Мария Кузнецова - Something Unbelievable

“Let him be,” she says. “Why rob him of his pleasure? Here’s a creature who actually knows how to make himself happy. If only we all could be so lucky.”

I get Tally in her stroller and we walk Baba to the train. I tried one last time to convince her to get a cab, but she insisted on “riding with the people,” and there was nothing I could do to change her mind. Though there’s another week until Labor Day, it’s starting to feel like fall already. A crisp breeze fills the air as we pass old men playing chess in the park, women not much younger than my grandmother peddling apples and berries on the sidewalks, a coffee shop filled with people my age furiously typing into their laptops. We get to the platform well ahead of time. Three trains could go by before Baba is late, even on a Saturday morning. We sit on a bench and stare at the buildings in front of us, with only two teenage girls and a bunch of pigeons for company. Baba leans over and tickles Tally under the chin, and she gives her a little laugh.

“I have grown quite fond of this child,” she says. “Now that her rat face is gone, she is quite handsome, like her parents, I can see it as clearly as the sun in the sky.”

“I have too,” I tell her. I’m trying to hold back a flood of tears. I don’t want to spend our last moments together blubbering like an idiot. I want her to feel like I am in control, like I will figure everything out.

“It seems you have grown fond of someone else too,” she says without looking at me.

I feel my face shifting into an attempt to deny what she has said, but I decide there’s no point. “You don’t miss a thing, do you?”

“There are plenty of things I have missed, my darling.”

I wipe Tally’s face just to stall. “You must think I’m ridiculous,” I say finally. “ I think I’m ridiculous. But it’s like—this tide just washed over me and all I could do was drown.” I don’t add, Until recently . Until I read his dumb poem and saw how clueless I was . Then again, there was the feeling I had when he stood by my side the whole night at the bar, the hairs on my arms feeling electric from him, and I was back where I started.

“Who am I to judge? I know the feeling,” she says. I feel the tears stinging my eyes and only then does my grandmother look at me. “What are your plans, dear girl?”

I take a deep breath and say, “As if I know.” Then I add, “Can I ask you something?” I continue before she can say yes or deny me. “You had a nice long life with Grandpa Misha, even if it wasn’t perfect. But do you think—I mean, if you could go back and do it all over again, would you have chosen Bogdan?”

My grandmother sighs and shakes her head. “My darling, don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “If I had not married your grandfather, I would not have had your father, and he would not have had you.”

“Is that an answer?”

“My life would have been completely different.”

“But you might have had other children, other grandchildren.”

“I might have given birth to a one-eyed donkey, but I didn’t, so what is the point of mulling it over?” she says, and I feel her temperature rising.

“I’m sorry. I just…” I say. “So does that mean—do you mean to say you’re glad your life turned out the way it did?”

I imagine my great-great-grandmother standing on a platform over a century ago, with nothing to guide her but her intuition. What would she think of what became of my grandmother? What would she think of me? Baba and I both know that there’s a good chance this is it. She could certainly go on and live a few more years, maybe even to be a hundred, but she could also leave the world any day now, and who knows when we’ll have another visit. I want to tell her that she was everything to me, that those trips to Sevastopol were everything, that I didn’t judge her for having affairs, not really, that I never expected her to be perfect.

My grandmother sighs again. “Who is to say? I have lived my life the best I could live it, but not without my share of mistakes. You have made them, too, and will continue to make them. Most of them won’t kill you,” she says. She smiles and adds, “If what happened between me and the brothers is so important to you, then why did you cut them out of your story?”

I laugh. “The story wasn’t really about them.”

“I suppose not.”

She reaches into her pocket. She pulls out a pouch, and from that, a string of red jewels that it takes me a minute to understand is the ruby necklace she had been talking about all along. The one that had been stolen from her grandmother. The one that led the woman to go completely mad and end her life.

“But how did you…” I say, staring at her hand, the bright jewels in it that look cartoonishly lavish, sparkling like crazy. Before I finish asking the question, I realize I don’t want to know the answer. Or, rather, that I can figure out what happened without my grandmother telling me, without her confirming she had stolen the rubies from her grandmother out of spite. How can I blame her for hating the woman, after all she had done to her father? And as she herself had just said, who am I to judge?

At last I hear it, the train chugging toward the platform, and see it snaking around the bend in the distance.

“I have made my share of mistakes,” she says again. “At least this one was valuable. Please, take it. It can give you the freedom you seek.”

I slowly take the necklace out of her hand just as the train comes to a halt and opens its doors. It’s even heavier than it looks and it makes my hand tremble, either from the weight or the thought of touching something that my great-great-grandmother had worn for years like a second skin, something that the woman in the photograph on my wall had loved best of all.

“What should I do with it?” I say.

“Be careful with it,” my grandmother says, closing my hand around it and kissing my fist. “It is a very precious thing.”

And with that, she gives me a big hug, strokes my daughter’s cheeks, and disappears through the jaws of the train.

I give Tally a bottle after the train pulls away, and then we keep walking, walking, walking. The girl is smiling, cooing, staring at everything with her mouth open in unabashed wonder, like it seems impossible that all of these things can exist: the two red-haired children trailing their mother, the woman in the pink dress smoking a cigarette on the street corner, the leaves on the trees fluttering in the wind, the two tired men entering an Irish pub, the light hitting the store windows, the big garbage trucks and their loud, loud roar as they pummel down the street. As we wait to cross it, my girl looks so perfect sitting there in her little green jumper, the light in her reddish curls, that I bend down and take a picture of her, and capture her smile perfectly.

I open my Instagram but decide against posting it, and send the picture to Yuri instead. I wait a few seconds to see if he answers, but he does not; he’s probably too busy packing for his trip anyway. I scroll and see that I got more likes on my play post—I’m up to four hundred—and try to remind myself that I’m not going to get any validation or love from the Internet, that those likes didn’t translate into asses in seats. Fucking social media is like a bad boyfriend who won’t change his ways, no matter how much I beg him to, and the only real love I can try to get right now is from the sweet little lump in the stroller.

My phone dings with a text from my agent, not Yuri. He’s telling me I have been cast as the orphaned sister killer in L.A.—filming starts next week. I assumed I didn’t book it because I sent in the tape weeks ago and forgot all about it. I can’t help but laugh and laugh, which makes my girl smile hard. After being my grandmother and great-great-grandmother, do I really want to stoop to being a murderer, as Stas would put it? I straighten Talia’s little barrette and stroke her face. I do, I do, I do, I know that I do. Somehow, I—we—will do it. I can’t turn it down. And it may just be the break we need. And after that—what do I do? Return to life with Yuri? Ask Mel if I can pick up a few shifts at the Lair? See if I can enroll at the community college? Take Stas by the hand and ride off into the sunset? Pawn the necklace and leave them both for good?