1.6 We go back east, where all the secrets are (part 2)
I was flooded with relief. At finally knowing the truth, and at knowing that Vova hadn’t pulled the trigger. Relief too, and especially, that Sasha understood how unfair this secret felt to me...
On our last morning in Boston, Sasha and I decided to go for a walk as final prep for the road trip was underway. Uncle Paddy and Emma were loading the car, Aunt Luda was packing us lunches in the kitchen, and cousins Iosif and Maxim were chasing Luka around the back yard one last time.
Sasha and I were pretty good friends for cousins who usually saw each other once a year, always picking up easily where we’d left off the last time. We hadn’t talked about Venya’s revelation the night before, or any of the other family mysteries I wondered about. I hadn’t even told her that Vladimir had written me a letter. Partly because I knew the only permissible mention of his name was when the photo albums where he appeared as a child were out, and partly because I didn’t want her to feel bad if he hadn’t written to her too.
I was unaware that this pattern was about to change even as we set off down the block. I’m not sure what I was thinking.
Maybe it was becoming clearer that Emma would tell me as little as she possibly could, forever, and I had to take matters into my own hands. I had no idea that she’d ever been to Las Vegas, let alone having “fucked off” there, whatever Venya meant by that. Her story, as told by her, was that when she graduated from high school in Boston, she wanted to see California. So she went to San Diego, where she got a job as a waitress at The Coffee Cup, a diner, where my dad was working as a manager. He’d just gotten out of the navy and rather than go home, he stayed in California, working and going to college part time. They eventually married and, when I was about a year old, they packed up and drove to my dad’s hometown in Ohio, where we’d all been ever since. But the way my mom reacted to Venya suggested he’d revealed a secret, and I added it to my mental tally. Maybe I was tired of this math, the number of mysteries always going up.
Or maybe it was becoming clearer that, even if Emma did tell me her version of events, it didn’t mean they were the whole story. Not only did I believe what Venya said about Ma’s behavior — her cleaning sprees were always bad news — I understood exactly how he felt about it. He didn’t make excuses for her, unlike other adults, and maybe I’d gotten a little taste of feeling less alone in the world, and I wanted more of that. Whatever it was, I hadn’t planned it, but suddenly a question was coming out of my mouth.
“Sasha, who is Vova?”
“You know who Vova is,” Sasha said, a hint of irritation in her voice. “He’s our moms’s brother.”
“Yes,” I said, “I knew that.” I understood her irritation, I was hedging my bets. “What I mean is — ” I paused, drilling down to find the right question: “Where is Vova?”
“I’m not allowed to tell you,” she said. “Your mother doesn’t want you to know.”
“My mother told you not to tell me?”
“No,” Sasha said, “My mother said I can’t tell you because your mother doesn’t want you to know.”
So Aunt Luda was in on it too. I wasn’t surprised. And I didn’t blame her, or only a little bit. You couldn’t expect Luda to defy mom code or sister code, even if she didn’t think this needed to be a secret. Sasha and I took a few more steps and then I came to a stop. “It’s not fair, Sasha,” I said. “You get to know. Your brothers know, your dad knows, everybody who lives here knows! Why does everybody get to know but me?”
Sasha had kept walking but now she stopped and turned around. I could see the struggle on her face. It wasn’t fair to put her in this position, I knew. But I was getting desperate.
Sasha was looking at her feet, looking at the trees, thinking. She turned away from me again and I studied the single blonde braid snaking down her back, her hair just like our mothers wore in so many of their childhood photos. My hair wasn’t blonde — I got thick brown hair from my dad’s side of the family — and it wasn’t long, and my mother never braided it. Sasha and I had so much in common, and so little too. Families are strange that way.
She was still thinking. I opened my mouth, hoping to say the right thing to make up her mind, then I closed it again. Sasha was never mean but if you pushed her, she could get really stubborn. If I pissed her off, it’d be over. I could only wait.
She turned around again and sighed. “He’s in a hospital.”
“A mental hospital?”
“Yes.”
“And why is that a secret? Ma goes to the mental hospital all the time, nobody cares, that’s not a secret.”
“You can’t tell anyone I told you,” she said.
“I won’t, Sasha.”
“Especially your mother and especially my mother.”
“I promise,” I said.
“He’s not in a regular mental hospital,” she said. “He’s in a mental hospital that is also a prison.”
“A prison. Because …?”
“Because he committed a crime.” Sasha resumed walking and I hurried to catch up to her. “When he was seventeen years old, he robbed a liquor store with two other kids.”
A robbery wasn’t good, of course, but I was still puzzled why this was such a big secret. Before I could frame the question, Sasha said, “The liquor store owner was killed in the robbery.”
“He was killed how?”
“He was shot.”
“By Vova?”
“No,” Sasha said. “One of the other guys did it, not Vova.”
Thank god.
“The bullet went right through the guy’s eye,” Sasha continued, pointing to her own eye, her hand in the shape of a gun, “and killed him instantly.”
I stopped walking again, feeling the shock in my gut. Sasha stopped too, and let me take that in.
“The liquor store owner was a former cop, it was big news, it was all over the newspapers. Russians/commies, all that, you know,” she said.
“But Vova didn’t do it, right?”
“No,” Sasha shook her head. “He didn’t. I think a guy named Frankie did it. But Vova was there, so he was charged with murder too. They all got life in prison.”
“Okay,” I said. I felt a little bit sick.
“And then Vova went crazy in prison. So they sent him to the prison mental hospital, where he’s been ever since.”
“And that’s it, the whole story?”
Sasha nodded.
I was flooded with relief. At finally knowing the truth, and at knowing that Vova hadn’t pulled the trigger. Relief too, and especially, that Sasha had understood how unfair these secrets felt to me, and how badly I needed answers.
I felt as well a slight bit of glee that I’d found a way over the wall Emma had constructed around this information, but I was still too busy trying to take in what Sasha had told me to enjoy that feeling very much.
We kept walking, silently turning the last corner back toward Sasha’s house. After a minute, I said, “Thank you for telling me, Sasha.”