The Wise and the Wicked

by Rebecca Podos

  Ruby raised her fist and pressed her hand against his bedroom door, gathering the courage to knock. But it was unlatched, and eased open at her touch. Through the gap she could see Dov in his bed, seemingly asleep despite the music playing at fairly high volume:

  You are a raisin in the sun

  Your skin is warm and wrinkled

  I’m just a grape

  Cool in the shade

  The only difference is passion and age

  Oooh, what’s thirty years

  Between two fruits from the same vine?

  Her heart staggered as she recognized the pluck of the ukulele, the singer’s reedy voice. She must have made some strangle sound loud enough to hear above the song, because Dov turned his head to blink up at her.

  “You’re here.” There was awe in his voice, as if it was a magic trick.

  Ruby edged into his room, which in some ways looked exactly as she’d expected. The basic “manly” red-and-black-plaid bedspread and drapes, the jumbles of clothing on the floor, the scent—his spicy deodorant, laundry in varying states of fresh, and something uniquely Dov that didn’t smell like fire and whiskey and snow, but reminded Ruby of it anyway.

  There were little surprises, too. An aquarium in one corner, clear water with bright yellow fish weaving between the plastic ferns. Colored pencil drawings tacked to the bold blue walls: a band poster he’d copied, anime characters she didn’t recognize. It was good work, if not stunning; it was . . . observant? There was a drawing of the aquarium, the ferns beautifully feathered, the fish delicately scaled.

  Dov was a surprise up close, too, but not a happy one. He lay on top of his blankets in only pajama pants and a loose black V-neck tee, and she could see the sweat on him, the light sheen of a fever. One bare foot was propped up on pillows at the end of the bed, the leg of his sweatpants rucked up just enough to show his ankle, brown skin mottled purple and painful looking.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said quickly, almost sounding embarrassed. “It just hurts. A little.”

  “Jesus . . . Dov, it was just a stupid bone. I would’ve been fine.”

  “You looked like you couldn’t breathe. I thought it was worse. I thought maybe . . . I panicked, sue me. But I’m okay. What about you?” From the way his brown eyes wouldn’t meet hers, she doubted he was asking about her ankle.

  Ruby did a little tap dance to demonstrate its health, and he laughed. As she started to sit on the bed opposite his bad ankle, she realized she was still in her winter wear. She dragged her hat off, but remembered the last time they’d shed their clothing, and thought better of taking off her coat or gloves. As she perched stiffly, she saw that Dov was staring up at her. “What?”

  “Your hair,” he said. “It’s pretty.”

  She tugged on the strands, painfully aware that while he’d been lying in bed with a busted ankle on her behalf, she’d been coloring her hair. “How’s your hand?”

  Dov spread his bandaged right hand palm up on the blanket, gazing down as if considering it for the first time.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “That was . . . kind of the point.”

  Unsure what he meant, she reached her gloved hand out and tucked it into his undamaged one. There was no electric thrill this time, but her stomach was bubbling lava. He looked so harmless in his bed, soft and sleep-rumpled, but he could have been lying to her the whole time, using her. All of his talk about wishing they’d known each other sooner might be sugared bullshit. Or he might be as oblivious as Cece. She didn’t know, and so she didn’t know how to feel about him. Ruby had never had an enemy before . . . but then, she’d never had anything to lose, and she has a suspicion the two went together. “Can you talk about it?” she asked, forcing her voice to patience.

  He sort of laughed. “Mom says you already had a talk.”

  “Kind of.” Ruby stepped carefully. “Did, um, did she say anything about me?”

  His forehead puckered beneath his bangs. “She said . . . I should leave you alone. Let you go. She said it was wrong to make you a part of all this.”

  But she hadn’t told him who she really was. Or was he lying? Ruby frowned, undecided. “Your mother is an intense lady.”

  “All the Volkovs are.”

  “The who?”

  “That’s my mom’s side.” He shrugged. “They’re the ones with the gifts.”

  “So your dad doesn’t have it,” she guessed. “Does he know who you are?”

  Dov flinched. “Yeah, of course.”

  “But he’s not like you?”

  At that, he raised an eyebrow. “He’s short, dark, and allergic to eggplant. So we have that in common. But no, he doesn’t go around recklessly healing people and fainting, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Sorry. That was a bad question. But both you and Talia, you can fix people. Except, um, your mom says you shouldn’t be practicing?”

  “Talia’s really good at it, like everything else.” His smile was only a touch bitter. “I’m . . . complicated.”

  He levered himself upright in bed, wincing as his leg shifted. When Ruby scooted backward to give him space, he reached out and wrapped a hand around her wrist where the glove met her coat sleeve. If he moved his thumb just a little, they’d truly be touching.

  Every blood cell in her body rushed to fill a square inch of skin.

  She held very, very still until he let her go, and her held breath slipped away. “I want to know what that means, complicated.”

  Dov’s bright-dark eyes searched hers. “Right. Okay.”

  And then Dov Mahalel told her his story.

  When Dov was ten years old, he’d had a different name.

  That name no longer mattered, and was never spoken except by those who mourned the loss of it, none of whom mattered to Dov anymore. If he ever thought of it now, it was as a bold red X. He pictured it struck through the pieces of his past that no longer fit.

  An X across the photo of him and Talia dressed to match on the first day of kindergarten, in skirt sets patterned with tropical fruit, hands linked, big brown eyes luminous with nerves.

  An X through the second-grade sleepover where Kacie Lowell dared him to put on her big sister’s bra to see what he’d look like when he grew up, and his body in her closet mirror made him nauseated and afraid.

  An X over the board game corner in his fourth-grade homeroom, where he’d wanted to play the boy token, only to have the plastic silhouette of a girl pressed into his palm.

  An X through the person he thought he had to be.

  Dov Mahalel had been born a boy but was mistaken for a girl by the world, until magic, of all things, set him free.

  It wasn’t the magic of fairy tales, though their bedtime stories about the Volkov ancestors could’ve been mistaken for such. But their mother was always careful to tell them otherwise. “This is a story,” she’d say every night in their childhood bedroom, “but it is also true.”

  Once upon a time, every Volkov had been gifted. They could sense what was broken in others—a miner whose lungs were stoppered by coal dust, or a child wasting away without the will to nurse. They could take away illness and sadness and pain, for a cost. Not much of one, of course. A small pile of kopecks, or a few stringy chickens, or a pouch of salt for preserving food while they traveled the cold countryside, healing the sick and the heartsick. Dov’s great-great-grandfather had saved a farm full of workers who had been drinking from a contaminated stream. His great-great-aunt had brought a child back from the brink of death by tuberculosis. A woman who’d gone dumb with grief at the death of her husband, wasting away in her bed, was seen in town the day after a visit from Dov’s grandfather’s older cousin. She was shopping at the fish markets, a spray of flowers pinned in her hair, humming “Yablochko.” The Volkov name was spoken with awe on back roads and in taverns, their reputation spreading among the desperate. They were beloved by the people whose paths they crossed. Blessings were always whispered at their backs.

 
One day, the mayor of a town stricken by cholera heard the rumors and summoned Dov’s great-grandfather, who brought his wife and many children with him. This was not unusual, for the Volkov families had often gone their separate ways, traveling the roads to practice. Like moons with elliptical orbits, their journeys would occasionally bring them close before spinning them away again.

  To perform such a large healing, the family went into the field. The girls stripped naked and covered their heads with white cloths. The man and his sons armed themselves with scythes and rocks and animal skulls and lit torches. They called out to the sickness, gathering it to themselves.

  But the people were not healed.

  “This is not a natural plague,” Dov’s great-grandfather told the mayor. “It is not in our nature to heal it.”

  “Then I fear we must turn to the woman in the woods,” the mayor said, suddenly pale. “Those who seek her and return say she has the gift to grant life where it has run its course, though their cost is much higher than yours, and may not be known until the deed is done.”

  Dov’s ancestor considered this. “There is always a price. Let me seek her out. I would learn of her gifts, and judge the cost for myself.”

  And so, leaving his wife and daughters behind to keep them safe, he and his sons did just that. And what happened within those woods, nobody knows, except that the youngest son—Dov’s grandfather, a boy of seven—stumbled from the trees days later, weak with thirst and hunger, white skin flecked with blood. Wild-eyed and tight-lipped, he could not tell the story, only this: that they had seen a woman and her daughters in the forest, beyond the river. Of their meeting, he could recall nothing. But afterward, as they set up camp for the night, a strange fever had come over his father and brothers and himself. They had turned on each other disastrously, for their gift was a two-sided coin, and not only could they fix what was broken, they could, should they will it, break what was whole.

  Thereafter, the men of their line were cursed—those still in Russia, and those who had gone abroad, from young to old, fathers and grandfathers and sons—that they should never attempt one without causing the other, and be left with blood on their hands and ash on their tongues. The Volkov name, once spoken with reverence, was now mumbled while spitting upon the path. Dov’s ancestors no longer traveled with blessings at their backs, but were chased away with scythes and rifle barrels.

  And so they ran. Family by family, they crossed the glittering ocean for a place that had never heard of them, joining the few relations who’d immigrated ahead of the war. They settled together on the outskirts of a small town, amid miles upon miles of wavering cornstalks in the center of America, hoping for peace. What had been done to them by the woman in the woods could not be undone—not by their hand—and all that remained was to begin new lives in this new country. The men would no longer practice. It was the women who kept the old ways, sacred but secret. They traveled by night to heal for coin, their passings unnoticed as the mice that scurried through the cornfields. For if their name had not been so renowned in Russia, their pride so great, would their fall have been so terrible?

  It was here that Dov’s mother was born, and these were the stories she was raised on. Even when she met a boy, a college student crossing through town who kissed her on the tire swing of the playground at dusk and took her with him when he left, she promised that she would return with children, and raise them the same. Dov’s mother, the most talented healer of her generation, was beloved by her family. And, true to her word, when she visited with two seemingly perfect little girls on her hips, they, too, were beloved. Dark-haired and dark-eyed and tan-skinned like their father, Mahalels by name, they were declared Volkovs all the same. Beautiful and gifted and blessed.

  But blessings can be revoked.

  And love, like fortune, can turn sour in a moment.

  If anybody knew that, it was the Volkovs. Just as they had lost the love of the people of Russia, there were things they themselves could neither understand, nor forgive. Not even of Mila and her children.

  From a young age, the curse set upon them by the woman in the woods was the black thread embroidering their mother’s fantastical bedtime stories. While boys could pass along the gift in their blood, they were never to use it. Should they try, the pain and sickness they sought to cure in others would not be diminished, but multiply. It would be like a campfire that leapt the rocks to the woods around it and, once wild, could not be contained. The Volkov sons were no longer taught to practice, lest they burn themselves down, and innocents along with them.

  But, believing that she had two daughters, Mila Volkov taught her children. “When you’re women, you’ll do the same for your daughters,” she assured them, and Dov felt the terrible weight of When baring down on his still-small, unchanged body.

  Then, at ten years of age, Dov used his gifts for the first time.

  His mother was out in the backyard, in the little garden past the lawn, beyond the trees. She’d left water boiling on the stove for her work, and while Talia was old enough to know better, she’d reached for it. Advanced for her age in everything from math to gymnastics, she thought she could help. But she tripped and pulled the pot down on herself, a mistake any kid could make. Dov had been in the living room watching Max Steel and eating broken, bottom-of-the-bag Doritos out of a cereal bowl with a spoon. He heard the scream and sprinted for the kitchen, where his sister was dripping wet, on the floor, writhing.

  Dov had never practiced before, but he’d heard the stories, had the lessons, knew the principles. And however much it hurt, he believed that as a Volkov daughter, the gift was his to use. Rather than leave his sister in pain, and with a ten-year-old’s thoughtlessness, he dodged her flailing limbs and wrapped his hands around hers, willed what was broken to wholeness. He knew there would be consequences—his mother, after she’d practiced, was always a bit down for a day or two, as if with a light cold—but he could handle that.

  He was not prepared for the pain when it set in.

  It started in his hands and crept up his arms, covered his body as if he himself had been soaked with boiling water. Pain was a starburst behind his eyes, replacing the blood in his veins. He was an electrical wire, live and severed and whipping.

  He was a bomb.

  Seizing, he leapt away from Talia and stumbled backward, bracing himself against the stove, hand coming to rest on the still-hot burner. And then the pain was running down his body, back to that hand, and it was pulsing there, almost beyond managing . . . but at least he was a bomb no longer.

  Dov collapsed, and woke up in the hospital days later with a crazed heartbeat and a burned arm thickly bandaged from fingertips to elbow. His mother sat beside his bed, studying his face as if she’d never truly seen it.

  “I thought . . .” She swallowed. “Is there something you need to tell me, X? I’m ready to listen.”

  His mother had always suspected, she later told Dov. She had paid attention. Listened as, when he was just a toddler, he begged her to call him boys’ names. Read the elementary school essays where he talked about being a fireman when he grew up, or a policeman, or an army man—anything with man in the title. Humored him when he dragged her to the boys’ section of the department store to try on loose jeans and shapeless dark T-shirts, once she’d proclaimed him old enough to pick out his own clothes. And she’d wondered, but had never really accepted. Neither did their relatives back home, aging among the cornfields—they scolded her for helping Dov “pretend,” allowing him to cut his hair and register as male when they moved schools, for letting a precious female heir to their gifts slip away. They shunned Mila, and her children as well; though Talia had been a family jewel, the most promising among the next generation, she, too, was cast out.

  But the Volkov gifts knew, their mother told Dov. The magic had always known she had a son; it knew that it was not meant for Dov to practice. It accepted the truth of who he was before he did.

  And as she said so, Dov felt the power
of certainty, and the perfect lightness of freedom.

  Ruby’s heart was a bird, and it forced its way up, up her throat, trying to fly away. She pressed a hand against her chest to keep it caged.

  Though she hadn’t known for certain, she’d feared that Mrs. Mahalel was a bad guy, one of the grasping, desperate people in this world who the woman in the woods had predicted would come for her family, would always come for them. That a woman and not a man had shown up at long last was unexpected, but whatever. You couldn’t take every single word of a story literally.

  Ruby had never guessed that Dov’s mother was the bad guy.

  Or at least, that her ancestors were. Her people. Her family. And wasn’t that the same thing?

  “You’re weirded out,” Dov said. He didn’t sound upset, only matter-of-fact, as if there could never have been another outcome.

  And she was, though not by the part that he’d expected; it was impossibly strange to recognize herself—her family—in Dov’s story. The woman in the woods. But she rushed to say, “I’m not.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “I’m not. I’m . . . glad you told me.”

  “I meant to sooner, before—”

  Before the lightning, the kiss, pulled clothing and heated skin and crushed lips. The Spark. Ruby’s ears flamed at the memory, and she fought the urge to hide behind the red curtain of her hair. “I remember.”

  “I know this probably sounds insane. Like . . . magic? Sometimes I can’t believe it’s real, and I’ve seen it. I’ve been around it my whole life. It’s what my family does, but . . . I . . . I just don’t want you to think that’s who I am. I guess it’s a part, but I want you to know me. Does that make sense?”

  She understood now how he could separate the two; that family could be nothing but blood, just a jagged piece that no longer fit into the puzzle of him. Ruby couldn’t, but she tried to push away the Chernyavsky part of herself and be a person. She focused on the gorgeous boy in his bed, waiting for her to react, ask questions, walk out or stay. She threaded her safely encased fingers more tightly between his. “That’s why your family won’t talk to your mom?”