All the Lies We Tell (Quarry Road #1)(26)
So, he ran.
Out of the house, across the street. Past his own house and through his backyard, into the field and the woods beyond. He ran until he had to bend over, thinking he might puke. Not far beyond him was the fence that surrounded the quarry, but he was nowhere near the place where they usually hung out to swim and mess around. Even so, he pushed through the vines and bushes and found a spot in the fence that let him through. He wasn’t the first to seek access, after all. Despite the signs warning people to stay away, nobody ever did.
Niko stood on the edge of the quarry, looking down to the water below. If he jumped from here, there was a good chance he would hit the water, legs and arms straight, making him a bullet. It was so deep there wasn’t a chance he’d hit bottom. But he could mess up the angle, screw up the jump, hit a dozen places along the wall on the way down. Thinking of this, he shifted, and one foot slipped on a crumble of pebbles, which pattered downward and plink, plink, so far down he couldn’t even hear them hitting the water.
Heart pounding, he stepped back, grabbing for the fence, for a moment certain he’d gone too far this time. He was going to end up a broken mess on the rocks below. It would be better to die if that happened, he thought, sort of incoherently, knowing it was smart to stay back from the edge, but somehow helpless to keep himself from leaning forward again, anyway. Better to be dead than hurt so bad you couldn’t take care of yourself, or to be in a coma, or something like that.
He took in a deep breath when the ground beneath him didn’t give way and send him hurtling toward the pit. He gripped the fence’s rusty metal links with one hand and leaned forward with only that to hold him. Eyes closed, heart pounding, Niko considered letting go. Again and again he let his body swing forward, then back, with only his fingertips tethering him, until finally whatever was inside him that made him run had been appeased. Like a kind of dark demon, it ate something out of him and left him sort of shivering and empty, so that he stared at the marks of the metal fence gouged into his fingers, like he’d just woken from a dream. Shaking it off, Niko headed back to his house, which felt so different now that there was another man living there.
Barry wasn’t home when he got there. Neither was Galina. Niko could hear the faint sound of music coming from upstairs, some boy band that Theresa favored. Babulya met him in the kitchen with crossed arms and a frown.
“You’ve been stealing cookies.”
Niko was sweaty, with prickers and twigs scratching at him. Mud thick on his shoes that he’d tracked in on the clean kitchen floor. “I was hungry.”
His grandmother nodded once, sharply, and fixed him with a look. “You’ll always be hungry. You need to feed more than your stomach.”
“I’ll clean this up.” He gestured at the skid marks of mud, hanging his head, ashamed of having made a mess when he should have known better.
“Kolya.” Babulya put a hand on his shoulder and waited until he looked at her. She was so tiny he towered over her. “You don’t have to stay here forever.”
“Huh?”
Babulya shook her head. Her fingers squeezed for a moment, before she released him. “This house. This place. You don’t have to stay here forever, Kolya, moye solnishko.”
My little sun.
He’d only ever heard her call his brother that, and somehow even though he didn’t want to, Niko was sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. He didn’t cry, although his throat closed and his eyes burned. All he could do was sit there. His grandmother put the plate of cookies in front of him, along with a glass of milk. She rubbed the spot between his shoulders in slow, steady circles for a minute or so, then patted his shoulder.
“I just hate everything,” Niko said in a low voice, no longer hungry for cookies but taking one anyway.
Babulya laughed. “I know, you’re like your mother in that way. She hated everything, too.”
“I don’t want to be like her,” he muttered. The thought of it repelled him.
“We are what we are. That is the way it works.” Babulya shrugged and went to the sink to fill the kettle with water so she could make some tea. “Ilya—he likes to fight when he knows he can’t win. You like to win without fighting.”
“Whatever that means.”
He ducked away from her swat. When she hugged him, though, he closed his eyes and let her press his face to the front of her familiar scratchy sweater. Ilya was always her favorite, as Nikolai belonged to his mother. They wore the same lotion, Babulya and his mother, something the two of them shared, which they probably didn’t realize. The faint scent of flowers made him think of how it had been when he was a little kid who’d had a bad dream, and Galina had let him climb into bed with her until he wasn’t scared anymore. He was way too big for that now, too old for that comfort, though sometimes he believed his mother would gladly keep him that close to her forever.
Babulya hugged him tightly, then let him go. “It means that it will be all right when you run, Kolya. That’s what it means. One day you will run toward something instead of away, and then you will understand.”
Run toward instead of away.
His grandmother had been full of stories, fairy tales, myths, and fables, but of all the advice she’d ever given him, those words had been the ones Niko carried with him. She’d seen something in him back then that he hadn’t been able to see in himself, not until he was older and had started traveling the world, telling himself it was because he wanted to see and do and feel and live a life far beyond the tiny rural Pennsylvania town where everyone knew everyone else’s business. That had been a part of it, but it hadn’t been all of it.