I removed my coat and boots, put them nearby, so they could dry out, then moved the pistol I'd been carrying at the front of my pants and set it within reach on the wobbly wooden coffee table that had come with the house. I pulled a chair of my own closer to the stove, and proceeded to let it do the same thing for me that it was doing for Miata. It was warm and it was comfortable, and the stiffness that had been rising in my right hip was abating. I felt drowsy, realized that it would be very easy to nod off right here, and realized also that there was really no reason that I shouldn't.
When I heard Alena's voice, I had no idea that she was back in the room.
"Atticus?"
I sat up and turned, and she was standing on the edge of the rug, her bath towel wrapped around her body, and that was all she was wearing. With her hair wet, it looked closer to black than to red. She shivered.
"I told you," Alena said. "I don't know how to do this."
"You've got to be freezing," I said.
Her brow creased with her frown. "It's not my first time. I don't want you to think that."
The only response I could think to that was to get up and go to where she was standing. I knew what she was trying to say, but she had also told me enough about her youth that I knew what she wasn't telling me, as well. When the girl is eight and in a prison cell, the "first time" is the last thing you can call it.
She had crossed her arms around her middle, and as I approached she wouldn't meet my eyes, instead focusing on my chest. Her expression had shifted, turned to something between determined and sullen.
I kissed her, the way I had wanted to kiss her back in the house in Cold Spring.
"It's all right," I told her. "It's mine." We moved to Kobuleti the following winter. It was another resort town, roughly midway between Batumi and Poti, and the town wasn't meant for great things, but great things had been thrust upon it. When Abkhazia, in the north, had seceded, it had taken Georgia's best beaches with it, the ones of soft sand and alluring landscapes. Kobuleti's beach was rocky, flat, and utterly uninspiring. But it was Kobuleti's beach, and it was safe, and wealthy Muscovites and young Georgians came every summer to soak up the heat and wade the water. Kobuleti had responded, and now there was a resort that took advantage of the nearby mineral springs, two new hotels with all the amenities, and several flourishing boutiques and restaurants. During the high season, from the beginning of July until mid-September, the town was packed. Walking down the main street on a summer's night, music poured from every other cafe and bar as each venue pulled double duty as a nightclub.
During the off-season, though, Kobuleti shut down, turning into one of those quiet seaside communities that made me remember my Northern Californian youth. The tourists left, as did most of the attendant service workers, and everything grew quiet, and the world around the town contracted. Walking the rocky beach on a cold November morning, the sky and the Black Sea sharing the same battleship shade of gray, the only noise that of the water and the gulls, it could seem like the whole planet was nothing but a small town surrounded by pines and water.
We'd bought a house two and a half miles from the sea, on the north side of town, the right size for the three of us. Secluded, far enough back in the woods that you couldn't trip over it by accident, but not so far away that we couldn't see someone coming if a visitor wanted to drop by unannounced. The house had been a summer cottage for some minor Party official once upon a time, then sold as a rental property, and subsequently had seen more than its share of abuse.
The first thing we did when we moved in was to make it secure. We installed an alarm system with motion detectors and two cameras, covering the immediate approaches from the front and the back. We hooked up external lights to complement the cameras, and to give us visibility if anyone wanted to pay us a visit during the night. We replaced all of the locks, and a couple of the doors.
Then we discovered that the roof leaked, and instead of paying for someone to come up from Batumi to fix it, we decided we would do it ourselves. Then we found mold in the walls and carpet, and set about tearing out the old and installing the new. When we pulled up the carpet, we found there were hardwood floors in almost every room, and we decided we liked those better, so we had to finish them. Everything needed a fresh coat of paint. Cracked windowpanes had to be replaced. The pipes were lead in many places, and had to go.
The house became our project, how we spent our hours when we weren't training in the woods or the makeshift gym we'd built in the garage. We read books on home repair and carpentry and renovation. We bought tools. We drove all over the country in search of building supplies and fixtures. Partly, we did it as a way to keep busy, but partly we did it because, without our ever saying so to the other, we'd both decided that this house outside of Kobuleti was going to be our home.
It wasn't that we'd forgotten. I could still conjure the memory of Natalie effortlessly, the picture of her as she lay in death as clear as today in my mind. But after two years of lurking apprehension and no sign of Illya Tyagachev, with word from Dan coming less and less often, it had become impossible to simply mark time. Since it was impossible for me to do what I truly wanted to do-what I had come to feel I needed to do-it became necessary to do something else. A little over seven months after we'd bought the house, Rezo Raminisshvilli, who ran one of the two cafes in town where we went for Internet access, mentioned to Alena that another of the summer cottages about a mile and a half from ours was going to be demolished. Whoever now owned the property wanted to put up a more modern abode, and felt that starting from square one was the best way to do it. We headed out the same afternoon to see if there was anything we could salvage, and were delighted to find that not only were most of the windows intact, but they were the original fixtures, and in reasonably good condition.
We salvaged five of them, brought them back home, and set to work repairing and installing them. They'd been painted multiple times, and the paints used had been lead-based, so I had them out on sawhorses in the back, and was working on stripping the third of the five. It was hot-it could get quite hot in the summer, even along the coast-and I stopped to drink some water and catch my breath. Miata was lying on the threshold of the open back door, in the shade, half asleep, and Alena was fitting one of the finished boxes into place, alternately shimming and hammering. She was wearing a white tank and blue bootleg Levi's she'd bought the last time we'd been in Batumi. I could see the scar, thin and white, that curled along the inside of her left bicep, from a man in Afghanistan who hadn't liked her politics, or lack thereof. She hadn't cut her hair since we'd left the States, and it was down to her shoulders now when she wore it loose, but at the moment she'd tied it up and back in a hasty ponytail.
I drank my water and I looked at Miata, and I looked at her, and I looked at myself, and then I burst out laughing.
"What?" Alena asked. She spoke in Georgian. Mostly, we spoke in Georgian or Russian, as a habit. "What is it?"
I kept laughing. Miata had raised his head, sleepy and perhaps annoyed at my interrupting his nap. That made me laugh harder. I wasn't hysterical, and Alena could tell that, and that probably helped to keep her from thinking that I'd lost my mind. She scowled at me just the same, folding her arms across her chest, waiting for me to share the joke. She had to wait a while, because when she did that, I laughed even harder.