Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
Natasha
The quarterly earnings presentation is running at optimal velocity when my body files a formal, non-negotiable objection.
I have been running the numbers on slide fourteen for thirty seconds, the kind of slide that requires nothing from me beyond the autopilot function I have spent nine years developing to surgical reliability.
The board table is full of faces in various stages of engaged attention.
The CFO's quarterly review is not typically the event at which people expect drama.
I am aware of this. My body is not currently accepting input.
"Excuse me," I say, in the tone I use when delivering information that does not require commentary.
I walk out of the boardroom at a pace that is brisk but not panicked — a very narrow target that requires active management — and I make it to the executive bathroom on floor eleven with approximately four seconds to spare.
Afterwards I sit on the cold tile floor with my back against the stall door and my four-thousand-dollar Akris jacket spread around me and I breathe through my nose in the regulated pattern my Pilates instructor calls centering and I call functional survival.
The tiles are cold through the fabric. The fluorescent light above the sink hums at a frequency that is doing nothing for my nervous system.
I sit here anyway because standing requires confidence in my own legs that I do not currently have.
The nausea has been arriving every morning for eleven days.
I have attributed it, each morning, with increasing creative flexibility, to: the change in my coffee order, accumulated sleep deficit, the lingering stress of the gala, a mild viral situation, and most recently, atmospheric pressure.
I have been attributing it the way you attribute a recurring anomaly in a financial report to data entry error - because the alternative hypothesis requires assembling a set of facts you have been declining to arrange into their obvious conclusion.
I assemble them now, on the bathroom floor of Sterling-Kane Records' headquarters, in a suit that costs more than most monthly rents in this building.
The last time I had a period was six weeks ago. Before the auction.
I sit with this fact for sixty seconds, which is fifty-five seconds longer than it deserves, given that the arithmetic is not complex.
I stand up. I straighten my jacket. I wash my hands. I look at my reflection in the mirror above the sink for approximately three seconds before I look away, because the woman in the mirror is doing something with her face that I am not ready to catalog.
I have a very long lunch.
Three pharmacies. Two tests from each, because I have always believed a single data point is an anecdote and a pattern is information.
I stand in the locked bathroom of a coffee shop two blocks from the Sterling-Kane building and I read six results in sequence, each one arriving with the tireless consistency of facts that do not care about your prior assumptions.
I know Nik used protection. I saw him reach for the complimentary hotel supply and slide the condom on.
Yet, all six are positive.
Seems even condoms have a fail rate.
I sit on the closed toilet lid in my good suit and I look at the ceiling.
The ceiling is white and featureless and offers no useful input. This does not stop me from looking at it for a long time.
My first instinct is the familiar one - the one that has managed every difficult development of my adult life with clean efficiency. Handle it alone. Build the spreadsheet. Run the scenarios. Develop the action plan. Do not require anyone to witness the process.
Thirty seconds later, a second instinct arrives. It surprises me enough that I sit with it for a full minute before I trust it.
Victoria.
I walk back to the Sterling-Kane building in the November air with my hands in my coat pockets and my face arranged in its standard professional configuration.
I go directly to Victoria's office. Her assistant, who has worked with both of us long enough to read my focused walk, waves me through without being asked.
Victoria is at her desk reviewing something on her laptop. She looks up when I close the door behind me and reads whatever is on my face in the way she has been reading me for nine years.
"Tasha."
"I need to tell you something," I say, "and I need you to not touch me, because if you touch me I'm going to fall apart and I have a three-thirty with the Atlantic Records team."
Victoria closes her laptop. She folds her hands on the desk. She gives me her complete, undivided attention - one of the ways she loves people, by going completely still and letting them fill the space.
"I'm pregnant," I say.
The room holds this for a moment.
"The auction," I add
"Nikolai Astrovsky," she surmises.
"Yes."
Victoria breathes in and out once, steadily. She does not react in any of the ways I have been braced for - no alarm, no unsolicited opinion, no cascade of logistical questions I am not equipped to field. She asks the one question I should have anticipated and did not.
"What do you want to do?"
I open my mouth. The prepared answer is not there.
In the place where the prepared answer lives, there is only a strange, unscheduled silence.
And in the silence, something is sitting that I have been stepping around for eleven days of morning nausea and three pharmacies and six positive tests and one cold tile floor.
Nobody has asked me that in so long I have lost the reflex for answering it.
I press my hand flat against the front of my jacket. Not a gesture. Just the need for something solid.
"What do you want, Tasha?" Victoria asks again. Her voice is very quiet and very steady and entirely without agenda.
The answer comes from somewhere beneath my processing centers. Barely a whisper. Rough-edged, unvetted - the most unguarded thing I have said aloud in years.
"I want to keep it." A beat. "I don't know why."
Victoria's expression does something I do not have a clinical name for. Certain and lit from the inside.
"You don't need a why," she says simply. "You need a prenatal vitamin. You probably need a good OB. And at some point you are going to need to have a conversation with the father."
I look at her for a moment. "The father may be in the process of building a strategic play against this company."
"Yes," Victoria says. "That is going to be a genuinely awkward conversation."
Something in my chest loosens, fractionally.
Not the crisis - the crisis is structurally unchanged - but the solitude of it shifts.
The sealed, pressurized quality that has been sitting on my sternum for eleven days opens a valve somewhere.
What comes out of me is not quite a laugh.
It is not quite a sob. It lives in the no-man's land between them, undignified and entirely outside my scheduling system.
Victoria stands up. She comes around her desk and she takes my hand, and I let her.
I stand there in her office with my hand in hers and my excellent posture temporarily suspended and my free hand pressed flat against my sternum, as if I can hold the whole complicated architecture of this together through applied pressure.
"You are going to be extraordinary at this," she says.
"You cannot possibly know that."
"I know you," she says. "Same thing."
I retrieve my hand when I am ready to retrieve it, which is longer than I would normally permit. I straighten my jacket. I smooth the lapel.
"Don't tell anyone," I warn.
"Of course not."
"Not even Alex."
"Natasha."
"Not yet, Victoria. I need to think."
She holds up both hands in the gesture of someone standing down. "You have until you are visibly showing. Then we are telling everyone, because I refuse to be the only person in this building carrying a secret of this magnitude."
I leave her office and I go back to my own and I sit behind my desk and I do not open a single spreadsheet.
The three-thirty with Atlantic Records proceeds without incident.
I am precise and functional. I run the numbers.
I conclude the meeting. My internal monologue, the entire time, runs on a completely separate track in the background - quiet and unrelenting, cycling through the fact of six positive tests and the face of a man who dances like he knows where you are going before you do.
At eight in the evening, my apartment is quiet.
Beethoven is on the windowsill. Billie is curled on the cushion of the reading chair in the corner.
Bowie is somewhere in the hallway, visible only as a dark shape against the baseboard.
I have fed them and changed out of the work clothes and I am standing in front of the piano in the main room in a cashmere sweater and bare feet.
The piano is a Steinway. I bought it four years into the Sterling-Kane job, in the approximate period when I had enough money to acquire things and not enough sense of self to know what I actually needed.
I play at two in the morning with the lights off, by myself, never for anyone, never as a performance.
I play because it is the one place where the part of me that my father called weakness and Crawford called liability is allowed to exist without apology.
Tonight I sit down at eight PM.
I turn the lights on.
I sit for a moment with my hands in my lap, breathing.
Then I place my fingers on the keys and I begin the opening bars of Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat major - the piece my mother hummed while she worked, bent over someone else's fabric in the seamstress shop on the ground floor of the building we rented in Brooklyn.
She hummed this piece while I did homework at the kitchen table. She hummed it while she cooked the simple meals we could afford. She hummed it on the last morning I saw her well, before the pneumonia became the kind that takes people quietly and completely.
I sat beside her hospital bed and she was too tired to hum, but her fingers moved against the blanket in the pattern of the notes. Unconscious. Faithful. Still carrying the music even when everything else was going.
I play and the apartment fills with it.
The nocturne moves through its phrases with the Chopin quality of grief that is not mournful but conversational - as if loss is being discussed between equals who have both accepted its terms. My fingers know this piece the way my body knows the barre exercises, not from effort but from repetition layered so deep it has become structural.
Somewhere in the second phrase, my face is wet.
I do not stop playing.
Billie moves from the reading chair to the piano bench and presses against my hip.
Beethoven stays at the window, facing me.
Bowie materializes from the hallway and sits at the foot of the bench with the composed attention of a small creature that has decided this matters and will stay until it is finished.
I play the nocturne through to its end.
I sit with my hands in my lap in the lit room and the silence after the last note.
And I cry - actually cry, properly and without strategy - for the first time since I stood at the back of Crawford Sterling's funeral two years ago and felt only the grey, exhausted aftermath of grief that had been deferred so long it no longer knew what shape it was supposed to take.
I cry for my mother and her humming and her hands on the blanket. I cry for my father and the man he was before the oligarchs arrived and the man he became after - the one who said we endure and turned to stone so thoroughly that the stone was all that was left when the heart attack came.
I cry for the girl who danced in the Bolshoi scholarship program and lost the language when she lost the knee and never found another one until a man at a charity auction looked at her like she was the most interesting thing he had heard in a calendar year.
I cry for that, too. Quietly, without drama, the way Volkovs do things they are not supposed to do.
Beethoven does not move from the window until I am finished.
Billie presses harder against my hip.
Bowie, who has never once in three years of feral-cat reclamation allowed me to touch him unprompted, places one careful paw on my bare foot.
I look down at him for a long moment.
"Alright," I say, to the room, to the three cats, to the Chopin still sitting in the air. "Alright."