Page 16 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“Elena.”
We look at each other. He has always been able to do this, to hold my gaze long enough that I tell him things I had not planned to tell him, but tonight he is the one looking away first, and that has never happened before, and the knot that formed in my stomach on the subway ride here pulls tighter.
“I’m fine,” he says, before I can ask again. “Just tired. It has been a long few weeks.”
I want to push. I don’t push, because he is already carrying whatever this is, and adding my worry to the weight of it will not help either of us.
I stay for an hour. We talk about small things. A neighbor whose son just had a baby. A television program he has been watching.
I’m pulling my coat back on in the hallway when Carla appears from the kitchen. She has the look she gets when she has been waiting for me to be about to leave. Carla has always has excellent timing for conversations I do not want to have.
“He had another appointment last week,” she says.
Straight to it, the way she always goes straight to it when there is something she wants me to feel the weight of. “The bills from the last round of tests are already coming in. The insurance is covering less than they said they would.”
I keep my coat half on. “How much?”
She names a number she has clearly been holding in her mouth all evening, waiting for the right moment to put it down properly. It lands properly. I feel it in my back teeth.
“I’m working on it,” I say.
“You’ve been working on it.” She folds her arms. “Aleksei called again this week. He is still willing to take on everything. All of it, Elena, gone, and your father would not have to worry for the rest of his life.”
“I’m not marrying Aleksei.”
“He was very good to you.”
“He wasn’t.” I say it quietly, and I say it once, and I hold her gaze when I say it, and she looks away first.
A beat of silence. Through the wall, I can hear the low sound of the television from my father’s room.
Carla looks back at me. “Then you need to find another way,” she says. “Because I am one person and I am doing everything I can, and it is not enough, and I cannot keep doing this alone.”
She goes back to the kitchen.
I stand in the hallway with my coat half on and the front door in front of me and the television murmuring through the wall, and I don’t move for a long moment.
She’s not wrong. That’s the part I can’t argue with, the part that follows me out the door and down the front steps and all the way to the subway. Carla is many things, most of them difficult, but she is one person in that house, and my father is getting worse,and the bills are real, and I am a twenty-three-year-old secretary whose salary does exactly enough and nothing more.
I sit on the subway with my bag in my lap and the dark window across from me throwing my own reflection back at myself, and I think about Aleksei’s controlled smile and my father’s tired eyes and Roman’s gaze across the desk this afternoon and the revised agenda I still have to send before seven and the number Carla put in my mouth that I cannot stop turning over.
I think about all of it, and I do not have a single answer for any of it.
7
ROMAN
I standat the kitchen counter in the gray morning light and drink my coffee black and look out at the city.
Sixty-two floors up, Manhattan spreads itself out in every direction, still half-dark at this hour, the skyline doing what it always does, sitting there being enormous, indifferent and not particularly impressed with anyone looking at it.
I have lived in this penthouse for nine years. I stopped being impressed by the view sometime in the third year and started just using it to think.
I have a lunch today that I’ve been managing my feelings about since Kostya put it in the calendar two weeks ago.
I finish my coffee, rinse the cup, and go get dressed.
Elena is at the curb when Viktor pulls up, which means she has been waiting rather than making me wait, which is what she always does. I have stopped remarking on it because it would mean acknowledging that I notice it.
