Dreaming Anastasia

by Joy Preble

  “We must believe it,” the professor says. “We’re dealing with magic and folklore here, so we must accept those parameters—let them mesh with our world and see what happens. Your dreams are part of it, so we have to take them as they are. In literature, you’d call it a suspension of disbelief. For example, we have to accept that in a fairy tale, animals can talk. For our purposes, it’s really the same thing. We figure out the rules and accept them.”

  “He sent me,” Ethan says, and I can see him going back there in his head. “Viktor knew the tsar, but he sent me that day. He told me he wasn’t even positive the assassination would occur right then, but he’d heard rumors that the time was close, and he wanted me to be there. He didn’t go himself. If he knew how crucial this was, why would he teach me the words? Why would he set up something this monumental and then not go himself?”

  “So what then?” Tess stands up, then reaches out her hand and hauls me off the floor too. Ethan and the professor follow our example. “Did this Viktor guy have something to hide? I mean, why would he not want to be there? Maybe he just couldn’t watch it happen. If he knew her like you said, maybe he just couldn’t stand to be there. You guys were supposed to be protecting them, right? So if he knew most of them were going to die, maybe he just couldn’t handle watching it.”

  “But she kept thinking that he’d promised her she could save them—and that he’d broken his promise,” I say. “She was really clear on that. It wasn’t just that it didn’t work out, but that he’d lied to her.”

  “Well, that’s original.” Tess snorts. “A guy going back on his promise. Big deal. Men are bastards. Nothing new about that.” Her eyes go squinty again, and I’m pretty sure she’s thinking about Neal.

  “Oh,” the professor says. “Oh! I can’t believe I didn’t—oh!” He claps Tess on the back a couple of times. “Young lady, you’re a genius, an absolute genius!” He’s grinning hugely at her, and his eyes are lit up like two little candles.

  “Because I said men are bastards? Present company excepted and all that, but is that like a surprise to you? Being that you’re a guy, I figured you already knew.” Tess shrugs Olensky’s hand away.

  “Alex,” Ethan says. “What are you—? Oh!” Whatever it is that the professor has figured out, Ethan seems to be on the same wavelength. “Oh my God! It’s the first thing that finally makes sense.”

  “Not to me,” I say. “Want to clue us in?”

  “Viktor was her brother,” Ethan says.

  “Well, I told you she thought about him like that, kept calling him her—oh. I get it. I mean, I think I do. You mean like—”

  “Like Tsar Nicholas had an illegitimate son,” Professor Olensky says. “Viktor. And Anastasia knew.”

  “Whoa,” Tess says. “You mean that kind of bastard. This is finally getting really interesting.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But would it have been a secret all this time? Wouldn’t other people have known?”

  “Yes and no,” the professor says. “First of all, you have to remember that this was the late 1800s and early 1900s. No Internet. No instant communication. No cell phones snapping pictures and sending them around the world in the time it takes for you to press a button. And no media like we know today. This was tsarist Russia. No freedom of the press either, like here in America.”

  “And the yes part?” I ask.

  “The yes part,” Professor Olensky says, “is that the history books are filled with stories about Tsar Nicholas and his possible affairs—particularly because his father, the previous tsar, didn’t want him to marry Alexandra. We know, for example, that Nicholas had a well-documented affair with a dancer from the royal ballet. But there have been rumors for years that there were other affairs, other women. It seems very possible that one of these other women was Viktor’s mother.”

  “Do you think Viktor knew? Who he was, I mean?”

  Ethan blows out a breath. “Of course he knew. And he told Anastasia. It all makes sense. It explains what you saw in your dream and why she would have trusted him. Who knows? Maybe that’s why they all trusted him. Maybe they went down there like lambs to the slaughter because of it.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say to him. “I know you were there and I wasn’t, but every time I relive it—it’s not like that, Ethan. It’s only her. She’s the only one who’s looking for it to happen.”

  Ethan shrugs. “Nicholas had to have known who Viktor was. He had four daughters before the tsarina finally gave birth to Alexei, to a son. If he had another boy out there, he’d have known it. But I don’t see any way for us to find that out for sure—at least for now. Even if we go on the assumption that this is the truth—that Viktor was Anastasia’s illegitimate half brother—it still doesn’t tell us why he wants to stop us—why he wants to keep her trapped. Or why I was so blind to it all back then.”

  “It’s the Neal factor,” Tess says. “People tell you one thing, but they’re really doing another. Not everyone is a good guy.”

  Ethan rolls his eyes at that.

  “Enough with Neal,” I tell Tess. “Seriously. Give it a rest.”

  “It’s relevant,” she says. “You can’t deny it. Besides,” she eyeballs Ethan, “Anne says that you were a monk back then, right? So you wouldn’t have been thinking about all that kind of stuff anyway, would you? Tsars fooling around and all that?”

  “No,” Ethan says evenly. “I suppose not.”

  We all ponder that for a minute. In the silence, Professor Olensky strolls back to his computer.

  “So how does this all lead back to Anne?” Tess grabs up her purse from the chair where she’d tossed it, pulls out her lip gloss, and re-glosses her lips.

  “I guess I could be related to any of you,” I say. “How many brothers were there, anyway?” I direct my question to Ethan. “Come to think of it, I could even be related to you somehow, couldn’t I?”

  “Yeah,” Tess adds, then dumps the lip gloss back in her purse. “You’ve been around a long time. Maybe you’ve got some love child out there you don’t know about.”

  Ethan scowls. I press my hand over Tess’s mouth and then take it away all covered with peach-colored gloss. “Gross,” I tell her, and I’m not sure whether I mean the gloss or the love-child comment.

  “You’re not the only people to ask questions like that,” the professor says as he settles himself back in his chair and starts clicking the mouse again. “So when we research, we work systematically—cross off stories that aren’t really plausible and work with what is. Like those stories that existed for years about the woman named Anna Anderson who claimed she was actually Anastasia. Some people believed. Others examined the evidence—eventually even DNA evidence—and declared she was a fake. The tale of Anastasia is so powerful, it seems to attract people and stories like a magnet.”

  “Imagine if anyone knew all the stuff you guys are talking about,” Tess says. “You wonder if they’d believe you or think it was just too crazy.”

  “You’d be surprised at what people are capable of accepting, whether it’s true or not,” Olensky says. “For instance, there was a woman who contacted me a few years ago through one of my colleagues in Prague. Nadia Tauman was her name. She sent me—here let me show you.” He gestures for us to join him at the computer and brings up a document for us to see.

  “It’s a family tree she sent me. I’ve received dozens like this over the years, but this was one of the most intriguing, even if ultimately it was a dead end. Now, I suppose, we could insert Viktor’s name into it, see if that took us anywhere different—although it’s a time-consuming task and—well, look.”

  Ethan, Tess, and I read the letter over the professor’s shoulder. Nadia Tauman, it seemed, had helped her friend Lily give up Lily’s newborn baby girl for adoption. By itself, that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary—just sad, maybe, because Lily didn’t want to give the baby away. But her husband had been gunned down in a jewelry-store robbery in Chicago, and she had no means of support
to keep her baby. Nadia was claiming that there was more to the story. Her cousin in Prague had heard Olensky lecture about the Romanovs and given her his email, because according to Nadia, Lily was not just any ordinary young widowed mother. She claimed she was the great-granddaughter of the last tsar of Russia.

  “Huh,” I say. Something about the story has tickled the back of my brain, but I have no idea what it is, and I’m on such information overload right now that it’s probably nothing. “You get letters like this all the time? People claiming these connections to the Romanovs?”

  The professor nods. “Yes,” he says, “although this one was particularly heartbreaking to read.”

  Ethan points to the monitor. “Like you say, Alex, we could certainly contemplate the possibility that if the great-grandfather was Nicholas, then there is also a relation to Viktor—although I’m not sure where that gets us.”

  “Plus,” says Tess, “how would you know? She’s listed only mothers’ names here.”

  I read through the names with Tess. Lily, daughter of Natasha, granddaughter of a ballerina named Irina, great-granddaughter of an unnamed woman who had an affair with Tsar Nicholas.

  “So if Nicholas was really Viktor’s father, then this Irina could have been Viktor’s lover,” Tess says. “Cool.”

  I glance over at Ethan on that one. His expression is pretty guarded—which makes sense, since what do you say when someone you’ve known and trusted turns out to be someone else entirely?

  “We could only make that connection if we were certain these claims were valid,” Professor Olensky says, and there’s an edge of frustration in his voice. “But I lost contact with Nadia, and through her, Lily. There’s really no way to document any of this at this point.”

  “What about the baby?” I ask as I get to the bottom of the page. “Does it say what happened to the poor baby?”

  Olensky scrolls to the next page. “According to this, she was adopted by a family here in Chicago,” he says. “See?” He points to a sentence in the middle of the next page. “Baby girl, Laura, born in 1965. Closed adoption.”

  I read the sentence. And then I read it again. My hands turn to ice. I know what was tickling at the back of my brain.

  “Oh,” I say. “I think I’m going to be sick.” I swallow hard, fighting back the bile that’s rising in my throat. I’d told them that maybe I was the only one who could see the clues. I didn’t know what it would feel like to be right.

  “What’s wrong?” Ethan places his hand on my shoulder. Tess and Olensky are both looking at me as well.

  “What is it?” Tess asks. “Anne, what’s going on?”

  “Lily,” I say. “She had a daughter named Laura, born in 1965 and given up for adoption.”

  “I got that,” Ethan says slowly, as though if he speaks too fast, I might just freak out and bolt away. “Anne, what is it?”

  I close my eyes and breathe in deeply. But when I open them, the words on the screen still say the same thing.

  “It’s my mother,” I tell them. “Laura—she’s my mother. I—I’m Lily’s granddaughter.”

  Wednesday, 9:15 pm

  Ethan

  Lily’s granddaughter?” I say to Anne. “Explain yourself. Certainly you know your grandparents.”

  “Well, no, I don’t. Not really.” Anne’s face has drained of color. She looks scared and young—too young.

  “Oh,” says Tess, and once more, I have to resist the overwhelming urge to just throttle the girl. “This is the Grandma Ellen story, isn’t it? You guys are gonna love this one. Her grandmother is the biggest bi—”

  “For God’s sake, please, please just let her tell it.” I grab the pack of Winstons from the desk. “May I?” I ask Alex, although I’m already pulling matches from my pocket.

  “Go on,” I tell Anne as Alex nods, and I slide a cigarette from the pack, light up, and take a deep drag. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Two years ago,” she begins, “my older brother David died of cancer.” She bites her lip, and I know the telling of this tale is costing her. It is a price I understand all too well.

  “It was horrible,” she says, “and it was quick. Too quick. One day at football practice, he went out for a pass, and he dropped it. Coach yelled at him, ‘Michaelson, what the hell are you doing?’ David told us he wondered the same thing. But he had this horrible pain under his arm when he reached up to catch the ball, and when the trainer felt around to see if it was a muscle tear, he found this lump.”

  Anne pauses, and once again, her eyes well with tears. “Turns out he had lymphoma. So the doctors began treatment, and he was supposed to be okay. He was young and an athlete. Only it didn’t matter because the cancer had spread to his lungs and his brain. That was September. We buried him that following January. It was the worst thing our family had ever gone through. It still is.”

  A tear traces its way down Anne’s cheek, and as it does, the images of my own family flicker through my memory. I take another drag of the cigarette and flick ashes into a mug that still holds a few swallows of old tea. After so many years, I’m still surprised that the longing can be so great.

  “Here,” Alex says to Anne. He fumbles around, unearths an empty tissue box, then finally hands her a couple of unused napkins. She smiles, takes one, and dabs at her eyes.

  “Thanks,” she says. “I hate getting all…I hate being that person—the one everybody feels sorry for. You know, that was my first thought when David died. We walked out of his hospital room, and we had to start calling people. To tell them. And I—I kept thinking how I didn’t want to do that, because once we told them, I wouldn’t be just Anne anymore. I’d be Anne whose brother David died. And I hated it.”

  “But what does this have to do with the woman named Lily?” Olensky asks.

  “I’m getting to that,” Anne says, “but you need to see the whole story to understand. After the funeral, we were all back at our house. The neighbors had brought food, and Grandma Ellen was trying to get my mother to eat something. ‘Just something, ’ she said to her. I remember she tried to hand my mother a deviled egg. Now, my mother hates deviled eggs, but Grandma Ellen said to her, ‘Laura, dear, Mrs. Lewis made these. She’s such a lovely young woman.’ And suddenly, my mother was screaming. See, you have to understand, my Grandma Ellen is the type of person who’s super-polite on the surface. It’s all about appearances with her. You don’t raise your voice, you call everyone a lovely young man or woman. It drives us all crazy. So my mother was screaming. She knocked the egg out of Grandma’s hand, and it splattered all over the floor. ‘I don’t want to eat!’ she yelled at Grandma Ellen. ‘My son is dead! I don’t want a goddamned deviled egg!’”

  “See what I mean?” Tess interrupts. “Her grandma—”

  “Let her finish, dear,” Olensky tells her. He reaches over and pats Tess on the arm. Then he fixes his gaze back on Anne.

  “So my grandma,” Anne says, “she just looked at my mom like she’d slapped her. And that’s when my mother said it. She yelled, ‘Maybe you don’t understand what it’s like to lose a child, but she would! Lily would. You’ve never understood me, and you’ve proven that today!’ Then she ran, crying, into her bedroom.”

  Slowly, I drop the remains of the Winston in the teacup. If this is the same Lily, then Anne, and Viktor, and, yes, Anastasia, all come from the same line. The girl I’ve been trying to save, the man who’s betrayed me, and the young woman who’s sitting here telling her story—all of them Romanovs.

  Olensky’s gaze catches mine. His eyes are shining.

  “After that,” Anne says, “it was like we all pretended it hadn’t happened. I guess we were too busy pulling the pieces of our lives back together—trying to be a family again after David’s death. But later the next month, my mom and I spent a day together. She seemed to want to tell me something, so even though it was freezing out, I went walking with her on the beach—not too far from where we just were, in fact. And that’s when she told me she was adopted,
that Grandma Ellen and Grandpa Sam weren’t her birth parents. I guess when she was little, you didn’t talk about stuff like that—not like we do today.”

  “But what did she know?” A note of urgency creeps into Olensky’s voice. “About Lily, I mean?”

  “Not much.” Anne shrugs her shoulders. “But she said her birth mom’s name was Lily, and that her birth father had died, and Lily couldn’t raise her on her own. That all seems to agree with what that Nadia wrote to you. My mom didn’t really dwell on the details much. She just wanted me to understand why she’d said what she did the day of the funeral, let me know that even though Grandma drives her insane, she still loves her. After that, we never really talked about it. But when I read the name Lily, I knew I’d heard it.”

  Anne sucks in a quick breath. “Oh my God,” she says. “My mother—do you know she used to dream she was Anastasia? That’s what she told me. This morning, before school, when I was—well, freaking out, I asked her if she’d ever dreamed something over and over. I don’t know why I said it, except she looked worried about me, so I had to say something. And she didn’t even hesitate. She just blurted out that, oh, yeah, she used to have this recurring dream that she was Anastasia.”

  “It sort of makes sense,” Tess says. “I mean, she’s your mother and—hey, wait a second.” Tess stares at Anne. Her eyes grow huge. “If you’re really related to Lily, then that means…that would mean that you’re—” Tess just stares, her mouth popping open and closed, like a fish out of water.

  “A princess,” Olensky says. He’s beaming. “A princess.”

  “Well,” Anne tells him, “let’s get it right. An illegitimate princess. Not quite the same thing.”

  “Way better,” Tess says. “Much more interesting. Think about it. Maybe Coach Wicker will let you guest lecture in world history or something.”

  “Just shut up,” Anne tells her and then laughs. “Seriously.”

  I just stand there. Surely there is more than one woman in the world named Lily who gave her baby up for adoption. But more than one who gave birth in the same year, in the same place, to a girl named Laura? Who just happened to have had a dream that mirrored her own daughter’s?