"It's better than I hoped," I said.
"No running?" Alena demanded. "No jumping? How is that better?"
"You'll be able to walk without assistance, without the cane. You'll be able to swim."
She grunted a sullen acceptance, and I left it at that. The last operation was performed that March, five months after we'd fled the States, and it was a shorter procedure than the second, and at the end of it Frau Doktor Akrman declared it a success. Alena was discharged from the clinic eight days later, and we made our way back to Georgia by roundabout route over the next three days. She was on crutches, and despite the Frau Doktor's optimism, we both knew it would be a while before she could move about reliably on her own.
Vadim had located a new house for us outside the city of Batumi-the fifth we'd stayed in since fleeing the U.S.-down in the south along the Black Sea coast. It was easy to find places on the coast to rent or buy, and the Georgian economy being what it was, a little of Alena's money went a very long way. Most of the dachas the Party bigwigs once used were uninhabited or had been converted to summer rentals, and if we were willing to pay in cash-and we always were-almost anything we needed could be obtained in relatively short order, from vehicles to accommodations to weapons.
The house was larger and more ostentatious than I would have chosen if I'd made the pick myself, with too much space for only three people and a dog. The last of the Georgian winter was still with us, and keeping the house warm was a nightmare. Vadim acknowledged all of these faults, but then justified the choice by telling us that there was an indoor pool, and that it was heated.
I was growing very fond of Vadim.
Alena and I made the first, stuttering attempts at resuming our respective training regimens. We swam a lot, slowly resumed our routine of morning yoga. Alena still couldn't incorporate ballet into her workout, but she took great glee in watching me attempt it, and never failed to find something wrong with the way I was moving, with a jete here, an entrechat quatre there. I didn't mind; I enjoyed my feeble attempts at dance, the way it focused my mind inward, honed my awareness of my own body.
We brought up a physical therapist from Batumi three times a week to work with Alena. He worked with her in the pool, mostly, and with weights, sometimes, and after watching them together during the first half-dozen or so of their sessions, I left them alone. Vadim tailed him the first four times the therapist left the house, and his assessment was, and I agreed with him, that if this guy was going to try and kill any of us, it wouldn't be because he was working for someone who wanted him to do it.
Twice since the year turned Dan had contacted us via e-mail sent from anonymous accounts. There had been no sign of Illya, and in February, Dan offered the theory that whoever he'd been working for had tied up that particular loose end with a hollow-point to the base of the skull. Alena was inclined to agree. I wasn't so certain.
In early April, we received a third e-mail, and in it Dan asked if we could perhaps do without Vadim, that he had work for him back in Brooklyn.
"He's missing him," Alena confided to me while watching my attempts at dance the following morning. "So he says he has work, because Dan doesn't want us to think he is weak."
"He misses his son. How is that weak?"
"He believes admitting such things makes one vulnerable. It can be exploited."
I thought about what Natalie had said to me six months earlier in the kitchen of the house in Cold Spring, and what I'd said to her in return. Her words had seemed so saccharine and manipulative at the time, an attempt by her to convince me to stay, and I'd resented her like hell for making something that was already difficult all the harder.
At night, when I closed my eyes, I still saw her on her autumnal bed. It didn't help things that the last words I'd exchanged with her had been bitter and spiteful ones.
"It can," I said, and left it at that. At the end of April we moved to a smaller house outside the resort town of Ureki, and the next morning we sent Vadim back to his father. The boy was glad to go, though he tried to hide it. He missed New York, and he had friends there he wanted to see. I could almost remember what that was like.
The following day the weather turned unseasonably ugly, as if reminding us it was still winter, but Alena, Miata, and I went down to the shore for a walk anyway. We did some shopping for the house, bought some fresh-caught sea bass for dinner. In the grocery store, I saw Alena hovering over the selection of wines, and she caught me looking and then moved on to gather fruits and vegetables. Georgians, as a rule, loved to drink, and loved their wine, but Alena was not Georgian, she was Russian, born-she thought-in Magadan, and further, she never touched alcohol. Since I'd begun training with her, I didn't, either.
We took our walk, getting cold and wet, trying to enjoy the empty beach and the quiet, but it wouldn't take. When we'd been in Bequia, both of us had known Oxford was coming, that it was only a matter of when, not if. That knowledge had followed us, cast its pall on the mood and the environment. Even at the best of times in Bequia, it had been impossible to truly relax.
So it was here, some six and a half months since the attempts on our respective lives. It didn't matter that there'd been nothing, no threat, no signs of danger since that murderous night in Cold Spring. Our enemy remained, unnamed and unknown and potentially very powerful, and just because they hadn't found us yet didn't mean they had abandoned their search. As it had been with Oxford, we lived with the knowledge that we were hunted, and that the hunter might find us at any time.
Yet we lived with something else now, too, something that we hadn't truly had in Bequia, even with Alena teaching me. We had been tested, after all, first by Oxford, then more cruelly by Cold Spring, and we had remained true to each other, had defended each other, had supported each other. For Alena, it must have been an extraordinary sensation, bewildering and perhaps even frightening. There had always been someone who had wanted to hurt her, or use her, or kill her, or there had been the promise of the same. That promise remained, but this time it was different.
This time, she had someone with her that she could trust absolutely.
With Vadim in the house, it had been easy to push any thoughts of intimacy aside as inappropriate, even if, as an excuse, it was a feeble one. Vadim didn't care what we did, and, being nineteen, probably imagined that we were doing far more together than we could've possibly done, anyway. With the addition of fabulous lingerie.
But Vadim was gone, the house was ours, and when Alena looked at me, I could see everything she felt for me, and everything she wanted. It was all there, and it was so raw and so sincere that I had to look away, because it scared me. It scared me a lot.
Because Natalie had been right. Every single thing she'd said to me had been right. The house, like the one in Batumi, was murder to keep warm. A woodstove served as the major source of heat, positioned in the main room. Miata went straight for it as soon as we were inside, dropping to the floor to bathe in its glow, and we knew that meant the house was safe. Each of us trusted his ears and his nose far more than our own, and if he wasn't reacting to anything, that was because there was nothing to react to.
We did a sweep anyway, confirming what we already knew, then unpacked the groceries in the kitchen. Alena went off to change out of her soaked clothes, and I went to the stove and fed it a couple more logs, annoying Miata as I did so, because it forced him to move out of my way. The fire came back strong, and I used a stick to close the door on it, then cleaned the rain from my glasses. A few droplets fell from my hair, spat and sizzled when they hit the cast iron. From the back of the house, I heard the little stereo in Alena's bedroom switch on, the strings and harmonies of "Eleanor Rigby" coasting softly down the hall. Her music tastes were eclectic, almost exclusively confined to the Beatles and their catalogue, with the occasional opera or string concerto thrown in for variety. After another moment, I could make out the sound of running water, the shower in the bathroom starting.