The Woods (Page 93)

I said nothing. I just stared at the page in front of me.

“Don’t you get it? It’s not your sister.”

I closed my eyes. My heart felt so damn heavy.

“Cope?”

“I know,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s not my sister in the woods,” I said. “It’s my mother.”

CHAPTER 42

SOSH WASN’T SURPRISED TO SEE ME.

“You knew, didn’t you?”

He was on the phone. He put his hand over the mouthpiece.

“Sit down, Pavel.”

“I asked you a question.”

He finished his call and put the phone back in the cradle. Then he saw the manila envelope in my hand. “What’s that?”

“It’s a summary of my father’s KGB file.”

His shoulders slumped. “You can’t believe everything in those,” Sosh said, but there was nothing behind his words. It was as though he’d read them off a teleprompter.

“On page two,” I said, trying to quiet the tremor in my voice, “it says what my father did.”

Sosh just looked at me.

“He turned in my Noni and Popi, didn’t he? He was the source that betrayed them. My own father.”

Sosh still wouldn’t speak.

“Answer me, dammit.”

“You still don’t understand.”

“Did my own father turn my grandparents in, yes or no?”

“Yes.”

I stopped.

“Your father had been accused of botching a delivery. I don’t know if he did or not. It makes no difference. The government wanted him. I told you all the pressure that they can apply. They would have destroyed your entire family.”

“So he sold out my grandparents to save his own skin?”

“The government would have gotten them anyway. But yes, okay, Vladimir chose to save his own children over his elderly in-laws. He didn’t know it would go so wrong. He thought that the regime would just crack down a little, flex a little muscle, that’s all. He figured they’d hold your grandparents for a few weeks at the most. And in exchange, your family would get a second chance. Your father would make life better for his children and his children’s children. Don’t you see?”

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“Because you are rich and comfortable.”

“Don’t hand me that crap, Sosh. People don’t sell out their own family members. You should know better. You survived that blockade. The people of Leningrad wouldn’t surrender. No matter what the Nazis did, you took it and held your head high.”

“And you think that was smart?” he snapped. His hands formed two fists. “My God, you are so naive. My brother and sister starved to death. Do you understand that? If we had surrendered, if we’d given those bastards that damn city, Gavrel and Aline would still be alive. The tide still would have turned against the Nazis eventually. But my brother and sister would have had lives—children, grandchildren, grown old. Instead…”

He turned away.

“When did my mother find out about what he’d done?” I asked.

“It haunted him. Your father, I mean. I think part of your mother always wondered. I think that was why she had such contempt for him. But the night your sister vanished, he thought that Camille was dead. He crumbled. And so he confessed the truth.”

It made sense. Horrible sense. My mother had learned what my father had done. She would never forgive him for betraying her beloved parents. She would think nothing of making him suffer, of letting him think that his own daughter was dead.

“So,” I said, “my mother hid my sister. She waited until she had enough money from the settlement. Then she planned on disappearing with Camille.”

“Yes.”

“But that begs the central question, doesn’t it?”

“What question?”

I spread my hands. “What about me, her only son? How could my mother just leave me behind?”

Sosh said nothing.

“My whole life,” I said. “I spent my whole life thinking my mother didn’t care enough about me. That she just ran off and never looked back. How could you let me believe that, Sosh?”

“You think the truth is better?”

I thought of how I spied on my father in those woods. He dug and dug for his daughter. And then one day he stopped. I thought that he stopped because my mother ran off. I remembered the last day he had gone out to those woods, how he told me not to follow him:

“Not today, Paul. Today I go alone….”

He dug his last hole that day. Not to find my sister. But to bury my mother.

Was it poetic justice, placing her in the ground where my sister supposedly died, or was there also an element of practicality—who would think to look in a place where they had already searched so thoroughly?

“Dad found out she planned to run.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I told him.”

Sosh met my eye. I said nothing.

“I learned that your mother had transferred a hundred thousand dollars out of their joint account. It was common KGB protocol to keep an eye on one another. I asked your father about it.”

“And he confronted her.”

“Yes.”

“And my mother…” There was a choke in my voice. I cleared my throat, blinked, tried again. “My mother never planned on abandoning me,” I said. “She was going to take me too.”

Sosh held my gaze and nodded.

That truth should have offered me some small measure of comfort. It didn’t.

“Did you know he killed her, Sosh?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

Again he went quiet.

“And you didn’t do anything about it, did you?”

“We were still working for the government,” Sosh said. “If it came out that he was a murderer, we could all be in danger.”

“Your cover would have been blown.”

“Not just mine. Your father knew a lot of us.”

“So you let him get away with it.”

“It was what we did back then. Sacrifice for the higher cause. Your father said she threatened to expose us all.”

“You believed that?”

“Does it matter what I believed? Your father never meant to kill her. He snapped. Imagine it. Natasha was going to run away and hide. She was going to take his children and disappear forever.”

I remembered now my father’s last words, on that deathbed…