Chapter Eleven–Elena #2
“I didn’t hate it,” I said. The fire had built now, the room warmer, the storm still pressing its rhythm against the glass.
“I want to be accurate about that. There were parts of it I was genuinely good at and occasionally loved. The dancing–the actual movement, the stage, the thing that happened when the music was right and the body knew what to do before the mind did.” I paused.
“I wasn’t there for the attention. I know some girls were, and that was their reason and it was fine.
I was there because the math worked and because I was good at it.
And also because it didn’t require me to have a history. ”
“No history required,” Mikhail said quietly.
“Exactly.” I looked at him. “Las Vegas doesn’t ask where you came from.
It’s one of the things I actually appreciated about it.
You could be from nowhere and it didn’t read as a deficiency.
Everyone here is from somewhere else, or nowhere, or a version of themselves they’ve stopped being.
I wasn’t running from anything. I just–needed somewhere that would take me as I was, with what I had, and not make the absence of a background a problem. ”
He was still watching me with that quality of attention that I had been receiving for long enough now. And the guilt moved through me in response, predictably, the stone becoming briefly and specifically heavier.
Lightning again, the room going white for half a second, and I counted automatically. One. Two. The thunder came. Two miles, moving across rather than directly above. The storm shifting.
“My parents died when I was four,” I said.
It came out even, because I had had long enough with it that the evenness was genuine rather than managed.
“Car accident. I don’t remember them except in the way that children who lose people young remember them–not as specific people but as the shape of an absence.
The particular quality of something that should have been there.
” I pressed my feet flat against the chair.
“I used to try to construct them from photographs, when I had access to photographs, which wasn’t always.
My mother had dark hair. My father had an interesting face.
” A pause. “I don’t know if I look like either of them. There was no one left to ask.”
The fire moved.
I realized I was crying, which surprised me–not the emotional content, which I had been living in for long enough that the content was familiar, but the fact of it, the physical reality, the tears arriving without the usual warning.
I pressed my fingers against my face and willed them to stop because I was twenty-two years old and had not cried about my parents since the age of nine when I had decided, with the pragmatic clarity of a child who needed to be functional, that it cost more than it returned.
Mikhail moved from his chair.
He crossed the space between the chairs and sat on the arm of mine, which was not a place the chair was designed to accommodate but which he made work.
He put his arm around my shoulders. Not pulling me in. Not demanding anything. Just the weight of his arm across my back, the warmth of him on my left side, the solid and uncomplicated presence of someone who had decided that the space between us should be smaller.
I let out a breath.
I turned slightly toward him and pressed my face against the side of his shoulder, which was solid and warm and did not offer absolution or reprieve but offered the simple, devastatingly insufficient and completely necessary fact of itself.
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
The storm was going.
“You didn’t choose any of it,” he said. His voice was low and even and not in the register of the operational man, the Pakhan, the thing he was in lit rooms with other people present. “The parents. The homes. The math of Las Vegas.” He paused. “None of it was your choosing.”
“A lot of it was my executing,” I said. “The math. The decisions inside the constraints.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I know.” I did know. The distinction between the hand you were dealt and how you played it had been one of the organizing principles of my adult life–the insistence on accountability for my choices within the conditions even when I had not chosen the conditions, because accountability was the only thing that gave me any agency in the story at all.
“But I’d rather own the executing than be only the person things happened to. ”
He was quiet for a moment.
“That’s–yes.” The single affirmation carrying something in it I didn’t have a full word for. A recognition. “Yes, I understand that.”
I looked up at him. He was looking at the fire, his jaw in the familiar compression, and there was something in his expression that was different from the way he looked in rooms with other people–the control still present but not performing anything, simply existing as itself, a man in a library in the middle of the night with his arm around his wife and a storm going out over the desert.
The guilt arrived with fresh weight.
I had been coerced. The circumstances were what they were and I was not going to pretend they were simpler than they were.
But I had also chosen, to not tell him–had made the calculation that my survival required the silence, and that calculation was not incorrect, but it was mine, and it sat in the same category as all my other choices, the ones I had insisted on owning rather than being only the person things happened to.
I had chosen the silence.
I pressed my face back against his shoulder and said nothing, because the thing I needed to say was too large for the storm’s ending and the fire’s warmth and the weight of his arm, and I was a coward, and I was exhausted, and he was warm, and I had not been held by anything in a very long time before this man, and the compounding injustice of that fact sat in my chest alongside the guilt and somehow didn’t cancel it out and somehow also didn’t make it smaller.
“The house is secured,” he said. Quiet. “No one comes in without my knowledge. You’re safe here.”
“I know.” The words came out smaller than I intended.
“Whatever is coming—” He stopped. An unusual stop, for him–not the pause of someone choosing words but the pause of someone encountering a limit. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
The stone in my chest made itself felt.
I pressed my eyes closed.
He had said it with the flat certainty he brought to things he intended fully, and I believed him.
I was going to tell him.
Not tonight–I held to that, and not as an excuse but as a genuine assessment. Tonight was the storm and the fire.
Tomorrow, or the day after. Soon.
The storm continued its departure. The intervals lengthened. Four seconds. Five.
I was so tired. The tiredness arrived all at once in the way it sometimes did at the end of a sustained effort. My eyes were heavy. The fire was warm. Mikhail’s shoulder was solid and still, and the arm around me had not shifted, the weight of it consistent and uncalculating.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It came out low and specific and not quite asleep.
“For what?” he asked.
I didn’t answer, because the answer was everything and I couldn’t say everything yet, and I hoped he heard it the way I meant it–as something that was real and was larger than I was currently able to carry out of my mouth and into the room.
He was quiet for a moment.
“Sleep.”
I did not argue.
The calm was temporary. I knew it was temporary. I held onto it anyway, with both hands, for as long as the morning would allow.