“I didn’t think you’d come,” he says.
She cannot seem to talk. The words, like her breath, are trapped in her chest. She looks at his handsome lips and it is a mistake. In a flash, she is closing her eyes, leaning toward him, and still it is a surprise when he kisses her. She gasps a little, feels herself start to cry, and though her tears turn into tiny stars and embarrass her, there is nothing she can do to stop them from falling.
Now he will know that she is a silly peasant girl who has fallen in love over nothing and cried at her first kiss.
She starts to make an excuse—she is not even sure what it will be, but before she can speak, Sasha pulls her down into a crouch and says, “Be quiet,” in a voice so sharp she feels stung by it. “Look.”
A shiny black carriage, drawn by six black dragons, is moving slowly down the street. Silence falls all at once. People freeze in their tracks, retreat into shadows. It is the Black Knight. . . .
The carriage moves like a hunting animal, the dragons breathing fire. When it stops, Vera feels a chill move through her. “That is where I live,” she says.
Three hulking green trolls in black capes get out of the carriage and come together on the sidewalk, talking for a moment before they go to the front door. “What are they doing?” she whispers as they go inside the building. “What do they want?”
The minutes tick by slowly until the door opens again.
Vera sees it all in some kind of slow motion. The trolls have her father. He is not fighting, not arguing, not even talking.
Her mama stumbles down the steps behind them, sobbing, pleading. Windows in the building above her are slamming shut.
“Papa!” Vera cries out.
Across the street, her father looks up and sees her. It is as if he alone heard her cry out.
He shakes his head and holds out his hand as if to say, Stay there, and then he is shoved into the carriage and he is gone.
She elbows Sasha one last time and he lets her go. Without a backward glance, she runs across the street. “Mama, where have they taken him?”
Her mother looks up slowly. For a second, she seems not to recognize her own daughter. “You should be in bed, Vera.”
“The trolls. Where are they taking Papa?”
When her mother doesn’t answer, she hears Sasha’s voice behind her. “It’s the Black Knight, Vera. They do what they want.”
“I do not understand,” Vera cries. “You are a prince—”
“My family has no power anymore. The Black Knight has imprisoned my father and my uncles. You must know that. It is dangerous to be a royal in the Snow Kingdom these days. No one can help you,” he says. “I am sorry.”
She starts to cry, and this time her tears are not starlight; they are tiny black stones that hurt when they form.
“Veronika,” her mother says. “We need to get inside. Now.” She grabs Vera’s hand and pulls her away from Sasha, who just stands there watching her. “She is fifteen years old,” Mama says to him, putting an arm around Vera, holding her close as they climb the steps to the door.
When Vera looks back out to the street, her prince is gone.
From then on, Vera’s family is changed. No one smiles anymore, no one laughs. She and her mother and her sister try to pretend that it will get better, but none believes it.
The kingdom is still beautiful, still a white, walled city filled with bridges and spires and magical rivers, but Vera sees it differently now. She sees shadows where there had been light, fear where there had been love. Before, the sound of students laughing on a warm white night could make her cry with longing. Now she knows what is worth crying over.
Days melt into weeks and Vera begins to lose all hope that her father will return. She turns sixteen without a celebration.
“I hear they are looking for workers at the castle,” her mother says one day while they are eating supper. “In the library and in the bakery.”
“Yes,” Vera says.
“I know you wanted to go to university,” her mother says.
Already that dream is losing substance. It is something her father had dreamed for her, that one day she, too, would be a poet. Finally, she is the grown-up she’d longed to be, and she has no choices now. Not a peasant girl like her. She understands this at last.
Her future has been changed by this arrest; fixed. There will be no schooling for her, no handsome boys carrying her school-books or kissing her under streetlamps. No Sasha. “I do not want to smell like bread all day.”
She feels her mother’s nod. They are connected like that now, the three of them. When one moves, they all feel it. Ripples in a pond.
“I will go to the royal library tomorrow,” Vera says.
She is sixteen. How can she possibly understand the mistake she has just made? Who could have known that people she loved would die because of it?
Twelve
What do you mean, people will die? What’s her mistake?” Nina said when her mother fell silent. “We’ve never heard that part of the story before.”
“Yes, you have. It scared Meredith, so I sometimes skipped it.”
Nina got up and went to the bed, turning on the lamp. In the soft light, her mother looked like a ghost, unmoving, her eyes closed.
“I am tired. You will leave me now.”
Nina wanted to argue. She could sit in the dark and listen to her mother’s voice for hours. About that, her father had been right. The fairy tale connected them somehow. And her mother might be feeling it, too; Nina was certain Mom was elaborating, going deeper into the story than ever before. Did she, like Nina, want to keep it going? Had Dad asked that of her?
“Can I bring you anything before I go?” Nina asked.
“My knitting.”
Nina looked around, saw the bulging bag stuffed alongside the rocking chair. Retrieving it, she went back to the bed. In no time, Mom’s hands were moving over the coil of blue-green mohair yarn. Nina left the room, hearing the click click click of the needles as she closed the door.
She stopped by the bathroom and pushed the door open. The room was empty.
Alone, she went downstairs and put a log on the dwindling fire. She poured herself a glass of wine and sat down on the hearth.
“Wow,” she said. “Wow.”
It was a hell of a story, worth listening to, if for no other reason than to hear her mother speak with such passion and power. The woman who told that story was someone else entirely, not the cold, distant Anya Whitson of Nina’s youth.
Was that the secret her father wanted her to glimpse? That somewhere, buried beneath the silent exterior, lay a different woman? Was that her father’s gift? A glimpse—finally—at the woman with whom he had fallen in love?
Or was there more to it? The story was so much richer and more detailed than she remembered. Or maybe she hadn’t really listened before. The story had always been something she’d taken for granted; like a picture you saw so often you never wondered who it was that had taken it, or who that was standing in the background. But once you’d noticed the oddity, it threw everything else into question.
Meredith hadn’t intended to listen to her mother’s fairy tale, but as she sat in the ridiculously overstocked bathroom, going through drawers full of over-the-counter and prescription medications dating back to 1980, she heard The Voice.
That was how she’d always thought of it, even as a girl.
Without making a conscious decision, she finished packing the box, marked it BATHROOM, and dragged it into the hallway. There she heard the words from her childhood float through the open door.
Maybe she is thinking of boys. Of a boy. . . .
Meredith felt a shiver. She recognized her own longing; it was familiar to her, that feeling of wanting something from her mother. She had known it all of her life.
She knew she should leave the bathroom and walk down the hallway and out of the house, but she couldn’t do it. The lure of Mom’s voice, as sweet and honeyed as any fairy-tale witch’s, snared her as it always had, and before she really thought about it, she found herself crossing the hallway, standing at the partially open door, listening.
It wasn’t until she heard Nina’s sharp voice say, “What do you mean, people will die?” that the spell broke. Meredith backed away from the door quickly—she definitely did not want to be caught eavesdropping; Nina would take it as interest and pounce.
Hurrying down the stairs, she was home in no time.
The dogs greeted her with dizzying enthusiasm. She was so relieved to have been missed that when she let them inside, she dropped to her knees on the mudroom floor and hugged them both, letting their nuzzling and face-licking substitute for the sound of her husband’s voice.
“Good puppies,” she murmured, scratching the soft hair behind their ears. Getting tiredly to her feet, she went to the closet beside the washer and dryer and got the giant bag of dog food—
Jeff’s job
—and poured some into their silver bowls. After a quick check that they had plenty of fresh water, she went into the kitchen.
The room was empty, quiet, with no lingering scents. She stood there in the darkness, paralyzed by the thought of the night to come. No wonder she’d stayed for the story. Anything was better than facing her empty bed.
She called each of her daughters, left I-love-you messages, and then made herself a cup of tea. Grabbing a heavy blanket, she went outside to sit on the porch.
At least the quiet out here felt natural.
She could lose herself in the endless starlit sky, in the smell of rich black earth, in the sweet scent of new growth. In this month that was a pause between spring and summer, the first tiny apples were out on the trees. In no time, the orchards would be full of fruit and workmen and pickers. . . .
It was her dad’s favorite time of year, this moment when everything was possible and he could still hope for the best crop ever. She had tried to love Belye Nochi as her father had. She loved him, so she tried to love what he had loved, and what she’d ended up with was a facsimile of his life, lacking the passion he had brought to it.
She closed her eyes and leaned back. The wicker swing back bit into her neck, but she didn’t care. The rusty old chains on either side squeaked as she pushed off with her feet.
You’re like her.
That was what Jeff had said.
Wrapping the blanket more tightly around her, she finished her tea and went upstairs, letting the dogs come up the stairs behind her. In her room, she took a sleeping pill and crawled into bed, pulling the covers up past her chin. Curling into a fetal position, she tried to focus on the chuffing sound of the dogs’ breathing.
Finally, somewhere past midnight, she fell into a troubled, fitful sleep, until her alarm went off at 5:47.
Batting the off button, she tried to go back to sleep, but it was a wasted effort, so she got up, dressed in her running clothes, and ran for six miles. When she got home she was exhausted enough to climb back into bed, but she didn’t dare take that route.
Work was the key. Keeping busy.
She thought about going in to work, although on the beautiful sunny Sunday, someone was liable to see her car, and if Daisy found out that Meredith had come in on a Sunday, the inquisition would begin.