Page 48 of Vasily the Hammer

“Lacey, shh. You can’t be pregnant.”

“Well, how do you know that?” I ask, although actually, I could be on birth control. Probably I’m making a big deal out of nothing.

“When you gave birth to Artom, you hemorrhaged badly. The doctors did what they had to, and that ended up being a hysterectomy. You don’t have a uterus anymore.”

Vasily’s apartment was sterile, empty. Soulless. I don’t know that even Vasily truly lived there.

Then again, Vasily might be soulless. The only thing I can figure after what he just put me through is he’s a sociopath and I was an easy target. I didn’t believe everything that he said, but I believed enough.

I loved him. And that hurts a lot.

But the love I feel in Tony’s home helps. It’s the house I grew up in. Our mom left us when I was a baby, but there are tons of pictures with my dad and me, and some of them trigger something close but not quite memories. These moments existed, and I was happy. And losing Dad in high school was devastating, but I don’t need Tony to tell me that. The tears that spring up when I see the pictures make it clear.

“That’s your grandpa,” I tell Artom.

“I know. We have pictures of him at home. Other home. He gave you your necklace.” Artom gasps dramatically. “Where’s your necklace, Mommy?”

The necklace.

Vasily remembered it. He knew it was important to me.

But I can’t think about that.

“I’m not sure,” I tell Artom. “Friends are looking for it.” Hopefully, they really are friends. I liked Sasha and Gio andeven the doctors.

Tony’s house is warm, but I know he lives here alone now. Well, other than Artom, who says helovesit here and hopes his friends can spend the night soon because he got to spend the night at their house yesterday. That freaks me out some, but when I ply Artom for details, he says they weren’t strangers at all; we went to Disney World with them last summer.

When Vasily told me we were meeting Camilla today, the name was meaningless, but I’ve got a picture of her and me on my teenage vanity, and as soon as I see us together at the beach as gangly pre-teens, I know it’s Camilla, and I know we still talk. That’s who Artom spent the night with. Her family.

“We’ll see them tomorrow,” I promise Artom, hoping it’s a promise I can keep. I don’t have any way to communicate with her. What with everything that’s happened with Vasily, I don’t have a phone or anything. And the tale that Vasily spun this morning about meeting them?

Well, I don’t know what happened there. I don’t know why Vasily would have ever agreed to meet my brother and why he wouldn’t have told me he was going to bring Artom. Why did Vasily even want to see him?

I sit down on my bed and pat the spot next to me for Artom to sit there. He hoists himself up, using his feet to clamber to the top and standing on the bed before spinning back around and sitting down next to me.

His shoes still on, tracking dirt all over my clean bedspread.

Guess I’ve got a lot to relearn about little boys.

“Are you going to tell me a story?” he asks hopefully.

“Unfortunately, I have forgottenaaaaaaallllllmy stories, but maybe one day they’ll come back. Did I used to tell you a lot of stories?”

“Uh huh.” He nods dramatically just to make sure I really do believe him. “You used to tell me stories about dragons and dinosaurs and school and magic and dwarves and Flagstaff and—”

“Flagstaff?”

“Yep. They were my favorites!”

“Really?” I’m surprised I would have ever talked about Flagstaff; then again, I can’t trust anything Vasily said to me. I may have regularly traveled to Flagstaff. Vasily may have kidnapped me because of a connection he and I had in Flagstaff, nothing at all to do with the organized crime connection between him and Tony. Every single thing he told me could have been a lie.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Artom asks in a smaller voice.

My heart. He’s been so wonderful today, and I can’t believe I’ve raised him to be so amazing on my own. “Of course you can!”

He climbs back up onto his feet, making sure to really massage that dirt into the fibers, and whisper-shouts into my ear, “It’s ‘cause they were stories about my daddy.”

“I told you stories about him?” I pray he can’t hear the cracking in my voice as all the good thoughts I’ve had about Vasily threaten to invade.

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