“How is your leg?” I asked.
Win smiled. “Still hurts like heck. How was the rest of your summer?”
I smiled, too. “Awful.” I shook my head to steel myself against him. “I heard you’re seeing Alison Wheeler.”
“Yes, Anya, I am,” Win replied after a pause. “Word moves quickly.”
And hearts even more so. “I once told you that you’d get over me faster than you thought, and I was right.”
“Anya …” he said.
I knew I sounded bitter, and what was the point of that? The truth was, any wrong he might be doing me now, I probably deserved. It was an accomplishment really—to have turned someone as devoted as Win so quickly.
I told him I was happy for him. I didn’t mean it, but I was trying to pretend like I was a grownup. (Didn’t grownups tell lies like that?) He looked as if he might have wanted to explain about Alison, but I didn’t really want to know. Usually, I wanted to know everything about everything, but in this case, I was fine being left in a forgiving patch of darkness. Win had made things easy for me, hadn’t he? Instead, I leaned in to hug him for what I imagined would be the last time. “Take care of yourself,” I said. “I probably won’t be seeing you around.”
“No,” he agreed. “Probably not.”
I guess I was sentimental back then. I had one bar of Balanchine Special Dark left and I gave it to him. I made him promise that he wouldn’t show his dad. He took the bar without a word or a wisecrack about it being poisoned. I was grateful for that. He just slipped the bar into his pocket and then he disappeared into the crowd. He did have a limp, and it occurred to me that I was glad to have left him with something other than that limp. He probably counted himself luckier than Gable Arsley.
Natty and I got on the bus with our parcels. “Why Alison Wheeler?” Natty asked after we’d been on the bus a couple of minutes. “He loves you.”
“I broke up with him, Natty.”
“Yes but—”
“And I got him shot.”
“But—”
“And maybe he’s tired of me. Of our family. Of how difficult it all is. Sometimes I get tired of me, too.”
“Not Win, no,” Natty said in a soft but resolute voice. “It doesn’t make sense.”
I sighed. Natty might have looked twenty-five, but her heart was still so very twelve (thirteen!) and this was comforting to me. “I can’t think about him anymore. I have to find a school to go to. I have to see Cousin Mickey. I have to call Yuji Ono. But from now on, we’re going to the market at Columbus Circle,” I said. “I don’t care if we do have to cross the park!” As we entered the apartment, the phone was ringing. I heard Imogen answer it. “Yes, I think Anya’s just come in. Hold on a moment.”
I went into the kitchen to unpack my bags, and Imogen held out the phone to me. “It’s Win,” Imogen said with a dopey grin on her face.
“See,” Natty said with an annoyingly knowing look in her eyes.
Imogen put her arm around Natty. “Come, dear one,” she whispered. “Let’s give your sister some privacy.”
I took a deep breath. As I crossed the kitchen to the telephone, it felt like the blood in my veins had begun to warm. I took the phone. “Win,” I said.
“Welcome back, Anya.” The voice was familiar, but it definitely wasn’t Win’s.
My hands turned to ice. “Who is this?”
“It’s your cousin,” he said after a pause. “It’s Jacks. Jakov Pirozhki.”
As if I knew another Jacks. “Why are you pretending to be Win?” I demanded.
“Because you wouldn’t talk to me otherwise. And we do need to talk,” Jacks said.
I told him we had nothing to talk about. “I’m hanging up now.”
“If you were going to hang up, you would have just done it.”
He was right, but I said nothing. My silence must have made him nervous because when he next spoke, his manner was more contrite. “Listen, Annie, listen. I don’t have much time. I only get one phone call a week, and they ain’t free, you know.”
“How is prison life, Cousin?”
“It’s unspeakable in here,” Jacks replied after a pause.
“I hope it’s Hell.”
“Please, Annie. Come see me at Rikers. I have things I want to tell you that I can’t say over the phone. You never know who’s listening.”
“Why would I ever do that? You poisoned one of my boyfriends and shot the other when you were trying to shoot my brother. I was expelled from school and sent to Liberty because of you.”
“Don’t be naïve,” he said. “Those things were in motion long before me. I don’t have the syvasi. Please. In your heart, you can’t honestly believe that I … Things are not what they appear … I’ve already said too much. You must come see me.” He lowered his voice. “I believe that you and your sister are in terrible danger.”
For a second, I felt fear in my heart, but then it passed. Who cared what Jacks said? He would have said or done anything to get what he wanted. Wasn’t this the exact technique he had used to manipulate Leo? Telling him that Natty and I were in danger as a way of controlling him? “It seems to me, Jacks, that the person who has put my family in the greatest danger has been you. And you, dear cousin, are in prison for the next twenty-five years. Personally, I’ve never felt safer in my entire life. Please don’t call here again,” I said. As I hung up the phone, I thought I might have heard him say something about my father, but I couldn’t make it out. He really would have said anything.
In the living room, Imogen and Natty waited for me. “What did Win say?” Natty asked with happy, dancing eyes.
I looked at Natty. I couldn’t protect her from this. “It wasn’t Win. It was Jacks.”
Imogen stood up from the couch. “Anya, I apologize. He did say he was Win, and I guess I don’t know Win’s voice well enough to tell the difference.”
I assured her that it wasn’t her fault.
Natty shook her head. “That was incredibly mean of him. What did he want anyway?”
I couldn’t exactly repeat what Jacks had said about the two of us being in terrible danger. I sat down next to Natty and put my arms around her. I would do anything to keep her safe and I wondered how I could even have allowed myself the indulgence of lamenting Win. Natty was the love of my life, not him. At that moment, the love of my life extricated herself from my embrace—was she getting too old for such things?—then he asked me a second time what our ne’er-do-well cousin had wanted.
Here, I told a pretty lie: “To welcome me home.”
COUNT MY BLESSINGS
SUNDAY MORNING, Natty and I went to church. The new priest was an incredibly boring speaker, but the liturgy was not without interest to me: it was about how we focus too much on the things we don’t have instead of the things we do. I was certainly guilty of such behavior. To pass the time, I decided to count my blessings:
1. I was out of Liberty.
2. Natty and Leo, as far as I knew, were safe.
3. Win had made it easy for me to keep my bargain with his father.
4. We had money and health.
5. We had Imogen Goodfellow, Simon Green, and Mr. Kipling …
By the time I had reached six, we were standing to receive the host.
On our way out of church, someone called my name. I turned: it was Mickey Balanchine and his wife, Sophia. “Hello, cousins!” he greeted Natty and me warmly. Mickey kissed us both on our cheeks.
“Since when do you go to this church?” I asked Mickey, having never seen him there before. Natty and I attended a Catholic church because our mother had, but everyone on my father’s side of the family went to an Eastern Orthodox church if they went at all.
“Since he married a Catholic,” Sophia Balanchine replied in that strange accent of hers. Though she spoke English very well, it was obviously not her native language. “Good morning, Anya. Nataliya. We met, but only briefly, at the occasion of my marriage. It is good to see you both looking so well.
” She, too, kissed us on our cheeks. “It’s hard to tell which of you is the older sister.”
Mickey pointed a finger at me. “You were supposed to come see me as soon as you got out.”
I told him that I’d only been home since Friday afternoon and had planned to visit him that week.
“Mickey, you must give the girl room,” Sophia said, and then she did just the opposite, hooking arms with Natty and me, and insisting that we join them for brunch. “You have not eaten,” she accused us, “and we live only blocks from here. We should cease making spectacles of ourselves on the front stoop of this cathedral.” She wasn’t Russian, but something about her reminded me of Nana. I took a moment to consider Sophia Balanchine. I remembered that I had thought her plain at the wedding but maybe that had been harsh. She had brown hair, brown eyes, a large, rather horsey nose. Indeed, everything about her was large—her hands, her lips, her eyes, her cheekbones—and she was several inches taller than her husband. (Mickey was so short I had always suspected him of wearing shoes with lifts.) Sophia Balanchine seemed powerful. I liked my cousin somewhat better knowing he was married to this woman.
Though Natty and I tried to demur, Sophia insisted we come to brunch and somehow we found ourselves at their town house on East Fifty-Seventh Street, not far from where Win’s family lived.
Sophia and Mickey occupied the bottom two floors of a three-story brownstone. The top floor was used by Mickey’s father, Yuri Balanchine, and his nurses. Any day now, they expected Yuri to die, Sophia Balanchine informed me. “It will be a mercy,” she said.
“It will be,” Natty agreed. I’m sure she was thinking of Nana.
Over lunch, we stuck to innocuous subjects. I found out the source of Sophia’s unusual accent—she had a German father and a Mexican mother—and Mickey and Sophia asked me about my plans for the following school year. I told them that I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. The third week of the semester was just about to start, and I feared that I wouldn’t be able to find a suitable school that would also find me suitable. Considering my criminal record, I mean.
Natty sighed. “I wish you could just go back to Trinity.”
On some level, I was glad not to be going back to Trinity. It was a chance to make a break from old routines, old people. That was what I told myself, at least.
“After what you have been through, it is good to make a change, I think,” Sophia said, echoing my own thoughts. “Though it is also difficult to have to go to a new school in your senior year.”
“It’s an insult,” Mickey said. “Those bastards had no cause to throw you out.”
He was wrong. The administration had had perfect cause: I had brought a gun to school.
The discussion then turned to Natty’s time at genius camp, a subject I had heard very little about myself. She had spent the summer working on a project to strip water from garbage before it left people’s houses. As she described her work, Natty sounded smart, impressive, genuinely happy, and I knew all at once that I had done the right thing in making sure she had made it to genius camp. I was proud that this was my sister and even proud of myself a little for having done right by her. My throat closed up. I stood and offered to help clear the table.
Sophia followed me into their kitchen. She told me where to set the dishes and then she touched my elbow. “You and I have a mutual friend,” she said.
I looked at her. “We do?”
“Yuji Ono, of course,” Sophia said. “Perhaps you did not know that he and I went to an international high school together in Belgium. Yuji is my oldest and dearest friend in the world.”
It made sense. They were both the same age, twenty-four, and in point of fact, they did have a similar manner of speaking. And that was why he had been at her wedding, not merely to keep tabs on my family. I wondered how much she knew about the role her oldest and dearest friend had played in Leo’s escape. The thought of it made me uncomfortable. “It was Yuji,” she continued, “who introduced me to my husband.”
I hadn’t known that.
“He told me to give you his regards when I saw you.”
Hadn’t our meeting at the church been accidental? “But you didn’t know you would see me today?” I said after a pause.
“I knew I should see you eventually,” she explained without missing a beat. “My husband had visited you at Liberty, had he not?”
Who was this Sophia Balanchine anyway? I tried to remember her maiden name. Bitter. Sophia Bitter. I wished Nana were still alive so that I could consult with her. She knew everything about everybody.
Sophia laughed. “Yuji thinks so well of you that, at times, I have been jealous. I have been dying to meet Anya the Great.”
I reminded her that we had, in fact, met.
“The wedding? That is not really meeting!” she protested.
“I want to know you, Anya.” She stared at me with her dark, dark eyes.
I asked her what she thought of me so far.
“The only impression I can have of you is physical, and physically, you are attractive enough but your feet are freakishly large,” Sophia said.
“And what do physical impressions really matter anyway?”
“You say that because you are pretty,” she replied. “I assure you that they matter very much.”
I decided that Sophia Balanchine was an odd woman.
“Were you and Yuji ever boyfriend and girlfriend?” I asked.
She laughed again. “Are you asking me if I am your rival, Anya? I am a married lady, don’t you know?”
“No, Yuji and I aren’t that way.” I could feel the blush spread across my face. “I just wondered. I’m sorry if it was rude,” I said.
She shook her head, but there was a smile on her face. “That is a very American question,” she said. I suspected I was being insulted. “I love Yuji very much. And all that interests him interests me as well. This is to say that I hope you and I will be very great friends.”
My sister and Sophia’s husband joined us in the kitchen. “My brilliant little cousin says she needs to get home to study,” Mickey informed us. “I wondered, Anya, if you’d like to say hello to Dad before you go.”
“You’ll come see me next week after you’ve got this school business sorted out,” Mickey said as we walked up the two flights of stairs to where my uncle Yuri was dying. “He had another stroke over the summer so he is difficult to understand,” Mickey continued. “He may not even be awake, and if he is, he may not recognize you. The doctors have him on so much medication.”
I was used to dealing with the dying and infirm.
The curtains were drawn, and the room smelled sweet and fetid, much like Nana’s had in the year before her death. Yuri’s eyes were open, though, and they seemed to light up upon seeing me. He held out one of his arms to me. “Ahhhhnuh.” He said my name with a tongue that was too thick. As I got closer to see him, I could see that half of his face was paralyzed and one of his hands was permanently flexed into a fist. He waved his good hand toward Mickey and the nurse who was in the room. “Goooo! Ahhhloh.”
Mickey translated this for me. “Dad says he wants to talk to you alone.”
I sat in the chair by Uncle Yuri’s bedside. “Ahhhhnuh.” His mouth was working furiously. “Ahhhhnuh, gooooooooo theeeeee ahkkkkkk.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle Yuri. I don’t know what you want.”
“Theeeee okkk.” My face was coated in spit, but I didn’t want to insult him by wiping it away. “Mahhhh pohhh boooooooi. Theeeeeee yahkkkkk. Yakkkk!”
I struggled to make sense of this. I shook my head. There was a slate by the bed. I set it in front of him. “Maybe you could write it?”
Yuri nodded. For several moments, he occupied himself with moving his finger around the slate but when I looked down, it was a maze of scribbles. “I’m sorry, Uncle. Maybe we could get Mickey. He understands you better than I can.”
Uncle Yuri shook his head vigorously. “Ahhhhnuh, ohffffffeeee ohhh noooo!” Uncle Yuri gra
bbed my hand and held it to his heart. He was perspiring and there were tears of frustration in his eyes. “Luuuuuuuuuuuffffffffffff.”
“Love?” I asked. I still had no idea what he was trying to say, but he nodded with relief that I had at least translated that one word. With my free hand, I grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and blotted his forehead with it.
“Luuuufff,” he repeated. “Thhhhhaaaaaaaaaahhhrrrr.”
I felt his hand weaken and his body relax. At first I worried he was dead, but he was only asleep. I set his hand on his chest and then I slipped out of the room. For the moment, I had escaped death once again.
On the two-mile walk home, I added more blessings to my list:
6. I was young enough to correct any mistakes I had made.
7. I was strong and could go wherever my legs could carry me.
8. Anything I wanted to say to anyone living, I could still say.
“You haven’t said a word since we left. What are you brooding about, Annie?” Natty asked.
We had just reached the southern edge of the park. (It was undeniable that the park was somewhat safer since Charles Delacroix had come to town with his policy of prosecuting even small crimes.) I turned to look at my sister. Though I hadn’t had a stroke like Uncle Yuri, it was still difficult for me to express what was in my heart. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, that she was the most important person in the world to me, that I was truly sorry for having lied to her about Liberty. Instead, I asked her what she wanted for dinner.
“Dinner already?” she asked. “We just ate brunch.”
Monday, while Natty and all other nondelinquents were at school, I went about the business of finding a new school for myself. Mr. Kipling had thought I should wait until after I was out of Liberty to formally begin the process. His theory had been that it was better for me to appear to have put my incarceration behind me.
According to Simon Green’s preliminary research, there were a dozen private schools comparable to Holy Trinity, and of that number, eight didn’t admit incoming seniors. That left a grand total of four schools that would even consider me. A further issue was that I was, in Simon Green’s words, “The infamous Anya Balanchine—sorry, Anya, but it’s true.” The media would likely find out about any school that admitted me, which would lead to bad publicity for the school. After making several inquiries, Simon Green had only come up with one real option, the Leary Alternative School, in the East Village, within walking distance of my cousin’s speakeasy. I had an interview scheduled with them that afternoon. Mr. Kipling would accompany me.