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Me?
What did I do?
“What’s wrong? What’s happened?” I reach for her hand and she lets me take it, but her grip is loose.
My Zenya, not holding me back?
As we stare at each other, I run through all the interactions I’ve had with my niece and the thoughts I’ve had about her recently. My fantasies have been depraved, but I haven’t acted on them or even mentioned them to anyone. I’ve never told anyone about wanting Zenya. When I left her yesterday, she was tired and sad, but she smiled at me.
The only thing I can think of that might have upset Zenya is that Troian knows I made a vague threat toward Chessa two days before she died. What does he think I did, crept around here in the middle of the night and shoved a dumpling down her throat?
I know better than to start volunteering information that might get me into even deeper shit, so I play dumb. “You’re going to have to help me out here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done.”
Zenya steps back with her head down, allowing me inside. “Dad’s in the living room. He wants to talk to you.”
I stare at my niece as I pass her. Not once in all her sixteen years has she not greeted me with a hug.
I make my way down the hall and turn into the living room. Troian’s sitting in an armchair in an empty room, his crutches leaning against the arm of the chair.
My older brother turns his head slowly to look at me. There’s grief on his face, but something else that wasn’t there when I said goodbye yesterday.
Burning fury.
And it’s directed at me.
“Is there anything you want to tell me, Kristian?”
I never tell him anything if I don’t have to, so I play for time. “You sounded just like Dad then.”
Explain yourself, Kristian. Why can’t you be more like your brother, Kristian?
Troian slams his fist on the side table next to him. “Don’t be smart with me. Answer the fucking question.”
“I would if you’d stop being so goddamn cryptic. What is it that I’m supposed to have done?”
Troian pulls out his phone, unlocks it, and holds it out. I step closer and see that he’s showing me a photo on his screen.
I realize I’m looking at a picture of myself in the strip club last night. I’m sitting on a red velvet sofa with my crew all around me. There’s a girl on my lap, a brunette wearing lots of makeup, a spangled G-string and nothing else. Across her bare tits is a word scrawled in red lipstick.CHESSA.
My expression in the photograph is nasty. Vindictive. Both my hands are around the stripper’s throat as I pretend to choke her.
Shit.
That.
I’d forgotten about that.
I was on my fifth or six bourbon on top of several glasses of champagne, and I’d just been ranting to Mikhail and some of the other boys about how much I hated my brother’s wife. Someone had found a lipstick between the sofa cushions and it was lying on the table. On a whim, I picked it up and wroteCHESSAacross the stripper’s tits and pretended to choke her to make the boys laugh. To make myself laugh.
Now that I think about it, I remember being momentarily dazzled at the time, but I didn’t connect the light with a camera flash. It was over in a second and then I forgot all about it. It was just one moment of a six-hour drinking session and was far from representative of the entire night.
But someone in the club took my fucking picture.
How do I play this? My brain is still sluggish with too much alcohol, but I know it didn’t fucking mean anything. I was blowing off steam after a long day of seeing my girl and my brother utterly miserable without being able to do anything about it. Zenya was the most upset I’ve seen her since she was ten years old, and it got to me. I never wanted to see her like that ever again, and in my mind it was all Chessa’s fault for not being able to chew a dumpling like a normal fucking person.
I’m tempted to make light of what I did or brush it off, but I can see from Troian’s face that he’s not going to be able to brush this off when his grief over Chessa’s death is so raw.
I put my hand over my heart and meet his gaze with my sincerest expression. “Mea culpa. That was a terrible thing that I did. I have no excuse.”
