Epilogue
Lev
“You’re holding those juice boxes like they’re evidence.”
Poppy says it from the shade of the pavilion with a clipboard under her arm and a whistle around her neck she has not earned and will not surrender.
Eighteen months of Sunday dinners and she talks to me the way she talks to Kevin, which is to say she has never once been afraid of me and has stopped pretending she ought to be.
“They’re leaking.”
“They leak. That’s the deal with a juice box, that’s its whole point. You puncture it with a straw, and then you carry the consequences.” She takes four off the top of my stack and goes down the line of coolers. “Table two, and don’t let Amelia near the grape.”
Brighton Beach in July, ninety degrees, the train going over on its stilts, and two hundred yards of boardwalk cordoned off for a first-grade class picnic that has grown a lot of guests nobody invited.
Yefim is under an umbrella with three other old men and a folding table of pickled things they brought from home, and he has been telling the same story about a customs official in Odessa for forty minutes to a rotating audience of seven-year-olds who do not understand one word and refuse to leave.
Down on the sand, Danil is running the sack race.
He has a stopwatch. He has drawn lanes with a rake, and he has been out here since seven in the morning because the tide comes in over the finish line and he wanted the geometry right. He is on one knee in the sand in front of Louis, who has come in fourth and is taking it hard.
“You went early,” Danil says. “You came out of the box before I said the word, so you spent the first ten feet correcting, and then you had nothing left at the end. That’s not slow. That’s early. Next heat you wait for the word.”
“But everybody else went early.”
“Everybody else lost too.” Danil sets him back at the line. “Wait for the word.”
Louis waits for the word. Louis wins the next heat by a length and a half and comes up the beach with his fists over his head, and Danil turns to the parents with a face I have not seen on that man since 2021.
Vasilisa is at the rail on the boardwalk with the cane hooked over the top bar, watching him.
The chair is in the trunk two hundred feet behind us.
Some Sundays it comes out on the boards with us, and she takes the whole promenade in it.
Today it stays in the trunk, and she does the boardwalk on the brass, slow, with her hand in mine, and she calls it a cane day the way somebody else would call it a nice day.
“Table two is out of grape,” I tell her.
“Table two was always going to be out of grape. Table two is Amelia’s table.” She takes my arm to shift her weight off the right side for a second, then takes it back off. “You’ve got sand in your shoes.”
“I have.”
“You could have worn something other than dress shoes to a beach picnic.”
“I own four pairs of shoes, and they’re all the same pair.”
“I know. It’s one of your three personality traits.
” She turns her face up. She’s got the freckles all the way out, she’s been on the terrace every afternoon this summer purely because she knows what it does to me, and I stopped being able to keep count of them the first winter and never told her.
“Fifteen minutes and then the relay, and you’re anchoring the parents’ team. ”
“No.”
“Mr. Delgado has already announced it. He brings orange slices, Lev, he’s the most powerful man on this beach, and you know it.”
I anchor the parents’ team. We come second. Mr. Delgado runs a leg like a man half his age and shakes my hand at the finish with both of his. I stand on the sand in Brighton Beach with a rib that still aches in the cold and forty people applauding a thing that does not matter at all.
At four the cars come to take the coolers back, and my wife’s kids go home covered in salt and gold glitter that will be in their houses until Christmas, and I sweep the boards with a push broom Poppy hands me without asking.
We’re home by six.
The apartment is quiet, the terrace doors open, the city doing what it does forty floors down. She’s washing the paste out of her hands at the low sink, and I’m putting the coolers away, and when I come back she’s at the island with a box in front of her.
It’s small. Blue paper, a ribbon somebody’s made a mess of and then given up on. She has her hands flat on either side of it.
“Sit down,” she says.
“That’s my line.”
“I stole it. Sit down.”
I don’t sit down. I stand across the marble from her with the box between us, and I look at her face, and there’s a thing in it I have not seen in eighteen months of marriage, not on the estate floor, not in a hospital corridor, not on any night since.
Her hands are steady. Her hands are always steady, they lie like professionals, but she has gone entirely still in a way she does not go, and my chest has already started doing something ahead of my head.
“Open it.”
The ribbon comes off. The lid comes off. There’s tissue paper, and under the tissue paper there’s a pair of socks the size of my thumb, knit in yellow, sunflower yellow, the exact yellow of the enamel that has been drying on a set of rims in this apartment since our first winter.
The kitchen goes out.
“Fifteen weeks,” she says. “I’ve known nine days. I wanted the picnic first, I wanted one whole day of you carrying juice boxes before your entire personality changed.”
I have been shot. I have been cut. I stood in a fish house off Emmons Avenue at fifteen and said yes, that’s my father, with three of them and one of me.
Nothing in the whole inventory of my life has done to me what a pair of yellow socks on a marble island does in the four seconds after she stops talking.
I go around the island, and I go down.
Not a crouch. All the way down, both knees on my own kitchen floor, and I get my arms around her hips and put my face against her belly through the shirt, and I hold on to my wife like a man holding a rail in a storm.
Her hands come into my hair.
“Natasha knows, Eliza knows, and neither of them will promise me anything, which is exactly why I trust them,” she says above me.
“It’s going to be hard on the spine. It’s going to be a bad third trimester, and there’s a real conversation coming about the delivery, but I’m not doing the brave face about any of it, I’m telling you the whole thing up front, because you’re going to try to buy me a specialist within the hour, and I’d like to be consulted first this time. ”
“I’ll ask.”
“Say it properly.”
“I’ll ask you first.” My voice has gone somewhere I don’t recognize, and I let it stay there. “Every time. Before the specialist, before the room, before anything gets decided. You hold the pencil.”
“Good,” she says, and her thumb moves once behind my ear.
I don’t get up. I keep my face where it is, and I go somewhere I have not been since I was a boy in my mother’s kitchen in a house that smelled like bread, and I do the thing I have not done since a man came to that kitchen with a watch in a paper bag and I decided nobody was listening.
I pray.
I don’t do it well. I don’t have the words in either language, and I don’t bargain, because I know what I am and I know what I’ve done, and there isn’t a saint painted on any wall in Brighton who’d take my money.
I ask for one thing, and I ask for it in Russian with my forehead against my wife’s body, and the ask is this.
Let her come through it. Let both of them come through it. Take the rest off me in any order.
Her hand stays in my hair.
For nineteen years, I climbed toward a chair where a man signed a piece of paper.
I took it. It’s mine, all of it, the money and the soldiers and the whole borough, and Semyon Krutov is under a slab in New Jersey where the trucks park, and Ustin Filatov’s house belongs to Matvei Etush’s son.
I did every single thing I set out to do at fifteen, and I could not tell you the last morning I thought about any of it before my feet hit the floor.
I think about a set of parallel bars and the number she comes home with.
I think about fourteen steps across this apartment and a cane with a fifty-year groove in the brass.
My father’s watch is going on my wrist against her hip, both hands moving, the second hand coming around and around, and under my ear there’s the other sound, the one I’ve been listening to for eighteen months in the dark on the nights she falls asleep first.
I spent twenty years clawing toward a throne, only to find out the empire was always going to be this. Her heartbeat, and now, impossibly, another one.
The end.
Thank you for stepping into Vasilisa and Lev’s dark, violent world in The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress.
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