Chapter 12 #2
"Mikhail," he said. "Your third brother. I am the favorite. Do not argue with me about it."
I made a small sound that was almost a laugh. It came up out of my chest before I told it to. It surprised me a little.
Mikhail's eyes wet over again at the sound. He did not say anything about it. He let me have it.
A third man was standing inside the door of the hall. He had not moved since we came in.
He was built like a refrigerator. Heavy through the shoulders, heavy through the chest. His hands hung at his sides and they were not loose.
They were not tight either. They were the hands of a man who had decided a long time ago what he was going to do with them and had not been surprised by the decision since.
I looked at him over Mikhail's shoulder.
"And you?" I said.
"Ivan," he said. "The one you forgot too."
Mikhail leaned in toward my ear. "He is a grumpy man on a good day," he said, low. "But yes. Your brother. The middle of us."
Ivan did not smile. He nodded once at me. He looked at me a beat longer than the moment asked for. Whatever he saw on my face, he did not say. He turned and walked into the front room.
"Come," Alek said.
The three women had already taken Rhea toward the kitchen. I made her promise. I went to one knee in the hall in front of her and I made her promise three times.
"You call me if you need me."
"I will."
"I am one room away. You shout my name and I am there."
"I will," she said again. "Pete. I will."
I let her go. I stood up. I followed my brothers into a room off the hall.
It was long and low and lined on two walls with books. A long table ran the length of it. Three chairs were pulled out at one end. There was a folder on the table.
"Sit," Alek said.
I sat.
Alek opened the folder.
Inside, laid out the way a man lays things out when he wants you to pick them up one at a time, were a driver's license, a passport, a bank card, and two photographs.
The license said Daniil Sorokin. The face on the license was a face I did not know.
Clean jaw. Eyes the same gray-green as the man across the table from me.
The mouth set the way a man sets his mouth for a camera he does not respect.
I looked at the face for a long time. I did not find anything behind it.
The passport said the same name. The stamps inside were stamps in countries I could not place on a map without trying.
The bank card had the same name embossed across it. I touched the raised letters with the side of my thumb. The thumb knew the shape of the letters. The man did not.
The two photographs were the part I sat with longest. In the first I was younger.
In the second I was holding the camera and the camera was turned around.
The hands on the camera in the second photograph were hands like mine.
The knuckles. The way the index finger lay along the body of the lens.
I knew those hands the way I knew the inside of my own coat.
I do not know that face. I know those hands.
"Your name is Daniil Sorokin," Alek said.
"You are our youngest brother. You went off the road in your own car three months ago.
Brakes were cut. The car was rolled into a tree.
We searched for ninety days. We found nothing.
" He let a beat sit between us. "We are still trying to find the man who cut the line. "
"Are you sure I am this man?" I said.
"We have known you since the day you were born, brother," Mikhail said, gentle.
"I do not remember a single one of you."
Ivan spoke from the wall where he had set himself. "We know."
It was dry and it was not cruel. It landed where it was supposed to.
I told them about the elderly couple. The road they had found me on. The wool of the bandage Grandma had wrapped around my head with her own hand. The three months at the kitchen table. The little girl with the bear and the two braids and the way she said brother. The two stones at the cemetery.
I told them about the note.
I said the line on the note word for word.
Mikhail's mouth tightened around his teeth.
"Do not say that line again," Alek said. "Not out loud in this house."
"Why?"
"Because it is from a man we are going to bury."
I sat with that for a moment. I had been carrying the question since the porch, and the question wanted out, and I let it.
"So whatever made those two old people dead," I said. "That is partly on me."
Alek did not answer right away. He sat forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees. He looked at the folder. He looked at me.
"I will not say it is not," he said. "But it was not your choice. If you had remembered who you were, you would have died standing in front of them. That is who you are." A beat. "It is not who they were. We are bratva. They were not. You did not make that. You only walked into their kitchen."
I put my face into both my hands for the count of one breath. The dark behind my palms was a kind of relief. I brought my hands back down.
"I know this is a lot, brother," Mikhail said. "If you want to seek justice for them, you have the family behind you."
"I want to."
"Rest first," Ivan said. "We start tomorrow."
Tomorrow was a word that meant a thing in this house. I could hear it in the way he said it. It was not a soft word and it was not a hard word. It was a marker on a calendar that other men were going to keep.
Mikhail's tone changed. He stood from the chair he had been on. He brushed the front of his shirt down with the flat of his hand the way a man does when he is changing the subject on purpose.
"There is one more thing," he said. "The little girl. You are going to be on the floor of this thing inside a week. You will not have hours for her. I know a nanny who is very good. The best. I will see if she can come up for a few days while you are working."
He did not look at his brothers when he said it. He looked at a corner of the wall above my head.
His mouth lifted at one corner. A small thing. He did not let it become a smile. He let it sit at the corner of his mouth for the length of half a breath and then he put it away again.
"Thank you," I said. "Anything that keeps her steady. I take it."
Mikhail nodded. He did not say a name.
I walked out of the meeting room. The hall was quieter than I expected it to be. The light at the far end was warm and yellow and coming from a doorway I had not been through yet.
I followed it.
Rhea was on a tall stool at the kitchen island.
The three women were around her at three points of a triangle, not crowding her, leaving her space.
There was a bowl of soup in front of her she had not touched yet, but she was talking to it as if she might.
Her braids were still crooked. The bear sat on the counter at her elbow with its arms out.
Lily was at the stove with a wooden spoon in her hand and her head turned at an angle that said she was listening to the small voice at the island more than she was watching the pot.
Jade was leaning on the island with both elbows and her braid down her back.
Sienna had taken the stool next to Rhea and was peeling the paper off a piece of bread.
I stopped at the doorway.
I looked at my sister surrounded by three women who had put their arms around me on the steps because their bodies had remembered me before I did.
The name Daniil sat a little differently on me than it had at the grave.
I could not say how. It was not a memory.
It was not a face coming back. It was a name that had been in a drawer for three months, and someone had taken it out, and now it was on the table in front of me with my driver's license and my passport and my own hands in a photograph.
I did not put the name on. I did not take it off either.
Rhea looked up and saw me in the doorway. She lifted the bear at me by one arm in a small wave. I lifted my hand back.
She is safe in this room tonight. That is the thing I have.