“But I left everything I loved and everyone who loved me,” her mother said. “And I learned how big and strange the world really is. You’d be amazed. You girls can’t possibly know, because you’ve spent your whole short lives here in Saltville, without any idea where you really come from, or what you’re really capable of. Polina made sure of that. She’s the one who betrayed this family. But when you’re older, when you leave, as you surely will”—here, she gave them both a penetrating look, as if she knew more of their fates than they did—“you’ll see.”
“That’s not . . .” Ruby’s swallowed, her mouth so dry in the strange heat that her tongue felt swollen, and tried again. “Polina loved the family. She was the family. She never betrayed us.”
Her mother didn’t answer. She reached for a photo on the mantel—one of the pictures the aunts had set out for the Reading, of Polina standing in her backyard beside a teenaged Evelina and Anfisa. Instead of picking it up, she plucked out a small bundle from behind the frame. Like a white cloth napkin, tied up with red yarn. Balancing it in her open palm, she wrapped something Ruby couldn’t see around the neck of the bundle. A piece of string so thin, it was invisible from where they sat. “You learn a lot about yourself when you’re alone,” her mother said, as if Ruby hadn’t spoken. “You figure out exactly how strong you are, and what really matters to you, and what you’ll do to protect it.”
Evelina looked at them through the shimmering heat of the fire, and very deliberately, she closed her fingers around the cloth, slowly crushing its contents.
Beside Ruby, Cece doubled over.
She coughed violently, and Ruby reached out to pat her back, but her cousin pitched forward off the edge of the couch, landing on all fours.
“Cece!” She scrambled down to help her. . . .
And saw the blood just as it spattered the floorboards. Still coughing, she looked up at Ruby, panic in her streaming green eyes, her teeth and the spit clinging to them stained red.
Stupidly, Ruby turned to Evelina for help, and in her mother’s eyes, she saw something colder even than Polina at her very coldest staring back.
• Thirty-Four •
Before she could speak, her mother’s fingers relaxed around the bundle, and Cece’s cough eased.
“What’s happening?” Ruby asked, her voice as insubstantial as the steam and smoke wafting through the room.
“She’s—” Her cousin choked, then spit a mouthful of thin blood onto the boards between her splayed, shaking fingers. “It’s her, Bebe,” she mumbled wetly.
Ruby didn’t want to believe. She searched her mother’s face, and thought she saw the shade of uncertainty. But when she spoke, she sounded sure. “One day, you’ll understand. I did.”
“What does that mean?”
Evelina stared down at her, considering Ruby in the shifting firelight.
Then she told one last story.
Polina set her tea glass in its podstakannik down with a clink, watching her little sister from across the kitchen table. Though she was in her midforties, Galina looked considerably younger, with her round, gem-like green eyes, the pale blond hair twined into a crown of braids, and the sweetness of her heart-shaped face. Polina, on the other hand, looked her age and felt older.
It was why she’d called Galina over this afternoon, why she’d sent the girls outside when they arrived. Little Anfisa, with her mother’s light coloring but without her beauty, angular and scrawny, always complaining. And then there was Evelina. Nine and quiet, but clearly the leader, even among her older cousins, her small heart-shaped face ever serious under coils of dark blond hair. Polina could see the two of them through the window over her kitchen sink, which looked out on the backyard. It was a sunny September day, and the girls sifted through the erratically tended grass for acorns dropped by the bordering oaks, picked spiny purple flowers from the creeping thistle to stick in their own braids. As Polina watched, Evelina plucked a flower and straightened, examining it. Then she crushed it between her palms, slowly and deliberately, rolling the bud back and forth. She buried her face in her hands to breathe it in, then opened them, letting the tiny petals flutter away on the breeze.
“She’s like Vera at that age, don’t you think?”
Polina turned back to her sister, who was watching her watch Evelina. She shook her head briskly. “Your memory of home is poor. Vera was not so quiet. She could never be.”
Galina laughed at the memory, but asked, “You still think of that old log shack as home? That was all so long ago.”
“It’s where we are born. It’s in our blood. How long is too long? How soon did you forget who we are, sestrichka?”
Now Galina set her own cup down. “Please tell me we’re not talking about this again.”
Polina reached for her sister’s hand and found it stiff in her grip, like holding on to a store mannequin. “We are, again and again until you see the truth. You must send her to me. I will teach her. You don’t see she is made for it? She can carry the knowledge. It is meant for her. And you, you will not be alone. You have Anfisa still.”
“No!” Her sister yanked her hand away, then glanced back out the window, wincing as if her daughters might have heard her outburst. She lowered her voice to a hiss. “I’ve told you, I don’t want her learning all of that. We’re in America now, and we’re not going back. We have jobs. We have lives here. We don’t have to do that anymore.”
“It is not what we do, Galina. It is who—”
“Who we are,” her sister finished wearily. “But it’s not who I want Evelina to be.”
“You think you have a choice?”
“We always do. That’s what I believe.”
Polina leaned back in her chair, steeling her gaze until her sister squirmed beneath it. “Enough. I am patient for too long. I wait for too long, but it is time. Evelina is ready. She is sharp. She is hungry. Of all the children, she will keep our traditions. The family needs her. We forget our past, we forget our power, and we die. We must survive, Galina. Even a kuritsa like you can see this.”
The women sat motionless, staring each other down with matching eyes. Then Galina stood, so quickly the motion sent her chair skittering away from her across the floorboards. “Perhaps if you wanted a child to train so badly,” she said coolly, “you should’ve had one of your own. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take mine home.”
Gathering her purse and coat, she crossed the kitchen and rapped on the window above the sink. When the girls looked up, shirt fronts sagging under piles of acorns, Galina beckoned them sharply, and the girls headed for the house.
“You say you have a choice?” Polina spoke from her seat at the table, watching her sister’s shoulders stiffen. “Choose carefully, sestrichka. I don’t wait forever.”
As it turned out, Polina had only to wait three more days. When her telephone rang, she knew before answering that it was Galina, whether through some Chernyavsky gift, or because only her sisters had ever called her.
Galina’s answer, too, she’d anticipated, though not the venom in her voice.
“You can’t have her,” Galina said through gritted teeth; Polina could picture her in that tea shop of hers, fist clenched around the phone cord, pale hair frazzled with sleepless worry. “You’d ruin her to make her like you. Like Mama. I’m going to Vera, and we’ll make sure you won’t have any of the children. I mean it. These so-called gifts end with us, Polina. But if they mean so much to you, then you can live alone with them for the rest of your too-long life. And that’s my final word.”
That was all she said before the call ended with a click, and then the maddening dial tone. Calmly, Polina set her phone down on its cradle.
She had prepared for this.
All her life, really, she had been prepared to do what it took to keep them going, to ensure their continued existence. Vladlena had taught her, as her own mother had taught her, just as Polina would teach Evelina. Because there was nothing more important than family: strong, t
owering and ancient, with roots sunk deep into the dirt, whether it be the dark and sometimes bitter soil of Russia, or the cool earth of Maine. Perhaps the family needed Evelina, an acorn to be tended and replanted, grown under just the right circumstances to achieve her potential. But the tree did not depend upon a single, shivering leaf on a single branch to survive.
Without Polina’s sestrichka, the Chernyavskys would go on.
“She killed her,” Ruby said faintly, head spinning with smoke and stories. “Polina killed your mother because she wouldn’t give you to her. And then she changed Galina’s entry in the Recordings to hide it. And you knew?”
“Not then.” Evelina sighed. “Decades later, when she admitted it.”
Cece’s arm started to tremble, and Ruby pressed her pathetically small body against hers. “But . . . why would she tell you?”
Her mother actually laughed, though it was a flat, joyless note. “Because she was scared. She claimed she wanted the family to survive, to be strong, but when push came to shove, she was weak.”
That sounded nothing like the Polina Ruby remembered. “But she taught you everything you know!”
“She told me stories,” Evelina sneered. “Taught me a little Russian. She’d taken me from my mother to train me to be like her, but in the end, she gave me crumbs. She only showed me what she showed your sisters—to nudge fate back a bit—but not to fend it off. She never gave me the knowledge she used to save herself for so long, or what we’ll need to save you. After everything she’d done, after she’d killed her own sister to keep the family secrets alive, she couldn’t go through with it. I wanted her to make me like her, strong enough so that we would never have to fear anybody, ever again. ‘When you’re older,’ she kept saying. ‘When you’re ready.’ But I grew up, and she never let me in all the way.
“So I went to Polina when you were ten. I knew you were strong. I saw that you had the potential to be powerful. I asked Polina to work with me to train you. All I wanted was for her to keep her promise.”
“She said no?” Ruby guessed.
Evelina’s fingertips drifting to the locket at her throat, winking in the firelight. “Time had made her soft, and sad. She said the power wasn’t worth what it had cost the family, or would continue to cost us. And she told me what she’d done to my mother, and why.” She took the locket into her fist then, and squeezed until her knuckles went white. She finished softly, “That’s when I . . . did what I did.”
“You left us,” Ruby clarified. “Across town from a murderer.”
“She would never have hurt you. And I always planned to come back. But it took a lot longer than I thought.” Her lips twisting as if the words were bitter. “Suddenly I was alone, without my family for the first time, and my daughters back home hating me, and me hating Polina. She’d killed my mother for nothing. I wanted revenge. I wanted to . . . to topple her from her throne. I wanted to take everything from her and protect this family in the way she never could. But I never would’ve beaten her, with what little she’d taught me. I wasn’t strong enough.
“So I went searching. I followed rumors and fairy tales across the world. Along the way, I found a lot of other folks with their own gifts. I told you they’re all over, when you start to look.” She glanced toward the windows on the far wall, as if one of them might be peeking over the sill. “Some of them came to America to survive, just like us. Some of them are in hiding, too. But I found them out there.”
“That’s what you were doing for six years?” Ruby burst out, angrier than she was afraid. “What, were you traveling around Europe by fucking donkey cart?”
A muscle in her mother’s delicate jaw twitched. “I suppose I got lost in the woods, for a while.”
“And when you came out, you were evil?”
Her mother’s lips parted in protest, but Cece interrupted. “You could’ve told the family what Polina did. My mom—”
“You think I didn’t try? I went to Annie the same night I learned the truth. I begged her to stand up to Polina with me. I told her we were strong together. I gave her the story to remind her where we’d come from, and what we were capable of. But my little sister . . . she was scared. She was weak, too. Ask her about it. She’ll probably cry—she cried then—but she kept quiet. She protected the tiny life she’d made for herself with that Baker.”
Evelina clenched the fist around the bundle. Only long enough that Cece began to choke, spittle and blood dribbling from between her teeth. Ruby threw her body over her cousin’s to hold her up and screamed, “Stop!”
Her mother’s hand unfurled. “It didn’t matter, because I didn’t need her. I tracked down our people, after all.”
“All of our people are here,” Ruby challenged, and then, thinking of Vladlena, “or dead.”
A light smile danced over her mother’s soft lips, so much like Dahlia’s. “Who says they are?”
Ruby looked to Cece, who stared up at her with wide, red-rimmed eyes.
“Anyways, I found the knowledge I went looking for. And I would’ve come back to face my aunt. I was about to come back.” She said this defensively, small shoulders thrust back, as if desperate for both of them to believe. “But I was a little too late, and the Volkov bitch got her first.”
“How do you know that?” Ruby demanded, even as she thought back to that bright, clean kitchen with its expensive appliances and its gleaming countertops, Mrs. Mahalel’s eyes as sharp as the knives in the block.
“Polina. After the Reading, when I ran into you in my old bedroom, I was looking for, well, something from her—my aunt was too powerful to be caught unaware, even if she’d slipped with age. We parted badly, obviously, but I know she always hoped I’d come back to her. I didn’t think she’d leave me totally unprepared. And she didn’t. There was a letter under my mattress, where I used to hide my diary from Annie. And other contraband, until Polina found it all.” Her mother smirked, fondly remembering her teenage exploits, perhaps a squashed joint or R-rated love notes stashed beneath her bed.
Meanwhile, Ruby’s lungs contracted. She’d thought her mother was searching for her that afternoon, desperate to explain herself. Apparently, it was the first lie Ruby had made herself believe.
She shook the memory free—she’d feel sorry for herself later. “Polina told you in a letter that she’d be murdered?”
“She said she sensed trouble coming. Old enemies and a fight she didn’t think she was strong enough to win. She was right.”
Abandoning her post by the fire, Evelina crossed the room to kneel on the floor beside them. They shrunk backward, but her mother ignored Cece, looking only at Ruby. Her eyes were as green as the shadows at the bottom of a lake. “Polina was right about this, once, even if she lost her nerve. Strength matters. Power matters. It’s what kept the Chernyavsky women alive in this hard world. Your family needs you, and it needs me, if it’s going to survive. There are so many of us . . . but they’re leaves on a branch. We’re the root. Do you understand?”
“I . . . I thought you loved me.” Ruby’s voice was hoarse, her throat pricked by glass when she tried to swallow. “I thought that’s what all of this was for.”
“Ruby, I do love you.” Evelina dropped back onto her heels. “It doesn’t have to be like this. None of us needs to get hurt. We can do the ritual tonight and buy you years. We can be together, you and me and your sisters. I learned so much while I was away, and I can teach you everything.”
“What if I don’t want that?” she dared to ask.
The cloth bundle still rested in her mother’s open palm, and she plucked idly at the red yarn wrapped around its neck. She didn’t need to speak.
Evelina truly was Polina’s heir. She was the monster Polina’s choices had made her, and more. While Polina’s hunger had dulled with time and regret, Evelina’s had only sharpened. She was willing to do terrible things, to hurt anybody—to hurt her own niece—to get what she wanted.
And though Ruby wouldn’t have thought it in t
he last six years, what Evelina wanted most was Ruby.
“If I do this,” Ruby began, sucking in a breath of potent air, “will the family be safe? From—” From you, she could’ve said. “From the Volkovs?”
Cece grabbed at her ankle. “Bebe, don’t.”
Evelina ignored her. “As long as they exist, our family will be in danger. But with you by my side? I know whose survival I’ll be betting on.”
Ruby recognized the new fire in her mother’s voice—not bitterness toward the past, but hope for the future. Hadn’t she had that, once? Wouldn’t she have done anything to hold on to it?
Well, almost anything.
“Okay,” she gave in.
Her mother smiled, proud of Ruby’s choice. “Good. That’s good, baby. Let’s get started.” She stood and strode toward the fireplace, stoking the flames again with an iron poker from beside the rack.
With one eye on her mother, Ruby reached back to pry her cousin off. But then she slipped a hand into her back pocket and, in the brief moment they weren’t watched, pulled out what was inside and slid it beneath Cece’s hand. Because she had a bad idea, desperate and uncertain, and she whispered it to her cousin before her mother came back to claim her.
Preparations for the ritual were more intense than they had been before Nell’s, which Ruby might have expected.
She and Evelina sat beside the spread on the coffee table while her mother did her best to braid the dried stalks of a plant stacked with withered violet-blue blossoms into Ruby’s hair, which had grown out and faded, though it still gleamed red. Evelina managed to weave them through the strands, and the smell of the flowers and their crisped gray leaves was a strange mix of lilac and turpentine.
Ruby shook her head to listen to the rattle of dead plants.
Otherwise, she kept still and tried not to look at Cece, or at the clock on the wall above the fireplace.
As her mother worked, Ruby shut her eyes tight and thought of her Time.
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