Chapter 2 #2
For a minute neither of us said anything.
The nursery did the talking—the water stain on the ceiling shaped like Italy, which we’d decided years ago was an omen and then argued about of what; the wallpaper firebirds faded to ghosts; the shelf where his baby books still leaned against my old ones, because after Mama died nobody had the authority to separate them and I certainly wasn’t going to grant it.
I was fifteen when I started signing his permission slips.
Sixteen when I learned to forge our father’s signature for parent-teacher conferences, because Lev Sokolov did not attend conferences and the teachers were beginning to ask questions in that tone.
Kiryl thinks he was raised by me. The truth is worse and better: we raised each other, in this room, on contraband sugar and lies to the ground floor.
“So,” he said, too casually, which is the only way he can say anything. “The contract.”
“You’ve been listening at doors again.”
“No! Just standing near them. It’s not my fault they’re so thin. What do you want me to do? Turn my ears off?” He put the textbook down, which meant we were serious now. “Lena. The wedding is in three weeks.”
“I’m aware. I’m being upholstered for it.”
“Then go.” He leaned forward, and his voice dropped, and there it was—the thing he’d been rehearsing, probably into the mirror, probably for days.
“Now. Before it. You have friends in the city, you have Mama’s accounts, you speak four languages, you could be anywhere by Sunday.
Go and don’t tell me where, so I can’t—” his throat worked “—so nobody can get it out of me.”
He’d thought about that part. That was the unbearable bit. My gentle brother, who apologized to furniture when he bumped it, had sat in this room and thought through his own interrogation and decided he’d fail it.
“Kiryusha—”
“I’m the reason you’re still here. Do you think I don’t know that?” He said it fast, like pulling a splinter. “I’ve done the math, Lena. Every time you should have run, there’s me, standing in the doorway of it like an idiot. So take me out of the doorway. Go.”
I set the mug down on the sill, very carefully, because I wanted to throw it.
“All right. Let’s ‘do the math,’ since you brought it up.
” I held up one finger. “Your passport. Papa took it in March—‘for safekeeping,’ which is also what he says about my jewelry and my mail. Two.” Another finger.
“Your account. Frozen since the engagement was announced. You have what’s in your wallet, which is, what? ”
“...Forty dollars and a coupon.”
“Forty dollars and a coupon. Three.” I pointed at the door.
“Dmitri, or whichever slab of beef they’ve rotated in this month, stands outside your room from eleven at night until seven in the morning.
You think that’s for your protection? It’s a fishhook, Kiryusha.
It’s in me, not you. And if I ran tonight, alone, tell me—honestly, you’re the honest one, it’s your whole personality—how long before Papa realizes the fastest way to bring me back is you? ”
He didn’t answer. He looked at his hands. Nineteen years old and he still sat like a boy waiting outside an office.
“We go together,” I said, quieter now. “That’s the plan. That has always been the plan. I need you to trust that there is one, even when I can’t show you the pieces, because the pieces only work if you can’t be made to describe them. Understand?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Nothing is fair. But at least I’m being unfair in your favor.”
He laughed—a cracked, unwilling laugh, the kind that’s half surrender—and slumped back into the chair, and for a moment he looked like what he was under all of it: a kind, clever kid born into a family of raptors, still waiting for someone to tell him it had been an administrative error.
I would burn the whole coastline before I let Gianni Scordato take him for instruction.
But I didn’t say that. Some promises you keep by never saying them out loud where the house can hear.
“Lena.” He was watching me now, with Mama’s carefulness. “Are you frightened?”
“No,” I said. Smoothly. Immediately. A performance, of course.
Kiryl looked at me. Then he looked, pointedly, at the mug on the windowsill.
I followed his gaze. The chocolate was half gone. The marshmallow raft was gone entirely—I’d eaten it without noticing, the way you do—except for a small, damning archipelago of survivors floating in the middle of the cup.
The pink ones. Every single pink one, untouched.
“You only leave the pink ones,” my little brother said gently. “You’ve done it since you were nine. You’re still the same, aren’t you? Haven’t changed.”
I looked at my cup full of evidence for a long moment.
“They taste like soap,” I said.
“They taste identical, Lena. It’s the same marshmallow.”
“Drink your own disgusting chocolate,” I said, and he did, and neither of us said anything else, and I ate exactly one pink marshmallow on principle, and it did taste like soap, and I was terrified.
My mother’s study was a shrine.
My father’s rule, established the week she died and enforced for eleven years since: nothing in the room moves.
Her fountain pens still stood in their cup.
Her reading glasses still sat folded on the blotter, exactly where she’d set them down before the last drive to the hospital.
Lev came in twice a year—her birthday, their anniversary—stood in the doorway for four minutes, and left.
He thought grief was a customs seal. Break it and the contents spoil.
I was the only other person allowed in here, and that was only because mother had stipulated it in her will. Even so, I had to make sure everything in the shrine was in the right place.
And what father did not know, because he had never came in here, was that his shrine had a payroll.
I sat down at her desk, moved nothing, and woke the laptop I kept in the bottom drawer under a stack of condolence cards nobody had ever answered.
My mother left me fifty-one percent of two companies when she died—the cold storage in Newark, the trucking fleet—and my father, who considered legitimate business the way other men consider needlepoint, had decided years ago that letting me “handle the paperwork” kept me occupied and cost him nothing.
He thought I filed things. He told people I filed things.
Meanwhile the paperwork employed three hundred people, ran nine figures of clean revenue a year, and answered to me from a dead woman’s desk while a camera down the corridor guarded the wrong door.
The phone in the drawer buzzed before I’d even logged in. The Newark facility manager. At this hour, that meant blood or freon.
“Talk to me.”
“Miss Sokolova—” He was breathing like he’d run up stairs.
He was sixty and built like a filing cabinet; he did not run up stairs.
“Compressor’s down in Section C. Went down maybe forty minutes ago, temperature’s climbing, we’ve got—the whole citrus contract’s in there, the berries for the supermarket account, I’m looking at three, four hundred thousand if it turns, and the night crew, they logged the fault right away, they did everything right, but if Mr. Sokolov hears—”
“Stop.” I said it the way you say it to a horse. “Breathe. You called me first?”
“You always say to.”
“I do always say to. Good. Now listen.” I pulled the facility schematic up on the laptop, the layout I knew the way my father knew prison tattoos.
“You’re not going to save Section C, so stop trying.
Isolate it—close the air dampers between C and B, keep the cold you still have where it can work. How much space is open in B?”
Keys clattered. “Maybe sixty pallets.”
“Then move the berries first. Berries turn fastest and the supermarket contract has the penalty clause; the citrus can take four hours of bad temperature and shrug. Get every hand you have on B, and pull the forklift crew off the loading dock—nothing ships in the next two hours that matters more than this.”
“There’s two trucks inbound from the produce terminal—”
“Reroute them.” I was already in the fleet system, and there they were, two blinking dots on the Turnpike with my last name painted on their sides.
“Send them to the Elizabeth facility, I’m authorizing the transfer fees now.
And call the refrigeration contractor—the good one, the one we used in August, not the one Papa’s cousin recommends.
Emergency call-out, tonight, my authorization.
” I typed my credentials, the shareholder codes my mother had put in my name the summer I turned eighteen.
“Tell them the invoice comes to me directly.”
A pause on the line. Then, carefully: “Mr. Sokolov’s going to ask why the repair wasn’t budgeted.”
“Mr. Sokolov declined the maintenance budget in April because the equipment was ‘fine,’” I said.
“The equipment was not fine. That is not your fault, it is not the night crew’s fault, and no one—hear me—no one loses wages or shifts over my father’s arithmetic.
If there’s blame going around, send it to me.
I’ve got a wedding coming; the blame will slip off me like water off a duck’s back. ”
He laughed, the shocked little laugh of a frightened man given somewhere to stand, and I heard him already moving, shouting names, dampers closing. “Yes, Miss Sokolova. Thank you, Miss Sokolova.”
“Call me when B is loaded.”
I hung up, and for a moment I sat in my mother’s chair with my heart going and my blood up, feeling—and this is the shameful, private truth of my life—happy.
Genuinely happy. Give me a crisis and a phone and I am a rational woman doing useful work in a world that makes sense.
It’s the quiet that ruins me. The quiet, and the fittings.
Then I saw the notification sitting in the portal’s approval queue, and the happiness evaporated.