I don't want to hear your excuses or your rationale. We all got excuses for what it's worth, you're not special just because you think you have reasons.
Your God ain't gonna help you. You think God is stepping in for you when he lets kids get cancer? I don't believe in it one way or another, but you gotta admit - if he's out there, he is one sick motherfucker.
More like a devil if you ask me.
Really? I think we all got angels and devils inside us. It's time you met the total package.
Really? I think we all got angels and devils inside us. It's time you met the total package.
I want more.
ReplyDeleteMarina woke from a light hazy slumber in time to see Anatole seated on the edge of her bed, pulling on his left boot. “What,” she said, “not even a few dollars on the nightstand?”
ReplyDeleteHis laugh was subdued, the smile tentative. “How I have missed you, Marina.”
This is how you miss me? Take me to bed, then disappear? Granted, it was nice. She might even have called it making love, perhaps only because fifty wasn’t thirty and she wasn’t the nubile young thing he’d once known, but what they’d done had a different feel to it than before. Not a hello-and-see-you-later but a goodbye. It suddenly made her sad.
“If I didn’t wake up, you were just going to leave without a word?” She didn’t want to be that woman. She cursed the part of herself that had been socialized to accept the crumbs of male affection. She thought it had died long ago.
“No,” he said. “I was not.”
“Liar.”
He leaned toward her, brushed her hair back from her forehead, landed a soft kiss on her lips. He tasted of her minty toothpaste. Part of her felt robbed. All the time they were together, before the war, he’d never spent the night. She’d never gotten to wake up with him, or watch him sleep, or even share a morning-breath kiss that she would tease him about later. “I would never,” he said, and she felt the minty breath hot against her cheek, then her jawline, then her neck. His boots fell one after the other to the floor.
She unbuttoned his shirt. She hadn’t gotten to see the whole of his naked body before they’d tumbled to her mattress – they’d undressed quickly, too hurried to get to each other – but now she wanted to go slowly. Reacquaint herself with the man she’d once known. She found the old diagonal scar on his chest, ran her fingers along it.
“It’s still me,” he said. “With a few more trophies now.”
“Show me.”
She lay back. He let his shirt fall from his shoulders. He was nearly as fit as she remembered, a little softer in the belly, a bit of gray in his chest hair like in his beard, but it suited him. He took her fingers and ran them across a newer scar on his shoulder, about three inches long, like a caterpillar. “Donbas,” he said. He moved her hand down his chest to his abdomen, the skin warm and smooth and tempting, then toward the right, just above his pelvis. “Chernobyl.”
“You were there?” She’d heard the news about it. Stupid Russians risking nuclear meltdown by having a shootout just outside the reactor. By taking scientists hostage, and the military protecting them. Civilians and military, some with injuries, held at gunpoint, made to work. “The IT guy stitched me up,” he said. “Not too many could say that.”
It looked field-stitched, thick and uneven.
(continued)
“I have another on my leg,” he said, indicating which. He looked like he was about to say more, but didn’t.
DeleteShe looked back as if to indicate that she wanted to hear more.
He flopped to his side next to her. “One of the Russians guarding us didn’t like that I was going to be part of a prisoner exchange and gave me something to remember him by. I got a quick patch job but it opened up on my way to—”
He looked guilty. Her eyes challenged his.
“After I was released,” he said, “I went back to Kyiv. An old man in your neighborhood told me where you’d gone. I found the camp in Poland. But apparently I’d just missed you.”
Her eyes opened wide.
“Marina.” His voice was terrifyingly soft. His hand lit on her hip. “They said you had a child. Is that true?”
Her jaw tensed. She didn’t want to go to this place with him. Not yet. Maybe not ever. “You know what they say. The first casualty of war is the truth.” But then she froze. Certainly a man would know the differences in a woman’s body before bearing a child and afterward.
If he could tell he didn’t say. He sat up and buttoned his shirt. “I am truly very sorry that I have to go.”
“Because you’re needed elsewhere,” Marina sighed. “Like one of those comic book heroes.” Again, she was angered with herself for this reaction. You had no claim to him before, she told herself. And you still don’t.
He stopped. Turned to her. “One day soon my time will be my own,” he said. “But this is not that day.”
“When that time comes, don’t be surprised to find me gone.”
His brow raised. “Where are you going?”
“New York. I’m leaving next month.”
“You’d leave Ukraine. After everything we fought for.”
“There’s an opportunity for me, and it’s time.” The light on his face shifted in a way that made her quiver, made her want to reach for him despite her anger, which oddly made her want him that much more. “So when your time is your own, maybe you’ll think about coming to me? Or here’s a wild idea—leave it all behind and come with me now.”
The silence from him was excruciating. Then he said, “I’m going to be a grandfather soon. I can’t leave them.”
He pulled out his phone and showed her a picture of his pregnant daughter. She looked happy, and beautiful, and this made Marina sad. For what could have been. For her foolish idea that he’d come away with her. After all this time. Foolish, silly dreams! There’s a reason it’s called lovesickness. It makes you sick, do stupid empty-headed things.
“Obviously you were on your way out of here in a hurry,” she said. “Don’t let me hold you up any longer.”
“Marina.”
“No. It’s okay.”
“I never lied to you, Marina. You always knew…how things were.”
“Still, after all this time, with no love between you, she would not release you?”
He didn’t answer fast enough. Which made her think he didn’t want a divorce either. “Your child is a grown woman starting her own family,” she said. “I hope to god you won’t tell me that the two of you stayed together for her sake.”
“I would not insult you in that way,” he said.
Yet you insult me by letting me know there might be hope. Like hell you never lied to me. She flung herself out of bed, threw on her robe. “Let me make you some coffee for the road.”
Four in the morning found her restless, chest tight, aching to howl at the moon. As it had for the last few nights. At first she tried to ignore it, did her deep breathing exercises, thought it would pass. But it would not. Finally the grief decided for her. She made a thermos of coffee and got in her car and drove to the highest spot in town, a bluff over the river, and parked herself on a bench there, as if some compassionate soul would know that when other people came up here to howl at the moon, they would eventually want a place to sit.
ReplyDeleteAnd there she sat, breathing the predawn air, watching a garbage scow slide along the river and underneath the bridge, surprised at how much she could see in the dark, once her eyes adjusted. A light wind rustling the branches of nearby trees. Night creatures heading to their burrows after last call. She closed her eyes and focused on the feel of the cool sweet air on her face, the hum of the distant traffic, the early-morning industry clocking in for another day.
The dark began to lighten from dull gray to rosy glow to flaming scarlet. She was always a girl who loved a sunrise in all its permutations, but the treeline behind her house blocked most of the show. And in that moment adrenaline began pumping through her body, something like joy in her heart, a feeling she hadn’t experienced in a long time. She thought of her tripod, her digital camera, her lenses, at home gathering dust. The phone camera wouldn’t do it justice. But she knew she would be back. Tomorrow, the next day, and the next.