Chapter 4 #2
The firebird was still pinned at my shoulder. His diamonds. His gift. My right hand was pinned but my left was free, and it took me two seconds to open the clasp and slide the brooch free with the long pin standing open like a stinger.
His hand came off my wrist to grab at my waist, palm open.
I put the stinger into it.
Not a stab. I simply let his own grasping hand close over the open pin, and the metal went into the meat of his palm, and Gianni Scordato came off me swearing in three dialects, shaking his hand, a bright bead of blood already welling in the lifeline like a small red pearl.
“You—” He stared at his palm, then at me, and his face went through its colors. “You cut me. You cut me—”
“You grabbed a brooch.” I stayed where I was against the dressing table, and I made my voice into the thing I had spent twenty-six years building — level, dry, faintly bored, the voice of a woman discussing invoices.
My heart was going hard enough to hurt. He would never know it.
“Pins are sharp, Gianni. It’s how they hold things. ”
“You think this is funny—”
“I think you should listen to me now, because I’m going to explain your own contract to you, since your lawyers don’t seem capable.
” I set the firebird down on the dressing table between us, wings spread, its pin still open, a small glittering display of threat.
“My father is selling you an alliance. Part of the price is me—an untouched bride, delivered traditionally, in white, in front of witnesses, because that is what men like you are supposed to want. Clearly, it’s true.
The other part is a proxy with the word irrevocable in it, which is not signed yet.
” I let that sit. “So consider what happens if I come down to breakfast tomorrow with bruises. Or if I go to my father frightened and weeping and tell him I can’t go through with the ceremony.
Or if it simply reaches him that his son-in-law couldn’t wait three weeks for what he’d already been promised—that you have no discipline, no patience, no control.
My father has buried men for less, Gianni.
He would not even be angry. He would just reopen the bidding. ”
I watched it land. The rage came first. Then, behind it, moving slower and heavier, the calculation: the fleet, the warehouses, the clean American companies, the whole machine he’d confessed over the soup, all of it hanging off one old man’s approval and one signature that did not exist yet.
He wanted to hit me. I could see it in his shoulders. And I stood very still and let him look at exactly what hitting me would cost, itemized, and the contract won. The contract was always going to win. It was the only thing about Gianni I could rely on.
He stepped back. He wrapped his handkerchief around his palm, taking his time about it, reassembling himself.
“Clauses,” he said finally. His voice had gone quiet, and quiet was the only register in which Gianni was ever frightening.
“Notary blocks. Traditions. Pins. You’re very good at finding things to stand behind, ptichka.
It’s a talent.” He picked up the firebird from the dressing table, closed the pin with his thumb—wincing—and set it back down, a small demonstration that he could handle it now.
“Six days a week I let you have this. But hear me. After the wedding there are no more clauses. No father, no contract, no little brother down the hall. Just my house, my rules, and my wife. And we will finish this conversation then, and you will find there is nothing left to stand behind at all.”
He let himself out. He closed the door gently, which was worse than slamming it.
I stood against the dressing table and listened to his shoes going down the marble, and the front door, and the cars.
Then, only then, I looked down and found that my hands had started to shake—both of them, badly, the fine china-rattle shake of the body settling its accounts after the mind has refused to pay — and there was a thin smear of his blood on my palm from the brooch, and I went into the bathroom and turned the water as hot as it would go.
Iwas still at the sink when the dressing room door whispered open behind me. Only one person in this house used that door, and he used it the way mice use walls.
“Lena.”
I didn’t turn around. I had a washcloth in my hand and I was scrubbing my mouth—my jaw, really, the place where Gianni’s kiss had landed—and I had been scrubbing it for a while, apparently, because in the mirror the skin had gone red and raw and I hadn’t noticed.
Kiryl crossed the bathroom, and his reflection joined mine, and I watched my little brother look at my mouth, and my wrist, and the wet cloth, and put two and two together.
“Give me that,” he said, and took the cloth out of my hand.
Gently. He was gentle with everything; he apologized to doors.
He wet the cloth with cool water, wrung it out, and took my wrist—the one with the fading white ring of Gianni’s fingers layered under the fresher red of his grip from the dressing table—and cleaned it as though the marks were something that could be cleaned.
As though they were dirt and not history.
“There’s a guard outside your room,” I said. “Since eleven.”
“Foreg that.” His voice was steady, doing a very good impression of steady, and then it wasn’t. “What happened.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Lena.”
“Gianni came up to say good night. He was oafish about it. I discouraged him.” I retrieved my wrist and my face and assembled both. “That’s all. It’s handled.”
He looked at me with doubt in his eyes.
“It’s handled,” I said again, softer. “I promise you. Look—no bruises. Nothing my father would even blink at. I stuck him with his own brooch and quoted his contract at him and he left like a lamb. It was almost funny.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It was a little funny.”
His throat worked. He wanted to argue and he wanted to believe me, and belief won because I have been teaching it to win his whole life. “Nursery,” he said finally, in the tone of a doctor prescribing. “Now. Non-negotiable.”
So we went. Down the hall in socked feet, through the three blind feet by the stairwell the camera couldn’t see, into the northeast room where the empire ended and we began.
I went to the shelf under the window and changed behind the old dressing screen into the pajamas that lived up here and nowhere else—soft blue flannel gone pale with a hundred washings, printed with tiny silver stars, bought three sizes ago in every sense.
Downstairs I wore silk chosen by committee.
Up here I wore stars. Then I pulled the scratchy blanket off its shelf and wrapped it around my shoulders, and reached into the back of the cabinet for Misha.
Misha was a rabbit, or at least once he had been.
Now he was gray-brown velveteen worn to the weave, one ear reattached in my mother’s small even stitches, a seam along his belly redone in her thread the winter I was ten and loved him too hard.
She’d repaired him twice and told me both times, Everything worth keeping needs mending, Lenochka, and I had kept him under this roof for twenty years past any age that could explain him, because a family that took inventory of everything I owned had never once thought to count him.
I sat on the floor with the rabbit in the crook of my arm, and something in my chest came down out of my throat and back where it belonged.
I got out the pencil tin and opened the coloring book—not the centerfold, not the map, just an ordinary page near the front, the firebird small and singing in a painted tree—and began to fill a feather in slow orange strokes, and my shoulders let go by degrees, one vertebra at a time.
“Read it,” I said. Casually. Very casually. I had spent some effort on the casualness. “The story. My hands are busy.”
“Your hands are busy,” Kiryl repeated, with the solemnity of a man honoring a treaty, and took the book of tales off the shelf and folded himself into the armchair and read to me.
He read about the tsar’s garden and the golden apples and the bird made of fire that no net could hold, and I colored, and for a quarter of an hour I was not the anticipated share transfer or the untouched merchandise or the woman who put her hand between an old driver and a bad man’s anger.
I was nobody at all. It was the best thing I owned, being nobody, and it fit in one room and had to be hidden under the floor.
He finished the chapter and closed the book, and he was quiet for a while, and then he ruined it.
“The Sicilian,” he said. “Tonight. The one Papa met.” He picked at the chair’s worn arm.
“The drivers were talking when they brought the cars around. I heard them, when they thought they were alone. They said he watched you the whole dinner. They said he made Gianni look like a fool at the table and left something behind for you.” He looked up.
“The way they told it—Lena, it sounds like he wanted to help you.”
The orange pencil kept moving. Slow strokes. The bird doesn’t fly if you rush her.
“He noticed me,” I said. “That’s not the same thing.”
“He stood up to Gianni—”
“He disliked Gianni before I existed. I was standing near his target.” I set the pencil down and looked at my brother.
“Kiryusha. Listen to me. Gianni is a monster. You can see his teeth, his claws. You know exactly how dangerous he is. In a terrible way it’s honest.” I pulled the blanket tighter.
“A man like the Sicilian — controlled, patient, watching everything—a man like that doesn’t show any of his weapons.
But he does have them.” I picked the pencil back up.
Kiryl was quiet. Misha regarded the ceiling with his lopsided mended ear, keeping his opinion to himself, the way our mother had taught him.
“That’s the bleakest thing you’ve ever said in the nursery,” my brother said at last. “And you once explained probate to me in here.”