Two weeks after the scene at my mother’s, I still had received no communications from my father. My inference?
He didn’t give a damn?
She didn’t contact him?
The latter seemed unlikely. Highly unlikely.
My hunch was she’d sent him a letter bordering on hysteria. Accusing me and Dimitri of annoying her? Provoking her? Threatening her?
She was divorcing him, but she undoubtedly made demands . . . demands my father couldn’t satisfy at that moment, wherever he was. He’d take care of me when he returned.
His silence emboldened me. He’d always given in to her, the bitch. Took her side against me. Capitulated to her every whim.
And where had it gotten him?
She publicly humiliated him . . . slutting around with a lesser man. Shutting him out of her life after the death of Alexei. Demanding he remove me and Dimitri from her home because of our offensive natures.
What kind of mother abandons her surviving child?
“I think we should scare her before we kill her,” Dimitri said as we walked home from school in late March.
“How?” I turned my collar up against the wind.
“Does the ambassador stay with her every night?”
“I have no idea.”
“We could check tonight . . .”
So we did. Sneaking out of the house after Emma went to bed offered no problems.
Except watching for police. The cops were always on the lookout for kids being on the streets at late hours.
Both Dimitri and I looked less and less like young kids. Emma’s cooking—totally lacking imagination—relied heavily on butter and cream. Both he and I gained weight and inches in height. The hours we spent trudging through the city after school built muscles and gave us a wind-blown ruddiness that made us appear older—teenagers at least.
Worries about over-zealous cops diminished the first night we caught the bus to our old house. We arrived at ten past eleven. No sign of Herr Karppinen’s Grosser. No lights inside. No barking dogs or other disturbances to the quiet neighborhood. We slipped into the back garden, closing the gate behind us.
The wind had died down, but the temperature had also dropped. The thirty-minute walk from the train station felt like a trek across Siberia. We decided on the train versus the bus because we thought there was less likelihood the train conductor would remember us.
My parents’ bedroom was located at the rear of the old house and overlooked a frozen garden. French windows faced an inactive fountain and several denuded trees. Dimitri and I had brought pockets filled with fine gravel from the current house. We pelted the French windows at intermittent intervals.
Eight minutes after our arrival, a light went on in the bedroom. We shrank behind the trees. Five minutes passed. My feet went as dead as the tree limbs. Dimitri blew on his gloved hands.
The lights finally went out.
We resumed strafing the windows.
The lights came on.
Dimitri yowled like a cat.
The lights went out.
I broke off a frozen tree limb and dragged it across the windows. Dimitri shelled more pebbles at the glass panes.
This time, after turning on more lights, my mother came to the window and pushed back the drapes. Backlit by the lamps, she viewed the vast openness of the black garden. Her glorious blonde hair glowed in the soft light. She turned her head from side to side, and her hair swung out behind her like ropes of silvered gold.
Dimitri and I barely breathed.
She let the curtains drop. A few seconds later, the lights in her bedroom went off again.
Freezing, risking a sudden appearance of the neighborhood cop, Dimitri and I stayed there for another half an hour. On our way out of the garden, we tossed the last of our rocks at the windows. I dragged the limb across our footprints on our way to the gate.
We ran as if chased by a policeman back to the train station and boarded the last train, out of breath. We showed great self-discipline by sitting in our seats without congratulating each other. As we walked home, we relived our triumph, laughing, deciding a twenty-four-hour moratorium made sense before repeating our performance. We tiptoed into the current house, crept past Emma’s room, and fell in our separate beds.
I dreamed of my mother’s terror.