Page 30 of My Wedding Night Massacre

20

Pavlina

His face.

That’s all my brain produces for the first three seconds. Not a thought, not a word, just the fact of it. His face, without the beard, without the glasses, exactly as I’ve been rebuilding it from memory for three years, standing at the end of the aisle in a dark suit with his hands at his sides and his grey eyes on me.

I don’t move. My body simply stops participating.

The flowers are still in my hands. I’m aware of them distantly, the stems, the slight dampness of them against my palms. My posture hasn’t changed. Three years of training hold my body upright even when the mind has gone completely dark, which is what’s happening right now, the lights going out one by one behind my eyes while the performance stays running on its own.

He spoke. I heard the words. They landed in the correct order, and I understood, processed, and filed them. This wedding cannot proceed. Pavlina Lyubimtseva is already married. To me. I heard all of it, and my brain received it the way it receives things when it’s decided to stop believing what it’s being told, as sound, as syllables, as a sequence with no weight attached.

This is the pills. That’s the first coherent thought that forms. This is the stress, and the dress, and ten days of counting down to something I never wanted, and Denis at the window waiting for my car, and the hallucination three nights ago that felt more real than anything has felt in three years. My mind has finally done what I always knew it might do if I pushed it far enough. It’s broken. It’s given me him, right here, in the worst possible moment, as solid and present and impossible as he was in my bedroom.

I look at his face and think: not real.

Then I look at my father.

My father’s face is doing something I have never seen it do in twenty-seven years of knowing it. Not the controlled cold of the office, not the performed warmth of the early years, not even the absolute blankness he used when he told me sentiment was a luxury. His face right now has fear in it. Contained, managed, already being pushed back behind the wall, but there, unmistakably there, for two full seconds before he gets it under control.

My father is afraid.

My father is never afraid.

The congregation has moved from silence into sound, a murmur spreading row by row toward the back of the church. I can hear it without turning around. Two hundred people registering something that doesn’t fit the event they were invited to. Somewhere behind me, a chair scrapes. Voices, low and urgent. Near the left wall, two of my father’s men have shifted position, a movement I catch in my peripheral vision, subtle but not subtle enough. The whole room is reorganizing itself around what just happened, and my father is watching it unfold from the front row, his jaw set and his hands very still.

He’s doing the calculation. I know that face. I’ve been watching him calculate my entire life.

I look back at the hallucination.

He hasn’t moved. He’s standing at that respectful distance from the altar, composed, waiting, his eyes on me now that I’ve turned fully toward him. Grey eyes. His eyes. I’ve spent three years looking at a child with those eyes and telling myself to stop looking, giving myself thirty seconds, and then making myself put it away. I know those eyes. I’ve had them memorized longer than I’ve been trying to forget them.

The flowers are going to fall. I realize this before it happens, my grip on the stems loosening without instruction from any conscious part of me. I tighten my hands around them instead, holding on because it’s the only physical thing I can make my body do right now, hold on.

He’s not real. He can’t be real. I watched him bleed out on concrete through a car window, and I have been surviving that image for three years. I am not going to let my mind unmake it now, in this church, in this dress, because that would be worse than anything. That would be the cruelest thing my own brain has ever done to me.

But my father is afraid.

My father does not get afraid of hallucinations.

The thought sits in the middle of everything else and doesn’t dissolve. I look at it. I look at my father’s face again, at the set of it, the controlled fury underneath the control, and I think about what that means. What it would have to mean. I’ve been living in his house my entire life, and in the last three years, I have come to know every version of his face, and none of them have ever looked like this. My father is afraid of something real.

Something real is standing in the aisle.

My throat closes.

Movement to my right. I turn, not because I’ve decided to, but because my body tracks motion without asking. David Gachev is moving.

Not toward Slava. Not toward my father. Not toward me. He steps back from the altar. He looks like a man who has looked at a situation, reached a conclusion, and accepted it without drama. He straightens his jacket, one hand smoothing the front of it. A small adjustment, neat and final.

He looks at the front rows first, not at anyone in particular. And then, he looks at me.

It isn’t pity. It isn’t the look of a man who has lost something he wanted. He was never sentimental about this, and he told me as much at dinner when he said he had no interest in pretending. There’s something in his face that lands closer to recognition, the nod of a man who has just had a suspicion confirmed, and underneath it, just barely, something that might be relief.

“I won’t be part of this,” he says. Clearly, levelly, loud enough for the front rows to catch every word. “I think we all know what this is.”

He looks at my father for exactly one second. My father looks back. Whatever passes between them in that second doesn’t have words.