Chapter 28
NORA
The estate has gone quiet in the way a barn goes quiet right before a horse goes down, and I have spent enough years in barns to hate the sound of it.
There are men at the gate now who weren't here a week ago.
Four where there used to be one, in a black SUV that never turns its engine off.
Two more walk the fence line in the dark with the dogs, and a third sits on the roof of the garage I'm not supposed to know about.
Lev moved them in the night they took Isaak.
He didn't ask me. He stood in the motor court, still, his eyes flat, and told me the new rules in a voice that left no room in it. I stood there with my hand on my stomach, eighteen weeks of it now, a real curve I can't hide under a sweater anymore, and I didn't argue.
"You don't leave the property," Lev says. We're in the kitchen. It's the third morning. "Not the gate, not the road, not the feed store. Marisol comes here. The doctor comes here. You want air, you walk the garden, and you take Borscht."
"And if I want to see my husband?"
"That's the one place you go." He sets a paper on the counter, a printed sheet, a name, a number, a date. "Sol arranged it. Visiting's Thursdays. I drive you myself."
I look at the paper. Men's Central. An address downtown I've never had reason to learn. There's a list of rules under the date, what I can wear, what I can't bring, how long I get.
"Forty minutes," I say.
"Forty minutes through glass." Nothing of Lev moves.
The blankness is the tell. He has gone emptier than a man goes when nothing is wrong, the way I understand he hates this as much as I do and would sooner die than say so.
"No contact. You talk on a phone. You'll be searched going in and coming out.
They'll make you feel like the criminal.
" He turns his cup a quarter turn on the counter, the one tell he has.
"He told me to make sure you go. Every week. He was specific."
"He doesn't get to be specific about my Thursdays from a cell."
"No," Lev says. "He doesn't. The ex has been seen near Glendale twice this week. Near your clinic. I don't know why yet." He goes.
The television is the worst of it.
I stop watching the news by the fourth day, but the household doesn't, and so I get it secondhand, in pieces, from a screen Yuri forgets to turn off when I come into the den.
There's the man himself, Wade Hutchins, on the courthouse steps with a microphone in his face and a neck brace he doesn't need.
He's doing the thing he did to me in the rearview, the almost-kind face, the appetite working under it like he's already enjoying what he's taking, except now there's a camera to perform it for.
"He put his hands on me," Hutchins says to the reporter, and his eyes are watering on cue.
I want to put my boot through the glass.
"I was conducting a lawful stop and this man, this so-called businessman, assaulted a peace officer in front of forty witnesses.
People in this community have been afraid of these men for years. Afraid to speak. Today I'm speaking."
Yuri makes a sound in Russian I don't need translated.
"Turn it off," I say.
He scrambles for the remote, nineteen and furious, his ears red. "He is lying. Nora. He is lying with his whole face, they let him stand there, and they put his lie on the television like it's true."
"I know."
"You were there. You know what he did to you in the car." Yuri's hands are shaking. He's got Pelmeni in his lap, the kitten asleep on him because Waffle goes where Isaak's warmth used to be and Yuri is the closest thing. He's holding him too tight. "I want to. I shouldn't say what I want."
"Then don't." I sit down next to him. The screen's dark now.
The room smells like the cold coffee nobody's drinking, the wood wax Vera keeps running over the furniture whether anyone's here or not, under it the dogs, and under that nothing, the empty-house nothing of a place built for a man who isn't in it.
"Saying it out loud is how people end up where he is. You understand me?"
Yuri looks at me. "Is that why you don't say it?"
I don't answer that. I scratch the kitten's ear and let him think I didn't hear it.
The doctor comes that week. Dr. Anand drives up in a little gray car the gate men sweep top to bottom while she stands in the gravel with her bag and her unbothered face.
When they finally wave her through she comes inside and sets up in the morning room like it's a clinic.
She puts the cold gel on the curve of me and finds the heartbeats.
Three of them.
"There," she says. "And there. And there's the stubborn one, behind the others, making me work.
" She moves the wand. The sound fills the room, fast, wet, impossibly loud, three small gallops out of sync.
"Eighteen weeks. They're the size of sweet potatoes, if you want a thing to picture.
You're measuring right where you should. "
I have heard this sound four times now. It doesn't get smaller.
I put my hand over my mouth and I don't cry in front of the doctor, because crying is a thing I do alone at two in the morning where the house can't hear it.
But it's close, it's right there, three heartbeats and the man who put them in me in a cage forty minutes south.
"He should be here for this," I say.
Dr. Anand wipes the gel off me, gentle, professional, and she doesn't pretend she doesn't know what's happened, because half the valley knows.
"He should," she says. "I'll write it all down.
Every measurement. You take it to him." She caps her pen.
"And you eat. You've lost weight you can't spare and you're feeding four.
Whatever the stress is doing to your stomach, you fight it.
That's the only instruction I'm giving you that isn't a suggestion. "
Vera takes that instruction like a commandment from God.
She doesn't ask me what I want. She just starts cooking, all day, the whole house smelling like onions, dill, bread.
She sets a plate in front of me three times a day and stands there with her arms crossed until I've eaten enough of it to satisfy whatever scale she's running in her head.
She doesn't say a word about Isaak, not one, until the fifth night, when she sets down the bowl and doesn't walk away.
"My husband was inside," Vera says. "Long time ago. Different country." She says it to the stove, not to me, a truth said sideways. "Four years. I went every visit they let me. Every one. Rain, no rain, money for the bus or no money, I went."
I look up from the bowl. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you are going to want to stop going.
" She turns around. Her face holds dead still while her eyes fill anyway, the only crack she lets show.
"Around week six, week seven, when nothing changes, when the glass is still glass and you cry the whole drive home.
You will think, it's better for him if I don't come, I just make it worse, I remind him what he's lost. You will be wrong.
" She picks up the bowl, checks it's empty, sets it back down.
"You go anyway. You hear me? Doesn't matter what he says through that phone. You go. The going is the whole thing."
I eat. She watches. Borscht puts his enormous head on my knee under the table and sighs like the weight of the world.
Pelmeni, the smaller one, lies across both my feet.
For a second the kitchen is warm in a way the rest of the house isn't, four animals, an old woman, three heartbeats.
I think a thing I have been circling for a week and finally let myself say plain.
I had a way out. I always had a way out.
I think about it that night, in the bed that's too big now, with the dogs up on it because nobody's here to tell them no.
When my father died there was a life waiting for me that was small and clean, a clinic job in a town nobody famous lives in, a duplex, a dog of my own, anonymity like a held breath. I could have taken it. I almost did.
I came into this man's world owing him nothing, warned by everyone I trusted. At the door of it I had a choice, the clean quiet life behind me and the gate in front of me. I walked through the gate.
I told myself then it was the box, the debt, the no-other-option of it. It wasn't.
Here is what I know now that I didn't let myself know then.
His money can't fix this. The man who could make any problem disappear with a phone call is sitting in an orange jumpsuit unable to make the simplest one disappear, the one that matters, the one that's him.
All that reach Hutchins keeps sneering about on the television has come down to a sheet of paper that says Thursdays and forty minutes.
Everything that made him untouchable is on the other side of glass. And I'm still here. I chose the gate when it was a velvet rope. Now it's a chain-link fence with armed men on it, and I wouldn't trade places with the woman in the duplex for anything in this world.
I'd rather be locked in with them than free without them.
That's the whole of it. That's what I couldn't say at the start and can say now that it's plain. I don't want the exit. I want the people the lockdown is keeping me with.
Thursday comes.
Lev drives. He doesn't talk. The freeway south is gray and ordinary, strip malls, billboards, then the building, which is enormous, the color of nothing, then the parking, then the line.
There's a line of women, mostly, a few men, some children, and we stand in it in the heat.
I keep both hands on the curve of me because it's the only thing that feels real.