At 5:47 Meredith went for her run. The dogs raced along with her, eagerly vying for attention.
By seven o’clock, she was out in the orchard and walking the rows with her foreman, checking on the new fruit’s early progress, noting frost damage, and assessing the workers’ careful hand-wrapping of the apples, and by ten she was at her desk, reading crop projections.
But all she could really think about was the fairy tale.
I’m just going to ask it: Is she Vera?
The idea of that was like a budding apple; it flowered, grew, and gained mass. It seemed impossible that something you’d heard all your life and deemed irrelevant could actually be of value; it was like finding out that the painting above your fireplace was an early Van Gogh.
But it was true; she’d heard the words for years and simply accepted them at face value, never questioning, never looking deeper. Maybe all kids did that with family stories. The more you heard something, the less you questioned the veracity of it.
She put aside the crop reports and turned to her computer. For the next hour she ran random searches. Leningrad, Stalin, Vera, Olga (if she had been looking for Russian mail-order brides, the names would have been pay dirt), Fontanka Bridge, Great Terror. Bronze Horseman statue. Nothing of real value came up, just more and more evidence that the backdrop of the fairy tale was largely real.
She found a long list of Vasily Adamovich’s published works. He’d written about almost every facet of Russian and Soviet life, from the earliest days of the Bolshevik revolution, through the murder of the Romanovs and the rise of Stalin and the terrors of his regime, to Hitler’s attack during World War II, to the tragedy at Chernobyl. Whatever had happened to Russians in the twentieth century, he’d studied it.
“That’s a lot of help,” Meredith murmured, tapping her pen. When she added RETIREMENT to the search, she came up with an unexpected link to a newspaper article.
Dr. Vasily Adamovich, a former professor of Russian studies at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, suffered a stroke yesterday at his home in Juneau. Dr. Adamovich is well known in academic circles for his prolific publishing schedule, but friends say he is a master gardener and can tell a mean ghost story. He retired from teaching in 1989 and volunteered frequently at his neighborhood library. He is recovering at a local hospital.
Meredith picked up the phone and dialed information. The operator had no listing for a Vasily Adamovich in Juneau. Disappointed, Meredith asked for the library’s number instead.
“There are several listings, ma’am.”
“Give me all of them,” Meredith answered, making note of each branch’s phone number.
On the fourth call, she got lucky. “Hello,” she said. “I’m trying to find a Dr. Vasily Adamovich.”
“Oh, Vasya,” the woman answered. “No one has called for him in a while, I’m sad to say.”
“This is the library where he volunteered?”
“Two days a week for years. The high school kids loved him.”
“I’m trying to reach him. . . .”
“Last I heard he was in a nursing home.”
“Do you know which one?”
“No. I’m sorry. I don’t, but . . . are you a friend of Vasya’s?”
“My mother is. She hasn’t spoken to him in a long time, though.”
“You do know about the stroke?”
“Yes.”
“I heard he was in pretty bad shape. He has difficulty speaking.”
“Okay, well. Thank you for your help.” Meredith hung up the phone.
Almost simultaneously, Daisy walked into her office.
“There’s a problem down in the warehouse. Nothing urgent, but Hector wants you to stop by sometime today if you can. If you’re too busy, I’m sure I can solve it for you.”
“Yeah,” Meredith said, staring down at her notes. “Why don’t you do that?”
“And then I’ll go to Tahiti.”
“Um. Okay.”
“On the company credit card.”
“Uh-huh. Thanks, Daisy.”
Daisy crossed the room in a burst of energy and sat down in the chair opposite Meredith’s desk. “That’s it,” she said, crossing her arms. “Start talking.”
Meredith looked up. Honestly, she was surprised. What had Daisy been saying? “What?”
“I just told you I was going to Tahiti on the company dime.”
Meredith laughed. “So you’re saying I wasn’t listening.”
“What’s going on?”
Meredith considered that Daisy had been around the Whitsons for as long as anyone could remember. “When did you meet my mom?”
Daisy’s overplucked eyebrows lift ed in surprise. “Well, let’s see. I guess I was about ten. Maybe a little younger. It was all the buzz. I remember that. ’Cause your daddy was datin’ Sally Herman when he went off to war and when he came home, he was married.”
“So he barely knew her.”
“I don’t know about that. He was in love with her, though. My mom said she’d never seen a man so in love. She took care of Anya.”
“Who did?”
“My mom. For most of that first year.”
Meredith frowned. “What do you mean?”
“She was sick. You knew that, right? I think she was in bed for a year or so and then one day she just got better. My mom thought they’d be friends, but you know Anya.”
It was stunning news, really. Stunning. She didn’t remember her mother ever having so much as a cough. “Sick how? What was wrong with her?” What caused a woman to spend a year in bed? And what made her suddenly get better?
“I don’t know. Mom never said much about it, really.”
“Thanks, Daisy.” She watched Daisy leave the office and close the door behind her.
For the next few hours, Meredith managed to get a little bit of work done, but mostly she was thinking about her mother.
At five o’clock, she gave up the pretense and left the office, saying, “Daisy, will you run the warehouse check for me? If there’s a real problem, I’ll be on my cell. Otherwise I’m gone for the day.”
“You bet, Meredith.”
Ten minutes later, when she walked into her mother’s house, the smell of baking bread greeted her. She found her mother in the kitchen, draped in her big, baggy white apron, her hands sticky white with flour. As she had always done, she was making enough bread for an army. The freezer in the garage was full of it.
“You are here early.”
“Business was slow, so I thought I’d come here and do some more packing for you. When I get it all organized, you and I should probably go through the giveaway piles.”
“If you wish.”
“Do you care what I keep and what I get rid of?”
“No.”
Meredith didn’t even know what to say to that. How could nothing be of importance to her mom? “Where’s Nina?”
“She said something about errands and left an hour ago. She took her camera, so . . .”
“Who knows when she’ll be back.”
“Right.” Mom turned back to her dough.
Meredith stood there a minute longer, then took off her jacket and hung it on the hook by the door. She started to go down the hall toward Dad’s office, but as she approached the open door, she paused. The last time she’d packed up Mom’s things, she hadn’t looked for anything, hadn’t gone through pockets or felt back in the drawers.
Glancing back at the kitchen, seeing Mom still kneading dough, she eased toward the stairs and went up to the master bedroom.
In the long, wide closet, her mother’s black and gray clothing lined the right wall. Almost everything was either soft merino wool or brushed cotton. Turtlenecks and cardigans and long skirts and flowy pants. There was nothing trendy or showy or expensive here.
Clothes to hide in.
The thought came out of nowhere, surprising her. It was the sort of thing she would have noticed before, if she’d ever really looked.
This telling of the fairy tale was changing their perceptions of everything, of each other most of all. With that thought came another: what was it about the play—and about the fairy tale—that had upset Mom so much all those years ago? Before, Meredith had always assumed that her mother’s Christmas play anger had been directed at Meredith, that in choosing to do the fairy tale as a Christmas play, Meredith had done something wrong.
But what if it hadn’t been about Meredith and Nina at all; what if it had been a reaction to seeing the words acted out?
She went deeper into the closet and stood in front of her mother’s chest of drawers. There was something in here that would reveal her mother. There had to be. What woman didn’t have some memento hidden far from prying eyes?
She closed the door until there was only the slimmest view of the room, and then she returned to the chest, opening the top drawer. Underwear lay neatly folded in three piles: white, gray, black. Socks were organized in similarly colored balls. Several bras filled out the corner. She let her fingers trail beneath it all, feeling the smooth wood of the drawer’s bottom. Guilt made her grimace but she continued through the second and third drawers, with their neatly folded sweaters and T-shirts. Kneeling, she opened the bottom drawer. Inside, she found pajamas, nightgowns, and an out-of-date bathing suit.
Nothing hidden. Nothing more personal than undergarments.
Disappointed and vaguely embarrassed, she closed the drawer. With a sigh, she got back to her feet and stood there looking at the clothes. It was all perfectly organized. Everything with a place and in it; the only thing that didn’t fit was a sapphire-blue wool coat hanging at the very back of the closet.
Meredith remembered the coat. She’d seen her mother wear it once—to a performance of The Nutcracker when she and Nina were little girls. Dad had insisted, had twirled Mom around and kissed her and said, “Come on, Anya, just this once . . .”
She reached back for it, pulled it out. The coat was a bright blue cashmere in a classic forties style, with broad shoulders, a fitted waist, and wide, cuffed sleeves. Intricately carved Lucite buttons ran from throat to waist. Meredith put it on; the silk lining was deliciously soft. Surprisingly, it fit pretty well; wearing it made her imagine her mother as young instead of old, as a smiling girl who would love the feel of cashmere.
But she hadn’t loved it, had rarely worn it. Neither, though, had she thrown it away, and for a woman who kept so few mementos, it was an odd thing to have saved. Unless she hadn’t wanted to hurt Dad’s feelings. It must have been expensive.
She put her hands in the pockets and twirled to look at herself in the full-length mirror behind the door.
That was when she felt it, something hidden, sewn into the lining behind the pocket.
She felt for the fraying edge of the secret compartment and worked it for a few seconds, finally extracting a tattered, creased black and white photograph of two children.
Meredith stared down at it. The image was slightly blurry and the paper was so creased and veined it was hard to see clearly, but it was two children, about three or four years of age, holding hands. At first she thought it was her and Nina, but then she noticed the old-fashioned, heavy coats and boots the kids were wearing. She turned the picture over and found a word written on the back. In Russian.
“Meredith!”
She flushed guiltily before she realized it was Nina, thundering up the stairs like an elephant.
Meredith opened the closet door. “I’m in here, Nina.”
Dressed in khaki pants and a matching T-shirt, with hiking boots, Nina looked ready to go on a safari. “There you are. I’ve been look—”
Meredith grabbed her arm and pulled her into the closet. “Is Mom still in the kitchen?”
“Baking enough bread for a third world country? Yes. Why?”
“Look what I found,” Meredith said, holding out the picture.
“You went snooping? Good girl. I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.”
“Just look.”
Nina took the photograph and stared down at it for a long time and then turned it over. After a quick glimpse at the word, she turned it over again. “Vera and Olga?”
Meredith’s heart actually skipped a beat. “You think?”
“I can’t tell if they’re boys or girls. But this one kinda looks like Mom, don’t you think?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. What should we do with it?”
Nina thought about that. “Leave it here for now. We’ll bring it with us. Sooner or later, we’ll ask Mom.”
“She’ll know I went through her stuff.”
“No. She’ll know I did. I’m a journalist, remember? Snooping is my job description.”
“And I found out from Daisy that Mom was sick when she married Dad. They thought she’d die.”
“Mom? Sick? She never even gets a cold.”
“I know. Weird, huh?”
“Now I’m certain about my plan,” Nina said. “What plan?”
“I’ll tell you at dinner. Mom needs to hear this, too. Come on, let’s go.”
Nina waited with obvious impatience while Meredith returned the photograph to its hiding place and hung the coat back up. Together, they went downstairs.
Their mother was seated at the kitchen table. On the counter, there were dozens of loaves of bread and several bags from the local Chinese restaurant.
Nina carried the Chinese food to the table, positioning the white cartons around the vodka bottle and shot glasses.
“Can I have wine instead?” Meredith said.
“Sure,” Nina said absently, pouring two shots instead of three.
“You seem . . . buoyant,” Mom said.
“Like a Pekingese when the mailman comes,” Meredith added when her sister sat down across from her.
“I have a surprise,” Nina said, lifting her shot glass. “Cheers.”
“What is it?” Meredith asked.
“First we talk,” Nina said, reaching for the beef with broccoli, serving up a portion on her plate. “Let’s see. My favorite thing to do is travel. I love passion in all of its guises. And my boyfriend wants me to settle down.”
Meredith was shocked by that last bit. It was so intimate. To her surprise, she decided to match it. “I love to shop for beautiful things. I used to dream of opening a string of Belye Nochi gift stores, and . . . my husband left me.”
Mom looked up sharply but said nothing.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Meredith said at last. “I think maybe love can just . . . dissolve.”
“No, it does not,” her mother said.
“So how do—”
“You hang on,” her mother said. “Until your hands are bleeding, and still you do not let go.”
“Is that how you and Dad stayed happy for so long?” Nina asked. Mom reached for the chow mein’s serving spoon. “Of course that is what I am speaking of.”
“Your turn,” Nina said to Mom.
Meredith could have kicked her sister. For once they were actually talking and Nina turned it right back to the game.
Mom stared down at her food. “My favorite thing to do is cook. I love the feel of a fire on a cold night. And . . .” She paused.
Meredith found herself leaning forward.
“And . . . I am afraid of many things.” She picked up her fork and began to eat.
Meredith sat back in amazement. It was impossible to imagine her mother afraid of anything, and yet she’d revealed it, so it must be true. She wanted to ask, What frightens you? but she didn’t have the courage.
“It’s time for my surprise,” Nina said, smiling. “We’re going to Alaska.”
Meredith frowned. “We who?”
“You, me, and Mom.” She reached down and produced three tickets. “On a cruise ship.”
Meredith was too stunned to say anything. She knew she should argue, say she had to work, that the dogs couldn’t be left alone—anything—but the truth was that she wanted to go. She wanted to get away from the orchard and the office and the talk she had to have with Jeff. Daisy could run the warehouse.
Mom looked up slowly. Her face was pale; her blue eyes seemed to burn through the pallor. “You are taking me to Alaska? Why?”
“You said it was your dream,” Nina said simply. Meredith could have kissed her. There was such a gentleness in her sister’s voice. “And you said it, too, Mere.”
“But . . . ,” Mom said, shaking her head.
“We need this,” Nina said. “The three of us. We need to be together and I want Mom to see Alaska.”
“In exchange for the rest of the story,” Mom said.
An awkward pause fell over the table.
“Yes. We want to hear the whole . . . fairy tale, Mom, but this is separate. I saw your face when you said you’d always dreamed of going to Alaska. You have dreamed of this trip. Let Meredith and me take you.”
Mom got up and went to the French doors in the dining room. There, she stared out at the winter garden, which was now in full vibrant bloom. “When do we leave?”
The next morning, Nina stood at the fence line, with her camera in her hands, watching workers stream onto the property. Women headed toward the shed, where they would pack apples from cold storage for shipment around the world; in a few months, Nina knew, they’d be busy sorting the harvest by quality. All up and down the rows, workers in faded jeans, most with jet-black hair, climbed up and down ladders beneath the branches, carefully hand-wrapping the fledgling apples to protect them from bugs and the elements.
She was just about to go back into the house when a dirty blue car pulled in front of the garage and parked. The driver’s door opened. All Nina saw was a shock of gray-threaded black hair and she started to run for him.
“Danny!” she cried, throwing herself into his arms so hard he stumbled backward and hit the car, but still he held on to her.
“You’re not an easy woman to track down, Nina Whitson.”
Smiling, she took him by the hand. “You did okay. Here. Let me show you around the place.”
With an unexpected pride, she showed him around the orchard her father had loved. Now and then she shared memories from her past; mostly she told him about the story her mother was telling.
Finally, she said, “Why are you here?”
He smiled down at her. “First things first, love. Where’s your bedroom?”
“On the second floor.”
“Damn,” he said. “You’re goin’ t’ make me work for it.”
“I’ll make it worth your time. Promise,” she said, kissing his ear.
He carried her up the stairs and into her girlhood room.
“A cheerleader, eh?” he said, glancing at the dusty red and white pom-pom lying in the corner. “How come I never knew that?”
She started unbuttoning his shirt. Her hands were frantic as she undressed him. Anticipation of his touch was an exquisite torture, and when they were both naked and in bed, he began caressing her with an ardor that matched her own. She was on fire for him; there was no other way to put it. And when she came, it was so intense it felt as if she were breaking apart.
Afterward, he rolled over onto one elbow and looked down at her. His face was deeply tanned and lined, the creases at his eyes like tiny white knife marks. His hair had taken flight during their lovemaking, turned into dozens of curly black wings. He was smiling, but there was something pinched in it, and the look in his eyes was almost sad. “You asked why I was here.”
“Give a girl a chance to breathe, won’t you?”
“You’re breathing,” he said quietly. With those two words, and the look in his eyes, she knew it all.
“Okay,” she said, and this time she had to force herself to look at him. “Why are you here?”
“I was in Atlanta. From there, this was nothin’.”
“Atlanta?” she said, but she knew what was in Atlanta. Every journalist did.
“CNN. They’ve offered me my own show. In-depth world stories.” He smiled. “I’m tired, Neens. I’ve been gallivantin’ for decades now, and my bum leg hurts all the time and I’m tired of tryin’ to keep up with the twenty-year-olds. Mostly, though . . . I’m tired of being alone so much. I wouldn’t mind the globe-trottin’ if I had a place to come home to.”
“Congratulations,” she said woodenly.
“Marry me,” he said, and the earnestness in his blue eyes made her want to cry. She thought, absurdly, I should have taken more pictures of him.
“If I said yes,” she said, touching his face, feeling the unfamiliar smoothness of his cheek, “would you forget CNN and stay in Africa with me? Or maybe go to the Middle East, or Malaysia? Could I say on Friday, I need good Thai food, and we’d hop on a plane?”
“We’ve done all that, love.”
“And what would I do in Atlanta? Learn to make the perfect peach pie and welcome you home with a glass of scotch?”
“Come on, Neens. I know who you are.”
“Do you?” Nina felt as if she were falling suddenly. Her stomach ached, her eyes stung. How could she say yes . . . how could she say no? She loved this man. Of that she was sure. But the rest of it? Settling down? A house in the city or a place in the suburbs? A permanent address? How could she handle that? The only life she’d ever wanted was the one she now had. She simply couldn’t plant roots—that was for men like her father and women like her sister, who liked the ground to be level where they stood. And if Danny really loved Nina, he’d know that.
“Just come back to Atlanta with me for the weekend. We’ll talk to people, see what’s available for you. You’re a world-famous photojournalist, for fuck’s sake. They’d be crawlin’ all over themselves to give you a job. Come on, love, give us a chance.”
“I’m going to Alaska with Mom and Meredith.”
“I’ll have you back in time. I swear it.”
“But . . . the fairy tale . . . I have more research to do. I can’t just leave the story. Maybe in two weeks, when we’re done. . . .”
Danny pulled away from her. “There will always be another story to follow, won’t there, Neens?”
“That’s not fair. This is my family history, the promise I made to my dad. You can’t ask me to give that up.”
“Is that what I asked?”
“You know what I mean.”
“ ’Cause I thought I proposed marriage and didn’t get an answer.”
“Give me more time.”
He leaned down and kissed her; this time it was slow and soft and sad. And when he took her in his arms and made love to her again, she learned something new, something she hadn’t known before: sex could mean many things; one of them was good-bye.
Meredith hadn’t been on a vacation without Jeff and the girls in years. As she packed and repacked her suitcase, she found her enthusiasm for the trip growing by leaps and bounds. She had always wanted to go to Alaska.
So why had she never gone?
The question, when it occurred to her, made her pause in her packing. She stared down at the open suitcase on her bed, but instead of seeing the neatly folded white sweater, she saw the blank landscape of her own life.
By and large, she’d been the one who planned family vacations, and she’d always let someone else choose the destination. Jillian had wanted to see the Grand Canyon, so they’d gone camping in the summer; Maddy had always been the Tiki-Girl, and two family vacations in Hawaii had cemented that nickname; and Jeff loved to ski, so they went to Sun Valley every year.
But never had they headed north to Alaska.
Why was that? Why had Meredith been so ready to bypass her own happiness? She’d thought there would be time to unwind those choices, that if she put her children first for nineteen years, she could then shift course and be the one who mattered. As easy as changing lanes while driving. But it hadn’t been like that, not for her anyway. She’d lost too much of herself in parenthood to simply go back to who she’d been before.
As she looked around her room, there were mementos everywhere, bits and pieces of the life she’d lived—photographs of the family, art projects the girls had made over the years, souvenirs she and Jeff had bought together. There, right by the bed, was a photograph she’d looked at every day of her life and yet not really seen in years. In it, she and Jeff were young—kids, really—a pair of newlyweds with a bald, bright-eyed little girl cradled between them. Jeff’s hair was long and wheat-blond, blown by the wind across his sunburned cheeks. And the smile on his face was breathtaking in its honesty.
She’s us, he’d said to Meredith on that day, all those years ago, when they’d held their daughter, Jillian, between them. The best of us.
And suddenly the thought of losing him was more than she could bear. She grabbed her car keys and drove to his office, but once there, when she looked up at him, she realized she was equally afraid of losing herself.
“I wanted to remind you that we’re leaving tomorrow,” she said after what had to be the longest silence in the world.
“I know that.”
“You’re staying at the house, right? The girls are going to be calling you every day, I think. They’re sure you can’t live without me.”
“You think they’re wrong?”
He was close, so close she could have touched him with only the slightest eff ort. She longed suddenly to do it, but she held back. “Are they?”
“When you come home, we’ll talk.”
“What if—” slipped out of her mouth before she realized even that she was going to speak.
“What if what?”
“What if I still don’t know what to say?” she finally said.
“After twenty years?”
“It went by fast.”
“It’s one question, Mere. Are you in love with me?”
One question.
How could the whole of an adult life funnel down to that?
As the silence expanded, he reached for a framed picture on his desk.
“This is for you,” he said.
She looked down at it, feeling the start of tears. It was their wedding picture. He’d kept it on his desk all these years. “You don’t want it on your desk anymore?”
“That’s not why I’m giving it to you.”
He touched her cheek with a gentleness that somehow communicated more than twenty years of being together, of knowing each other, of passion and love and the disappointments that came with both, and she knew he’d given her the picture so that she’d remember them.
She looked up at him. “I never told you I wanted to go to Alaska. I think there were a lot of things I didn’t say.” She could tell by the way he was looking at her that he understood, and all at once she was reminded of how well he knew her. He’d been at her side through graduation and childbirth and her father’s death. He’d been the primary witness to most of her life. When had she stopped talking to him about her dreams? And why?
“I wish you had told me.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“Words matter, I guess,” he said finally. “Maybe your dad knew that all along.”
Meredith nodded. How was it that her whole life could be distilled down to that simple truth? Words mattered. Her life had been defined by things said and unsaid, and now her marriage was being undermined by silence. “She’s not who we thought she was, Jeff. My mom, I mean. Sometimes, when she’s telling us the story, it’s like . . . I don’t know. She melts into this other woman. I’m almost afraid of finding out the truth, but I can’t stop. I need to know who she is. Maybe then I’ll know who I am.”
He nodded and came closer. Leaning down, he kissed her cheek. “Safe travels, Mere. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”