11. Vasilisa
Vasilisa
“You’re not Natasha.”
“Dr. Garson. Eliza.” She doesn’t offer the hand, which tells me she’s read the part of my file where I flatten feet. “Natasha’s still your lead. I’m consulting. There was a scheduling change.”
“A scheduling change.”
“Mm.” She sets the tablet down and crouches to my eye level, and I brace for the spaniel crouch, but it’s not that, it’s a woman getting down to look at the joint she’s about to make me hate.
“You transfer left. You’ve built the left side up to compensate, and the right’s lagging, which is going to cap you before your spine does if we don’t get in front of it.
Natasha’s been fighting it the right way.
I’ve got a couple of things she hasn’t had the equipment for. ”
She’s good. That’s the first thing. She’s better than good, she’s the kind of good that makes you forget to be suspicious, and I go full thirty minutes forgetting, up on the bars with her hands hovering exactly where Natasha’s hover, calling adjustments I feel work before I understand them, and it’s the best session I’ve had in two years and I’m grinning like an idiot before the suspicion catches up.
It catches up on the thirty-second minute.
Because a woman like this costs more than my building.
A woman like this probably has a waiting list I couldn’t buy my way onto if I sold both kidneys and the chair, and she’s crouched on my clinic floor working my right hip like I’m the only name on her calendar, and I know exactly one person in my life who makes waiting lists evaporate.
“Who’s paying for you?” I ask.
Garson doesn’t lie. I’ll give her that forever. She doesn’t do the little pause, doesn’t check a script, just meets my eyes and says, “I’m not able to discuss the billing arrangement,” which is the most expensive way anyone has ever said Lev Etush to my face.
I finish the last fifteen minutes of my session.
I finish it because I’m not going to let a good thing go to waste out of spite, and because my right hip has already tasted what she’s offering and it’s staging a coup against my principles.
But I drive home with both hands hard on the controls, and my jaw set so tight I’ll feel it tomorrow, because he did it again.
He found the one acre that was mine, the one fight I was winning by myself, and he bought it, wholesale, and tried to bury the receipt so I’d never even get to be angry about it out loud.
He’s at the kitchen island when the elevator lets me off. Coat still on, phone in his hand. It takes him one look at my face to make him set the phone down. He’s not stupid, he’s never once been stupid, and that’s the whole problem.
“You went behind my back and stuck your long nose into my session.”
“I simply sent a consultant to your session.”
“You bought Eliza Garson.” I roll straight at him, no stop three feet off, right up into his space, because I’m done letting him watch me pick where to halt.
“You bought the best spinal specialist on the continent, you laundered her through some story about a scheduling change, and you pointed her at my body without asking me a single question, again, again, Lev, after the apartment, after the whole speech about the asking, after you looked me in the eye in that flawless kitchen and said you remembered.”
“I did remember.” He doesn’t move back. “You’ll notice she consults. Natasha stays lead. Nobody moved your therapist, nobody changed your appointments, nobody touched your body without your hands on the decision. You said yes to every exercise she ran today. I was told you say yes.”
“You were told. Of course you were told.”
“You had the best numbers you’ve had in two years. I was told you were even grinning on the bars.” He says it like it’s evidence, like it settles anything. “Where’s the crime?”
“The crime is my recovery is the one thing in this entire circus that is MINE.” My voice cracks, and I hate it.
I hate that it cracks. I want it steady, and it goes to gravel on the last word.
“Do you understand that? My father gambled away my childhood. My fiancé took my future out the door in a duffel bag three weeks after they fused my spine. You took my name, my apartment, my whole life, and I let it, I signed the paper, I made you toast. But the bars are mine. The seconds are mine. My numbers are mine, and they’re the one score in my whole life nobody handed me, and nobody can spend, and you reached into it, and you bought me a better coach like I’m a horse you like the odds on. ”
His jaw works once, like he’s turning a word over before he’ll spend it.
It isn’t the millimeter at the mouth I’ve learned to hunt for.
It’s his whole face going open for a second, the flat gray dropping out of his eyes, and I watch it take effort, I watch him decide to let me see it, and when he says it there’s no showman anywhere in him, just a plain delivery, a man reading a number off a chart he’s already checked twice.
“You count seconds on those bars like a miser counts coins.” He holds my eyes.
“You hoard them. You lie awake doing the math, one better than last week, and you’d sell your own hands before you’d let anyone see how much each one means.
I can see it. I’m a gambler, Vasilisa. I’ve spent my whole life at a table reading which hand is going to turn.
I back winning hands. You’re the best hand I’ve ever seen sat down at a table that underestimated it, and I put the best coach in the country behind you because I’d bet everything I own on you, and only a fool leaves money on a hand like that. ”
The kitchen goes very quiet.
Because he’s not talking about the bloodline.
He’s not talking about the ring, or the meeting he mentioned is coming in spring, or the last Filatov breathing, or the crown he keeps telling me I am.
He’s looked at me, the arithmetic I do in the dark, the score I keep from everyone, including Natasha, some weeks, the private, stubborn, one-second-at-a-time war nobody’s ever bothered to watch me fight, and he’s called it a winning hand.
He saw me. Not the chair he built rooms around.
Not the eyes every old man in Brighton Beach genuflects at. Me. The miser with her seconds.
It lands like a fist. It lands worse than a fist, because a fist I’ve got comebacks for, I’ve had comebacks for fists since I was fourteen, and I’ve got nothing loaded for a man who looked at the one thing I keep hidden and told me he’d bet the house on it.
My throat does the treacherous warm climb. His eyes drop half an inch to the color coming up the side of my neck, and this time he doesn’t drag them back to my face fast enough, and the air in the kitchen goes thick as syrup.
“That’s not fair,” I say, and it comes out with no fight in it at all.
“I’m not a fair man. I thought we covered that.”
“You can’t just say a thing like that and stand there being enormous about it.” I get my hands back on the rims because my hands need a job that isn’t reaching for his shirt. “I came in here to scream at you.”
“So scream.”
“I can’t anymore; you ruined it. You put a compliment in the middle of the crime scene.
” I back the chair up a foot to get some air that doesn’t smell like him.
“Garson stays. I’m not throwing out the best hip work I’ve had in two years to win a point.
But you don’t get to feel good about this.
You did a controlling, invasive, unforgivable thing, and it happened to be right, and you being right about my body when you didn’t ask is the single most infuriating thing about you, and there is genuine competition for that title. ”
“Understood,” he says.
“Don’t you understood me. I’ll bite you again.”
The corner of his mouth moves. “I know you will.”
And yet, two days later he ruins yet another place he swore he’d never touch.
I’m mid-morning, elbow-deep in a hundred laminated apples that are supposed to teach counting and mostly teach chaos, when the temperature of my classroom changes.
I know it before I turn. Twenty-six six-year-olds go from a dull roar to a held breath, and there is exactly one thing on this earth that quiets a first-grade room without a fire, and it’s a grown-up in the doorway who’s doing something wrong.
Lev fills my classroom door the way he filled my apartment door, which is to say, he brings the frame down to meet him.
“You’re in my school,” I say.
“Security review.” He steps in, and he has to angle his shoulders through a door built for people under six feet tall, and the effect is a wolf trying to fit inside a dollhouse.
“Two exits unlocked, a fire door propped with a rock, and a man in the parking lot I didn’t recognize, who turned out to be a father, but I didn’t know that for the ninety seconds it took to find out, and neither did anyone paid to be here. ”
“That’s Mr. Delgado, he brings orange slices.”
“He should be badged.”
“He brings ORANGE SLICES, Lev.” But he’s not listening, because twenty-six children have decided the enormous man in black is the single most interesting event of their entire lives, and they are closing on him like small warm sharks.
“Are you a giant?” Amelia asks, up on her toes, no fear in her at all, because six-year-olds haven’t learned yet what a man’s stillness means.
Lev looks down at her. This is the man who showed me a mutilated body as a proposal, who rolled his cuffs over a knife tattoo in a corridor that smelled like a slaughterhouse, who prices human beings across a card table without a flicker.
He looks down at a gap-toothed six-year-old holding a laminated apple, and I watch the most feared man in Brighton Beach run entirely out of moves.
“No,” he says.
“You’re really tall though.”
“Yes.”
“Did you eat a lot of vegetables?”
There’s a pause I would frame and hang on my wall. “Yes,” Lev says.
“SEE,” Amelia announces to the room, wheeling on her classmates with the fury of the vindicated, “I TOLD you vegetables make you tall, and Louis said it was a lie.”
Louis, gap in his own teeth from the applesauce incident, marches up to inspect the evidence. “Did the vegetables make you scary too?”
“Louis,” I say.
“It’s a fair question,” Lev says, and he crouches. He gets all the way down, forearms on his knees, the crouch I’ve hated for two years but can’t hate right now because he’s doing it to be Louis’s height and not to look down at anyone. “What makes you think I’m scary?”
“Your face is doing it,” Louis says.
“My face does that. It’s not about you.”
“Miss Plaksin’s face does the same thing when Kevin eats glue.”
“Then your Miss Plaksin and I have that in common,” Lev says, and does not look at me, and I have to turn around and rearrange apples that do not need rearranging, because the heart in my chest has decided to race like its life depends on it, and I refuse to let a room full of first-graders witness it.
They swarm him. That’s the only word. Ana wants to know if he has a dog, Kevin wants to show him the marker snorkel, three of them want to know if he can pick up the reading beanbag with one hand, which he can, and does, to a sound of pure collective awe that no adult has ever earned from this room.
Someone puts a paper crown on him. It’s from the birthday bin, gold, glitter-shedding, and it sits on the head of a man who told me I’m a crown he’d open a throat to keep, and it says HAPPY BIRTHDAY PRINCESS on the front.
Danil is in the doorway. I don’t know when he arrived, but he’s got his phone up, and he is taking a photograph of his boss, down on the floor of a first-grade classroom, wearing a birthday-princess crown, a six-year-old hanging off each forearm, and the look on Danil’s face is the look of a man who has just been handed the single greatest thing that will ever happen to him.
“Delete that,” Lev says without turning his head.
“No,” Danil says, and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard him refuse his boss anything, but he means it to the marrow.
The bell scatters them. Coats, backpacks, a shriek from Ana about the eternal left mitten, and Lev stands and hands the paper crown back to the birthday bin like it’s evidence in a trial, and the glitter has already found him, it’s on the black shoulder, in the black cuff, it’s forever, we’ve established this as settled law in this room, and now it’s his problem too.
Poppy’s in my doorway before the last child’s cleared the hall, arms crossed, taking in six-foot-four of glittering husband, and she does not so much as flinch.
“So that’s the fiancé,” she says.
“Husband,” Lev corrects.
Poppy’s eyebrows leave her face. She turns to me very slowly. “Husband.”
“I was going to tell you at lunch.”
“What the actual fuck, Vasilisa.” But she’s not looking at me, she’s looking at Lev, doing the full Poppy scan, the one that took the measure of every terrible boyfriend I ever had and was right about all of them.
“You made Kevin stop running with scissors on the first ask. My janitor’s your janitor.
You’ve got glitter on you that will outlive us both.
And you married my best friend and didn’t invite me. ”
“That last one was her choice,” Lev says.
“It really was,” I admit.
Poppy points a finger at him, the exact finger she points at children who bite. “I’m watching you. I want that on the record. I have zero filter and a long memory, and if you make her cry, I will find where you keep your feelings, and I will run them over with her chair.”
“Understood,” Lev says, and there’s a thing at the corner of his mouth that only I can see, because I’m the only one in this conversation who’s spent enough days studying that face to catch a millimeter, but Poppy squints at him like she almost caught it too.
They leave through the fire door with the rock still propping it, which Lev pauses to remove and set inside, and Danil’s already got the photo up on his screen again, grinning down at it, and I sit alone in my glitter-storm classroom with my heart doing the jumps I swore I’d never let anyone watch me do.
Winning hand.
The bastard.