5. Vasilisa
Vasilisa
“You’ve moved the couch.”
Lev says it from the elevator at nine at night, still buttoned into the black coat.
“I rehabilitated the couch. It was nose to the wall like it got sent to the corner for biting. Furniture has feelings, Lev, and that couch was depressed.” I roll toward the kitchen that’s too flawless to love, but I love it anyway and in spite of myself, which is its own insult.
“Seating faces the room. This is settled law. It’s in the Geneva Convention, go check, right after the part about not shooting medics. ”
“There are four Geneva Conventions. Not one of them mentions the couch.”
“Of course you know the count. A normal person says ‘the Geneva Convention’ and moves on with their evening.”
I’ve spent the entire afternoon waging a small stupid war on his penthouse.
I hauled an armchair the length of the floor with my brakes off and my whole trunk behind the push, and now I’m paying the price.
My shoulders are two overtightened strings, and the base of my spine is a match somebody just struck, but the chair is where I put it now, not where his decorator manifested it.
I flipped the art on one wall upside down, because I couldn’t reach the hook and I wanted to make a statement.
I stood a lone coffee mug in the precise center of the marble island, a flag driven into a summit nobody invited me to climb.
I taped a kid’s drawing to the front of his sub-zero fridge at exactly my eye level, a purple dog with nine legs and a banner underneath that’s supposed to say MISS PLAKSIN IS THE BEST and instead says MIS PLAKSN IS THE BST.
He does the whole circuit without a sound. He walks his own home, taking count of what’s shifted, and I watch him find them one by one without reacting at all.
“You really aren’t going to say anything.”
“You moved a couch. It’s not like you took anything that was mine.
” He hangs the coat on its hook by the door, and under it he’s black straight through, cuffs done at the wrist, that steel watch sitting dead against the pulse in his forearm.
“Move whatever your hands can get to. It’s your home too.
Whatever you can’t reach, let me know, and they’ll be adjusted.
The asking. That was the piece I got wrong the first time. I remember.”
I have a whole armory built for a man who swings back, but not one shell loaded for a man who just quietly agrees with me. So I go to bed livid about winning, which is a brand of livid I’ve never experienced.
When I wake up in the morning, my chair doesn’t squeak.
For two months, that front-left caster has played a thin, dying note across every hard floor I’ve crossed, and I’d worn a groove so deep in the sound I stopped hearing it, gone deaf to it.
But now that it’s gone, I notice. The wheel turns without a whisper.
Someone let themselves into the room where I sleep, in the black middle of the night, while I lay four feet off with my jaw slack and dreaming about the price of gold glitter, and got down on the floor by my chair and repaired the one small ruined thing I have never commented on, because it was never worth the breath.
I sit in the fresh silence of my own wheels, and I want to launch the chair straight through his wall of glass because Lev Etush oiled my caster at some godless hour.
He’s at the island when I surface, thumbing through his phone, a second coffee already poured and steaming at the place beside his. I decide to plant my flag on the one strip of ground that the accident, my father, and now this man haven’t already poured concrete across.
“I’m keeping my job.”
“Fine.”
“I’m not leaving my kids. You can seal me in your terrarium and marry me for what’s swimming in my blood, but I teach first grade Monday, and the Monday after, and every Monday until they wheel me out, and if you so much as reach toward that I will convert the remainder of your life into a very slow documentary about a man’s regret. Six parts. Mournful cello.”
“I said fine, Vasilisa.” His eyes never come up off the screen. “Keep the job. Keep all of it. I’m not touching the children.”
I exhale in relief because I’d come in braced to open a vein for it, and when the thing I steeled myself to bleed for lands soft in my lap, the softness passes for victory.
I drink the coffee, pocket the tidy little win, then drive to Brooklyn, and let twenty-six children entomb a construction-paper turkey under a gold blizzard.
It never once crosses my mind to ask why the man who counts every coin on the table let this one roll off the edge without a grab.
“Did you hear about the new janitor?”
Poppy’s in my doorway, and she’s got the face she wears when she’s been sitting on something for a full period, and her body couldn’t hold it another minute.
“I’m a bit busy with the kids right now, Poppy.”
“We’re all busy. There are children everywhere.
That’s the job.” She steps over Amelia, who’s flat on the rug gluing feathers to a turkey, and sits in the tiny chair by the door.
“Enormous Russian man. Radiates disdain. Told Kevin to stop running with the scissors, and Kevin stopped on the first ask, Vasilisa. On the first ask. I have begged that child for six weeks. I have gotten on his level. I have used his full name.”
“Maybe Kevin finally matured.”
“Kevin put a marker in his nose on Tuesday and told me it was a snorkel.” She points at me with a feather she’s confiscated from the floor. “This man walked past him with a mop, and Kevin dropped the scissors like they’d gotten hot. And he keeps eyeing your door. Not the hall. Your door.”
The glue in my hand goes down on the desk without me telling it to. “What does he look like?”
“Enormous. I said that. Black everything, walks like he owns the floor, does not blink at a normal human interval.” She squints. “Do you know this man? Cough once for yes. Twice if you’re being held hostage.”
I don’t cough. I sit in my own classroom, with gold glitter on my knuckles, and think it through.
It all points to one man: Danil. Lev had him infiltrate my school.
My one clean acre, the only dirt on this earth that was mine, and Lev put a soldier in it on the exact same morning he told me I don’t need to quit my job.
“Vasilisa?”
“I know him.”
Poppy’s mouth opens, closes. “That’s not a cough.”
“His name’s Danil.” I pick the glue back up because my hands need distraction. “He works for my fiancé.”
“Your what?”
“Amelia, that’s enough feathers. The turkey’s dead; let it rest.”
“Your WHAT?!”
“Inside voice, Poppy. We’re in a school.” I roll to the sink and run my knuckles under the tap. The gold refuses to leave, because the gold is forever, we’ve established this as settled law in this room. “I’ll tell you at lunch.”
“Lunch was an hour ago.”
“Then I’ll tell you never, and you’ll die curious, and honestly that’s a fitting end for you.”
She doesn’t move out of the tiny chair. She sits there with the confiscated feather in her fist, watching me dry my hands on a paper towel with more attention than the task has ever required in the history of paper towels, and for once in her entire loud life she doesn’t fill the silence.
“He’s the janitor,” she says finally. “Your fiancé’s guy is mopping our hallway.”
“Apparently.”
“Do you want him to be mopping our hallway?”
Amelia’s still going at the turkey. Louis is showing the gap in his teeth to anyone who’ll hold still.
Twenty-six of them, none of them looking at me, all of them fine, all of them exactly as safe as they were yesterday and yesterday and every day for two years before a man told me whose blood I’ve been walking around in.
“No,” I admit.
The bell goes off over both our heads, and the room detonates into coats and backpacks and one shriek of pure administrative panic from Ana, who can never find the left mitten and never once has thought to check the sleeve she put it in.
Poppy gets out of the tiny chair a joint at a time, and she takes her sweet time about it.
She points the confiscated feather at my chest on her way past.
“This isn’t over.”
“It’s four hours from over. It’s not even in the parking lot.”
“Vasilisa.” She stops in my doorway with the hall filling up behind her.
“You said fiancé. In a sentence. Out loud. To me. I’m going to my room, and I’m going to teach a lesson about weather, and I’m going to think about nothing else for forty minutes, and tomorrow I’m coming back with a coffee, and I’m going to sit in that stupid little chair until you talk. ”
She leaves, taking the feather with her.
I don’t call Lev to yell at him inside the school, because there are children, and because the thing climbing my throat runs too hot to bring within fifty feet of a six-year-old.
I hold it in through the PT hour I stretched an extra thirty minutes past the buzzer for the sole purpose of not going home.
I drive. That’s the whole plan, and it’s a bad one, and I execute it for four hours anyway.
Brooklyn to the bridge and back, the long way, the stupid way, past my own building twice without stopping, and the black sedan holds four car lengths off my bumper the entire time.
He doesn’t flash me, doesn’t pull up at a light and roll the window down.
At some point around eleven I take a left I have no reason to take, purely to see if he’ll take it, and he takes it.
He doesn’t even have the decency to make it look like a coincidence.
I have never in my life wanted so badly to be honked at.
I know exactly who’s following me and why.
By the time the elevator lets me off at one in the morning I have the whole speech racked and my finger resting warm on the trigger.