Because It Is My Blood (Birthright #2)(9)

In the living room, Imogen and Natty waited for me. “What did Win say?” Natty asked with happy, dancing eyes.

I looked at Natty. I couldn’t protect her from this. “It wasn’t Win. It was Jacks.”

Imogen stood up from the couch. “Anya, I apologize. He did say he was Win, and I guess I don’t know Win’s voice well enough to tell the difference.”

I assured her that it wasn’t her fault.

Natty shook her head. “That was incredibly mean of him. What did he want anyway?”

I couldn’t exactly repeat what Jacks had said about the two of us being in terrible danger. I sat down next to Natty and put my arms around her. I would do anything to keep her safe and I wondered how I could even have allowed myself the indulgence of lamenting Win. Natty was the love of my life, not him. At that moment, the love of my life extricated herself from my embrace—was she getting too old for such things?—then she asked me a second time what our ne’er-do-well cousin had wanted.

Here, I told a pretty lie: “To welcome me home.”

II

I COUNT MY BLESSINGS

SUNDAY MORNING, Natty and I went to church. The new priest was an incredibly boring speaker, but the homily was not without interest to me: it was about how we focus too much on the things we don’t have instead of the things we do. I was certainly guilty of such behavior. To pass the time, I decided to count my blessings:

1. I was out of Liberty.

2. Natty and Leo, as far as I knew, were safe.

3. Win had made it easy for me to keep my bargain with his father.

4. We had money and health.

5. We had Imogen Goodfellow, Simon Green, and Mr. Kipling …

By the time I had reached six, we were standing to receive the host.

On our way out of church, someone called my name. I turned: it was Mickey Balanchine and his wife, Sophia. “Hello, cousins!” he greeted Natty and me warmly. Mickey kissed us both on our cheeks.

“Since when do you go to this church?” I asked Mickey, having never seen him there before. Natty and I attended a Catholic church because our mother had, but everyone on my father’s side of the family went to an Eastern Orthodox church if they went at all.

“Since he married a Catholic,” Sophia Balanchine replied in that strange accent of hers. Though she spoke English very well, it was obviously not her native language. “Good morning, Anya. Nataliya. We met, but only briefly, at the occasion of my marriage. It is good to see you both looking so well.” She, too, kissed us on our cheeks. “It’s hard to tell which of you is the older sister.”

Mickey pointed a finger at me. “You were supposed to come see me as soon as you got out.”

I told him that I’d only been home since Friday afternoon and had planned to visit him that week.

“Mickey, you must give the girl room,” Sophia said, and then she did just the opposite, hooking arms with Natty and me, and insisting that we join them for brunch. “You have not eaten,” she accused us, “and we live only blocks from here. We should cease making spectacles of ourselves on the front stoop of this cathedral.” She wasn’t Russian, but something about her reminded me of Nana. I took a moment to consider Sophia Balanchine. I remembered that I had thought her plain at the wedding but maybe that had been harsh. She had brown hair, brown eyes, a large, rather horsey nose. Indeed, everything about her was large—her hands, her lips, her eyes, her cheekbones—and she was several inches taller than her husband. (Mickey was so short I had always suspected him of wearing shoes with lifts.) Sophia Balanchine seemed powerful. I liked my cousin somewhat better knowing he was married to this woman.

Though Natty and I tried to demur, Sophia insisted we come to brunch and somehow we found ourselves at their town house on East Fifty-Seventh Street, not far from where Win’s family lived.

Sophia and Mickey occupied the bottom two floors of a three-story brownstone. The top floor was used by Mickey’s father, Yuri Balanchine, and his nurses. Any day now, they expected Yuri to die, Sophia Balanchine informed me. “It will be a mercy,” she said.

“It will be,” Natty agreed. I’m sure she was thinking of Nana.

Over lunch, we stuck to innocuous subjects. I found out the source of Sophia’s unusual accent—she had a German father and a Mexican mother—and Mickey and Sophia asked me about my plans for the following school year. I told them that I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. The third week of the semester was about to start, and I feared that I wouldn’t be able to find a suitable school that would also find me suitable. Considering my criminal record, I mean.

Natty sighed. “I wish you could just go back to Trinity.”

On some level, I was glad not to be going back to Trinity. It was a chance to make a break from old routines, old people. That was what I told myself, at least.

“After what you have been through, it is good to make a change, I think,” Sophia said, echoing my own thoughts. “Though it is also difficult to have to go to a new school in your senior year.”

“It’s an insult,” Mickey said. “Those bastards had no cause to throw you out.”

He was wrong. The administration had had perfect cause: I had brought a gun to school.

The discussion then turned to Natty’s time at genius camp, a subject I had heard very little about myself. She had spent the summer working on a project to strip water from garbage before it left people’s houses. As she described her work, Natty sounded smart, impressive, genuinely happy, and I knew all at once that I had done the right thing in making sure she had made it to camp. I was proud that this was my sister and even a little proud of myself for having done right by her. My throat closed up. I stood and offered to help clear the table.