“Long enough.”
He crossed the room. Not to me–to the fireplace, where he crouched with the unhurried economy of someone who had done this many times and added two pieces of wood from the rack beside the hearth, coaxing the banked embers into something more substantial. The fire found the wood and the room brightened fractionally. He remained crouched for a moment, watching it catch, and then he stood and turned and looked at me.
“You weren’t asleep,” he said.
“No.”
“You haven’t been. Not properly.”
Not a question. He had noticed–of course he had noticed, this was Mikhail, who noticed the angle of a guest’s attention across a reception room and the minute compression of a jaw and the way breathing changed in proximity. He noticed everything.
“The storm woke you?” he inquired.
“I was already awake.”
He took the chair across from mine, angling it slightly toward the fire, and sat with his forearms on his knees.
Outside, the thunder moved through the sky in a long slow roll, the storm finding its rhythm. I looked at the fire.
The thing about storms–the thing the woman on the staircase landing had not explained, but I had figured out later–was that they were better with someone beside you. Not because they were objectively less dangerous but simply because the body calculated threat differently in company.
I said it before I had made a decision to say it, which was becoming a pattern in this library, in this low light.
“I used to count the seconds between the flash and the thunder.”
He looked at me.
“There was a woman,” I said. “In one of the foster homes. I was seven. She sat with me on the staircase landing during storms and explained how to calculate the distance.” I looked at the fire. “She was the third. There were eight total, not counting the emergency placements. I stopped counting those.” I paused. “She moved away that spring. I was placed with a different family by summer.”
Mikhail said nothing. I could feel him listening–the specific quality of his attention in the room with me, the same quality ithad in the hotel suite when I had told him about the debt. Like the information mattered. Like I mattered, in the particular non-generic way.
I had not talked about the foster homes to anyone in Las Vegas. Not Sofia–Sofia knew the broad strokes, the number, the general outline, but not the texture of it. Sofia offered fierce protective love to things she understood and I had not wanted the texture of it understood in quite that way, had not wanted to become something she needed to protect from her own pity. I had kept the texture to myself and worn the broad strokes lightly, a biographical fact rather than a formative one.
It was two in the morning and a thunderstorm was pressing against the windows and I was in a library that smelled of leather and old paper.
So I talked. The way water found the available channels–following the path that existed, moving because the pressure required it.
I told him about the fourth home with the thin walls and the couple who were kind in the careful, distant way of people who had taken on a responsibility they understood but could not quite feel, and about the fifth which was the one I didn’t talk about, the one I had filed behind the firmest door, and I found to my surprise that I mentioned it only peripherally and then moved past it, and he did not push, which was the correct thing–because the fifth was not tonight’s story, and he seemed to understand this without being told.
I told him about the sixth home and the woman who had three biological children who came first, as they should, and about learning to be grateful for the secondary position because secondary was better than some of the alternatives I hadaccumulated. About learning to be grateful in general as a survival strategy, not as a character trait–to find the specific positive in each placement.
I told him about graduating and calculating the options with the spreadsheet precision of a person who had been managing resource constraints their entire life, and about Las Vegas, which had been honest in its way–it had told me exactly what it was and what it required, and I had agreed to the exchange with clear eyes. The body was a resource like any other. It could be used carefully and to your own ends or it could be used without your consent, and showgirl work was the former, and the former was always preferable to the latter.
“I didn’t hate it,” I said. The fire had built now, the room warmer, the storm still pressing its rhythm against the glass. “I want to be accurate about that. There were parts of it I was genuinely good at and occasionally loved. The dancing–the actual movement, the stage, the thing that happened when the music was right and the body knew what to do before the mind did.” I paused. “I wasn’t there for the attention. I know some girls were, and that was their reason and it was fine. I was there because the math worked and because I was good at it. And also because it didn’t require me to have a history.”
“No history required,” Mikhail said quietly.
“Exactly.” I looked at him. “Las Vegas doesn’t ask where you came from. It’s one of the things I actually appreciated about it. You could be from nowhere and it didn’t read as a deficiency. Everyone here is from somewhere else, or nowhere, or a version of themselves they’ve stopped being. I wasn’t running from anything. I just–needed somewhere that would take me as I was, with what I had, and not make the absence of a background a problem.”
He was still watching me with that quality of attention that I had been receiving for long enough now. And the guilt moved through me in response, predictably, the stone becoming briefly and specifically heavier.
Lightning again, the room going white for half a second, and I counted automatically. One. Two. The thunder came. Two miles, moving across rather than directly above. The storm shifting.
“My parents died when I was four,” I said. It came out even, because I had had long enough with it that the evenness was genuine rather than managed. “Car accident. I don’t remember them except in the way that children who lose people young remember them–not as specific people but as the shape of an absence. The particular quality of something that should have been there.” I pressed my feet flat against the chair. “I used to try to construct them from photographs, when I had access to photographs, which wasn’t always. My mother had dark hair. My father had an interesting face.” A pause. “I don’t know if I look like either of them. There was no one left to ask.”
The fire moved.
I realized I was crying, which surprised me–not the emotional content, which I had been living in for long enough that the content was familiar, but the fact of it, the physical reality, the tears arriving without the usual warning. I pressed my fingers against my face and willed them to stop because I was twenty-two years old and had not cried about my parents since the age of nine when I had decided, with the pragmatic clarity of a child who needed to be functional, that it cost more than it returned.
