EPILOGUE — The sky isn’t ready. （Tamara） #2
Aleksander laughs.
Yuri checks his watch. “We need to go. Happy birthday, kid.”
Mikhail steps backward down the porch stairs. “Survive the frosting.”
Anna’s house smells like cake, coffee, and crayons. The entry table is covered in paper plates. Shoes pile beneath the bench in several sizes. A jacket has been abandoned on the stair rail. Music comes from the backyard, cheerful and loud, making all adult conversation feel faintly pointless.
On the hallway wall, photographs follow Ivan through a life I missed.
A newborn in a striped hat. A toddler with oatmeal on his face. First day of school. Halloween vampire. Missing tooth. Anna kneeling beside him in front of a Christmas tree, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.
The photos still hurt.
They just no longer feel like evidence against me.
Anna sees me looking. She doesn’t apologize for having them.
I love her for that.
“I put the one from the planetarium up too,” she says, nodding toward the fridge as we pass the kitchen.
There, between the school lunch calendar and a spelling list, is a photo from last month. Ivan standing between Anna and me in front of a model of Saturn, looking irritated because Aleksander took too long to take the picture.
I remember that day. I remember Ivan handing me his jacket because he was too warm and forgetting to ask for it back until we reached the car. I remember carrying it like something sacred and ordinary.
The backyard is chaos.
Children run across the grass in paper crowns. Someone has overturned a bucket of sidewalk chalk. A little girl in purple leggings is explaining the rules of a game nobody else seems to understand. Two boys are arguing over whether aliens would prefer chocolate cake or vanilla.
Ivan returns to his friends, then immediately turns back.
“Tamara?”
“Yes?”
“You’re staying for cake, right? Mom made my favorite.”
Mom. The word still touches the old bruise. But it no longer decides the whole day.
Anna moves past me with a stack of napkins. “Chocolate. What a shocker, right?”
Aleksander leans down, his mouth near my ear. “You’re smiling. I like it.”
“This is a child’s birthday party.”
“I’m aware.”
“Please also be aware there are witnesses.”
His hand settles briefly at my waist. “I’m being very well behaved,” he says.
“That’s true.”
I have the deeply inappropriate thought that a children’s birthday party is a terrible place to be in love with your husband.
The rest of the afternoon passes in a blur of blue frosting, paper crowns, and children negotiating rules no adult could possibly understand.
Aleksander is handed a stack of planet-themed plates and accepts the assignment with gravity. Anna catches my eye over the cake and nearly smiles. Ivan blows out all nine candles in one breath, then spends five minutes pretending not to be pleased when everyone claps.
By early evening, the last child leaves with a gift bag, a balloon, and enough sugar in the bloodstream to make the parents hate all of us by bedtime. The backyard quiets. Paper plates are stacked on the patio table. A smear of blue frosting has somehow reached the sleeve of Aleksander’s shirt.
Anna comes out carrying coffee, her hair slipping from its clip. “Presents now?”
Ivan appears behind her before she has finished the sentence. “Yes.”
The telescope waits on the hall table where Aleksander left it, silver paper intact. Ivan looks at it, then at me, trying very hard not to look as if he has been waiting for this all afternoon.
“Is that from you?” he asks.
“From us,” I say.
Aleksander lifts the box and sets it carefully on the patio table.
Ivan tears the paper slowly once he sees the picture underneath. For all his earlier impatience, he handles the box like something that might matter. When the telescope appears, his fingers move over the image on the cardboard. “No way.”
“You said the city has too much light,” I tell him. “And that your backyard has almost enough dark.”
His head comes up. “You remembered?”
“Yes.”
It’s the smallest possible answer. It still feels too large in my chest.
Ivan looks at Anna. “Can we set it up tonight?”
“After we read the instructions,” she says.
He groans, because he is nine and reasonable things don’t always make sense. Then he turns to me. “Can you help me set it up?”
The patio goes quiet enough for the question to reach every adult standing there. Anna stands beside the patio table. She doesn’t answer for me.
I keep my voice steady. “If you help.”
Ivan gives me a look of deep patience and hands me the instruction booklet.
“Obviously.”
The telescope takes twenty minutes, one dropped screw, and a brief disagreement over whether instructions are allowed to be this bad. Finally, it stands at the edge of the patio, pointed toward a sky not dark enough for stars yet.
Ivan bends to look through it.
“I don’t see anything.”
“The sky isn’t ready,” I say.
“How long?”
“A little while.”
“Adults always say that.” He looks at me over the telescope. “Are you coming next Saturday?”
The question sounds casual. It’s anything but.
I glance toward Anna. She gives me the smallest nod. I make myself answer like one casual question has not just handed me the world.
“Yes,” I say. “Want to go to the planetarium?”
“Can we get waffles before?”
“Yes.”
Anna points at him. “That’s not how invitations work.”
Ivan shrugs. “It worked.”
Aleksander sits next to me, and I know without looking that he is smiling.
The first star appears while Ivan is arguing with Anna about bedtime and birthday privileges. He sees it before any of us and shouts like he has personally invented the sky.
We all move toward him. Anna first, because she is his mother. Me beside her, because there is room now.
Aleksander behind me, his hand warm at my waist.
Ivan presses his face to the telescope and announces that he can see “basically the whole universe,” which is not true, but no one corrects him.
Anna laughs.
Aleksander bends his mouth to my ear. “Your apartment tonight?”
I lean back into him. “Ask properly.”
His mouth brushes my ear, too brief for anyone else to notice and entirely unfair. “Tamara Kalinin, may I stay over tonight?”
I look at the yard. At Anna. At Ivan. At the telescope pointed toward a sky that’s only beginning to open. Then I turn my face enough to meet his mouth. “Yes, Sasha,” I say. “You may.”
His hand tightens at my waist, and across the yard Ivan calls my name.
“Tamara, come look!”
So I do.
Separate.
Attached.
Still becoming.
Enough.