The Wise and the Wicked

by Rebecca Podos

  “I don’t think anyone will miss it,” Ruby assured her.

  “At least it fell faceup.” She set it gingerly on the table, as if it was a wounded animal.

  “Why is that a good thing?”

  “Why is it a bad thing?”

  Aside from the table, the only other furniture in the room was a cabinet covered in chipped black paint. It held rows and rows of tiny drawers with brass handles, their faces the size of playing cards, and a bottom drawer that ran the length of it. She’d seen one like it in the antique store where Dahlia had worked for about three months of Ruby’s freshman year: an apothecary cabinet. She remembered the name on the tag, because she’d pretended to read the price while slipping a cloudy silver tea ball into her pocket. Not to keep, because what was she going to do—pull out a precious-looking tea ball to make Twinings in front of Dahlia or Ginger? Instead, the next afternoon, she’d taken the plug out of one of the ceramic piggy banks on the little souvenir shelf in the General Store, the kind with the state of Maine stamped on the side, and stuffed the tea ball inside.

  It wasn’t really the having that made her feel powerful. It was the taking.

  Ruby pinched one of the knobs and pulled, wrinkling her nose at a pile of dull dried leaves, and the bitter smell the drawer coughed up.

  Cece pulled open her own drawer, which held a small mound of rust-colored dirt.

  They tried others and found the sharp tips of feathers, string and frayed scraps of cloth, kernels of corn dried as hard as teeth, clear white pebbles, black seeds, and the withered remains of berries.

  “Did Polina have a garden?” Cece asked.

  “Yeah, she was growing those heirloom pebbles everyone loves so much.” The idea of Polina gardening was hard to believe. For one thing, the land behind 54 Ivory Road was wild, a plot of earth being digested by trees, overrun by creeping thistle that grew taller and more tangled every year. For another, Ruby had never seen their great-aunt in anything but her high-collared shirts and wool skirts and thick brown stockings, even in summer, when cooking over the hot stove. So the idea of her in gardening gloves and a big brimmed hat and jeans with soiled knees was ridiculous.

  “What then, she was a crafter?” Cece snapped back; she was only short-tempered when she was very nervous.

  “Maybe.” Ruby slid closed a drawer of strange dried cones the length of matchsticks that smelled a bit like pepper.

  Cece spun slowly around, scanning the tower, while Ruby tugged on the long bottom drawer. The warped wood had to be coaxed along centimeter by centimeter. After a moment, the peeling paper corner of a book appeared. Her chest flamed with excitement, but she quickly stomped it out—the Recordings were as thick as the giant fancy dictionary Ginger kept pretentiously on her nightstand, and this drawer was as slim as the rest, even if it was longer. Slowly, Ruby worked it open to reveal a cloth-bound book with a golden-haired princess on the cover, its title in Russian.

  Ruby pried out the book, a film of grit and dust slipping from the cover, and turned carefully through delicate yellowed pages. The neat Russian text was punctuated with painted color illustrations she had never seen, but which still seemed familiar. An old man with a wizard’s beard and staff in a wintry forest, a white duck on a dark blue pond with a palace in the background, a young woman with no arms caught in a thorn bush.

  “The Armless Maiden,” Ruby realized. A fairy tale she’d been told when she was little. Maybe by her mother, or Polina, or by anyone of the aunts at a cousin sleepover. Though she couldn’t read this version, she remembered the plot. An orphaned brother and sister had wandered the countryside until they settled in a village, where the brother was married. His wife, jealous of his sister’s beauty, caused all kinds of trouble—broke their furniture, spoiled the food in their pantry, killed their horse—and blamed the sister. When the wife gave birth to a baby, she killed it, and accused the sister. Finally, the girl’s brother took her for a ride in their carriage, shoved her out into the bramble, and cut off both arms at the elbow in revenge.

  Not the nicest story, but then, Russian fairy tales weren’t famous for their humor. This one had a happy ending, though. The sister was married, and gave birth to a boy whose arms were gold, who had stars on his ribs, the moon on his forehead, and the sun in his heart. When the wife found out and tried again to cause trouble, the brother eventually realized her lies, tied her to the tail of a horse by her braid, and slapped its haunches. The horse returned that night with only the wife’s braid, the rest of her having been trampled into the fields.

  Well. It was a happy-ish ending.

  By now, Cece had come to peer at the book over Ruby’s shoulder. “That’s Polina’s?”

  “It must be.” Ruby turned to the title page, expecting more unreadable script. Instead, she found Polina’s spiky black handwriting slanted across the paper, its inscription in her questionable English:

  Remember this, Evelina: if time is a prize you want to win, you must prepare to lose.

  Her heart stuttered, then quickened at her mother’s name. She flipped forward, searching for more, for any notes in the margins. The paper was faintly splotched by age, but it was clean and unmarked.

  Except for pages twenty-five to thirty, which were not disfigured; they simply weren’t there.

  After page twenty-four and before page thirty-one, a whole chapter had been ripped away, jagged white scraps poking out of the binding like exposed bone. She turned to what was presumably the table of contents to find the missing story, but of course, she couldn’t read the titles.

  Suddenly, Cece grabbed at Ruby’s sweater and nodded toward the battered clock on the worktable, still ticking. “We have to go!”

  She was right. It was quarter to ten, and they’d only just have time to deposit Cece at her front door if they left now. “Yeah, okay.” Swiftly, Ruby tucked the book down the front of her coat.

  Cece watched, wide eyed. “So we’re not just breaking and entering, we’re stealing, too?”

  Ruby brushed a patch of dust from the shoulder of Cece’s bright white coat before heading for the attic stairs. “Calm down,” she said, pulling the light cord so that her cousin scrambled to keep close to her in the fresh dark. “You have to break something for it to be ‘breaking and entering.’ And anyway, it’s just a book.” Which was true. It wasn’t much, but the feeling that it was something prickled at her. Maybe it was the only clue they could ask of the old house, seemingly emptied of the Recordings.

  Besides, if the fairy-tale book had once belonged to her mother, as Ruby suspected, then taking it wasn’t really stealing.

  It was more like . . . inheriting.

  • Fifteen •

  The story of how Evelina and Anfisa had come to live with Polina was just one tiny, twinkling speck swallowed up inside the dark nebula of the Chernyavsky family history.

  At the very end of the 1930s, three sisters—Polina, Vera, and Galina—disembarked from a boat at Ellis Island and made their way north, their hearts only comfortable in the woods and the cold. By day they took small jobs in the small towns they traveled through, sewing skirt hems, cleaning homes, collecting eggs from henhouses. By night, they told fake fortunes and read tea leaves in Russian accents that only added to their mystery.

  When they reached Maine in the early ’40s, Polina decided that that they would stay. She found permanent work as a cook for an old widower who lived in a large stone house in the small town of Saltville, with a big kitchen where nobody had lit the stove since his wife, years before. The widower let the sisters sleep together in the tower and share his food, as long as Galina and Vera, still children, kept out of the way.

  There was talk in town when the sisters went to the shops. By then, Polina was eighteen, and she wasn’t beautiful—her mouth was thin and sharp, her nose hooked and sharp, and her eyes the sharp, cold color of a pond beneath treacherously thin ice. Still, she had a quality. People looked up when she passed by, and hugged their bags to their bodies even though she was
immigrant thin. Despite the fact that she took up little physical room, she filled the space around her.

  Maybe that was why, when the widower died and left Polina his large home after ten years of loyal service, Galina and Vera still moved away. Vera went a little ways north, but Galina stayed in town with her oldest sister. She lived alone until her thirties, when she had two daughters of her own. For all that anyone had seen men around, she might’ve spelled them out of air, or brewed them like tea. Evelina was born calm, self-possessed for such a little girl. Anfisa, two years younger than her sister, was bony and nervous from the start. It was not strange to see them in the small park blocks away from their house, playing together as the sun set. Nobody bothered them, or brought them back to their mother despite the dark. People had a better sense for these things back then, and they sensed not to meddle with the Chernyavsky girls.

  One early fall afternoon in ’72, the sisters walked home from elementary school arm in arm. The lights in the house were on, but their mother wasn’t home. It wasn’t strange—Galina spoke to her own sisters almost every day, and often dropped everything to visit. The fact that her car wasn’t in the driveway meant she’d probably run over to the north side of Saltville to see Polina, or even an hour away to Abbot to see Vera.

  They left a note and went to the park, stayed until the sun was a golden crown just over the treetops, and then all at once . . . they felt it. The sudden bone-deep freeze, the shortness of breath like they’d been running uphill in the cold instead of playing in the sand beneath the slide. The way that time seemed to stop and stretch painfully before snapping back into place. Neither Evelina nor Anfisa had experienced it before—what it feels like when a branch of the Chernyavsky tree withers and dies—but they sensed something was wrong.

  The sisters ran home to nothing. Galina was still gone, the house growing cold because nobody had turned on the wood stove once the mild day faded. The phone rang, and it was Polina, who had felt it and knew.

  The police found Galina’s car parked along Route 201 almost fifty miles away, not far from Vera’s home. She sat upright in the driver’s seat, stone dead, but without a mark on her, without a clue as to why. Nothing was revealed by the autopsy, and while her Reading confirmed she’d gone right on schedule, as usual, there was no mention of how.

  So nine-year-old Evelina and seven-year-old Anfisa moved into the house on Ivory Road with their aunt Polina, and became who they were always meant to be. They learned a little more Russian than their mother had taught them, though Anfisa never had a gift for languages. They learned how to cook dumplings and shuba—herring under a layer of grated beets, onions, mayonnaise, and boiled vegetables—and vatrushka for family parties. They learned how to brew tea over logs on the fire, and to rely on garlic and onion in steaming pots of water for every sickness.

  And, of course, they learned about Time.

  • Sixteen •

  If her life were a TV show about two spunky teens trying to unlock their family secrets, Ruby would’ve found an English version of the book on eBay or Amazon with a little mild sleuthing. But she couldn’t. Of course there were Russian fairy-tale collections that included “The Armless Maiden,” and “The White Duck,” and “Father Frost.” Those were popular stories. But not any book with this cover, published in 1936 (the copyright date was readable, at least).

  Or she could’ve brought it to a conveniently local professor of Slavic languages at the community college to decode the text and tell her she’d been right, that there was something special and unique and meaningful about this particular collection. Unfortunately, the college’s only foreign language courses were Spanish and Italian. Ruby had checked that in a moment of desperation, too.

  She could’ve brought her cousins in, but they didn’t know any more Russian than Ruby. None of their mothers were anything near fluent. The only Chernyavskys who truly spoke the language were the three who’d been born on Russian soil, of which Vera was the only sister left alive, and Ruby couldn’t imagine her as a willing accomplice.

  She could have driven to the Molehill Motel, knocked on the door of room 113. . . .

  But what had changed since the Reading? She still didn’t trust her mother. She could’ve told Ruby anything she wanted to when they were alone, but all she’d done was make weak excuses for her long absence. And so the book had her mother’s name in it—how meaningful could it really be to Evelina, if she’d left it behind?

  So the month rolled on. Cece was waiting for her rescheduled party, roped into weeks of preparations with her mother and Vera, and Ruby was waiting to have Cece’s full attention once more.

  One night after school, Ruby sat on her bed, smoothing her fingers across Polina’s lightly impressed handwriting for the hundredth time. It wasn’t fair. These stories belonged to her—just as this language belonged to her—but unless the letters magically rearranged themselves into a known alphabet, she would learn nothing from them.

  Remember this, Evelina: if time is a prize you want to win, you must prepare to lose.

  To lose what?

  Her phone vibrated on her nightstand beside a library copy of Pale Blue Dot, a week overdue already, but the fairy-tale book was the only one she cared about these days. She picked her phone up to read the text.

  Cece: Uuuuugh I need a break. Is Dahlia working the register tomorrow? Could she get us in?

  She meant at ’Wiches and Wings, where Dahlia mostly waitressed in the café, serving Bug Juice and sandwiches with bug-based names (like the Antuna on Rye), but occasionally sold tickets at the register in front of the butterfly house, wearing glittery costume wings. Even if she only applied for the job because Ruby had been going through a serious entomology phase a little while ago and made her sister take her every free weekend she had, it actually wasn’t the worst work she’d had. In the six years since she’d taken legal custody of Ruby and Ginger, Dahlia had bounced from one low-skill job to the next. Last fall had been Party Monster, the seasonal Halloween shop. Over the summer, she’d manned a frozen lemonade cart by the city pool, where she got a 5 percent employee discount on top of her minimum wage. Before that, Ruby lost track. Maybe it had been the paint-your-own-pottery place called the Clayroom, where she was fairly certain Dahlia got paid in weed alone.

  Ruby: Us who?

  Cece: Talia and me. And you???

  Somebody knocked, and she dropped her phone so she could lean down and slip the fairy-tale book into her backpack, where it lived whenever she wasn’t cradling it. “Occupied!” she huffed, mysteriously out of breath.

  “Ruby?” Dahlia’s voice floated through the bedroom door.

  “Yeah, okay.” She grabbed the Sagan book and spread it on the bed before her.

  Dahlia entered, blackbird-and-vine-patterned skirt swishing. Her sisters were preparing for a client, which meant Ginger was actually home for once; she’d been spending more time at Levi Dorgan’s than ever, sometimes days at a time.

  Ruby was pretty certain her mother’s return was the reason for Ginger’s absence.

  “How’s the homework coming?” Dahlia asked.

  “Fine. Are you at the register or in the café tomorrow? Cece wants to know.”

  “The register. That reminds me, I have to lint-roll my wings later.”

  Before she could stop herself, Ruby snorted.

  “We can’t all be gastroenterologists.” Dahlia shrugged with half a smile. Cece’s father’s profession was something of a Chernyavsky punch line. Which was funny, because any other family would be thrilled to have a respectable doctor in its ranks. In her family, gastroenterologist was code for normal person, and that was not a compliment.

  “No, but . . .”

  “But?”

  “You could have a job where you don’t wear wings.” Ruby threw her hands up. “Or monster horns. Or a beret with a big plastic lemon on it.”

  “Maybe.” She twisted her opal ring around her thumb, one of many she wore. As always, she was extravagantly bejeweled
for the appointment. “But I’m not my job. So none of that bothers me, and I’m sorry if it bothers you.”

  Ruby hadn’t meant to start a fight. But with every day that passed since the Reading, she’d felt the breath of time on the back of her neck, felt it squeeze her heart in its iron fists. Meanwhile, Dahlia had all the time in the world to become something. And yet, like Ginger, she had no plans to do so, content to be small and safe and ordinary. Ruby herself had always obeyed the Chernyavsky law—believed that her Time could not be altered or escaped—but everything was different since Polina’s Reading. Didn’t her sisters understand that? Didn’t they care? They claimed to be paralyzed by a fear three generations old, just like Vera. But for all Ruby could tell, the Russian boogiemen who had allegedly hunted them eighty years ago were just another excuse not to try.

  And suddenly, a fight was exactly what Ruby wanted.

  “Who are you, then?” she sneered.

  Dahlia crossed Ruby’s room in two slow strides and sat beside her on the bed, spreading out her skirt. “I guess . . . I’m your sister, and Ginger’s. I take care of you. At least I try to. That’s who I’m supposed to be.”

  “That means Mom was supposed to leave us.”

  Dahlia winced. “None of us knows why she left, because she didn’t tell us. You know that. You read the letter.”

  That was true. Dahlia had shown it to her the morning after their mother vanished. She was a part of their family, Dahlia had said, and had a right to see. It was also true that the letter, scribbled on a harmless-looking piece of stationary with a border of cartoon coffee cups from the pad they’d kept in the junk drawer, contained no actual explanation. “But Ginger said—”

  “She doesn’t know, either. Polina told me that Mom was scared, and I probably shouldn’t have repeated that to Ginger. I thought it would help. But she believes what she needs to. It’s easier for her to tell herself that Mom was weak, that she betrayed us all, than to wonder . . . why else Mom left her.”