Dreaming Anastasia (6 page)

The Forest, Midnight

Anastasia

At night, next to me, my matroyshka doll whispers. I am not Vasilisa, and this is no fairy tale, but still she talks, which is a secret that not even Auntie knows. She is the nesting doll my mother gave me—my mother, who believed, even until the end, that there was more to this world than we could see, although I think those thoughts were part of what destroyed us. Because in looking so intently at what might be, my mother did not always see what truly was.

Like the parts of the
matroyshka
doll herself, the truth is sometimes hidden. Layered so deeply, each piece inside the other, that it's often impossible to see. Even so, I do not question the idea of the doll's speaking. I simply listen.

Be sure to sweeten Auntie's tea the way she likes it,
she tells me.
Three sugar cubes should be just right.
Or,
Be kind to Auntie's black cat. Feed it tidbits from your plate when Auntie is not looking.
Or what she tells me tonight, just as I am about to drift off to sleep, hoping the dreams will not come again.

Listen carefully, Anastasia,
she tells me, even though her red painted lips do not move.
You must not sleep tonight. You must stay awake and watch Baba Yaga. Promise me, Anastasia. It is important that you know what she does. That you see what she sees.

Ever so slightly, I turn my head. Across the room in her rocking chair, Auntie stares into the fire, humming some wordless tune I do not know.

I nod. “Yes,” I whisper. “Yes, I will.” Then, gently, I slide my
matroyshka
under the red and blue quilt. Tuck her away where Auntie will not see. And with half-closed eyes, I watch, and I wait.

The fire burns lower, its embers glowing red in the hearth. Auntie rocks in her chair, hums that same wordless tune. The room is warm, close. I think for a moment that I might drift off to sleep. And then the rocking stops.

Auntie reaches with both hands into the front pocket of the apron she wears over her dress. Her huge, wrinkled, brown hands—the same hands that hold the mugs of sweet tea I bring her. And from inside that pocket, she brings forth a skull.

In the life I used to have, I might have gasped. Certainly my stomach still clenches, and my skin feels flushed with the panic that never really leaves, just recedes from the surface and lets me seem braver than I am. Although in my old life, I would have screamed or run, I do none of those things. Instead, I watch.

She holds the skull, its surface smooth, bone bleached and pale like the twelve skulls that surround this hut. Skulls that stand on wooden spikes in even intervals and remind me, even when I try to pretend that this place is now my home, that I am somewhere I do not want to be.

The skull floats into the fire, the flickering flames dancing in and out of its empty eye sockets.

“
Ya khachu videt!
” Auntie calls to it.

Three times she repeats it. “
Ya khachu videt.
” I want.

I think for a moment of my mother—how she scolded my sister Olga just before Christmas the year I turned thirteen. The year Olga desperately wanted a pair of diamond earbobs. “Do not say that you
want
something,” she told Olga. “Polite young ladies say, ‘I'd like,' not ‘I want.'” And I almost laugh aloud as I imagine my mother standing here, scolding Baba Yaga the way she once reprimanded Olga.

Only then I remember. My mother is dead.

Inside the skull, the flames glow red, then yellow, then blue. Stronger and stronger, they have now become a single ball of fire that swirls and opens.
Ya khachu videt.
I want.

And then, inside the flames, I see him. The man with blue eyes who was there the day I disappeared. The man who was not the one I expected. Not at all. The one whose blue eyes, ever watchful, ever serious, filled with tears as my family died, one by one.

What did he know as he stood there? What had he been told? Did he know the lies I had been fed? Or was he betrayed as well?

“The time is coming,” Auntie says. “Soon.”

Ya khachu videt.
I want. But what I want, I am not certain.

Wednesday, 2:00 am

Anne

It's the middle of the night, and my parents are sleeping. I, however, am huddled in my brother David's bed, clutching so tightly at his navy blue comforter—the one that still smells faintly of boy sweat and Lucky cologne—that I think the feeling is going to leave my fingers. I'd curled up here a couple of hours ago, chasing sleep. Sometimes, this helps. Neither Mom nor Dad has had the heart to change this room yet, even after almost two years—as though changing it might erase David even more than he's already been erased. In fact, for a while they didn't even turn off his cell-phone service—not until they got the bill and realized I was calling his phone two or three times a day just to hear his voice when it flipped over to voice mail.

But right now, I'm not sleeping. Far from it. Oh, I was. But now I'm sitting bolt upright, willing my pulse to settle and failing miserably.

She's invaded my dreams again: the girl with the long, brown hair and the white dress spattered with blood. Around her, like last time, people were dying. A family, I realize now. Probably her family—a man and a woman, who I assume were her parents, and some other girls and a boy. Even a couple of dogs. All of them executed. All of them bleeding and screaming and dying.

I still couldn't understand what they were saying, only this time, I did pick out a name.
Anastasia
. The woman I guess was her mother screamed it as she tried to reach for her.
Anastasia.
Over and over as those same two giant, wrinkly brown hands came down from that black cloud that appeared out of nowhere and grabbed her—carried her off as her mother fell to the floor.

But that's not what has me sitting here, certain that I'm not going to fall back asleep anytime soon.

This time, there was one other person in the room. He was standing behind a pillar, clothed in a brown robe. A wooden cross hung from his neck, and his brown hair was long and disheveled. When he lifted his head and stared straight at me, his deep blue eyes burning with anger, fear, and tears, I didn't have to listen for someone to call his name.

I already knew it.
Ethan.

Wednesday, 2:05 am

Ethan

I awake with a jolt, the mark on my arm burning. It's all happening faster than I ever imagined it would. Finding Anne has set it all in motion. The mark. The lacquer box that her mother believes came to her through a simple sale, which was, in truth, not simple at all. The hut that moved in ways that only the right girl—the girl who is Anne—could see. The dreams we've both had now of that day in 1918. The moment that Anne's sleeping self looked up and saw me looking back.

All this is good. It is what I have worked toward for so many years. She is the one. I am absolutely certain.

Only there is one problem. She is absolutely nothing like what I imagined.

And I—well, I am behaving nothing like I imagined either. And as I am no longer the inexperienced boy who once crouched in that filthy basement and watched the Romanovs die, said the words that Brother Viktor taught him so that Baba Yaga would come for Anastasia and at least one life would be saved, I would expect things to work differently.

But they're not.

Because, as I've been saying, I'm a
zalupa
. In more than one lifetime, by the way, if my fashion sense and regrettable hairstyle from the dream I've just had are any indication.

Also, because this girl is the most frustrating female I have met in a very long while. For me, that's considerable—long-term relationships are out of the question since I am—well, much more long-term than most.

Even so, I had thought that over the years, I'd figured out some things about women. It is clear now that I was very wrong about that.

“Absolutely not,” she told me this evening when I asked her to sit down with me at the coffee shop. “No. Absolutely not.” This, of course, after she had asked me if I was following her.

Of course I am following her. I have to follow her. It just hadn't occurred to me that I was so clumsy at it that she'd have noticed.

Still, the time is here, and Anne's power—the power she does not yet know she has—is growing. So I fumble for my cell phone on the table next to my bed and punch in the proper numbers.

I wait as it rings.

Wednesday, 2:30 am

Anne

I pull David's comforter tighter around me and wait for my laptop to power up. I'm back in my own room now, sitting on my own bed, and my pulse has settled back down to something resembling normal, but I've taken the comforter with me. The weird dreams have come along too. And so, it seems, has Buster, who pads in, looking sleepy, and curls up at my feet. The vibration of his purr tickles my legs.

I guess if I'm going to dream about a witch, I might as well do it with my cat keeping me company.

As for the girl—well, at least now I know her name. Anastasia. I don't have a clue why she's haunting my dreams or why an oddly dressed Ethan just appeared in the middle of the last one, but at least I know who she is.

I log on to the server. I'm pretty certain the Internet is not going to unearth any information on my new mystery buddy, but I Google
Ethan Kozninsky
just to be sure. Nothing.

So I type in the name
Anastasia
—or actually,
Anastasia Romanov.
I'm not an expert or anything, but I know a little.

As long as I can remember, my mother's had this—well,
thing
about Russia. And not just Russian lacquer boxes like the one at the Jewel Box. (Although I'm sure her affection for it would dim a bit if she saw the house on the cover move like I did.) Over the years, she's gone through her Russian cooking phase, which ended after a disastrous episode with borscht; her Russian music phase, which I think is why she originally signed me up for ballet; and more recently, her Russian history and literature phase.

The summer before I turned thirteen, she plowed her way through
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
. And during one of her “Let's improve Anne's cultural background” missions, she'd presented me with a copy of
The History of Nicholas and Alexandra.

But that summer I was more interested in whether or not David's football friends thought I looked cute in my turquoise and white, two-piece swimsuit than in reading about some horribly doomed family from back in the horse-and-carriage days. So I flipped a few pages, looked at the chapter headings, and moved on. I remember some of it: last of the Russian royal families, creepy religious advisor, daughter named Anastasia, tragic ending. Had I known that a few years later, I'd be reliving their assassinations, I might have paid better attention.

I press enter. Within seconds, I'm scrolling through website after website proposing that somehow Anastasia didn't die with the rest of her family. What is this girl? The Russian Elvis?

Not surprisingly, no one seems to be proposing that, instead of getting splattered on the floor with everyone else, she was somehow carried away by a giant pair of ugly hands.

At my feet, Buster yawns, punctuated by a little half-meow, then curls up tighter and continues to purr.

I take a breath, click on another entry, and continue reading.

Wednesday, 2:30 am

Ethan

I have found her, Brother.” The words tumble from me as soon as Viktor answers my call, his voice heavy and tired even though it is the middle of the day in St. Petersburg.

“The signs, Etanovich?” he says after a brief silence. “They are there?”

“The signs are right, Viktor. There is no mistaking it. I have found her. Anne. Her name is Anne.” I take a breath, shove my emotions—more raw than I had realized—back below the surface. “She is here, Viktor. Right outside Chicago.”

For a moment, Viktor stays silent again.

“Chicago?” he says then, and something I can't quite identify edges into his tone. “You are in Chicago? I had no idea, Brother. It was not in the report I received from our contacts. I know we have not spoken, but I thought—I had understood you were still in Paris, Ethan.”

He has shifted to my Americanized name. And there is still something in his tone that I know I should attend to, but my story continues to pour from me. “Paris was this summer, Brother. A Slavic languages professor I had met in Budapest was there. He helped me gain access to some documents that—”

“Documents?” Viktor interrupts. “What documents? You have told me nothing of this, Brother.” And something I
can
identify edges into his voice—anger.

This time, it's my turn to stay silent. His attitude of superiority is nothing new. It's how our relationship began and—despite the many years that have passed—how it continues. Still, an uneasiness—the same tiny shiver of concern I'd felt a few seconds ago—slips its way up my spine and burrows in. There is indeed something else there, just below the surface.

Even so, what I do next takes me by surprise. I lie.

“The papers were nothing, Viktor,” I tell him. “The man was a fraud. I stayed in Paris a few more weeks and then headed to the States.”

He clears his throat, seems to consider what I've said. “A fraud, eh? It has happened before, Brother. Remember Rome? No matter. But tell me, how did you end up in Chicago? How did you find her?” His tone is lighter now, but the sense of distraction remains.

“Just luck, Brother,” I lie again. “Just luck. I had not been to Chicago for a long time. At the ballet, I saw this girl. I—I felt something, and so I followed her, and now, now that I have met her, I know. The spark was there, Viktor. She is the one.” Although I have begun my answer in a lie, it ends in truth.

“If this is so, Etanovich,” Viktor says, “then you know what you must do. We have waited a long time, Brother—a very long time. Be certain you are correct. When you are, I will be waiting.”

“Yes, Brother,” I say—and realize I am talking to dead air.