The Wise and the Wicked

by Rebecca Podos

  Dahlia and Ginger wore matching black knee-length dresses with bell sleeves and sheer, floor-length overlays. Their hair was freshly dyed for the occasion, Dahlia’s like lavender in spring, Ginger’s striking violet. Ruby, too small for their Hip Witch aesthetic, wore a hand-me-down dress of Ginger’s, a black satin shift dress with a high collar and a heart-shaped clasp at the throat. Dahlia had to chop half a foot from the hem for it to fit her. Ginger had smoothed and slicked her brown hair with bobby pins, and Great-Aunt Vera ran a plump hand over it before stepping back to let them in from the cold.

  Except for bouquets of bright blue forget-me-nots on every clear surface, the house looked the same inside as it always had: the beet-red bubbling wallpaper, the dark hardwood floors, the lightly spiderwebbed molding. Past the foyer and down three steps was the great room. The ceiling here rose up two stories, the second floor ringed by a balcony, beyond which you could see door after door on the upper level.

  The great room was full of women in black, some cradling babies or toddlers with demure dresses rucked up around their short, plump legs.

  By the big marble fireplace, Cece lifted her arm and waved Ruby over to a cluster of cousins. They weren’t just cousins, but second cousins once removed, though who could keep track of that? Except for Cece, they were all Vera’s granddaughters. There was twenty-year-old Lili, who looked more like Ginger than Ruby, only without the everlasting frown. Her sister, Mikki, was seventeen, stamped with the Chernyavsky green eyes and her unknown father’s black skin and dark, cloud-like hair. They lived with their mother, Aunt Mariya, an hour north. Then there was Oksana, Ruby’s age, with ash-brown hair that dripped below her bottom and so many freckles, even her lips were dappled. Oksana went to ritzy Oakleaf Prep a few towns over; she and her friends wore their navy school blazers all the time, even when they were going out for ice cream. She wore it now, with its embroidered crest on the pocket, over her short black dress.

  She slid over to make room, hooking her slim arm through Ruby’s. “I knew it. Didn’t you? I mean, I didn’t know who it was when I felt it, but . . . And it was a heart attack, they said? Can you even believe it?”

  “I thought she’d be around forever,” Ruby said honestly. “She was so strong.”

  Mikki leaned her head on Lili’s shoulder, but spoke to Ruby. “You must be so sad. You were her favorite, you know.”

  “I wasn’t,” Ruby protested, but weakly. Ruby will live with me now, she remembered her great-aunt saying, Ginger an afterthought. She had wondered . . .

  “Mom just talked to her two days before it happened,” Cece said in a small voice. “To plan.”

  “Oh, Cece, your party!” Oksana moaned sympathetically.

  “We’ll have it later. Maybe in March, Mom said.”

  “Remember Theo’s party?” Lili asked.

  Ruby did remember. It’d been about a year after her mother left. They’d all worn their fanciest, puffiest dresses and stuffed their faces with vatrushka, round buns filled with baked cottage cheese and sugar, and avoided the kholodets, the rectangular platter of cold jellied meat served at most Chernyavsky gatherings (paired with vodka for the aunts, though Ruby hadn’t known it until she’d sipped from Dahlia’s abandoned cup one New Year’s Eve).

  At night, when the aunts and big sisters gathered in the great room, all of the cousins who hadn’t yet seen their Times but were old enough to be left on their own were sent upstairs. The five of them—Cece, Ruby, Mikki, Lili, and Oksana—claimed one of the bigger second-floor bedrooms. It had a king-sized bed with a fancy brass headboard, and they arranged themselves in a star on the quilt. On their stomachs, propped up on elbows, they faced the center of the star. “Truth or dare,” Lili asked. As the fifteen-year-old leader, the game had been her idea.

  Ruby had overheard the aunts murmuring about Lili, how she was old enough, how she was sure to see her Time any day now.

  “Truth,” Mikki picked.

  “If the five of us were stuck on a desert island, who would you kill for food?”

  “Oh, gross.” She tugged on one black coil of hair. “But Cece I guess, ’cause she’s the sweetest.” Mikki giggled, then asked, “Ruby, truth or dare?”

  Ruby chose dare. She usually did, and her cousins must’ve been counting on that, because it wasn’t Mikki who spoke, but Lili. “You have to sneak out onto the balcony and spy on what Baba Yaga and everyone is saying down there, and then come and tell us,” she ordered with a laugh.

  It wasn’t the kindest nickname for Great-Aunt Polina. Baba Yaga, according to the old stories, was a bony old woman with iron teeth and a nose so long it scraped the ceiling when she slept on her back. She lived in a magical chicken-legged hut behind a fence of stacked human bones, and gave tasks to the heroes who wandered up to the door of the hut, seemingly unwarned by the bone fence. If the hero succeeded, she gave them a gift. Fail, and she’d punish them, perhaps cook them in her giant stove. A scary story they’d grown up hearing, but only a story. Unlike legends of the old country, the Chernyavsky glory and downfall, nobody pretended that Baba Yaga was real. It was like “The Death of Koschei the Immortal,” “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” and “The Giant Turnip”: a fairy tale.

  Out of loyalty to the woman who’d been to see them once a week since their mother had fled the family, Ruby never used the nickname. But she had to admit it wasn’t unfitting. Their great-aunt had earned it with her oldness, her angularness—elbows and stockinged knees and cheekbones and even knuckles as sharp as arrows—and a few silver crowned teeth. If she caught the girls spying, she was unlikely to cook them, more likely to chastise their mothers (or in Ruby’s case, sisters) in brusque Russian for raising children who snooped on their elders.

  Grudgingly, Ruby peeled herself from the mattress, and to her surprise, Cece did, too. “I’ll come,” she announced. “I want to come.”

  Easing the bedroom door open and shut behind them, they crept along in their socks until the wall met the balcony railing that overlooked the great room. Dropping and flattening themselves against the hardwood floor, boards digging into the points of Ruby’s hip bones, they did a dry-land breast stroke forward. Ruby peered down through the iron swirls of the railing, keeping her chin on the floor so that somebody would have to peer straight up and squint into the unlit hallway to catch pieces of them through the rails.

  Cece squeezed beside her. “Look, they have the Recordings.”

  Their great-aunt was in her faded leather armchair, which smelled up-close exactly like her oversized handbag, and the headscarves she wore from September till spring. It was tobacco and strong tea and the perfume that sat in corked glass bottles on her dresser, shipped from her homeland. It was a Polina smell.

  The middle-aged aunts sat on the squat sofas with wooden legs, the younger aunts in chairs dragged in from the kitchen. Ginger and Dahlia and the cousins sat on the floor, except for Theo, the youngest in the room, thirteen then. She stood right in front of Polina’s chair, with her mother, Aunt Irina, behind her. In their great-aunt’s lap was a book the girls knew as the Chernyavsky Family Recordings. It was thick and old and unlabeled, with a cracked leather binding. Ruby had never held it or seen it read from—when Alyona died two years before, Ruby had been sent off with the rest who hadn’t had their Time, hadn’t even gotten the talk that Dahlia and Ginger had already given Ruby at the Cone Zone. Theo had been with them then.

  “What if I do it wrong?” Theo was asking Polina.

  Aunt Irina reached around her daughter and placed a thick ballpoint pen in Theo’s hand. “Don’t worry about the spelling, baby.”

  “No, but I mean like . . .” Theo stopped, her voice shivery with almost tears.

  Great-Aunt Polina rose from her chair. Even at ninety, she was strong, straight, her spine uncurved. “You will not. Write what you see. People, they waste a whole life worrying. ‘Who am I?’ But this is not your problem. You see yourself at the end, so you know. This is the gift. You know who you will be, so you know who yo
u are.” She pressed the book toward Theo. “This makes you strong.”

  Theo held it out from her body like something dangerous. “Will you read it when I’m done?”

  Polina shook her head. “Not today. Not for a long time. Tell who you like, or tell no one. It belongs to you.”

  Tapping her on the shoulder, Cece swam backward up the hallway, and Ruby followed. Once they were beyond the wall, Ruby stood, brushing off her party dress, and trailed Cece toward the spare bedroom. But her cousin didn’t go in. She kept walking to the far end of the hallway and the staircase that led to the tower. Narrow and uncarpeted, it spiraled up toward the door they couldn’t see in the dark but knew was always locked. Polina said it was unsafe, rust and dust and old furniture teetering in stacks. Lili claimed it was haunted.

  Cece dropped onto the bottom step, as far as she ever dared go, and Ruby sat below her on the floor. She couldn’t see her cousin’s face well, only the halo of her hair, frizzed out of its braids.

  “What?” Ruby whispered.

  “Aren’t you scared?” she whispered back.

  “We knew all that stuff already.” Not that they understood it all, but at least the two of them had been told.

  “Yeah, but what if, like, you get your Time and then you see you’re in an electric chair when you die, because you robbed the Red Rooster and killed everyone, and everybody hates you? So then you figure out that you’re an evil person, but you can’t do anything about it?”

  “If that’s the thing you’re the most afraid of, you’re obviously a good person,” Ruby pointed out.

  “I hope so.” In the dark she was just a rounded shadow, hunched and hugging herself. “Will you tell me?”

  “What?”

  “About your Time. When you get it.”

  “Oh.” In the year since she’d been told, Ruby had come to believe Dahlia, and to believe most of the stories about their family. Still, it was hard to imagine small, skinny, unimportant, powerless her being a part of all that, even if it was much more about tea and tradition than actual magic these days. The stories were easier to accept than her place in them. “I guess so?”

  “You guess?”

  “Yeah, of course I will. Will you tell me?”

  The shape of Cece nodded. “Let’s tell each other together, after both of us see our Times.”

  They made their promises, and Ruby scooted up to sit on the same step as Cece.

  “You’re not afraid of it?” her cousin asked, leaning her head on Ruby’s shoulder. “I am.”

  Thinking of her mother, she set her jaw and answered, “No, I’m not.”

  If it had been a lie at the time, she told herself that it wasn’t anymore. When you knew your expiration date—or near enough—you knew what to expect out of life, what to hope for, and what not to hope for. As Polina had said, you knew who you would be, and so you knew who you were. Maybe it wasn’t the death you would have picked, or the years you would have asked for, but you made peace with your Time. You looked it in the face, and you were stronger for doing so.

  You certainly didn’t run from it. As if you even could.

  Even though she understood that she would never matter to the world—that she would never have the chance to—she mattered to her family. Ruby was a Chernyavsky, and that was everything. It was enough.

  It had to be.

  Now, as the afternoon passed and the aunts brought out bowls of pickles, fermented cabbage, platters of blini and the dreaded kholodets, and the cousins scrambled to speak over one another, and Great-Aunt Vera held court in Polina’s old leather armchair by the fireplace, Ruby watched the clock. All she wanted was to go home, strip out of her dress and coil up on the couch with Dahlia and Ginger, half watching trash TV while they drifted through private memories of Polina. Like the time Ruby had gotten sick, and Ginger was still in high school, and Dahlia couldn’t take off from whichever part-time day job she was working to keep the water on in the small house on Stone Road she’d moved them to soon after their mother left, having discovered how little a tea shop’s profits had left them financially prepared. Polina came to watch Ruby, and instead of the NyQuil Dahlia left on the counter, her great-aunt had minced up garlic and onion, made Ruby stick her face over the bowl and breathe for hours or minutes.

  “Without medicine, this cold lasts seven days,” she’d said sternly as Ruby’s eyes teared. “With medicine, it lasts a week.” But then she’d fished through the compartments of her purse, pulling out the customary little bag of pastila.

  That was Polina: garlic and onions, but with the unexpected aftertaste of sugar.

  When the early evening light through the windows turned waxy and peeled away, leaving night behind it, it was time for the Reading. This was Ruby’s and Cece’s first, and they found seats on the floor among their cousins, facing Great-Aunt Vera in the armchair. Ruby supposed that was Vera’s place now; the youngest of the three daughters of the supposed woman in the woods, she was the last remaining. The last Chernyavsky born on Russian soil, who spoke the old language fluently, and truly remembered where they came from.

  Once Vera was gone, there would be nothing but stories.

  “Thank you all for coming to celebrate our family matriarch, Polina Chernyavsky,” she said in better English than her sister had ever spoken. Perhaps because she spoke so much of it; Vera was still a fountain of family gossip in her eighties. “The funeral will be next Saturday at the—” Vera paused, pressing her red lacquered lips together, blinking at a spot beyond the gathered crowd.

  Heads turned—Ruby’s too—and in the raised threshold between the great room and the hall, there stood a woman. Arms spread apologetically, palms up and empty, Evelina Chernyavsky said in the low but lilting voice lodged forever like a splinter in Ruby’s chest, “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  • Eight •

  Ruby’s memories of her mother were dusty with age and disuse, like the books you outgrew and never took off the shelf anymore, or the old photo boxes you stored in the basement so you could pretend your former embarrassing self had never existed.

  But she’d never truly managed to forget Evelina Chernyavsky.

  Ruby remembered the smell of her mint hand cream. Her long straw-blond hair, like Dahlia’s and Ginger’s, woven into crown braids or hanging loose, its tendrils alive on a windy day. Her fingers, slim and sure as they sewed Ruby’s Halloween costumes, or stirred a pot of cabbage soup. Her voice, deep for a woman’s but musical, even when she spoke, so her lullabies sounded like rumbling blues songs.

  Most often, though, when she thought of her mother, it wasn’t as the woman who’d smoothed Band-Aids over skinned elbows, or packed tiny origami beetles and butterflies and frogs in her lunch box, or let Ruby climb into her canopied bed during tornado warnings. It was as she’d seen her last: standing in their driveway in her thin pink sweater and too-big jeans, shoeless and shivering, diminishing as the school bus pulled farther and farther away from her.

  Small.

  Soft.

  Scared.

  Family is everything. The most important power we Chernyavskys have. Your mother will find this out for herself, I think. I hope. If not, she will never come back.

  Now she realized her mother was even shorter than she’d remembered. And older, which she might have expected. Already twenty-eight when Dahlia was born, almost forty when she’d had Ruby, she must be in her midfifties by now. Her hair had salt in it, but it was still swirled into its familiar crown braid. In fact, she was dressed much as she always had, in soft summer colors. Light blue baggy jeans cuffed at the ankles above sheepskin boots, and a yellow cardigan buttoned all the way to her pale neck. Standing before a sea of black dresses and crisply tailored suits, she looked like the last sunflower in the field before the winter frost killed it, too.

  Ruby turned back, searching for her sisters. They sat on the couches with Vera’s oldest granddaughters and their children, Dahlia holding cousin Zeny’s very pink newborn, Ginger holding a vodka to
nic. Dahlia’s face was stone; Ginger’s was glass.

  She felt a soft hand slip inside hers, and wrapped frozen fingers around Cece’s, squeezing hard.

  In her armchair, Vera pursed her lips, then nodded once, releasing Evelina from whatever spell held her in the doorway. Her mother took the steps softly and tucked herself into the nearest corner of the great room, eyes on her boots.

  “The funeral will take place next Saturday at the Mount Carmel Cemetery,” Vera continued, slightly ruffled. “But today, we gather in the family tradition for Polina’s Reading, as we someday will for all our daughters, our sisters, our mothers.”

  Ruby knew Polina had recited the same words at Aunt Alyona’s reading; Ginger had described it to Ruby last night to prepare her for today. Next, Vera would read Polina’s own account of her Time aloud to the family. Ruby tried to picture teenaged Polina, perhaps having just arrived in America, seeing herself as an old woman. Ninety-five would’ve seemed an eternity away. Had she been relieved, or scared despite the many years promised to her?

  She wished she’d thought to ask her great-aunt, though she could imagine Polina’s gruff response. Why scared? Because I know I will die? This is not news, kroshka.

  As expected, Vera held the heavy Recordings aloft with slightly trembling arms and said, “Let us know Polina in death as she knew herself in life.” She thumbed through the stiff yellowed pages of the book, and then she read aloud, translating the Russian to English as she went.

  Entry in the Chernyavsky Recordings

  April the 29, 1938

  I am young, but not so young, perhaps thirty. In a small hard bed, my bed in my small house, I am giving birth. My sisters are around me, Vera’s hand in mine, Galina at my feet. There is pressure and fire and so much pain, I myself am like a planet being born. But the child at the center of it all, I have always been waiting for. I am miserable and joyful and in such pain, and I am becoming who I am meant to be. Above all, I am in love. I have been waiting my whole long, short life to feel a love like this.