Part Eight: The Night
He slept, that first night, in the chair by the window.
Not because the bed was unavailable — Vera’s things were gone and the bedroom was the bedroom again. He slept in the chair because he wanted to be in the living room, in the main space of the apartment, which was his daughter’s apartment, which felt different now — not lighter exactly, but cleared. The way a room feels after you have opened the windows.
He slept well, which surprised him. He had expected, from the accumulated tension of the day, the kind of sleep that is too full of things to be restful. Instead he slept the way he had not slept in two years — the sleep of someone who is exactly where they are supposed to be.
In the morning, Masha came out of her room and found him in the chair and stopped in the doorway with the expression of someone who is checking whether something is still true.
“You’re still here,” she said.
“I’m still here,” he said.
She came and sat on the couch near the chair, folding her legs under herself the way she had always sat on the couch since she could climb up onto it.
“Are you going to leave again?” she asked.
He looked at his daughter. He thought about the honest answer, which was complicated, because the world was complicated and the future was uncertain and he could not guarantee anything about circumstances that he could not fully predict.
He thought about what she was actually asking, which was not about the future and its contingencies. She was asking about intent. About whether his presence was provisional or foundational.
“I’m not going to leave you,” he said. “That’s different from being able to guarantee I’ll always be in this specific room. But I’m not going to leave you.”
She processed this with the seriousness she brought to things that mattered.
“Okay,” she said. Then: “Can we have breakfast?”
“What do you want?”
“Eggs,” she said. “You used to make eggs with the green things.”
“Herbs,” he said. “Chives.”
“Do we have them?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Let’s find out.”
He went to the kitchen. She followed him, sitting on the counter the way she had always sat on the counter when he cooked, which had always been prohibited by Vera and which he had always allowed because some things are worth the minor inconvenience of a child on a counter.
He opened the refrigerator. The chives were not there, but there were eggs and butter and the other necessary things. He found dried herbs in the cabinet that were not chives but were something — oregano, thyme.
“We’ll improvise,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we make it work with what we have.”
She watched him cook with the focused attention she gave to things she was interested in. She asked questions — why butter and not oil, why this pan and not that one, why you break the egg on the edge and not the flat.
He answered all of them.
The kitchen filled with the smell of eggs and butter and the herbs that were not chives but were something, and outside the window October was doing its October work, and his mother appeared from the hallway in her robe and sat at the table without ceremony, the way she sat at tables that were hers.
Aleksei cooked eggs for three people in his daughter’s kitchen in his daughter’s apartment on the morning after he came home.
