Chapter 14
CHLOE
Rhea's room at the compound smelled like new paint and old crayon.
Someone had taped her drawings to the wall at her own height, low enough that I had to bend to read the captions.
A sun with eyelashes. A dog she did not own.
A house with three chimneys and four windows and one heart over the door.
The lamp on the dresser was a small ceramic owl with a paper shade, and it threw a warm circle out on the rug that ended at the edge of the bed.
The bed was pushed against the wall under a window.
Bare trees outside, dark and thin. The throw at the foot of the mattress was that nubbly cream knit the wives put on every bed in this house.
Beom-Beom was already on the pillow with his one ear pointed at the ceiling and his small black eyes on the door.
I set my duffel on the floor by the dresser. They had given me the guest room down the hall and I would sleep there later. For now I was here to put a small girl into a bed that was not the bed she had grown up in.
"Pajamas first," I said. "Teeth after. Then we read one."
Rhea took her pajamas off the corner of the dresser and changed in the bathroom across the hall while I pulled the blanket back and fluffed the pillow under Beom-Beom and pretended I was not noting every detail of the room for some private file inside my chest. She came back in pink flannel with a worn cuff and climbed up over the blanket and slid under it like she had practiced. She tucked the bear under her chin.
I sat on the edge of the bed and combed two pieces of her hair back from her face with my fingers. Her braids were soft at the ends where the elastics had given up.
"Can you sleep here with me?" she said.
"In here?"
"I used to sleep with my grandparents. Since they died I can't fall asleep on my own."
The word died is a short word. I felt my chest go down half an inch when she said it, and stay down. I did not let her see it on my face.
"I can stay."
I kicked off my shoes and they made two small thumps on the rug.
I pulled the throw off the foot of the bed and folded myself onto the mattress on top of the blanket, on my side, facing her.
There was room for both of us if I kept my knees in.
I left the lamp on low. The owl threw its circle up onto the ceiling now, soft and round.
"Tell me about them," I said.
She was quiet a moment, deciding whether she wanted to. Then she did.
"Grandma made the best japchae in the world. She used three pans. One for the noodles. One for the beef. One for the vegetables. She never let them touch until the end." She paused. "Grandpa once nailed a swing to a tree and the swing held for ten years. I was on it last spring. It still held."
"That is a good swing."
"He used the right kind of nails. He told me about it every time we sat on it."
I smiled into the pillow. She turned her face toward me on hers.
"My mom wasn't good," she said. The sentence was flat and short and matter of fact and a little too old for her mouth. "She wasn't, like, hitting people. She was just gone. They raised me. Just them. For ten years. They only had each other and me."
"That is a lot of love in one little house."
"They never made me feel like I was the work they were making."
That landed in my throat and stayed there. I reached and put my hand flat on the top of her blanket where her shoulder was under it.
"I miss them so much, Chloe."
"I know, baby."
The word baby cost me something I did not mind paying. She closed her eyes a second and opened them again. The lamp made her lashes look longer.
"Is Daniil your real brother?" I asked.
She shook her head once on the pillow. The braid by her cheek moved with her.
"No. But he is like one."
"Tell me about when he first came."
She thought about it. She was good at thinking about things before she said them. It was one of the first things I had learned about her at the apartment, and it had not changed at the compound.
"He didn't know which door went where," she said.
"For a week. He would go to the linen closet looking for the bathroom.
He would open the oven looking for a drawer.
He was confused. He was scared. I could tell because of his shoulders.
" She put her hand up briefly and lifted her own shoulders to show me.
"But he wasn't mean. Not one time. Grandpa scared him in the bathroom once because Grandpa got up at night and Daniil didn't hear him coming.
Daniil jumped. He had that look in his face like he might hit someone.
Then he saw it was Grandpa and his whole face changed. He apologized for a long time."
"Yeah."
"And Grandma cried at breakfast one morning because she thought he was going to leave us.
She said the word leaving and she just cried right into her toast. He got up and he went around the table and he pulled her into a hug right there standing up.
He told her he was not going anywhere. He held her until she stopped. "
"He held her."
"Even when he was that scared, he was never bad to us. He was kind. He always tried to fix things. He fixed the porch light. He fixed the squeak in my door. He didn't have to."
"He is really good," I said.
"You sound so sure."
I weighed the choice for half a breath. The owl lamp ticked once with the heat of its bulb.
"Can you keep a secret?"
"Cross my heart."
"Daniil is my boyfriend. Not officially. But same."
Her eyes went big. The kind of big a kid's eyes go when they have just been handed an adult thing to hold. She turned the thing over in her hands for one beat the size of a seven-year-old's beat, careful with it.
"Then why are you pretending? Like you don't know him?"
"Because right now is a lot for him. I don't want to add weight he can't carry. If he remembers on his own, that is good. If he doesn't, I'm not going to push."
"But what if he doesn't?"
"I don't know what I'll do then."
She was quiet. I watched the small wheels behind her face. Then she said the line that was going to stay with me for the rest of the night.
"Make him feel it, Chloe. He doesn't need the words. He needs the feel of it. That is what gets him back."
I looked at her for a long moment. The owl light caught the top of her head and lit the part in her hair. I leaned down and kissed the top of her head where the part was. Her hair smelled like the strawberry shampoo from the apartment, which someone had thought to bring.
"You are wiser than half the lawyers I've met," I said.
She grinned with the gap of her front teeth showing. Then she closed her eyes. She was gone in five minutes. I felt the moment her breath changed from awake breath to asleep breath, that small shift in the engine of her chest. I did not move for a long time after.
I must have slept some. I woke to a sound I did not place at first. A small wet sound that did not belong in this room.
The lamp was still on. The trees outside the window were the same trees, black against a slightly less black sky.
Rhea was asleep with one arm flung out over the blanket and Beom-Beom tucked under her chin.
The clock in the hall did its quiet work somewhere.
I lifted my head off the pillow.
Daniil was on the floor at the side of the bed, sitting against the wall. His knees were drawn up. His head was dropped between them. His shoulders were doing the small quiet shake of a man crying in a way he had decided no one was going to see. He had not noticed I was awake.
I touched the pendant at my neck without thinking, the small weight of it under my fingertips. Then I let it go.
I slid out from under the throw a careful inch at a time so Rhea would not wake.
My bare feet found the rug and then the cold edge of the floorboard past it.
I crossed to him and lowered myself to the floor in front of him at the distance of an arm's length, slow on the way down, so he would hear me come before he saw me.
He lifted his head. His face was wet. The polite stranger's face from the dining room was gone. The face under it was rawer than I had ever seen on him in either of the lives I had with him.
"Want to share the pain?" I said.
He looked at me for a long beat. He did not put the polite mask back on. He let me have his face.
"Two people are dead because of a name," he said.
His voice was quiet and the bratva strain ran under the gentleness in him like a wire under a floor.
"Mine. I don't even know who that name belongs to.
I have a brother who hugs me like he has been holding a fist closed for three months.
I have a girl in there asleep who is mine and not mine.
I am trying to find a man inside my head and I can't get past the door. "
I reached up. I used the side of my thumb to wipe a tear off the side of his cheek. The thumb knew the angle of his jaw before my head caught up. I let it.
"You don't have to force any of it," I said. "You are strong. You're a Sorokin for a reason."
"I don't even know what that means."
"It means you carry this room without dropping it. You already are."
He breathed out through his nose. I moved closer on my knees.
I got my arms around him on the floor in front of Rhea's bed.
He resisted for half a second. Then he didn't. He broke against my shoulder the way a man breaks when he has been carrying a thing alone for a long stretch of days and finally meets something to set it down on.
He did not make sound. He just shook and breathed and let the front of my shirt take the weight of his face.
I did not tell him I had been doing the same on a parallel road.
I did not tell him about the kitchen floor in the apartment where I had folded down on the tile with my forehead against the cabinet at two in the morning more nights than I wanted to count.
I let him take what he needed. I rested my cheek against the top of his head and breathed him in.
He smelled like the soap from this house and like himself underneath.
Both of those things were true. I held them both.
"Daniil," I said, low into his hair. "Don't overthink it. I won't pretend I know how heavy this is on you. But I know the people who love you. They are so happy you are alive. Please fight for them."
He sat with that. His breathing slowed against my collarbone. The shake at the back of his neck eased under my palm.
He lifted his head. His eyes were on mine. The owl lamp made them honey.
"Why do you sound like you know me?" he said.
"Maybe I know you a little more than you think."
I held his eyes for one breath. I let the corner of my mouth lift, small. I brought my hand up to the side of his face and tilted my own face up. I kissed him on the cheek. Not the corner of his mouth. The cheek. Right under the cheekbone, where the bone made a shelf for my mouth.
"Get back to bed," I said. "Try to rest."
He did not let me leave it there.
"Could you tell me. If you do know me. I feel like you do."
Please don't ask me again tonight. I will give it to you and I am not supposed to.
"Goodnight, Daniil," I said. "You will know soon. I'm not going anywhere."
He looked at me a long second. He nodded. He used the wall to get up. He walked out of Rhea's room with his head down. The door closed softly behind him.
I climbed back onto the edge of the bed and pulled the throw over my legs.
I did not sleep. I listened to Rhea's small breath and the radiator clicking on once and then off once and then on again.
The owl lamp kept its circle on the ceiling.
The trees outside got their edges back as the sky began to lighten.
I watched them get their edges back. I did not move.
The light at the window went gray and then warmer. A small hand touched my arm.
"Chloe. Come on. Breakfast."
"Okay. Let me put myself together."
Rhea slid off the bed and padded out with Beom-Beom under her arm by his good ear. I used the small bathroom across the hall. I put cold water on my face twice. I tucked the loose pieces of hair behind my ears and braided everything back at the nape with the elastic from my wrist.
I followed Rhea downstairs.
Daniil was already at the kitchen table at the head with a cup of black coffee in his hand and the soft black shirt on again, sleeves pushed back to the elbow. He had clearly slept too little. The skin under his eyes was a shade I knew. He looked up when we came in.
"Good morning, brother," Rhea said, climbing onto her chair.
"Good morning, Rhea."
He turned his eyes to me.
"Good morning, Chloe."
"Good morning, Daniil." Mine was quieter than I meant it. I cleared the small frog out of my throat after.
I crossed to the chair on his left without thinking about it. The body knew where to sit. Then I caught myself and almost stepped back. I did not. I sat. He noticed. I felt him notice. He did not say anything about it.
Rhea pushed a plate toward me with two pieces of toast on it, careful, the way she had pushed her own fries at me the day before.
"Brother," she said.
"Yes."
"Isn't Chloe pretty?"
The kitchen went very quiet for half a heartbeat. The fridge hummed once and then remembered itself. Daniil did not look at Rhea. He looked at me. He had the small careful look of a man who had been thinking about something he had not known he had been thinking about for some hours.
"She is," he said.
"You two would look good together," Rhea said. She said it with the seriousness of a kid making a deal at recess. "I'm just saying."
My face went hot. I brought my cup up to hide behind it. The corner of my mouth gave me away anyway and I knew it.
"Eat your toast, Rhea," Daniil said. He said it very small, into his coffee, and the corner of his own mouth gave him away too.
The room settled. The kettle on the stove ticked as it cooled.
Rhea began to hum a thin tune around the toast in her cheek, a song I half knew from the apartment, two notes climbing and one note coming back down.
I wrapped my hands around my cup and let the warmth come up into my palms. Daniil had not eaten yet.
His eyes had landed on the side of my jaw where my thumb had wiped his tear in the dark, and they had stayed there a beat past polite, and then he had looked down at his cup.