Chapter 12
DANIIL
The earth in front of me was still soft. They had finished filling the two graves an hour before, and the dirt had not had time to harden into anything that looked like a place. It looked like a wound. Two of them, side by side, the way they had slept.
I was on one knee. The cold was coming up through the fabric of my pants and into my shin and I let it. Rhea stood beside me with her small hand in mine. Her other arm held Beom-Beom under her chin. She had not let go of the bear once since the church.
The headstones were cheap. I knew it when I bought them and I had bought them anyway.
Two slabs of pale stone, a brass plaque on Grandma's that was already going a little dull at the edges in the wind.
I had paid for both in cash from a tin in the back of the kitchen drawer.
There had not been enough for anything better.
"What do we do now, brother?" Rhea said.
Her voice was very small. She said it to the headstones, not to me.
"I don't know yet," I said. "Honestly."
She was quiet for the length of a breath. Then she said, even quieter, "I don't have a family anymore."
I turned my face up to her. Her braids were a little crooked. I had done them this morning in the bathroom mirror in the dark because the porch light had blown out and I did not want to wake her by turning on the overhead. She had not noticed they were crooked. Or she had, and she had not said.
"I am here," I said. "I will not let you be alone. Same blood or not. You are my sister, Rhea."
Her chin shook once. She held it.
"I'm lucky I have a good brother," she said.
I pulled her into the front of my coat. She let me. Her cheek pressed against the cold buttons and I felt the warm spot of her breath through two layers of wool. I held her there for a long count and watched the brass plaque go a little duller in the failing light.
Gravel moved behind me on the path.
It was a deliberate sound. The man making it wanted to be heard. He was not creeping. He was not hurrying. The steps were even, and they stopped at a distance that said he had picked the distance on purpose.
I turned without standing. My free hand went to the small of my back the way it sometimes did when I was startled, and I noted that my free hand did that, and then I let it drop.
He was tall. A long black coat that fell almost to his boots.
A patch over his left eye. The working eye was a blue that had nothing soft in it.
A scar ran from his temple down to the line of his jaw.
He stood with his hand at his side and the kind of stillness that had nothing to do with respect for a grave and everything to do with not wanting to startle the small girl behind my leg.
He said one word.
"Daniil."
I stood up slowly. Rhea slid behind my knee and put the bear out in front of her like a shield. The man did not move closer.
"He looks scary," Rhea said into the back of my knee.
"Are you the one who killed them?" I said.
He took the question on the chin. He did not flinch. He shook his head once.
"I am your brother," he said. "Alek Sorokin."
"I don't remember anything."
"I can tell that from the way you are looking at me," he said. "We have been looking for you a long time, brother."
"How am I supposed to trust you?"
He paused. He looked at the headstones for one beat. He looked back at me.
"I do not know how to give you the trust you are asking for," he said. "If you remembered me, you would know I am not the brother who throws sweet words at you. I am the brother who buries the man that touches my blood. You are coming with me. We will both protect you."
"We are not going anywhere."
"Do not be stubborn." He nodded once, a small motion, at the two stones in front of me.
"Do you want the girl to follow them? There are people who hunt you when you are at your worst, Daniil.
You are not a regular man and you are not a safe one to be near.
The longer you stand at this grave, the more likely the next one is hers. "
I looked down at Rhea behind my leg. Her eyes were very wide and very fixed on the boots of the man on the path. I looked at the soft earth in front of me. I looked back at the man in the long black coat and the working blue eye that had not moved off my face since he said my name.
I decided.
"If anything happens to her," I said, "I will find a way to remember who I was just to break you."
His mouth lifted on one side. A small, slow smile. The kind a man gives a man he has been waiting to see again.
"Spoken like family," he said.
The car at the edge of the cemetery was long and dark and parked the way men park cars when they intend to leave quickly. The driver did not open the door for us. He left it for Alek. Alek opened the back and stepped aside.
I lifted Rhea in first. She sat in my lap with the bear at her chest. My hand went to her shoulder and stayed there. She was small enough that her braid lay across the back of my wrist.
The driver pulled out of the lot. The cemetery slid out of the side window. I did not look at the headstones again. I had already memorized the angle.
I watched the road through the front windshield.
I counted the turns. I had been counting things for three months.
The number of plates on the rack. The number of steps from the porch to the truck.
The number of seconds between the click of the kettle and the steam.
It was how I kept the edges of the day where I could see them.
The driver had the rearview tilted a little to the right.
He used it more than he used the side mirrors.
I noticed the angle without meaning to, and I knew, without knowing how I knew, that I had sat in the back of cars like this before.
That the angle of that mirror was a thing a certain kind of driver did because he was watching the road behind him for something specific.
Rhea did not say anything. She watched the trees go by and held the bear tighter when the road got rough.
The car turned off the highway onto a road I did not know and then off that road onto a longer one that ran between two stretches of bare field.
We came up to a fieldstone wall and a gate.
The gate opened for us without anyone getting out.
The gravel under the tires changed sound when we crossed onto the drive.
There was a willow at the edge of the property. Bare for the season. The shape of it was the shape of a tree someone had planted on purpose.
The house at the end of the drive was bigger than I had been ready for. I had not put a number on what I had been ready for, but whatever the number was, the house was past it.
"It's so huge," Rhea whispered.
"Stay close to me," I said.
"I'm not letting go."
The car rolled to a stop in front of a wide set of steps and the front door of the house opened before I had the handle.
Three women came down the steps at once.
A brunette in a soft cream sweater first, on the balls of her bare feet against the cold stone.
Behind her a smaller woman with a long dark braid down her back, moving fast but careful, the way a person moves who has put other people back together for a living.
A third behind them with sharp eyes and a mouth already set against the moment, the kind of look a person wears when they have decided not to cry in front of a stranger.
They were on me before I had taken a full breath. Three pairs of arms at once. Hair against my jaw. The smell of perfume I did not know and the smell of laundry soap I did not know. A small sound I did not have a name for, half a sob, more than one mouth saying my name at the same time.
I stood inside the hug without lifting my arms. Rhea was half between my knees and her small hand had not let go of mine. The bear was pressed between my hip and her shoulder.
I let it go on for a count and then I said, gently, "Excuse me. I am sorry. I do not know any of you."
The arms came off me in one movement.
The three faces in front of me did not change in the same way. The brunette's mouth opened a little and stayed open. The small dark woman did not move at all. The third kept her hand on my upper arm a second longer than the others and then let it fall.
"He has amnesia," Alek said behind me on the steps.
The three women exchanged a look that was not for me. It was a fast look. The kind of look women trade in a kitchen when one of them has just burned her hand and none of them want her to know they noticed. Then they did what good women did in a moment like this, which was to be useful.
The brunette went to one knee on the cold stone in front of Rhea. She held her hand out. She did not reach. She held it out and waited.
"Hello," she said. "I am Lily. I am Alek's wife. May I show you the kitchen? We have warm food."
The small dark woman said, "I am Jade. I am married to your other brother, Ivan."
"Sienna," said the third. "I am married to Mikhail. There is hot tea."
Rhea looked up at me. I nodded once.
She took Sienna's hand. She did not drop mine.
A man came across the front hall toward us through the open door.
He was not as tall as Alek. The shape of his shoulders was different. The eyes were the same, though. The same gray-green, set the same way under the same brow.
The same eyes our mother gave us.
The thought arrived without my permission and did not give me a face for the woman attached to it. I stood inside the thought for a beat and let it pass.
The man was crying without seeming to know he was crying. He crossed the hall in three long steps and pulled me into a hug that was rougher than the three women's. He held on. I let him.
"Damn you for forgetting me, brother," he said into my shoulder.
"I am sorry," I said. "I really am."
He pulled back. His hands stayed at my shoulders. He looked at my face the way a man looks at a face he has not seen in a long time and is checking to see if anything is broken in it.