by Joy Preble
“We were together for three years,” he says. “I wasn’t always in London, of course. I was still doing what I thought I was supposed to—searching for the girl we needed to save Anastasia. It all still seemed so imminent then—that any second we’d find her. The Revolution, the assassination—they all were still so close in my mind, so vivid. Tasha thought I was traveling on business all those times, and I suppose that wasn’t really a lie. But when I’d go back, we’d be together. And then one day—one afternoon—she’d planned a picnic for us. We were sitting on a blanket in a small park not far from where she lived. The sun was shining, and the weather was pleasant, and I honestly don’t remember what we were talking about. But what I do remember is that she stopped in the middle of what she was saying and looked at me—really looked at me in a way that she never had before. And then, very slowly, she said, ‘Do you know that you don’t look a day older than that first day I met you?’ There was more that we said to each other that day, but I don’t remember that either. All I know is that a few weeks later, I left her note telling her that I wouldn’t be back. Because what else could I do, really? That’s how I saw it then. I couldn’t tell her, and I couldn’t stay and not tell her, so I left.”
“That’s it? You left? You really never saw her again?” I hate how shocked my voice sounds when I say it, but it’s just so sad. And it’s more than sad, but I don’t want to go there. Could I leave someone like that, even if I knew I had to? What does it say about Ethan that he could do that, give up on love like that? Or did he just feel he really had no choice?
He’s silent for a while. “Those were different times,” he says eventually. “I was different. I—I truly believed that I was bound to some higher cause. That the path I’d chosen obligated me to certain sacrifices that were simply inevitable. So yes, I left. But I did come back, actually. I did see her. She just didn’t see me. The first time was a few years later. She’d married and had a daughter by then. The last was not long before she died. She was eighty years old by then. I—well, I hadn’t planned on seeing her. It had been a long time since I’d been in London, and I never imagined that our paths would cross. Except they did. The lobby bar of the hotel I was staying at had live music in the evenings. A woman in her late thirties or even early forties sat down to play that night. She had long brown hair in a braid that hung down her back. And she looked right at me and smiled. She looked so much like Tasha that for a few seconds, I couldn’t move. Then an older woman walked in. And the woman at the piano rose and hugged her. ‘Nana,’ she called her. ‘Nana, I’m so glad you could come hear me tonight.’ The older woman had been Tasha. She’d grown older just like I should have, but couldn’t and—well, that’s my story. Have I taught you the word zalupa? Idiot. Dickhead. That’s me.”
I don’t push him to tell me more, even though my mind is brimming with questions. What if he’d been honest with her? Wouldn’t she have found a way to deal with it? But it’s easy to say stuff like that when you have no idea if it’s possible. I ponder telling him about Ben and me, about why I first liked him. But the story seems so small and so typical. Girl likes guy for all the wrong reasons. Guy likes girl. Girl’s heart—and her wacky, uncontrollable super powers—lead her somewhere else. Breakup follows—still to be announced. The only thing I know for sure is that I can’t judge Ethan on his choices. Based on mine, I could also be considered a—what did he just say? Zalupa.
Instead, I surprise myself again and say, “When my brother died, I thought I’d break in two. I know I’ve told you about it some. But I—I’d walk into his room and sit on his floor and just cry until I didn’t have any tears left. It didn’t help that my mom just kind of checked out for a while. Oh, she still got up every morning and made coffee and talked to me while I ate my breakfast. And she still went to work at the Jewel Box. But sometimes, when I would tell her about my day, I knew she wasn’t listening. Not really. It was like she was there and not there at the same time. My dad—well, he just kept on going, the same as always. I suppose he just didn’t know what else to do. I mean, what else do you do, really? I guess he figured that my mom would just deal somehow. And he was sort of right, but not really. She just pretends a lot. I don’t know if she’ll ever truly get over it.”
Ethan sighs and pulls me to him again. “She won’t. You know that, right? It’ll become easier—maybe. I suspect it has. But she won’t get over it, Anne. Just like you won’t. Just like I’ve never—”
“I know.” Talking about it makes my chest feel tight. All things in our family seem to circle back to David. But Ethan reaches up then and strokes my hair, and I kiss him, and he kisses me, and then I’m happy when we stop talking for a while.
In fact, we’re so busy doing things that don’t include talking that it takes a few minutes for the sound of running water to register in either of our brains.
“Is that the shower?” My skin prickles in a way that lets me know this is not good at all.
Ethan presses his hand over my lips. “Shh. Let me listen.” But he’s off the couch and headed toward his bathroom before I can say anything to be shushed about.
The hardwood floor is cold under my bare feet as I follow him.
“Stay behind me.” Ethan’s voice is low, and he holds up a hand to signal me to stop.
The shower sound is distinct. My pulse kicks into high gear as we reach the bathroom door—the one I’m sure was open earlier. My hands—the same ones Ethan had been kissing not long ago—tingle with a sudden burst of energy. Terrific. Maybe whatever has chosen this moment to take a shower in Ethan’s bathroom will let me heal a shaving cut or something. As if on cue, I hear a rustling, like someone—something—is moving slowly toward the door. Toward us.
“Do you smell that?” It’s the salty odor of seawater. My dream rushes back to me: My brother lying on the floor. Baba Yaga telling me what I can do to ease my mother’s pain. The rusalka pointing up toward Viktor. “And then you cursed me! He doesn’t know what you did. But I do. I know the truth. I won’t forget. I can’t. I gave her up. And look where it got me.” In my dream, this is what she said. I gave her up. Who did she give up? Something as frightening as the prospect of opening the bathroom door begins to rise in my chest.
Ethan turns the handle and slowly pushes the door open. A cloud of steam escapes the small tiled room. The saltwater smell grows stronger. If my eyes were closed, I’d think I was at the edge of the sea.
Through the fog of steam, I can make out the water running full blast in the glassed-in shower. Fingers of mist drift into the hallway, sifting around us. “Do you see her?” My question gets swallowed up in the billows of gray steam.
It’s the rusalka who answers me, rising from nowhere and sliding her way through the narrow doorway, her lilac dress hanging heavily on her, dripping water onto the floor. “Of course he sees me. But when he looks closer, perhaps he won’t want to. It is as I have told you, my sweet, my dearest. I cannot do this on my own. You must see for me. You must fix what needs to be fixed. This is a burden, I know. But you must carry it. It is your destiny. It is what is coming, whether you are willing to see it or not. Look at me. Please. Do not turn away. Secrets within secrets. Life within life. Life within me, passed down to you.”
Look at me. Her words spark something else from my dream. Don’t look at her, the Ethan in my dream had told me. But why? What is it about her that I just can’t see?
“Kak vas zovut?” Ethan asks her like he did at the pond. “What is your name? What do you want?” He’s gripping my arm so tightly that he’s cutting off my circulation.
She doesn’t answer us. She just stands there, shoulders slumped sadly, her dress in tatters, her wild hair dotted with wet sparkles as the fog settles on it.
“Kak vas zovut?” Ethan repeats. “We can help you if you tell us your name.”
The rusalka sighs sadly and stares at me with storm gray eyes. The shape of them looks familiar. So does the slight tilt of her full lips and something I hadn’t noticed before—the
sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. They stand out starkly against her pale skin and her dark hair, her sharp jawline and slender build. Confusion jolts through me. I see now why it was so easy for her to mimic my mother’s appearance. Not only does she look a little like me, but if her hair had auburn streaks and her eyes were brown, she could be my mother.
“Kak vas zovut?” Ethan says a third time. My heart is pounding. It’s so humid that each breath is like taking a sip of water.
Ever so slightly—as she had at the pond—the rusalka stands a little taller, straightens her thin shoulders. That motion again. So very much like my mother. An idea rises in my brain. Is it possible?
I’d tried to find her now and then since last fall, but not one email, not one website yielded anything. Back then, my heart had hoped that she would be looking too, still trying to find the daughter she’d given up: the woman I call mom. It was only a few weeks ago that I’d finally decided that Lily, my mother’s birth mother, just didn’t want to be found.
It had never once occurred to me that just when I finally stopped searching, she’d find me instead.
In my head, I see Professor Olensky in his office last fall, showing us the letter from the woman named Nadia Tauman—the one who swore her friend was descended from the Romanovs. Her friend who was my birth grandmother, who’d given up my mom for adoption.
I peer at the rusalka through the mist. And with a quick intake of breath, I finally understand.
“Oh, my God!” I shout at the rusalka. “I know who you are! You’re Lily, aren’t you? Oh, my God, you’re Lily! You’re my real grandmother! And you’re a mermaid. Every single time I think my life can’t get any weirder, it does. My grandmother’s a Russian mermaid.” I stop before I add the part about how she also tried to kill my boyfriend—correction: ex-boyfriend, even if he doesn’t know it yet.
Still gripping my arm, Ethan looks at me sharply. The rusalka doesn’t answer. She just smooths her wild dark hair with bony fingers.
I wait for Ethan to tell me I’m crazy, that I’ve got it wrong. Anne, you’re an idiot. How can a crazy Russian mermaid be your grandmother? Isn’t your family dysfunctional enough, what with great-great-grandfather Viktor being Tsar Nicholas’s wacky illegitimate son who caused my hundred-year immortality problem and Anastasia’s entrapment? Instead, he squints at Lily through the billows of foggy steam.
“I know you,” he says slowly. “I saw you once. It was only for a second on the street. But I saw you.”
My pulse quickens. “Saw her when?” I glance from Ethan to the rusalka and back to Ethan. Is she really Lily, my grandmother? And he knows her? Excuse me?
“A long time ago. I don’t know—it was years ago. The early sixties, I think. I was here in Chicago with Viktor.” He flips his gaze back to the woman I think is Lily. “Can you tell me? Is that it? I did see you, didn’t I?”
Lily—I decide to think of her as Lily now—nods her head silently. More droplets of water fall to the floor. I’m attempting not to freak out about this sudden collision with Ethan’s past. I’d understood in theory that he had one. But other than that Tasha story a few minutes ago, I’d mostly ignored it. It is now officially impossible to ignore. Where exactly had he seen her? What was she doing? How can she be a mermaid?
“You know him?” I pry my arm from Ethan’s grip and edge closer to her. Tiny scraps of seaweed adorn her hair. Is there seaweed in Lake Michigan? How did she get here anyway? By swimming across the Bering Strait with other Russian rusalkas and sort of magically migrating from Alaska to Chicago? Was she a mermaid when she had my mother? Even for me, this is way too twisted.
“He was one of the last to see me alive.” Her voice echoes everywhere, bouncing through the swirling fog. “Did you know that, Ethan? Did you know? I like to believe that you did not. That you were unaware of what your friend was up to. But I’d seen you with him, and so I ran, and only when it was too late, when there was no going back for me, did I stop to think that perhaps he had not involved you.”
Lily tilts back her head and laughs.
“You know my name?” Ethan moves next to me again, and we both step even closer to Lily.
“You know mine,” she tells him. “It is only fair I tell you that I know yours. He killed me, you know. Oh, not in the way you might think. Not like he killed Misha. Even that he didn’t do on his own. He sent men after us, but they were fools. They did not care who they shot, as long as they shot someone, and so they shot my Misha. My darling, darling Misha. The father of the baby that was heavy in my belly. Do you know the pain I felt that day? A girl like me? Alone with a child in her womb? Not even a ring on my finger to prove that I belonged to someone? It was too much for me. I was not strong like this girl here. And I did not really understand who had wanted me dead. My sisters explained it later. This was something they understood. To be a rusalka is to grieve. It is to know how men see us. It is to have everything and nothing. The power to seduce and the pain of never knowing love.”
“The baby?” I ask her. My voice shakes, and I concentrate to steady it. “That was my mother, right? Is that what you’re telling us?”
For one crazy second, I imagine myself trying to explain this to my mother—along with everything else about our family history that she doesn’t know.
“I am telling you many things. But I do not know if you are ready to listen.” In that instant, she’s gone—just a faded shimmering outline in the fog, and then nothing.
We wait. I count off the seconds and try to even out my breathing. “Is she telling the truth?” I ask Ethan. “Did you know her?” Can she even tell the truth?
He rubs a hand through his hair. His face is damp from the fog. “Each time we’ve seen her, she’s seemed familiar somehow. But it was a long time ago, Anne. There was no reason to think—it was downtown here. Viktor and I had been—searching. He’d been sure the girl we needed was here. But then late that afternoon, he’d met me at the coffee shop where we usually ate our meals and told me he’d been wrong, that he’d seen the girl, and he knew she was not the one. I had no cause then not to believe him.”
“Yeah, and that turned out great, huh?” He smiles grimly at my lame attempt at humor.
“Here’s the thing.” He walks into the bathroom, reaches into the shower, and turns off the water. I walk in behind and catch a glimpse of the two of us in the foggy mirror: Ethan—tall, lanky, and brown-haired, his blue eyes wary. Me—shorter and very pale. My shirt is plastered to my chest, and my hair is frizzing crazily. I reach up to smooth it, but I know it’s pointless.
Ethan sighs. “I never connected that with what I saw later. Viktor said he was meeting someone, and I headed back to my hotel room. It was dark, and some of the streetlights were out. I remember passing a little bookshop, and then as I walked past the alley near the end of the block, there she was, so close that we almost collided. But she stopped short just in time and looked at me. It’s her eyes that I really remember. That’s what I saw when I was in the pool with her yesterday—those gray eyes. And what I’ve never forgotten is that when she looked at me, she sort of froze—just stood there staring—and then she turned and ran. It didn’t occur to me go after her. I was a stranger, and it was dark, and I assumed she was afraid I was going to rob her or something. She ran around the corner, and that was the last I saw of her. Until yesterday.”
“So that’s what she means? When she said your friend, she meant Viktor? Is it true, do you think? That he’s the one who had her husband killed? That he tried to kill her? Because that would mean—”
Ethan sighs again. He takes my hand, and we walk out of the bathroom. We stand there in the hall, both barefoot on the wooden floor. “That would mean that Viktor knew who she was—that he had figured out somehow that she was potentially the one we were looking for.”
“So he tries to get rid of her. But they shoot her husband instead, and she somehow gives her baby—my mother—up for adoption. Then at some point later, she sees
you, knows you’re friends with Viktor, and runs—and then what? She jumps or falls into a river and gets adopted by a band of rusalkas, where she waits until she figures out how to haunt me so I can somehow help her? I’d say it was impossible, but obviously, nothing is impossible anymore.”
“Even if it’s all true, I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why she’s appearing to you, or what she really wants, or why she’s chosen now to ask for it.”
He pulls me to him, and I wrap my arms around him. He tucks a stray strand of my hair behind my ear. “If Viktor went after her, it’s possible that he knew everything, even then. That somehow he knew she was connected to him. The daughter of—well, what would she be? The daughter of his daughter, most likely.” He shakes his head. I can feel the shiver of disbelief travel through his body. But I realize we’re both thinking that it was probably true—Viktor’s desire for immortality had outweighed everything else in his world.
I’m sorry for the words that blurt out next, but there’s no pulling them back in. “You really didn’t know? But then why did she run from you? If you didn’t know who she was—if you’d never seen her—then why did she look at you like that and run?”
It’s as though I’ve slapped him again.
“You think that I knew what he was up to and just ignored it? That I let her die or become a rusalka or whatever it is that happened to her?”
“No. Well—no. I just want to understand, that’s all.” Is that what I think? I wonder. I said it, but that doesn’t mean that I really think it. It just means I’m confused.
“So do I, Anne. And you know what? The man who has the answers isn’t about to tell us anytime soon.”
I feel a twinge of anger rise. “Well, that’s easy, isn’t it? Viktor’s the one who’s trapped now, so that’s the end of it, huh? Lily will just hang around trying to off my boyfriends, and you’ll just say it isn’t your fault, and then what? Hey, maybe next year she can just come to college with me. She can live in the shower in my dorm like some sort of creepy mascot or something. Because you told her that we’d help her, but you don’t have a clue how we’re going to do that, do you?”