I peered into the darkness. “Depends. Do you have anything in there that doesn’t resemble lawn?”
My father laughed, a sound that made my heart ache with its rarity. “I have some less healthy options too.” He rummaged around and came out with a bottle of iced coffee.
I popped it open and took a long swig. “How come you have to be at to work when the trains aren’t running?”
My father leaned against the workbench, a thick green smoothie in his hand. It resembled the stuff from my grandmother’s recipe. Just looking at it made the place where the needle had gone into my arm pulse, hungry for more.
“Style over substance, like everything in St. Hilaire. They don’t make anything like these old trains anymore. And this is one of a kind. So I thought I’d give it a shot, while we wait to hear if there is a part that can be shipped in.”
Of course, my father would make whatever random part was missing. It was just like him to create a solution to a problem if one didn’t already exist.
Dad continued. “The normal trains are still running, but of course they can’t use this track, so no one will be coming in or leaving through the station. Not a big deal. No one comes by train this time of year anyhow.”
I twisted the cap off the bottle again and took a deep drink of bitter coffee. “There’s a girl. She was on the train the other day. She’s staying at Dec’s.”
My father looked at me with meaning. “Ah.”
“No, it’s not—” I took a sip of coffee and regrouped. This had nothing to do with any feelings I may or may not have for my best friend. “Everything feels off. Like it’s shifting.”
When my father’s eyes narrowed behind his glasses, I realized how much older he’d gotten since we moved to St. Hilaire and he’d taken on a job that sucked up all of his time and energy. Seeing him every day made the small changes hard to notice, but the shop’s too-bright light accentuated the tiny wrinkles that now lined my father’s face. It made me wonder what my mother looked like now, if she still wore her hair in one long blond braid like Rapunzel.
“Welcome to adulthood,” Dad said.
Was this all just down to everyone growing up and apart? We were all thinking about our next steps. Stay. Leave. Maybe it was just that simple, but it felt like more.
“Do you miss Mom?” I wasn’t sure why, out of everything that was troubling me, I’d latched onto that one.
“I was missing your mother long before she left. I guess I kind of got used to it.”
“Do you ever regret…” I don’t know why I asked. Staying in Chicago had never been a real option.
“Russell, mistakes aren’t necessarily made up of the things you screw up. It’s the things you do for the wrong reasons that end up hurting. Or the things you don’t do at all.”
My father didn’t have a spiritualist bone in his body. But he knew me and knew there were a lot if things I hadn’t done. Things that were only half-formed in my mind. Things that seemed too risky. And the small smile on my father’s face was urging me onward. Offering promises without words, that I would always have his love and support.
I drank the rest of the coffee. Vines of caffeine raced through me. It was barely after midnight. The night was still young after all.
Chapter 22
Annie
The cursor on the screen blinked as if it were yelling at me. It was ridiculous that I was having so many problems telling my parents about Dmitry’s death. I was long past the point where they would have or would want to have any say over whether I returned home or continued with my tour. And they had no personal connection to Dmitry, so it was not as if they would grieve.
Still, nothing I wrote sounded right. I was trying to share my feelings of loss, my wonderment over arriving in St. Hilaire, and the crescendos of excitement I felt when I thought about taking over Dmitry’s search for some lost measures of music.
The truth was, nothing I could write would make my parents—who each worked ten hours a day, my father as a tailor and my mother as a housekeeper—understand. To them, I led a charmed life of travel and frivolity. After all, what was music? You couldn’t eat it or live under its protection. I had long ago given up trying to explain that it created jobs and made people happy and less stressed and therefore had to count. They only saw my music as something foreign and mystical, something that existed to pay the rent.
I hit delete, started over, and then hit delete again.
This time, without reading the thirty or so new emails already lined up in my inbox, I grabbed my phone and sent Viktor a text, even though it was late.
I miss him.
The phone rang, as I knew it would, even though I had never hidden my frustration with people who answered voicemails with an email or text messages with a call.
“Zvyozdochka.” Viktor’s voice was warm and familiar.
“Hi, Viktor. How is everyone?”
He made a number of “tsk” sounds. “It’s what you’d expect. Weeping and wailing and whatnot from all those pretty people who thought they were his friends.”
It was easy to picture the spectacle of the funeral. Tomorrow the paparazzi would sell all of their photos, and it would be impossible to turn on a computer without seeing the pictures of black-clad mourners attempting to cry without ruining their makeup.
“He loved them,” I said. I had rarely commented when the topic turned to Dmitry’s social life since I always felt too young and sheltered to be worthy of an opinion. Still, I knew him well enough to know Dmitry loved nothing more than to be in the center of a crowd of adoring fans. He had the ability to make them feel as if they were long-lost friends, even if he kept the important and vulnerable parts of himself hidden.
“This is true, this is true,” Viktor said. “Do not quote me to anyone, but I think he would have been happy that you were not here to see this.”
I exhaled. “I am also happy not to be there. Is that horrible?”
There was silence on the other end. “There is something I must tell you, Anastasia.”
I braced myself and then relaxed. Dmitry was already dead. There was not much else Viktor could say. “Go on.”
I waited.
“Li Yong has entered the Hull competition,” he said.
Of course, he had. It had been too easy to think of the most important under-eighteen competition without my biggest rival.
“I thought he was hurt,” I said. I had heard about a fracture in his arm or elbow or something.
“I hear, underground, that a medical team is working with him. This is not American football. There is no penalty for taking shots of steroids or whatever. He’s practicing.”