Dreaming Anastasia

by Joy Preble

  But right now, I’m not sleeping. Far from it. Oh, I was. But now I’m sitting bolt upright, willing my pulse to settle and failing miserably.

  She’s invaded my dreams again: the girl with the long, brown hair and the white dress spattered with blood. Around her, like last time, people were dying. A family, I realize now. Probably her family—a man and a woman, who I assume were her parents, and some other girls and a boy. Even a couple of dogs. All of them executed. All of them bleeding and screaming and dying.

  I still couldn’t understand what they were saying, only this time, I did pick out a name. Anastasia . The woman I guess was her mother screamed it as she tried to reach for her. Anastasia. Over and over as those same two giant, wrinkly brown hands came down from that black cloud that appeared out of nowhere and grabbed her—carried her off as her mother fell to the floor.

  But that’s not what has me sitting here, certain that I’m not going to fall back asleep anytime soon.

  This time, there was one other person in the room. He was standing behind a pillar, clothed in a brown robe. A wooden cross hung from his neck, and his brown hair was long and disheveled. When he lifted his head and stared straight at me, his deep blue eyes burning with anger, fear, and tears, I didn’t have to listen for someone to call his name.

  I already knew it. Ethan.

  Wednesday, 2:05 am

  Ethan

  I awake with a jolt, the mark on my arm burning. It’s all happening faster than I ever imagined it would. Finding Anne has set it all in motion. The mark. The lacquer box that her mother believes came to her through a simple sale, which was, in truth, not simple at all. The hut that moved in ways that only the right girl—the girl who is Anne—could see. The dreams we’ve both had now of that day in 1918. The moment that Anne’s sleeping self looked up and saw me looking back.

  All this is good. It is what I have worked toward for so many years. She is the one. I am absolutely certain.

  Only there is one problem. She is absolutely nothing like what I imagined.

  And I—well, I am behaving nothing like I imagined either. And as I am no longer the inexperienced boy who once crouched in that filthy basement and watched the Romanovs die, said the words that Brother Viktor taught him so that Baba Yaga would come for Anastasia and at least one life would be saved, I would expect things to work differently.

  But they’re not.

  Because, as I’ve been saying, I’m a zalupa . In more than one lifetime, by the way, if my fashion sense and regrettable hairstyle from the dream I’ve just had are any indication.

  Also, because this girl is the most frustrating female I have met in a very long while. For me, that’s considerable—long-term relationships are out of the question since I am—well, much more long-term than most.

  Even so, I had thought that over the years, I’d figured out some things about women. It is clear now that I was very wrong about that.

  “Absolutely not,” she told me this evening when I asked her to sit down with me at the coffee shop. “No. Absolutely not.” This, of course, after she had asked me if I was following her.

  Of course I am following her. I have to follow her. It just hadn’t occurred to me that I was so clumsy at it that she’d have noticed.

  Still, the time is here, and Anne’s power—the power she does not yet know she has—is growing. So I fumble for my cell phone on the table next to my bed and punch in the proper numbers.

  I wait as it rings.

  Wednesday, 2:30 am

  Anne

  I pull David’s comforter tighter around me and wait for my laptop to power up. I’m back in my own room now, sitting on my own bed, and my pulse has settled back down to something resembling normal, but I’ve taken the comforter with me. The weird dreams have come along too. And so, it seems, has Buster, who pads in, looking sleepy, and curls up at my feet. The vibration of his purr tickles my legs.

  I guess if I’m going to dream about a witch, I might as well do it with my cat keeping me company.

  As for the girl—well, at least now I know her name. Anastasia. I don’t have a clue why she’s haunting my dreams or why an oddly dressed Ethan just appeared in the middle of the last one, but at least I know who she is.

  I log on to the server. I’m pretty certain the Internet is not going to unearth any information on my new mystery buddy, but I Google Ethan Kozninsky just to be sure. Nothing.

  So I type in the name Anastasia —or actually, Anastasia Romanov. I’m not an expert or anything, but I know a little.

  As long as I can remember, my mother’s had this—well, thing about Russia. And not just Russian lacquer boxes like the one at the Jewel Box. (Although I’m sure her affection for it would dim a bit if she saw the house on the cover move like I did.) Over the years, she’s gone through her Russian cooking phase, which ended after a disastrous episode with borscht; her Russian music phase, which I think is why she originally signed me up for ballet; and more recently, her Russian history and literature phase.

  The summer before I turned thirteen, she plowed her way through War and Peace and Anna Karenina . And during one of her “Let’s improve Anne’s cultural background” missions, she’d presented me with a copy of The History of Nicholas and Alexandra.

  But that summer I was more interested in whether or not David’s football friends thought I looked cute in my turquoise and white, two-piece swimsuit than in reading about some horribly doomed family from back in the horse-and-carriage days. So I flipped a few pages, looked at the chapter headings, and moved on. I remember some of it: last of the Russian royal families, creepy religious advisor, daughter named Anastasia, tragic ending. Had I known that a few years later, I’d be reliving their assassinations, I might have paid better attention.

  I press enter. Within seconds, I’m scrolling through website after website proposing that somehow Anastasia didn’t die with the rest of her family. What is this girl? The Russian Elvis?

  Not surprisingly, no one seems to be proposing that, instead of getting splattered on the floor with everyone else, she was somehow carried away by a giant pair of ugly hands.

  At my feet, Buster yawns, punctuated by a little half-meow, then curls up tighter and continues to purr.

  I take a breath, click on another entry, and continue reading.

  Wednesday, 2:30 am

  Ethan

  “I have found her, Brother.” The words tumble from me as soon as Viktor answers my call, his voice heavy and tired even though it is the middle of the day in St. Petersburg.

  “The signs, Etanovich?” he says after a brief silence. “They are there?”

  “The signs are right, Viktor. There is no mistaking it. I have found her. Anne. Her name is Anne.” I take a breath, shove my emotions—more raw than I had realized—back below the surface. “She is here, Viktor. Right outside Chicago.”

  For a moment, Viktor stays silent again.

  “Chicago?” he says then, and something I can’t quite identify edges into his tone. “You are in Chicago? I had no idea, Brother. It was not in the report I received from our contacts. I know we have not spoken, but I thought—I had understood you were still in Paris, Ethan.”

  He has shifted to my Americanized name. And there is still something in his tone that I know I should attend to, but my story continues to pour from me. “Paris was this summer, Brother. A Slavic languages professor I had met in Budapest was there. He helped me gain access to some documents that—”

  “Documents?” Viktor interrupts. “What documents? You have told me nothing of this, Brother.” And something I can identify edges into his voice—anger.

  This time, it’s my turn to stay silent. His attitude of superiority is nothing new. It’s how our relationship began and—despite the many years that have passed—how it continues. Still, an uneasiness—the same tiny shiver of concern I’d felt a few seconds ago—slips its way up my spine and burrows in. There is indeed something else there, just below the surface.

  Ev
en so, what I do next takes me by surprise. I lie.

  “The papers were nothing, Viktor,” I tell him. “The man was a fraud. I stayed in Paris a few more weeks and then headed to the States.”

  He clears his throat, seems to consider what I’ve said. “A fraud, eh? It has happened before, Brother. Remember Rome? No matter. But tell me, how did you end up in Chicago? How did you find her?” His tone is lighter now, but the sense of distraction remains.

  “Just luck, Brother,” I lie again. “Just luck. I had not been to Chicago for a long time. At the ballet, I saw this girl. I—I felt something, and so I followed her, and now, now that I have met her, I know. The spark was there, Viktor. She is the one.” Although I have begun my answer in a lie, it ends in truth.

  “If this is so, Etanovich,” Viktor says, “then you know what you must do. We have waited a long time, Brother—a very long time. Be certain you are correct. When you are, I will be waiting.”

  “Yes, Brother,” I say—and realize I am talking to dead air.

  Wednesday, 4:30 am

  Anne

  Two hours of research later, the Romanov family stares at me from the photo on the monitor.

  Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children—Olga, the eldest daughter, followed by Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the son Alexis, who they called Alexei. I wonder, as I rub my hand across my eyes, if any of them had a clue what their fate was going to be.

  For old-time people, they’re all rather attractive. Sometimes in those older photographs, people look kind of wild-eyed, probably because they had to sit still so long for the whole flash thing to happen. It’s like the time my Grandpa Sam tried to take a picture of me with his new digital camera: by the time he figured out what button to press—“Is it this one, Anne? This one?”—I looked sort of bored and cockeyed.

  There’s one person, though, whose picture definitely looks totally crazed and I don’t think it’s from having to sit too long for a bunch of flashbulbs to go off. That’s Father Grigory, also known as Rasputin.

  Besides being the poster child for ick, what with the long, greasy hair, squinty eyes, and the whole Hogwarts robe thing, the guy was beyond certifiable, which leaves me clueless as to why the tsarina took his advice so seriously. But she certainly let him do quite the brainwashing job on her and Tsar Nicholas—at least until a bunch of people, including some Romanov relative named Felix Yussupov decided he was not only nuts, but also dangerous. They invited him to a party, fed him enough poisoned cake and wine to kill an elephant, then shot him a bunch of times. Ungracious guest that he was, he refused to die. So they dumped him in the river, where, finally, he drowned.

  He might have been crazier than a loon, but he was one powerful whack job, that’s for sure. If you believe some of the wilder sources, he wasn’t just a priest of some sort, but also this kind of evil magician.

  Which, of course, might explain his refusal to die.

  I reach down and gently shove Buster off my feet, where he’s successfully managed to cut off much of my circulation, and I wiggle my toes to bring back some of the feeling. He blinks at me a few times, then stands up, leaps off my bed, and stalks away. I return my attention to the computer and scroll down from the family picture to one of just Anastasia.

  Anastasia. The doomed Russian princess who I’ve finally realized is the one who’s been lurking in my dreams for the past few years.

  She looks back at me from her photo—this truly pretty girl with long, curled hair and thoughtful eyes—and I wonder. Did the bullets just bounce off the jewels she had sewn in her clothes, allowing her to escape when the guards got freaked out because it looked like magic? Did someone help her? Or did a giant pair of hands truly swoop out of a thundercloud in the ceiling and carry her away while Ethan, or someone who looked like Ethan, said some prayers in the corner of the room?

  Because that’s the part I still don’t get. Why would I dream that Ethan was there? I’m sure it’s just one of those things. Like how last week Tess dreamed she went bowling with Neal Patterson, and then out of the blue, his head popped off, and she used it to roll a strike.

  I yawn. It’s almost five. I turn off the laptop, close my eyes, and lean back against my pillows. Outside I hear a car coming down the street and the not-so-gentle thump of our morning newspaper hitting the driveway.

  I’m dozing off when the pain hits. It jolts through my right forearm—the same arm that brushed against Ethan yesterday—with a force that makes me gasp.

  I turn my arm over and look. There’s a circular red spot, as big as a quarter, glowing like a little sun. I rub at it, but like everything else that’s been happening to me lately, it refuses to go away.

  Wednesday, 6:25 a.m.

  Anne

  “Have a good day, honey.” My father—who I heard get up to run when I finally dragged myself and my aching arm into the shower—has to catch the 6:50 train into the city, where he’s partner at Enright, Vogel, and Michaelson. The last name, of course, is his—Steven Michaelson, Attorney at Law.

  My dad used to be this obnoxiously cheerful morning person, singing, laughing, and telling jokes when the rest of us could barely pry our eyes open. But these days it’s like the fizz has gone out of him. He still gets up absurdly early to run, and sometimes adds a run at the end of the day too, but it’s more of a routine than anything else—as if he’s thinking, If I just keep getting up and running, one morning I’ll enjoy it again.

  “Love you, Dad,” I tell him. “See you tonight.”

  He throws me a kiss, shouts, “I’m headed out, Laura,” to my mother, and disappears down the stairs.

  I’ve managed to pull on the pair of jeans I wore yesterday, along with the University of Illinois sweatshirt that was draped over my desk chair, and gather my hair into a ponytail. Not exactly high fashion standards, but with the almost-all-nighter, the paranormal antics, and the mark on my arm that’s faded some but still visible if I roll up my sleeve, it’s the best I can do.

  I swipe on a little lip gloss—although I’m sensing that even the Benefit people can’t help me much at this point—and head downstairs to the kitchen, where I shove a filter into the coffee maker, scoop a sufficient amount of grounds out of the coffee can, fill up the water, and press the on button. It’s going to take a boatload of caffeine to get me through the day.

  Then I feed Buster, who crunches loudly as he bolts down the Purina, pour myself a bowl of cornflakes and milk, slice up half a banana—to be eaten plain, not in the cereal where it will get all mushy—and sit down at the table. I may be freaked out and exhausted, but like Tess, I like what I like, and I figure sticking to the routine right now can’t hurt.

  I’m chewing on a slice of banana when my mother clatters into the kitchen dressed in black pants, a silky, turquoise T-shirt, a black blazer, and black boots.

  “Chamber of Commerce breakfast this morning,” she says, and then unceremoniously plops the Russian lacquer box from yesterday on the table next to my bowl of cornflakes.

  I try not to gag. The piece of banana now tastes like half-chewed sawdust.

  “You seemed to like it so much,” my mother says as she rummages in the cabinet for a mug and pours herself a cup of the coffee that’s finished brewing. “So after you left I bought it for you.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I give her what I hope is a sufficiently enthusiastic smile—one that says, Gee, thanks so much for the wacky enchanted box from Russia.

  “You’re welcome, sweetie.” She leaves her mug on the counter, walks over, and bends down to hug me. I reach up and put my arms around her. Tess had said my mother looked less fragile, but I’m not feeling it right now. What I’m feeling under the bulk of her clothes is a thin frame that’s gotten even thinner, which doesn’t surprise me, since she spends most meals pushing her food around on her plate, trying to reconfigure it so Dad or I won’t mention that she’s really only taken a bite or two. Just the ongoing fallout of our family of four turning into a family of three.


  “You want some coffee?” she asks me as she returns for her cup.

  I nod. She grabs another mug, fills it, and brings it to me.

  “How was the fund-raiser last night?” I ask her as I push the lacquer box away from me—subtly, I hope—in case it decides to start putting on a show again.

  “The usual.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “Speeches, stuffed chicken breast, and a silent auction. But we did raise a lot of money.”

  My parents have recently joined the board of the local chapter of the American Cancer Society, something they initially had some rather loud fights about. Dad had said it made him feel better to do something positive to aid research. Mom had said she wasn’t going to use her dead son’s memory to get someone to write a bigger check. I had closed my door and turned the sound up on my iPod. But eventually, my mother acquiesced, and thus, last night’s banquet.

  I nod my head, eat a spoonful of cereal, and then wash it down with a generous sip of my coffee. I’ve got the spoon halfway to my mouth for another bite when I realize my mother is staring at me.

  “Are you okay? Your dad said you were already in the shower when he got up to run.” This is typical of my mother’s interrogation style: prime me with a gift and coffee, then go in for the kill.

  I surprise myself by starting to answer. “Mom,” I say. “Do you…did you ever…?” I swish around my tired brain for the right words. If I don’t hurry this up, though, she’s going to think it’s about sex or alcohol.

  Of all the things I can think of to be worried about, there’s only one that seems safe enough to ask her. “Have you ever dreamed something over and over? Like this dream loop you just can’t get out of?”

  “Only once,” she says, her response so abrupt it startles me. “When I was about your age, actually.”