Analiese
Analiese
I don’t know what to say. It’s an unbelievable story, but there’s no doubt in my mind that he believes he’s hearing the voice of his mother telling him he’s going to die. The fact that we both lost our mothers at a young age — although mine simply ran off when I was baby — and that we’ve lost our fathers more recently should be something that binds us, but I can’t fathom this.
I don’t remember my mother’s voice. My father made sure nothing remained of her when he gave up on her return. And when he died, I was devastated, but it was cancer. It moved quickly — he died on the six-month anniversary of the diagnosis — but we knew. And my whole world was still with me, helping me through my grief. Tony even put me in therapy.
I can’t imagine surviving what Vasily went through. I question the voices, but I don’t know anything about schizophrenia. Does trauma cause it? I don’t know.
I do know that all those thoughts I had about his drug use and about whether he’s a viable solution I have for my problems is irrelevant now. Vasily needs help. I don’t know if I’m the person who can do it, but I have to do something. I feel like everyone else around him is more concerned about damage control.
We’re silent for a long time after Vasily says the voice tells him he’s going to die in Flagstaff. Thoughts like that are toxic. He’s going to make it happen simply because he thinks it’s going to. Which makes a new challenge for me.
We’re silent, but I don’t let go of his hand.
I’m going to figure this out, somehow.
Niko’s advice this morning drifts back to me. It was such a strange experience, sitting there face to face, knee to knee, confessing to a man who was having a casual conversation with me. In my church, the priests know who I am, but there’s still a sense of anonymity. There’s a comfort in believing that what they tell me is the same thing that they would tell anyone else and that what I tell them they won’t judge me for outside the confessional. With Nico, everything was right between us; at the same time, he was talking to me , telling me to do what was right for me .
Right for us.
For Nico, it wasn’t about obeying a book written two thousand years ago and rewritten over the generations, it was about what’s right for my soul.
And what’s right for Vasily’s. Nico was firm in his conviction that Vasily can be saved too, and not because of any rules about confession or communion. What Vasily’s just told me makes me believe it, too.
I reset my grip on his hand, just to make sure he knows that I’m still solidly here and wanting to hold him when I say, “The stuff I marked in those books, I didn’t want you to do any of that stuff, I just wanted—”
“Oh, fuck.”
“No, no, no. Let me finish. I highlighted them because—”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t apologize!” I talk quickly, squeezing his hand like I’m about to fall off a cliff and he’s my only hope of staying on solid ground. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I told you to do it, and you did exactly what I told you to do.”
“That’s why you pushed me away afterward,” he says morosely, and God love him because he actually attempts to curl up on his seat, bringing his feet up and doing his best to take his hand away from me so he can hold his knees. When his incredible size makes the position impossible, he gives up and scrubs at his forehead roughly enough I’m worried he’ll hurt himself.
“Hey, hey, hey, hey. Look at me. Absolutely not. You did everything just right. If you don’t look at me, I will pull this car over again.” I can’t look at him, not now that I understand why he’s uncomfortable with driving, but I need his attention on me. “I enjoyed it way more than I ever could have expected. I just feel like I need to tell you why I wanted that. It wasn’t any sort of kink I was into.” Or I didn’t think it was, but he definitely changed my mind. “I thought I was going to hate every second of it, but it wouldn’t matter because it would get me what I needed.”
“What’s that?”
A baby . But I can’t give him that level of honesty. I feel guiltier about it now, even if I refuse to waste the opportunity. “I wanted you to ruin me.”
When he’s silent for more than a second, I allow myself to glance at him.
He’s stricken. He looks every bit as devastated as he did that night when I insisted I shower by myself. I get the feeling that he worried that he’d ruined me in some way — or us , whatever that is — then, and I’ve just confirmed that he did.
“I have spent my entire life being perfect, absolutely unimpeachable, because I knew that when it came down to it, I had no control over who I would spend my life with. You understand that, right?”
My eyes are back on the winding road cutting through the mountains ahead of us, but in my peripheral, I can see Vasily’s jaw tightening, the vein in his neck ticking. “Tony’s going to sell you to the highest bidder,” he grinds out.
“And the better my reputation is, the better I’ll do. I don’t want to say it’s about money, but—”
“But if you have no control over anything else, better to have money than not.”
“Yes.”
He swallows and says, “I have no money. I can never be your highest bidder. You understand that, right?”
I guide his hand from the console into my lap again, needing to give him something more. “I didn’t want you to bid for me. It wasn’t about that. It was about the fact that Tony sold my most valuable bargaining chip to you — or, your brother,” I correct, knowing how poorly he feels about how we met. “And I had no idea if he was going to attempt to hide that in negotiations and hope that whomever he sold me to wouldn’t notice or care, or if he was going to sell me as damaged goods, or—”
“Don’t fucking call yourself that,” Vasily snarls, every bit as angry as he was when I confronted him about the drugs.
“I don’t consider myself that, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that Tony probably does. Did you hear what the last thing he said to me was?” Don’t be such a slut . God, those words taste like bile in my throat, and I’m only hearing them in my head. “So I still don’t know what he intends for me now. But if I’ve spent the last nineteen years being my best possible self just to end up living in a two-bedroom open concept apartment with the tiniest balcony in existence and a roommate who’s accidentally attempted to kill me” —I flash Vasily a quick, bright smile to show that I’m poking fun and not seriously trashing on the home I’ve gotten surprisingly comfortable in this week, the attempted homicide notwithstanding— “I’d rather it be with someone I choose instead of just a business connection who’s willing to buy me at a clearance price.”
Vasily rubs his thumb over my hand as he mulls this over, finally saying, “You wanted to make sure not a single man on Earth would want to buy you.”
I nod.
Another bout of silence before Vasily says, “You’re beautiful.”
I frown. I’ve heard it so many times in my life it’s become meaningless. It’s become expected, even deserved , because I’ve devoted so much of my time to it. Because my beauty, my reputation, and what’s going on between my legs are all that matter. But it feels different now, coming from Vasily. Like that’s literally all I am now, having lost the rest of it.
Even if he says it reverently.
But then he says, “And you’re so sweet and smart. You taught yourself how to cook in eight days. And now you’re wanting to try pierogies? And that video, what did it prove except something happened to you that was really horrible that you didn’t want? Wouldn’t that have protected your . . .” He pauses as he deliberates over the word, finally spitting out, “Value,” like it’s the dirtiest word he could have chosen.
I don’t want to explain this any further. Not that I’m mad at him, it’s just depressing, and when he says it like that, it makes me question whether this plan is going to work or not. He could be right. It might not matter nearly as much as I’ve been led to believe.
But I don’t want him to think I’m irritated if I simply tell him we’re not discussing it anymore, so I grin impishly and say, “Well, in all fairness, any man who saw that video is going to realize I’ll be comparing him to you, and I doubt any of them will compare.”
He laughs boldly at that and reaches across both of us to lay his hand on my cheek and hold me there as he lands a loud, wet smacker of a kiss on my temple.
“Stop!” I cry out, but I’m giggling too. I’m still laughing when I hear a buzzing sound and he fishes his phone out of his pocket.
He speaks rapidly in Russian. The sounds lack meaning to me, but I feel the temper in them. After several volleys, he hangs up and says, “We need to go to the hospital.”
Alex is conscious, thank God. Like Vasily, he carries the pungent scent of burning tobacco on him even in his hospital bed, even after surgery, and like Vasily, there’s a darkness about him that could have only come from a life of seeing too many terrible things — of doing too many terrible things himself — too young.
That’s the wild thing about Alex, though. He is young. Everyone else I’ve met is at least Vasily’s age if not much older, but Alex can’t be any older than Kseniya. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was my age.
“Hey, girl,” he says with a friendly smile as I enter the room on Vasily’s heels. “How you—” He has to stop as coughs wrack through his body and he attempts to hold his broken ribs with the arm that’s stuck in a sling. He also has a foot in a cast, and there are bandages all over his swollen face.
I hurry to his side to hit the call button to get a nurse in, but he takes the button from me and tucks it back under his good arm. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says with a weak smile as he dabs away the blood he’s just coughed up.
Total bull, but I get it. He’s got to look tough with the guys.
“Besides, we should probably keep hospital staff out in case, you know, fighting.” He nods to the men standing in the corner: Vasily, Artyom, Dima, and Kostya. All gigantic men, too big to fit in that small space, but somehow, they manage to take up a tiny corner while they converse in Russian.
No, not converse. The moment I look their way, Artyom says something in a low, angry tone. Vasily responds by grabbing the collar of his shirt, and Dima and Kostya wedge themselves in between them. Dima’s clearly trying to calm Vasily down, but I swear I catch a shimmer of glee in Kostya’s eyes over the chaos.
I don’t like him. I know Vasily thinks highly of him, but he rubs me the wrong way every time I see him.
Also, I’m tired of the fighting. I tell myself I shouldn’t like Artyom because my situation is about as much his fault as it is Tony’s, but I can tell he cares about Vasily. They fight as brothers do, but they love each other, too, and I wish they’d fight less.
I roll my eyes and turn back to Alex. “Do you need me to kick them out so you can get some sleep? I will.”
That has him laughing even though it pains him. I only met him the one time, on the drive up to Flagstaff, but he was nice to me. They all were except Kostya, and honestly, he just gave me a bad vibe and didn’t do anything to change my mind. The fact that Kostya’s apparently happy being Vasily’s driver despite having once been ousted from succession for avtorivet means he’s probably not a bad guy.
“I believe you’d really try to if I asked,” Alex says.
“Try to? No, I’d succeed. You think I can’t handle those boys?” I don’t think I can handle those boys. In fact, I’m pretty sure if I said anything, Vasily would just smile with his baby blue eyes and promise me everything’s fine — and that we’d stop for ice cream on the way home or something — and I’d forget I was kicking them out of the room and toddle right on back to Alex.
“I’m glad you’re doing okay,” Alex says.
“Oh my gosh, you shouldn’t be worried about me!” I blurt out. “Look at you! What can I do for you? Is there someone you want me to call so you’re not stuck here with these idiots? Your, uh, girlfriend or parents or something? Your brother? Niko’s your brother, right?”
“Yeah, I’ve already talked to him, but I told him not to worry. Or call our parents. They’re up in Chicago. It’ll just freak them out. No girlfriend.”
“Really? A looker like you?”
Alex coughs his laugh. “Not feeling pretty right now, if I’m being—” He cuts himself off with a Russian curse as the arguing behind me flips to English.
“She stays with me!” Vasily shouts.
Artyom fires back with, “It’s not safe.”
“She’s staying in Flagstaff!”
Artyom huffs in exasperation. “I just mean your apartment. She can’t be here now.”
“You think I’m gonna leave her on her own when Alex was just jumped by those skinhead fuckers while he was walking down the street in broad daylight?” As he shouts that, he reaches out for me, and I immediately toddle on over, just as predicted, and take his hand.
Artyom switches to Russian again, but he grumbles something as he gets his phone out and makes a call. While he’s chatting, Vasily fully engulfs me within him like I’m his favorite teddy and big brother’s threatening to take me away. Once Artyom wraps up his phone calls, there’s a short, calmer conversation with Vasily before Vasily spins me to face him and says, “Kseniya and Miguel are on their way to pick you up, okay? They’re going to take you back to the apartment so you can pack an overnight bag and you’ll spend the night with them. They know you’ve got the audition tomorrow, so Miguel’s gonna cook while you and Kseniya go over lines, whatever you need. And Kostya and I will pick you up in the morning to take you down to Phoenix for your audition. Does that sound good?”
No, I’d rather spend the night with Vasily now that I know Alex was jumped, and I’d much rather Vasily and I go to Phoenix without Kostya, as much because I don’t like Kostya as because I want to see if there’s some way other than drugs to help Vasily quiet his agitated mind. I don’t want Vasily to worry or to irritate him further, so I smile and nod.
I ignore the way he swipes a pill out of a little cup by Alex’s bed on our way down to the waiting room to meet Kseniya.