by Ninie Hammon
Why she was allowed to believe that her sister was dead.
So Bailey told her about Sergei Wassily Mikhailov.
“He shot Aaron and the homeless woman because they … we had seen his son blow through the red light drunk. Mikhailov had been chasing him all the way from where they’d had a fight in a restaurant called Little Moscow, and he showed up — I don’t know, a minute, two maybe after his son killed that woman and that poor little baby.
“So he shot him, just shot him, María.”
She took a gulp of air because there didn’t seem to be enough of it in the room. María had to understand about Mikhailov. Because soon … not now, oh, goodness there were other things to talk about right now, but soon they would have to talk about María and the danger she was in.
Not just the “generic” danger of being Bailey’s sister when Mikhailov figured out Bailey was still alive — but the specific danger of a ball gown, flames and the opening night of The Nutcracker, about how it was that Bailey knew about that danger.
That was for later, though.
“When I was in the police station, they played me a tape recording that had been made by one of their informants in Mikhailov’s organization.”
She paused. “He died, the informant. They didn’t tell me how or when, but they killed him. Mikhailov’s accent was thick, but I could understand every word he said.”
The police officer picks up the phone and touches the screen and a gravelly voice issues from the speaker.
“Cross me and you die. A guarantee, I kill you.” The voice is emotionless, not as if he were making a horrible threat but like he’s telling the speaker box in a drive-through window to super-size his fries. “Any two-bit hood can say that, yes? But does anybody else guarantee to kill those you love, too? No, they do not, but I, Sergei Wassily Mikhailov, make you that promise. You cross Sergei and you die.”
He pauses and his voice grows softer, but still there is no threat in it, no emotion of any kind. “Then your wife dies, your mother, your brothers and sisters, your children. I will find those you love and I will butcher them, one by one.”
Bailey feels the voice slither into her ear like a poisonous serpent, coil through her head and down into her belly where cold fear begins to freeze everything it touches, ice spreading out inside her so fast she can hear the cracking sound it makes.
“It could take a week, a month, a lifetime. A fall from a high window, yes? A hit-and-run driver. A car explosion. A gunshot from a dark alley. One by one, I will not leave breathing anyone who shares the same blood as you. Even after you are dead, you can look up through the fires of hell and watch me slice the throat of your baby son lying in his soiled diaper in your dead wife’s arms and lick his blood off the dagger.”
“Sergei Mikhailov is not human,” says the other man at the table, not the one who had turned on the recording from his cellphone. “I’m serious, I really don’t think there’s a man in there anywhere. He is pure evil, has made his way in life by annihilating the competition and ruthlessly butchering anybody who stands in his way.”
The woman speaks and her voice is hard-edged, not soothing.
“You have to understand what you’re dealing with here, Mrs. Cunningham. His whole life is built on intimidation. He keeps the troops in line, and his enemies at bay, because they know he always … always keeps his promises. It’s his trademark and he wears it with pride.”
“If he knew you were alive, he would kill you,” says the man who had played the recording. “Eventually he would kill every member of your family, too.”
María’s face had grown deathly pale as Bailey told her the story. She could see shock and horror written on the girl’s features. Empathy, too. There at the end, there was probably also fear.
“They told me about a family. The man had worked for Mikhailov and did something, stole money or something, and got caught. Mikhailov killed him and dumped his body with bullet holes … full of bullet holes … on the porch of his home.”
The air was too thick again, hard to breathe, but she drew it with a struggle into her lungs to continue.
“The day after the funeral, there was a car bomb … killed his wife and little girl. Within six months, his mother, two brothers and a grandmother were all dead, too. I don’t know how. Didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know.”
“So if this Mikhail-person knew you had seen and were alive, he’d have …”
“He’d have killed all of us. Me, you … and Bethany.”
María covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes wide.
“But why so long … and why are you here now?”
“The so-long part is because he vanished. The WITSEC marshals, they told me it’d only be a little while, that soon …” She couldn’t even speak for a moment. The word soon did as it always did. It stole her breath. “They said they’d arrest him and I could testify and then … but he went back to Russia. He got away.” She almost wailed the word “away,” and grabbed her emotions again. Her hold on them was so very, very tentative. “They moved me from one city to another. It was a duplex in Albuquerque, then some other anonymous pace in some other anonymous city …”
María’s face was awash with compassion, and confusion, with a large side order of shock. Bailey was babbling, knew it but couldn’t stop, spewed words out in one long stream, pausing only to grab a breath now and then.
“Then on my birthday … we went to this casino restaurant and after dinner we had a group picture taken. And there he was in the background — Mikhailov, right there so close I could have touched him.” She shuddered. “I called the federal marshals. Now that he’s back in this country, they can arrest him. But as soon as they do, he’ll know he missed one of the eyewitnesses. He’ll know my name and he’ll come looking for me.”
Bailey burped out a bark of something like laughter. “All this time, I’ve been safe because nobody goes looking for somebody they think is dead. When he finds out I’m alive …”
She squeezed María’s hand so hard it must have hurt. “When he comes looking for me, he’ll find you, too! You and Bethany. Right out in plain sight, and—”
At that moment, there was a thunderous knock on the door. It wasn’t locked, and before either of them could move, it was thrown open and a large, broad-faced woman stood in the doorway.
Beside her was a little girl with long black hair that curled on her shoulders. Her eyes were the color of robins’ eggs.
She smiled and her whole face lit up. A brilliant flare chased all the shadows into the corners of the room and created a golden glow around her head.
She held out her arms.
“Mommy!” she cried and ran into the room toward Bailey.
Chapter Seventeen
María couldn’t drag her eyes off her sister’s face. She heard what Bailey was saying, too, of course, but it was if she did it as two different people. One part of her was listening to the words, understanding them, grasping their significance, or maybe struggling to grasp the significance, while the other part of her did nothing but revel, bask in the miracle of her sister’s presence.
Bailey wasn’t dead. Bailey was alive.
Of course that was ridiculous, absurd.
Except it wasn’t. She was sitting here, María could feel her next to her, could feel their hands, clasped together so tight that her fingers had grown numb but she couldn’t let go, wouldn’t let go.
She devoured Bailey face. She looked just like María remembered, like she looked in the half dozen pictures of her scattered around the apartment. At the same time, she didn’t look like the Bailey María knew. Looked almost like someone else entirely.
There had been a … softness to Bailey, a tenderness. She probably allowed María to see it more than she allowed others to see. She could be tender and vulnerable, and after she met Aaron … oh, my. It was almost like she had gone home. He gave her permission to be … weak. Sort of. In foster care, you learned early to build as much protective shield around
yourself as you could because it was a cold hard world out there.
That’s how Bailey had come to the Andersons, wearing that Foster Care Suit of Armor. She didn’t wear it all the time, not once she relaxed, saw that it was an okay place, probably better than a lot of other places Bailey had seen. When she was with María, the armor was laid aside and she became real.
Aaron became that suit of armor for Bailey. Maybe she didn’t see that, but María did. Bailey relaxed. She allowed herself to be vulnerable. To love … maybe too much. She set aside her shields because he was there for her, not to protect her in any real physical sense, exactly, but there to protect her heart. To love her totally and completely and fill up all the empty places inside her where she had needed love and it hadn’t been there for her.
How utterly horrifying that he’d been butchered in the street while she watched. María’s eyes filled with tears at the thought of that kind of pain. Watching him …
The person sitting beside her clutching her hand every bit as tightly as María was clutching hers was the product of that experience. That loss. That horror. She was who came out the other side. It wasn’t that María could see the suit of armor again, like she had crawled back into it and stayed there confined, protected by it.
No, this person was someone who didn’t need a suit of armor. Who had become strong enough — whether voluntarily or not — that she didn’t have to hide behind anything anymore.
María’s respect and admiration grew at the realization.
Bailey’s pain at seeing Aaron shot down on the street, and losing Bethany …
That thought stopped in the middle of her mind. Screeched to a halt and all the other thoughts behind it banged into the back of it one after another, bang, bang, bang, then toppled off the track and lay on their sides.
She had given up her daughter!
No, her daughter had been snatched away from her every bit as violently as Aaron had.
And that daughter … had become María’s daughter.
The little girl who now drew pictures of everything she saw, and talked about wanting a unicorn for Christmas and didn’t suck on the edge of her minion blanket hardly at all anymore was no more the baby Bailey’d placed in María’s arms than this Bailey was the woman who had placed her there.
That baby, Bailey’s baby, didn’t exist anymore. She wasn’t there anymore, couldn’t be conjured up any more than Aaron could be brought back to life. That baby had changed and grown.
Into María’s daughter.
That’s who she was now. Bethany Nicole Cunningham-soon-to-be-McKessen was María’s daughter. She wasn’t Bailey’s little girl anymore.
The part of María’s mind that’d been listening to Bailey’s words heard Bailey say that the man named Mikhailov who had shot Aaron down would kill her if he found her.
“So if this Mikhail-person knew you had seen and were alive, he’d have—”
“He’d have killed all of us. Me, you … and Bethany.”
Killed Bethany.
The thought sounded in her brain like an ugly foghorn, like the blaring of a train whistle, like the blatting of those backup signals on a forklift.
Bethany would be in danger if this man knew Bailey was alive.
María’s little girl would …
Then she heard Mrs. Trimboni’s knock on the door. As expected, she didn’t wait to be invited, just opened the door.
There stood Bethany beside her. The moment Bethany saw her, she cried out Mommy, held out her arms and came running across the room.
Bailey was sitting on the floor beside María, closer to the door than María was. When she saw Bethany, her face … María took a picture of the look on Bailey’s face with the cellphone of her mind. She would go back one day and examine the look there. The looks. The emotions that played across it. She would study that face, learn from it what loss and redemption looked like in human form.
She couldn’t do that now, though, because there was no time.
Bailey leaped up to her knees and held out her arms as Bethany ran across the room.
“Bethany,” she cried and grabbed the child as she ran by, clasped her to her chest and held her, sobbing noiselessly.
Bethany was thunderstruck, shocked at being violently grabbed by this stranger.
Note to self. Bailey is a stranger to Bethany now. I am her mommy.
The little girl let out a squeak of a cry and started wiggling, looking at María with surprise and fear on her face.
“Mommy!” she cried, and struggled to be free from Bailey’s embrace. But Bailey wasn’t in any space where she could attend to that. She was holding the child to her chest, crushing her, with a look on her face of absolute rapture, and tears pouring down her cheeks.
“Let me go!” Bethany cried, wiggling, squirming.
Before María could get to her she kicked out and caught Bailey in the leg, crying now, “Mommy! Make her let me go.”
Bailey seemed to come to then, or at least came back to herself enough to lose her grip so Bethany could wiggle free. The child leapt back as soon as Bailey’s hands let go and then launched herself into María’s embrace.
“Mommy!” she wailed. “Mommy!”
She wrapped her arms around María’s neck, buried her face in the crook of her neck and shoulder and clung to her with a death grip, sobbing.
Mrs. Trimboni stood in the doorway, too surprised by the scene to move.
Bailey looked at the child, her face a mask of misery and heartache. She reached out to touch her, then drew her hand back. She whispered, “I’m sorry, baby. I …”
Then she settled back against the couch. But didn’t cry. Just wore a look of profound misery, far too deep to be assuaged by something as simple and cleansing as tears.
Chapter Eighteen
There might possibly have been a way that her reunion with the daughter she had not seen in almost two years could have gone more wrong, but right off hand Bailey couldn’t imagine it.
Maybe there was a scenario of reunion that was more the polar opposite of how she had dreamed it would be, night after night, until she’d finally had to ban such fantasies from her thoughts or she would go mad.
She didn’t think so.
She hadn’t meant to grab Bethany like that. Would never have done such a thing. Had spent a good number of the hours since she knew that soon meant today considering how best to slowly become reacquainted with her daughter.
How to make a good first impression.
How not to put the child off by being too pushy.
Like with a dog you didn’t know. You didn’t rush up and pet it just because you thought it was adorable. People who tried to snatch Bundy off the ground because he was just the cutest dog Ev-er were not rewarded by tail-wagging and licks.
At the very least, he squirmed to be out of their grasp.
At the worst, he either bit them or peed on them.
She’d never have done a thing like that to her precious Bethany.
But that’s exactly what she had done.
It had been knee-jerk.
It was that fantasy playing in her head, except this time it was real.
A door opens and there stands her precious daughter. She breaks into a breathtakingly beatific smile, holds out her arms, squeals “Mommy” and rushes into Bailey’s embrace.
It had just been too much like Bailey’d always hoped and dreamed it would be. It was too perfect. She just fell into the narrative without thinking. So desperate to touch, to hold …
She looked at the little girl now, clinging to María, sobbing into the crook of her shoulder and she wanted almost more than she had ever wanted anything in her life to have a do-over of the past thirty seconds.
“Why what in the world …” said the broad-faced woman who had transferred into pit bull mode between one heartbeat and the next. A more rational Bailey would have liked that, would have appreciated how protective this woman — obviously her nanny — was of Bethany.
&nb
sp; But right now all she could think was, “Butt out, lady, you don’t have a dog in this fight.”
She didn’t say that, of course. Didn’t say anything. Just sat mute, watching her little girl heaving sobs, wanting desperately to soothe them away instead of being the cause of them.
María said something to the woman. Bailey didn’t attend to what it was. She mollified her with a couple of other remarks Bailey didn’t listen to, and the woman harrumphed her way out the door, closing it a little too much like banging it shut.
Then there was no sound in the room except Bethany’s sobs, which weren’t ratcheting down in either volume or intensity.
“You don’t understand …” María said. “Bethany is scared to death of strangers.”
She could tell that María didn’t like the way that had come out any more than she did, but the words hung in the air, a curtain between them, separating them in an almost tangible way.
María didn’t say anything to ameliorate the situation, just began talking softly to Bethany. Saying all the things Bailey would say, wanted so desperately to say, but had lost the right to say by her own behavior.
She owned this one. Her bad.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. Hey there, you can stop crying now. It’s okay, sugar. Shhhhh. Do you hear me, it’s okay. Now, stop crying. Everything’s fine now. Mommy’s gotcha. I’ve gotcha right here, hugging you tight. You’re fine.”
More words to that effect finally began to calm the child. She ratcheted down from full bore sobbing, to merely crying, to that hitching breath-in-and-out thing little kids did when they’d just had a good cry.
Bailey was devouring the child with her eyes.
She’d only gotten a glimpse of her face, but even in the glimpse, she was stabbed in the heart by the little girl’s resemblance to Aaron. She had always thought the child was the image of her father, had said so on many, many occasions, to which Aaron had always replied that he sincerely hoped not because she would be far better off if she were the image of her drop-dead-gorgeous mother rather than her — his word — schmuck of a father.