“Dammit.” Why’d I hesitate? I took three candy bars myself and headed to the refrigerator section.
Milk, bread, and candy bars in hand, I set everything on the counter in front of the cashier and paid.
“Want a bag?”
“Yeah,” I said, my eyes lingering on the door. I wondered where he’d disappeared to. “Oh, wait.” I pulled the candy bars out. “Put those back on the shelf for me?”
“Uh—okay.… You wanna return them?”
“Yeah.”
“Hold on, lemme do a return.” He groaned at the effort even the thought of doing a return evidently took.
“No. You don’t have to do that. Just put them back—and leave the money in the till.”
He squinted at me, confused.
“Please?”
“Yeah, whatever.” He placed the candy bars behind the counter, and I headed for the door. “You meet all sorts of weirdos in this place,” he muttered even before the door began to shut behind me. “Shoulda stayed in Farthington. Nice and normal there.”
Alexi
Dealing with death, every family faces unique problems. Some war over possessions the dead left behind. Some squabble about unanswered questions and fight out their inner turmoil, wondering if there was something they still should have done, if there were words left unsaid.
There always are.
My family was no different in those things. We all had doubts and questions. Worldly possessions came into none of it—they never had mattered when we thought Mother was dead before, so why should they now?
But the unique problem we—nyet, I—was faced with was how to dispose of the body of a woman who never seemed to truly exist. Even in life, Mother had been more ghost than alive—at least when it came to open and public government documentation.
Pietr did not want to think about it—not any of it. Having seen his haggard expression after the cure took hold, I could only imagine what it was like to lose two such amazingly important things so close together. I dared not ask him to help. The mere idea of suggesting we get rid of Mother’s body, not give her the burial, the respect, she deserved, would be too much for my youngest brother.
I raked my hand through my hair, tugging at its roots; For nearly a month I had not wanted a cigarette like I did now. But Cat found every last one of them and emptied the last of the vodka, saying so many things had changed so fast, perhaps a few more dramatic changes were in order.
It seemed wrong for my little sister to be smarter about life than I was.
Standing before Mother’s carefully wrapped corpse, I decided there was nothing left to do but make a call.
“Allo?” a voice rich as the finest cognac said, and I was too easily drunk on the mere sound of Nadezhda again. “Allo?” she repeated, this time the cognac slipping away and the word sharpening like the sting of a wasp. “Alexi, I know it is you. Talk to me or hang up. I am a busy woman.”
“Nadezhda,” I whispered. “I need you—” I coughed and stuttered out a more acceptable truth. “I need … your help.”
“Of course you do,” she snapped. “Everyone needs my help. ‘Day in and day out,’ as they say. I am a popular girl.”
I envisioned her in some fancy hotel, checking her meticulously managed blond hair in a gilt-framed mirror far away from me. Far away from the trouble her associations with me brought.
The distance did not matter so long as she was safe. I had to remember that and believe that.
“Alexi,” she said again. “I have no time to chat. If you have merely called to hear the sound of my voice…”
“Nyet.” It was true, but it felt like lying, listening as intently as I did.
“Horashow. Then what is it, boy?”
I blinked. She did that sometimes, called me boy though we were nearly the same age. Sometimes, she had joked to me at a party in Moscow, you surprise me by being the more mature one. I sighed so deeply she had to hear. “She is dead, Nadezhda.”
“What?” Although she felt a million miles away, I heard the shock as plainly as if I had seen it on her face as her breath brushed out in surprise. “Who?”
“Mother.”
“Oh, Sasha—dear, sweet, Sasha…”
The back of my throat burned at the shift in her tone and attention. I coughed to keep from strangling the words fighting to get out. “It will be all right,” I assured her, though I knew I was bluffing.
“Shhh,” she soothed. She knew I was bluffing, too.
Damn it.
“Breathe, baby.”
But how could I when she was being so gentle with me? Damn the woman. I needed guidance, not tenderness. I needed logic and calm, the cool of rational thinking and emotional distance.
How would she respect me if I let grief overwhelm me and I buckled now?
“I simply need to know how to…” My breath caught, wedged around a lump swelling in my throat. “… how to dispose of her body.”
Nadezhda sighed.
I pushed ahead, using the awkward momentum the words helped build.
“She cannot be found … by anyone.… Is there a place? A method?”
“Da,” she whispered. “There is always a method.”
Carefully and quietly she explained the most efficient way to destroy all physical traces of the only woman who’d truly known me and still loved me—knowing all.
Jessie
I shoved the milk into the fridge and tossed the bread on the counter. Knowing all that I did still didn’t help me know how to help Pietr. I wanted to go home—back to the farm and the horses and the regular rhythm of what some people in Junction still called “city folk” presumed was a simpler life.
Normalcy. The sweet lure of an average life.
I wanted that. And now.
But I couldn’t leave because the thought of going home so soon after Tatiana’s death made my stomach twist. I’d be abandoning Pietr.
And I couldn’t do that.
But I was no good to him as some shadow occasionally wrapping its arms around him and muttering soft and soothing noises. My contribution to his happiness was utterly lame. I’d lost my own mother and I still didn’t know what he needed now that he’d lost his.
Propping my elbows on the counter, I rested my head in my hands. It felt heavy—oddly foreign. Maybe something more was going on inside some deep recess of my brain.… The hairs on my arms rose in warning. Fumbling for my phone, I considered calling Sophie. Maybe she’d had some weird vision thing, too.…