Page 6 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“Two minutes.”

“Glitter incident.”

“With you it’s always a glitter incident.” She doesn’t smile. That’s why she has my whole trust and the other specialists never got a scrap of it. The ones I saw after the accident smiled at me like I was a sad occasion they’d RSVP’d to out of politeness, and they kept handing me the word again like a lollipop, walk by June, walk by the holidays, as if my spine were a subscription that just needed renewing. Natasha read the chart, the T12, the L1, that flat little word incomplete doing so much heavy lifting, and she said, “We’ll find out what your body will give us, and we’ll take every inch it hands over,” and I almost lost it right there on her exam table, because a person had finally decided not to lie to me.

I lock the brakes and transfer from the chair to the mat on my own, palms planted, arms taking the load. She spots without touching, hands hovering, because she watched me flatten an orderly’s foot in month two for grabbing my handles like I was a shopping cart, and she is a fast learner.

“Bars. You call it when the fire wins. Not early to spare my feelings, not late to prove a point.”

The parallel bars are eight feet of steel and they are the summit of the tallest mountain I know. I set my hands, drag my feet under me, and push up through my arms and my hips and the stubborn lit-up parts of my legs that still pick up when I call, and I stand. The pain arrives punctual as ever, a wire pulled taut and hot from the fused place in my back, and I breathe into it instead of away, because the pain is just my body sending word that it’s still here, still mine, still in the fight. Natasha thumbs the timer. I hold. My thighs quake, my palms scream, the burn climbs, and I count in my head, private, unbudgeable.

Forty-one.

The fire takes it at forty-one and I lower down, controlled, into the chair I always leave exactly where my hand knows to find it.

“Forty-one.” There’s the tiniest thing under her voice, as close to proud as she comes. “And last week?”

“Forty.”

“So.”

“So one better.” I’m heaving, soaked to the spine, grinning like I’ve lost my mind, and I have, a little, over a single second. She writes it down without a word about how one is small, without at this rate, without the nighttime arithmetic I run myself into the ground with. She logs it like it matters, because it does. Some people cross finish lines, and I earned one whole second, and it takes up the exact same room in my chest; I’d swear to it in court.

I drive home buzzing, palms working the hand controls, no pedals, the way my car’s been rigged since the accident, streetlight pouring gold over the hood like the glitter followed me out of the building. I cradle the forty-one the whole way, and I’ve already got Poppy’s text half-composed, three exclamation points, zero dignity, because dignity is for people who aren’t this happy.

The apartment door is open.

Not unlocked. Open, hanging four inches into the dark of the hall, and everything in me goes to ice in the space of one breath. My father is a catalogue of disappointments, but a careless lock isn’t one of them, not in this building, not since the night in Sheepshead Bay we don’t discuss. I push in fast. Dark. The place has that hollow feel a room holds when someone left it running, and I know before I reach the lamp. I know it in the roots of my teeth.

His closet stands open. The gray suit is gone, the one he keeps zipped in dry-cleaner plastic like a relic, the one he only puts on when he needs to be a bigger man than he is, and the bare hanger swinging there says everything a note would’ve, minus the courage.

The kitchen next. I don’t want to go, and my hands go without me, reaching to the shelf over the stove for the red tin with the rooster stamped on the side. My mother’s tin. One of exactly four things of hers that made it to me, the others being a scarf, a bad photograph, and her eyes, which I’ve never seen except in a mirror. I lift the lid. The rent’s gone. Six hundred and forty dollars I counted in on Friday, my half and the half of his that’s always mine by the thirty-first, and where it sat there’s nothing, not even a scrawled sorry, because a sorry would’ve meant he held still long enough to mean it.

I sit in the dark with the empty tin in my lap, and I reach for the joke, because the joke is my reflex, the joke is how I stay upright when I can’t. At least he left the rooster. The joke doesn’t take. It slides right off me, no grip, because forty-one seconds ago I was the wealthiest woman in Brooklyn and now I’m doing sums whose answer I already have memorized. I don’t cry. Tears are a budget line, and I’m overdrawn. I set the tin back where it belongs.

Sleep doesn’t come. I lie there with my legs doing their deep post-bars ache, and I work the list, the landlord’s grace period, the school’s hardship fund, the credit card I promised on my mother’s tin I’d cut into confetti. Around one, I give up the pretense and just watch the ceiling and let the fury run, quiet, contained, aimed at the man who dealt away my childhood one hand at a time and is somewhere out there right now doing an encore with money that was never his.

The knock comes at two.

Not the buzzer. The door itself. Three raps, no hurry in them, and nobody knocks on an inner door at two in the morning in this building unless they came up past the dead lobby lock on purpose, and knew it’d be dead. I sit up, heart going like a fist on a table. I swing into the chair by the bed and roll to the door in the dark, no light, because I’m reckless but I’ve never once been stupid, and I put my eye to the peephole.

Two men. Black coats, black gloves, and a way of standing nobody waiting on a friend has ever managed. The one in front swallows the whole fisheye. He isn’t shifting his weight. He isn’t thumbing a phone. He stands like the door is already open, and he’s letting me pretend otherwise as a kindness.

“Miss Plaksin.” Low, an accent worn smooth, coming through the wood like he’s confirming an appointment. “Gavril Plaksin’s daughter.”

I keep quiet. My thumb finds the phone in my lap.

“He asked for you. It’ll go easier if you open the door.”

“See, that’s the problem with that sentence.” My mouth’s off before my judgment can file an objection, the way it always is. “Nothing that goes easier has ever needed a man in a black coat to knock at two in the morning and personally recommend it.”

A beat on his side. Not a puzzled one. He tips his head a fraction toward the second man and back to the lens.

“They didn’t tell me you’d be funny.” He doesn’t say it like a man being charmed. He says it like a man revising a file. “It wasn’t in what I was given.”

“My father undersells me across the board. It’s kind of his signature move.” I hold the classroom register, the voice that keeps twenty-six kids calm when the fire drill turns out to be real smoke. “Where is he?”

“Somewhere he stays until a debt clears.” The big one settles his weight, and the old hallway board takes it without a creak, which tells me he knows how to stand on a floor that talks. “The debt has your name on it now, Miss Plaksin. That’s what I can tell you right now. You can get the rest of the message out here in a hallway, or somewhere with chairs and hot coffee. Mr. Etush prefers the coffee. He thinks hallways are undignified.”