“Don’t be silly. It’s a beautiful dress, and it’s a good thing that it isn’t what everyone else is wearing. Trust me on that.”
“My God, do you live under a rock? Don’t you know what it’s like for me in school, always wearing these hand-me-down clothes and trying to pass them off as new? I’m barely hanging on to a social life now, and if I show up in that, they’re going to laugh me out of the dance, and I might as well drop out.”
Mira placed the dress over the back of the couch. “Now you’re just being melodramatic. I suppose you want to spend $200 on some designer piece of trash you’ll wear once and never want to see again? So you can be like everyone else?”
Katya stormed up to her room and grabbed her blue dress out of her closet. She yanked off her school clothes and stepped into the dress, stealing a glance at herself in the mirror. She looked like something from MTV, and the dress really did do wonders for her eyes, not to mention her legs, which were not swathed in tulle and could actually be seen.
She flew down the stairs and stood behind her mother, who had gone back to preparing dinner. “There. This is what I am going to wear.”
Mira turned slowly, distracted. She froze, and her mouth set in a hard line when she saw Katya. “And when did you get that?”
“When I went to Traverse City.”
“And with what money?”
“I’m going to pay for it.”
“With what money, Katya?”
“Tiffany paid for it. I said I’d pay her back.”
Mira smacked the knife flat side down on the cutting board. “So one of the rich girls tells you to buy a dress, and you just say ‘Sure, whatever you say!’ You are not wearing that. Leave the tags on, you’re taking it back.”
“What?” Katya hugged herself as if Mira were about to rip it off right then. “You wouldn’t!” She knew her mother wouldn’t like it, she knew she’d get a lecture and probably have to pay for the dress herself over several weeks of reimbursing her mother. She never expected this.
“You lied to me and sneaked around to buy this dress behind my back. You will not wear it.”
“I will not wear that thing!” Kat jabbed a finger at the fifties dress, in a heap on the couch. She imagined looking like Sandra Dee at the prom, and she started to cry.
“So Patty will sew you something, but you’re not wearing that one.”
“You’re being so unfair! You’re going to ruin my life!”
She turned back to her vegetables. “You’ll survive.”
“I’m not going then. I will not go to the prom if I can’t wear this dress.”
Katya crossed her arms, tapping her foot and staring at her mother. Mira’s black hair was escaping from the loose braid she wore over a tunic and long floral-print skirt. She was barefoot, as usual. She turned slowly to face Kat and leaned back on the counter, her face still, except for one fine line across her forehead.
“I guess you’ll have to call Danny and tell him to find another date.”
In the end, Katya feigned a stomach flu at the last moment, when she couldn’t bear the sight of herself in the fifties dress, and Mira did not relent about the blue dress. Mira returned the blue one and gave her the money to give to Tiffany, who never knew about the fight.
“I’m so sorry you missed it!” she’d told Katya at school the following Monday. “But I’m sure you can wear the dress next Homecoming.”
Next Homecoming, Danny took Tiffany to the dance. Katya sold concessions at the football game and watched a video Saturday night.
Katya shivers in the cool breeze off the lake as she smudges parts of her sketch where the line is too heavy and dark.
She wonders if teenage Katya would have done anything differently if she’d known that in just over twenty years, her mother would have cancer. Maybe she would have smiled indulgently and worn the stupid dress.
“Kat, when are we getting out of here?”
Charles stands above her, wearing some jeans and a polo shirt, his hair combed, face clean-shaven.
“What’s the rush?”
“There’s no power. I have to get to the office, or at least to an Internet connection. I can’t get through to the insurance company about the truck, and we’ll have to rent a car, which will take time. There’s…I just need to.”
Katya slaps her sketchbook shut and shoves the pencil into the spiral binding. She struggles to a standing position without Charles offering her a hand.
“You need to tell me what’s going on,” she says, brushing a piece of hair out of her face. “Are you having an affair?”
“What? Jesus,” he looks around, but no one seems to have heard. She sees his jaw clench and wonders if she’s gotten it right. He really is screwing somebody. “I told you, it’s just business. A work crisis.”
“What’s the problem?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m not a drooling moron. Try me.”
“You wouldn’t be interested.” Charles shifts his weight from foot to foot, looks over her head, and chews on his lower lip. Anything but looking her in the eye.
“I have never been more interested in your business. I demand to know what’s happening that is of such critical importance that we have to leave my mother’s house the morning after we find out she’s got cancer.”
“It’s just…We’re having…”
“Out with it.” Katya throws her sketchbook at the ground. “Out with it, damn you!”
“Stop shouting and be reasonable.”
“I’m fucking sick of reasonable!” Her shriek startles a man who had been sawing off a tree limb across the street. He stops in midstroke and openly gapes.
CHAPTER 50
Ivan
VAN SAVORS THE TRIPPY ECHO IN THE BOATHOUSE AS HE STRUMS a chord. A tune has burrowed its way into his brain, but he doesn’t yet know what it’s trying to tell him. He picks out a few notes of something that might be a melody. Typically, he hammers out some lyrics, then whaps together a melody that seems to fit.
This one’s different.
Everything’s different, now. His mother is dying. His best friend loves him. He tries to imagine loving Jenny. It’s easy enough to imagine sex with Jenny, because he’s already considered it, in his most lonely of nights. He’s even pondered asking her about it, but somehow asking his best friend for a pity fuck was too pathetic, even for him.
The boathouse is empty, not rented at the moment, it seems, as there aren’t even any signs of recent use other than a few liquor bottles from kids sneaking in. One open end frames the harbor, with boats tipped on their sides, some turned completely over; still others in the public marina across the way are smashed and scraped. And all around them a sky so blue it pierces the eye.
He feels terrible having snuck out on Jenny while she was showering. But since her profession of love and needling him about his pathetic career, he couldn’t bear to look in her direction.
The sound of heavy steps on the old boards makes Van nearly topple off the barrel he was using as an ersatz stool.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was in here.”
Van appraises Darius, who looks imposing, poised in the open end of the boathouse closest to the house. His long arms hang loosely at his sides, but there’s a taut expectancy in him, as if he’s ready to draw his six-shooter at high noon.
“Trying to escape?” Van adjusts his seat on the old barrel, intently studying his fingering, to avoid having to look at his brother-in-law.
“Just walking around. Irina is getting dressed, and the house is a bit crazy right now.” He leans his long frame against the doorway. “And what did you mean exactly by ‘escape’?”
“Nothing.”
“Hmm. Like it meant nothing yesterday when you said ‘if you stick around long enough.’ There some reason you assume I’m going to run out on your sister?”
“It’s not because you’re black.” Van wishes he could grab those words and stuff them back down his throat.
“Damn, what is it with you? I never said you thought that. We’re talking man to man, here. Black’s got nothing to do with it. Right?”
Van forces his eyes up from his guitar. “Of course not. Look, you don’t know this about me yet, but I’m like an idiot savant, except I’ve just got the idiot part. I’m excellent at saying the wrong thing at the worst possible time.”
“So why have you been looking at me sideways the whole time I’ve been here? That is when you’re not stammering and trying not to sound racist.”
Van takes his time resting his guitar carefully against a pile of canvas next to his barrel.
“Why do you act like you own my sister?”
“Excuse me?”
“I heard you bossing her around about the coffee. Yes, OK, she’s pregnant, and caffeine isn’t the best. But you’re not her boss, you don’t own her.”
“I do look out for her because someone’s got to.”
“She’s got a family for that, not to mention she’s not helpless herself.”
“She’s just a…”
“Kid? Then why did you marry her? Why did you knock her up?”
Darius cracks his knuckles. “I didn’t knock anything. It’s a two-party system. She seduced me, if you have to know.”
“I didn’t have to know, but I’m not surprised. Reenie can’t be alone, for whatever reason. She’s gotta always have a guy, and sometimes she’s not choosy.”
“You think I’m that low-down to leave her while she was pregnant? Like you said in the hallway, ‘if you stick around long enough’ I believe was your phrasing.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be you that leaves.”
Darius folds his arms tight and looks down at the knotted and gnarled boards in the floor of the boathouse.
“I don’t know you at all. I just know my sister’s track record. For all I know, you’re just like…” Van stops himself. “…Just like the others.”
“She married me.”
“Well, that is different all right. You got siblings?”
Darius drops his arms to his sides. “None living. I had an older sister who died in childhood. I don’t remember her.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. If you did, you might understand the protectiveness. Especially for Reenie.”
“Who says I don’t understand?”
“Because you married her. I’m sorry to say it, I love her more than life, but since you married her, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of my sister’s temperament and attention span.”
“You don’t give her enough credit.”
“And you don’t hardly know her.” Van pulls on his ear, his stomach churning with a sudden desperate desire to change the subject. “Look, forget it. You seem like a good guy.” Van smirks at him. “You know, for being black and all.”
Darius laughs, his warm voice bouncing around in the boathouse, the water giving the sound a ringing quality, like church bells.
“You’re all right, you know that?”
“You only say that because you don’t hardly know me, either. Give it time.”
“I will. Because I don’t quit. If your sister quits on me, that’s her business, but that baby is my baby and my blood no matter what she decides, and it’s your blood, too. So. Looks like we’re connected. For a long, long time.”
Van considers this, studying Darius again. He tries to imagine their gene pools mixing.
Darius sighs, takes one more look out at the water, then turns back toward the house, striding up the grassy slope with long, purposeful steps.
Van strums another chord, feeling a growing admiration for that composed, mature gentleman who inexplicably married his ditzy sister in what will surely end up as another sordid page in Irina’s colorful romantic history. It’s as if Katya got all the good karma, meeting her dashing and successful husband in college, having three beautiful healthy children and raising them in a showplace home. Running her own successful business. She used it all up, like she used to use all the hot water on school days, when they were trying to catch the bus.
Of course that’s silly. Good fortune is not a finite, concrete substance that gets passed around like a potluck dish. She wanted her life to be perfect, and she went out and made it that way.
“What’s her secret?” Van whispers. And he decides to go find out.
He slings his guitar over his back and steps out of the boathouse, blinking in the morning sun. That’s when he spots his dad coming down the hill, hand over his eyes, and calling out, “Ivan! Have you seen your mother? I can’t find her anywhere!”
CHAPTER 51
Irina
IRINA SLAPS HER YELLOW DRESS INTO THEIR SUITCASE, ALONG with her still-damp pajamas from chasing after Darius out into the rain.
Her shorts that morning wouldn’t snap, so she left them undone, hoping the fly wouldn’t unzip at an inconvenient time.
The door creaks, and Irina whirls around. Darius slides into the room, his eyes on the floor. He studies the floor for a time, then gazes out the window. The silence swells in the room until Irina feels it pushing her away like an expanding balloon.
He looks just past her shoulder when he finally speaks. “Will you need help finding a new place? Or maybe you will stay here because of the baby.”
His voice is hard and brittle as fresh ice.
“I haven’t thought about it.” She takes his dress shirt and shakes it out with a snap of her wrist, before folding it in the suitcase. “I’ll pack my things first, then decide.”
“I’d like you to be staying with someone, anyway. Someone to keep an eye on you. Might not be a bad idea to stay here, during the pregnancy. Your mom could…”
“You don’t get to say where I go. Ex-husbands usually don’t.”
If Darius was hurt by that, he didn’t show it. “I’m looking out for the baby. If you should pass out like you did at the party, but alone…You could hit your head, lie on the floor unconscious. It’s not good for the baby. Or for you.”
Irina couldn’t help but notice the phrasing, how the baby came first. Well, what did she expect? She was divorcing him. She’s become simply a brief affair turned quickie marriage. In fact, she’s become a baby-mama, something Darius probably never wanted to have. He doesn’t like clichés.
“I like living alone,” Irina says, needling him, knowing it’s childish and not caring. Realistically, she wouldn’t be able to afford a decent place of her own, and in all likelihood would end up in her childhood room, with a few boxes of possessions, just like she did last year during the affair with Alex. She always seemed to zoom back toward home base after every relationship went up in flames, brushing ashes out of her hair.
“Just think about it,” Darius says. “I’m not asking for my sake, because I know that doesn’t matter. But the baby needs to be safe.”
“I know.” She speaks so quietly he likely doesn’t hear. He doesn’t acknowledge her, and instead reaches around her to put his shaving kit in the suitcase. She leans her head against his muscular arm, and takes that arm in her hand, caressing it.
Darius jerks his arm away. “Do you think the roads are passable? The traffic lights are out, but that just means all the intersections are four-way stops, I think…”
“How are you so calm?” Irina swallows back a rising sob.
“I don’t know why you’re upset. You want to split up, in fact, you say you didn’t even want to get married.”
Irina turns away from the suitcase to face him. The bright morning light cuts a shaft across his body, and she wants to throw herself into him. “I’m all at loose ends, with my mom’s news, and the storm tearing up the tree…Oh, that doesn’t make sense, but, I don’t know. I’m confused.”
“You’re young, is what you are. I don’t mean that to be insulting, so don’t go getting all indignant. It’s true. I was wrong to convince you to marry me, I should have seen this coming. This is all my fault. But I did let myself believe we’d be a family, for a while. No
w I believe we will not be, and I’m getting used to that. Don’t confuse the issue.”
“What are you talking about?” Irina steps toward him, and he visibly stiffens.
“I mean, you didn’t want to marry me, you don’t want to raise our child together. So don’t think you can still use me to get laid or get a hug or whatever.”
“I wasn’t trying to use you!”
“At least this time I’m only losing the wife, and not the baby, too.” Darius steps toward the door, then turns back. “Assuming you take good care of yourself. You really need to take good care of yourself, Irina.”
He steps out through the door as quietly as he came in, shutting it so gently it doesn’t latch, and swings back open with a creak.
CHAPTER 52
Mira
I STUB OUT THE JOINT AND BURY IT AS DEEP IN THE SAND AS I CAN. The sand feels beautiful in my fingers, silky and also soft like the hand of a lover. It’s cool in the lower layers underneath the hard, rain-speckled surface.
I’m so grateful for that sand, and the lake, and the breeze, and yet soon it could all be gone for me.
Then I’d better enjoy it while it’s here.
I’m halfway to the pier before I realize I’ve left my sandals by the wall, but I don’t care. My toes love the sand, too.
I’m surprised the pier is deserted on this incredible morning, this morning so fresh it feels newborn and unscarred. But then, most everyone else is picking shingles out of their landscaping.
Katya will have to get that tree off her truck somehow. She’s probably so angry, her head is spinning like Linda Blair’s. The images make me giggle, and I immediately feel rueful. It’s not what I wanted for my daughter. I had such great plans for her.
She’d be a free spirit, independent, brave, and strong. Yet from the beginning she was determined to follow. And follow what? A cause? A religion? An ideal?
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