Page 12 of Spring's Arcana
Stop worrying about it,Mom kept saying,did you visit her, did you go? We won’t have to worry if you go.
Maybe de Winter would be taking over the payments. That would be a relief. Nat knocked at the door, her usual two brief taps, and stepped inside.
The top half of Mom’s bed was up, and Maria Drozdova was awake. The IV pole near the bed held a bag of clear fluid, andMom’s big blue eyes were bloodshot. Her cheekbones stood out alarmingly and her hands, motionless for once, lay on a fuzzy beige hospital blanket. She wasn’t wearing her three gold rings; they were safe at home, in the little gilt jewelry box atop the cedar vanity in the big bedroom. Nor did she wear the big gold hoop earrings; those were tucked away as well. At least she had a glossy black kerchief with bright red roses covering her strawlike, thinning hair, and her mouth wasn’t pulled tight with pain.
Instead, Mom looked almost cheerful. Pale, snowy sunlight poured over a small bench with pink vinyl cushions under the window; the suite’s bathroom, with enough space for a wheelchair if the person helping the patient was a contortionist, reeked of damp disinfectant smeared on gleaming tiles.
Maybe other rooms had a tinsel decoration, or cut flowers. Mom didn’t even want one of her beloved houseplants here.It will shrivel in the window, bad light.
“There she is, my daughter.” Maria Drozdova’s voice was a throaty whisper. A clear plastic tube dipped across her face, loops secured behind her ears, its top arc passing just under her high-prowed nose which was, Nat could now see, very like Baba de Winter’s; the oxygen machine tucked behind the IV pole made a soft whispering sound. “You’re early today.”
I’m about to be a very busy girl, Mama. Working for the Mob or trying to find another low-end secretarial-slash-retail job accessible to a girl with a bare high school diploma—what a choice. “Hi, Mom.” She leaned over the bed to press her lips gently to a papery cheek. “How are you feeling?”
“I ate today.” A slight click of distaste, tongue against teeth; Mom deplored hospital food.No proper black bread and not a spot of good soup, no wonder people die here,she liked to grumble; under Lysol and the brassy smell of pain a ghost of her perfume lingered like dried flowers. “Did you sing to the begonias this morning? They needtwofull choruses if I’m not going to be there.”
“Your begonias are fine, Mom.” Every plant in the house was, though the way her mother talked they would all droop and turn brown overnight without her rituals. Nat skirted the bed, set hercanvas visiting bag on the bench. “Uncle Leo got those crackers you like, so—”
“Sweet man.” Mom waved the subject of Nat’s uncle aside with an irritable motion of one thin, clawlike hand. Her crimson nail polish—another similarity to de Winter—was chipped and cracked. “But listen, Natchenka—”
“Yes, Mama. I went and saw her yesterday. That’s why I wasn’t here after work.” Nat busied herself with digging in the bag.
The silence was full of footsteps in the hallway, soft humming machinery noises, the low indistinct hum of conversation. Someone was coughing in another room, dry croupy explosions.
“They’ll bring you milk; you can dip these.” Nat drew out the package of plain saltines, the specific kind Mom liked—not brand, not generic, somewhere in between and of course difficult to find in bodega or supermarket. “I can bring some broth too. We can figure out how to heat it up.”
“Come over here, sit down.” The words had all their accustomed bite, a short-term flush of strength filling Mom’s blue eyes with new fire, spotting her pale cheeks with bright carmine coins. Her bed jacket, a cheerful black-and-red quilted number sewn on the ancient Singer during a morning full of leaves and mist when Nat was eleven, was saggy-loose and creased instead of properly ironed. “Now,Natchenka.”
“Is she really your mother?” Nat obeyed, settling a cautious hip on the bed past the railing, near her mother’s knees. “She doesn’t look like either of us.”Except the nose—and she sure as hellactslike you.
“In a manner of speaking, she’s everyone’s grandmother.” Mom reached out, two frail, birdlike hands with their red-streaked nails. “Come closer.”
“I can’t, the railing’s up.” Nat clutched the saltines box. She longed to put her head down on her mother’s shrunken chest and listen to her heart, but there was no way to do that without hurting her. And besides, once Nat was old enough to walk to school alone, her mother had decided she was old enough to be self-sufficient. Other parents coddled, but not the queen of the little yellow house.“She had some tattooed guy with her. You sent me to the Mob, Mom.”
Maria Drozdova stared at her daughter for a moment. A sly gleam filled her faded blue eyes, and for a moment she was radiant again through a thin mask of illness. Her gauntness turned ethereal instead of skeletal, and she stiffened, lifting herself from the pillows. “What did she say? What did Baba say?”
Shouldn’t you address her as my lady de Winter?“She wants me to find something for her. Said you’d know what.” Nat’s throat was dry, and the coffee she’d managed to take down—free of vodka this morning, though Uncle Leo’s had smelled suspiciously doctored—gurgled in her stomach. “Mama, why did you always tell me cats don’t talk?”
She sounded eight years old again, Nat realized, and the box’s cardboard was slippery against her sweating fingers.Stop lying to me. Or tell me you knew I was special, but you kept saying those things because… because why?
“Because they don’t in this country, Natchenka. Not yet.” Mom sagged against pillows, that transitory beauty gone. Only its ghost remained in her bone structure, the ruins of a white-columned temple on a sunny, forgotten hillside. “I told you she’d know why I sent you. Clever bitch, that one.”
In this country? They don’t talk yet?It was a sudden about-face from every other answer Nat had received on the question, and the change made her even dizzier. “Mama—”
“Shhh.” Her mother made a distracted, peremptory movement, no less sharp for being slight and weak. “She probably has a mouse in the room. All her spies, the damn rodents.” Mom’s eyes half-lidded, and she visibly considered the situation much as she had the question of school shopping trips every September—a necessary evil when she would much rather be thinking about other things, a painful expenditure of cash that could be used elsewhere. “Very well. You didn’t promise her anything, did you? Tell me you did what I said, tell me you didn’t promise her anything.”
Oh, for God’s sake. Nat strangled her own impatience, something she did so frequently it was almost reflexive by now. Uncle Leohad been so proud of finding the crackers, and here she was putting creases in the box. “I told her I’d find it, but I wouldn’t promise more.”Because I was glued in a chair and hypnotized. And I think that guy with the tattoos was on our back fence last night. Watching me. “What else was I supposed to do? And the man with her—”
“Oh, don’t you worry abouthim. Dima’s easily led.” Her mother’s hands fell to her lap, dry fingertips rubbing at each other. The rest of her under the sheet and blanket was two long barrows and tiny foot-hillocks, nothing solid remaining. A strong wind might blow her away. “It’s Baba you keep an eye on. You mind me now, Natchi.”
“Yes, Mama.” The same old dismal feeling—of being a parent with an adult-sized toddler—returned.
Since the Easter Nat turned eight, it had been a quasi-constant companion.
Her mother knew this “Dmitri” too. Well, growing up meant finding out about your parents’ unfinished business; maybe Mom and Leo had been trafficked into the States? It made some kind of sense to think about it that way, but not enough.
Notnearlyenough.
“Still…” Mama examined her, and Nat was aware of her own muddy complexion since she didn’t use the rosewater her mother did, aware of her brownish hair slipping free of its twist, of her peacoat still damp from yesterday and reeking of wet wool. There was probably shed hair on her shoulder from the tabby, too, and this morning a tuxedo cat on the stoop had chirpedGood day, Drozdovabefore turning sideways and vanishing as Nat locked the front door.
