Page 39 of Last Hand

Igor considers the request like he’s being asked to grant a royal pardon, his broad face impassive. His eyes slide from Rebecca to the twins, then to me, calculating some equation where we’re all variables he needs to control.

“Da,” he finally decides, rising from his chair. “We all go. You, too,” he adds, jabbing a thick finger in my direction. “Fresh air good for aches.” No beatings would be good for aches. Instead, he offers me sunlight. His logic makes little sense to me, yet I know better than to piss this asshole off.

The twins squeal with delight, oblivious to the power play unfolding around them. They rush to the door, identical blonde heads bobbing with excitement. Rebecca follows, her relief visible only in the slight loosening of her shoulders.

I trail behind. With each step I’m fighting back a whimper of pain after the way Igor tossed me in the basement last night. The sunlight hits me like a physical force when we step outside, and I blink against its brightness. How strange that the same sun shines here as it does back home, where Dad and Emma are probably sick with worry. The thought twists in my gut yet it’s hard for me to live this nightmare and compare it to home; they feel worlds away, lifetimes even.

The yard stretches out before us, a deceptively idyllic setting. Lush grass, well-tended flower beds, and a wooden play structure that looks recently built. Beyond that, trees, thick woods that might offer escape if not for the fence I can see peeking through the foliage. Nature shaped into another prison.

Anya and Mila race ahead, their matching yellow dresses fluttering behind them like butterfly wings. They move in that particular way only children can, as if gravity has less claim on them, as if joy makes them lighter. I try to remember the last time I felt that unburdened. I don’t think I have ever felt that.

Igor positions himself on the covered porch, settling into a wooden chair that creaks under his weight. From this vantage point, he can see the entire yard. His hand rests near his waistband—where a gun is holstered, I’m sure. He might look relaxed, but his eyes never stop moving, scanning our surroundings with mechanical precision.

Rebecca kneels in the grass beside a patch of wildflowers, where the girls have already begun some elaborate game of their own invention. Something about fairies, from the snippets I catch. My mother picks a daisy, showing Anya how to split the stem with her thumbnail to make a chain. Her fingers move with a grace I don’t recognize; she’s patient, gentle, present.

“Like this, Mama?” Mila asks, her small face scrunched in concentration as she attempts to copy the technique.

“Perfect, solnyshko,” Rebecca praises, using an endearment I’ve never heard from her lips—not that I haven’t any clue what she said, though I can tell that’s what it is by the way Mila beams up at her.

I stand apart, unwilling or unable to join this scene of domestic bliss. My arms hang useless at my sides. What am I supposed to do here? Play pretend family while Igor watches us like specimens in a glass jar?

A memory surfaces, sharp and unwelcome: me at their age, tugging at Rebecca’s sleeve as she stared vacant-eyed at the TV. “Mom, can you read this to me?” I had asked excitedly holding up my popup book Dad had got from some yard sale. Her irritated shove, the sloshing of whatever was in her glass. “Figure it out yourself. I’m not Martha fucking Stewart.”

Now I watch her teach Mila when she couldn’t be bothered to even read to me, and something cold hardens in my chest.

The twins play with the boundless energy of children who’ve never known hunger or fear or the weight of responsibility too heavy for small shoulders. They chase each other in circles, fall dramatically onto the grass, roll down a small slope at the edge of the yard, all while Rebecca watches with that soft smile I never knew existed.

I sink onto a bench, the furthest one from Igor while still remaining in his line of sight. No sense provoking him. My body aches from the basement floor, from the beatings, from the constant tension of waiting for the next awful thing to happen.

“Fallon,” Rebecca calls, waving me over. “Come see what the girls found.”

I don’t move. Can’t. My legs feel cemented to the earth.

The twins look up at me with curious matching gazes, then whisper to each other behind cupped hands. They’re trying to figure me out, this strange, bruised woman who doesn’t speak or smile. I wonder what Rebecca has told them, anything about me, their secret sister. I doubt it since she doesn’t even want Mikhail to know who I am.

Rebecca’s smile falters at my stillness. She quickly turns back to the girls, seamlessly rejoining their game as if my rejection means nothing. Maybe it doesn’t. She’s had years of practice ignoring me, after all.

Yet something in her posture, a slight stiffness in her shoulders as she glances at me when she thinks I’m not looking tells a different story. There’s guilt there, buried under layers of survival and accommodation.

Good. Let her feel it.

Anya stumbles, scraping her knee on a stone hidden in the grass. Her wail pierces the afternoon quiet, and Rebecca is there instantly, gathering the child into her arms, murmuring comfortagainst her hair. She inspects the injury with careful hands, plants a kiss just above the small, angry scrape.

“All better,” she says, and somehow, impossibly, it is. Anya’s tears dry up, replaced by a wobbly smile.

The sun tracks across the sky as the afternoon wears on. The twins exhaust one game and invent another, their creativity seemingly boundless. Rebecca remains engaged, suggesting new activities when interest wanes, mediating the tiny conflicts that arise between siblings.

And I sit. Silent. Watching. A ghost at the edge of a life I never had, witnessing the mother Rebecca could have been and should have been for Emma and me.

Igor shifts in his chair, checking his phone periodically. His presence never fades from my awareness, a constant reminder that this peaceful scene is just another face of our captivity. The pretty yard, the playing children, the attentive mother all of it existing inside the borders he controls.

I wonder if Rebecca ever forgets he’s there, if she’s learned to partition her mind so thoroughly that moments like these feel real and free. I wonder if she’s taught herself to believe in this counterfeit happiness, or if she’s just a better actress than I ever gave her credit for.

Rebecca laughs as Anya places a slightly mangled flower behind her ear—a sound so light and genuine it seems to float on the afternoon air. I find myself frozen, cataloging the sound, comparing it to the limited library of laughs I remember from childhood. The bitter, slurred chuckles when she was off her face. The hollow, performance laughs when someone was watching. The rare, startled laughs that came out when she briefly surfaced from whatever fog she lived in.

The woman sitting in the grass—her knees dirty, her hair falling loose from its bun, her hands stained green from the clover stems—that’s not the woman who used to disappear forthree days at a time. That’s not the ghost I used to tiptoe around, hoping she’d come down before she got mean. That’s not the mother who forgot to pick me up from primary school so many times that eventually, I stopped expecting her to come.

That woman in the dirt—laughing, present, sober—wasn’t available for me. She was hidden away somewhere, locked behind the chemical walls Rebecca built around herself. Or maybe she didn’t exist yet. Maybe Rebecca had to lose us to become her.

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