38. Kolya
KOLYA
Iassembled the crib like it was a hostage negotiation, and lost to it twice.
The instructions were printed in four languages, none of which seemed to be the one the hardware had been built in.
There were thirty-one screws and a small wordless cartoon of a man having a markedly better afternoon than I was.
I have stripped a rifle blindfolded. I have defused things that would have ended me for one trembling hand.
I sat on the nursery floor of the compound for the better part of two hours and was beaten, comprehensively, by a piece of Swedish furniture engineered for joy.
"You are glaring at it," Ruby said from the doorway, one hand resting on the curve of her that had stopped being a suggestion and become a fact.
"I am assessing it."
"You're losing to it."
"I am assessing it slowly."
She laughed, the whole-body one, and lowered herself down beside me with the deliberate care of a woman renegotiating her own center of gravity, and she picked up the instruction sheet, and she turned it right side up.
Oh.
I will not claim the crib went together with ease after that. I will say it went together. She read, I built, and we did not discuss the two hours that came before her, which is, I am learning, a load-bearing wall in the architecture of a marriage.
I had cleared the nursery on the first day out of pure habit, checked the lines of sight, noted with approval that the one window faced the inner wall and not the road.
Then I had stayed up until two in the morning reading about car seats, until I could have argued crash ratings with the engineer who designed them.
Ruby found the search history. She has never once let it lie quiet since.
"The most dangerous man on the eastern seaboard," she told Maks at dinner, delighted, "bookmarks strollers now."
I did not deny it. I had bookmarked three, and one of them folded shut with a single hand, which struck me as tactically superior.
"You are enjoying this," Maks said from across the table, watching me with the look of a man who has caught a glacier learning to dance. "The one who interrogated Lebedev's lieutenants now reads stroller reviews like target dossiers. Should I be concerned?"
"You should be grateful. The same instinct that keeps our child safe is the one that keeps you employed."
"That instinct used to keep me awake at night."
"And now?"
"Now it builds cribs." He raised his glass to me. "Poorly. But it builds them."
By then the entire house had reorganized itself around the arrival of a person who currently weighed less than my sidearm.
Petya had appointed himself doula. No one had requested this.
Petya is a man who once held a stretch of Brighton Beach through a sheer refusal to be reasoned with, and he had redirected the whole of that gift toward the unborn.
"You are folding them wrong," he informed me, in the room we had stopped calling the second armory. He had a shelf of socks the size of espresso cups and was sorting them by a logic known to him alone. "There is a method."
"They are socks, Petya."
"They are her socks." He never said the baby. He said her, with total certainty, having settled the question of sex by a process he described only as listening. "And you will not fold them like a man garroting a sentry. You will fold them with love."
"And what does a doula do, exactly, that a midwife does not?"
"A doula believes. Can a midwife believe?
No. She has a license. Belief does not come from a school.
" He held up a sock the length of my thumb.
"You think this is small? Her foot will be smaller than this.
And one day it will kick you, here, while you carry her, and you will weep like an infant yourself.
I have watched it break harder men than you. "
"You have watched no such thing. I am the hardest man you know."
"I saw your face the night she said yes," Petya said, and went back to his sorting, and let the matter rest, because he had already won it.
I have cleared safehouses faster than Petya cleared one shelf of tiny socks, and with far fewer tears. His, not mine. Allegedly.
Downstairs the war was louder, and it smelled considerably better.
Galina has run the compound kitchen since before I was a man anyone bothered to feed.
Marisol, Ruby's grandmother, had flown in to inspect the man who had gotten her granddaughter pregnant, had found the man acceptable and the kitchen an atrocity, and had simply never left.
In the weeks since they had reached the particular closeness of two generals who respect each other far too much to call a ceasefire.
"The child will have a Russian stomach," Galina said, not lifting her eyes from the pelmeni.
"The child will have taste," Marisol said, not lifting hers from the masa.
"Borscht builds blood."
"Pozole builds a soul."
"You put chili in everything. The baby will come out already annoyed."
"Your food is the gray of a long winter. No wonder this whole family broods."
I stood in the doorway and did the thing I have begun doing without ever choosing to, which is simply standing in the noise and the heat of it, two old women insulting each other across a stove on behalf of a palate that did not yet exist, and feeling a thing in my chest for which the life I came up in never gave me a word.
"They've been going since six," Ruby said, appearing at my shoulder with a stolen empanada and the contentment of a woman fed lavishly by both sides of a conflict. "Galina cried this morning. The happy kind. Then she denied it and threatened Petya with a spoon."
"Your grandmother called my home an atrocity."
"She adores it here. Atrocity is the warmest thing she's said about any place since my grandfather died." She nudged my arm. "Eat it, Kolya. It's a peace offering. You're good at those now."
That night, when the house had finally gone still and Ruby slept with one hand flung across the space I had left, I stood at the window and did the arithmetic I had been avoiding for weeks.
I had three fathers, of a kind, growing up.
The first sold me. The second taught me a blade before I could spell my own name.
The third pressed a pistol into my hand at eleven and called it a graduation.
For most of my life I had assumed I was only the sum of those three men, that whatever they had poured into me was the entire contents of the well.
So I did not know how to be a father. I knew, with a terrible and useless precision, how to be each of the men who had failed to be mine. And the inheritance frightened me more than any enemy ever had, because you cannot put a bullet in a pattern when you are the one standing inside it.
But I had been wrong about inheritances before.
I had believed for four decades that a man is only ever what was done to him.
One year beside Ruby had quietly dismantled that.
A man is also what he refuses to hand down.
I could not give my child the father I was never given.
I could only decline, day after day, to become the ones who raised me.
It was a thin plan. It was, I was starting to understand, the whole of the job.
She found me there. She always finds me there.
"You're brooding," she said, soft, behind me. "I can hear it through the wall. It has a frequency."
"I was at the window."
"Come back to the bed, Kolya. Be here instead of in there."
She came to me with the particular look that has undone me since the first time she aimed it across a trauma bay, the one that says she has decided something and I am the something.
I turned from the glass, and the arithmetic, and every man who had made me, and I let her be the only thing in the room.
I kissed her the way I had not allowed myself all day, with the whole of my attention, slow and deep, learning her mouth again as though it were fresh intelligence.
She made a low sound against my lips and arched into me, and I walked her backward toward the bed with my hands framing a face I would have burned the world down to keep.
"Careful," she breathed, smiling, when the backs of her knees found the mattress.
"Always," I said, and lowered her down as though she were the one thing I had never once been willing to break.
For a time I did nothing but kiss her. Her mouth, the line of her jaw, the soft place beneath her ear that steals her breath every time and has never failed me yet.
She dragged my shirt up over my head and ran her palms flat across my chest, over scars she had once cataloged with a nurse's cool hands and long since reclaimed with a lover's, and when her thumbs crossed them I felt it travel the whole length of my spine.
I undressed her slowly, because we had nowhere left to run and nothing left to outrun, and that freedom was its own kind of drunkenness.
I drew the soft cotton up and away from the new fullness of her, and I took my time over everything the months had changed, the heavier weight of her breasts, the darker peaks of them, the low insistent curve that held our child.
I closed my mouth over one breast and she gasped and held me there, and I memorized the new pitch of every sound she made, because she is a country I intend to go on mapping for the rest of my life.
Then I kissed my way down the center of her, slow, over the swell that was the proof of everything we had lived through, and set my mouth to it once, with a thing I have no colder word for than worship.
And then lower. She lifted to me, already breathing my name like a soft warning, and I parted her and tasted her, and her hands flew into my hair.