Anastasia Forever (23 page)

I wasn't there when it happened. But I've replayed it in my head a thousand times. The night I saw Lily—human Lily. The night she didn't die but instead became a rusalka, an evil thing. Viktor had already identified her as the one who might be able to save Anastasia. I had no idea. He told me the trail had gone cold. Why would I have doubted him? By then I had believed him for almost fifty years.

The truth? I was tired of this little game we were playing. Fifty years in, that's how I saw it. Later, I regained my vigilance. I found Anne. I became the man I wanted to become. But then—it seemed to me there were better things to do.

It was another woman I saw first—the one I later learned was Nadia, Lily's friend. Nadia who would take the identity of Amelia Benson and continue to protect Lily's baby. Baby Laura, Anne's mother. Fate is a funny thing. Another minute and I would have seen them both together. All our destinies, I think, would have vastly changed. But I didn't. I stopped and lit Nadia's cigarette as she fumbled for a match.

I thought it strange that Viktor kept walking; usually he was a man of good manners, especially in public. We had both kept some of the old ways—a courtliness that came with having lived in different times. But that night, he didn't stop. Years later, I would understand why, but not then. All I knew was that I'd given a small favor to a woman I'd never seen before and never planned on seeing again.

I was almost to my hotel when I saw the other woman. There was something so sad about her gray eyes; this is why I was able to recognize them a few weeks ago. Why I was able to connect these events that had happened so many years apart. To understand even more painfully what I had already come to know—that I had been betrayed by many people, but most of all by Viktor, a man I had trusted with my life. The woman with the gray eyes had bumped into me as I passed by a small bookshop, stared at my face, then run.

It should have bothered me more. I should have followed her. But I didn't. Of the many things I regret in my very long life, this is one. Now I understand that I had a chance to save her. I, Ethan, who knew that magic existed, that there is a world beyond what most people see. That seventeen-year-old grand duchesses can be swept away by the hands of a witch, and women can meet hideous fates in the water.

This is the trick about destiny. If we are not watching, it can pass us by. We can miss the signs and the opportunities and the moments. Only if you live as long as I have, can you truly understand the tragedy of this.

That night I saw Lily—daughter of Natasha, granddaughter of Irina, great-granddaughter of Marina, Tsar Nicholas's lover, and Viktor's mother—she leaped into the Chicago River rather than be traced back to the infant daughter she'd hoped to save by giving up for adoption. Viktor had already killed her husband, Misha, in his attempt to do away with her.

Would he have pursued this had he known then that Lily was his own blood, that the girl who could rescue Anastasia was not just connected to the Brotherhood but to him? I do not know. I only know that Lily also ran because she saw me. And I was too much of a
zalupa
then to question why.

When she was drowning, when it was too late to turn back, when she opened her mouth to the water and let it rush into her lungs, they came for her. Rusalki, we call them in Russia. Mermaids. Lethal. Seductive. Malevolent. Cursed. Each unable to find rest or peace or a true death until the blood of the person who killed her—or betrayed her or caused her death—is shed. This is the way the folk tale goes. This is the destiny that found Lily.

Here is what I believe as Anne and I race along the river, desperate to finally bring this thing to an end: Lily's fate is not just on Viktor's head. It is also on mine. Everything that has come from that moment until now, I take responsibility for it all.

“Over there!” I shout now as I see Anne's mother leaning toward the water. “Hurry.”

Here's the stuff most Chicagoans know about the Chicago River. You can go on a Wendella boat ride. On St. Patrick's Day, they dye the river green. Yellow water taxis zip back and forth, taking people all the way from Michigan Avenue down to Chinatown and some other stops in between. In the winter, parts of the river sometimes freeze if it gets really cold. Some of the bridges that go over the river have to open and lift up when sailboats are passing.

Here's what almost no one knows: in 1961, a woman named Lily tried to drown herself in the river and instead was turned into a rusalka. In part, she did it because she was afraid. In part, she did it to save her daughter, Laura, who happens to be my mom. Lily has not been able to rest since. She can't die, and she can't go free until the person responsible for what happened to her has his blood shed.

It's a creepy story and a creepy curse, and if Lily wasn't my birth grandmother, and the guy who tried to kill her wasn't my ancestor Viktor, who makes me connected to the Russian Romanovs, I probably wouldn't know it. But I do. And my mom hasn't been the same since she lost her son, my brother, David, to cancer. Anyone standing by the river right now needs to understand this. Otherwise I'm just a girl running to save her crazy family from even more unhappiness. It is not looking like I'm going to succeed.

“Mom!” I call to her. “Mom.”

My mother sways on the edge of the sidewalk, the river below her. She's wearing a gauzy flowered sundress—cream-colored with tiny little sunflowers—and gladiator sandals. Her hair is hanging loose, blowing behind her in the wind. One of those yellow water taxis chugs not far out in the water.

When she hears my voice, Mom looks up. Her gaze meets mine, and she smiles, but then she turns her attention back at the river.

“Laura,” Ethan says. “Look at me. Look at Anne.”

We're almost to her now. As if with one mind, he and I slow to a brisk walk. Don't want to frighten her. Don't want her to move.

I hear their crooning sound before I see them. Like in the Jewel Box when they tried to lure Ben. At least a dozen rusalki bob in the river below us. One of them blows a kiss to the driver of the water taxi. And in the center of the pack is Lily, with her tattered lilac dress, her wild gray eyes, her dark hair snaking this way and that in the water and wind.

“I can be with him if I go to her,” Mom says. She looks up again. Her eyes—brown like mine—are blank looking. Like with Ben, I think. The rusalki are luring her. Lily is luring her.

“No,” Ethan says. “You won't be with David. It's a lie. That's what they do. They lie. She's lying, Laura.”

Mom tilts her head. “She wouldn't do that. Mothers don't lie to daughters.”

Of course they do, I want to scream. Especially if they're evil Russian mermaids. And even if they're not. We lie for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes just because the truth is too awful. It doesn't make it right. It just makes us human.

“Mom,” I say as calmly as I can, given the circumstances, “Lily isn't ever going to tell you the truth. She can't. It's part of her curse. I know it sucks, and I know you're sad, and I know you want things to be different. But jumping into the river isn't going to do anything but make it worse. Is that what you want for me and Daddy? To be sad enough that we want to die?”

Mom hesitates, then teeters closer to the edge. My heart catches in my throat.
This isn't her
, I think.
She's not herself.
No matter what, my mom wouldn't do this to me.

Slowly, I edge closer, ready to grab her. Ethan maneuvers himself to the other side.

“Laura,” Lily calls up from the water. “It's not so bad once you let go. You'll be with me then. We'll see my grandson. I promise. The pain will stop.”

“Liar.” I spit the word between gritted teeth. “You horrible liar. I hate you. Oh God, how I hate you.” I would kill her right now if I could. With magic. With my bare hands. But she's not human. Which I guess is the point.

I take another step, almost to her. My body is shaking—with fear, with exhaustion, and with the power that's building inside me, readying itself to do whatever I ask.

Protection spell. Yes. I need to do that. But I can't even…it comes anyway, flowing easily. My mind builds a cocoon of safety around my mother, like tucking an invisible comforter around her as she lies in bed.

Then terror grips me once again. The spell protects her from Lily. But it does nothing to stop my mother's free will. No magic will stop her from jumping. Only me and Ethan.

On the other side of Mom, I see Ethan shiver. Black tendrils of power flow around him like before. He shudders. Closes his eyes, and the threads of magic fade.

“You okay?” I can see that he's not.

“For now.”

In the water, Lily laughs.

Behind me, so does someone else.

Viktor. He holds Tess next to him, his arm draped casually over her shoulders like they're the best of friends. There's a purple bruise under her eye. But she's alive.
Tess. Oh, Tess
.

“Anne,” she says, and Viktor's hand moves to her throat. She winces. “You need to—” Tess rasps. Viktor's grip tightens.

“I had no idea,” Viktor says, “that we were having a party. I thought Ethan, here, would be quite tapped out from his little escapade. Ah, Brother Ethan, I do believe I have underestimated your stamina. How fortunate.”

My mother looks from Lily to me to Viktor and Tess to Ethan. Her pretty sundress whips around her thin legs in the wind. The rest of us look like we've been through twelve tornadoes, but my mom—poised on the edge of no return—looks like she's stepped out of a fashion magazine. If I wasn't panicked to the point of nausea, I might find this funny.

“Laura,” Lily calls from the water. “David is waiting for you. You need to come now.”

It is at that moment, as everything prepares to explode again in one way or the other, that Tess does something very Tess-like. She stomps with all her might on Viktor's foot. Then she knees him in the groin. It isn't magic. But it gets her point across.

“Do it!” she screams at me when he loses his grip on her throat.

Does she not see that my mother is about to leap into a scrum of rusalki?

Ethan lunges for my mother.

I pull the matryoshka doll out of my pocket.

I guess what happens after that is just my mother being a mom. Okay, a very depressed, hypnotized-by-her-evil-mermaid-mother mom, but a mom.

A mom who sees that her daughter's best friend since preschool is being hurt by some guy she doesn't really know. I assume she sort of recognizes him, but it isn't enough.

My mother ducks from Ethan's reach and tackles Viktor like she's trying out for the NFL. He loses his hold on Tess and she scrambles free.

“Mom!” I scream, and keep on screaming as Viktor and my mother twist and turn, like they're dancing at the edge of the water. And then in a blink my mother falls, flailing, into the river. Into the circle of rusalki. Did he push her? Did she jump? Did my protection spell fail?

Ethan never even hesitates. He dives after her.

After that, I don't think. I just do what I have to do.

My hand uncurls. In my palm sits the tiny, fragile wooden doll that somehow one day in another time and place will end up being Anastasia's. I place it on the sidewalk. Raise my foot and smash it to pieces.

Like that day last fall when we returned from the forest and Ethan and Viktor got their mortality back, the world fills with light. Viktor's eyes widen in shock.
Didn't think I was going to do that now, did you? Yeah, me—just a stupid girl
.

If I make it through this and anyone ever asks me what I think about the human soul, here's what I'll say: people choose how they act—good, bad, homicidal maniac on a power trip. But the soul—it's all light and energy. I can't explain it beyond that. I just know that the light finds Viktor. It pours into every inch of him. Makes him stumble and sink to his knees accepting that energy. Life force? Soul? I'm not the person to ask. I just know what I see. The light pours out of the broken matryoshka doll and into Viktor. Who, let me add, does not look pleased.

“Gotcha!” Tess says. She's doing a happy dance over by a tree.

But I don't have time to celebrate. My mother is still in the water.

My hands slice through the water just as everything inside me begins to pull and twist and burn. For a second, I think I've hit my head because even as my body goes underwater, the world seems full of light.

Only as I surface and get my bearings do I understand. Anne has done it. Viktor's soul really was in Anastasia's matryoshka doll. Now it's back inside him and he's vulnerable. We can stop him. He can die.

Laura flounders in the river a few feet from me, Lily treading water at her side. The rusalki have made a circle around them. If we're lucky—if this has really worked—Viktor is no longer invincible. But his magic still writhes inside me, stronger than anything I've ever felt. Viktor's power has used me. Now I use it.

Magic streams from my fingers through the water. The mermaids shriek and howl as the air around them grows warmer, then warmer still. I kick toward them, flick a hand. Heat. Smoke. Flame.

I dive beneath them as they scream. As their hair burns but they find themselves unable to sink into the cooling water. Inside the circle, I grab Laura. She struggles. Lily has her mind still.

“Look below the surface,” she tells Anne's mother. “You'll see your boy. Your son. You can't leave him. You can't leave me.”

She reaches out her skeletal arms, covered in dark lines of seaweed. The light that's everywhere, the light that means that Anne has succeeded—we've succeeded—illuminates everything—Lily, me, Laura, and the singed, screaming rusalka circle.

Lily lifts her gaze to the sidewalk above us. To Viktor, bent over, arms resting on his thigh, one knee on the ground. Lily gasps, stays very still in the water as Viktor stands.

I start to swim, pulling Anne's mother with me. Toward the closest safety I can find—the yellow water taxi chugging swiftly toward us. Someone pulls her up. They reach for me next. But something drags me back and under. Begins to claw at my face. Not Lily. But another rusalka. The rusalka who used to be Nadia. Nadia—Lily's friend. Nadia, whose cigarette I lit all those years ago.

Sharp talons of nails rake my forehead, dig into my eye. Blood spurts, blurs my vision. Pain. Hot, searing.
My
eye
.

The magic rises again. I send her under, as deep as she can go. If I could kill her, I would. Maybe I do.

Only one eye is functioning as I swim back toward Anne. My only thought is to reach her. I keep swimming, my own blood slick on my face.