15. Vasilisa
Vasilisa
“Fourteen. You want to stop at fourteen, or you want to bleed for the last two?”
Natasha’s at the end of the bars with the timer she’s not using today because today isn’t seconds, today is steps, and I’m eleven steps into a thing I’ve never done, and my arms are two ropes fraying, and my legs are lit up and screaming, and I have never in my life felt this good and this destroyed at once.
“Sixteen,” I get out. “I want sixteen.”
“You’ve done twelve. Once.”
“Then sixteen’s a record, and you can write it with the red pen.
” I drag the right foot through, which is the hard one, Eliza’s been at that hip for three weeks, and it answers now where it used to sit there like luggage, and it comes through, and that’s twelve, tied, and my whole body wants to fold. “Don’t you dare catch me.”
“I never catch you.” Natasha’s hands hover, the way they always hover, close enough to matter but never touching. “You’ll catch yourself, or you’ll go down, and I’ll write down that you went down and you’ll come back Thursday and beat it. That’s the deal. That’s always been the deal.”
Thirteen. My arms are shaking so hard the bars ring with it.
Fourteen, and there’s sweat in my eyes and the fused place in my back has become a single struck match, and I’m breathing the way I breathe when the fire wins.
But I don’t let it win, I put the left foot through, fifteen, and I hear a sound come out of me I don’t recognize.
I drag the right through the mud one more time and that’s sixteen and I stand there at the end of eight feet of steel I’ve climbed like the tallest mountain on earth, and I’m crying, I’m actually crying, which I never do, tears are a budget line and I’m overdrawn, except apparently not today, today the account’s got sixteen steps in it.
I turn to find Natasha’s face.
And Lev’s in the doorway.
He’s in the doorway of the clinic in his black coat, and he’s been there, I understand all at once, he’s been there the whole time, and not just today.
Two weeks. The shape of him at the edge of the room on Tuesdays and Thursdays that I’d half-clocked and told myself was Danil, the black coat I’d catch and lose in the parking lot, the sense, some sessions, that the room had one more person breathing in it than it should.
He’s been coming to watch me count my seconds and now my steps, silent, standing where he thought I couldn’t see him, and he’s here now with sixteen steps hanging in the air between us, and his face.
His face is the face of a man shot somewhere he can’t put a hand over.
I should yell at him. That’s the whole catalogue of how I greet this man, I yell, he lets me, neither of us backs down.
He came to my sanctuary uninvited, again.
He watched the most private war I fight, again.
He’s standing in the one room that was mine before it was anything, and every rule I’ve got says I take his skin off for it.
I smile at him instead.
I don’t decide to. It’s just on my face, sixteen steps and tears and Lev in the doorway, and I smile at him across the clinic like he’s one of the people I keep the warm part for, the drawer I lock, the keys I hand to almost no one, and I watch him take the smile like a round to the chest. His jaw twitches.
The gray drops out of his eyes. He doesn’t come toward me, he doesn’t say a word, he just stands there in his coat looking like a building deciding whether to come down, and Natasha glances between us and very wisely finds something to write on her clipboard.
And that’s the moment. That’s the exact moment, and I’d give a lot to be able to say it snuck up on me, but it doesn’t sneak, it arrives like the bell over a first-grade room, loud and impossible to ignore.
I’m glad he was here to see it.
Not tolerant. Not resigned. Glad. Out of everyone on this earth I could’ve turned and found in that doorway, Poppy and the ghost of a mother I never met, the one I wanted, the one whose face made sixteen worth twice sixteen, was the killer in the black coat who bought me at a card table and put a knife through a man’s hand over the veal.
I’m in love with him.
There it is. No fight left in me to keep it out, wrung too empty by sixteen steps to slam the door I’ve kept slammed since the corridor, and it just walks in and sits down like it’s been renting the place for weeks.
I love him. I love a Bratva pakhan-in-waiting who oils my wheels at three in the morning and reads my pain in my breath before I say a word and counts my freckles when he thinks I’m asleep.
I’ve been performing okay-ness about him the way I perform okay-ness about everything, and the performance just cracked all the way through on the end of a set of parallel bars, and underneath it is this, plain and terrifying and mine.
“Sixteen,” he says, from the doorway, low.
“Sixteen.” My voice is wrecked. “Four better than twelve, which was the old record, which means I lapped myself, which means Eliza owes me a cookie and you owe me an apology for lurking.”
“I’ll get you the cookie.” He still hasn’t moved. “The lurking stands.”
“I know it does. You’re incapable of shame, it’s one of your three personality traits.” I lower myself into the chair I left exactly where my hand knew to find it, and my arms give out the second I’m down, and I don’t care, I’ve never cared less about anything. “How long?”
“Two weeks.”
“Every session?”
“Every session.” He finally comes into the room, four steps, and he crouches.
I let him, because today the crouch isn’t the spaniel crouch, today it’s a man getting down to be level with a woman who just climbed a mountain.
“You told me not to coach you. I didn’t.
You told me the bars were yours. I didn’t touch them.
I only watched. I wanted to see you win one. ”
“You could’ve told me you were there.”
“You’d have made it about me. This wasn’t about me.” His eyes are still doing the shot-through thing, and he’s close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off his body. “You made sixteen steps, Vasilisa. This is all you.”
And that, the man acknowledging my own victory and refusing to stand in it, that’s what I fall asleep replaying, warm the whole drive home, warm through dinner, warm in a way I haven’t let myself be about a person since a man packed a bag and taught me warm was a thing that got repossessed.
But it only lasts until eleven at night, which is when I find the file.
I wasn’t looking for it, I was looking for a charger.
Mine died, and his study’s got a drawer of them, and he’s downstairs in the club being ominous at somebody, so I roll in without knocking because we’re past knocking, we’re past a lot of things, and I open the wrong drawer looking for a cable, and my hand comes out with a folder instead.
I almost put it back, but then I see the tab with my name on it, my real one, Filatova, in his handwriting.
I open the file.
Telephoto. Long lens, grainy, the compression that means the camera was far away and the man behind it didn’t want to be seen.
Me on the school ramp, mid-laugh, a kid’s mitten in my hand.
Me transferring into my car in the clinic lot, mid-pull, the whole weight coming through my shoulders.
Me on the terrace of an apartment I didn’t live in yet.
Pages of me. My school’s address. My PT schedule, Tuesdays and Thursdays, in a hand that isn’t mine.
My father’s habits, where he drinks, where he owes, the tracks of a man being walked toward a table.
The floor of the world opens up under my chair.
I turn to the first page and notice the date.
It’s four months before the poker game.
Four months. Before my father ever sat down at his table.
Before three hundred and forty thousand dollars, before the gray suit, before the bare hanger and the empty tin.
Four months before the night my father supposedly lost me by accident to a man who saw my mother’s eyes in a photograph and improvised a marriage on the spot.
He didn’t find me across a card table. He planned for it. He set my father up.
He found me first, with a long lens, four months out, and then my father lost me to him, and now I’m sitting in his study at eleven at night with the whole beautiful accidental story coming apart in my hands like wet paper.
My little victory goes cold in my chest, and the warmth goes out of the day all at once, and I understand that I fell in love this afternoon with a man who has been lying to me since before he ever knocked on my door.