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Svetlana can feel something isn’t right when she gets home. It’s not entirely unusual, her coming home to an empty house, sometimes Yevgeny leaves school with one of his friends, goes to one of their houses, hangs out with the neighbor girl, friends since they were in diapers. But a quick glance at her phone confirms the unthinkable; her son hasn’t told her about it. There’s no missed call, no unread text. No sweet message or snarky remark. She sits down by the kitchen table and takes a moment to think, to listen to the silence of the house, half expecting her son to amble down the stairs at any second.
Maybe he forgot to call, to write. Maybe something happened. She looks down at her phone and is just about to call him, find out, when it starts buzzing against her fingers, the picture of Yevgeny in his Sunday best flashing up on the screen.
”Where are you?” She says, immediately after putting the phone to her ear. ”Are you okay?”
”Uhm,” the voice on the other side is hesitant, but most certainly not her son’s.
”Who are you?” She accuses the voice, switching to English, realizing that Russian isn’t going to get her very far. ”What have you done to my son?”
”Jesus,” the bastard is laughing at her, nervously and quietly but still, and she’s about to really give him a piece of her mind when he speaks again, ”Yev’s fine, Lana, he’s here. He wanted me to talk to you for him.”
”Who is this?” She demands again, not ready to relax just yet.
”I don’t know if you remember me? It’s Ian, Ian Gallagher? Mickey’s um- Mick’s… guy?”
”Of course I remember,” she’s so surprised by this sudden turn of events that she more or less forgets to sound pissed, ”better husband than husband.”
Svetlana can’t help smiling when Ian chuckles softly on the other end. She wouldn’t admit it to most, but she’s missed him. Missed who he was when she was lost and felt like she’d reached the end of the line, and he’d opened a new door.
”Is Yevgeny there with you?” She asks, worry and anger replaced by confusion. Ian is a lot of things, but he’s not the worst case scenario when your child is missing, not by far.
”Yeah,” Ian clears his throat, clearly uncomfortable, ”he’s here, came to see us.”
”Us?”
”Came to see Mick, actually.”
There it is, the gut-clenching fear punching its way back into her.
”He’s out?” She asks, hates the way her voice trembles. Closes her eyes over the pointed silence on the other end.
”Yeah, he’s out. Been out for over five years, Lana. Why is Yev here? Why doesn’t he know about the DNA test?”
”Fuck,” she breathes, rests her head in her hand.
”You told our kid his dad was shot?”
”He was shot,” Svetlana defends herself, knows it’s useless but can’t help trying, ”he went to prison, gone for nine years. That man cared more about your one finger than about his own child, I did not want him as father. Yevgeny has been better off thinking his father was good and dead, than if he knew, knew about him and you and prison, about bullshit family and how he was made.”
She stands up and starts pacing the kitchen. Was she proud of her actions? No. Did she enjoy doing it? No, not at all. She’d done what she needed to do to survive, with Mickey in jail and Ian completely off the rails. Was she going to stand by her choices? Yes. No one had any right to accuse her of anything other than keeping her child’s best in mind.
”I was alone,” she hisses into the phone before Ian has a chance to speak, ”where were you? Where was husband? You have no right, no right. Give me address now and I will come pick up Yevgeny, he’s coming home with me. You have no right.”
”You know we almost broke him?” Svetlana stills in her tracks at the sadness in Ian’s voice. ”You an’ me. We did. Strongest person I know, and between us we almost killed him.”
”Mickey did not care,” Svetlana says it like she has more than just Ian to convince, ”did not give two shits about Yevgeny.”
”You know that’s not true,” Ian mumbles, his sigh muffled as though he’s covering his face with a hand.
”I know I did what I had to do,” Svetlana sits down at the table again, her ear hurting she’s pressing her phone against it so hard, ”give him back to me and I’ll tell him what he wants to know.”
”He doesn’t want to leave just yet, could you let us have an hour? We’ll talk to him. He’s not at all happy with you right now, just saying. Probably gonna bolt if I tell him you’re on your way.”
Svetlana sighs and nods, knows it makes no sense since Ian can’t see her. Ian seems to take her silence as compliance though, he always did understand her very well.
”We’ll drive him home after, make sure he gets home safe,” Ian promises and sounds like he’s about to say something else. Svetlana doesn’t let him, hangs up on him before he has the chance.
She sits at the table, in the deafening silence, losing track of time. Thoughts reeling. She honestly hadn’t thought this day would ever come; Yevgeny was happy, hadn’t asked about his dad for years now. She’d never heard from Mickey after she sent him the papers, getting him to sign for their divorce. For a while she’d worried about him coming after her, him or worse. There was still Terry, still the thought that if there ever was a person she should worry about getting out of jail and coming after her, it was him. No one came, not a word from a single Milkovich for over eleven years, almost like she’d never been one of them.
She thinks about what she could have done better, if things would have been better had she stayed at the house, stayed with Mickey through his sentence. She knows that what she’s done isn’t right, that she lied and did everything she needed to sever the ties to her old life, but she can’t see how it would have been better any other way. This way, her way, she’s got a happy, healthy child growing up in a decent area, attending a school interested in teaching him things. She is a person, this way, no longer a thing. People saw her, employed her, promoted her. Saw her worth. She can put food on the table every day, this way, heat their house all through the long winters.
She is a Forrester now, divorced twice. She is a citizen of this country, too, green card attained legally with one of the most innocuous, but sincere, of marriages. Alan wanted a wife, tolerated her child, expected his marital privileges, allowed her some space. He bought them a house, a car, built them a life. He thought with his dick and cheated his way into a clear-cut divorce. Apart from six years of quiet submission, it couldn’t have gone much better even if she’d planned it.
Yevgeny is still a Milkovich, she never wanted him to think of Alan as ’dad’. Alan had been ’sir’, and had been happy to stay that way all six years they’d been together. She never wanted anyone but her to have any claim on Yevgeny, in her eyes all men had the potential of her father in them. The essence of a Borya, or a Terry, just waiting to show their ugly faces.
She honestly doesn’t know if Mickey is the father, but a test won’t make any difference to her because no other alternative is acceptable. Mickey is Yevgeny’s father, and for almost twelve years he’s been a good father, stolen away from them a long time ago. A ghost, a story, a comfort, an ideal. Had she stayed in the Milkovich house, waited for Mickey to come home and be a dad, Yevgeny wouldn’t have had any of that. He would have had a sad, broken, drugged-up, ex-con of a dad, looking more like Terry with every day passing that Ian didn’t come back to him.
It had never even crossed her mind over the years that Ian could have come back, that they’d found a way. There might have been a way, a different way than the one she chose for them. She’s startled by the tear falling down her cheek and the sudden sound coming from the back of her throat. The kitchen is so quiet. She wipes the tear away and shakes herself out of her speculations, they’re useless.
The yellow light of a car outside travel through the kitchen. It doesn’t run through it but stops halfway, illuminating the far left wall of the room for a second before it cuts off. The kitchen is so dark, she doesn’t want Yevgeny to come home to a dark house.
Quietly she gets up from her seat and wraps her sweater closer around herself, walks into the living room and turns on the light. Then she steps back into the kitchen, stays in the dark for a bit longer, stands by the window facing the street. There’s a battered old car parked on the curb right outside and lit up by a streetlight, there’s her son standing next to Ian Gallagher. She wants to go outside, wants to go after him, kick, bash, break, she wants him to wrap his arms around her again, kiss her temple and smile at her. She watches as Ian says something, not looking at Yevgeny while he’s talking. She smiles despite herself when her son grabs the lovable ginger boy of a man by his coat and pulls himself into his embrace. Svetlana wraps her arms around herself, subconsciously mimicking Ian as he envelops Yevgeny entirely, and watches her past and present hug each other on the street. Ian’s fingers carding through Yevgeny’s dark hair, the look on his face blurred by distance and poor lighting but as clear as though he were mere inches away from her. Ian hadn’t mentioned it on the phone, he’d only talked about Mickey. She remembers it now, remembers how much Ian loved their child.
Svetlana feels entirely unprepared when Yevgeny suddenly pushes Ian away, playfully, grinning, and starts walking towards the house. She’s never felt reticence when it comes to talking to her son, and she doesn’t want to start now. But this isn’t going to be easy, for either of them. She worries that this might be something they can’t fix.
She stays by the window until Ian’s disappeared back into the driver’s seat, and she listens to Yevgeny unlocking the door, opening it, stepping inside, before she leaves the kitchen to go meet him in the hallway.
”Zhenya,” she says, reaching out to touch his face. Yevgeny takes a step back and stares at her, keeps his distance and his hurt eyes on her as he walks past her and towards the stairs.
”Don’t wanna talk to you,” he mumbles, in English. Knows she doesn’t like it when he speaks to her in her second language.
”Zhenya, my love, please,” she says, sounds more tired than pleading, ”don’t do this.”
”Me?” he snorts, but at least he stops, spins around to face her, ”I haven’t done anything, you’ve been lying to me all my life, mom. Were you ever gonna tell the truth?”
”No,” she says, firmer than she might have intended, the harshness of her tongue not helping, ”I wasn’t. I had my reasons, but I will tell you everything you want to know now, please, just sit down with me.”
”I’m tired, mom,” Yevgeny sighs, glancing up the stairs, towards the comfort and solitude his room, ”I’ve had a long day.”
”Please tell me,” she coaxes, reaches out again and this time is allowed to pull her fingers though his hair, ”tell me about it.”
”I’m really angry,” he’s switching to Russian now, a clear sign that he’s giving in to her, ”I met my dead dad today.”
Svetlana holds his gaze for a moment, steadily, nods and tries to convince him of her sympathy by ways of their usually profound connection. When he looks away, she does too, and she walks into the living room to sit down on the couch, watches her son linger by the stairs.
”I had to make a choice,” she explains, words unwilling to form, even in Russian, ”your father was not interested in being there for you, was not able. I needed to find something better, for both of us, and I couldn’t do that with Mickey still expecting me to wait for him.”
”He’s gay,” Yevgeny says, and Svetlana could have laughed if he wasn’t so serious saying it, ”did you know that?”
Svetlana nods, doesn’t want to go into it, but Yevgeny waits and clearly isn’t satisfied.
”Yes, of course I knew,” she sighs, ”he was with Ian when I first met him. Ian is the reason we got married, had you, Ian was the reason for everything your father did back then. The reason he didn’t want to love you.”
Yevgeny looks away, sharply, and Svetlana thinks she’s gone too far, that he’s about to leave the house or stomp upstairs. Instead, he sits down on the bottom stair and looks so very small. Her baby boy in every way.
”I was wrong,” she says and that makes him look up, expression shocked. She rolls her eyes and smiles at him, because really. ”He cared about you, I understand that now. And Ian came back, I was wrong about that too. But Zhenya, my love, I wasn’t wrong to keep you safe, keep you away from them. You don’t know what it was like then, what they were like.”
”Then tell me.”
Svetlana raises her hands in a helpless motion, shakes her head and looks at him as she opens her mouth and closes it again. Where to start?
”Your grandfather was a very bad man,” she decides, ”he was violent, dangerous. He didn’t like certain things.”
”He didn’t like me?” Yevgeny asks, betraying the extent of what he doesn’t know. Of what Svetlana hasn’t told him.
”He loved you,” she whispers, raising her voice to a more normal volume when Yevgeny frowns, ”his love was not a good love, just another reason to get you as far away from that family as possible.”
”What didn’t he like?” Yevgeny sounds like he thinks he should be able to imagine it, figure it out, but doesn’t even know where to begin. Svetlana prefers it that way, doesn’t want her son to know of these things.
”He didn’t like Ian, didn’t like what Ian meant,” she says, the words suddenly ridiculous, but she doesn’t know how else to talk about this. Can’t use the real words, not yet. ”Didn’t want Mickey to be who he was, didn’t want him to be gay. He thought a wife and child would change his son, make all the things he didn’t like go away.”
”He forced you to get married?”
”Yes.”
”But,” Yevgeny stands up, takes a couple of steps towards Svetlana before stopping, still at a distance, ”how could he do that?”
”It’s not a nice story, Yevgeny,” she sighs, ”and I don’t want you to know it. Because it doesn’t matter. Your father is a good man, who had a lot of bad things happen to him. We were forced together, yes, but when Terry went to prison you kept us together. For a while, we were a family, and we still would have been now, I’m sure of it. But Ian got sick, became dangerous.”
”Sick how?” Yevgeny’s wide-eyed expression tells her Mickey and Ian left out that small detail.
”It’s his thing to tell you about,” she answers, hopes that what little she knows of Ian’s illness isn’t the case anymore, ”but he became unreliable, he was like a father to you one day, and the next he made it so I couldn’t trust him. Not with you. He didn’t mean to, but he kept your father from us, Mickey chose him when I gave him the choice.”
”You mean ultimatum?” Yevgeny says in English, and for a second Svetlana can’t help thinking that she never told him how to say ’ultimatum’ in Russian. Never had reason to.
”Ultimatum,” she agrees, partly for educational purposes, partly because she never was one to shirk responsibility, ”yes. I told him; Ian or baby, he chose Ian.”
She watches Yevgeny’s shoulders slump, and the expression on his face turn to resigned sadness. She stands up, quickly, and walks over to him before he has any chance to escape. Wraps her arms around his unresponsive form.
”I never wanted to take him from you, Zhenya,” she whispers into his hair, ”my love, my child. I never wanted you to grow up without your fathers. Did they say they want to see you again?”
”Yes,” Yevgeny’s voice is low and muffled by her sweater, but she hears it.
”See,” she kisses the top of his head, ”see, they didn’t go anywhere, they’re still yours. I did what I had to do, and I can’t unmake it. But if you want them in your life now, I will not stand in your way.”
”I think Mickey hates you.”
She laughs, the cheeky tone to his voice not lost under the wetness and emotion. She laughs and she wants to cry and she’s so happy she’s managed to make a life for them, no matter what.
”I don’t blame him, my love,” she whispers, ”I don’t blame him. We’ll make it work, you’ll see. You’ll see.”
.