As always, she went straight to her room when they got home. Pete went to the refrigerator, took out a beer, and then carried it along with a kitchen chair out onto the porch. His inclination was to be down at the yard. But Ted had his real family around him now.
Pete was remembering the night — it seemed like years ago, but it wasn't so long — that the three of them had sat in the Zodiac down in the workshop and Wayne had made some gentle fun of Pete's funeral suit. He was wearing it again today. So much change, in so short a time; Pete felt as if he'd aged more in ten weeks than in the ten years that had gone before. Now he sat out on the porch with his chair tilted back and his feet up on the rail, and he sipped at his beer as he watched the patterns of sunlight on the forest over on the far side of the track.
He remembered what Alina had said to him, way back at that first dawn. Her instincts were right, this was a fine place to be.
It was just that some days could be rather less fine than others.
After an hour he went to see how she was doing, and to see if she needed anything. She smiled weakly, and said not. She was sitting on the bed with her album — that sparsely peopled record of whatever it was that she'd left behind — and she wasn't leafing through it hugging it close, as if it was a physical source of comfort to her when times were at their lowest.
She said, "I've been trying to think about Wayne, but instead I've been thinking about myself. Isn't that terrible?"
But Pete said that it wasn't, because for much of the hour he'd been doing the same. It wasn't something that he'd intended, but it wasn't something he could help. All through the valley people would be reflecting on the brevity of life and their own missed chances at happiness, and thinking of their common frailty in the shadow of the dark beast that had passed so close and taken someone so young.
And then he said, "You want to come for a ride in the car? Get out of the valley for a while, see somewhere new?" But again she smiled and she shook her head, saying that she preferred to stay here for a while and… just think about things. And Pete was relieved, because he hadn't really felt like going anywhere, either.
He left her in her room, thinking that perhaps he'd climb up to the rocks on the crest of the headland and watch the sunlight on the lake until the mountain shadows took it away.
He left her there, on the bed, with the book held close.
And then, when Pete McCarthy was safely out of the way, she opened the book, and the book spoke to her.
You've been unwell, the book said. My name is Belov. I'm a doctor.
INTERLUDE
He didn't look much like a doctor to Alina. He crouched in the corner by the big tiled kitchen range, his sleeves rolled up and his shirt and trousers covered in white ash. He'd been cleaning out the fireplace and clearing the flue, neither of which appeared to have been used in years. He was a big, dark, heavy man something in the manner of a friendly black bear going a little thin on top.
He smiled at her, and started to get to his feet.
Alina said, "Am I still in prison?"
"Technically," he said, "you never were. But no, this isn't a prison."
"It doesn't look like a hospital."
"No."
What it looked like was a long deserted log farmhouse, with stale rush matting on the floor and at the windows coarse-woven net curtains that had faded almost to nothing. Alina was holding onto the door, because the six steps that she'd taken to reach it had almost been enough to exhaust her; Belov dusted off his hands and came over to her now, and he took her by the shoulders and turned her around and steered her back toward the bed that she'd just left.
His touch was like a doctor's, firm and impersonal. And, of course, she'd seen him before; he'd been the third man on the commission that had interviewed her, the one who'd sat next to the Cheka's doctor and who'd listened to her slurred responses without ever saying anything. Now he was straightening the covers over her as she lay, utterly spent, and he was promising her answers to her unspoken questions in the morning. She could barely turn her head to watch him as he backed out of the room and closed the door; a moment later, the sounds of the fire irons against stone resumed. It was this strange subterranean thumping that had wakened and drawn her in the first place.
She was still wearing the thin cotton dress that she'd worn in the prison hospital, but now there was a shawl around her shoulders as well. She didn't know how she'd come by it, and she'd only the vaguest memories of her journey to this place. Why she was here, she couldn't imagine; but her head was clearer than it had been in a long time, which meant that she must have gone for some hours without any kind of an injection.
There was no denying the fact that there were gaps in her memory because of the drugs. There was no way of being certain how long she'd spent on the ward; it might have been six weeks or six years, but she was guessing at six months because this had been the first commission review that she'd received.
Unless there had been others, and she hadn't remembered.
They'd taken her from the police cells after two days. She'd been half expecting a trial and then a labour camp but instead, there was an ambulance. Seeing this, she'd known what lay ahead. They took her out, across the wide Neva river to the north east of the city, to a long street of factories and high concrete walls where tourists and visitors had little reason to go. The prison hospital fitted into its surroundings perfectly, a four storey warehouse of human cargo. It had small, dark windows in a main building set back from the road behind a staff block and a perimeter wall of newer red brick. Grim and forbidding were the two well-used words that came to mind as she looked up at the building for the first time; but there were no words that could easily describe the helpless terror that she felt as the side gate opened before them and the ambulance had driven through.
She'd thought that at least she'd be put with her own kind — border crossers and minor political dissidents — but it didn't happen. Her 'own kind' were in a minority. Instead she was confined for twenty hours a day on a ward for the criminally insane, most of them doped and many of them bruised from the warders' heavy handling. She'd sit in her dressing gown by the window and try to listen for the electric trams on the distant street, anything to give some kind of shape or structure to her day, but the noise made even this impossible.
And then her programme of treatment started, and the idea seemed to lose its importance to her.
This was better, she thought as she lay on her cot in the farmhouse. Anything was better than the ward. At least now she was beginning to get her focus back, even if her strength hadn't yet come with it.
Belov brought her some broth about an hour later, and he helped her up to the bowl. Apparently his efforts with the kitchen range had finally paid off. For a while Alina was afraid that she was going to throw it all up again, but she didn't.
Tomorrow, he promised her whenever she tried to ask him anything. Tomorrow, when she'd be stronger. And then he left her alone, climbing the wooden stairs to what she would later learn were his own makeshift quarters on the floor above. If he locked her in, she didn't hear it.
The next morning, she got to go outside.