Obviously I understand these are different universes, different Marguerites, different babies. But on every emotional level it feels as if I went from conception to delivery in two weeks.
Paul slips off his own gloves and holds one hand to my head before pulling it back to sign, “Do you think you have a fever? It’s not the flu, is it?”
“Honestly, I think all I need is sleep.” Plus some time to get used to this.
“No wonder. She’s been doing so much better, but last night was just like she was six weeks old again, wasn’t it? Up every hour.” He sighs, and I realize he’s tired too. But Paul lays his own weariness aside. “We’ve got some of the soup left over. I could heat that up, plus the bread and cheese. Does that sound good?”
He wants to make dinner for us, so I can rest. Our daughter is playing on the floor, and this cozy little apartment is ours. At least in one world, it got to be just this simple, this sweet. We fell in love. People marry young here, so we did too. And now we have a family. We share a life.
“Are you crying?” Paul touches my hands before kneeling in front of me.
I shake my head no, even though tears are in my eyes. “I’m fine. Everything is so much better than fine.”
He gives me a look, obviously wondering where that came from, but after only a moment he kisses my forehead and goes into the kitchen to get dinner started.
The next couple of hours pass in a blur, a mixture of the mundane and the sublime. For a while, as Paul cooks, I play with Valentina on the floor. In one moment, it feels like babysitting a stranger’s child. In the next, it hits me all over again. This is our daughter. Paul’s and mine, together.
Will the grand duchess’s child look like this? Valentina has big gray eyes like her daddy, but the few wispy curls atop her head tell me she’s inherited the lunatic Kovalenka hair. She’s beautiful, in the way most babies are beautiful, but the longer I look at her, the more individual she seems. I see a glimmer of my father’s smile, then Paul’s stubborn chin. In her I recognize parts of most of the people I’ve loved most in my life.
My parents would call it genetics. To me it seems like alchemy—the luminous space between science and magic.
Even diaper duty isn’t enough to make me feel less awed by this. When I scoop Valentina back into my arms afterward and smell her head, a warm little shiver passes through me, and I feel like I could hold her forever.
Once we’ve eaten, Paul insists on looking after Valentina himself. He settles in with her for yet more block-stacking action as I lie on the couch, when suddenly another small blinking light goes off. Paul winces. “I forgot Mom and Dad were coming by.”
“That’s okay.” I sit up and smile. “I want to see them.” What mad scientists will come through the door this time?
But when Paul lets our visitors in, I don’t see my parents. I see Leonid Markov and the woman who must be Paul’s mother, Olga.
The last time I laid eyes on Leonid Markov, he killed a man in cold blood not three feet from my face. He debated the pros and cons of keeping me alive. And I saw the cruelty and control he used to batter his son into leading a life that would slowly poison Paul’s soul. Olga was unknown to me until this moment. All I knew was that she supported her husband’s criminal enterprises, and she ostracized Paul for refusing to join the “family business.”
Tonight, however, Leonid wears a plain brown overcoat and suit. Olga’s hair is piled atop her head in an old-fashioned way, and her dress is a ghastly plaid. But they look, well, normal. They’re happy to be here. Most astonishingly, Paul smiles as he lets them in.
“Hello,” Olga signs. “Good to see you.” Her technique is clumsy, but I can still tell what she means. Obviously she doesn’t know much more sign than that, because she then starts speaking to Paul.
He seems used to serving as translator. “Babushka says Valentina grows prettier every day,” then signs as he replies to her, so I’ll understand too. “Beautiful, but the little tyrant was up all night. Marguerite is exhausted. Tonight isn’t good for a long visit.”
Leonid nods, smiling. As he talks to his son, Paul signs for me. “The party meeting was tonight, and my parents are tired too. Can they take the baby for a while this weekend instead? It would give you a chance to rest.” With a significant look, Paul adds something only for me: “Imagine having hours to ourselves.”
I remember the bedroom we share. Oh, I can imagine lots of things. “If it’s okay with you,” I reply. Paul’s smile widens, and he nods as he tells his parents of course, Valentina always loves spending time with her grandparents.
Slowly I begin to put it together. In this world, Leonid isn’t a mobster. Instead, he’s a loyal member of the Communist Party. Maybe that’s what he draws his sense of power from—that gives him the sense of authority he so craves. The USSR prized its top science students and gave them the best of everything, which meant that in the Moscowverse, Leonid supported Paul’s ambitions. He’s proud to have a scientist son.
I feel sure there’s a darker side to this. Leonid Markov is the last person who should ever have authority in a police state, and Paul is intelligent enough to have seen that for himself. But that doesn’t change the core fact that in this world, Paul grew up valued, supported, and cared for.
He has no reason to believe he will never be loved, and so, when we met, nothing held him back.
Olga and Leonid coo over Valentina a while longer as Paul serves them a quick cup of tea, but it’s not half an hour before they leave and our tiny family is alone again. Valentina fusses a little, and Paul bends down to kiss her head. “She’s tired too.” He smiles up at me. “No wonder. I’ll give her a bath, get her in bed.”
“I can help—”
“No, no. Rest.” Paul looks skyward. “And hope tonight she decides to sleep.”
Although I sneak a peek of him sitting beside the bathtub with her, laughing as she splashes, mostly I explore the front room even more avidly than before. I find a photo album, the kind I remember from my grandparents’ house with sticky adhesive pages and old, slightly discolored photographs. Here, though, most of the snapshots are in black and white. This album must have been put together by Olga, then given to us as a wedding gift, because the initial pages show Paul as a little boy—smiling more eagerly than he probably ever did in my own universe. After a few scholastic honors (scarlet ribbons emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, or portraits of Lenin again), the first photo of me shows up. Despite the dowdy school uniform I’m wearing, I grin unabashedly at the camera, both my arms around Paul’s waist. It looks like we hooked up here when we were maybe thirteen and fourteen? Maybe even a year younger than that.