by Chris Culver
The man reading the paper folded it slowly and left. Kostya grimaced.
“I may not have been a very good father, but I don’t want to lose you like I lost your mother.”
“You already have,” said Kara, reaching into her purse and pulling out a thin, white roll of paper. Kostya recognized the smell when she lit it and exhaled in his direction. He stood and looked at their growing audience.
“It’s time to go,” he said, motioning her forward. “This isn’t the place for this.”
Kara removed the joint from her mouth and looked at it, her eyebrows raised.
“This bothers you? A little dope?” She looked him up and down before standing. “You probably sold this to my dealer.”
He nodded apologies to the shop’s other patrons before escorting his daughter back to their car. She threw the remnants of her joint out the window as they drove away, but the smell lingered in his vehicle.
“I lost my mother and father when I was young,” said Kostya, adjusting the vents on his car to rid it of the smell. “I know what it’s like.”
“That sucks. I never had a father, so I didn’t lose much.”
As much as he tried to restrain himself, the barbs hurt, and Kostya felt his temper rise.
“I tried to be there for you both. I truly did.”
“Great. I feel better now,” said Kara. “You killed my mom, but that’s okay because you were always there for us.”
“I didn’t kill your mother. She died because she was sick. I sent her to clinics, to doctors, to retreats. I drove her to therapy. I sat up with her at night when she cried herself to sleep. I loved your mother, and I did everything I could for her. I will not tolerate you saying otherwise.”
“You can’t even say it, can you?” said Kara. “She killed herself, and it’s your fault.”
Kostya felt his heart ache, but something deep inside him refused to let that show.
“I loved your mother very much. I would have given anything for her. She knew that.”
“Mom never loved you. She was scared of you,” said Kara, shifting on her seat so she could face him. “She went to those clinics to get away from you, and I can see why.”
“She had no reason to be scared of me. No one does.”
Kara scoffed. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Of course not,” said Kostya, straightening. “You’re my daughter. I’d never think you were stupid.”
“I know what you do for a living.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. “And what do you think that is?”
She looked forward and started to say something, but quickly shut her mouth. Finally she asked, “What do you want from me? You want me to sit on your lap and call you Daddy? It’s too late for that. It’s too late for a lot of things.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.”
Kostya drove for another twenty minutes in silence before pulling to a stop in front of a two-story brick home near Butler University. Alicia had planted yellow mums beside the door; she loved flowers. Kostya didn’t say anything, not knowing what to say.
“Don’t worry,” said Kara, opening her door. “I’ll be out of here in a month so you can sell the place. You won’t ever have to see me again.”
“The house is yours. It’s part of the trust fund I started for you. You can stay in it while you finish college, or you can sell it. Mr. Evans, the lawyer we met with yesterday, will assist you with whatever you want.”
Kara’s back stiffened, but she didn’t get out of the car. “What do I have to do for it?”
“Nothing. Just please try to be happy.”
She put one leg out of the car but didn’t try to leave. “I don’t think we need to see each other again.”
“If that’s what you want,” said Kostya.
“It is,” she said, standing. Kostya watched his daughter walk into her house. She lived up to her word. He never saw her again.
* * *
Despite having written its address on letters twice a year, Kostya hadn’t set foot in front of the small, redbrick home in well over ten years. Little had changed. The yellow mums in the front lawn had been swapped with azaleas, and someone had painted the trim around the windows gray. A hose snaked across the front lawn to a crab apple tree. Somewhere along the way, it appeared her mother’s house had become Kara’s home. He wished he had been part of it.
“Park out front instead of the drive. I want to be able to leave quickly.”
Kostya’s nephew Michael nodded and slowed their paneled van. Kostya owned two such vehicles, and both had magnetic panels that could be affixed to the sides to disguise the vehicle’s ownership. Tonight, they had attached panels with the logo of a local HVAC company on the outside; that should keep them from arousing the attention of the neighbors.
As soon as Michael brought their van to a stop, Kostya stepped out and walked toward the home, stopping only to bend and pick up a decorative rock from a flowerbed to the right of the door. His knees and back creaked with the strain of the motion as he bent farther to retrieve the tarnished brass key underneath. Alicia had placed that rock on the porch to hide a house key fifteen years ago when Kara went to high school. Seeing it again made Kostya smile.
Within thirty seconds of arriving, four men stood in what had once been Kara’s entryway. Lev and his two sons, James and Michael, immediately began searching the home for information about Kara’s life, while Kostya stayed in the entryway and looked around. He saw his daughter in every corner of the room and wished he had seen it while she was still alive.
The entryway opened into an open-concept living room with attached kitchen and stairway to the second floor. When he bought the home for Alicia, cheap oak paneling had covered the walls, but Kara had pulled all that down and replaced it with drywall painted a cheery yellow. The hardwood floor creaked as he walked around. She had dusted the wooden coffee table, end tables, and fireplace mantel. Vacuum lines crisscrossed the rug in the center of the floor. When he knew her, Kara didn’t even seem to understand how a vacuum worked. He missed watching her grow up.
While his nephews searched the bedrooms, Kostya walked toward the mantel above the fireplace and picked up a black-and-white picture of a wedding. Kara smiled as her new husband fed her a piece of cake at the reception. She looked happy. He hadn’t planned to take anything from the house, but he tucked the picture beneath his arm and walked to the kitchen, feeling a dull hollowness build inside him.If Kara had kept the home’s original layout, the upstairs had three bedrooms and two bathrooms; he doubted anyone would find anything there, though. Assuming it still existed, he wanted to find the home office.
He passed a small powder room beside the kitchen before stopping at the last door on the left. The office had been a large corner bedroom at one time, but upon buying the house, Alicia had hired a contractor to refinish the hardwood floors and install built-in bookshelves along two of the walls. Kara hadn’t changed it much except to fill those bookshelves with legal textbooks. Her diploma hung on the wall. His daughter had become a lawyer apparently, one more major event he had missed in her life.
Lev looked up from his search of the desk when Kostya walked in.
“Have you found anything?”
“Kara changed her name. Her last name is Elliot now, like her husband. She saved your letters,” he said, sliding a thick stack of opened envelopes across the desk. Kostya added them to the portrait under his arm. Twice a year—on her birthday and Christmas—he wrote her a letter asking for her forgiveness, and twice a year he told her that he would be at a park near the White River downtown if she’d be willing to see him. She never showed, but he kept going year after year in the hopes that one day she’d change her mind.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Maybe,” said Lev, reaching down to a drawer and picking up a stack of folded color pamphlets. He slid them across the desk and took a step back. “Tell me what you think of these.”
The
pamphlets had been written in half a dozen languages and contained pictures of smiling men and women carrying backpacks and walking through a bucolic college campus. Kostya flipped through the pamphlets until he found one written in Russian, a language he understood. They advertised a student exchange program that would allow young women to come to the United States from abroad and study and work part-time to pay their way. The pictures looked innocuous, but the pamphlet read like a sales pitch.
“What does this company get out of its exchange students?” asked Kostya.
“Nothing according to their literature. They’re a charity.”
Lev sounded suspicious and rightfully so. Everybody had an angle, even supposed do-gooders out to save the world.
“See what else we can find.”
They searched for another ten minutes. Kara kept a copy of her taxes in her desk; in addition to dispersals from her trust fund, she had made just over a hundred thousand dollars each year for the past three years from a company called Commonwealth Financial Services. As they left the room, Lev bumped into a wooden filing cabinet beside the desk, causing it to slide across the floor on wheels hidden in the base, revealing a safe built into the wall. Lev immediately bent and tried to open it, but its handle wouldn’t budge.
“We can remove this, but we’ll make some noise,” said Lev, standing. “It’s your call.”
“Let me try something,” said Kostya, kneeling before the safe and feeling his knees creak. Kara’s safe had a keypad like a telephone instead of a spinning dial, making it easy to use. He typed in her birthday, but that didn’t work. He then tried Alicia’s, but that didn’t work either. He didn’t bother trying his own; she wouldn’t have used that. As a last resort, he typed 05-22-02, the date Alicia passed away. The lock clicked, and the door swung open, exposing the interior.
“Anything?” asked Lev. Kostya nodded and reached inside. He found four envelopes; the first two held cash, probably emergency money. The third envelope held her birth certificate, her wedding certificate, and other important documents. Kostya slipped that one into his jacket’s pocket. The fourth envelope felt heavier than the others. He slipped the top flap from the interior and pulled out eight passports from various countries. They all belonged to young women, mostly teenagers. He also found a black address book.
“What is this?” asked Lev.
“I don’t know,” said Kostya, holding out a hand. Lev pulled him to his feet. “We’ll find out. I know someone at the—”
Heavy footsteps interrupted him. James walked into the room, his face drawn and his breath shallow.
“We found something in the basement.”
“What is it?” asked Kostya.
“A girl.”
Kostya fingered the passports. “Is she alive?”
“Oh yeah. She ambushed us and hit Michael with a lamp. He’s still trying to calm her down.”
Kostya glanced at Lev. “Come on.”
When they arrived in the kitchen, Michael stood at the top of the basement stairs, repeatedly calling for the girl at the bottom to calm down. It didn’t work, possibly because they didn’t speak the same language. Every time Michael spoke, the girl would respond in Russian so quickly that even Kostya, a native Russian speaker, had trouble understanding it. He put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder and asked him to take a step back.
“Why can’t you leave me alone?” The girl’s voice was high pitched and breathless.
Kostya answered in Russian. “We’re not here to hurt you. I’m an old man. I couldn’t hurt you if I tried. Can I come down and talk?”
She hesitated. “No. I’ll hit you if you come. Stay up there.”
“I understand,” said Kostya, speaking as he had to his own children when they were young. “Do you know Kara?”
“Yes. She’s my friend.”
“She was my daughter. She and her husband passed away this afternoon, and I’m trying to find out what happened to her. Can I come down now?”
The girl didn’t say anything.
“Please,” said Kostya. “I need to find out why my daughter is dead. Will you talk to me?”
“Kara’s dead?”
“Yes,” said Kostya. “I loved her very much. I don’t know what happened.”
The girl remained silent for a moment. “You can come down. Just you, though.”
Kostya looked over his shoulder at his brother-in-law. They had worked with each other for so long that they didn’t need to communicate plans verbally anymore. Lev would stay at the top, but he and his boys would come down if they heard a scuffle.
When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Kostya visually searched the basement for threats, an old habit he had picked up as a young man in a Soviet prison. Kara hadn’t finished the room, but it looked and smelled clean and dry. Someone had painted the cinder block walls white, while the floor was bare concrete. He found a couch, bookshelf, and bed in one corner and a washing machine and dryer on the other side. He looked at the girl last. She was exceedingly pretty. Fear, hope, and pain merged in her eyes to form a gaze that was simultaneously pitying and pitiful. At one glance, Kostya knew she didn’t pose a threat. She tried to hold his eyes for a moment, but then she looked at her feet.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” said Kostya. “So please don’t be scared.”
“Okay.”
She didn’t seem convinced. Kostya smiled, hoping to put her at ease. He had only looked at the passports briefly, but he hadn’t seen her before. He didn’t know what, if anything, that meant.
“Do you live here?” he asked.
She looked at the bed and nodded but didn’t try to make eye contact.
“For two weeks. Kara and Daniel took care of me. They were very good people.”
“Daniel was her husband?”
She nodded. “Kara talked about her father some. She said you might be able to help me, but Daniel said it was too risky to call you.”
He wanted to ask what else Kara had said about him, but he refrained. They didn’t have time for that.
“How did you meet my daughter?”
She hesitated at first. “She and Daniel saved me.”
“Tell me about it.”
She choked up. “I don’t know if I can.”
Kostya knew what a frightened child looked like. He spoke softly.
“Try to take it one word at a time. I need to know. As long as I’m here, no one will ever hurt you.”
She stared at him, apparently trying to gauge his sincerity before walking to the bed and sitting down. Kostya sat nearby on the couch, his hands folded on his lap. The girl introduced herself as Iskra Konev and said she grew up in a small town in the Ukraine, an area which was, coincidentally, not far from a farm owned by Kostya’s aunt and uncle. She stumbled over her sentences at first, but she picked up speed quickly once she began talking. A woman named Ann had brought her to the United States with the promise that she’d be able to go to college and work in an office to pay her way. When she arrived, she found Ann had a quite different future in mind for her. Iskra never said exactly what Ann forced her to do, but Kostya knew. From the way Iskra shied away from him, from the way she held her hands across her chest, from the way she wouldn’t make eye contact. She said that after a week of her new life, she wanted to kill herself; after six months, she already felt dead. Had she been his child, he would have lied to her and said that everything would be okay. It wouldn’t, though, not for her or anyone in her circumstances. She was beyond comfort any human could give.
“Did Kara say why she didn’t take you to the police?”
Iskra shook her head. “No.”
Kostya stayed still, trying to think that through. His daughter was playing a game he didn’t understand yet, which meant he would need to step carefully. Kostya rocked his weight forward and stood, his knees smarting from the movement.
“I’m going to send you home.”
Iskra shook her head. “
I can’t pay you.”
“You don’t need to,” said Kostya. “I’m sending you home. My daughter would have wanted that. ”
“I...I don’t...,” she began.
Kostya shushed her. “It’s done. I’m sending you home.”
“I don’t have a passport yet.”
“Let me worry about that,” said Kostya, trying not to grimace as he took his first few stiff-legged steps toward the stairway. Apparently sensing that he wasn’t a threat, Iskra followed him a few steps back, but as soon as she saw Lev and his boys in the kitchen, she started shaking and pressing her back against the nearest wall.
“It’s all right,” said Kostya, his voice soft. “These men are my family. They’re Kara’s family.” He pointed to Lev. “This is her uncle, and his sons are her cousins. They won’t hurt you.”
She bit her lower lip and nodded. Her eyes looked like those of a wild animal caught in a snare.
Kostya put his hand on Lev’s shoulder. “My brother-in-law and his son Michael will drive you to people who can take care of you. Lev is my oldest and best friend. You’ll be as safe with him as you would be with me. We’ll get you home as soon as we can.”
She nodded and put her arms across her chest. Kostya smiled at her and held her gaze. She dropped her eyes from his.
“Thank you.”
“Of course,” he said, keeping his hand on Lev’s shoulder. “If you’ll excuse us for a moment, we need to make arrangements.”
He took Michael and Lev to the living room and spoke in low, hushed tones.
“This young lady has been through more pain in her life than anyone deserves. Bury her deep enough that her body is undisturbed by animals.”
“Of course,” said Lev. Kostya looked at his nephew. Michael swallowed hard and nodded.
“Good boy,” said Kostya, squeezing his nephew’s shoulder. “Your brother and I will take care of the house.” Kostya walked back to the kitchen and smiled at Iskra. “They will take you to Chicago, which is four hours from here. Take all the time you need to get ready. I’ll make arrangements while Lev and Michael drive.”