The Wise and the Wicked

by Rebecca Podos

  Maybe his family took down embarrassing photos upon request.

  He pointed her toward the right door, and she ducked inside the bathroom.

  All she had to do was make it through a movie, she told herself as she turned on the sink and ran her hands—then, still feeling overheated, her wrists and elbows—under cold water. It was early enough that they could leave right after, get to the north side of Saltville and back again before Cece’s curfew.

  And they would see . . . whatever there was to see in the house where their great-aunt died.

  Polina would want them to, Ruby told herself once more. She wasn’t like the aunts or cousins or—or Ruby’s mother. She wasn’t afraid of anything, or anybody. If she’d kept quiet about her secrets, she’d still kept them, hadn’t she?

  Too nervous to sit in the seashell themed bathroom any longer, Ruby jumped up and flung open the door—running smack into the woman from the Mahalel family photos.

  “Crap, I’m sorry!” Ruby yelped.

  Blue eyes wide, the woman stumbled backward into the hallway, her polka-dot bathrobe flapping around thin white legs.

  “Wait,” Ruby tried again, reaching out, but then Dov was there, his arm around his mother, guiding her away.

  “Mama, you didn’t have to get up. What do you need?”

  “I was th-thirsty . . .” she stuttered weakly, letting Dov help her up the stairs with one arm around her thin shoulders, one hand at her elbow.

  Ruby waited in the hallway while their footsteps sounded overhead, trying to remember whether Cece had said anything about Mrs. Mahalel before, if she’d mentioned that Dov and Talia’s mother was sick. It seemed serious. The woman hadn’t just looked unwell, she’d looked scared. Haunted, even. Just like the clients who came to see Ruby’s sisters.

  After a minute or two, Dov clomped back down the stairs and sighed. “You, um, want something to drink?”

  Because he seemed as if he was genuinely offering, and because she was in no great rush to join Talia and Cece, she nodded and followed him to the kitchen. It was half the size of Ruby’s house, vast expanses of marbled countertops and stainless steel all reflecting points of light from a crystal-drop chandelier overhead. It tinkled gently as Dov yanked open the door of the fridge and peered into the depths. “Water? Ginger ale? Something purple with antioxidants?”

  “Anything is fine. Is your mom okay?” Like it was her business.

  Dov answered anyways. “She’s fine. She just gets sick for a day or two sometimes. Kind of runs in the family.” Turning back with a bottle of ginger ale, his lips—full like his mother’s, only hers had been so chapped they looked serrated—pressed into a tight line. “Bad blood.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry about your aunt.”

  “Who, Polina?”

  “Cece told Talia why you guys were out of school. I just wanted to say, you know, I’m really sorry.”

  “Thanks.” And then, because it felt strange to take his sympathy when he must be picturing a typical aunt—ten-dollar bills in birthday cards and funny family stories at Christmas—Ruby wanted to explain. “She’s actually my great-aunt. But she babysat me a lot when I was a kid. And she raised my mom, so she was more like my grandmother.”

  He nodded, unscrewing the bottle cap to a brief burst of fizz and pouring three glasses he’d lined up. “Cece said you were her favorite?”

  First Mikki had said so, now Cece. “Sometimes it was hard to tell,” Ruby answered honestly. “She wasn’t exactly grandmotherly. She was . . .” Ruby thought. “She was a silver-toothed Russian hard-ass in a hair kerchief for as long as I’ve known her. But I loved her.” She shrugged. “We were family.”

  “Family is complicated,” Dov said, squatting to dig something out of a low cabinet. He surfaced with a golden-brown bottle of Bushmills and tipped a bit into one of the glasses, skipping the second. “Spicy or mild?” he asked, poised over the third.

  Ruby raised her eyes to the ceiling, as if she could see Dov’s mother through the plaster and beams.

  “The spicy one’s for her,” he laughed. “She never drinks when she’s healthy but swears by it when she’s sick. Says it cleans the blood.”

  Because he hadn’t poured any in his own glass, Ruby passed with a wave of her hand. “Is your family? Complicated?”

  “Kind of. My dad was born here, but his parents were born in Israel, and he has an older brother who’s lived there his whole life. Like twenty years older, actually. My grandparents were super old when I was born, I didn’t really know them. My uncle does something in engineering, super smart like my dad. And like Talia—she got it all,” he said, again without bitterness. “We’ve visited a couple of times, but him and dad are, like, I don’t know, uncle and nephew instead of brothers. They get along okay, though.”

  “Is your mom Israeli too?”

  “No,” Dov said, something like a laugh in his voice, but not in his eyes, trained intently on the soda. “We don’t talk to her family. Or, they don’t talk to us. They don’t like Mom’s choices.”

  “That sucks.”

  He shrugged lightly and slid her glass across the counter, looking up at her as he did. “It really doesn’t matter. It’s just blood, you know?”

  Ruby didn’t know. Family was everything, the only thing—where you came from and who you were—and it felt blasphemous to speak of it otherwise.

  And to turn your back on family . . .

  The old splinter in her chest pricked at her, and she pushed it down, suspecting she was doing more damage than if she’d plucked it out cleanly to look at it.

  She liked Dov, she realized. Even if he was a bonfire smoking, snowmobiling slacker bro, he was also a good talker, with a good face, and good, slightly crooked teeth, and good hands. But . . . that was where it ended. Maybe the Chernyavskys were something out of a storybook, but Ruby wasn’t foolish enough to believe every story out there. She knew that kisses did not break curses. It hadn’t been True Love that kept steely Polina going past the Time allotted to her. Which meant that Dov, however good his face, could not grant her a life.

  “I should go down,” she said.

  He nodded and grabbed two glasses in one hand, so they clinked between his fingers. “I should go up.” His brown eyes hovered on Ruby’s and he scrubbed at his smooth jaw. “It’s Ruby, right? I realized I never asked.”

  “It’s Ruby.” Stung, even though she’d only just learned his name, she asked, “And yours starts with a D?”

  He laughed, sincerely this time. “Dov.”

  The o was just a little longer than Cece pronounced it—closer to dove into a pool than dove-the-bird—which made it feel like he and Ruby shared a secret her cousin didn’t. And that made her feel like a traitor. Her cousin might be shy about boys, but if she’d admitted Dov was cute, if she was listening to his terrible music and blushing about him, she must have a thing for him.

  Though how much could she really care if she didn’t know his name?

  Ruby sat for a moment after he left the room, staring into her glass before dumping it down the sink. She had important things to do, and couldn’t afford to be drinking soda some boy had poured for her, thinking about him. He didn’t even know your name, she reminded herself.

  But, a still smaller part of her shot back, he knows it now, doesn’t he?

  • Fourteen •

  It was nearly nine when Ruby and Cece stood in Great-Aunt Polina’s foyer, stomping the crust of snow from their boots. It was warmer inside than the bitter night outside, though it wasn’t warm. The heat had been turned low since the Reading. They kept their coats on, but kicked their boots off automatically; Polina may have been mortal, but her rules were eternal.

  “Have you ever been in here alone?” Cece asked, her voice very small, a snowflake on the edge of melting.

  “Yeah,” Ruby said too loudly. “Once. Remember that big ice storm, like, five years ago? Dahlia’s car got stuck at the bottom of the drive
way coming to pick me up after work. Polina went down with the cat litter to help, and made me stay in so I wouldn’t slip.”

  “Ten minutes doesn’t count.”

  “It felt like it counted.” Ruby had looked out the window beside the door, watching Polina heft her heavy plastic pail down the slope of the driveway, strong even at ninety. She’d vanished into the trees, their limbs glass-blown by the storm, and Ruby swore that all at once, the whole house stirred. Suddenly the worst thing imaginable was being stuck there all night, even though nothing bad had ever happened to her in this house. With Polina inside, it had felt like one of the safest places to be; without her, the house felt . . . disloyal.

  So where did its loyalty lie now that Polina was gone forever?

  Ruby shivered.

  “Where first?” Cece asked quietly.

  “Her bedroom.”

  The girls passed through the great room. Cece headed right for the stairs, but Ruby paused beside the table set up from the Reading. The food had been cleared away, of course, but Polina’s samovar sat there still. Cold and empty of tea for once, it was shaped like a pint-sized potbelly stove, its spigot in place of a door. Beside it, Polina’s gold-plated tea glass holders, washed and waiting.

  She picked one up—a podstakannik, it was called. Delicate-looking, but heavy for its size, it felt like family in her palm. Without thinking, she shoved it into the deep pocket of her coat. Then she reached with both hands for the familiar round glass bottle of slivovitz beside the samovar. A plum brandy the Chernyavskys drank at family funerals and birthdays and Readings, it smelled like jam-flavored jet fuel when she unscrewed the cap. She knew it tasted the same, much stronger than the Stolichnaya, but Ruby took a long pull to remind herself.

  “Pah,” she gasped, her nose raw and her throat on fire.

  She shoved the bottle back onto the table, turned away—

  —and smacked into Cece. They shrieked identical shrieks.

  “I looked back and you weren’t there!”

  “I’m still here,” Ruby rasped, throat aflame, and took her cousin’s hand to lead her away.

  With Cece behind her, Ruby eased open the heavy door to Polina’s bedroom. The room looked . . . well, it looked like Polina. Everything ironed and orderly, from the dark wood furniture that hadn’t had time to gather dust, to the big four-poster bed, with thick blue curtains hanging closed. Cece gave a shudder that Ruby felt up her own arm and down her whole body. Ruby let her go to edge into the room, trailing her hand along the dusky blue wallpaper patterned with black roses on winding black vines.

  “What are you looking for?”

  Maybe she hadn’t realized until now, but when Ruby answered, she was sure of it. “The Recordings.” She slipped around the curtained bed, scaring herself by imagining a pale old hand parting those drapes from the inside. Cece peered nervously at it, too, perhaps picturing the same.

  We’re Chernyavsky women, and the dark is scared of us, Ruby told herself. As always, it made her braver.

  It didn’t look as if the aunts had taken anything, yet. The room was as it had been. There were Polina’s sharply cornered reading glasses on the nightstand. Her clothes were still in their drawers when Ruby peeked inside the bureau, smelling of her particular perfume, like old books and strange dried flowers. On top of the vanity, a neat row of crystal bottles twinkled in the lamplight. Even her jewelry remained; Ruby opened the lid of a little wooden box to see the small locket she remembered Polina wearing, an inartistic pattern scratched into the dulled gold.

  There were no Recordings, though.

  To be sure, they did a sweep of the rooms on the second floor, even their mothers’ childhood bedroom. They looked in Polina’s library, the last room at the end of the hallway, but it didn’t hold much. Two shelves of books, some in English, worn paperbacks with corny titles like No Shirt, No Pulse, No Problem; some in Russian, identifiable by the cover illustrations of men in tuxedoes or military suits, and women in white gowns both slinky and fluttery, all of them holding smoking pistols. There was another leather armchair mottled with age, much like the one in the great room, beside a stained-glass floor lamp. It cast its buttery light on the wall of framed family photos.

  Still no Recordings. On the floor of the closet, there was a small black fire safe, but Ruby wasn’t the kind of thief who could crack open a combination lock. Besides, it was barely the size of a small briefcase, and couldn’t possibly contain the Recordings. It was probably all banking information and spare keys.

  With a sick feeling in her stomach like the slivovitz roiling back up, Ruby sank into the armchair where she and Cece used to fit side by side. If the aunts had cleared out . . . whatever paperwork grown-ups felt important enough to protect from fire, then the chances that they’d left the most prized possession of the Chernyavsky line behind were very small.

  Cece slid a yellowed book with ravens on its cover back into place, then squeezed herself onto the cushion beside Ruby. They didn’t really fit together anymore, so the sharp point of Ruby’s hip bone ground into the meat of Cece’s, and her cousin had to twist her spine to lay her head against Ruby’s. “Now what?” she asked.

  Ruby shifted to make them both more comfortable, but winced as the key ring in her coat pocket jabbed her. She pried it out and twirled it around her fingers, letting the keys clap together on every spin. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Hmm,” Cece murmured, and then, gazing at the many portraits on the opposite wall, “I guess no one’s gonna change those pictures now. Too bad, I really hate my sophomore photo.”

  All of the cousins’ latest school pictures were mounted in plain wooden frames. Mixed in among them were photos of the aunts and great-aunts graduating from nursing school, or serving cakes at family parties, or posing soberly in Polina’s own great room at more serious family affairs. All of them arranged in precise rows and columns, organized in chronological order. Cece and Ruby were grouped together near the bottom right, while the first and oldest black-and-white photo in the upper left corner showed Polina and her sisters, Vera and Galina.

  It was taken in 1938, the year before Ruby’s great-grandmother sent her daughters to America to escape their enemies (Great-Grandmother Vladlena, the trunk of their strange family tree, stayed behind, having seen from her Time that she would die in the dark pine forest where she’d been born). The sisters were lined up in front of a crooked little log house, shortest to tallest. Vera would have been five; Galina, nine or ten; and Polina, fifteen. The girls wore blouses with puffy sleeves and high collars, the plain tips of their boots peeking out beneath full skirts. Their faces were pale ovals inside dark knotted kerchiefs, dead-faced in the way of old colorless photos, their green eyes unremarkable in a black-and-white world. Each held a plate in front of them, heaped with what might be berries, but could be rocks or dirt for all that anybody could tell.

  The picture had been payment from a traveling photographer in exchange for Vladlena’s services—her gifts—and was one of the few possessions that made the trip over, in a single steamer trunk with precious family heirlooms. Like the podstakannik weighing down her left coat pocket, the Recordings, brass candlesticks, embroidered skirts, and a few other treasures Polina had said were stored in the tower for safekeeping . . .

  Ruby closed her fist around the keys mid-swing.

  Almost every key on the ring was labeled in Polina’s bold, spiked handwriting—Vera’s House, Front Door, Bathroom. There was the key to Polina’s old Volvo in the garage, and then a fifth, small and tarnished, unlabeled. “Is this the key to the tower?” she guessed aloud, as though Cece would know.

  Cece stiffened, the leather crackling beneath them. But when Ruby leapt up and ran for the spiral staircase at the end of the hallway, she followed loyally.

  At the top, Ruby stooped down to squint through the keyhole in the heavy door.

  “What do you see?” Cece breathed down her neck.

  “I see . . . a keyhole.”

&nbs
p; Which fit the little unlabeled key perfectly.

  They hadn’t turned on the hallway light below, so after they swung the door open, while they fumbled with their phones to see into the yawning dark, Ruby reminded herself: The dark is scared of us. We’re Chernyavsky women, and the dark is scared of us.

  Their screens illuminated a pull cord dangling by Cece’s head, which she tugged so sharply, Ruby worried it would drag the ceiling down on their heads. She relaxed when the beams didn’t cave, and then they were gazing into the tower for the very first time.

  It looked clean. Cleaner than she’d imagined a ninety-five-year-old woman would keep a creepy attic tower. Dust motes sprinkled the air, very cold and stale—unsurprising, given the single shuttered window—but the floor was swept. The storage shelf that stood awkwardly against the circular wall was neatly arranged, as was a thick, squat wooden worktable below the window. It held a pile of candles, probably for power outages during winter storms, and a stack of metal bowls. Ruby crossed to it and unlatched the shutters, pulling them inward with the groaning of old wood and a great puff of dust. Curiously, she peered out of the window, which looked down on the driveway where it melted away into the black trees.

  CRASH.

  Ruby spun around to find Cece standing beside the table. She looked extremely guilty, even in the low light.

  “Sorry, I bumped it,” she whispered. Her cousin bent to pick up an old clock, the small kind that usually sat on a mantel. The glass face must have cracked in the fall, and the spiderwebbed pane crunched delicately, though miraculously, the second hand still ticked on.

  “Do you think it’s expensive?” Cece asked, a little teary-eyed, turning it to show Ruby.