Page 74 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Yes."

"Because of me."

"No." I come into the room. "Sergei — no. Look at me. It isn't⁠—"

"I told her about the gate." His voice cracks straight down the middle. "She asked me, and I told her, and I told Andrei about it afterward because I thought I'd been helpful, and she asked about the blind spot, and I told her about the post and I⁠—"

And then he does cry, all at once, the way something gives way.

I do not know what to do.

I have never known what to do. Six years in a nursery I was not welcome in, and four years in a corridor, and here is my son coming apart at the edge of a bed with a piece of paper in his hands, and each impulse I have is telling me to explain something to him.

So I do the only thing I actually know how to do, which is the thing she taught me on a floor in a room in his house days ago.

I get down. All the way down, onto the floor beside the bed, so I am lower than he is.

I do not say it's all right, because it isn't.

"Two hands," I say.

He looks at me, wrecked.

"Two hands, Sergei. Count them."

"...two."

"Two. Five things you can see."

He gets to four, stops, and can't find the fifth, and I wait and do not supply it because she never supplies it.

"You," he says finally.

"Me." I keep going despite the crack in my voice. "Four things you can hear."

We do it three times. It takes about eleven minutes, and at the end of it he is breathing, and I am sitting on the floor of his bedroom with my back against the frame, and he comes down onto the floor beside me, puts his head against my arm, and stays there.

"She's not coming back," he says.

"I don't know."

"That means no."

"It means I don't know," I say, "and I am not going to lie to you, because she didn't."

He thinks about that.

"She wrote about you," he says. "In the letter."

"I know."

"You read it?"

"I read it. I should not have, and I did, and I am telling you rather than letting you find out." I look at the wall. "You may be angry about that. You would be entitled."

Sergei considers this with total gravity, as he does everything.

"It's okay," he decides. "She'd have wanted you to read that part."