First Papers (82 page)

Authors: Laura Z. Hobson

I’m going to, she thought. Maybe tomorrow. And I’ll get Eli or Joan to take a snapshot. If the snap comes out, I could put it in my next letter. She tried to imagine Garry seeing it, opening a letter and seeing her face, and then looking at her.

She turned away from the mirror, and went downstairs. She wanted something, even though she wasn’t hungry.
I’d like mine in a glass.

“We’ll have some tea,” she said to Shag and put the water up to boil.

When she finally finished her Lit paper, it was past three and she went to bed. Still no sign of her mother and father. She slept hard, and when she sprang awake at the sound of their voices, she had a momentary feeling that it was the sleeping porch again, as on that dawning day in spring when they were out there with the flag. This time, too, it was just getting light, but they were nowhere to be seen.

For a moment she was still, listening, straining to hear. Their voices were agitated, just like that other time at daybreak, but they were downstairs in the kitchen, not out on the porch. They were not having a fight, and though her mother was in tears, it wasn’t the usual hurt-feelings kind, or even the same as her weeping over Garry.

Fee got out of bed and reached for her bathrobe. She didn’t have to sneak halfway down the stairs any longer; she could walk down and let them see her openly. Now only her father was talking, flinging words out, something about a
coup d’état,
about Kerensky fleeing for his life, the moderates being shot, the extremists triumphant—

The kitchen door was open, and they were both there. Something in the way they sat, in the way they looked at each other halted Fee on the threshold, where they did not see her.

“And now we’ll see a terrorism,” her father shouted, “now the whole world will see such a terrorism as the czars never dreamed of.”

“Perhaps—”

He wouldn’t listen. “Six months of hope, then the Bolsheviki take over.”

“Perhaps it will fail too. Maybe Trotsky and Lenin—”

He cut her off once more. “This time it is real. We are finished.”

“Stiva, perhaps—somehow—”

“There is no ‘perhaps.’ There is no ‘somehow.’” He sounded like a giant shouting in anguish. Then suddenly there was silence.

Fee stood motionless, still in the doorway, still unwilling to go in. Her father suddenly put his head down, covering his face with his hands, right over his glasses. His shoulders were tight and high, and they were shaking. She remembered the time in spring when she saw him crying for the first time in all her life.

He spoke again, and this time his voice broke. “My poor Russia,” he said. “My poor Russia.”

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

cover design by Michel Vrana

978-1-4532-3877-6

This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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