Winter Garden (26 page)

The waitress returned and cleared their plates. Instead of placing the bill on the wooden table, she set a piece of birthday cake in front of Mom. Its lit candle danced above the buttercream frosting.

“Happy birthday, Mom,” Meredith and Nina said together.

Mom stared down at the candle.

“We always wanted to have a birthday party for you,” Meredith said. She reached out and put her hand on Mom’s.

“I have made so many mistakes,” Mom said softly.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Meredith said.

“No. I . . . I didn’t mean to be that way . . . I wanted to tell you . . . but I couldn’t even look at you, I was so ashamed.”

“You’re looking at us now,” Nina said, although it wasn’t strictly true. Mom was actually staring at the candle. “You want to tell us your story. You always wanted to. That’s why you started the fairy tale.”

Mom shook her head.

“You’re Vera,” Nina said quietly.

“No,” Mom said, “that girl is not who I am.”

“But she’s who you were,” Nina said, hating herself for saying it, but unable to stop.

“You are a dog with a bone, Nina.” She sighed. “Yes. Long ago I was Veronika Petronova Marchenko.”

“Why—”

“Enough,” Mom said sharply. “This is my first birthday party with my daughters. There will be time later for the rest of it.”

At dinner, they talked about ordinary things. They drank wine and toasted again to Mom’s eighty-first birthday. After a delicious meal, they wandered through the Vegas-like glitter of the giant ship and found their way to a theater, where a man in an orange sequined jumpsuit was performing magic. He made his barely clad assistant disappear, gave her paper roses that turned into white doves and flew away, and cut her in several pieces and then put her back together.

Mom clapped enthusiastically at each new trick, smiled like a little kid.

Meredith could hardly take her eyes off her mother. She looked bright and almost happy; for the first time, Meredith understood how cold her mother’s beauty had always been before. Her beauty was different tonight: softer, warmer.

When the show was over, they walked back to their staterooms. In the crowded hallways, amid all the chatter of their fellow passengers and the ringing of the casino bells, they were strangely silent. Something had changed today, with that little burning candle on a piece of chocolate cake, but Meredith didn’t know quite what had changed or how they would be reshaped by it. All she knew was that she had lost the ability to stay separate now. For more than twenty-five years, she’d kept up her side of the wall, too. She had refused to really see or need her mother, and in that distance, she’d found strength. At least a facsimile of strength. Now she had almost none of that left. Truthfully, she was glad it was too late to hear more of the story tonight.

At their door, Nina stopped. “I had a great day, Mom. Happy birthday.” She moved forward awkwardly, pulled Mom into an embrace that was over before Mom could lift her own arms.

Meredith wanted to follow suit, but when she looked in her mother’s blue eyes, she felt too vulnerable to make a move. “I . . . uh . . . I know you must be tired,” Meredith said, smiling nervously. “We should go to bed and get up early. Tomorrow we’ll be cruising Glacier Bay. It’s supposed to be spectacular.”

Mom said, “Thank you for my birthday,” so softly they almost couldn’t hear, and then she opened the door and went into her room.

Meredith unlocked their door and went inside.

“Dibs on the bathtub,” Nina said, grinning.

Meredith barely noticed. She grabbed a blanket from her bed and went out onto the small veranda. From here, even in the darkness, she could make out the coastline. Here and there lights shone, marking peoples’ lives.

She leaned back against the sliding door and wondered at the vistas she wasn’t seeing. It was all out there—the mystery, the beauty; beyond her ability to see now, but there just the same. It was simply a matter of timing and perspective, what one saw. Like with Mom. Perhaps everything had been there to be seen all along and Meredith had had the wrong perspective, or not enough light.

“I suppose that is you, Meredith.”

She was startled by the sound of her mother’s voice, coming from the darkness of the veranda to her right. It was another jolt of reality: there were hundreds of tiny verandas stuck out from the side of this ship, and yet in the dark, each one seemed entirely separate. “Hey, Mom,” she said. She could only make out the merest shape of her mother, see only the white sheen of her hair.

They were alike in that way, she and her mom. When they were troubled, both wanted to be outside and alone.

“You are thinking about your marriage,” Mom said.

Meredith sighed. “I don’t suppose you have any advice for me.”

“To lose love is a terrible thing,” Mom said softly. “But to turn away from it is unbearable. Will you spend the rest of your life replaying it in your head? Wondering if you walked away too soon or too easily? Or if you’ll ever love anyone that deeply again?”

Meredith heard the softening in her mother’s voice. It was like listening to melted pain, that voice. “You know about loss,” she said quietly.

“We all do.”

“When I first fell in love with Jeff, it was like seeing sunlight for the first time. I couldn’t stand to be away from him. And then . . . I could. We got married so young. . . .”

“Young has nothing to do with love. A woman can be a girl and still know her own heart.”

“I stopped being happy. I don’t even know why or when.”

“I remember when you were always smiling. Back when you opened the gift shop. Maybe you never should have taken over the business.”

Meredith was too surprised to do more than nod. She hadn’t thought her mother ever noticed her one way or the other. “It meant so much to Dad.”

“It did.”

“I made the mistake of living for other people. For Dad and the orchard, and my kids. Mostly for them, and now they are so busy with their own lives they hardly ever call. I have to memorize their schedules and track them down like Hercule Poirot. I’m a bounty hunter with a phone.”

“Jillian and Maddy flew away because you gave them wings and taught them to fly.”

“I wish I had wings,” Meredith said quietly.

“This is my fault,” Mom said, standing up. The veranda creaked at the movement.

“Why?” Meredith said, moving closer to the rail that separated the two verandas. She felt her mother come toward her until suddenly they were standing face-to-face, a foot or less apart. Finally, she could see Mom’s eyes.

“I am telling my story to explain.”

“When it’s over, will I know what I did that was so wrong?”

In the uncertain mix of light and shadow, her mother’s face seemed to crumple like old wax paper. “You will know, when it is all done, that you are not the one who did anything wrong. Now come inside. I will tell you about the Luga line tonight.”

“Are you sure? It’s late.”

“I am sure.” She opened her sliding door and disappeared inside her cabin.

Meredith went back into the brightly lit stateroom and found Nina on her bed, drying her short black hair with a towel.

“You can’t see anything out there, can you?”

“Mom wants to tell more of the story.”

“Tonight?” Nina jumped up, letting the wet towel slump to the floor, and hurried to the other side of the room.

Meredith picked up the damp towel and carried it to the bathroom, where she hung it back up.

“You ready?” Nina said from the doorway.

Meredith turned to look at her sister. “You have wings.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe I’m like some ostrich or dodo bird. I stayed on the ground so long, I lost the ability to fly.”

Laughing, Nina put an arm around Meredith and led her out of the stateroom. “You’re not some damned ostrich, which, by the way, are mean assed birds who always stand alone.”

“So what am I?” Meredith asked as Nina knocked on Mom’s door.

“Maybe you’re a swan. They mate for life, you know. I don’t know if one can fly without the other.”

“That’s strange, coming from you. You’re no romantic.”

“Yeah,” Nina said, looking at her. “But you are.”

Meredith was surprised by that. She would never have called herself a romantic. That was for people like her father who loved everyone unconditionally and never failed at the grand gesture. Or like Jeff, who never forgot to kiss her good night, no matter how late it was or how hard his day had been.

Or maybe it was for girls who found their soul mates when they were young and didn’t quite understand how rare that was.

The door opened. Mom stood there waiting, her white hair unbound and her body wrapped in an oversized blue cruise ship robe. The color was so incongruous on Mom that Meredith did a double-take.

And then it struck her. “Vera sees color,” she said.

Beside her, Nina gasped. “That’s right. So you see in color.”

“No,” Mom said.

“How come—”

“No questions,” Mom said firmly. “These were the rules.” She walked over to her bed and climbed in, leaning back into a pile of pillows.

Meredith followed Nina into the room and took a seat beside her sister on the love seat. In the silence, she heard waves slapping the side of the boat, and the quiet intake of their combined breathing.

“Vera cannot believe that she must leave her children again,” Mom said softly, using her voice to its fullest power. She no longer looked delicate and old. In fact, she was almost smiling and her eyes had drifted shut.

“Especially when she worked so hard to bring them home, but Leningrad is a city of women now, and they must defend against the Germans, and so, on a bright and sunny day, Vera kisses

her babies good-bye for the second time in a week. They are four and five, too young to be left without their mother, but war changes everything, and just as her mother had predicted, Vera is doing what would have been unimaginable even a few months ago. In their small apartment, with all eyes on her, Vera kneels down in front of them. “Aunt Olga and Mama have to go help keep Leningrad safe. You need to be very strong and grown-up while we are gone, yes? Baba will need your help.”

Leo’s eyes immediately fill with tears. “I don’t want you to go.”

Vera cannot look in her son’s sad eyes, so she turns slightly toward her daughter, whom already she had begun to think of as the strong one.

“What if you don’t come back?” Anya says quietly, trying her best not to cry.

Vera reaches into her pocket for the treasure she had thought to take with her. She pulls it out slowly. In her palm sits the beautiful jeweled butterfly. “Here,” she says to Anya. “I want you to hold this for Mama. It is my most special thing. When you look at it, you’ll think of me and know that I will come back to you and that wherever I am, I am thinking of you and Leo, and loving you both. Don’t play with it, or break it. This is who we are, Anya. It proves that I will come back to you. Okay?”

Very solemnly, Anya takes the butterfly, holds it carefully in her small palm.

Vera kisses them both one last time and stands.

Across the room, she meets her mother’s gaze. It is all there, in their eyes—the good-bye, the promise to take care and come back, and the worry that this is good-bye. Vera knows she should hug her mother, but if she does that she’ll cry, and she cannot cry in front of her children, so she instead grabs a heavy winter coat off the hook by the door and slings it over her shoulder. In no time at all, she and Olga are crammed together in the back of a transport truck, surrounded by dozens of other young women; many of them are dressed in flowery summer skirts with sandals on their feet. In other times, they would look like girls going off to camp, maybe to the Urals or the Black Sea, but no one would make that mistake of them now. There is not a one of them smiling.

When they reach the Luga line, there are people—girls and women, mostly—as far as the eye can see; they are building the massive trenches and fortifications that will stop the enemy from reaching Leningrad. Bent above the ground, stabbing at the dirt with pickaxes and shovels, these women are exhausted; their faces are streaked with sweat and dirt and their dresses are ruined. But they are Russians—Soviets—and no one dares to pause or complain. No one even imagines doing such a thing. Vera stands in the sunlight, with the forest only a few miles away, while a comrade tells her what to do.

Olga moves in close to her, takes her hand. They listen like soldiers and look like children, though they do not know this. It is their last moment of peace for many nights. After that, they take up pickaxes and trudge to the line, where the ground has been chewed up already. Dropping into the trench, they become two more in an endless line of girls and women and old men who hack at the earth until their hands blister and bleed, until they cough up blood and cry black tears. Day after day, they dig.

At night, they huddle in a barn with the other girls, who look as dazed and tired and dirty as Vera feels. The whole place smells of dust and mud and sweat and smoke.

On their seventh night, Vera finds a quiet corner in the barn where they stay at night and builds a small fire of twigs. It will not last long, these flames that feed on so little, so she works fast, boiling a cup of water for her sister, handing it to her. The watery cabbage soup they had for dinner has long ago given way to hunger, but there is nothing to be done about that.

Beside them, a heavyset older woman leans against the bales of hay, looking at her dirty fingernails as if she’s never seen her own hands before. Her fleshy, dirty face is unfamiliar, but there is something comforting in her eyes.

“Look at my hands,” Olga says, putting down her cup of water. “I’m bleeding.”

She says it with a kind of confused wonder, as if the pain is not hers, nor really even the blood.

Vera takes her sister’s hand, sees the matted blood and broken blisters on her palm. “You have to keep your hands wrapped. I told you this.”

“They were watching me today,” Olga says quietly. “Comrades Slotkov and Pritkin. I know they know about Papa. I could not stop to adjust the wraps.”

Vera frowns. She has heard this from her sister before in the past week, but now she recognizes that something is wrong. Olga does not make eye contact with her. Already they have seen girls die around them. Only yesterday, Olga spent half the day deafened by a bomb that landed too close.

Outside, the alarm blares. The sound of aircraft is a faraway drone at first, not unlike the murmur of a distant bee at a summer picnic. But the sound builds, and fear in the barn becomes palpable. Girls move and shift and lie flat, but really there is nowhere to go.

Bombs drop. Fires flash red and yellow and black through the slats in the barn siding. Somewhere, someone is screaming. The air turns gray and gritty. Vera’s eyes sting.

Olga flinches but doesn’t move. Instead, she stares at her wounded palm, and begins methodically ripping off the dead, blistered skin. Blood bubbles up from her wounds.

“Don’t do that,” Vera says, pulling her sister’s hand away.

“Honey.”

Vera hears the word spoken aloud. At first it makes no sense; all she can really comprehend is the bombing. Near her, someone is crying.

Then she hears it again. “Honey.”

The old woman is nearer now. Deep wrinkles bracket her smoker’s mouth and purplish bags buttress her tired eyes. She pulls a small vial from her apron pocket. “Put honey on your sister’s wounds.”