I’ll lose the Picasso, but it was gone the instant Tarasov called to strong-arm me. But now, given his greedy gullibility, I’ll end up with something far more valuable. I’ll have the money to pay off my blackmailer. And after a year and a day, when Tarasov tries to sell my other three paintings, he’ll discover the true cost of engaging in business transactions he doesn’t understand.
I can be patient. This is all part of making him pay for the name he called Kate. He’ll suffer. And then he’ll die.
21
KATE
My grandmother is sitting in the garden, a half-finished jewel-tone shawl bunched in her lap as her knitting needles flash like swooping birds. A canvas bag gapes at her feet, holding her yarn. A floppy cotton hat provides shade for her face and the back of her neck.
“Granny!” I say, leaning down to kiss her cheek. There isn’t a second chair, so I collapse on the ground beside her. Sitting cross-legged, I pluck a long stem of grass and wrap it around my finger.
“A chroí,” she says, settling her needles in her lap. Her hands tremble a lot more than I would like. There’s a reason she’s been working on that shawl for months. “You’re looking grand today.”
I glance down at my hoodie and sweatpants. There’s nothing special about my clothes.
Granny laughs. “You’ve got some color in your cheeks. Here,” she says, fumbling for the mobile she keeps with her at all times. “Let me take a photo.”
I blush. After last night, I’ll never think of a camera the same way again. Instead of smiling for my grandmother, I hold up a hand, blocking her view of my face.
“Now, now,” Granny tsks. “Just pretend we’re on holiday. You let me take plenty of snaps that first trip to Ireland.”
“I was eight years old,” I say dryly.
But her mention of Ireland drags a chill down my spine. The sky hasn’t changed—it’s still the bright clear blue of early June—but gooseflesh rises on my arms. I hug my knees.
Granny sits back in her chair, her eyes glinting like a sparrow’s. “Go on, then,” she says. “What’s the craic?”
The familiar phrase should make me smile. It was one of the first things I learned when we arrived in County Donegal, an easy way of asking for the day’s gossip. But when I think about that first trip to our homeland, I can’t help but remember the reason, and something inside me withers.
Granny waits, because she’s wise that way.
I finally ask: “Was it wrong for us to go to Donegal?” I’m shocked to hear my voice break on the last word. But I’ve been asking myself the question for days, ever since Breagha broke down in her bedroom. “Was it wrong to leave Breagha behind?”
Granny folds her hands in her lap. “Breagha wasn’t hurt,” she says quietly. “Not the way you were.”
“Not by the Bad Men,” I say, because I’ve never said Pyotr Tarasov’s name out loud to my grandmother, not even when I woke screaming in my bed in the little stone hut where we stayed by the lake. “But after. During the Dogfight. She heard about everything that happened, all the ways men die. She knew it was because of us. Because of me.”
Granny purses her lips. “First,” she says. “Those men didn’t die because of you. They died because there isn’t a clan on earth content with the size of its territory. Not we Lynches. Not the bratva. Not the Italians or the Japanese or the Colombians, none of them. The Russians wanted your Da to give up land. You were just a tool for the Tarasov mob to get what they wanted.”
She’s said it before, from the very first night after I got away from the Bad Men and was safe in my Canton bed:This was not your fault.
I shred the grass between my fingernails. I didn’t believe her when I was a child. I don’t believe her now. I never will.
Granny sighs. “And second, your sister wasn’t all alone. She had that woman they brought in after Larissa, the one with a face like a dried apple doll…”
“Noreen O’Connor,” I say. Mam found her somewhere in Canton. She was a thousand years old and walked with a nasty limp, but she treated Breagha like her own personal baby doll, dressing my sister in frilly lace and braiding her hair and spoiling her with sweets any time of day or night.
I ran off Nanny Noreen the instant I came home from Ireland. All it took was a box of crickets, the type meant to feed pet lizards. That, and a black rubber snake.
Granny says, “Your sister had Noreen.” After a pause, she adds, “And she had your mother too.”
Mam didn’t let my sister out of her sight for months. My mother sat in the back of Breagha’s classrooms at St. Brigid’s, played endless rounds of Candyland and Chutes and Ladders, even slept on a cot in our bedroom. For years after, Mam prided herself on knowing every bite of every meal my sister ate.
Everyone said Mam was the best mother on earth. Especially after her back gave out from sleeping on that cot. And she had to give up chairing St. Brigid’s Altar Guild, because she didn’t havetime for meetings. And she was dropped from Junior League for the very same reason. Mam was a feckin’ saint.
“We could have brought Breagha with us,” I say.
“We could have,” Granny agrees. “But did she really need to hear you screaming in your dreams?”