The Believer's Daugher - [A Treadwell Academy - 02]

by Caitlyn Duffy

  While I had barely been home for that entire week because I was so busy organizing the fundraiser for Quian, I still hadn’t told my brother about my job. I felt a bit guilty about getting up every morning and leaving the apartment for the day without telling him what had happened. When I started thinking about John, far away in San Francisco, and the call we were going to get from him when we were late with our January rent, my heart beat so fast I felt like I couldn’t breathe. More than once, the pain was so bad that I had to lie down on the floor for a few minutes and wait for it to subside. It felt like there was a knife under my rib cage, stabbing me repeatedly.

  Three days before Christmas, when I was riding the subway home from a job-hunting venture on the Upper West Side, I was doodling in my notebook with my black ballpoint pen when the person sitting next to me said, “That looks nothing like me.”

  I looked up in shock. I had been on the subway for at least fifteen minutes, or six or seven stops, and had barely noticed when the person next to me had boarded and sat down on the empty gray seat next to mine. I had just been flipping through my notebook looking for a doodle-free, clean page, and almost jumped out of my skin when I saw that the person sitting next to me was none other than Felix.

  “How did you… how… hi,” I said shyly.

  I was absolutely stupefied that our paths had crossed so randomly again.

  “Hi,” he said. “Did you miss me?”

  I almost burst out laughing. I mean, we didn’t even know each other, really, but actually, yeah, I had missed him.

  “Are we ever going to actually hang out?” I blurted. “Or are we just going to make a lifelong habit out of running into each other at strange moments?”

  Felix looked delighted to see me. He was smiling from ear to ear. I was immediately very aware of his closeness, which only seconds earlier, had been oblivious to me. Our hips were touching. Our knees were touching. His battered backpack was balanced in his lap.

  “Is this moment so strange?” he asked. “This feels like a perfectly normal moment to me.”

  “You know what I mean, Felix,” I teased.

  “I wouldn’t mind running into you for the rest of my life,” Felix said.

  We stared at each other for an awkward moment, during which I was pretty sure, looking into his blue-gray eyes, that he might kiss me.

  But he didn’t.

  “What about your boyfriend?” he asked.

  “Boyfriend? What boyfriend?” I exclaimed. Who could he have possibly thought was my boyfriend? Someone he had seen me talking to at the store? Eliot? Eliot wore a purple bandana on his head every single day and sang showtunes off-key at inappropriate moments, even during shifts. I mean, I adored him, but he was not exactly boyfriend material.

  “The guy you were on the train with the first night I saw you,” Felix said. “You live with him, don’t you?”

  I was stumped. Had Felix followed me home? How did he know that I lived with Aaron? “That’s my older brother,” I clarified. “Totally not my boyfriend.”

  “Oh,” Felix replied.

  “How did you know that I live with my brother?” I asked. Felix couldn’t have seen me out and about with my brother in at least two weeks; Aaron couldn’t get up and down the stairs.

  “I saw you a while ago, in Chinatown,” Felix said. “I was going to say hello but I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said emphatically, to drive home the point that I was available. And basically dying for him to ask me out.

  “Is that why you’re drawing pictures of me in your notebook?” he teased. Before I could stop him, he took my sketchpad out of my hands. The skin of his hands grazed mine and I felt a little bit like I had been electrocuted.

  “How do you know it’s supposed to be you if it doesn’t look anything like you?” I asked.

  Felix remained silent, completely engrossed in my black line drawings. He flipped through the notebook carefully, studying each illustration. There was the full-body portrait I’d done painstakingly with one long line of True. Another of Jacinda, rolling her eyes and smiling. In the middle of the sketchpad were the drawings I had done at Brighton Beach, of the desolate amusement park.

  “You are very talented,” he finally said, the fingers of his right hand lingering on a drawing of Coney Island. “These are all drawings made with one line.”

  “Yeah, it’s been kind of an experiment,” I said, blushing. I could draw better if I was just freehand sketching. The line drawings were hardly my typical style.

  “Very interesting concept. Of course, it makes sense that you’re an artist. Do you have a portfolio online?”

  I blushed. Of course I didn’t have a portfolio online. I was a sixteen-year-old high school drop-out, not a professional illustrator. I had abandoned my childish notion about ever finding paid work as an artist in New York my first week in the city. It was downright crazy to think anyone would hire me for my artistic talents when there were so many professional artists in the city, people with degrees in graphic design. I had become so jaded, even just in two short months in the city, that I felt like laughing at my former self when I remembered how excited I had been that Ms. DiMico wanted me to submit a sketch for her art contest. What a silly thing, to think I had a shot at having my art hung at MOMA just because my submission to the contest came from a tony boarding school.

  “No,” I said. “This is just a hobby.”

  The train was approaching my stop, East Broadway.

  “Do you have any more work at home?” Felix asked, handing my notebook back to me.

  “I do,” I said, thinking of the two sketchpads I had in my room at the apartment, but also wistfully at all of the scans that my brother had thrown out when he had tossed my laptop. “But this is my stop.”

  To my great surprise, Felix stood, put his backpack over one shoulder and intended to follow me.

  “What are you doing now? Do you have any plans?”

  I didn’t have any plans. My lack of plans was so severe, it was laughable. I didn’t have any solid plans, in general, for the rest of my life, other than to be at Holy Trinity on Saturday morning, Christmas Eve, to help them notify winners of the raffle and write thank-you notes to everyone who had contributed prizes. I was kind of hoping the writer who had done the initial story about Quian and the raffle would be interested in doing a follow-up and giving some good press to the business owners who had been kind enough to make donations.

  “No, I was just going to go home,” I confessed. Jacinda had been bugging me for days to meet up with her for dinner, but I just couldn’t spend more money on restaurant food, or ask her to pay for me.

  “Come to my house. My mother is making dinner,” Felix said.

  I balked. The train was rolling to a stop and the doors were opening. If I was going to get off the train and go home, I had to step onto the platform. And yet, I hesitated.

  I barely knew him. It was totally weird to go to the home of someone who was practically a stranger. Being home-schooled and having so few friends growing up made other people’s houses seem like foreign countries to me. I resisted going to Juliette’s house for a weekend for so long during our freshman year that she finally confronted me, told me that I was being a freak, and it was just three days. She had been right. Three days in someone else’s house hadn’t killed me. In fact, it had been fun.

  So I sat back down on the gray seat, and so did Felix.

  The doors of the subway closed and we were on our way to Brooklyn.

  He pulled his own sketchpad out of his backpack and showed me all of his recent work. To say that he was talented would have been the understatement of the century. Each page held a new surprise. He worked across a variety of mediums: pencil, charcoal, collage, marker, water color. Sometimes he drew elaborate illustrations; there were dragons and pterodactyls and cityscapes. Other pages were filled from corner to corner with abstract color bursts, patterns and notes. On a page in the middle, t
here was a simple but beautiful pencil drawing of a woman sitting at a table, with her head resting on her hand, smiling shyly.

  “My mother,” Felix explained, when he noticed me lingering on that page.

  Felix lived in one of those huge brick buildings, exactly as I had imagined on my first trip to Brighton Beach. When we entered the building, Felix nodded at the security guard, who looked at me with curiosity. The building’s lobby was nothing fancy, and we passed a wall of mailboxes and a holiday display of a Christmas tree right next to a menorah. Three candles on the big plastic menorah were illuminated. We rode up eighteen floors in the elevator.

  “Is your mother going to be freaked out that you’re bringing someone home for dinner?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” Felix said. “She’s always telling us to bring friends home. We’re Russian. We like to entertain.”

  “But it’s Hanukkah. Should I have brought something? It’s rude for me to show up empty-handed.”

  “Gigi,” Felix said with a smile, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Relax. You’re our guest.”

  As we entered the apartment, the smell of frying onions hit us. The apartment was enormous, its layout comparable to a small house in the suburbs. It even had wall-to-wall carpet and wallpaper, just like a real house. Felix automatically kicked off his shoes once we entered, and left them on a mat already crowded with pairs of shoes. I did the same, hoping my socks weren’t too dirty or holey to attract attention.

  “Mama,” Felix called out down the hall to the interior of the apartment, following that with something in Russian.

  Moments later, a pretty, plump woman in her mid-forties stepped out of the kitchen carrying a dish towel. She had soft red hair pulled into a bun, and wore just as much makeup as my own mom.

  “Hi, I’m Felix’s mother,” she introduced herself to me with a thick accent.

  “I’m Gigi,” I said nervously. I was very self-conscious to be meeting a boy’s mom for the first time looking the way I did, with my rainbow mess hair and dirty jeans. This was not exactly how I had ever pictured meeting a potential love interest’s parents.

  Felix gave me a tour of the apartment. The apartment was large enough that it actually had a dining room, where flowered china was on display in an intricately carved wooden cabinet with tiny spotlights shining down on the plates. A metal menorah, with real wax candles in it, was at the center of the table, positioned on top of a lace doily.

  A guy with a round face, slight goatee and pot belly sat on the couch in the living room watching an American sitcom.

  “This is my brother, Kyrill,” Felix said.

  Kyrill looked older than Felix and waved at me without getting up.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said. His accent was barely noticeable and he had the same kind eyes as Felix. In every other way, however, I never would have guessed that they were related. Kyrill wore baggy sweatpants and a NY Giants t-shirt.

  Felix led me down a hall past Kyrill’s room to his own, and my heart began beating as loudly as an elephant’s footsteps. I mean, not like he was going to try to put the moves on me or anything in his mom’s apartment while she was home, but who knew? Maybe he was.

  “Come on in,” he said, flipping on the light. He thankfully made no attempt to close the door for privacy behind me as I entered. His room was perfectly innocuous and I breathed a sigh of relief that there weren’t any gross bikini model posters on the walls, or dirty boxer shorts on the floor. His room was downright Spartan: white walls, beige carpet, neatly made bed, alarm clock set for the next morning, organized desk. The only decorations on his walls were framed photographs and a few of his own drawings, all hung in orderly rows rather than haphazardly.

  “We have a lot of work to do,” he said.

  I had no clue what he was talking about until he disappeared into his brother’s room and returned with a rolling office chair for me. He urged me to sit down. As he flipped open his laptop and began talking a mile a minute about art and marketing and recognition, I realized he hadn’t brought me home to take advantage of me. He had brought me home to help me build a website.

  Felix set up a blog for me and then configured my mobile phone so that I could post pictures directly to the blog from its camera. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that in another five days or so, my service plan was going to run out on my phone and I couldn’t afford to keep it turned on. He helped me design a background for the blog, and then painstakingly lit all of the pages in my sketchbook one by one with his desk lamp and took pictures of them. I watched in wonderment as he began to populate my new website with them.

  “This is amazing,” I said breathlessly, watching him work away, the reflection of the laptop screen dancing in the lenses of his glasses. I knew how to create a blog and do basic Photoshop stuff from school, but it never would have occurred to me to pull together a portfolio of my designs together with such efficiency. “Why are you helping me like this?”

  Felix turned away from the laptop to face me, and took my left hand in his right hand. He gave it a little squeeze and then let go.

  “You are an artist, and your work is worthy of attention. When I told my father I wanted to be an artist, he said good, but be a marketer, too. He told me I was too talented to ever go hungry,” Felix said. His eyes drifted to a framed picture hanging above his desk of what looked like him when he was younger, with long hair that curled to his jaw line. An older man with a huge smile and tons of chest hair peeking out of the open collar of his shirt smiled broadly with his arm around Felix.

  “Is that your dad?” I asked.

  Felix nodded. “Yep.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He doesn’t do anything, now. He’s dead.”

  I sat in surprised silence for a moment before saying, “I’m so sorry, Felix.”

  “It’s OK. It’s been a while. He used to own a Laundromat right here in Brighton Beach. He had colon cancer,” Felix told me. “What about your father? What does he do?”

  I gathered this was hard for him to talk about because he looked straight ahead at the computer rather than facing me. I didn’t know what to say in response to the question about my father. I could hardly say, “my father is a millionaire leader of a Christian church movement and he’s probably going to go to jail next year for fraud and tax evasion.”

  Or could I? I felt an almost irresistible urge to be honest with Felix. I wanted him to know everything about me. And I wanted to know everything about him. Inside my head, I was kind of freaking out that I was actually with him, in his room. I had to promise myself that I could have a total emotional combustion once I got home as long as I played it cool in his presence.

  “He does finance stuff,” I said. “We don’t really talk. That’s why I live in New York with my brother. Our family kind of… imploded.”

  Felix’s mother had made soft cabbages stuffed with rice and meat (golubtsi) for dinner, with a strong-tasting horseradish sauce poured over them, and dainty meatballs on the side. It had been so long since I had eaten a hot meal at a real table that I was extra conscious of my manners and was afraid of wolfing the food down too quickly. I was absolutely starving. Felix sliced a long loaf of rye bread and we all took slices, which we slathered with butter. We lit three candles of the menorah, and I learned that Felix’s family didn’t exchange gifts until the eighth night of Hanukkah.

  I learned all about Felix’s family; his mother and brother were chatty and seemed very happy. Felix’s mom was a dental assistant at a dental clinic down the block. She had grown up in St. Petersburg and it had been her childhood dream to move to New York. When Felix told her I was from California (I had almost forgotten that I had told him that outside the club in Brooklyn), she seemed very impressed.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Hollywood,” she said, clucking her tongue. “Beautiful, beautiful palm trees.”

  “She’s never seen a palm tree,” Kyrill said.

  “You,” Felix’s mom said, swatting at K
yrill with her cloth napkin. “This one went to Disney World with the marching band last year and now he thinks he’s a world traveler.”

  “We came here when Kyrill was only three,” Felix told me. “He doesn’t remember Russia.”

  “Someday I’ll go,” Kyrill vowed.

  “There are a million better places to go,” his mother told him. “Don’t waste your time on Russia.”

  I did some math in my head. If Kyrill was three when Felix’s family moved to the U.S., and Felix had been five, that made Felix the older of the two brothers. Kyrill, I had gathered, was a senior in high school. That made Felix twenty!

  Way too old for me.

  Felix also had an older brother named Vlad who lived on the Upper West Side with his girlfriend, Antonia, who was also from Brighton Beach. Vlad was earning his master’s degree at Columbia in law. Vlad was the reason why Felix and I had met and found ourselves on this wild course of random run-ins; the night that Aaron and I had been taking the train uptown to the hostel, Felix had been on his way to crash at Vlad’s apartment.

  I helped Felix’s mom clear the plates from the table and Felix rinsed them off in the sink before loading up the dishwasher. A real dishwasher! I couldn’t help but wonder how much rent Felix’s family paid for their majestic apartment. Maybe my brother and I had been foolish to rent in Manhattan.

  He insisted on riding the train with me back into the city even though it was only nine o’clock at night. I assured him that he didn’t have to, but was happy to have the company. It was bitterly cold in his neighborhood, so close to the ocean, and just as we were about to step outside from his building’s front lobby, Felix turned me toward him, pulled my hat down more snugly over my head, pulled the zipper on my coat up higher, and rewrapped my scarf more tightly around my neck.