It wasn’t until Vera was born and little Galina set to the task of watching her that Polina was allowed to help her mother with her work, though only to a point before she, too, was sent away.
One day, a young man walked out of the trees and up the path. One of the refugees seeking food and safety, her mother murmured to her in the doorway. This was during the Famine, which burned through the Soviet Union when Polina was ten. Peasants from the countryside had settled just outside the cities in temporary slums. The young man swam inside his ragged coat and black cap, his square beard tangled and damp. He arrived on their doorstep, and without asking his purpose, Polina’s mother knew.
“The braziers, kotyonok,” Vladlena commanded.
Polina, twelve years old now, lit the brass bowls of coal hanging in the four corners of the front room the way she’d been taught, setting pots on top filled with river water and herbs, saxifrage and juniper berries and others. Once the water boiled, the room became warm and humid, and smelled bitter and sharp. But even despite the heat, it felt like winter again when Polina glanced up at the man.
Vladlena took his coat and hat, revealing flesh stretched over bones. He was a writer, the man said, who’d been traveling by train when the famine struck, going into the countryside to collect folklore and fairy tales. Starving alongside the farmers, he migrated with them to the settlements outside the city, where he gathered their tales still. But—here, a coughing fit wracked his brittle frame—he needed time. Time to finish his work, which he believed was vitally important. How can a people know who they are, but through their stories?
Besides, whispered stories were how he’d learned about Polina’s mother.
“When I am done, you will have strength enough to do what is needed. But to finish your work, you must complete the ritual. You know how?”
Here, the young man nodded—he had heard this in whispers, too.
It was there that Mom fell quiet.
Ruby waited, but only for a moment. “That’s the end? But . . . what did she do?” Though Ruby was never certain what she believed about the woman in the woods, she’d sometimes imagined her welcoming women into her home, pouring them tea, giving them counsel and support the way Polina and her sisters always had. This was not what she’d pictured. “What was the ritual? What was it for?”
“You can’t guess?” her mother asked.
“You can’t tell me?” she snapped.
Her mother searched her eyes for an uncomfortably silent moment. Then, it seemed she came to some decision with a slight nod. “What if, instead, I show you?”
“. . . How?”
“I have someone coming here, tonight.” She checked the nightstand clock again. “Soon. I thought maybe you were them, arriving early.”
“They’re coming to the motel?”
“Sure. I need to pay for my room somehow. Ruby, I want you to stay and watch.”
Ruby’s phone chimed in her backpack—probably her sisters summoning her—but she didn’t answer. “All right,” she said hesitantly.
She would text Ginger and Dahlia when she left that she’d fallen asleep watching a movie on Dov’s couch—was it just hours ago that she’d sat beside him by the fire?—and while they’d assume she was lying, they’d never dream it was to hide a truth like this.
• Twenty-Two •
Over the next half hour, her mother’s cheap motel room was transformed.
Evelina spread a black cloth over the nightstand between the beds, cleared off the lamp and clock, and carefully arranged objects on top like a strange table setting: A bowl of brown eggs. A pile of dried corn kernels on a white handkerchief. A tiny clay teapot, and a plate of blini, the same ceremonial food they ate at parties and readings, which her mother took from the mini fridge. How she’d prepared them without a kitchen, Ruby couldn’t guess. There was also a glass jar of water with bits of what looked like chopped roots bobbing inside it, a black candle, a coil of red yarn, and an electric soup pot.
Her mother put on no makeup, only went into the bathroom to change into jeans and a sweater. But when she emerged just before their guest was due to arrive, Polina’s locket winked dully around her throat.
Before Ruby could mention it, there was a knock at the door. Her mother looked to her and placed a finger against her lips. “Questions later. I’ll handle everything. You only need to watch.”
Evelina ushered in her mystery guest, a short, square-shouldered woman with a halo of white curls that must’ve turned early, because she wasn’t all that old, even though Ruby could see the knobs of her bones through her withered skin. It was as if her bones were bigger than her body. The woman leaned on her mother, mouth drawn thin with pain as Evelina guided her to a bed and eased her gently down.
The woman glanced over at Ruby, who’d shoved herself into the corner between the closet and the bathroom.
“Nell, this is my daughter,” Evelina said in a hushed voice. “She’s here to learn. Shall we begin?”
The client—Nell—nodded once, then looked to the spread on the nightstand. “You know I can’t . . . can’t keep much down these days.”
“It doesn’t matter,” her mother said. “It’s only the ritual that’s important.”
The “ritual” began with the pouring of tea. Evelina sipped from a Styrofoam coffee cup, then passed it to Nell to drink. She handed Nell a blini from the stack with her fingers, which Nell took and nibbled warily, grimacing as if it were baked of ash. It was barely bitten when she dropped it back into Evelina’s palm.
Her mother spoke then, the words meaningless but the bled-together sounds familiar, rich then soft, then harsh.
She could’ve sworn her mother didn’t speak fluent Russian.
Busy listening for any stray word she might recognize, she nearly missed it when her mother asked in clear English, “You brought the offering?”
“Yes.” Nell nodded weakly. She reached into her large purse, and Ruby thought she was about to pull out her wallet. But she drew out a hand towel crusted in something dark, splatters and spots of black in the dim light.
Ruby wouldn’t have touched it, but her mother took the towel with both hands and draped it over the bowl of eggs, like a cloth napkin over a bread basket in a fancy restaurant.
Next, her mother lit the black candle and sifted through the pile of corn kernels with her long fingers as if searching for . . . something. The candle smoke and its familiar, peppery scent grew in strength and presence, a coiled snake slithering through the motel room. It was a wonder it didn’t trip the fire alarm, Ruby thought.
She realized that she’d smelled something like it in Polina’s attic, in the little drawers full of odd plants and pebbles. And before that, even—the candle she’d once found in Dahlia’s room.
Nell swayed slightly on the bed, eyes glassed over, and Ruby felt like she was swaying, too, dizzy with confusion, head stuffed with smoke. She pressed herself tighter against the wall.
It might have been the flickering light, but as she watched, Nell began to . . . change.
First it was her eyes, like cups filling slowly to the brim, where before there’d been dregs. Her skin, sagging and pale, grew firmer and pinked. Her hands in her lap ceased to shake. It was like watching paper curl in a candle flame, but in reverse.
Evelina lifted the lid from the little soup pot and, to Ruby’s amazement, pinched something from the boiling water inside with her fingers without flinching. A lump of coal, it looked like. It hissed as she plunged it into the jar of water, screwed on the lid, and wrapped it with the red yarn.
She handed it to Nell, who tucked the jar inside her purse. “Is it done? It feels . . .”
“It is.” Evelina leaned in and kissed Nell’s now-pink cheek. “Make good use of it, moya dorogaya.”
As Nell rose on steady feet and handed her mother a sealed envelope stuffed to the seams, she didn’t look happy, exactly. More like grimly satisfied, as if she’d gotten what she came for, and not a penny more.
> The Molehill Motel had a little square pool, tarped in winter. It was bordered by a gate, but the padlock had rusted through, so Evelina took Ruby from the still-smoky room to sit on poolside plastic loungers under the flickering security lights while she explained. “Nell is very, very sick, Ruby. You could see that—you could probably sense it, anyway. I didn’t give her much. A good week, maybe three. Enough to do what she couldn’t have done without me. Put things in order, spend a bit more time with the people she loves.”
Ruby felt as if her brain had been packed in ice, each thought chipping its sluggish way to the surface. Her mother had warned her—she’d told her the stories—but hearing them was one thing, and seeing, another. “But how—how can we do this?”
“It’s what we do,” her mother said simply. “What we’ve always done. Our Times, they’re just a bit of the tree root that pokes aboveground. They say we ran from our true gifts, but they’re all connected. The way we recognize the presence of death, the way we feel it when one of us dies. It’s all about time. We sense it. We speak its language. And if we know exactly what to ask of it and how, time obeys us.”
“Time isn’t, like, a being. It’s just a fundamental quality. That’s science. How do we make it do anything?”
Evelina turned up her palms helplessly. “You want me to tell you the exact mutated gene or chromosome that makes us who we are? I can’t. Some things you just have to believe, Ruby—there can’t ever be a perfect explanation.”
Kerrigan Black would beg to differ. “Fine, say we can control time. You couldn’t give Nell more than a few weeks?”
“Not for the price she was willing to pay.”
“But if she was willing to pay it . . .”
“Then that’s a different story.”
Ruby’s blood quickened inside her. “So what is the price?”
“First, tell me: Why is this so important to you?”
Her mother’s eyes were green seas, and Ruby felt herself sinking as Evelina stared into hers. She took a deep breath, trying to stay afloat. “I just don’t get it. If we still have this power, why do our Times always come true? Why hasn’t anybody tried to stop it besides Polina? Like, okay, maybe Alyona didn’t know how, but Galina must have known something. She was only a couple of years younger than Polina. Why didn’t your mom—”
“There’s always a choice, Ruby,” her mother said, so softly it barely stirred the air. “We make our choices, and we face the consequences. That’s the way it works, even for Chernyavskys. I made a choice when I left you. I was trying to do the right thing by you. I know it’s hard to . . . I thought I knew about right and wrong. But now I’m back, and no matter what, I will never leave you again. You and I, we’re going to fix what I broke six years ago.”
“It’s too late for that,” Ruby said, angry at the wobble in her own voice. Angry at herself for not being angrier with Evelina.
Her mother cupped a hand over her cold cheek, and it smelled like mint. “Well, I’m not going anywhere. We’ve got time.”
“Maybe you do. Or Dahlia, or Ginger. But I don’t.”
And then she told her mother about her Time.
“Zerkal’tse,” her mother said, the nickname a low moan. She reached between them and pulled Ruby closer over the arms of their chairs, into the pillowy shoulder of her coat. “My baby girl. I—” Evelina cleared her throat and tried again. “I won’t promise I can fix this for you, because you’re not a child anymore. You grew up while I was gone, and you’re strong—I knew that as soon as I saw you. You’re so important to me, and to this family, in ways you can’t even imagine. You’re more powerful than you realize. You can fight this. There’s a way to fight. And if you’ll trust me, I promise we’ll do it together.”
It shouldn’t have made Ruby feel better, but it did, even as she sensed her carefully bricked walls crumbling, falling away. On the side of the dark highway where her grandmother had winked out of existence, Ruby hugged her mother hard against the loss of them.
When she pulled away at last, she felt colder than she had before. “Okay. Okay. So . . . how? How exactly do we fight?”
“You asked about the fairy tales. There was a missing story—”
“Vasilisa the Beautiful. I know, we found it at Aunt Annie’s.”
“I’m surprised she still has it,” her mother said dryly.
“You gave her those pages, didn’t you?”
“Yes. We were . . . we’d had a fight. A disagreement. And I wanted to remind her who we were. Where we came from.”
“The story tells us that?”
“In a way.” Then her mother closed her eyes, reciting the tale from memory.
As with any story, the details changed a bit between tellings. In some versions of the tale, there were riders on horseback in red and white and black, or talking mice, or scheming cats, or disembodied hands to work the corn. But the bones remained the same.
Not the version Ruby’s mother told then. That one was different.
When Vasilisa the Beautiful was stricken with the same wasting sickness that had killed her mother halfway through, the story changed.
Not wanting to catch the sickness themselves, her stepmother and stepsisters—who weren’t kindly anyway—sent her into the woods while their father was gone on business. “Seek Baba Yaga in the forest,” her stepmother said cruelly as she barred the door behind Vasilisa. “Perhaps she can help you, if she does not eat you up.”
Terrified but having little to lose, Vasilisa did so, though her legs shook with every step. Once she reached the chicken-legged hut and Baba Yaga had sniffed her out, she did not beg for a light. She asked for a cure so she might live to see her father again. Baba Yaga made her the usual deal—if Vasilisa worked for her, she would give her what she needed. If not, she’d eat her. Vasilisa warned the witch she would catch a fever if she did, but Baba Yaga only cackled. “Bah! I am the Bone Mother, and death is afraid of me.”
Vasilisa worked hard, sorted grain, scrubbed poppy seeds. Again, Baba Yaga gifted her with a fiery skull perched on a stick. “Here is your cure,” she cawed. “Take it to your stepmother and stepsisters, and may they enjoy every bit of it!”
“But I am scared,” Vasilisa pleaded. “What if they will not let me in? What if they open the door only to rid themselves of me for good and bury my bones in the garden?”
Baba Yaga sent her away despite her tears. “Time is a costly prize, child, and to win it, you must be prepared to lose.”
So, gathering her courage, the girl marched on through the dark woods, and when she reached her father’s gate, used all of her cunning to convince her stepmother and stepsisters to let her in, so that they might see the wonder of Baba Yaga’s miraculous cure.
The skull burned them up alive.
Vasilisa stood on their ashes, healthy again, restored to her youth and glory. She wept at what had come to pass, but the next morning, she swept the ashes into the garden, buried the skull, and sat down to await her father’s return.
In her chair, Ruby shivered, the plastic slats squeaking beneath her. “So Vasilisa risked her life to find the cure for death. That’s what she was prepared to lose, right? Like Polina wrote in the front of the book. That was the cost for time.”
“I wish I could protect you. You’re my daughter, and I wish I could wrap you up and keep you safe forever. That’s all I’ve wanted since the day you were born. But that’s not the way this works. It’s not how the world works. I’ll be here with you the whole time, helping you, but . . . if you want a life, Ruby, then you’ll have to fight for it. And you need to decide what you’re willing to lose.”
She’d known the answer to this question since Polina’s Reading. She knew it when Cece confessed her own Time—
“Cece,” Ruby said aloud.
“What about her?”
“Her Time. She’s not dying anytime soon, but she doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. Is there a way to change it? I promised . . .”
Her mother c
onsidered this. “Perhaps. Polina didn’t only add years to her life; she changed it. She unbound herself from her own fate. If we work together, we can figure out how. I truly believe we can.”
It would have to be enough; as she’d said, Cece wasn’t in imminent danger, and with time, they could help her, too.
“So, Ruby. What are you willing to lose?” Evelina repeated the question.
“Anything,” she answered at once. She’d felt it when she looked into Dov’s eyes across the fire. There was nothing she wouldn’t risk.
“Good,” her mother said, pride in her voice.
“Okay, so, where do we start?”
“I think you should get home for now. Your sisters will be worrying. And I’ll still be here tomorrow.” She spoke up over Ruby’s sound of protest. “I told you, zerkal’tse, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Wait, I have one more question,” Ruby hurried to say, though in truth, she had dozens. “Why are you telling me this? I mean, why didn’t you ever tell Dahlia and Ginger?”
Her mother’s soft mouth crooked up at the corner. “Ruby, Dahlia was my apprentice when she was a little older than you. You don’t remember? Those nights when Ginger babysat you? Well, you were young.”
But all of a sudden, she did remember: rare evenings when her mother sent her and Ginger upstairs, keeping Dahlia by her side. She and her middle sister would watch old movies with the volume turned up, and Ginger would braid her hair into a dark crown to match her bright one, and feed her blini from a stack she’d snuck away for them. This was before Ginger turned into a know-it-all in a black beanie who brought stacks of classic novels to the dentist’s office, just to be seen reading them.
The Wise and the Wicked Page 14