Page 89 of Vasily the Hammer

All three of us in a bed. It’s too small for us all, what with the way Artom sprawls and Vasily is just Vasily, but when I issue a stern warning that no funny business is going to happen, Vasily looks at me like I’m crazy for even mentioning it.

I wake in the middle of the night to discover Vasily is curled up around Artom, Artom all snuggly with him. I’m not jealous ofeither of them and I’m happy that so far, they’re two peas in a pod, but oh my God, what a traitor.

It’s a reminder, though, that this is it, this is what I chose. Vasily is inextricably in our lives now. And as much as I keep falling for him like a sex-addicted dimwit, I can’t just move on like everything is fine, all’s well that ends well.

It’s another teary goodbye when Dima loads everyone up in his car, promising Vasily repeatedly that he’ll drive ten miles under the speed limit as Vasily fusses with the seatbelt on the booster seat even though he’s never touched a booster seat in his life. His son is five, but we’re giving him all the new dad allowances. I even give him the forty minutes it takes Dima to drive them to the airport and then let us know they arrived safely before I say, “We need to talk,” with a crook of my finger for him to follow me into our bedroom.

My tone is enough for him to grope his pockets for his pills, but he’s wearing pocketless board shorts despite the arctic temperatures of Denver in February.

It’s as good a place as any to start when the door clicks behind him.

“Dima says that after you took over Flagstaff, you quit all the drugs and the smoking.”

“Oh. Yeah,” he says hesitantly, clearly surprised that this is the private conversation.

Because it isn’t, not really. It’s just a starting point. “So you could run things better?”

“Yeah, I guess.” That doesn’t sound honest, though.

“You’re not schizophrenic anymore?”

There’s a barely perceptible grimace. I don’t need to believe everything Dima says; I just need to bring it back to Vasily to watch his face for confirmation.

“I was schizophrenic,” he says firmly. “I had schizophrenic episodes. But I haven’t had any in a long time. I think I’m past that now.”

I nod. Whether having episodes is the same as having the actual disorder, I don’t know and it doesn’t matter now. “But you have migraines?”

“I have shots for that. They work really well.”

“But you took heroin, instead.”

“Right, right, right, but not like that,” he says urgently, his hands waving like the very question has put him in a panic.

He likes to do this thing with me where he walks toward me just right that I instinctively step back. I try it on him now, knowing that the full foot height difference makes me far less intimidating. Still, I crowd him with enough conviction that he takes one step back, then two, then bumps into the bed and automatically sits.

Super effective. Huh.

“I promise I’m clean.” He swallows. “I—I’ve felt some withdrawal from it, but I can’t help that. I just...” He gropes his pockets again, showing me that he doesn’t have the tin of pills he always had in LA.

“And those pills?” I prompt.

“They’re all prescribed.”

“I know. I do. But does your doctor know you walk around with them all the time, that you pop them like candy? That the second you start to feel the slightest twinge of stress, you take one?”

He scowls. “They’re as needed. And it’s not the ‘slightest twinge.’ Shit is falling apart, and I’m talking like our plan to take down Kostya and Tony is going to work, but maybe it won’t, maybe I’m... maybe I’m going to die in Flagstaff.”

I step back, my arms crossed over my chest, ready for this reality check. “Vasily, even if the whole family curse thing is real,you just died in Flagstaff.And you survived. We’re past that. And I already know you won’t let me put stipulations on if you’re in Artom’s life going forward, so I’m not going to put stipulations on this: you’re not going to carry pills in your pocket anymore.”

He scowls at me, but he doesn’t immediately respond. His toe taps; his hand, too. Nervous energy? The twitch of a junkie needing a fix? He knows he’s doing it, too, but I get the feeling that calling him out has him suddenly convinced he’s worse than he is.

I’m being harsh. In this one thing, I know I’m being harsh. It’s a demand impossible for most addicts, and I’m not unsympathetic. I get this feeling that working in restaurants and doing community service has giving me exposure to far more addiction than just Vasily’s. “I’m not telling you to stop. I’m telling you that Artom is a good kid, but he’s akid. They get in everything, and they do what they see the people they love do. Hell, I had to ban Dima from drinking in the house because I caught Artom pouring juice into shot glasses.”

Vasily snorts.

“It’s not funny!” But then I’m struggling not to laugh either, because yeah, that memory just smacked me in the back of the head, and the problem wasn’t even the shot glass. It was the twelve ounces of juice it took Artom to get an ounce and a half into the glass. I was going to go broke on cran-apple if he kept it up. “If there’s something else you’ll have to do, if it means you have to go to therapy every single day or hike up to the top of the mountain to scream at the world or bathe in oatmeal or—”

“Bathe in oatmeal?”

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