The Survivor

Chapter 35

When Pavlo entered the kitchen, Nastya was eating red caviar on borodinski, wiping crumbs of the black bread from her glossy lips with the back of her hand. Dima and Valerik sat with her at the table, shots of cloudy horseradish vodka set before them. She was in the middle of a story, her graceful arms gesturing comically, and the men were laughing, basking in her radiance. A black halter top and miniskirt displayed her woman’s body, and yet she was still so much a girl, telling tales through a full mouth, laughing with abandon, wearing sunglasses even in the house, even at dusk. A razor-blade pendant, made of thick blunted steel, dangled on a black cord, resting against her flat chest.

Misha remained by himself at the counter, sipping tarkhun, the cheery bright green tarragon soda failing to lighten his dark expression. The fingers of one hand shifted and rubbed a set of matte-black handcuffs, working them like a rosary. He stared straight through a Russian soap opera on the wall-mounted TV, his thoughts as impossible to gauge as ever.

Six and a half hours to wait, and they would have resolution with Nate Overbay, one way or another. They would have the list, those names, and shortly thereafter seven hearts would stop beating and all would rest right in the world again.

Pavlo paused in the doorway, taking in the sight of his daughter. Young enough to be his granddaughter and yet ageless, timeless, the kind of girl-woman he’d chased around Kiev when he was twelve and twenty and forty. She was framed against a wall of plate glass that showed off the dizzying view. The lights of the Strip twinkled below, the wattage of Sunset Boulevard waging war with the encroaching night, whispering its age-old promise that it was not yet time to sleep, that there was more fun still to be squeezed from the residue of the day. Youth, beauty, and dangerous promises, all there in a single snapshot. Had there ever been a better encapsulation of the City of Angels?

Misha noticed Pavlo first and stood, the others following suit. Nastya smiled and removed her sunglasses, a sign of respect. The light limned the fringe of her face, the feathered seam of scar tissue along her ear in sudden, evident relief. He recalled coming into the back room of the club where she’d fled that night after the accident, her panicked, babbling phone call still echoing in his head. She’d been hunched over as if vomiting into a friend’s maroon T-shirt, and it was only as he’d stepped closer that he’d realized that the cloth was not maroon at all, but had started the evening as a white undershirt. At the sound of his voice, she’d looked up, her face hanging off, hinged at one side.

He had known immediately that it was not severe. He had seen and inflicted injuries such as these and knew the ways that flesh could tear and mend. Her friends were shocked at his collected demeanor as he’d reseated the living mask and bundled her off. Then again, he was not like most fathers.

She’d had the best surgeons, one who’d been brought in to improve a pop star’s nose, and within days the reconstruction had been complete. Swelling had diminished. Purple had faded to tan. Flesh had knit together, leaving only tiny cracks, like etched veins. In short order all that remained was the imprint of the accident at the back of her cheek like a manufacturer’s stamp, a reminder that people were no more than toys that could be broken apart and occasionally, when luck and fate complied, put back together.

“Papa? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, my beauty.” He crossed and took her face in his rough hands, holding it delicately, like a bird, kissing her softly on the scar. Nastya squeezed him in a hug, her mane of hair redolent of French cigarettes. A lovely smell, the closest thing to home these days.

Shotglasses clinked, and Dima cracked a joke, and there was laughter, muted in the soft glow of the kitchen. A haven up here in the Hollywood Hills, safe from the chill of evening and the world outside with its fangs and claws. Even Misha smiled and hoisted his glass in a toast, his boyish cheeks tightening into ovals.

Then Nastya stiffened in Pavlo’s arms, all bone and angles.

Pavlo pulled back from their embrace, followed her gaze.

The television. A commercial. Plump diapered baby sitting in a car tire, floating safely along.

He looked back at his daughter. Frozen with remorse and horror.

The TV shut off-Yuri had the remote. Then the men faded from the room like wraiths, and there remained only the sound of Nastya’s hard breaths.

“I forget it, like a dream. A drunken dream. But then images come back, here and there.” Nastya’s chest heaved. “The baby-”

“You hit no one. You were at the club all night. The Jag was stolen from valet there. You were struck in the face with bottle during fight on dance floor.”

“I know,” she said. “But no. This is you and me now. We can talk-”

“There is no need for talk. There is only what happened. You hit no one. You were at the club all night. The Jag was stolen-”

A thin, high-pitched noise escaped her throat, a stifled scream. Tears streaming down her face, she shifted her weight from boot to boot, as if the parquet flooring burned her feet. “I need to say the words. I need to know what I did. I need to know who I am.”

She tottered back a step and collapsed into a chair. Her miniskirt stretched wide, and he saw, on the soft flank of skin beside her crotch, several dark lines. Rage bubbled up inside him, a familiar ally, there waiting in the shadows. He swept the plates from the table with his forearm and grabbed her throat, forcing her legs apart with his other hand.

“What is this? What did you do to yourself?”

She choked out a few words. “Papa … no…”

He dropped to his knees, peering up her skirt at the inside of her thigh. But the marks were not ink. They were cuts, a neat row of them. The top mark was mostly healed, the middle ones scabbed, the bottom slice still fresh.

He stared in disbelief. Cuts there? Why? He had forgotten he was still gripping her throat. He released, and she coughed and hacked.

“Who did this to you?”

She wiped her face on the inside of her collar.

“Who did this to you?”

“I did!” she screamed in a fury, her torso twisting away from him.

He was on his feet, stepping back from her, perplexed and oddly on edge. Coals in the pit of his belly. “You cut yourself? Why?”

“To feel. I just want to feel something. I just want…” She leaned onto the table, burying her face in her bare arms.

The air of the kitchen had grown thicker. He was having trouble inhaling fully. He needed the breadth of the floor upstairs, his perch atop the world. Her sobs trailed him up the stairs. Pacing the perimeter of his vast bedroom, counting his steps, he heard her cries still, rising through the floor.

The sound of her ripped him back to the night itself.

Quiet enough at first. A carved turkey served by a nameless maid who, like the others, spoke no English, the atmosphere in the dining room frigid with Nastya’s mood.

“What’s wrong?” he’d finally asked.

“I’m sick of this,” she said. “Always us. Always alone. And I’m sick of her.” She glared at the maid. “You can’t even understand what I’m saying, can you? Can you?” The maid withdrew meekly. “She might as well not even be here.” Nastya skewered a cooked carrot on the tines of her fork and held it before her face.

“You have no idea what you have,” he said softly. “You have everything.”

“It’s like a mausoleum.” She dropped her fork, which clanged against the fine china, chipping the twenty-four-karat-gold band at the rim. “Cold and empty.”

He folded his hands, straining for patience. “What do you want?”

“I want to belong.”

“We do belong. Here.”

“No. We float. Above the city. Away from other people.” She took a big gulp of red wine, the crystal throwing slivers of light across her face. Turning sideways in her chair, she stared at the wall. “What was my mama like?” she asked. “Tell me again.”

He set down his silverware. Pushed his plate away. Studied the markings on his knuckles. Prison-ink asterisks in a circle, the symbol of a thief from a broken home. When he looked up again, he saw that Nastya had guzzled the rest of her wine.

He spoke the mantra. “She was simple country girl. Seamstress. She loved you very much.”

Nastya’s body sagged a bit, relaxing into a daze. “And how’d she die?”

“Diphtheria outbreak. She caught.”

Nastya closed her eyes. “And she said…”

“On her deathbed she say, ‘My daughter must always know I carry her in my heart. And she carries me in hers.’”

Nastya mouthed the last sentence with him. She pushed away dreamily from the table and drifted back toward her room.

He sat and stared at his knuckles, the table. Turkey and wine, stuffing and potatoes. A dripping gravy boat. All that American excess. He felt a hole grow inside him that could be filled with neither food nor rage. He thought about the bundle of pink blanket delivered into his arms by the whore. How the sight of those sapphire eyes had delivered him into another life.

His chair screeched when he pushed back from the table. He walked down the hall, the house staff shrinking into the walls as he passed.

Nastya’s room, when he entered, smelled of schnapps and sweet perfume. A Gauloise protruded from an ashtray, sighing a wisp of smoke, and a plastic tumbler sat beside Nastya’s hand on the mouse pad. At his footfall she started, then swiftly began clicking screens closed on the computer.

He’d come to comfort her, but now his steps across her lush carpet were hard, enraged. He brushed her aside, tapping the mouse around on pages with an unskilled hand as file after file repopulated the screen.

“Papa, no,” she slurred. “I was only…”

He stared at the monitor, doing his best to force the words to make sense. Requests made to a genealogy forum online. Subject line: “American girl trying to find her mother.” A response to an e-mail she’d written to the U.S. embassy in Kiev. A database of victims of the diphtheria outbreak that had occurred after perestroika. Weeks, maybe months of searching and requests and secret communications. “Is my mother dead?”

His face glowed with heat, the pulse of an infection. He drew himself erect over the desk, gathering into himself. “You doubt me? Me? Who gave you everything? Who brought you here to give you this life?”

“I see the guns on the men. I know your tattoos. I’m not stupid.” She wobbled on her stork legs, emboldened by the alcohol. “I got a letter from the embassy. They said you served time. I don’t know your story. I don’t know my mama’s story. I don’t know my story.”

“I told you your mama’s story.”

“I know it’s fake. I know she wasn’t a seamstress. I’m not a child. I’m seventeen.” Her eyes were glassy, her breath ninety proof. “What happened to her?”

“It is history. No more.”

“We are our history.”

“No. We are who we are. Now. You and me. We have each other.”

“It’s not enough.”

The hollow in his gut spread, devouring his intestines, flesh and blood, a black hole of pain. “I gave up everything for you. And this is how you show respect?” His mouth was moving, throwing words before thought. It felt like vomiting to say this. She was backing away from him, tripping over the furniture, terrified. “You want to know who your mama was? I do not even remember lying with her. I remember only when she dropped you into my arms like trash. She was a whore who died with a needle in her arm.”

Nastya’s mouth twisted open, emitting a startled moan. Then she was scrambling out, away, clawing across her bed to the door, pulling the sheets in her wake.

Her feet slapped the tile of the hall. Then the door to the garage opened and slammed harder than he believed a door could slam. The Jaguar fired to life in the garage, the roar of 470 horses. There came a scream of grinding metal, car scraping house, as she flew out into the night.