Page 22 of My Wedding Night Massacre

The engine is off. The street is quiet, the usual quiet that settles at four in the morning in a residential neighborhood, nothing moving, the city doing its minimal version of rest. I have the photograph in my hand, taken from her desk before I left. Instead of starting the car and driving away, I’m looking at it.

She was asleep when I left. Completely under, breathing slow and even, her face relaxed and neutral. I stood at the edge of the bed and looked at her for longer than was necessary, then I took the photograph from the desk because it was face down. It was more out of curiosity than anything else because I wanted to know what was face down. Then I left.

I should’ve left an hour earlier. I should never have gone through the window in the first place. I made a promise to Misha that I would think about it properly, and what I did instead was go through a window at one in the morning while she was on sleeping pills. In my defense, I had no idea she was taking the pills. But still, the way she invited me in, the way she embraced me… It felt real.

Despite all that, Misha’s going to have something to say about that, and I know that whatever he says, he’s going to be right.

None of that is what I’m thinking about now.

She called me by my name.

Not in the way you call someone’s name in a dream, vague and directed at nothing. She said it, looking me directly in the eye, her hand gripping the front of my shirt. And then she kissed me, told me not to talk, and asked me to stay. I did just that. I stayed.

She thought I was a hallucination. That’s the part I keep returning to. She said as much, not in words but in everything around the words, the way she touched me like she was taking something before it disappeared, the way she said if this is the last one she was going to take it. She’s had versions of this before. That’s what it meant. She’s been dreaming me up for three years, making me up out of grief, and when I came through the window, she didn’t even question it.

She didn’t know she was touching someone real.

I sit with that for a long time in the dark car on the quiet street.

If she’s been grieving me for three years, if she’s been having hallucinations of me out of grief, then the version of events I’ve been carrying since the wedding night needs to be addressed again. Needs to be taken out and looked at in daylight rather than kept in the container I’ve been keeping it in, the one I built in the early months when the only way to survive the loss was to make it her fault.

I know what I saw. I know she was gone before the lights went out. I know what I concluded. I also know that I’ve been in this city for two weeks and I’ve seen her twice now, once through a car window and once in her own bedroom, and neither time has she looked like a woman who got what she wanted. She looks like a woman who has been surviving something for three years. She looks like someone who fell asleep on my chest like it was the only place she’d ever felt safe, and she was asleep before I’d finished processing that.

I look down at the photograph in my hand.

It’s small, the kind you put in a frame on a desk, the kind that means something to the person who put it there. It’s of Pavlina and a child. She’s holding him, her face turned slightly toward him. There’s something on her face that’s different from every other expression I’ve seen on her in two weeks of surveillance, different from the composed public version, the hollowed out moving version, and even the unguarded sleeping version. She looks present. Actually present, not the performance of it.

The child is maybe two years old. Dark blond hair. He’s looking at the camera with an expression that’s so familiar it stops my breathing.

I knew he had grey eyes. I read it in the report. But seeing an actual photo of him hits differently.

I look at the photograph for a long time. I look at the dark blond hair, the grey eyes, and the shape of the face that I know. I’ve seen it in mirrors my whole life. I let myself finish the thought I’ve been refusing to finish since the intelligence report mentioned Pavlina had a son, two years old with dark hair and grey eyes. I read it and then moved on because I didn’t want to acknowledge it.

I don’t move on now.

I do the acknowledging.

I count the months between the wedding night and now. It’s not needed because the answer is right in front of me.

Pavlina’s child looks like me.

Not approximately, not vaguely, not in the way children sometimes accidentally resemble people they’ve never met. He looks exactly like me. The coloring, the eyes, the shape of the jaw that I can see even in a small photograph in poor light, all of it mine, all of it unmistakable to anyone who has ever looked at a photograph of me at that age.

I think about what it means that she kept this photograph on her desk. Face down, which means she looks at it when she needs to and puts it away when she can’t. I think about what it means that she’s been in her father’s house for three years, in the house of the man who killed my family and took everything, raising a child who looks exactly like the man she believes is dead.

I think about how there was no sign of the child in that same house, how she was alone in her room without even a toy around.

The entire situation could be even more complicated than I initially thought. I’m not lucky enough to face a straightforward problem. Of course, there has to be a curveball. There always is.

I put the photograph in my jacket pocket and sit very still in the dark for a while, feeling the weight of something enormous settling into place. It’s not a revelation as much as it is a confirmation of something I already knew deep down but had been refusing to name.

I have a son.

16

Pavlina

I wake with his hands on my skin.