by Jane Kindred
“He wandered off while Lukas—Mr. Strand—was showing me the tower.”
Roger closed the door on the damp wind and pulled back his hood. “Wandered off…you mean he’s walking already?” He smiled. “It seems you work miracles, Ms. Lang.”
“Just Millie, please. That’s just it.” I glanced over at Konstantin, sound asleep. “He shouldn’t have been able to get across the room much less down the steps and across the yard into the woods.”
“Children often surprise us with what they can do if they’re determined to.” Roger picked up a canvas shopping bag he’d set on the floor beside him. “With this awful weather, I thought I’d bring some extras. Karolina’s packed up two nights of dinners and tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch as well.” He held out the bag with a smile. “All labeled. Konstantin has a wheat allergy, so she’s marked which ones are his. Most of Karolina’s recipes are wheat-free—she’s a marvel—but she didn’t have any of her special flour blend on hand today.”
“Thanks.” I glanced in, and the incredible smell of spices blending together and the yeasty warmth of fresh bread rose up to meet me. “She’s pretty amazing,” I said as I took the food to the kitchen.
Roger followed and started removing containers from the bag to help me put tomorrow’s meals in the refrigerator. “Yes, the Strands are very lucky to have her.”
“Seems like the Strands are lucky to have you too.” I smiled at the self-effacing wave of his hand. “How long have you worked for them?”
“Oh, quite a long time. They’re like family to me. I came to work for the winery when Signe and Clara were just girls.”
“Wow. You must have been just a boy yourself.”
Roger laughed. “That’s kind of you to say. We’re all getting on in years.”
“Well, you don’t look a day over fifty,” I said, and Roger shushed me with a laugh. I picked up a stack of containers he’d set on the table and opened the refrigerator. “Do you know who Sebastian was?”
Roger’s hand hovered inside the bag, and he glanced up at me. “Where did you hear that name?”
“Signe must have mentioned him at dinner. I’m just curious about the family. Such an interesting lot.”
Roger went back to putting things away. “It’s interesting Ms. Strand would have spoken of Sebastian. They don’t speak of him much these days.”
I leaned back against the counter. “Why’s that?”
“Sebastian was their nephew. He and his father, their brother Per, were killed in a terrible car accident years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories. You must have known him his whole life.”
Roger nodded. “It was a terrible thing. We nearly lost little Lukas with them.”
A thrum of warning pounded in my chest. “Lukas? He was in the car?” Of course he was. That’s how he got the scar. My heart was beating painfully as I tried to stave off what I’d only suspected on a subconscious level, a burrowing beetle in the back of my mind that had begun to whittle at my core. I could barely hear Roger’s answer, my mind spinning as all the pieces came together.
“Yes, poor boy. He was bedridden for a long time, just like Koste’s been. And he’d lost his mother only a few years earlier.” Roger shook his head, putting away the last of the food. “Losing his brother and his father at the same time… Sometimes fate is just cruel.” My insides seemed to turn liquid as adrenaline shot through me in an urgent fight-or-flight response.
He folded up the canvas bag while I nodded and tried to hold myself together. “Guess Koste needed the sleep,” he said, heading back into the living room. “Well, you have the house number. Don’t hesitate to call.”
I followed him to the door, feeling as if I were watching myself, not recognizing my own body or my own voice that came out of it as if everything were normal. “I won’t,” I managed. “Hesitate, I mean. Thanks so much for bringing the food by in this awful storm.”
He waved his hand again with a shushing sound. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I brought it by. It’s my pleasure, Ms. Lang. That’s what I’m here for.” He pulled his hood up over his head and dashed into the rain with one hand held on top of the hood against the wind. I closed the door and leaned back against it, no longer able to shut out the horrible refrain ringing in my head.
Sebastian was Lukas’s brother. If Sebastian had fathered Beverly’s child—me— I swallowed a sick taste in the back of my throat and wrapped my arms around myself, shivering against the chill of the door at my back. I had known it couldn’t be a coincidence that Lukas was here. The heir of the Strand fortune, and he just happened to be the father of my patient. Eight years of silence from him, and he was here where some secretive person wanted me to know my mother had died. Here, at the Strand, where I was born.
Lukas Strand was my uncle.
There was no time to dwell on it. Konstantin had finally been awakened by the closing door.
“Mamma?” He sat up, looking confused, and made an exclamation of pain as the leg with the cast slid off the couch.
I pushed away from the door and went to his side, realizing this job had become far more than I’d signed on for. I was a physical therapist, not a nanny. And Konstantin needed something way beyond either. “Hey, sweetie. Guess you got a little ambitious with exercising that leg, huh?” I gently lifted his leg back onto the couch, and he winced but didn’t cry out, eyes on me warily. “Do you remember going outside?”
Konstantin’s eyes clouded, and he looked as if he might be “fugueing” out again right in front of me, but then the blank look dissipated, and he shook his head. “Where’s Pappa?”
“He had to get back to work.” I kept talking in a casual tone as his face fell. “Roger stopped by while you were sleeping, though, and brought us a whole bunch of yummy stuff from Karolina. There’s a dessert we’re supposed to save for after dinner, but if you promise not to tell anyone, we can cheat and have it now.” I gave him a conspiratorial grin, but even the promise of illicit sweets didn’t cheer him up.
“I want to go home. I don’t want to stay here anymore.”
“I know it’s hard, Koste, but—”
“Konstantin!” His furious scowl looked just like his father’s.
“Sorry. Konstantin.” I gave him an apologetic smile. I supposed a parenting expert would say I was capitulating or rewarding rude behavior, but I got it. I knew how important it was to be able to choose what people called you, especially for a kid. “It’s kind of a long name, and I guess I was being lazy. I’ll try to remember.”
Konstantin looked surprised that I was speaking to him as if his opinion mattered.
“Listen, sweetie, I know you want to go back to the house and your own room, but you’re doing really well with your exercises, which will help you get there quicker. Although your little trip outside today is probably going to mean a lot more sore muscles. How do you feel about a bath? I think a long soak in some nice warm water would help keep your leg from getting too stiff.”
The kid seemed dubious but impressed by my straight talk. “I guess so. Are there bubbles?”
I smiled. “I never travel without them.” I went to get his crutches and remembered they were covered in mud. I headed to the bathroom with them. “Be right back. I just need to wash these off.”
When I brought them back, Konstantin looked at them curiously. “Why were they all muddy?”
“You really don’t remember?” I gave him my arm to pull himself up, and he shook his head and struggled to stand on the boot, his face knotted with effort. “You went outside and down the porch steps on your own while your pappa was showing me the lighthouse tower. We found you in the woods behind the cottage.”
“I went down the steps?”
“You sure did.”
“No wonder my underarms hurt,” he said, making a face as I slid the crutches in
to place beneath them.
I nodded, letting go to allow him to stand on his own. “Yeah, I guess they would.” He was certainly taking it in stride that he’d been wandering about the grounds with no recollection. I continued talking to him to distract him from the pain and effort, keeping pace with him with one hand hovering at his back as he made his way down the hall. “Does that happen very often? Doing things you don’t remember?”
Konstantin didn’t answer for a bit, his face scrunched up in concentration as he swung through the last few steps without putting weight on the boot and stopped at the bathroom door. I caught him as he wavered, and he looked up at me, his eyes worried. “Am I crazy? Is that why I have to stay here?”
“Oh, honey, no.” I crouched to put myself at his level. “Of course you’re not.” How well I understood what he was feeling. They’d had me thinking I was crazy in the Youth Guidance Center, wondering if there was something wrong with me that made me different from other kids. Something that made me bad. “Don’t you ever think that,” I said. “Don’t you ever let anyone make you think that.” I realized I’d gotten a little scary-intense from the way he hunched into his shoulders. “Come on. Let’s get these bubbles going.”
I rose and guided him to sit on the covered toilet seat to take a break while I ran the bath and poured some of my bubble bath under the running water. It smelled like roses, but Konstantin was young enough that he probably wouldn’t notice or care. There’d be plenty of time for him to learn the subtle misogyny that said things that smelled nice were for girls, and things that were for girls were inferior and worthless.
Okay, maybe I was still in scary-intense mode. Being taken back in my head to those unpleasant stays at the YGC had sparked a bit of buried hurt and anger. I pushed it down.
Making sure the water wasn’t too hot once the tub was full, I turned to Konstantin. “Do you need me to help you undress?”
He looked embarrassed. Oops. Already old enough for that. “No. I can do it.”
“Okay, let me take off the boot for you then, and I’ll leave you to it.” I knelt and undid the Velcro straps on the cast. “But I don’t want you to fall and hurt yourself. If you need help, you just yell. I’ll be right outside the door.”
Sliding the boot off as gingerly as I could, I pulled it away from the scrawny little leg. Kid legs were scrawny anyway, but man, was that some serious loss of muscle tone. I couldn’t imagine how he’d made it all the way out into the woods.
“Okay, kiddo.” I set the boot aside and stood. “Tub’s all yours.”
I went out into the hallway and pulled the door most of the way shut. I wanted to give him his privacy, but I was a little leery of letting him climb into the tub on that leg. I shouldn’t have worried. He managed just fine without me. I would have made a terrible parent, I thought as I gathered his pajamas and underwear from his room—one of those “helicopter moms” always hovering about making sure the kid never took any risks. Not to mention that I hadn’t exactly had any great role models in that department.
Pediatric PT was enough for me. I’d spent years of my childhood in physical therapy, in pain and angry, and often scared. Getting a kid through that part was right up my alley—and often the part parents couldn’t quite cope with on their own. Who wants to make their kid do something that hurts?
I supposed I could cut Aravella some slack. She was definitely a helicopter, but she was compensating for Lukas’s lack of engagement.
Shit. Lukas. My uncle. Konstantin was my cousin. The realization stirred an unexpected protective urge inside me. I’d been angry on Konstantin’s behalf before, but now it felt personal.
But that was just another channel for me to avoid thinking about the unpleasant reality of this revelation. I’d had sex with my uncle. A shudder ran through me as every good memory I had left of Lukas shifted slightly into something grotesque and dirty. It could only have been worse if I’d discovered he was my brother. Thank heaven for small mercies.
So what the fuck was I going to do about it? I couldn’t stay here. But I’d promised Aravella, and how could I leave Konstantin to Lukas when she wasn’t here to defend him? The more I thought about Konstantin’s “fugues”, the more convinced I became that this wasn’t any kind of psychological dissociative state. It was something physiological, and he needed a more comprehensive medical evaluation, not a shrink.
But without anyone here to advocate for him, I had no doubt the boy would be institutionalized. Lukas wanted him gone. Motherfucker. I nearly burst out into wild, hysterical laughter at the irony of my choice of epithets. I was seriously losing it.
“Millie?” Konstantin’s voice, small and anxious, interrupted my internal hysteria.
I went to the door and stood beside it without looking in. “Do you need something, hon?”
There was a moment’s silence before he spoke again. “I can’t get out.” He sounded miserable at the admission.
“Is it okay if I come in and help you?”
“Yeah.”
When I entered, he looked lost and small in the sea of bubbles. I set his pajamas on the counter and picked up his towel, holding it up in front of me at the edge of the tub. “Why don’t you wrap this around you first, and then I’ll help you up.”
“It’ll get wet.”
“Doesn’t matter. There are more dry ones.”
Konstantin looked relieved as he took the towel and let it sink into the water to wrap it around himself.
“Ready?” He nodded, and I reached in and lifted him bodily from the tub, figuring it was easier than trying to help him stand in the water from outside it, and set him on the covered toilet seat once more, sodden towel and all. I got another towel down from the cabinet and handed it to him. “You okay to dry off by yourself and get your jammies on?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, just let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll come back and help you with the boot.”
It was a small thing to let him have his privacy and autonomy, but I remembered how humiliating it had been for me as a kid when mine was disregarded. Institutional staff and foster parents had treated me as if my scars made me nothing more than a patient whom they could treat with clinical indifference, never considering that I might be embarrassed to strip down for exams and therapeutic treatments. I was dehumanized, desexualized—not a prepubescent girl, but an asexual burn victim. No one had ever bothered to ask if I could do something on my own or wanted some privacy.
When Konstantin was ready, I guided him to the kitchen and broke out the desserts as promised. After popping them into the microwave, we ate warm brownie-cakes with a molten core, topped with vanilla ice cream and hot fudge, Konstantin giggling at the decadence of having dessert for dinner, while we snuggled on the couch and watched his favorite DVD—New Moon, from the Twilight Saga, of all things. I joked about the movies like everyone else, but secretly, I thought they were sweet.
Konstantin was all about the wolf boys. “I’m gonna be a shape shifter when I grow up,” he said with conviction, face sticky with chocolate as he licked the back of his spoon.
“Oh, you are, are you?” I smiled and played along. “What are you going to shift into? You going to be a wolf, like Jacob?”
“Nnooo,” he said, drawing out the word as if I were being ridiculous, and he rolled his eyes. “I’m going to be a forest giant.”
“A forest giant?” I wrinkled my brow with amusement. “What’s a forest giant?”
“A giant that lives in the forest.” Konstantin shook his head as if it were an egregious character flaw not to know what a forest giant was, and dug his spoon into the remainder of his gooey brownie lava with gusto while the wolf boys on the screen howled at the moon.
“So you’re going to shape shift into a giant.”
“How else would I be one?” He had me there.
“So how come you don’t wa
nt to be a werewolf?”
Konstantin stopped licking his spoon long enough to give me a perturbed look that was a dead ringer for one of Lukas’s. “Because. They’re not real, Millie. This is a movie.”
I had to take a big bite of brownie and ice cream to stifle a laugh. I couldn’t argue with such indisputable logic.
I took the bowls to the kitchen when we were done and rinsed them out, watching through the kitchen window as the rain came down in sheets. Through the undulating lines of water on the glass, I could just see the wavering glow of the lights of the Strand manor peeking out from within the trees. This was one hell of a storm. We never got rain like this in San Francisco.
The sky lit up with a brilliant flash of lightning, and a tremendous crack of thunder followed quick on its heels, making me jump. That had to be close. As I turned to see if Konstantin had been startled by it, the lights flickered, and the brief interruption of current was enough to switch the television off. Konstantin made a noise of protest, and then the lights blinked out. It was as dark in the cottage as if we were in the center of space.
“Millie?”
“I’m right here. I’m just going to find a flashlight or some candles in here.” I felt around for the drawers, opening them one by one and digging through them blind, but coming up with nothing. “Dammit.”
Konstantin’s voice came from the living room, full of anxiety. “I don’t like this.”
“It’s okay. I’m just going to call the house and see if I can find out where they keep the flashlights here.” As soon as I picked up the receiver, I realized there wouldn’t be service. The phone was connected via cable, and the cable modem was out.
I headed back into the living room, bashing my shin against an end table.
“Where are you?” Konstantin’s voice was sharp with alarm.
“Right here,” I said, gritting my teeth against the tingling pain radiating down my leg. As I held my hand out toward his vague silhouette, the door flew open behind me, and I shrieked, my nerves frayed.