The Language of Sisters

  “You’ll be safe, Valerie,” Nick said. “I don’t miss.”

  I heard police cars speeding down the street, but they were quiet. No sirens, no lights. They crept in. Soon the house was surrounded by police officers, Chief Crighton, and SWAT.

  They burst into the home, exactly like on TV, back and front, yelling, swearing for everyone to get down, hands up, guns out. Nick stayed with us, flat on the ground, his gun pointed at the door to the cellar.

  Quickly, so quickly, the police stormed into the cellar, to Valerie, held underground, no walls, no floor, only mud, beaten up. “It felt like a tomb,” she told me later. “Like a tomb.”

  Five men were arrested. Two were passed out from drugs upstairs. They were all from the Barton family. They would spend years in jail. Kidnapping and assaulting a prosecutor does not go over well. Maybe their cellmate would be their kin, Tyler Barton. It could be a family thing.

  * * *

  Valerie, “shaken but not stirred,” as she told me later, was fine.

  As fine as one can be after being hit and kidnapped in the parking lot of her own parents’ restaurant, driven in the trunk of a car to the country, and shoved into a wet, dirty cellar in preparation for being attacked later.

  “They were waiting for two other members of the gang to arrive and then my fate was signed, sealed, and delivered,” she said to us later that night at my parents’ home. She had been to the hospital, had six stitches on her forehead. She did not want the kids to see her, so a neighbor was at her house, Kai by her side. The rest of the family was coming over. Her ordeal was already on the news.

  My parents were ashen, holding hands. I held Nick’s hand.

  “It is the language of sisters then,” my father said.

  “Again,” my mother said. “It is from the Sabonis family line, through our genes, through our widow’s peaks.”

  Then my poor mother burst into tears. My father followed her lead.

  * * *

  I had called Dmitry from the hospital to tell him what had happened to Valerie.

  “I’m coming,” he asked.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m home.”

  “What do you mean, you’re home?”

  “I’m at my house.”

  I was flummoxed. “What house?”

  “The one I’m renting.”

  “Wait. You mean ... you didn’t leave? You’re not traveling?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. My.”

  “I’m home now, Toni. I’m staying with you all for a while. You’re my home.”

  I couldn’t even speak.

  “You’re crying aren’t you, Toni?”

  I still couldn’t speak.

  “You’re making that hiccupping sound you do when you cry. I’ll be there in five minutes. See you, sister.”

  * * *

  The Kozlovsky family is deafening. Valerie, kidnapped, beaten? Oh, woe on all our lives. It was an emotional Kozlovsky night. My father said a long, long prayer of thanks for saving Valerie, then we all had a small glass of wine to calm our fried nerves.

  Okay. We all had two small glasses.

  And maybe a shot of Russian vodka.

  It had been a bad night!

  “To family. To the Kozlovskys.” We clinked glasses.

  “And may the Barton family be locked away in jail for years,” my mother said, in Russian. “And may the Kozlovskys live with love forever. We are good people.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Dmitry said.

  We clinked the ol’ shot glasses again. Bottoms up.

  * * *

  Dmitry and I sat on my deck in my chaise lounges for a long time the next day. I apologized repeatedly. He quickly told me, “Stop, Toni. It’s okay. I forgive you.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I do. You’re my sister. You kept a secret you were told to keep.” He ran a hand through his curls. “I wish you had told me, but I understand. I can’t be angry at you, I love you too much, and in every single other area of my life, you have been my best friend. I don’t want to lose my best friend.”

  Forgiveness is healing. Down to the deepest part of who I am I was relieved to have it from Dmitry. It was humbling, but I wouldn’t forgive myself for a long time. I should have told him. It would have helped him to unravel his past, a thread pulling out. I had done Dmitry wrong, and I’d known it for years.

  It had been ingrained: Never tell, Antonia, never tell.

  “I understand now why Mama and Papa kept my real identity from me,” Dmitry said. “They’re right. It’s been ...” He paused. “It’s taken a lot not to bust out of my own head and leave for Antarctica, knowing my own reality. I have the genetics of a psychopath. My biological father murdered my mother. Our papa killed him, killed Rurik, for killing his father and torturing him in jail. That’s my past. No wonder Mama and Papa wanted to keep it from me. I get it.”

  “You have the truth now.”

  “And it would probably be easier to swallow a mountain than grasp this truth.” We sat in our silence for a while. Dixie, the great blue heron I loved, took off, so strong and graceful. Mr. and Mrs. Quackenbusch climbed up on the deck and quacked at me. I finally saw Anonymous flapping overhead. It had been weeks. I was glad he was still alive.

  Dmitry lay back on my chaise longue. “If you make me some of your brownies with extra chocolate chips it will help things between us, though.”

  I made him the brownies with extra chocolate chips. It was the least I could do.

  * * *

  That night I disentangled myself from Nick’s arms, wrapped a blanket around myself, and sat on the top deck of my tugboat. I thought about the guilt that had traipsed through life with me, like rocks that were tied to a rope that was tied to my waist.

  I couldn’t live like this anymore. I had pickpocketed to help feed my destitute family in Moscow when I was a child and my father was in jail. I was caught and jailed. My mother was attacked. That was the fault of a broken system that did not provide enough food for their people and a Communist state that did not protect its people. In fact, it endangered them.

  I had kept a secret that my parents told me to keep. Dmitry’s true past, with his lunatic father and the murder of his mother, was heinous. My parents had a rational reason to keep it from him.

  And Marty? I had been a devoted, loving wife. Even when I started sleeping with Nick, it had been twenty-one emotionally ruined months since he died. There was nothing wrong with what I did. There is nothing wrong with what I’m doing now, and how I am in love with Nick.

  I told myself to say good-bye to all the rocks filled with guilt that were drowning me.

  I was done with the rocks.

  25

  Moscow, Russia

  When Ellie, Dmitry, Valerie, and I arrived in Moscow, we flew in.

  We were not being throttled by fear as we were when we escaped the last night we were here, our father beaten, Dmitry not speaking.

  We walked out of the airport and hailed a cab.

  We did not have to pick anyone’s pockets for money for food.

  We went to our hotel, elegant and safe, off a side street. There was heat, hot water.

  We did not have to stand in long lines for bread.

  We were all healthy. Our mother was not stricken with pneumonia, her lungs crowded with disease, our father upside-down in a prison.

  We walked the streets in warm clothes. We did not have holes in our coats or in our shoes. Moscow was not as bleak as I remembered it from my childhood. The streets were cleaner, brighter. There were more shops and stores, more color, more life, skyscrapers and well-tended parks, Old-World traditional and incredible modern architecture.

  We walked with our heads up, not down, trying to be invisible, always ready to hide around concrete buildings, grasping a stolen wallet. We were Americans. We were visitors. Valerie is a prosecuting attorney. I’m a reporter. Ellie owns a pillow business and Dmitry is a well-loved writer and blogger.

/>   It was here, in Red Square, near St. Basil’s Cathedral, that I found out I was talented at pickpocketing.

  I knew how to slip my fingers in, soft and smooth, like moving silk. I was lightning quick, a sleight of hand, a twist of the wrist. I was adept at disappearing, at hiding, at waiting, until it was safe to run, to escape.

  I was a whisper, drifting smoke, a breeze.

  I was a little girl, in the frigid cold of Moscow, under the looming shadow of the Soviet Union, my coat too small, my shoes too tight, my stomach an empty shell.

  I was desperate. We were desperate.

  Survival stealing, my sisters and I called it.

  Had we not stolen, we might not have survived.

  But we did. We survived.

  We left as Kozlovskys and Kozlovskayas and returned as Kozlovskys, but there was a world of difference between the two sets of people.

  My sisters and I and Dmitry held hands in the middle of Red Square. Sometimes it is hard to believe you have come so far.

  We had one more place to visit before we headed out of Moscow.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe we’re here,” Ellie said, staring up at our apartment building. It looked the same—drab, dull, old.

  “Doesn’t feel like home, does it?” I asked.

  My mouth dropped as three little girls opened the door and headed down the stairs.

  “Would you look at that,” Valerie whispered.

  The girls were poor. We could see ourselves in them. The sleeves of their coats were too short. One girl’s boots were obviously too big, and she tripped over them, her sister pulling her back up. The other girl had tape over the front of her tennis shoe.

  They held hands as they headed down the street. Their mother leaned out the window, five floors up, from our apartment, the fourth window over from the left, and watched them, her hair up in a red kerchief. She could not have been more than thirty, but she looked fifty, her face worn, her dress faded.

  “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said. “I ... I ...” I didn’t know what else to say.

  The mother’s body sagged.

  We entered the building when another person came out and held the door for us. We went up five floors. We didn’t trust the elevator. It still seemed ragged, but there were improvements. There were lights on the ceiling now. The ancient floor had been changed out to tile. But it was still depressing inside.

  I took out my wallet when we were in front of our old apartment. Ellie, Dmitry, and Valerie took out theirs. We put the rubles under the mat, half sticking out. I nodded at my siblings and they walked away and turned the corner. I rang the doorbell, scooted off. My skills at disappearing quickly were still sharp.

  I watched from around the corner, with my siblings, as the mother opened the door, looked around, her brow creasing in confusion, then down.

  We will never, ever forget the expression on her face when she saw that money, or the way she sank to her knees, grabbed it, shoved it into the top of her shirt. The relief, the gratefulness.

  That could have been our mother, right there. Exhausted. Poor. Watching her girls disappear around the corner and worried each second until they came home.

  * * *

  The next day, we took a drive out of the city, hours into the country, a prison lurking like an avenging gargoyle up in the hills.

  We stopped and got out of the car, holding our coats close to us, the wind chilly.

  “That’s it,” Dmitry said.

  We stared up at the place where our father and grandfather had been imprisoned and tortured for a long time, and where our grandfather had died.

  “May all the men who hurt innocent men die slow and suffocating deaths,” Valerie said. “May their wives and children leave them, may they be alone at the end, may they be paralyzed as they watch maggots invade their bodies.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Impressive.”

  “Nice one,” Dmitry said.

  “Vindictive,” Ellie said. “I like it.”

  * * *

  We drove through to the next village. We knew we were close to Dmitry’s house, based on the directions our father had given us.

  “Dmitry,” he said, in Russian, “this is where you spent the first few years of your life, three or four, we were never exactly sure how old you are. You will find your mother’s grave east of the house, next to a large rock. Rurik told me he walked into the rising sun. There is a cement slab there. You will find your father’s grave in the forest, about thirty yards in. Walk directly toward the woods from the kitchen window. On top of his grave I piled stones to keep the animals out. Perhaps I should not have added the rocks. Let the jackals get him. It may be there still, it may not.”

  The village was small, one of those places where everyone knew everyone, so we stuck out, four Americans who all spoke fluent Russian.

  The owner of one of only three local restaurants, about sixty-five years old and stocky, saw Dmitry, smiled, spread his arms out to give him a hug, then stopped. He seemed confused, stared hard, then said, “You look like a young man who lives here, Ruslan Fyodorova. The resemblance ...” He shook his head, “Come, sit down, sit down. Welcome.”

  We ordered chicken Kiev—to test it against our mother’s—cold kvass soup, and cake soaked in liquors, frosted with chocolate icing. We chatted with the owner, Kirill, his wife, Lubov, and three neighbors who were there for a beer, while our meal was prepared. We all sat at the same table.

  “Ah, you look like the Fyodorova brothers,” one of the neighbors said to Dmitry.

  “When you walked in, I almost said, ‘Hello, Ruslan,’” Lubov said. “So unusual. You look exactly like him. You are from America, then? Now, why have you returned to Russia? When people go, they usually do not return.”

  Dmitry told them he had lived in a house outside the village as a little boy until his adoptive father came and took him with us to America. He left out many details.

  The sudden quiet in that restaurant could only be comparable to a roar.

  Lubov was the first to recover. “You lived here as a little boy until your adoptive father came and took you to America?”

  “What,” Kirill said, still appearing stunned, “was your mother’s name?”

  “Her name was Nelly. My father’s name was Rurik Nikonov.”

  The silence was so electrified, I could almost hear the sizzle. No one moved. One person dropped his glass, and it shattered on the stone floor. Still no one moved.

  “You are Dmitry Nikonov,” Lubov said.

  “Yes. But my name is Dmitry Kozlovsky now.”

  “I cannot believe this,” Kirill whispered. “I cannot. Quick, quick, Stepan, go and get Lucya and Nestor and the boys.” Stepan, a man about thirty, eyes wide, sprinted out of the restaurant.

  “All these years,” Kirill said, his eyes overflowing with tears. “Lucya, Nestor, they will be so happy.”

  “What?” Dmitry said. “Who is Lucya? Who is Nestor?”

  Lubov was aghast. “You do not know?”

  “I know nothing,” Dmitry said. “Nothing.”

  We would soon know everything.

  * * *

  “Your mother was my younger sister,” Lucya Fyodorova said, hugging Dmitry one more time. “I loved Nelly with my whole heart.”

  Lucya—gold hair with a few white streaks, high cheekbones, classically beautiful—had taken one look at Dmitry in the restaurant and almost fainted. Nestor, her husband, held her up, his face shocked, her four sons fretting over her and shooting confused glances Dmitry’s way.

  Dmitry was an exact replica of Lucya and Nestor’s sons—Ruslan, Rodian, Andon, Artur. If you were to line him up with those four, you would not be able to tell which one was not a full sibling. All blond curls. Green eyes. Tall. Lanky. Same high cheekbones, same friendly smile.

  When everyone recovered, and we were all introduced to one another, Nestor invited us over to their home across the street and down the road, small but comfy, a fire soo
n burning, candles lit, a huge wood table that Nestor had made in the center of the room.

  Lucya did exactly what my mother did. She fed us, though we had just eaten, ordering her husband and sons around, who obediently did as told until a meal was on the table.

  “Did I used to call you Aunt Lu Lu?” Dmitry asked.

  “Yes!” she cried. “You did. You couldn’t say Lucya.”

  “And did I have a little white dog?”

  “Yes. You did. We called her Snow.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Lucya hesitated. “Your father killed her. Your mother told me. He was trying to scare her. Threw Snow against the wall.”

  “I remember that. I remember Snow not moving.”

  “I wanted to kill Rurik when I found out,” Nestor said.

  We all sat in that bleak, horrifying moment.

  “And did you ...”—he turned to his uncle Nestor—“did you carve me wooden ducks?”

  “Yes, my boy.” Nestor, burly, weathered face, gentled. “Yes, I did. I loved you. You played with those ducks all the time.”

  “I remember,” Dmitry said, his face lighting up. “Were there were red trucks, too—”

  “Ours!” his cousins Rodian and Ruslan said. “We played with them together.”

  “My nephew, my sister’s son,” Lucya said, still trembling, tearful. “So long gone. Oh, today is one of the best days of my life. I have never stopped believing that you would return. I felt you.” She pointed to her heart. “Here. I felt you. What happened, what do you remember? Where is Rurik, do you know?”

  Ah, now that took a lot of time to explain.

  * * *

  “Rurik was a criminal,” Nestor spat out.

  “The devil,” Lucya said. “He wanted my sister from the second he saw her. He pursued her, flirted with her. She had no idea the type of man he was. She was young and innocent, only nineteen when she married him, pressured by our parents and, Dmitry, pregnant with you. She had nowhere to turn when he started to beat her.”

  I could not help but wonder if Rurik had raped her. I’ll bet he did. Trapped her into marriage through rape and pregnancy.

  “Our parents never would have supported a divorce. They thought it was a sin. Our father drank heavily, and sometimes he took a hand to our mother. I suppose he didn’t think that was a sin.” Her mouth twisted, bitter. “They were unhelpful, unkind. Nestor and I begged Nelly to come live with us, we told her we would protect her, and you, but she didn’t come. She was afraid of Rurik, afraid of what he would do to her, or to you, Dmitry. He had threatened to take you from her. Rurik thought Nelly was having an affair. He told her he would kill her if she did.