Page 16 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Does anybody come?"

He takes a long time with that one.

"Andrei stands outside," he says. "And Karina used to, before she stopped staying nights." A pause. "It's better if nobody comes in. It's worse if somebody comes in."

"Why's it worse?"

"Because then I have to be okay so they can go back to bed."

I sit on the floor of a strange room in a strange house and take that one directly in the chest.

Because I know it. I know it precisely, from the inside, at twelve years old in a house in Rockville with a mother who came apart in the next room every night for two years — the specific arithmetic of a kid who learns that the fastest way to end an adult's distress about your distress is to stop having any. You get very good at it. You get so good at it that fifteen years later somebody asks how you are and you answer before you've checked.

"Right," I say. "New rule. When I come in, I don't need you to be okay so I can leave. I'm not going anywhere until you're asleep, and if that's an hour, it's an hour, and I'll be extremely annoying the whole time."

He almost laughs. It's mostly a hiccup.

"That's a bad rule."

"It's a great rule. I made it up myself."

Two or three times a week, for four years, in a house with no mother in it and a father who won't come in.

He goes back down about twenty minutes later, all at once, the way kids do. I stay until his breathing evens out and then another five minutes on top, and then I get up and go to close the door.

And find Ilya is standing in the corridor outside.

Fully dressed. Coat still on, keys in his hand, a man who has come in from somewhere in the last few minutes. Standing about six feet from his son's door with the flat of one hand against the wall.

He looks at me and I look at him and neither of us says anything at all, I watch him assemble himself in real time — the hand comes off the wall, the shoulders reset, and by the time he speaks he's the man from the cabin again, entirely.

"Is he asleep?" He asks in a near whisper

"He's asleep." I tell him.

"Good." He turns to go.

And I don't know what makes me do it. Thirty-one hours in a shed, maybe. Or the shelf with the dust on it, or four years at two or three times a week, or the fact that I have watched this man take a room apart with his voice and he is standing in a hallway unable to walk through an open door.

"He wasn't asking for you," I say. “Why not?”

Ilya stops.

"When he was screaming. He wasn't asking for anyone. That's what it is — there's nobody there." I keep my voice level. "It takes about nine minutes. You put a light on, you get low, you make him count things. That's all of it. That's the entire technique."

The corridor is very quiet.

"You have known my son for one day," Ilya says. “How can you be so certain?”

"Yeah?" I hold the door frame. "And in that one day I've been in that room twice. Where were you?"

He looks at me for a long moment, and there's something working behind his face that I'd give a great deal to read, and then he says, perfectly evenly:

"Goodnight, Miss West."

He walks away down the corridor. I watch him go. And it isn't until I'm back in my own room with the connecting door open and the lamp off that I run the last three minutes again and find the piece that doesn't fit.

He came home at two in the morning.