Death of a Nightingale

Natasha had ended up on the wrong side of the lake, and there was only one way to deal with that. She had to get hold of a car.

The realization had been gnawing at her since the previous evening, or rather the previous night, because at that point it had been almost 2 A.M., and even if she had dared take a train or bus, they weren’t running any longer, at least not to where she was going.

She had been so tired that her bones hurt. In particular her knees and the small of her back ached from the many freezing kilometers, and she knew that she couldn’t walk much farther without resting.

Most of the houses on the quiet street lay dark and closed behind the snowy hedges. But she could hear music and party noises and beery shouts, and when she got to the next street corner, she saw three young men peeing into a hedge outside a whitewashed house that was alight with boozy festivities. She stopped, half sheltered by the fence of the corner lot, leaning for a moment against the cold tar-black planks.

“Laa, la-laa, la-laa …” roared one of the peeing men, loudly and in no key known to man. “Laa, la-aa, la-laaa … Come on!”

The two others joined in, which didn’t make it any more tuneful.

“We are the champions, my friend …”

She realized that they were celebrating some kind of sports victory. Presumably basketball—she suddenly saw how alike they were physically: broad shouldered, yes, but primarily tall, and younger than she had thought at first; she had been fooled by their height.

Yet another young boy emerged from the house. He seemed more low-key than his peeing buddies, just as tall but a little skinnier, a little more awkward. His dark hair looked damp and spiky, and he wore glasses. A girl tottered after him in high heels she could barely manage, the strap of her pink blouse falling halfway off one shoulder.

“Robbie, don’t go yet!” she shouted shrilly.

“I need to get home,” he said.

“Why? Dammit, Robbie … You can’t just … Robbie, come onnnn!”

One of the three at the hedge quickly zipped up and tried with similarly incoherent arguments to convince Robbie to stay, but he shook them off.

“I’ll see you guys,” he said and started walking with long, fairly controlled steps down the street in the direction of Natasha. The girl stood looking after him, her arms folded across her chest.

“Robbie,” she wailed, but one of the guys by the hedge put an arm around her and pulled her along with him back into the house. Robbie continued down the sidewalk as if he hadn’t heard her.

Natasha was about to back up so that he wouldn’t notice her, but he didn’t go all the way to her corner. Instead, he stopped at a dark blue car not far from her.

“Whoo-hoo,” one of the remaining party boys commented. “Does Daddy know you’re driving his Audi?”

“They’re skiing,” said Robbie. “They won’t be home until Thursday.”

He remained standing with the keys in his hand as if he didn’t feel like getting in while they were looking on. Not until they had followed their friend and the girl into the house did he unlock the car.

He was so tall. There was no way she’d be able to hit him and get away with it, and she no longer had a cobble or any other weapon. But he had a car key. And a car.

Without a car, she couldn’t reach Katerina. Without a car, they couldn’t get away, and they had to. In her mind, she once again heard the voices from the parking lot outside police headquarters. There was nothing recognizable about them, and what they had said wasn’t alarming in itself. “It has to be today. Understand?” Ordinary words, not threatening—but spoken in Ukrainian. She felt a fresh rush of panic just thinking about it.

She glided up behind the rangy young man and placed her hand on his, the hand in which he held the keys.

“Not good,” she said in English. “Not good to drive after drink.”

A good guess—the short delay in his reaction revealed that he had been drinking. Not as much as the others but probably still quite a bit. He stared at her as if he was trying to remember how they knew each other. She took the keys out of his hand, opened the door quickly and got in.

“Hey, wait …” He stuck his leg in so she couldn’t close the door and quickly grabbed the wheel. “What are you doing?”

Driving, she told herself silently. Driving to Katerina. But clearly he wasn’t planning to just let her do so.

“Robbie,” she said again in English. “Bad for you to drive. Let me. I take you home.”

He looked at her through slightly foggy glasses. Using his name had had an effect. He thought they knew each other even though he wasn’t sure how. And he was drunk. More than it had appeared at first.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “You drive, er …”

“Katerina,” she said with her most dazzling smile. “Don’t you remember? It’s Katerina.”

HE DIDN’T FALL asleep in the car as she had hoped. Instead he directed her through the suburban streets, closer to the lake that separated her from Katerina, and finally got her to turn into a drive and park in front of a garage and a yellow brick house with old ivy growing all the way to the roof. The branches from the large silver birch at the entrance were weighted so heavily with snow that they brushed across the car’s roof. She turned off the engine and tried to leave the key in the ignition, but he was still too much on guard and pulled it out himself.

“Thank you,” he said. And then apparently was struck by a thought beyond getting to his own front door. “What about you?” he asked. “How will you get home?”

She forced herself to look away from the car keys in his hand and into his eyes.

“Maybe you ask me to stay?” she said.

She felt anything but attractive. Her hair had been wet with snow several times, and the shirt under the down jacket was stiff and sticky with old sweat. She only had a little bit of mascara on, if it wasn’t smeared under her eyes by now, and she knew she was very, very far from the beautiful Natasha that Pavel had once shown off to selective friends as “my lovely wife.”

He sucked in air, making a sharp, startled sound. But somewhere a surprising degree of sophistication appeared from beneath the boyish awkwardness.

“You are very welcome,” he said. “This way, madame.”

“Katerina,” she corrected him gently. “Or you make me feel like an old woman.”

SHE WOKE UP abruptly many hours later with a feeling of panic racing through her veins. Her head hurt, and she was once again sticky with sweat. The clean comforter that lay so lightly across her naked body had never been anywhere near a prison laundry, but it wasn’t Michael lying next to her; it couldn’t be, not anymore. The panic subsided.

It had grown light outside. Grubby grey winter light fell on piles of clothing, basketball shoes, a desk that had almost disappeared under heaps of books and paper, a green carpet marked with white lines like a basketball court. She hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but the velvety blackness of her own unexpected orgasm had swept her into unconsciousness.

She felt a sudden tenderness for the overgrown boy who lay snoring with his face deep in the pillow—even more lost to the world than she herself had been. To be touched by another person. A person who hadn’t pulled on clear plastic gloves to examine her body. A person who wanted to bring her desire, not pain. When was the last time she had experienced that? Not since Pavel.

She hadn’t needed to sleep with him. He had left the car keys on a little table in the foyer. There had been several chances, but she hadn’t seized them. Instead she had drunk shots and beer with him, and they had kissed on the sofa with way too much tongue, as if she were a teenager again. As if she were seventeen and had just met Pavel. And now she lay here in his bed, staring up at a huge poster of a towering black American basketball player who apparently was called Magic. Recalled the pressure of his hip against her stomach, the slippery feeling of sweaty skin against sweaty skin, his eager, choppy rhythm, a little too sharp, a little too hard and fast, yet still enough to give her that surprising dark release that had carried her into sleep.

He didn’t move when she wriggled free of him and slid out of the bed. She stood for a moment, naked and dizzy on the green carpet, and felt so exhausted that she wanted just to crawl back into the nothingness with a heavy, warm body at her side.

“That won’t do, my girl,” she whispered, and it wasn’t her own voice she heard, but Anna’s. Neighbor Anna, Katerina called her, even though they hadn’t always been neighbors. “Sometimes you just have to go on. One foot in front of the other. Without thinking too much about it.”

She listened, but Anna-in-her-head didn’t have anything else to say this time. And the real Anna was probably sleeping safe at home in the yellow farmhouse next door to Michael’s.

Natasha pulled on her jeans even though they were stiff with dried road salt all the way up to the knees. The shirt she couldn’t bear. She bunched it up and stuffed it into the pocket of her jacket and instead stole a T-shirt and a grey hoodie from Robbie’s closet. The sweatshirt sleeves were about a foot too long, but she rolled them up and put on her down jacket before they could unroll again.

There was a saucy drumroll from somewhere on the other side of the bed, and Natasha gave a start as Freddy Mercury’s voice suddenly erupted into the same triumphant refrain she had heard the victory-drunk players bawl out at the party the night before. It was Robbie’s cell phone. It was lying with his pants on the floor by the desk.

She picked it up and pressed the OFF button frantically. Robbie hadn’t moved. Luckily, it would take more than that to wake the sleeping warrior. She stuffed the cell phone in her own pants pocket, wrote a message on a pad that was lying on the desk and placed it next to his pillow. Then she went downstairs.

The car keys were still lying on the foyer table. She took them. In the kitchen she opened the refrigerator and drank a pint of milk without taking the carton from her mouth. She quickly examined the shelves, nabbed a package of rye bread and a big box of chocolate wafers for sandwiches, stuffing four or five pieces in her mouth right away. The sweet explosion of melted milk chocolate went directly to her empty energy deposits. The rest she carefully wrapped in foil again for Katerina.

She glanced at the clock over the sink. It was after ten, and it was high time she got going. Katerina was waiting right on the other side of the lake. And now Natasha had a car.

She took a knife from the kitchen drawer before she left.