Kotik

Chapter 42 Such is Life

Such is Life

Itried to run, at first. The moment I realized what was happening, I took off, and got as far as the stairs. There, a man with a thick beard caught me by the arm, wrenching it hard enough to knock me off my feet. He jovially called for someone down the hall.

I screamed, but all the pale faces I saw on my way in retreated into their hidey-holes, like little crabs. A dialect of Russian I didn’t know boomed from somewhere behind me. They were laughing.

They came and got me.

Men I didn’t know, with faces that held no recognition of my humanity, took me into a room. I struggled, because whatever fate they had in store for me would certainly be worse than breaking a few bones on my way out. If only I could make it down the stairs. I was faster—I could run.

The needle came in the moment of my coldest despair. I only acutely recognized the prick as something medical, because the walls around me were nothing but cigarette grime and moldy wallpaper, not like a hospital at all.

Everything was pain and fear, and then it wasn’t.

* * *

Burnt plastic and urine. Something soft touched my leg. My foot separated from the floor with a wet squelch. Everything was slow and blurry. That was my world.

They put me in a dark room packed with garbage up to my shins. I wouldn’t have found the bare mattress, but I tripped and was too afraid to move because I’d gotten lucky that I hadn’t stuck my hand with a needle yet. But they were all over, and moving meant risk. I couldn’t risk… risk…

I faded in and out, and in the haze, I realized I wasn’t alone. A woman huddled in the corner; face buried between her knees. So thin, the thickest part of her frame were her joints. When she moved, her unevenly cut, matted blond hair stuck to her shoulders.

“Elena?” I muttered with a sandpaper rasp.

The woman glanced up. She had the same bruise as the last time I saw her, but she seemed worse—much worse. Even in the darkness, I got the impression her skin had yellowed, and red-rimmed eyes turned milky and dull.

“Oh Elena… I’m so sorry…”

She slowly shook her head, and her gaze drifted. “You couldn’t have done anything,” she said. “It happened after Elit. They killed Dmitri—you know? It wasn’t the same after that.”

“I should have called!”

I couldn’t put my finger on what was happening; the walls breathed, but I couldn’t.

“I wouldn’t have answered. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Lyosha wouldn’t give me any more money and would not let me leave. I had to, Katya. I had to do what he said to make whatever I could.”

“No, God, please—”

“It’s okay,” she smiled at me, wide enough for me to see her darkened gums, then all the way back until the masseter muscle peeked out the corners of her smeared lipstick. “You didn’t do this.”

I was already crying, but the sobs were dry. Everything swam. “I could have had Vitali look for you!”

“Even Mama didn’t know I was gone. It’s alright,” she repeated, and scratched her arm.

Her nails pulled the skin down like stretchy fabric.

“They call it krokodil, you know? It’s cheaper than heroin, and it keeps the girls sedated.

No one cared as long as I didn’t inject into my thighs. Nowhere they could see when—”

She quieted.

“Careful with the needles,” she said. “There’s one five centimeters to the right. It’s rusty. Don’t move.”

How could she see that? It was so dark…

The ceiling moved, but Elena kept perfectly still.

“I’m so sorry,” I repeated. “I’m so sorry this happened to you…”

“Such is life,” she said. “At least you’ll get out. Probably. When Vitali comes.”

I nodded. “When Vitali comes.”

“Try to stay awake,” she told me. “Try really hard. They gave you the clean stuff until you could be inspected. They’ll give you the clean stuff until you yourself get dirty, and then it doesn’t matter what they give you. Bye, Katya.”

“What?” I inhaled, and was alone. A broken chair and a twist of thick, metal wiring crowded the corner where Elena sat a moment ago. “Elena?”

And then there was commotion and screaming. The men were attacking all those poor, bone-thin people. Slaughtering them like cattle in the halls. The pale ones with the sores and kids with no shoes running through filth. Running running running…

And then the sounds got closer, and I curled into a tight ball, because if I could be very little, maybe this nightmare would pass by.

I could wake up next to Vitali, and his arms would be around me, and he would smell expensive and sweaty and like imported cigarettes.

His voice would vibrate through me when he sleepily said good morning. I would feel it in my core.

And all the white mice in the corner would gnaw on my pretty shoes.

Good, everything felt good. I could make a snow angel in the mattress. Somewhere below the cover were feathers waiting to explode if I only sawed through the fabric.

And then Vitali and I could build a home out of the stuffing. Two little mice.

I coughed, hacking up goop or maybe a piece of my liver.

The screams, or shouts, continued. But that wasn’t my problem. Mice didn’t have problems. They were mice.

A door flew open, kicking up a wave of mold and long-rotten food. Shadowed silhouettes appeared as ghosts against cold light. I sank deeper into my memories until I could smell him. Feel him cradling me in his arms.

“Kotik.” His low voice caressed my skin. An arm hooked under my knees and pressed me against hard, wet leather. “Close your eyes, Katya. Don’t open them until I tell you. Don’t look.”

I did. I squeezed them tight to the sound of barking dogs in concrete hallways. Hungry dogs on long, metal chains.

And then, cold air.

“What’s wrong with her?” I heard a familiar and out-of-breath voice ask. “Did they… "

“I don’t think so, I think they gave her a sedative, but we still need to get her to the hospital.”

Water rushed in my ears, and sounds ebbed all around me.

“Where’s Vitali?” I asked, but my tone was quieter than I intended. “I need Vitali…”

“I’m here, Kotik,” the velvety, warm voice hushed me.

“Musa is going to blow his asshole out. I hope you’re ready, Vitali. Moscow is coming after they find out about Sergei—and now we’re both on the Chechen’s shit list.”

“You don’t have to be. Tell whoever comes it was me.”

“Aha. You can’t keep getting away with things just because everyone thinks you’re psycho, Vitali. At some point, they’ll put the rabid dog down, and I’d say it’s likely after said dog put a bullet through its handler’s face.”

“Side of the head, his face was fine. I don’t plan on getting away with it. I’m done here, Misha. I am not going to put her through this any longer.”

The big man turned, suspiciously chewing on the cigarette that kept flashing gold with passing lights. When did we get in the car? “What do you mean by ‘done here,’ because you can’t seriously think you can just leave. I can’t walk away, and I’m nobody to them.”

“A guy in Krasnodarsk got me passports to get them out. I’ll need you to arrange some fake invoices to be wired overseas. Then all that’s left is me putting the verifications on the visas.”

“No invoices,” I mumbled. I meant to ask what he meant by any of that, but ‘invoices’ stuck better than the other words.

“Shh, Kotik.” He stroked my head.

I didn’t get my clarification, but I did throw up on his shoes and again on the hospital floor.

I never lost consciousness, but wished I had, because the way my head spun was unbearable.

There was another needle, and a tube, but they came and went quickly.

Things began to painfully fall into place, whatever they had done.

And we were on our way again as men with blood-stained clothes began arriving in poorly driven cars.

Misha eyed the entrance through the rearview mirror and smacked his lips. “Like roaches. Blyad. What’s the point if they’re all going to crawl back out?”

I didn’t care for roaches, and did not follow up.

We didn’t go back to our apartment, but no one would explain why. Instead, we pulled up on Mira Street to Mama’s building.

I lay curled up in the backseat, trying to keep myself from retching.

“Do you have anything left in there?” Vitali asked.

I didn’t, but it turned out the question wasn’t for me.

“No. If Olga Nikolaevna found something, she’d kill me,” Misha said. “What do you need?”

“Siphon some gas out of this thing. Kotik, does Mama use lye? Upholstery stain remover?”

“Uh…”

“Vitali,” Misha said very seriously. “You expect they’ll come after us tonight?”

He grunted and looked out the window at the dark podyezd. The melancholy silence cut through my sickness, revealing his tone for what it was.

“There is no way they didn’t notice us coming out of the hospital parking lot. You’ll take her to the airport, Mish,” Vitali said, his fingers drumming on metal. “I know you have spare plates in here.”

“What…” I sat up, and his dark silhouette turned its head toward me. “Who is ‘they?’ You can’t be serious… you’re not staying…”

“Just until your plane takes off, Kotik. Through the night, so I know they didn’t follow you.”

“Then I’m staying with you!”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Misha said, the plume of smoke billowing through the car with no windows open to relieve my heavy breathing.

“Do what he says, Katya. This isn’t some movie where you come out of the explosion unscathed and ride off in a convertible.

” He looked to Vitali. “There is going to be an explosion, huh?”

“Probably,” he said, too softly to be my Vitali.

“No!”

“Katya, go get Mama,” he said.

“I’m not—”

“Katya.” This time, Vitali’s stone-hard voice weighed across Misha and me both, crushing us into our seats.

“I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. Go wake Mama and Maxim.

They have twenty minutes to pack, preferably for cold weather.

No more than $500 a person—that’s what you can carry through customs. Ask her about lye and stain remover—set it out on the kitchen table if she has it. I’ll be right up.”

I stared at his shadow for a moment, but then crawled out of the car on my knees. It was the one occasion I didn’t expect him to open my door for me, and the only time he didn’t.

I leaned on the buzzer hard. There was a keypad, but I needed them to wake up before I got up there. There wouldn’t be a harder conversation to have, and it would have to be a fast one, because I wasn’t sure how many brains I had left over after all that.

It wasn’t fast. Everyone cried. Mama rocked back and forth on the couch, holding her head. Maxim hid his tears behind the closet door, because that was the only place he thought to hide.

I helplessly stood in the middle, swaying and not knowing who to comfort or if I could comfort anyone. And then, the door clicked, and Vitali was there.

And everything would be alright.

Mama never actually stopped crying. I think the only reason she complied at all was that she still thought herself to be sleeping—and this was all just a nightmare she could wake from, later, when her alarm rang.

I hoped so too, because what Vitali asked of me was impossible. Leaving Russia was one thing, who knew for how long or if I would be back at all, but I couldn’t leave him. Screw what he said—he mostly wasn’t the boss of me most of the time sometimes.

My head’s incessant spinning turned into the godmother of all headaches. I didn’t even have anything to pack—it was all at our place. So I listened to Vitali list off what he needed for God-knew what, and tried to figure out what to do with only $500 in a foreign country when we landed.

And all of it was absurd and not happening.

Not happening…

But it happened. Just past 1:00 AM, Misha took Mama and Maxim downstairs to the newly re-plated Lada, and left Vitali and me to say what couldn’t possibly be our goodbyes.

The moment was unreal enough that I had no tears to cry, and still he put his arms around me as if I were a sobbing child, and held me tight. It didn’t occur to me until later that it wasn’t a means to comfort me, but him.

“Listen to me, Kotik,” he said quietly, fingers tangling in my hair in slow strokes. You’re going to the United States—”

“I can’t…”

“You can. I’ve had the paperwork since you asked about Mama…

just in case. Here is the thing: it is very difficult to get there.

I pulled every favor I had for these, so you can’t waste them.

Mama and Maxim will depend on you, because you’re the only one who is in a position to secure their place in the country—”

“Vitali!” Now I was crying. What was the point of his ‘forever’ and his ‘I’m batshit crazy, I’m never letting you go’ speeches if he was going to let me go? Just like that!

“Stop interrupting, Kotik, or you’ll start losing privileges.”

I smiled through the tears.

“It’s up to you, because you’re going over there on something called a K-1 visa. That’s a fiancé visa—you’ll have to marry within ninety days to secure a green card and stay in the country. Then, you will bring them over from Germany. You only get one shot at this, Katya.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me—Vitali absolutely no!”

“I didn’t ask. Hush. His name is Dean Gray.”

“Dean Gray? What are you talking about! I can’t just marry someone!”

“The laws are very specific about that. Mama and Maxim are harder. Does she have any preferences in men?”

“Christian Orthodox? I guess? Wait—”

“And Dean is going to meet you at the airport in New York,” he continued. “He’ll propose, but just as a formality. The true proposal will be at a later time. When he gets better at it.”

I stared at him, mouth hanging open, but a smile twitched at the corner of his lips, and when I looked down—there it was, a ring held up between two fingers in the narrow space between us.

Beautiful, glinting in the dim hallway light just as brightly as it would in an expensive restaurant or at sunset on the beach in Greece.

“I want to see you wear it,” he said into my hair as I fell against him again, sobbing.

“When you’re on the plane, I want you to flash it anytime the stewardess comes by,” he whispered now, clutching me tighter until his words became strained.

“Tell them about this Dean. Practice saying the name over and over. Say it at every opportunity and announce to everyone how much you love him. Because Vitali will die here, in Russia, in the country he loves. But you go where the heart is. It does no good to speak a dead man’s name. ”

I nodded vigorously against his shirt, smearing my mascara.

“I’m fairly sure you have to say ‘yes,’ Katya,” he said. “Or it doesn’t count.”

“Yes, of course, yes!” I sobbed, holding out my finger. He slipped it on. The perfect size, as I knew it would be. So delicate and lavish against my hand, my fingernails still dark with the grime of a Bratva brothel.

He moved his arm lower, catching me at the waist, and our lips met in a kiss salty with my tears. A kiss, both long-awaited, hopeful, and a sweet goodbye.

No kiss should ever mean so many things at once.