A Door in the River

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  “So she didn’t want to kill him? They were friends? She did kill him!”

  “I want to show you the knife, Cathy. It came out of evidence, so it’s pretty awful. We can’t clean it yet. Do you think you can look at it?”

  Cathy was shaking her head no but looking anxiously at the bag. “Why?”

  The question was enough. She had to see it. Hazel removed a ziplock evidence bag from within and lay it on the table. The hunting knife they’d removed from Lee Travers’s chest was inside, still in its open position, and encrusted with dried blood from its tip to the end of the handle. “This is what killed that guard and also Terry Brennan and Lee Travers, who ran the whole thing. It’s a brand-new Buck knife. Your husband’s was the only store north of Mayfair and south of Sudbury to sell this brand of knife. This particular one is a Buck/Simonich Raven Legacy, a top-of-the-line knife that costs almost four hundred dollars. Someone at the store confirmed for me yesterday that the one they had in the case is missing. He hadn’t noticed it until I asked him. Henry gave Larysa this knife, Cathy. Because he wanted to help her escape.”

  “You said she was looking for something.”

  “We still don’t what it was.”

  Cathy picked up the clear plastic bag. It had a date and a code scrawled on a white patch in permanent black marker.

  “And you think he gave her this.”

  “I believe he did.”

  “And is this supposed to make me feel better?” She fell silent and dropped the gruesome object to the tabletop. “This isn’t proof my husband was a good man.”

  “No, you’re right,” Hazel said. “It isn’t. But if you can believe he was, then proof is nothing.”

  Epilogue

  Late August

  The man at the customs desk at Kiev Borispol stamped her passport and handed it back to her. Her visa had been for a full year. He asked her why she came back so soon. “I didn’t like it in Canada,” she said. “I got homesick.”

  She’d paid cash for the cheapest flight: a one-hopper from Toronto on Delta and Aerosvit. When she stepped out of the airport at noontime on a Friday at the end of August, it was hotter than she ever remembered the summer being. She hadn’t eaten real food in three months, her own food, and she stopped in the first decent place she could find and ordered smoked whitefish, potatoes, and a Heineken. Afterwards, she purchased a package of Yava Golds and had the first cigarette she’d smoked in ten years.

  She’d exchanged the rest of the Canadian money in the airport and received a total of almost ten thousand hryvnia. This was a lot more money in Ukraine than twelve hundred Canadian would have been in Canada. She could be independent for three months on that money, thinking through what her next move should be, planning how to execute it. She did not have to stay in Ukraine. She could opt never to be found by emigrating to Russia. In Moscow, she could change her name, her looks, her life. This was very appealing. It was desirable. But she could not leave Ukraine without knowing. For a week she lived in a cheap hotel and thought, and ate, and smoked, and slept.

  When she felt stronger at the end of that week, she paid 350 hryvnia for a ticket to Lviv and arrived in her hometown late one afternoon. She walked from the station to her and Matthieu’s flat on Doroschenka strasse and simply rang the bell. She did not expect him to answer. She did not expect to find him there. But if he was there, she would know from the instant she saw his face whether he had played a role in what had happened to her, and she would know what to do.

  She buzzed again and this time, she heard his voice. “Yes?”

  “Matthieu?” she said, feeling an unexpected thrill in her stomach. Maybe it had been a mere terrible dream, a life gone temporarily off course. It could not have been him! Just hearing him say the simple word “Yes” convinced her of this, and she said her own name. There was silence. Then he released the door and she walked in and up the stairs to their flat. He was waiting on the landing, looking perplexed and delighted all at once.

  “Laruschka? Oh my goodness, my goodness –” He opened his arms to her and stepped forward to grasp her tightly. Now she could not see his face, and she pushed back to look in his eyes.

  “Hello, Matthieu.”

  “I don’t understand. Did you … did you quit school? Come in, my goodness, my love, come in! Why did you not call?” He threw the door wide, but she saw he had a worried look on his face, and she could not interpret it. She entered, keeping her eyes open, and she went into the kitchen, where she dropped the satchel she had bought at the airport in Toronto and sat. The kitchen smelled good. Matthieu was making a stew on top of the stove in one of her crockpots. It was an innocent scene. He stood on the other side of the kitchen, in the doorway, studying her. “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t ask me why you haven’t heard from me in ten weeks?”

  He pulled his head back sharply on his neck. “What do you mean? We’ve been emailing every other day. Sometimes every day.”

  She looked at him with lowered eyes. “I have, have I?”

  “What is going on, Larysa?”

  “I did not quit school, Matthieu. Does this surprise you?”

  “It does. If you did not quit school, then I don’t know what you are doing in our kitchen. I was not expecting you back until the beginning of January!”

  “You were not expecting me back until the beginning of January,” she said with a sneer. “How were you expecting me to appear, when I returned at the beginning of January?”

  He came to the table and sat down, deeply confused, and took one of her hands in his. “What’s wrong, Laruschka? I’m very happy to see you, but you are angry, and I don’t understand. Tell me how I have upset you.”

  His eyes were filled with real concern. “When did I tell you I was coming home in January?”

  “My darling, you said if you could get an inexpensive flight home for Christmas, you would come home. You asked me to make you kutia. I said I would.”

  She erupted out of her chair. “When? When did I say this? When did we have this discussion?”

  Her outburst shocked him and he flung himself back in his chair. “Larysa! What is wrong! You’re frightening me – ”

  The knife block was standing on the counter, where it had always been, and she pulled a fish-boning knife from it and held it in front of her. “How much did you get paid, Matthieu? How much did they give you? To treat me like garbage and make me a whore?” Now his face changed, he trembled in his seat with terror; his hands flew to his mouth. He was caught or stunned, she couldn’t tell which and the tears that suddenly flooded his eyes seemed to give her the answer she sought, but could he fake such tears? He stood and she backed away, brandishing the knife, but he was weeping now, wildly, his mouth wide and wet.

  “What are you saying!” he wailed. “Laruschka, please tell me what has happened to you!”

  He came toward her, fearless of the knife, and his eyes glistened and flowed with feeling that had to be real. She put the knife down and let him close his arms around her. He said quietly in her ear, “No, no, please, what has happened to you?”

  It took the rest of the evening for her to tell him her story. When his face was not in his hands, he listened with a terrible, rapt expression. She had forgotten how intensely he paid attention to her. She felt like she was murdering him with her story, but he held up bravely under the onslaught, and emboldened, she told him everything. How she had been treated, her many resolutions to take her own life (and how his face, with authentic grief, had collapsed at this admission), and then, afterwards, what she did when she was free. What she felt she had to do. What she needed to do.

  He was moved by the awful choices she’d had to make, for her survival, and he absolved her – as much as a person who loves another person totally can absolve them of a mortal sin.

  Then he showed her what she had been to him in the nearly three months she’d been captive. It had not occurred to her that when they had taken her laptop and her phone from her t
hat they would have access to a rich supply of personal information they could use to cover their tracks. Email addresses of friends, colleagues, and family. Her password was saved in her browser, all they had to do was collect her email, pay any bills that came up (it was nothing compared to what she was bringing in for them), and reply to messages that clearly needed replies. He had almost sixty emails from her, and more than a third of them came with pictures of Toronto, supposedly pictures of school and her friends, a couple of images of herself taken by Tate or Bochko in which she had been told to smile and look happy or else. She’d understood these images were going to be used for the website, but now she saw their application had been much wider. It was astonishing to think of the difference between her life and that of her virtual doppelgänger.

  “Do you understand?” he asked her, holding her on the couch. “Don’t you know I would have done anything to help you if I’d known you were in trouble? My god, my god,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about it – ”

  “Don’t try,” she said. “I can’t be alone in my memories.”

  “I am here, Larysa,” he said, and he kissed her eyes.

  ______

  He had made the stew to last him a few days, but he served it with reverence to her that night, putting heaping spoonfuls of it onto her plate. He went out and got the best vodka he could find, and they ate and drank themselves into a stupour. They went into bed almost comatose with food, drink, and relief, and Matthieu fell asleep right away. He was never one to hold his vodka. He had not touched her at all, except to hold her and console her, and now she lay in his arms and felt his warm breath on her neck.

  Despite her full belly and her drunkenness, she could not sleep. Or perhaps because of it she remained painfully wakeful. She lay in the bed, alert, feeling the city of her childhood go through its nighttime motions, cars and the voices of people in the street, the slightly yeasty smell of the bread factory nearby, and the cry of the soccer fans in the stadium on Kleparivs’ka strasse. She hadn’t grown up here, but she knew the streets like she knew herself. That thought led to another one, as she lay on her side with Matthieu’s arm around her belly, looking at the streetlight coming through the window. The thought was that she could not be that person anymore, that self she’d known like the streets of Lviv. There was no actual life to return to. She was a victim of crime and a criminal herself. She would not be able to escape this truth, even if she told no other person than Matthieu about it.

  The real question now was could she trust herself? Her feelings had, in the past, led her astray. She saw the good in people. But no more. It was possible that Bochko’s agents were already aware of her presence here. It was possible that Bochko had alerted Matthieu and Matthieu had already made contact with the people who would come to deal with her. And then written sixty emails to himself.

  What did a capacity to deceive look like? It would mean a talent for hiding yourself, for expressing feelings you didn’t have. The truth was that if Matthieu’s heart had been broken by her revelations, or if he was a liar who had sold her into slavery, his reaction to her homecoming would have been the same. The performance would be as credible as if it were real. It would have been simple for Bochko to tell Matthieu that she had escaped. Matthieu could have been preparing for a while now to perform his shock and horror at learning the “truth.”

  And so, in the end, it was impossible to know the truth. As it had been with Henry Wiest, for that was his name, the name of her first victim. Choosing to see the good in people was an invitation to evil. If she was wrong about Matthieu, then a life of wedded bliss awaited her. If she was right, she’d be dead before the summer ended.

  She got out of the bed and paced nervously in the kitchen, lighting a cigarette and smoking it over the sink. Do I have a choice? she asked herself. Do I not owe it to those girls I suffered with to be truly free? To start over? To really survive?

  She went back into the bedroom and quietly opened the closet where all of her clothes still hung, as if in tribute to her. She slid a suitcase out from inside and laid it on the floor and silently piled her things into it, pausing to ensure that Matthieu did not awaken. She would not need much, just enough to get her through a few weeks of instability, enough to keep her looking tidy until she found a place to settle and a job. She would have to be careful: her name was not uncommon and if Matthieu or Bochko tried to track her down, she would be found under that name. There were going to be a hundred little details to attend to. Another haircut, another colour. New clothes. She packed her toiletries and went into the front room, where the lights from a billboard across the road played over the bookshelves and she selected a few novels, a number of collections of poetry, and the collected works of Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak, and wedged them into her suitcase.

  Matthieu kept sleeping. She took the suitcase into the kitchen and sat down to write a note. She began a number of times, tearing up her efforts and stuffing them into her jeans pocket, and on her fourth attempt, she was satisfied. She looked at the words she had written:

  My dearest Matthieu. I hope you will forgive me for doing this to you. I hope you can understand why it’s necessary that I do it. I feel I don’t have a choice but to protect myself from all danger, even, perhaps, imagined danger. I wish I could explain to you what it is like to lie in your arms and feel doubt about everything. I hope one day I will be able to love and trust again, but for the foreseeable future, I don’t think I can. The Larysa who loved you will never forgive herself for this. But that Larysa is gone, and so is her life, and Kitty must live. Kitty must live, no matter the cost.

  I am Kitty.

  This is Kitty.

  Goodbye.

  She folded the paper up tightly and pushed it down into one of her pockets and then she took the thin, gleaming fish knife out of its slot in the block and returned to the bedroom. He was lying on his back with his mouth slightly open, snoring quietly, his chest rising and falling. She placed the knife gently against the base of his throat and drew it across quickly, pressing down, and the flesh opened in a broad red grin. He didn’t even open his eyes. A mercy.

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