Page 8 of My Wedding Night Massacre

I end up on the window seat in the bedroom, knees pulled up, watching the glass go grey. I’m still in the dress, or most of it. Nadia had tried to get me to change. I’d let her take the veil and the shoes, but that was as far as I could go. She’d accepted it without comment, which is one of the many reasons I’ve always loved her.

My father’s footsteps stopped moving an hour ago. He’s either sleeping or he’s left. I don’t care enough to determine which.

The loop keeps on running.

Slava on the concrete. The window. The blood.

Nadia’s hand finds mine in the grey light and stays there. Compared to me, she’s warm and steady. I let her hold me because it’s the only warm thing I have right now, and I’m not too proud to hold onto it.

Outside, the city is starting to move, early trucks and the first suggestion of traffic, New York pulling itself back to vertical the way it always does, indifferent to what ended inside it last night.

I know that at some point, my father will come back with his fake-warm eyes and plans for me. He’ll push me to move on with my life because he doesn’t understand that Slava was my life.

With him gone, I’m as good as dead.

6

Pavlina

I’m awake before I remember why, and then I remember why.

The room is full of pale morning light that doesn’t commit to anything yet. I’m on the bed still in yesterday’s slip dress, and for one disorienting second before full consciousness arrives, I think I’m in the hotel. I think I’m waking up next to him. I think last night was something that happened to someone else.

Then I see the wedding dress on the chair by the window, laid out with the care of someone who didn’t know what else to do with it. White and intact. Like nothing happened inside it.

I stare at it until the room comes fully into focus around me, until the silence of the house settles back into my bones, until I remember every single thing I spent the night trying not to remember.

He’s gone. Slava is gone. The most alive person I’ve ever known is gone, and I’m in my childhood bedroom in my father’s house, and my father’s already on the phone through the wall.

“...the east properties transfer by Friday, there’s no reason to delay...” A pause. “...Yeleshev’s men will fall in line. Men always do when the head is gone...”

One moment I’m on the bed, the next I’m across the room, and I can’t tell how I got there.

The wedding dress is in my hands before I know I’ve crossed the room. I throw it. It hits the wall with a sound that’s nowhere near big enough for what’s inside me right now, so I grab the water glass from the nightstand and throw that too. It shatters against the dresser, glass spraying across the surface, across the floor. The sound of it hits me somewhere behind the sternum, and I feel the rage surge up to meet it, hot and directionless, looking for somewhere to go.

Nadia appears in the doorway. I see her, and I wait, breath heaving, for her to say my name, to tell me to stop and to calm down, or to simply cross the room, put her hands on my shoulders, talk me back from wherever I’m standing. Instead, she stays in the doorway with her hands at her sides. She looks at me but doesn’t move. Something about that, about being seen and not stopped, about someone finally letting me be exactly as destroyed as I am, takes the last thing that was holding me together and snaps it clean.

I take the lamp off the nightstand and throw it at the mirror.

The mirror comes apart in a sound that fills the entire room. Glass explodes across the dresser, the floor, the window ledge. The frame tears off the wall and I don’t wait for it to fall, I’m already at the dresser, both hands gripping the top drawer, pulling it out and hurling it at the opposite wall. It splits. I pull the next one. Clothes spill everywhere, old things, childhood things, the remnants of a life I was supposed to have walked away from yesterday morning in a white dress heading toward something better.

I pull the third drawer and scream.

It starts as his name and stops being a word somewhere in the middle of it. It’s everything underneath his name, everything that’s been locked in my chest since I saw his body. Slava not moving, Slava so still, Slava who was never still in his life is suddenly entirely, completely still. I scream until my throat tears, but I keep going because the alternative is silence, and I can’t bear silence right now. Silence is where reality lives, and I’m not ready for it. I’m not ready.

I hear my father’s voice through the wall, calm and businesslike, talking about property transfers while I fall apart on the other side of it. I think about Papa’s warm eyes, those eyes I trusted for twenty-seven years, the pride in his voice when he said my name in front of two hundred people, and I stood there glowing like an idiot because I’d spent my whole life waiting for him to take pride in me.

I pull the curtain rod off the wall. It takes the bracket with it and punches a hole in the plaster, dust falling. I stand in the middle of the room holding it and think about the last time I saw Slava alive. Standing in the ballroom, drink in hand, looking around the room the way he always did. I’d caught his eye, and he smiled. He always made me feel like I was the only fixed point in the room, like everything else was background noise. I’d smiled and looked away.

I looked away.

I didn’t say it. I had a hundred moments, and I didn’t take any of them because we had time, because tomorrow existed, because I was twenty-seven years old, newly married, and the rest of my life was supposed to be full of mornings where I could say it as many times as I wanted.

I drop the curtain rod.

My knees go next. The floor comes up, and I let it. I stop fighting it. I sit down in the middle of the wreckage I’ve made, glass, clothes, plaster dust, and the curtain pooled around me like a collapsed tent. I press both hands over my mouth, and I breathe. Just breathe. In and out, in and out, until the screaming in my head quiets enough to hear the room.

My throat is raw. My hands are shaking. My father’s voice continues through the wall without interruption.