19. Vasilisa #2
“Five weeks after your accident, Kilroy bought a sixteen-foot boat,” Danil says. “He took it alone into Jamaica Bay in November. No life jacket, no float plan, no boating license. Before that month, he had never owned so much as a canoe.”
“Did they find him?”
“Two days later.”
“Accidental drowning.”
“That’s what the report says.”
“Loose end.”
“Tied off.”
I look down at the folder.
I have spent two years asking my own body why it quit on me. I used to sit in the shower with the water running and apologize to my right leg. Out loud, in the dark, at two in the morning, using the same voice I give a child who has failed a spelling test.
It’s all right.
We’ll get it next time.
I’m not angry.
I know you tried.
I have apologized to a limb hundreds of times. Every apology went to the wrong address.
My leg did not fail me.
Dennis Kilroy sat at the mouth of Vandeveer with his lights off and waited for a twenty-four-year-old first-grade teacher to come around a curve she had driven since she was seventeen.
He put eighty thousand dollars against the wheel, came at me off-line because he was too drunk to strike square, and then ran before he could see the woman he was paid to kill pulled from the wreckage alive.
“Danil.”
“Yeah.”
“Does Lev know about the recording?”
“Not yet.”
“You brought it to me first.”
“That was the agreement.”
“And if I told you not to give it to him?”
“I’d give you enough time to get home before I broke the agreement.”
“Very principled.”
“I cut four hundred name tags for you. I have nothing left to prove.”
I close the folder and place both hands over it.
“I’ll tell him.”
“Tonight.”
“That sounded suspiciously like an instruction.”
“It was.”
“God, I miss when you were pretending to be a janitor.”
“I was never pretending. Your supply closet was a disgrace.”
He takes his phone and opens the classroom door with his hip.
Ruslan waits at the bottom of the ramp beside the car, a paper cup in one fist, sunflower-seed shells dropping into it one at a time. He has been assigned to me for eight days. He learned the children’s names in four.
He calls me Miss Plaksin with the same two beats the six-year-olds give it, first syllable rising, and I have never corrected him.
“Miss Plaksin. Cold today.”
“It’s forty-eight degrees, Ruslan. In Italy this would be a beach.”
“You are not Italian.”
“I’m whatever gets me out of small talk about the weather.”
I lock the brakes beside the open car door, put one hand on the frame and begin the transfer. Half my weight is riding through my shoulders when the school’s brick starts coming apart above my head.
There is no bang at first.
That is the thing nobody tells you.
The wall turns to powder in a line, and the dust reaches my mouth before the sound arrives. Then the sound comes all at once from a gray van in the bus lane with its side door open.
It is not a bang. It is a sewing machine, fast and flat and businesslike.
My mind offers me the word firecrackers because my mind is a coward and wants this to be somebody’s birthday.
Ruslan puts himself over me.
He does not shove me down. He does not shout. He turns his back to the van and folds his entire body across the open car door with me beneath him.
The paper cup falls. Sunflower shells scatter across the mat.
He takes what was meant for me into his back at a range where nobody misses twice.
I land on the floor of the rear footwell with my legs hanging halfway outside and my face pressed into the carpet. The car is already moving because Danil has the wheel and he is not waiting for the door to close.
“Derzhis’. Hold on.”
The car reverses at forty miles an hour through a bus lane patrolled by a nun, climbs the curb, crashes down again and leaves the rear glass behind in one glittering sheet.
Ruslan is heavy.
That is all I understand for the first block. He is heavy, warm through his coat and growing warmer. The heat runs down the inside of my collar and into my ear.
“Ruslan. Stay with me. You’ve got a whole cup of seeds to finish. I’ve watched you ration those things, so don’t you dare die now.”
“Miss Plaksin,” he says with the two familiar beats, first syllable rising.
Then nothing.
The nothing continues.
A distant part of my mind realizes my wheelchair is still on the pavement outside the school. It lies on its side beside the ramp, one wheel turning, the low sun catching the yellow rim.
The call ended with eight words.
It’s done. She didn’t come out.
This time they will not make the mistake of leaving before someone checks.
Danil carries me upstairs.
There is a conversation about it that I lose in four words. I am not going to think about being carried into my own home by my husband’s second while another man’s blood dries against my neck.
He puts me on the couch and arranges my legs across the cushions before returning to the elevator. He stands in front of it like a mountain, one hand inside his coat, waiting.
It does not take ten minutes for the machinery to move.
The elevator doors open, and Lev comes out at a dead run.
He crosses the floor before the doors finish parting, coat open, moving past Danil as though Danil is furniture. Then he drops onto both knees beside the couch.
Both knees. All the way to the floor.
His hands begin at my face. They enter my hair and come out red. They move to my throat, collarbone and shoulders, then down my arms and across my ribs, searching both sides at once.
He says my name.
Then he stops speaking English.
The Russian comes low, fast and wrecked. I catch only two words.
“Zhiva. Zhiva. Alive. Alive.”
He repeats them like a man arguing with someone who is not in the room.
“It isn’t mine,” I tell him. “Lev. The blood isn’t mine. It’s Ruslan’s.”
He does not stop.
He gets both hands beneath my knees and works down each leg with his thumbs, checking a body he already knows better than my last three doctors. I let him.
Every place he touches comes alive at once, the entire traitorous switchboard lighting beneath another man’s blood.
His hands are shaking.
I close my fingers around his wrist, over the watch with its dead hands, and hold on.
“They thought I died the first time,” I say.
His searching stops.
I look into his face and give him the truth Kilroy sold for eighty thousand dollars.
“They know better now.”