“I will be back in a moment, Papa.”
He waved me off impatiently, clearly not enjoying this stranger’s invasion in his life. Downstairs, I found Maya pouring a cup of coffee.
“Late start for you today?”
I shook my head. “He doesn’t know who I am, Maya. And he’s asking for my mother.”
She gestured to the kitchen table, encouraging me to sit. “It might be time to have that talk, Alexei.”
I didn’t want to sit. I wanted to rant and rave about the injustice of it all. I had just lost Lauren. I couldn’t lose my father.
“I want to think the man I love is still in there. Trapped, trying to get out.”
Maya considered that. I’m sure she had heard every attempt to bargain with this horrific disease.
“Sometimes, that man is there, knocking on the door. But the knocks will become less frequent, fainter, until eventually you won’t hear anything at all.”
Was that what awaited us? Slipping away underwater, bobbing his head above occasionally, but eventually losing the strength to stay afloat?
“It isn’t fair.”
Maya nodded. “No, it’s not. This seems like the end of the man you know, but it doesn’t have to be. We tend to focus on the loss, especially because the past is so important to relationships—how we relate to people is often centered on the memories we have of them. With them. When those memories are fractured or vanish altogether, it seems like the relationship disappears with it. But think of it like this: you can still have a relationship with him now. It’s an adjustment, but you can focus on this new phase in the present.”
I shook my head, still in denial. “But that’s not my father.”
“It is. You’re feeling grief for the man you worshipped all these years. But he’s still here, Alexei. It’s just not the version of him you knew. He might not remember you, but you won’t forget everything he has meant to you. You’re the keeper of those memories now. Use that to build something new.”
Something new? But we were Sasha and Alexei, father and son. I was too old to make new friends, never mind relate to a stranger who looked like my father. He might not recognize me, but I wasn’t ready to say the same.
“But if he doesn’t remember who I am, why would he even want to know me?”
Right now, after my fight with Lauren, I didn’t even want to know me.
“Because you’re all he has, Alexei. He may not know that on an intellectual level, but he will in here.” She touched her chest. “I know it’s not fair. None of it is, but you have to play the hand you’ve been dealt. You can’t change the destination, but you can make the journey as fulfilling as possible.”
Jason pulled his ankle up to stretch his quad, then the other. We had just finished our lakeshore run and were cooling down outside the coffee shop.
“I heard about Lauren.” He had gone five miles without bringing her up.
“What did you hear?”
“That you lied your Russian ass off about being married. Naughty, naughty, Nazarov.”
“What was I supposed to do? She refuses to understand.”
“That’s what you’re going with? Cool, cool.”
I scowled at him. “You have never told a white lie to smooth things over?”
“Naz, this is a bit more than a white lie. And you have to know honesty is so important to her after what her dad put her through, and then Thad. You might have been well-intentioned, but the upshot is the same. You fucked up.”
He was right, but I had to make him understand. “I would have lost her, Jason.” My life right now was crumbling, and Lauren was the one solid thing I could hold onto.
Jason stared at me for a moment, then asked, “How’s Sasha?”
“He is speaking more Russian now than English.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
