The Wise and the Wicked

by Rebecca Podos

  “She was,” Ruby insisted. “She did betray us.” Family was power, and her mother’s fear, her weakness, had made them all weaker. She must have known; Polina must’ve taught her that when she was young, as surely as she’d taught Ruby.

  “Maybe. But we don’t know what she was going through.”

  “So what, you forgive her?”

  “No. I don’t know, it’s complicated. I think I’ll always be angry at Mom. But . . . I can’t hate Evelina Chernyavsky. Because I never really knew her.”

  “They’re the same person,” Ruby said through gritted teeth. She was already furious with Dahlia for pretending that Polina’s death hadn’t changed all the rules and turned over the game board, and now, for pretending it was some harmless stranger and not their mother holed up a mere twenty-minute drive away in Hop River, waiting to be let back in from the cold. Waiting for one of her daughters to weaken just enough to open the door.

  Well, it wouldn’t be Ruby.

  Dahlia cocked her head to the side, maddeningly Zen. “If you say so.”

  Once her sister had gone, Ruby grabbed for her phone, jamming her thumbs at the keyboard.

  Ruby: She is working tomorrow, and I’m going too

  Cece: Really?? Yay!!!

  Ruby: But ask Dov to drive us, I don’t want to pay for gas

  Cece: Will do!

  Maybe her sisters were perfectly fine with their little lives, but Ruby wanted more. She wanted so many things for herself, and though she wasn’t sure if she would get any of them, here was something she could have right now: she could spend an afternoon staring up at Dov’s good face, feel that shameful but addictive rush of superheated blood through her whole body, and do a little pretending of her own. She would imagine that, if she were guaranteed a future, a boy like Dov Mahalel could somehow be a part of it.

  • Seventeen •

  When Dahlia waved them by the ticket counter the next afternoon, she did so with a dramatic double take. “Well, this is a surprise. I wasn’t expecting my beautiful little sister,” Dahlia said while smiling at Dov, who just happened to be walking next to Ruby.

  Glaring, Ruby tugged her sister’s sparkly pink wings askew as they walked past the register and into the butterfly house.

  Beyond Dahlia’s register was the little antechamber with mirrored walls, a brisk fan blowing, and a sign that read CHECK FOR HITCHHIKERS ON YOUR WAY OUT! Through the doors and into the garden, the hot, humid air weighed ten pounds at least and smelled of soil and ripe bananas. Cece peeled off her faded Coney Island Bowling League sweatshirt from over her T-shirt and tied the sleeves around her waist. Dov shoved up the sleeves of his thermal, and Talia scooped her long hair into a lush black waterfall of a ponytail.

  Ruby’s vision adjusted slowly to the butterflies, the way it would in a dark room after standing in sunlight. There were hundreds of them. Some, she recognized from her entomology phase. Tiny glass-winged butterflies, the transparent panes of their wings revealing the flowers behind them. Tiger swallowtails, their black-and-yellow-striped wings tipped with long black points like the nibs of calligraphy pens. Blue morphos, her favorite, with spotty brown wings that flashed bright aquamarine on the insides, like fluttering chips of sky.

  Cece and Talia kept stopping to laugh and whisper, though they’d spent the entire car ride laughing and whispering, so Ruby wasn’t sure what they had left to say. She’d thought Cece would be in the passenger seat when they picked her up after school. But as she’d crunched across the fresh snow on her driveway to the gleaming black truck, she saw her cousin tucked into the back beside Talia, leaving the empty seat beside Dov for Ruby.

  With the girls behind them once more, she and Dov moved quietly down the winding path through the garden. There was wildlife beside butterflies. Koi shone like large gold coins in a dark little pond. A quail and its train of chicks darted through the underbrush. On a tree trunk by the path, there was a giant winged beast twice as big as Ruby’s hand, with a sign pinned below that read: I AM SLEEPING. PLEASE DON’T DISTURB ME. THIS IS MY WORLD.

  “This is a particularly epic butterfly,” Dov appraised.

  “It’s an atlas moth, actually,” Ruby said, and felt her cheeks flush. She wanted to slap herself—why was she embarrassed to know this? Why shouldn’t she correct him?

  But Dov simply said, “Oh, nice!” as he leaned in to look, finger-combing his hair back off his forehead. It stuck in position, like a black wave before breaking.

  Ruby leaned in, too. She felt warmer than she should, even in the tropical air. There was a kind of electricity around them that pricked the back of her neck, the hair on her arms. She was charged, like if she touched Dov’s hand—perhaps the hand shoved into his jeans pocket, with barely enough room for hers to slip in beside it—there’d be a blue-white static shock, sharp and painful and exhilarating.

  She leaned away “So . . . how’s your mom doing?”

  Ruby could’ve slapped herself. What a brilliant conversation starter—asking the boy she liked about his mother.

  Smooth as fucking ice.

  He looked surprised. “All better, thanks. Like I said, we get sick easy, but we bounce back quick.” As he turned away from the atlas moth’s tree, a butterfly landed in his hair. She couldn’t identify this one. Like panes of stained glass lit from behind, its wings were incandescent green segmented by black, even deeper than Dov’s soft-looking black hair.

  Ruby reached up to touch it—the hair, or the butterfly—but pulled away, pointing instead. “You have a hitchhiker.”

  He froze and rolled his eyes skyward, peering through long black eyelashes, also soft-looking.

  “Here.” Taking a picture with her phone, she held it at an angle he could see without moving his head.

  “Is that its tongue?”

  Ruby bent a bit closer to examine the long pink straw-like thing probing his hair. “It’s the proboscis.”

  “Pro-bos-cis.” Dov tasted the word. “Can you send that to me? Maybe we’ll use it as an album cover and rename ourselves Proboscis. If we ever learn a third song.” He gave her his number.

  She typed it in. “You’re in a band?”

  He nodded slightly so as not to dislodge his passenger. “We call it a band. But it’s just a couple of us from school, playing whatever we had in our garages from middle school music lessons.”

  “Are you good?”

  “We’re . . . loud.” The butterfly took off, and he looked at Ruby. Or looked down at her—Dov wasn’t tall, probably no taller than Cece, but he still had nearly a head on Ruby. “We practice, though I don’t think it helps much. We’re not too ambitious. Right now, we’ve only played at that bowling alley in Skowhegan. They pretty much pay us in fries and shoe rentals.”

  “Are you a good bowler, at least?”

  “No.” He laughed. “Maybe a loud bowler. I don’t know. We’re playing tomorrow night. And bowling. You could come and judge us.” He said it offhandedly, peering down the path, but then he snuck a look at her, his teeth denting his bottom lip.

  Ruby’s heart must have spent the last few years asleep inside a chrysalis, because all of a sudden it burst through the brittle casing and emerged damp and fluttering behind her ribs.

  “I might,” she said bravely, and then made herself turn down the path, walking back the way they’d come to hide a ridiculous smile before Dov saw, or Cece. . . .

  Her stomach swooped violently as she thought of Cece, and that was when she knew she wouldn’t go see Dov. She had no business hanging around a bowling alley with the boy her cousin wanted, however she felt about him. Were pleasantly crooked white teeth and long black eyelashes all it took to betray her best friend, her blood? Ruby took things, true, but they were things nobody would miss. She didn’t steal. She wasn’t a thief.

  Was she?

  As she rounded the corner behind the fairy-lit gazebo, Dov shot a hand out. Though her sleeve lay between his fingertips and her skin, her arm crackled with heat. What the hell was wrong
with her? Why this boy? Why now?

  “Let’s just go this way,” he said. His touch was light, but he sounded anxious to steer her away, to keep her from moving forward.

  So of course that was the direction Ruby went, peering through the broad leafy branches of the plant right in front of her, through the butterflies that zoomed across her field of vision, to the purple tips of Talia’s ponytail, which she first confused for one of the colored pods of sugar water staked out among the foliage. Then she saw Cece behind the greenery, too. And the beaded bracelets that slid up Talia’s arm as she brushed away a white-blond strand of Cece’s hair, stuck to her pink skin. And the way her cousin’s cheeks flushed butterfly-bright. . . .

  “Come on, Ruby,” Dov said gently, but let her go and walked away.

  Without his anchoring grip, she stumbled sideways into a branch, swearing. Talia’s eyes snapped forward. They were lighter than her brother’s, Ruby realized, big and amber and blazing angrily as she caught sight of Ruby.

  Ruby rushed down the path after Dov. “Did you know?” she asked, her voice fuzzy.

  He frowned, and one eyebrow disappeared beneath his fallen bangs. “Didn’t you?”

  “Cece, come out.”

  Her cousin moaned, voice rusty and muffled by the quilt—they had gone to Ruby’s house to talk because it was empty, but now, burrowed under Ruby’s sheets, Cece wouldn’t let her in.

  “No, I promise, that wasn’t a pun! Just . . . look at me. It’s not that big a deal. I mean it is, it’s a deal, but . . . it’s also not!”

  She flipped the covers back, and her eyes were pink, her round cheeks splotched, her hair wild on the pillow. “I’m so fucked.”

  Ruby grabbed the quilt to keep her from retreating. “No, Cece. Maybe . . . maybe it feels that way. But this isn’t like a bad thing. And Talia, she’s . . .” Ruby scrambled for details about the girl she’d sat across from in the cafeteria for an entire semester, but never paid much attention to besides her obvious nearness to Cece. “Her hair is amazing. Are you guys, um, officially dating?”

  “No . . . not officially. Like, I’m not sure what Talia’s told her family. I mean they know she’s gay, and they know me, but we don’t talk about her parents much.”

  “Well, I would never tell anyone, you know that, but there’s nothing wrong with liking, you know, a girl. I just—I kind of thought you liked Dov.” She felt giddy with relief that she wasn’t in danger of stealing from her cousin, but felt guilty for being happy when Cece was so unhappy.

  Cece sniff-laughed, wiping her nose on the quilt. “I wish.”

  “You wish you liked him instead?”

  “I don’t know. No. I think this is just who I am. I like girls. But I’m not . . . it’s not who I’m supposed to be.”

  Ruby bunched the blankets in her fists to keep calm. “Are you talking about your Time?”

  Pulling viciously at a loose thread, Cece nodded.

  Ruby held her breath for a few heartbeats, then set it free so she could say, “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. I get it if you’re still not ready—”

  “I think I am,” Cece said, but was silent for a long moment before she spoke again. “I was married to this man. I mean, I will be, when—when I die.” Her swollen green eyes darted up to catch Ruby’s.

  Was that why Cece was so upset?

  Ruby tried to keep her face compassionate, when what she really felt was frustrated. She’d sat on her own Time for years, keeping her fairly imminent demise a secret until Cece caught up with her, and this was the great tragedy awaiting Cece? This was the terrible secret she’d had to pry out of her cousin? That Cece wasn’t still with Talia, her high school sort-of girlfriend, in her Time?

  What the hell? How was that even comparable?

  “Right,” Ruby said carefully. “That . . . really sucks, that you guys aren’t together. You must like her a lot. But . . . you still shouldn’t feel ashamed about it or anything. Dahlia is bi, you know that. I mean she hasn’t actually been with anyone in . . .” She tried to count. Dahlia had brought a few high school boyfriends over, and her girlfriend Nadine came home with her for Thanksgiving one year in college, but since their mother had left? Nobody, Ruby realized. “Maybe you can talk to her.”

  “I’m not bisexual,” Cece mumbled. “I don’t think so. But it doesn’t matter, ’cause I don’t love him. My . . . husband. In my Time, I don’t want to be with him, and I even kind of hate him for that. We were, um, in our bedroom.” Cece’s cheeks flushed nearly maroon. “We were old, and we’d been together for a long time. We had daughters, and they were grown-ups. There were pictures of them above the bed. He went to . . . touch me, and I felt . . . like I wanted to die, I was so miserable. And tired, like I was really, really used to feeling that way. I was mad at him, and at our daughters for, like, trapping me in this life, and at myself. And that’s—that’s all I saw. I don’t think he was a bad guy. Like he wasn’t abusive or anything. He was just a guy, and I was miserable, so now I know I’m gonna have a long miserable life. . . .”

  “Oh,” was all Ruby could say.

  She had truly never considered the curse of a long life.

  Cece scraped her hair back from her face, held it too tightly in both fists, and tugged. “I’m just like my mom.”

  “Aunt Annie loves your dad! And she’s, like, the übermother. She lives for the PTO.”

  “Does she?” Her cousin’s eyes were pinched with tears. “Maybe she’s just pretending. She and Dad don’t touch each other when we’re alone at home, you know. They never hug or hold hands or anything. Dad doesn’t even sleep in their bedroom—Mom says he snores, but I never hear him. She didn’t move away from the family to be with him, like every other Chernyavsky who really falls in love. Sometimes I think . . . She, like, decorates for dances and organizes fundraisers for the school computer lab and petitions the Fruit Street Block Association for a new playground every other year, but she doesn’t enjoy any of that.

  “Once, she took me up to her old bedroom at Polina’s, after Alyona’s Reading. I think Mom was a little drunk. More than a little. She was talking about Alyona, how when they were kids they promised each other that someday they’d go to Tokyo together and wear awesome clothes and eat sushi in the park every night. Obviously they didn’t, though when Alyona found out she was stage four, she did go to Japan that same week. Mom couldn’t go, because I was scheduled to get my tonsils out. At the Reading she said—she said she’d always regret not going away with Alyona when she had the chance.”

  “I’m sure she wasn’t blaming you—”

  “Oh, I know,” Cece said quickly. “I’m pretty sure she meant the first chance, when she was young. I’m pretty sure she meant that she wished she’d lived that life instead.” She exhaled, and it snagged, momentarily, on a sob. “So I really think . . . maybe she only had me in the first place because she was supposed to. She was doing her Chernyavsky duty. And then because she’s Mom, and she’s always cared what the entire fucking world thinks about her, she didn’t do it like the rest of the family—just find somebody for a night. She got a husband, and she joined the PTO. And because I’m just like her, and I’m always scared what everybody thinks about me, I’m going to do the same thing.”

  This was a lot to take in, so Ruby began with the simplest question: “What do you mean, her Chernyavsky duty?”

  Cece sniffed. “To have daughters, you know? To pass on the name, and the stories, and the traditions, and whatever. My mom always says so, even if she doesn’t use those words.”

  Ruby had never considered this her duty. Before seeing her Time, she’d thought of children as the inevitable problems of grown-up Ruby. Like a career, or scheduling your own dentist appointments, or the gas bill Ginger always sighed over. And after she’d seen her Time, it hadn’t been an issue.

  “You know, when we were little,” Cece continued, “one of our cousins once told me she wasn’t a girl? I thought she was kidding, so I laughed and ca
lled her a boy. But she said she wasn’t a boy, either, and she wasn’t joking.”

  “Which cousin?” Ruby asked, more sharply than she’d meant.

  “I can’t tell you that, Bebe! But I asked her about it again, like, years later, after she’d seen her Time. She got really quiet and teary, and said it hadn’t meant anything. I know it did, though. I think she just couldn’t imagine telling her mom and the aunts and grandmas who she really was.”

  Ruby’s head was buzzing. “Okay . . . but that’s not you. You don’t have to be straight to have daughters. You don’t even have to have daughters to have daughters.”

  Unbelievably, Cece looked at her with pity. “It’s about the blood, Bebe. It has to be Chernyavsky blood for the line to survive. And that’s not the whole point. It’s not like I don’t ever want kids, but not with some man I can’t—” Her voice wavered, and she stuffed the quilt over her mouth.

  “But . . . but Polina didn’t have children,” she pointed out. “Remember her Time? She was supposed to, but somehow she didn’t. She never got married, either, whether she was supposed to or not. And she definitely didn’t die in childbirth.”

  Cece sniffed again, but her shoulders stilled. “Her Time was wrong.”

  “Or she figured out a way around it.”

  “Right.” Her cousin rubbed the tears out of her eyelashes. “I’m sorry. I know it’s nothing like your Time.”

  “So? That doesn’t make it less important,” Ruby hurried to say, even though she’d thought so mere moments ago. Now she wrapped her arms around her cousin fiercely, blanket and all, and they tumbled sideways onto the mattress, heads knocking together. She didn’t let go. “So we’ll figure out exactly what happened with Polina. We’re already working on it, right?”

  “Okay, Bebe.”

  “You believe me?”

  “Yeah,” she sighed wetly, shuddering.

  That was good. Ruby wanted Cece to believe her. She wanted to believe herself, too.

  But . . .

  She thought of Aunt Annie, the most normal among them, all alone in her big bed on Fruit Street; of her mother all alone in a strange motel room; of Galina, who’d died alone on a highway; of Ruby’s great-grandmother Vladlena, who’d sent her daughters away and died alone in the dark woods, besieged by her enemies. In the coldest little corridors of Ruby’s heart, she wondered: If the Chernyavskys were really so wise and powerful, then why did it seem they were cursed?