[Quarry Road 01.0] All the Lies We Tell Read online

  They were at it again by the time Ilya got home from work, and something about this set Galina into another rage. Something about doing his own laundry. Paying rent.

  “Niko doesn’t pay a damned cent,” Ilya shouted, loud enough for Niko to hear him all the way upstairs. “If I’m going to pay, he better pay, too!”

  Niko couldn’t even be pissed off that his brother was throwing him under the bus. Three weeks past his high school graduation, Niko was already bored and tired of his job at the car wash. He’d quit two days ago. Hadn’t told his mother yet. Not sure he planned to.

  But Ilya knew. “Of course he’s not going to be able to pay a damned thing without a job.”

  Niko groaned, wishing he hadn’t told his brother about quitting. Things had been kind of messed up between them since Jennilynn died. It had been over a year, and Niko had started to think it was never going back to the way it was before. Nothing would. Across the street, the Harrisons functioned like a broken music box, playing a song that missed all the important notes. He’d hardly spoken to Allie since the night of the funeral and what happened between them. He wanted to, but he didn’t know what to say.

  Now he lay in bed and listened to the sound of his mother’s screaming drifting up through the vents, and he turned to press his face deep into the pillow. He didn’t want to hear her. He didn’t want to worry about her. Didn’t want to think about his brother, or Allie, or anything else about this place.

  At the sound of breaking glass he went downstairs, expecting to find someone bleeding. Ilya was gone. Babulya was locked inside her bedroom with the music turned up high so she could pretend she hadn’t heard anything. Niko found his mother on her hands and knees in the kitchen, weeping over a broken glass vase.

  “This was a wedding present,” she sobbed.

  “Mom, get up. I’ll clean that.” He bent to help her up, thinking he might catch a whiff of alcohol on her, but she didn’t seem to have been drinking. It might be easier if she was, he thought. She might be more predictable.

  Still sobbing, Galina sagged against him. Her fingers clutched at the front of his shirt. Her breath stank, sour and stale. Snot bubbled in one nostril.

  “Promise me, Kolya. Promise me you won’t leave me.”

  Unsettled by her use of his grandmother’s affectionate nickname for him, and more so by this demand, Niko put her in a chair and moved away to get the broom and dustpan. He cleaned up the glass, too aware of her staring and weeping behind him.

  “They all leave me,” she said.

  He turned to dump the glass carefully into a paper bag that he would later take out to the trash. “Why don’t you go to bed or something.”

  From behind him came a sound like rusted gears trying hard to move. A ratcheting, awful noise. He spun to see his mother’s fingernails raking lines in the varnish of the kitchen table. She was no longer crying. Her eyes had gone wide, her mouth gaping.

  “Go to bed. You’re acting crazy.” Niko put the broom and dustpan away. Sick of this shit. Done with it. Done with her—and this house and his brother being a constant dick to him.

  “Don’t you dare talk to me like that!”

  Then, his mother began shrieking, wailing, flying at him with her fists and nails, and Ilya came through the back door to haul her off him, and Niko touched the place on his face where she scratched him.

  There was blood, after all, but not from the broken glass.

  He was gone by the next morning, taking only a duffel bag and the small amount of money from his savings account. First a bus. Then a night or two at the YMCA. He considered joining the military but saw a sign at the local Reform synagogue, a place he’d never been inside, although he knew Babulya was Jewish.

  HERITAGE TRIP

  The rabbi was more understanding than Nikolai deserved, considering he lied through his teeth to get the guy to put him on that plane. Yes, he’d always wanted to visit the Holy Land and find his roots. Yes, he intended to become more observant in the ways of his ancestors. Yes, yes, he would gladly come back and volunteer with the synagogue youth group.

  All of it was lies, but it got him out of Quarrytown. He regretted only one thing: that he left without saying good-bye to Allie.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Theresa had changed.

  The gangly, awkward girl with braces who Ilya remembered torturing with scary stories had become a poised, voluptuous woman, whose dark hair hung in thick ringlets halfway down her back. When she smiled at him, the years of orthodontia proved well worthwhile. She wasn’t smiling at him right now. She looked confused or concerned, or maybe amused. He couldn’t tell, because there currently seemed to be two of her, neither of them quite clear.

  “Hey,” he said. “’Sup?”

  “You’re drunk.” She shook her head and stepped inside the front door, closing it behind her.

  “A little.” He’d had three or four beers, then lost track. He moved aside so she could bustle past him and into the kitchen, where she set the reusable grocery bags on the table. “Just a little.”

  “What if you have to drive to the home?” she demanded, turning with a frown he could definitely see.

  “I’ll call Allie. She’ll drive me. She lives across the street still. Right over there, where she always lived, except when she lived over here. Hey, you used to live here.”

  “I did.”

  He blinked, trying to focus. “Why are you here right now?”

  “I brought food. It’s what you do when someone’s sick.” Theresa paused to look him over. “You look like shit, Ilya. When’s the last time you ate something? Or slept?”

  It had been a rough few days; that was for sure. Learning that Babulya was failing had hit him hard. Hearing that his mother was on her way back to Quarrytown had been worse.

  “Galina’s coming home,” he said by way of explanation.

  Theresa nodded. “Ah. Well, I’d expect her to. Her mother’s dying.”

  He didn’t want to think about that. Ilya peeked into the grocery bags, then at her. “Lots of salad in there.”

  She laughed. “It wouldn’t kill you to eat a vegetable or two. Isn’t that what Babulya always said?”

  “Eat some things green,” Ilya said, imitating Babulya’s Russian accent, and laughed.

  Then all at once, he wasn’t laughing anymore. He wasn’t sure he was crying, but the world was blurring. Maybe spinning. He sat heavily in the chair and put his head in his hands.

  Theresa’s hands came to rest firmly on his shoulders. “It’s hard, I know.”

  She couldn’t possibly know. He shook his head without looking at her. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  “It’s going to be okay, Ilya.”

  Nothing much had been okay for a long time. He could say it was because of the divorce, but that wasn’t true. He missed being married to Allie when he tried hard to make himself wish he’d been a better husband, but truth was he didn’t miss being with her for all the reasons he’d been such a shitty spouse.

  “No.” The word blurted out of him before he could stop it, and the pound of his fist on the table startled them both. “Everything’s going to shit. Nothing sticks. I’ve been trying to make it all work, and it’s not working. Couldn’t keep a marriage, can’t keep my business running . . .”

  “Marriages end,” she said. “Seems to me you’re civil enough to keep working together, which says something, anyway.”

  “Sure, sure, we work together until Go Deep goes so deep it goes under.” He tossed his hands in the air, thinking of the piles of bills, the dwindling number of students, the dip in the economy that had made the dive trips too much of a luxury to be a sure thing.

  “What’s the matter with Go Deep?”

  Ilya shook his head. “Never mind. I don’t want to talk about that, either.”

  Theresa squeezed his shoulders, then stepped away from him. “You should have some water and something to eat. You drank too much.”

  “So what