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“Not that much,” she replies unconvincingly. Shutting the door, she begins to walk around me. I block her path. “Galina, what are you doing?”
Maybe it’s because of the fight with Arsen, but my spine is stronger today. “Mom, you need to answer my questions about Yevgeniy.”
She purses her lips together until they’re bloodless from the pressure. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Yes, there is. I’m not stupid.” I gather myself, then face off with her with my head held high. Think about the risks you’ve taken. You’ve earned the right to answers. “I found the documents. I know you took money from Yevgeniy. For years!”
Her face falls. Then she too begins to crumple. Her body sways like a dry leaf in the wind; the wrong impact will shatter her. “You’re wrong. You imagined that. You’re misunderstanding the paperwork?—”
“Stop lying to me!” My voice breaks during my plea. Mom flinches like I’ve slapped her. I wait for her to deny it as she’s done so many times already.
Pinching the bridge of her nose, her chin begins to tremble. She’s tight as a bowstring, the way someone might ready themselves to take a punch to the stomach.
Finally, realizing that she can’t deny this one, she whispers, “I made a deal with Yevgeniy. Years ago.”
“You what?” I recoil in horror. I wait for her to say she’s joking, but of course she won’t. She was never the type. My mother hangs her head more, shrinking in on herself. “Mom … what do you mean? What sort of deal?”
“It was when your father and I first arrived in America. We needed a loan, but no bank would lend to us because we had no credit. So we looked around the community, asked our neighbors, and that’s when we were introduced to him.” She turns away from me, and suddenly I’m reminded of the way Mila turned away from me in the studio when she told me about her past.
I want to reach out and offer comfort, but I don’t. Instead, I give her the space to keep speaking, and she does.
“He offered us money, enough to get the studio up and running. Enough to cover our expenses, and then some.” She goes silent, and I know there’s more. Her voice is barely a whisper. “But we should’ve known. The interest he charged us … We couldn’t pay it back, no matter how hard we worked. And one day, he came to collect…” She covers her mouth as tears well up in her eyes. “And we couldn’t pay him back. He threatened to break your father’s legs. To take away the only way that we could ever make money.”
I fight down a swell of bile. My intuition knows whatever is coming will be awful.
“And then he told us that there were other ways to pay him …”
“Mom, what did you do?”
Her hands cover her entire face, shoulders shaking violently as she sobs. “What else could I do? What else could I offer but myself?”
Grabbing the wall, I slide down to the ground. My legs don’t work anymore. She was a prostitute for Yevgeniy? Just like Mila? The reality is too much for me. I’m shaking as much as she is now.
My mother looks down at me with pure pain shining in her damp eyes. “I’m so sorry, malyshka. I didn’t want you to find out like this.”
Shaking my head in a slow arc, I force myself to talk. “It’s okay … I’m not mad at you. You didn’t have a choice, Mom.”
I can’t let her feel shame for this. Yevgeniy is the one who should feel guilty, not her.
She’s looking at me as if I’m a puzzle. The furtive way she glances from side to side, then back to me, hands balled at her gut, makes me suspect something else is going on.
“You don’t understand.” She sounds like she’s out of breath. “There is more. More for me to be sorry about.”
“More?” I can’t hide the despair in my tone.
She cringes, but to her credit, she doesn’t shy away this time. My mother, who has kept her secrets all these years, is done holding them inside.
“You need to know who you really are.”
A slow, steady thud begins in my veins. “No.”
“Your father?—”
“No!”
“Is Yevgeniy Grachev.”
“I said no!” I yell, leaping to my feet, getting in her face. “No! You can’t tell me that! It can’t be true! I refuse to believe it! No!”
