Chapter 9
DANIIL
The den off the main hall had a way of going gold in the late part of the afternoon, the tall windows pulling the last of the light in across the rug and laying it in long slats over the low table and over my knee and over the bottle that had been new on the table this morning and was two thirds of the way down to its label now.
I had not turned a lamp on. I had not been hungry.
The television was on a soccer match I had not chosen, the sound muted, the green of the pitch the only color in the room that was moving, and I had been sitting on this couch for the better part of three hours in a shirt I had also been sitting in yesterday.
My hair was wrong. I had put a hand through it too many times. I had not shaved.
The phone was face down on the cushion beside my thigh.
She had called four times in three days.
I had watched the screen light each time and I had let the screen go dark again.
I had not picked up. I had not written back.
I had sat with my glass empty and my hand on the glass and I had told myself, three days running, that I was the wrong man to put a hand on a phone right now.
I am not angry with her. I am afraid of myself.
That was the thing I could not say out loud yet. I could not trust my own hands tonight. I had felt the print of her arm under my fingers for three days and I could feel it now if I closed my eyes, and the woman who would have to live with those hands was the one calling. So I had let her call.
I poured. The bottle went lighter at the neck.
I drank. The Stoli did what Stoli does, which is to go down a clean road and put a clean floor under everything that has been falling.
I set the glass back. I did not feel any better.
I had not felt better at any point in three days.
I had only felt slower, and slower was not the thing I had been chasing. I had been chasing quiet.
The door of the den opened.
My brother did not knock at my door. He never had.
He came into the room the way he came into every room he had ever entered after me, which was without asking, and he sat down on the couch beside me without saying a word.
He picked up the bottle by the neck and held it up to the light and looked at the level of it the way a man looks at a fuel gauge on a long road. He set it back down on the wood.
He had the Glock at the small of his back. I could see the line of it under his jacket when he sat. He always carried at the compound. He had always carried.
"What is your problem?"
I let the question sit for a beat. I looked at the muted pitch on the screen. I looked at my hands.
"Is it that obvious?"
"I know what you look like when you are running. I am your brother."
He did not push. He reached and took the spare glass off the table, the one that had been clean since the housekeeper had been through this morning, and he poured himself two fingers and drank half of it without flinching and set the glass back on the wood with a small wet ring around the base. He sat back. He waited.
I told him. Not all of it. He did not need all of it.
I told him about the punch I had thrown at her cousin in the back booth of a restaurant in Brooklyn, the one I had not been able to call back into my body after it had left my hand.
I told him about the print of my fingers on her arm in front of the same room.
I told him what she had said to me on the wet sidewalk after, the line about the police, the boundary she had drawn with both hands.
I told him about three days of not picking up the phone. I told him about four calls.
He listened. He did not move. When I was done he sat forward with his elbows on his knees the way our father had sat forward on a couch, the way I sat forward on a couch when a man across the table from me had said the wrong thing.
"I cannot give you advice about this."
"That is a first."
A small flat smile at one corner of his mouth. "Because I realized something while you were talking. All four of us are wired the same way. Sorokin men are possessive as fuck."
I laughed. The two-note laugh our mother had given both of us came out of me one time and went flat in the middle of the second note. It was not a real laugh. It was the shape of one. He heard the difference and he did not say anything about it.
The door opened again.
Sienna came through with a mug of tea in one hand and a book under her arm and the look she wore when she had already been listening from the hall for longer than was strictly polite.
She did not pretend otherwise. She crossed the room and she sat herself on the arm of the couch on Mikhail's side, and Mikhail put a hand at the small of her back without looking at her, the way a man does with something he has been holding onto for years. She fit her shoulder against his.
"I agree."
"Are you both here to gang up on me?"
"We're here to keep you from drowning. Has she contacted you?"
I waited a beat. I did not want to answer the question. I answered it.
"Yes."
"And?"
"I have not picked up."
She drew a small sharp breath in through her nose. The kind of sound a lawyer makes when a client has just told her the wrong thing in a deposition.
"Why?"
"She may want to end it."
"Are you out of your mind, Daniil?"
I did not have anything to say to that. I sat with the glass in my hand.
"A woman who is done with you does not call you four times in three days. She moves on. She blocks the number. She does not keep dialing the man who scared her." She softened. The softening was worse than the sharpness. "You're scaring her again right now, by the way. You know that."
"Yes."
"She's reaching across to the man who hurt her and she's getting silence back, and you're making her feel that all by herself. That's the second hurt. You're stacking it on the first."
"She is right." Mikhail was looking at the table, not at me. "You are making a different version of the same mistake, brother. You are still deciding for her without asking her."
"Fuck. Yes. I am."
"Go," Sienna said. "Right now. Stop sitting in this room. Stop drinking the rest of that bottle. Get up."
I got up. The room did the small slow tilt a room does when a man has been on a couch with a bottle for three hours and has stood up too fast, and I let it tilt and I let it stop tilting, and then I crossed to the chair by the door where I had thrown my coat the night before and I pulled the coat off the back of the chair and put it on.
The wool smelled like the rain that had been on it yesterday.
"Good. At least you can see it. I'm proud of you."
"Do not be proud of me yet."
"I'll start now. You can catch up."
I straightened. The register came back for one beat under my ribs the way it always came back when one of them used the family name on me without meaning to, and I felt my shoulders set themselves the way our father had set his shoulders in a doorway.
Mikhail caught me at the door. A hand on my upper arm. Not a stopping hand. A holding hand. He kept it there until I turned my head and looked at him.
"Be careful on the road, brother. We have a traitor in the house. We have not found him yet. I do not like you driving alone tonight."
"I am fine."
"Take Yuri."
"I am taking the Maybach. I will not let her wait one more hour because I was being followed by my own caution."
He held the look another beat. He had a way of looking at me that was older than him and older than me and older than the room we were standing in. He nodded once.
"Then drive like you are being followed. Because you might be."
I went out through the hall. The compound was quiet at this hour. The gravel of the drive was the gray it went in the last of the light. I got into the Maybach. I closed the door. I sat for one breath with my hands on the wheel and I waited for the breath to be a real one and then I turned the key.
The road out of the compound was the road I had been driving since I was sixteen.
The trees along the parkway were half stripped.
The light was going from afternoon to evening the way it goes at this part of the year, the gold of the den windows turning to a thin blue at the tops of the bare branches.
I had the radio off. I had my hands on the wheel.
I had my mind on her, on the four calls I had let go to nothing, on the question I had not been letting myself answer for three days about what I was going to put my mouth around when I stood in front of her and she opened the door.
Two miles down the parkway I checked the rearview.
There was a dark sedan three cars back.
I let my eyes go back to the road. I drove. I checked again at the next overpass. The sedan had moved up by one car. I drove another mile. The sedan held the gap.
Not new. He has been with me since the second mile.
I took the next exit to see if the sedan would. The sedan took the exit.
The smaller road past the off ramp went into the woods.
Two lanes. Old asphalt. No shoulder to speak of, only a soft lip of dirt and then the bank and then the trees.
I knew the road. It went a long way through nothing before it came back out at the river crossing.
I had picked it on purpose because I knew it.
I pressed the brake at the first curve.
The pedal went soft under my foot.
I pressed again. The pedal went to the floor.
I pressed a third time. The pedal did nothing at all.
The car kept its speed.
Brake line. Tonight. Smart. Whoever it is.
I worked the gears. I dropped one. The engine bit.
I dropped another. The engine bit harder.
The Maybach is not a car you downshift on a back road and she did not like it and she did it because I told her to.
The needle came down. Not enough. The next curve was coming up faster than the needle was coming down, and the sedan was closer in the mirror now, the gap eaten in two seconds, then in two seconds more.
Two cars between us became one.
One became none.
They were running me off the road. They knew it.
I knew it. There was a stretch of old oak fifty yards ahead where the shoulder dipped into a soft bank and the trees stood close, and I picked the tree.
I did not let the sedan pick it for me. I picked the angle that would fold the front of the car and not the door.
I put both hands on the wheel. My knuckles went the white they go.
The Maybach went off the road into the bank.
The front went into the tree.
The world did the thing the world does when a car has hit a tree at speed.
The hood came up at me. The glass went. The airbag opened into my face and went flat in the same breath.
My head hit something to the left of the wheel, the pillar, the edge of the visor, something hard and small that took a piece of me with it.
The horn locked on. The red of the dash went red at the edges of what I could see and then the red went wider.
I killed the engine.
The horn kept going.
I could not feel my right hand. I waited. I felt it come back into my arm like a hot wire. I made it close. It closed.
I got the door open with my shoulder. The metal had bent enough that the latch fought me. I shouldered it twice. It went.
Blood was in my eye. I put the heel of my hand to my forehead and the heel came away wet and I could not find the place the blood was coming from with my fingers. The skin on the side of my head was hot and slick and the wet was going down the side of my neck into my collar.
I got one foot onto the dirt. Then the other.
Behind me on the road the sedan had pulled up. The doors were already opening. Two of them. I heard a third.
Do not be here when they reach the car.
I went into the trees.
The ground was wet. The leaves under my shoes went sideways.
I kept my weight forward. I put a hand on a trunk and pushed off it.
I put a hand on the next trunk and pushed off it.
I got fifty yards in before I had to stop and put both hands on a tree and wait for my chest to remember how to be a chest.
Voices behind me on the road. A language I half knew. Not Russian. Close to Russian. Something east of it. I did not stop to place it.
I ran.
I ran as hard as a man can run with the corners of his eyes going dark.
I went down a slope. I went through a streambed.
The cold of the water came up over my ankle into my shoe and I did not slow.
I went up the other side of the bank on my hands and my feet for the last yard of it.
I kept going. The voices behind me went small.
The voices went smaller. The voices went into the wind in the tops of the trees and out of it.
My head was wet down the whole side of my neck now. The wet had soaked the collar through to the shirt and the shirt was sticking. My ears were ringing the high small ring they ring after a hard hit. I could hear my breath inside the ring and not much else.
I made a hundred yards more.
I made fifty after that.
I made twenty after that.
I saw something low at the edge of my vision.
A light. A porch light, maybe. Or a fallen branch the shape of a light.
Or the inside of my own head making me a kind thing to walk toward.
I went toward it. The legs took back the permission they had been giving me.
I went down on one knee. I waited for the knee to do what a knee does.
The knee did not do it. I went down on the other.
The cold of the leaves came up my arm into my sleeve.
Ptichka.
I got one hand into my coat. I got my fingers on the phone. I pulled the phone out. The screen lit. The screen swam. I tried to find her name in the list of names. The names slid sideways. I touched the screen. I did not know what I touched. I touched it again.
The phone was warm in my hand and far away from it at the same time.
I put my cheek on the leaves.
The cold of the ground came up under my jaw.
There was a thing I had to say to her. I had been carrying it for three days and I had not let myself put it into a sentence yet, and I knew the shape of the sentence now, here, on the ground, with the wet of my own blood under my ear, and I opened my mouth around the first word of it.