Probably not, I assume, since Jonah has been part of the congregation for years. No. They met the old-fashioned way, and now every time I see them at church they are hand-in-hand, always smiling, leaning on each other.
Tears prickle in my eyes again. I want that.
Is this how my father met my mother? He is much older than her… The thought sends a chill down my spine, though there is a passing reassurance. They still live a Godly life, after all, and mother seems happy and well taken care of…
I look out over the crowds and think to myself just how little I know about the man I am about to marry. I remember his stern profile, his enormous height and thick-shouldered build. His deep, foreboding voice reverberates in my head. He made an impact on me, and was by far the most handsome that I saw in the room. Maybe the most handsome man I’d seen in my life. But what do his good looks hide?
Suddenly, my father’s firm hand appears on my shoulder. He leans down to whisper into my ear, “Remember who you represent today.”
I have the strange, foreign desire to cry, to scream at him. This is my wedding day! I don’t know very much about marriage or about much of anything, really, but I do know that brides are supposed to feel good on days like this! But instead, I want to crumple to the grassy earth and go to sleep, to do anything that will make the world spin away into oblivion.
However, my sense of familial duty overwhelms me, and I simply reply, “Yes, Daddy.”
His iron fist tightens on my shoulder, causing me to wince a little. I love my father, and I know he surely only wants what is best for me. But sometimes he does hurt me. I want nothing more than to please him and make him approve of me, to get through this day unscathed by him. I follow his line of sight to the roadside, where a black car has just pulled up. It is an extremely luxurious-looking vehicle, shining and reflective, with very dark windows. I wonder what could be hiding behind the tinted windows.
Then it hits me.
It must be my new husband’s car. I see a muscle clench in Daddy’s jaw and his eyes go narrow, into dark slits. “He is here,” my father says quietly.
“Oh,” I breathe, my heart rate quickening.
“You must not betray anything. Don’t let anyone see your fear, Cassandra. Remember that your actions reflect on the family, and if you screw this up, you will ruin us all,” he explains quickly in an undertone. “Act naturally.”
I want to shoot back, “What exactly qualifies as natural in this situation?” But I bite my tongue, as I have always done.
“Yes, Daddy,” I say dejectedly.
The overlapping, excited conversations among the crowds have dissipated and now they are only whispering and pointing at the big black car. I suddenly feel very dizzy and I realize that I haven’t had much to eat or drink for the past few days. My head starts to go fuzzy, but my father’s vice grip on my shoulder holds me up.
Then the driver side door of the car opens up and out steps the man I am to marry.
I don’t even get much of a chance to gawk, because my mother and father rush over to herd me into the chapel. “He cannot see you before the ceremony! It’s against tradition!” Mother hisses vehemently, poking me in the small of my back to hurry me along.
The inside of the chapel is adorned with simple white and dark green ribbons, with floral arrangements flanking the marital podium. The priest is already standing there waiting. I have known him since childhood. His name is Father Harrison and I spent much of my younger years wanting to marry him, actually. He is an older man, but to a young girl like me, he was the pinnacle of manly ideal. He has been the head of our congregation ever since I can remember, leading the services with a loud, powerful voice and elaborate gestures.
Now, of course, he is old and grey, but still charismatic. When his eyes land on me, he holds his arms open in a stance of welcome. “Little Cassandra Meadows! Hard to believe that it’s time for you to become a real woman of God!”
His warm smile reassures me, even as my father’s hand on my shoulder must be leaving a bruise. Daddy waves to him as he rushes me into a tiny side room to await the ceremony. My mother stands in the dark chamber with me, the both of us quietly listening to the crowds filing into the chapel pews. I peer through a crack in the door, the sliver of space allowing me a very limited view of the church interior. I see my fiancé walk briskly down the aisle, his back straight and head held tall. I can’t see any details, but just the sight of his hulking frame is enough to send a shiver down my spine. I feel so small and fragile in contrast to him.
Everyone is tittering excitedly, quietly, as he passes down the aisle. I blush, knowing that my fellow churchgoers are confused by the fact that nobody recognizes him. He is something very rare, indeed: a stranger in our midst. Surely, they must all be questioning how he managed to sneak his way in. I can just imagine the whispers going around, “Who is this strange man?” “Is he one of us?”
And the worst of all: “How in the world did they ever even meet?”
I want to vomit, right here in the side chamber of my own wedding chapel. My mother seems to pick up on my nerves, as she gently brushes the hair off of my shoulder and kisses the side of my head.
“Don’t be afraid, dear. I know it is daunting, but we all must take this vow. Trust in God to protect you,” she says, so softly I can barely hear her.
“I want to make you and Daddy proud, but I’m scared,” I reply, in an equally low voice.
“We are proud, Cassie. Just be strong.”
Outside in the church, the crowds are all cooing “aww” and I look through the crack to see my little brother, tiny, sweet Isaiah, walking down the aisle holding what looks like a ring pillow. His unruly brown hair is swept back using a copious amount of gel, and there is a half-frightened, half-petulant look on his cherubic face. My heart surges in my chest, and I have the sudden urge to burst out of the chamber, rush down the aisle, and scoop him up in my arms. Something deep in my soul tells me that I won’t be seeing him very often after today.
I miss him already.
Fighting back tears for the millionth time today, I straighten my shoulders and try to look radiantly happy as my mother opens the chamber door and pushes me out. My father is waiting nearby to take my arm and lead me down the aisle.
Everyone swivels in their pews, all eyes falling on me. I feel nauseous, gulping back a sob as Daddy smiles down at me and begins to walk me down the aisle to my fiancé, standing at the end of the walkway. The stranger is tall and imposing, towering over everyone, even Father Harrison.
The same dizziness that shook me before threatens to take me down now. My father senses my weakness and braces himself, subtly leaning into me as we approach the front of the church. My heart is galloping in my rib cage, beating so fast and so loudly that I wonder how nobody has noticed it yet. Finally, we are there. I’m standing at the marital podium next to my daddy and Father Harrison, looking up at…
My new husband.
He is just as scary as I remembered in my hazy memories of the other night. He is startlingly handsome. Frighteningly good-looking. He has hawk-like, watchful dark eyes, a long, straight nose, sensuous lips, and cropped black hair. His cheekbones are so high and sharp I think they could cut glass. And of course, even his fitted, immaculately-tailored black suit cannot hide his bulging muscles. I glance between Daddy, Father Harrison, and my fiancé — the latter is by far the biggest one.
I am so caught up in cataloguing the gorgeous, terrifying features of my future husband that I totally zone out during the ceremony! Father Harrison is droning on and on about the duties of a Godly woman to her husband, explaining what I already know from years of education: that my sole purpose in life is to serve my father… and then my husband.
“Do you, Cassandra Bethany Meadows, take Andrei Abramovich Petrov to be your lawfully wedded husband, to love and to serve as ordained by our formidable God?” Father Harrison asks of me, taking my hand and lifting it up.
I am shaken by the sudden realiza
tion that this is the first time I’ve heard his name. Then it hits me that I have to respond.
“Y-yes. I do,” I say quickly, my voice sounding a little thin.
“And do you, Andrei Abramovich Petrov, take Cassandra Bethany Meadows to be your lawfully wedded wife, to guide and to protect as ordained by our formidable God?”
Andrei, my new husband, looks at me deep in the eyes. I feel a sharp stab to my gut as though his gaze is physically piercing my body. I try not to flinch.
In a deep, velvety voice, he replies: “I do.”
5
Andrei
“You may now kiss the bride.”
I can practically feel her heart beating furiously through the palms of her hands as we hear those words, and she looks up at me with wide, anxious eyes. She puts on a strong show for these people, and I’m impressed by how well she’s kept herself together all this time.
Most women envision their wedding day to be the most magical moment of their lives, but I can only imagine the fear in her heart before my looming figure. She must feel alone and backed into a corner, her parents selling her off like a commodity, the rest of her cold family expecting her to perform like a doll today, and I just know she looks at me and sees me for the criminal I am.
But through it all, she looks angelic. Where she looked exposed and vulnerable up on the auction stage, she looks now like she should be in her element — a heavenly figure clothed in an immaculate dress.
After a brief pause, she offers a shy smile, fear still written in her eyes, and we lean into each other, our lips pressing together.
It’s a chaste kiss, but I feel her draw breath as she’s pressed up against my face, and her hands tighten in my grip as she feels the warmth of my mouth. Is this really her first kiss?
We break after only a moment, the poor girl too dazed by the whole ceremony and the rush of what’s happening to her to savor the moment. Even as I give her hand a squeeze, she blinks and looks confused, but not displeased as the audience begins to clap for us and the organ wedding music starts up.
“Brothers and sisters of the church, Mr. and Mrs. Petrov.”
A few moments later, we’re walking down the aisle towards the door, the rest of Cassie’s relatives smiling and bobbing their heads at us, many of them in poorly-fitted suits and reeking from an overuse of perfume. Many of their faces are stony even as they clap, as if this were a grave ritual rather than a cause for celebration. It’s all too familiar to me, though I can’t quite place why.
I feel like I’m guiding my shaky bride through the underworld as we pass through all these people she seems to know only tangentially. I see a lot of simple colors all around — the wedding was obviously thrown together at the last minute, but for that, I can’t blame anyone but Cassie’s parents.
We come out the doors of the chapel as man and wife, a Bratva assassin and his wife who’s never so much as spent time alone in a room with a man. As we’re ushered into the reception shortly after, that much and more becomes clear to me.
* * *
The reception hall is a wide room dotted with round tables, and after an arduously long prayer session in which everyone in the room was asked to link hands and bow their heads, the rest of the guests begin to eat while Cassie and I sit side by side at the table in the center of the room, where we’re victims of all the passing-by relatives.
A number of them stop by to try to make conversation with me, but while Cassie is seated quietly to my left, her parents have taken up posts to my right, fielding most of the prying relatives’ questions.
“So, are you a friend from Cassie’s home church?” an older man with patchy, white hair inquires. The term itself is foreign to me.
“No,” Arnold Meadows, Cassie’s father, interjects. “He and Cassie met over business, actually. Andrei’s father is an entrepreneur, you know, very well-traveled man, self-made. Never able to stay put anywhere, so the poor man couldn’t make it, but Andrei’s been handling the business on his behalf here in the States, and well,” Arnold pats me on the back as if I were a nephew or something, “he just fit right into the family!”
The old man seems satisfied, and he and Arnold chat a while as I peer around at the rest of the room, only half paying attention. The lies that roll off her father’s tongue are easy and practiced, like someone who has been lying his entire life. He very likely has, to get to the point where he’s willing to sell off his own child to a stranger at that auction.
I hear the family chattering about who knows who from where, what “denomination” this part of the family has defected to, who’s acted wrongly against whom in the family, and so on. It all sounds remarkably like the kinds of things the Bratva discusses at big, informal meetings, I realize. This whole ceremony has felt a lot like that, with just as many falsehoods being spun.
There was nothing like this back home in Siberia. As a boy growing up in an orphanage, I remember very little interaction with the Orthodox Church, and I rarely heard anything about it. It was simply outside my sphere of life, and as I grew into a man who had to do what he had to to get by, it was almost out of my mind entirely.
Being surrounded by a group of people whose entire life is clearly oriented around this institution is strange, but not incomprehensible. This is all clearly about relations, and as a man nearly bound to the Bratva, it isn’t too unfamiliar.
But this isn’t even like the Churches I know of here in the States. There’s an air of secrecy and deception thick in the air, not just from her father, but from the others as well. They all ask questions expecting a coded lie, and respond in kind.
I turn to my bride, and I find her picking at her food uncomfortably.
“Do you like it?” I ask, and she jumps a little, enraptured in her own world.
“Oh, yes, it’s...it’s good. I think one of my aunts made most of the food.”
An awkward pause lingers between us. I can only imagine the fear that’s binding her, but just as Oskar had promised, she seems intent on pleasing me and all the people around us. I clear my throat before swiftly changing the subject. “So, you know most of these people well, yes?”
Cassie shifts in her seat and looks around, pursing her lips. “Kind of.”
I wait for her to say more, but nothing else comes. She only looks at me for a moment as if she too were waiting for me to say more, but she averts her eyes and takes a drink after half a moment. She’s still shaken up. I can’t blame her, after everything she’s been through in the past few days.
Arnold’s voice catches my ear again, and I glance over at him, catching part of his conversation.
“Oh no doubt,” he’s saying to another man about his age, “a young girl her age can’t be going out to dances like that so late, that’s a ticket to trouble. I’ll bring it up at the next PTA meeting, and I’ll be praying for her in the meantime, brother.”
“You know, I said the same thing to her youth pastor, but these young people just can’t keep their hands off each other, even with chaperones,” the other man says, and I tune out of the conversation, figuring it’s going to go on like this for a while.
I realize I have a level of growing contempt for Cassie’s father. Arnold reminds me of Sergei in too many ways. He’s all smiles around other men who hold the same power as he, but when it comes to handling himself in private, I can smell the brute of a man he really is.
Every now and then, Cassie’s mother Jan tries to get a word in edgewise in the conversation, but Arnold is quick to interrupt her. After some time, I notice her resignation and how she keeps her eyes on her food.
I wonder how monstrously he must treat his wife and daughter at home. A man who would be willing to sell his daughter into debt must be twisted beyond comprehension to be able to sleep at night.
As the two men drone on in their conversation, I hear Arnold repeating a point Jan had made almost verbatim. Feeling exhausted just by being in the proximity, I speak up.
“Jan said that a moment ago.”
>
The two men stop at my sudden interjection, and Arnold raises an eyebrow. “Pardon?”
“What you just said about your church’s youth program providing women’s social groups — Jan brought that up a few minutes ago before you interrupted her.”
Arnold starts to go red, while the middle-aged man speaking to him clears his throat. “R-right, must have missed that. Anyhow, I’ll see you around, Arnie. Enjoy the food.”
He and Arnold exchange a nod, and before he turns back to his food, Arnold glares daggers at me while Jan pretends she hasn’t heard any part of the exchange, her cheeks bright. I can’t help but smile a little at the man’s embarrassment, and I dig back into my food with a little more vigor.
Cassie is paralyzed by the subtle exchange. I imagine that challenges to her father’s authority must not be common in the household.
I know already that Arnold won’t like me. Even if I wanted to be cozy with that govnosos, I’m an outsider here in every respect. I can feel it in the way everyone here regards me. This is a tight-knit community already, but as a Russian who knows nobody, this cold, cordial kindness is the best they’ll be willing to muster.
The rest of the dinner goes uneventfully, and after dinner, the time comes for me to drive my bride back to my home in Brighton Beach.
The family gives us both stiff goodbyes, and I exchange names with and receive business cards from a staggering amount of people I have no intention of seeing ever again. I can tell they hope the same, even as they keep up appearances.
There’s a certain finality to the goodbyes Cassie exchanges with her closer relatives, a few cousins who she might have known better than others. I’m reminded of what a foreigner I am to these people, and I realize that this ceremony is cutting Cassie off from these people altogether. She seems most upset about her brother, who’d fallen asleep earlier in the evening, but whom she went to kiss goodbye anyways, after asking my permission.
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