Runa.
Gone.
??
??
??
When I boarded the plane I didn’t make eye contact. I shuffled along with people. Stopped, waited and shuffled again until I reached my seat. My pockets were stuffed with tissues—some dry, most wet. I could feel people staring. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
These people meant nothing to me.
Only Runa—
I reached for a tissue and turned to the window. Someone settled into the seat beside me. I rested my head against the thick plastic and stared at nothing.
Every second of this journey would be wrought with dread.
You can go. She is mine.
He was releasing me. As though I were something that could be released from loving my child. As though a mother could simply be dismissed from the baby she had carried for nine months. Birthed alone in a foreign city. Lived for. Built an entire life around.
How could anyone be released from that?
The stewardess began the safety instructions. Her voice arrived at the edges of my awareness and logged itself there, unreachable.
Istanbul would be like a beautiful dream.
One a woman like me could never have kept.
I wiped my cheeks—the skin raw and sensitive, rubbed past the point of feeling. Eyes swollen. Lips swollen. Nose red from blowing into tissues I had run out of apologies for.
The weight of my own body felt like a burden I was carrying for someone else.
A corpse going home.
First Makari.
Now Runa.
More tears rolled down my cheeks and I let them. I had stopped having the energy to wipe them away somewhere over the water.
I reached for the pendant and pressed my lips against the scarf wrapped firmly around my neck—the burgundy cotton still holding the faint warmth of her, or perhaps I was imagining it because I needed to.
The entire flight felt like an out-of-body experience. As though the woman in the window seat were someone I was observing from a distance, someone I felt sorry for but couldn’t reach.
It was only when the plane touched down in Russia that the true fear seeped into my bones.
??
??
??
I handed the taxi driver money without looking at it, not caring about the change, and turned to face the iron gates.
I looked up. The sky above them was a dark navy, the first thin line of lighter blue beginning to show at the edges—the earliest hint of morning, the hour when the city hadn’t decided yet what kind of day it was going to be.
Wind moved through the trees. Branches creaked. Leaves rustled with the particular sound of early autumn in Chernograd—cold finding its way back in, the way it always did, the way it always would.
Beyond the gates, the tip of the house I had so desperately wanted to escape.
I closed my eyes.
They ached. Everything ached.
“You can’t be here.”
I opened them.
Radovan. Standing just inside the gate, his breath visible in the cold air, his eyes moving briefly to something behind me before they came back.
“We’ve been told to turn you away,” he said.
“I need to speak to him,” I rasped. My voice didn’t sound like my own—scraped raw, barely there, the voice of a woman who had been crying since Istanbul and hadn’t stopped.
“You need to leave,” he said. His eyes met mine. His voice was hard in the way of a man following an order he hadn’t chosen.
I shook my head.
It was only a few hours before daylight. I moved to the tall stone pillar beside the gate’s hinges and pressed my back against it, then slid down until I was sitting on the cold ground.
Silence.
Only the wind.
Then footsteps moving away from me and nothing after that.
I curled into myself for warmth. I had forgotten how unforgiving Chernograd’s cold was—the bite of it, the way it found every gap and settled there permanently.
I tugged Runa’s scarf up over my face.
And waited.