• Eighteen •
Ruby spent most of that weekend in her bedroom, feeling extremely sorry for herself.
She lay on her bed with the lights off, watching the sunset slowly tint her walls. She slipped out to eat only when Dahlia and Ginger weren’t around and, in the dead of Saturday night, snuck into the kitchen and scaled the counters to steal a teacup full of Stoli, and then another, sloppily pouring water into the bottle to hide her crime. When Dahlia knocked on Sunday morning, Ruby groaned that she was getting sick, and she looked so gray and miserable that her sister brought her tea and left her alone.
It was Sunday night before her mood—and her hangover—cleared enough to wriggle fishlike out of bed and flop toward her backpack, where her phone had been in the front pouch since Friday. There were texts from Mikki in the cousin chat about her new French-Canadian boyfriend, and one from a number she didn’t recognize, but could guess when she opened it and saw the butterfly suspended in Dov’s black hair, the first message in a thread. The second was a short video, presented without caption or comment. A bowling ball rolled leisurely down the gutter to plunk harmlessly into the pit at the end of the lane.
She mustered the strength to send back an applause emoji, but a little smile curled across her face without her meaning it to.
The only other message, the one she’d been avoiding, was from Cece. With a shuddering breath, Ruby opened the thread, expecting some bleak or terribly sad text she didn’t have the strength to answer, not even with a sparkling heart emoji.
Cece: I was investigating, or like, I was looking around my mom’s stuff for clues, and I think maybe I found something!!! Come over when you can. Dad’s out and Mom’s at MoM
That was Meeting of Moms, a loosely ruled group of mothers who gathered at Saltville’s one coffee shop every Sunday morning to put together petitions, demanding more crosswalks downtown or a wooden fence around the park to replace the rusted metal cage. Aunt Annie had invited Dahlia to join once, and she’d gone to be polite. But she’d had to run over from her job at the lemonade cart by the pool, and had shown up sweating in her yellow bikini and sarong and the beret with the plastic lemon bigger than her head perched atop it.
Ruby smiled at the memory, but it slipped away as shame rushed in. She and Cece were supposed to be searching for leads together, and yet she’d wasted the whole weekend, hiding in a fog of vodka and misery, thinking only of herself. Meanwhile, Cece had kept her shit together.
Now it was after nine, past Cece’s Sunday-night curfew. (Ruby wasn’t sure if she had a curfew; it had never come up, since she was unlikely to be out anywhere her cousin wasn’t.) Quickly, she answered.
Ruby: Sorry, just saw this! Meet before school tomorrow?
Cece: Finally!!!! Yes, Dad leaves early and Mom leaves at 7:30 for PTO
Ruby: I’ll be there
She followed this with an unnecessary number of sparkling heart emojis, still squirming with guilt that in her wallowing, she’d completely forgotten about her cousin, whose fate might be the opposite of her own, but it was no happier an ending.
If Cece’s bedroom looked like a picture from a furniture store, Aunt Annie and Uncle Neil’s was even more so. It was all flowered bedding, and white pillar candles with wicks that had never been lit, and blown-glass bowls of dried coral or polished river rocks. There was a hope chest at the foot of their bed with a fancy brass lock, modern but made to look antique, and Cece shocked her by opening the little jewelry box on her mother’s dresser and pulling out the key.
“You little thief!” Ruby cried. She’d never seen her cousin take so much as an extra ponchiki at a party or Reading, but maybe the habit ran in their blood.
“No, I’m a borrower,” Cece said, tightening the mushroom cloud of her sloppy bun defiantly. “Now come look before we have to leave for school.”
She dug down through the chest, to a layer of personal flotsam. An old wooden rattle with fading pink paint, and a knitted dress for a little girl with graying lace, and a baby doll, its unlikely ’60s-style bouffant frizzed and blue eyes cloudy—Cece’s childhood things, or Aunt Annie’s? The way they were buried beneath folded quilts and tablecloths made them seem like Aunt Annie’s true Chernyavsky self, beneath the PTOs and MoMs and the Baker name.
At the very bottom was a manila envelope, the clasp sealed. Eyes sparkling, Cece opened it and carefully poured out a thin stack of papers, yellow and rippled with age, ragged along the left side.
“Wait, is this . . .”
Cece’s eyes sparkled. “Pages twenty-five to thirty.”
The illustrated chapter header on top was a version of a painting Ruby had seen in her online searches: a young girl in traditional Russian peasant dress, her long braid bound with blue cloth. She stood in a dark forest, the floor thick with toadstools and weeds. Behind her, a log hut perched on chicken legs was just visible through the trees, bordered by a fence of human bones and skulls. She held aloft one skull on a stick, white light blazing from its eye sockets. This was “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” and the mean house in the distance belonged to Baba Yaga.
The pages were in Russian, obviously, but she already knew the story from the many, many retellings she’d read.
Once upon a time in a far-off tzardom, there was a lovely girl named Vasilisa whose mother lay dying, as they do. Before the end, she called Vasilisa to her and gave her a wooden doll, which her own mother had given her. When Vasilisa was sad or scared and needed help, she was to feed the doll something to eat, and it would tell her what to do.
When her father remarried, as they do, it was to a widow from the village with two daughters a little older than Vasilisa. While her father was around, the woman was kind, but whenever he left for the village, the stepmother proved herself to be a bitter old shrew, and her daughters, bitter young shrews. They sent Vasilisa to work in the fields, where they hoped she would become scrawny and sun-leathered, but she only grew more beautiful as the stepsisters grew hard and horrible. So the stepmother decided to get rid of Vasilisa for good.
While her husband was away on a long trip, the stepmother sent Vasilisa into the forest on some new errand each day, hoping she wouldn’t come out again; everybody knew that Baba Yaga lived there, and that the old crone devoured people as birds devour worms. But the doll spoke words of comfort to Vasilisa to keep her from losing hope, and Vasilisa always came home safely.
One night, all the lamps in the house had been extinguished except for one, in the room where the women sat spinning and sewing and knitting. The elder stepsister put the last candle out, pretending it was an accident, and they all ordered Vasilisa into the forest to bring back a light from Baba Yaga. Taking the doll, she walked all night and all day and into the next night through the trees, and came at last upon a hut perched on spindly chicken’s legs. It was surrounded by a fence made of bones, topped by grinning skulls with bright, burning eye sockets that lit the clearing.
The trees began to groan, the branches creaked, and along came Baba Yaga, trailed by howling spirits until she reached her gate. Then she thrust her long nose into the air, sniffed, and declared, “I smell a Russian bone or two! Who is it? Show yourself!”
Trembling, Vasilisa came forward and told Baba Yaga that she had been sent by her stepmother and stepsisters to get a light. Baba Yaga promised her one if she would work for it—otherwise, she would eat Vasilisa for supper.
That night, Vasilisa brought Baba Yaga food from the oven, watching as the old witch tore apart the meat and crunched large bones between her iron teeth. The next day, Vasilisa cleaned the hut, weeded the yard, and picked the bad grains out of the wheat from the storehouse with the help of the doll, whom she fed scraps from Baba Yaga’s table. The next day it was the same, and she cleaned the poppy seeds from the storehouse one by one, which she managed with the doll and her mother’s blessing. Angry that she couldn’t eat the girl, Baba Yaga was nevertheless an honest dealer, and gave Vasilisa a burning-eyed skull from her gate, stuck on a stick. “Her
e’s fire,” she said. “And I hope your stepmother and stepsisters enjoy every bit of it!”
Vasilisa walked all night and into the next, when at last she cleared the woods and approached the house on the edge. Inside, her stepmother snatched the skull from Vasilisa, complaining that they had waited for so long in the dark. Suddenly, the eyes burned brighter, boring into the stepmother and stepsisters with a white-hot light, until all three were burnt to ashes. Untouched, beautiful Vasilisa dug a hole in the ground and buried the skull, and then sat to await her father’s return.
Unexpectedly, Ruby’s heart dropped. Whatever she’d been hoping for—maybe an obscure story with some seed of truth that spoke to her, as Kerrigan would say—this wasn’t it. The story was in every Russian collection. The fairy tale was neither special, nor unique, nor meaningful. Even if she couldn’t read the Russian, she could follow the illustrations enough to know that the telling was a traditional one.
“Is this it?”
Cece shook her head, bun bobbling. From the envelope, she pinched out yet another piece of paper—the handwriting on this one familiar—and with the look of somebody delivering news that might be good or bad, she passed it to Ruby.
That evening after dinner—two bowls of Cheerios in front of the television, eaten dry because Dahlia had forgotten to buy milk—Ruby leaned against Dahlia’s open doorway. Her sister sat cross-legged on her bed. She held a beautiful glass pipe in one hand, and her homemade sploof in the other, cobbled together with a toilet paper tube and a dryer sheet. It was supposed to catch the stench of the weed when she exhaled through it. Dahlia felt no guiltier about smoking than she did drinking a glass of wine with dinner. But she never left evidence behind—she wouldn’t set her wineglass in the sink before washing it, even if she’d let bowls of pasta sit for days.
It was probably a habit formed while Dahlia was filing for legal guardianship. Because you couldn’t just take over custody of your minor sisters without a little paperwork, or a home visit from a calm but intimidating court representative, who it seemed could sniff out bad behavior from their driveway. At least their mother had made it easy on them, or tried to. Her note of consent was folded up in the envelope on the fridge the day she’d left.
As her sister breathed smoke into her sploof, Ruby asked the question she’d spent all afternoon working up the nerve for. “Can I, um, can I look at Mom’s letter?”
Dahlia coughed. “Why?”
She’d also spent the afternoon trying to craft a convincing lie. But what could she do, claim it was for school? What kind of class project required your estranged mother’s goodbye note? And she couldn’t pretend away its importance.
So she simply said, “Because I need to.”
Her sister looked at her. Then she inhaled deeply from her pipe, as if drawing in breath before plunging underwater, and let out a bluish cloud. Finally, she stood and walked to her closet, riffling through shoeboxes of all sizes to find the right one. She carried it by her fingertips to Ruby, held well away from her body. “Just . . . be careful with it, okay?”
“I’m not gonna hurt it.”
Dahlia frowned. “That’s not what I meant.”
Shut safely away in her bedroom, Ruby had thought she was prepared to open the box, sufficiently braced against a ten-year-old’s longing. It wasn’t real pain, she told herself, only remembered pain. Not love; just its ghost. But when she lifted the lid and saw the envelope inside, Dahlia’s name printed delicately across it, she rocked backward, battered under the wave of it. She could look down on Dahlia for pretending, but every story she had told herself about a girl who never really knew her mother, and had always lived happily with her two big sisters in a charming little wasp-infected house on Stone Road, watched over by their strong, surly great-aunt—all of that was just a fantasy. A fiction riddled with plot holes, built upon a terribly shaky foundation.
None of it held under pressure.
With sweat slick fingers, she opened the envelope and took out the letter. Missing the form that had granted Dahlia custody of herself and Ginger, it was only a few lines, written on their junk drawer stationary. Happy cartoon coffee cups smiled up at her from the border while she reread the words that had been carved into her hippocampus six years ago:
I’m sorrier to leave you than you’ll ever know, though I hope to see you again soon. Until then, my beautiful daughters—
Solnyshko, be strong.
Zvyodochka, be kind.
Zerkal’tse, be good.
Love, Mom
In those first few months after, she’d written letter upon letter of her own, with nowhere to send them. She’d scream at their mother in print, using every swear word her young brain could conjure, and in the next paragraph, beg her to come home. But as the days and weeks and months passed with no further contact, she realized the full truth of Polina’s words.
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.
If she hadn’t yet figured out what every other Chernyavsky seemed to understand from birth, she never would. And Ruby didn’t need a mother she would never see again. Better to believe she’d never had one.
Swallowing roughly but determinedly, she reached into her backpack and pulled out the book of fairy tales. Folded inside was the unreadable story of Vasilisa the Beautiful, scanned and printed on Neil Baker’s home office computer that morning. Also, a copy of the sheet of note paper, which she placed on the bed beside the letter. As if the happy dancing coffee cups weren’t proof enough, the sloped n’s and precise little o’s matched exactly. It even seemed they were written with the same thin-inked blue pen.
In her mother’s handwriting, the note read:
Remember the story. This is the price, Annie.
Ruby’s first instinct had been right, of that she was certain; the story meant something. Fairy tales weren’t just important to her family, they were history. They were legacy. And this one had made its way from Polina to Evelina to Annie, falling into Cece’s and Ruby’s hands years later. Like the Chernyavskys, it, too, was trying its hardest to survive. There must be a reason for that.
And then there was Polina’s inscription.
Remember this, Evelina: if time is a prize you want to win, you must prepare to lose.
Time was exactly what she was after. She’d felt a secret clock ticking inside of her since she was thirteen, but what if it could be stopped? According to stories, the Chernyavskys had been powerful enough to do just that, once. And if Ruby could be strong enough—and smart enough—then she could save herself and Cece, too. She could take back what belonged to her, because judging by Polina’s thwarted fate, it had never truly been abandoned.
And there was nothing she wasn’t prepared to risk to find it. She didn’t have much to lose in the first place.
Suddenly, Ruby could no longer sit still in this quiet little house, which was overwarm because their thermostat was acting up again, and thick with the smell of Dahlia’s weed despite her sister’s best efforts. Shouting that she was going for a walk, Ruby was out the door before her coat was zipped.
Fresh powder shifted under her boots, the frozen air heavy with the promise of more to come. The temperature on the electronic sign outside Saltville Hometown Banking read 13 degrees—no wonder her bones felt like thinly blown glass, like they’d shatter if tapped upon. Hunching down in her coat, she shuffled toward the General Store, though it was closed by now. And while she knew she shouldn’t, she couldn’t help but glance around for a big black truck glittering under the streetlights.
So it seemed like a kind of magic when her phone chimed, and she pried it out with stiff fingers to find a text waiting.
Dov: Hey, there’s a bonfire behind Keebler’s Saturday night. Interested? No band. Probably no bowling. Can’t make promises
A smile threatened to split the cold skin of her lips.
Ruby: What’s a Keebler?
Dov: You don’t know Keebler??? You are missing . . . probably not much, he’s kind of an ass
Ruby: Then why are we going to his bonfire?
Dov: Touché
Emboldened by possibility and alive with wanting, she wrote back as new snow drifted silently down around her.
Ruby: Maybe we should just have our own bonfire
Three eternal minutes later, an answer arrived.
Dov: We could do that
• Nineteen •
Dov had instructed her to park in the Mahalels’ empty driveway at 6:00 p.m. that Saturday, and from there, search for the trail in the snow.
The drifts around the driveway were three feet deep at least, but there it was: a neat pathway carved through them, leading toward the backyard. Shivering, she shoved her mittened hands into her coat pockets and stomped forward. The backyard was wide and deep when she reached it, disappearing at the far end into a thicket of gray trees rising up out of the white.
Through their leafless branches, Ruby saw the flicker of fire.
She followed the path toward the flames until it spit her out into an unexpected clearing, surrounded by trees and dunes of snow. In the middle was a squat black fire pit, the earth around it scraped nearly down to the grass, dark blades poking through the crust here and there. Dov sat in one of two camping chairs in full winter gear, gloved hands tucked beneath his armpits. He beamed proudly up at her, a shovel leaning against the snow wall nearby. Clearly, he was the architect.
Ruby’s mouth fell open, breath steaming out, but she tapped a mitten against her lips to hide it. “How long did this take?”
The Wise and the Wicked Page 11