Chapter 36
NORA
The vending machine in the contact room only takes quarters, so I bring a sandwich bag of them now. The first week I came with a twenty and a card. I learned fast that in here I'm as broke as everybody else.
I keep turning the quarters over on the drive down.
Out there the man I married can buy a building before lunch.
In here he can't get himself a bag of pretzels off a machine, and neither can I unless I plan for it like a ten-year-old saving for a bike.
So I plan for it. Two rolls of quarters in my coat, my ID, a clear pocket they can see through, and the kind of bra that doesn't set off the wand, because I learned that one the hard way too.
They moved him to contact visits three weeks ago, which means a bolted table instead of the glass, a guard by the door, one hug at the start that can't last longer than the guard decides it can.
I take the hug. I'm twenty-five weeks along and the bump gets between us.
He laughs against my hair, the first time I've heard him laugh since the gate closed on him.
I would buy that sound with every quarter I own.
"You're enormous," he says.
"I'm carrying three of your children, you charmer."
"I'm aware of the count." He pulls back to look at me, both hands still on my arms because that's allowed. His eyes go down to the bump and back up, his brows drawn in, his mouth pressed tight against whatever wants to break it open. "Three. Every time you walk in I have to learn it again."
"Sit down before the nice man with the clipboard decides you're hugging me felonious."
We sit. The table's the kind that's all one piece, bench welded to top, so we're stuck across from each other at a fixed distance the state picked.
His hands come onto the table. I put mine over them before I've decided to, and he lets me.
Two months ago he wouldn't have, not in front of a guard, not anywhere someone could see it and read a weakness in him.
His knuckles have healed since the last time. The tape's gone. There are two pale seams where the splits were, and a yellow-green smudge of old bruising fading off the back of one hand. I run my thumb over the new seams the way I'd check a horse's leg, slow, both sides.
"You said you'd tell me," I remind him. "Every mark."
"I did say that."
"So." I keep my thumb moving. "These two. Walk me through it."
He looks at our hands. "The young one came first, with the shank. I got his wrist. The split's from his teeth, after, when he was already going down and got a hand up." He says it flat, the way Lev says everything. "The other's the wall. We went into it together. That one's just concrete."
"And your face."
"His thumbnail." He doesn't touch the butterfly scar at his brow, half-healed now, a thin pink line through the dark. "He was going for the eye. He got the brow."
"Going for your eye." I have to put that down somewhere and there's nowhere to put it, so I keep my hands on his, breathing through it the way Dr. Anand taught me. "Okay. Thank you for telling me the real version."
"You asked for it."
"I'll always ask for it." I mean it as a soft thing and it comes out as a vow.
He shifts under my touch until our palms are together, no glass this time, warm, his thumb finding the side of my hand.
For a second neither of us says anything.
The want of it's so big in that ugly room I have to look at the vending machine.
"Pretzels or the orange crackers," I say, to have something to say. "I'm buying. I'm a woman of means, I've got eleven dollars in quarters."
"The crackers are stale."
"Everything in here is stale, that's the whole brand." I dig out a roll, crack it on the table edge, thumb four quarters loose. "Crackers it is. Don't argue with a pregnant woman about snacks, Isaak, it's a fight you can't win and the baby's on my side. All three."
He watches me feed the quarters into the slot, punch the buttons, catch the crackers out of the trough, and when I sit back down his face has gone open the same way again, undefended, like he forgot to put the wall back up. This time I make myself hold it instead of running from it.
"What?" I say.
"You drove an hour for this."
"I drove an hour for you. The crackers are a bonus."
"You do it every week." He says it like he's reading evidence into a record.
"Every week, bigger than the last, through the wand, the pat-down, the quarters, to sit at a steel table and watch me eat a dollar's worth of stale crackers.
There's nothing in it. I've got nothing to give you in here. I can't even buy the crackers."
"I know."
"I keep waiting for the week you don't come."
There it is, the wound, laid out plain on a bolted table between a vending machine and a guard. I split the cracker pack open, put half in front of him, take a piece myself, because if I look right at it he'll bolt, same as anything that's been hurt enough times.
"You're going to be waiting a long time," I tell him, chewing, casual as church. "I've got nothing better to do on a Thursday. The company at home is two dogs and your brother. Dima reorganized my spice rack by cuisine. I had to leave the house."
He huffs a laugh, the watching eases a notch, and I count it a win.
"Tell me about a mark that isn't from this place," I say.
He goes still. Not the bolting kind. The kind where a door I've been knocking on for five months finally has somebody standing behind it.
"You've seen the one on my ribs," he says.
"The one low on the left. Since the first night. I never asked." I keep my voice in the same easy register I'd use on a colt that's deciding whether to let me near. "I'm asking now. Who did that to you?"
For a while he doesn't answer. The guard by the door checks his watch. Somewhere behind me a kid is crying, a woman shushing it in Spanish, soft and tired. Isaak's thumb moves slow over my knuckles, his eyes down on our hands, on the place where the glass used to be and isn't.
"My father," he says.
I don't move. I made the mistake once early on of reacting too fast to a hard thing he handed me and watched him take it back. So I sit, hold his hand, and let the room be quiet around the size of it.
"I was eleven." His voice drops under the noise of the room, level, almost gentle, like he's telling it to the baby and not to me.
"He had a man come to the house twice a week to train me.
Boxing, knife, the cold-room work, all of it, because a son who could fight was worth something to the organization and a son who couldn't was a liability he'd have to carry.
That was the word he used about his own child. Liability."
He breathes. "One morning I quit in the middle.
I was eleven and tired. I sat down on the floor of the gym and said I was done.
He came down himself, put me back on my feet, and taught me with a knife from his own pocket what quitting does to a Radulov.
Low on the left. Six stitches he did at the kitchen table after, because a hospital asks questions. "
"Isaak." His name is all I've got.
"He wasn't drunk. That's the part people always want, that he was drunk, that it was a rage he didn't mean.
" He shakes his head, slow. "He was completely calm.
His hand didn't even hurry. I learned that morning what I was to my own father.
Something that earned its keep or got crossed out.
The only love in that house came with a number on it, and he could withdraw it with a knife when I came up short. "
He breathes. "I never told anyone that. Not Dima. Dima got out before it got bad, he doesn't know the half of it. Not one woman in forty years. They saw the scar. They thought it was a war story. I let them."
The crying kid behind me has gone quiet.
My eyes are wet and I let them be, because he just handed me the why of the whole man, the reason he can't believe a sandwich comes free.
The worst of it's how gently he tells it, like he stopped being able to be angry about it a long time ago and only the lesson stayed.
"That's why you wait for the invoice," I say.
"That's why I wait for it." He says it simply, like it's the most ordinary fact about himself. "Always have."
"Your own father taught you that love is a thing you earn and he could take it back with a knife if you didn't."
"He taught me there's no such thing as the free kind.
" He looks at our hands, mine over his, the scar I can't see through the jumpsuit but know the exact place of now.
"And then a ranch girl with a foul mouth started bringing me crackers in a cage with nothing I could hand back to her, breaking the only thing I was ever sure of. "
I laugh, wet, undignified, and squeeze his hand hard enough that the guard glances over.
"Good," I tell him. "Stay broke."
He turns that over. His eyes go bright and stay that way, his throat moving, the line of his mouth gone unsteady before he can set it.
For a second the most dangerous man in three counties looks eleven years old on a gym floor.
I want to climb the welded table, put myself between him and every year of it.
"Last week," he says. "On the phone. Through the glass. What I said in Russian."
My pulse goes sideways. He promised me the English of it. He promised next week, no glass. Here's no glass, and I have wanted those words for fourteen days like water.
And I watch him reach for them. I watch what it takes out of him in this room, with the guard, the vending machine, a kid crying somewhere, his father's knife still bleeding in the air between us.
If he says it here, like this, to fill the promise, on a Thursday because I'm owed it, then it arrives as a debt squared away, which is the one shape his whole wound is built on, and I won't do that to the first clean thing he's ever tried to give for free.
So I do the hard thing instead.
"Don't," I say, soft.
He stops.
"Not here." I lace my fingers into his, careful of the healed seams. "Not because you promised, not because I'm sitting here owed it, not to a schedule with a guard counting us down.
I don't want it paid, Isaak. I want it given.
So you hold onto it." I have to stop and steady my voice.
"You walk out of here a free man, on your own two feet, no glass, no bolted table, nobody's clock running.
You say it then, when it doesn't cost a thing and nobody's collecting. That's the only way I'll take it."
He looks at me like I've reorganized something in him as thoroughly as Dima did my spices.
"You're turning down the words," he says, low. "You've wanted them all week. I can see you wanting them right now."
"I'm wanting them so bad I could spit." My eyes spill over and I don't wipe them. "And I'm telling you to keep them until they're free, because that's the whole entire point of me. I'm not here to collect on you, not ever. Make me wait for it. Make us both wait."
The guard calls the five-minute warning into the room. The families around us start the long slow business of standing up, of last touches, of children being lifted for one more hold.
Isaak brings my hand up off the table, as far as the welded bench lets him, turns it, and presses his mouth to the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse, the only kiss this room allows. He holds it there a beat too long for the guard's liking.
"Then I'll say it the day I walk out," he says against my skin. "First thing. Before anything else. No glass, no clock, nothing between us."
"First thing," I agree, my voice only half working.
"Bring quarters Thursday."
"I always bring quarters Thursday." I stand, both hands flat on the bump because standing's a production now, and he watches every part of it, his eyes tracking me up, holding on too long, like he's storing it against the days I'm not here.
I memorize his face for the drive home. "Eat the other half of your crackers.
You're too thin. Surviving wet floors burns calories, apparently. "
"Nora."
"I know," I tell him, because I do, because it's the same thing in his face that he tried to hand me in Russian through a sheet of scratched plastic, and I'd rather see it than hear it cheap. "I know. Save it. Thursday after you're out, you can say the whole thing and I'll let you."
I make myself walk to the door, hand my visitor badge to the woman at the desk, and not look back.
Because if I look back at him sitting alone at that bolted steel table with half a pack of stale crackers, his father's lesson, and four syllables he's not allowed to spend yet, I won't get out of this building on my feet. One of us has to, today, so it's me.
In the parking lot I sit in the truck for a while before I trust myself to drive. My phone buzzes. Sol Reyes, two words and a thumbs that isn't an emoji because he's sixty.
It's filed.
The whole package, Dima's crypto trail, the wallets, the wire dated the night my father died, the payments to a sheriff, all of it, in front of a district attorney as of this afternoon.
I read it twice. Then I put both hands on the wheel, the bump against it, and I say it out loud to the three of them, the thing I won't say to him until he's free to hear it without a price.
"Almost, babies," I tell them. "Almost. Hold on a little longer. Your father's coming home, and the first thing he's going to do is finally say it out loud."