Chapter 34
Sasha
The apartment smells the same. That’s the thing nobody tells you about going home — not that it’s different, but that it’s exactly the same.
Same cooking oil in the kitchen. Same radiator clicking in the hall.
Same draft under the front door that Olga has been complaining about for fifteen years and never fixed.
I’m in the kitchen at midnight in a hoodie that belongs to Aaron Kelly.
I didn’t mean to pack it. Or I did and I’m lying to myself about it.
It was in my bag when I unzipped it in this apartment that hasn’t changed since I was twelve, and I put it on because it’s cold in Omsk in April and because it smells like his laundry detergent and a little bit like his skin and I’m not going to think about that right now.
The kitchen table is small. Four chairs, wood, scratched.
I’ve eaten a thousand meals at this table.
I used to do homework here while my father cooked — he was the cook, not Olga.
She did a lot of things well. Cooking was not one of them.
After he died, dinner became functional.
Rice, boiled potatoes. Food to survive, not to enjoy.
I’m drinking tea because there’s nothing else to drink at midnight in this apartment and I can’t sleep.
Almost two weeks in Omsk and my body still hasn’t figured out the time difference.
My brain is still in Massachusetts. My phone is on the table, screen dark, and I keep looking at it like Aaron Kelly is going to text me from six time zones away at whatever hour it is in Boston.
He’s not going to text me. I told him to think. Thinking requires silence. I hate the silence.
The trip hasn’t been all bad. I barely recognized Masha when she picked me up from the airport — she dyed her blonde hair red and got a job at a jewelry store nearby and she talks with her hands now the way I do.
Maksim is eighteen and taller than me, which is annoying and also makes me want to laugh every time he stands next to me.
He has our father’s face. He plays pickup hockey on the outdoor rink by the river on weekends and he’s terrible and he loves it.
I’ve gone with him twice. We don’t talk about anything important. We just skate.
It’s taken almost two weeks to feel like siblings again instead of strangers exchanging polite conversation over meals we all make together at home.
But it’s happening. Slowly. The rhythms come back — the teasing, the shorthand, the way Masha steals food off my plate the same way she did when we were kids.
Footsteps in the hall. Soft, shuffling. The creak of the floorboard outside the kitchen — the one that’s been creaking since I was eight.
Olga appears in the doorway. Robe, slippers, hair down. She looks older than the last time I was here. Smaller. The lines around her mouth are deeper .
She looks at me.
“You can’t sleep,” she says. Not a question.
“No.”
She crosses to the stove. Puts the kettle on.
Takes a cup from the shelf — her cup, the blue one with the chip on the rim that she’s been using since before I was born.
We stand in the kitchen in silence while the water heats.
The radiator clicks. Outside, Omsk does what Omsk does at midnight — exists, quietly, in the cold.
She sits across from me. Her hands wrap around the cup the same way mine wrap around mine. I got that from her. The hand thing. I never noticed until right now.
“Olga, ya—”
“English.” She cuts me off without looking up. “While you’re home, we speak English. My teacher says I need practice with native speakers.”
“I’m not a native speaker.”
“You sound like one. Close enough.” She blows across her tea. “Four years of American university and you can’t help your mother with her English homework? Selfish.”
The corner of her mouth lifts. Barely. That’s Olga’s version of a joke.
“I’ve been watching,” she says.
I look up.
“The commercials. The sponsorships. You and the Kelly boy.” Steam curls between us. “They show them here sometimes. On the sports channels. My son, the famous hockey player, fighting with his teammate on American television.”
“It’s a marketing campaign. Diego — our agent — he—”
“I know what it is.” Her eyes are steady. The same pale blue as mine — my father’s eyes in her face, or my eyes in hers. “I’m not stupid, Sasha. I watch my son on television and I know what I see.”
My chest tightens. “What do you see?”
She doesn’t answer right away. She drinks her tea. Sets the cup down. Runs her thumb along the chipped rim.
“You look at him the way your father looked at me.”
The kitchen gets very quiet. The kettle is off. The radiator has stopped clicking. There is only my mother’s voice and the sentence she just said.
“Olga—”
“Don’t.” She holds up a hand. “Let me say this. I’m not good at it and if you interrupt I’ll stop.”
I close my mouth. My hands are tight around my cup. The tea is too hot and I’m holding it anyway.
“When your father died,” she says. Her voice is careful.
Measured. Like she’s reading from something she rehearsed but not well enough.
“You were twelve. And you already looked like him. The jaw. The way you hold your shoulders. You moved like him, you laughed like him, and every year it got worse. You grew into his face.”
She pauses. Looks at the table. Her thumb keeps moving on the chipped rim.
“I couldn’t look at you without seeing him. And I couldn’t see him without—” She stops. Swallows. Starts again. “It was easier to be distant from you. It was easier to make it about the hockey, the money, the things I could manage.”
She pauses. Takes a breath.
“When your father was hit by that car — the rumors. People said he walked into traffic on purpose. We knew better. He would never have left us. It was an accident.” Her voice is tight but steady.
“The only thing that stopped the gossip was your hockey career taking off. Once people knew you as the boy who could play, nobody talked about how your father died. And that worked for me. Because as long as I only thought of you in terms of your future career and the money you would make, I didn’t have to feel anything else. ”
“If I didn’t let myself feel close to you and just reminded myself you were going to leave us someday for America anyway, you weren’t so much of a reminder of what I lost.”
My throat closes. I can’t swallow. I can’t speak.
I’m sitting in this kitchen where I ate a thousand meals and my mother is telling me she pulled away from me because loving me hurt too much and I don’t know what to do with that.
I’ve spent ten years thinking it was because I wasn’t enough.
Turns out it was because I was too much.
“I was wrong.” She says it simply. Not dramatic. Olga doesn’t do dramatic. “I was wrong about a lot of things. And I was unfair to you. You deserved a mother, not a manager.”
“Olga.” My voice cracks. Just the word. Just her name.
She looks at me. She looks sorry. She looks tired. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her look like this.
“The Kelly boy,” she says. “Aaron. Does he make you happy?”
I don’t deflect. I don’t joke. I just say it.
“I love him.”
She nods. Like she expected that. Like she saw it on television from six thousand miles away and just needed to hear me say it.
“He’s — he’s good, Olga. He’s careful and stubborn and he worries about everything and he makes me crazy and he’s the best person I’ve ever met.” I’ve never talked to her like this. “He makes me happy. Really happy. The kind of happy I didn’t think I was allowed to be.”
Her eyes are bright. Wet. She doesn’t wipe them. She just sits there with her chipped cup and her old robe and lets me see her cry. I don’t think she’s ever let me see that.
“Good,” she says. “That’s good.”
She reaches across the table. Her hand covers mine. Cold fingers, strong grip. The first time she’s touched me in — I don’t remember the last time she touched me. I go very still. Like if I move she’ll pull away.
She doesn’t pull away.
“Your brother looks like him too,” she says quietly. “Like your father. I see it every day. I’m trying to be better. With him. With — all of it.”
I turn my hand over under hers. Her fingers settle into my palm.
“I’m proud of you,” she says. A decade late. I feel it in my ribs. “I should have said that more. I should have said it every time. You left this country with nothing and you made yourself into something extraordinary and I was too — I was too broken to tell you.”
I can’t talk. My throat is shut. My eyes are burning and I’m not going to cry in this kitchen. I’m not.
But it’s too late. The tears well up in my eyes.
She squeezes my hand. Lets go. Picks up her tea. Takes a sip. Gives me a minute.
The radiator clicks back on. Something between us has shifted.
“Sasha.” She sets her cup down. Looks at me with those pale blue eyes — my eyes, my father’s eyes. “If this boy makes you so happy, what are you doing here in Russia with me?”
I laugh. It comes out wet and cracked and surprised, and Olga almost smiles. Almost. Closer than anything I’ve seen on her face in ten years.
“Go home,” she says. “Go back to your Aaron Kelly. Tell him your mother says he better be worth all this trouble.”
I wipe my face with the sleeve of Aaron’s hoodie. “He’s worth it.”
I look at her. This woman who made me, who broke my heart, who spent a decade treating me like a bank account because the alternative was looking at a ghost. She’s trying. It’s imperfect and late and not enough and it’s the most she’s ever given me and I’ll take it. I’ll take every piece of it.
She nods. Picks up her cup. Stands.
“I’m glad we talked,” she says quietly. “Now I’m going to bed.”
She shuffles back down the hall. The floorboard creaks. Her bedroom door closes.
I sit at the kitchen table in Aaron Kelly’s hoodie and I pick up my phone and I hold it and I don’t call him. Not yet.
The silence doesn’t feel so hopeless tonight. If even Olga could see it in my eyes, what we were working so hard to hide, maybe there is some hope left for Aaron and me after all.
Just maybe.