Ring of Truth (20 page)

“Oh my God.” Veronica's knees gave out when a new idea swam into her mind. She sank back onto the lumpy couch with the green stripes.

It had been hours since she'd had the dream of the graveyard, and she'd allowed herself to discount its message, but now she had to wonder if maybe, after all, the dream had been right. Maybe this morning when Viktor had called her birth mother to make the final arrangements, he'd found out she was dead. And so he had made himself unavailable. He didn't want to face Veronica's heartbreak and so concocted the lame “my car broke down” excuse. He might as well have said his dog ate his homework.

Masha appeared in her field of vision, holding up her cell phone. “I have idea, Miss Veronica. Call Nicholas. Maybe he take you to your mother.”

Veronica didn't wait for a second invitation to place that call. And to her immense relief, Nicholas immediately agreed to drive her to her birth mother's home—which was a full hour out of town—to translate for her, and then to return her to the Kudrinskaya Building afterward.

There was only one hitch: Work would tie him up for three hours at least. So her birth mother would have to make herself available for a nighttime visit.

“I'll call Viktor,” Nicholas said, “get the particulars from him, and then call your birth mother.”

Veronica hadn't known that men like Nicholas existed anymore. “I don't know how to thank you.”

“I understand how important this is,” he told her.

Yes, he would understand that. He'd been an orphan, too. Veronica resisted sharing her concern that her birth mother had died. For one thing, there was no rational way to frame it.
I dreamed I was searching for her grave. And when I had the dream I was wearing a ring that speaks the truth. So when Viktor pulled his disappearing act, what else could I conclude?

It was an agony waiting for Nicholas to call back. When finally he did, he delivered the news Veronica longed to hear. “Your birth mother very much wants to see you, regardless of the hour.”

Veronica clutched Masha's phone.
She's still alive.

“You understand,” Nicholas went on, “that she's quite ill?”

“She wrote me that she's dying.”

“I'll get to the orphanage as soon as I can.”

Veronica shivered. The way he said it, she worried they might not make it in time.

She glanced at the ring. Now the emerald gemstone was nearly as white as the snowflakes drifting lazily toward earth outside the window, like sighs from the heavens. The ring had come through for her yet again. Nonsensical as it seemed, it was as if the ring had contrived to put Nicholas at the orphanage to make up for Viktor's lapse and take her to her birth mother.

Still, she had to suffer through another agony of waiting. But the clock ticked faster than it might have when Masha allowed her to help care for the children. She learned that this baby home housed ninety children up to age five, with only four caregivers present at any given time. It broke her heart to see infants who were nearly a year old barely able to sit up in their cribs. Had they enjoyed the devoted care of loving parents, they would be crawling or taking their first steps or even walking by that age.

At last Nicholas arrived. He hurried inside the orphanage's front room accompanied by a blast of frigid night air. Little Marina, now in her nightgown, somehow managed to escape her bed and grab him around the knees. Finally he had to pry her little body off his own and leave her, red-faced and wailing, inside.

The door closed on the orphanage. It was past seven now, dark save for a line of streetlights that stretched far into the night. The sidewalks were nearly empty, but cars still lined both sides of the road. They set off, walking past a row of buildings as institutional in style as the orphanage. Almost immediately Veronica slipped on a patch of ice.

“Careful.” Nicholas offered her his arm. “My car is just up the street.”

They fell into step. “Those children hate seeing you go,” she said after a time.

“It's the same for me. Every time.”

“Your attention must mean so much to them.”

“They get so little of it. I mean, the staff are great, but they're woefully shorthanded.”

“I learned just how much today. It boggles the mind.”

“Every time I visit I think there but for the grace of God go I.”

Veronica knew the feeling. If it hadn't been for her parents, who nearly bankrupted themselves to adopt her, she would have been one of the thousands of abandoned children for whom a knock on the door never came. She squeezed Nicholas's arm. “Masha told me.”

He glanced down at her and returned the squeeze. He said nothing, but nothing needed to be said. Both of them understood how fortunate they were.

A few minutes later he was settling her in his small black Renault. “I can't thank you enough for doing this,” she told him.

“Honestly, I'm happy to help.” He turned the ignition and the engine responded. No car problems here. That meant it would be only one hour more until she arrived at her birth mother's house, after she'd been waiting a lifetime. It was hard to fathom.

Veronica fell silent. In short order they encountered a fair amount of traffic, not surprising in a city of ten million people. Moscow drivers seemed as aggressive as their California counterparts, but she soon discovered that Nicholas could hustle with the best of them.

When they were tooling along a four-lane highway, she spoke again. “Did you try to get posted to Moscow so you could be close to the orphanage?”

“I wouldn't say that, but I had a focus on Russia from early on. I knew someday I'd land here.”

“Where else have you been posted?”

“Angola, to start. Then Egypt, Uzbekistan, and now here.”

A little different from the overseas travel she'd done thanks to her opera career, which was all Western Europe with one expedition to Singapore. With U.S. opera companies in such poor straits, American singers often found more opportunities abroad—for paid work, at least. “So you must speak several languages,” she said to Nicholas.

“Three well and a smattering of others. English and Russian, of course, French, and enough Arabic to get by, though I can't read or write.” He glanced at her. “What do you do?”

“I'm an opera singer. A soprano.”

“Really?” Nicholas didn't mask the astonishment in his voice. “That is very impressive.”

“Not so much. It's not like I'm famous or anything.”

“Maybe not yet. You must speak several languages, too, in that line of work.”

“I wish. All opera singers have to know some Italian, French, and German, but for most of us, our vocabulary is truly bizarre. I know how to tell you that my lover ran off with my sister or that I stabbed my father's courtesan in the heart, but I couldn't have a normal conversation if my life depended on it.”

Nicholas threw back his head and laughed. In that moment Veronica could imagine him as an imp of a boy.

She'd known him only a few hours, but already she liked him a lot. He was so good-looking, and so considerate. He just had a wonderful way about him. He seemed almost too good to be true.

She glanced at his left hand to see if it sported a telltale gold band and was pleased to note it did not. Still, that didn't prove anything. She tried to sound only casually interested. “Do you have family here in Moscow with you?”

“No. My parents, cousins, everybody are all back in Chicago.”

Right answer. “Yes, I remember now, Masha did mention Chicago.” She hesitated. “If you don't mind my asking, how old are you? I'm wondering if we were at the orphanage at the same time.”

“Wouldn't that be incredible? But I doubt it. I'm older than you. Thirty-six.”

“Yes, you are older than me.” She said nothing more.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him glance her way and chuckle. She kept her gaze straight ahead and smiled. She hadn't flirted with a man in a long time. And with a man like Nicholas—never.

Veronica looked down at the ring, wondering if it had an opinion of her traveling companion. She found herself caring quite a bit what it thought. Happily, not only was the emerald gemstone back to being a milky cream color, now it even glowed in the dark as if going opalescent weren't endorsement enough. Then again, Veronica was about to complete the journey on which the ring had helped dispatch her, so she would expect it to be satisfied.

It was more than a little nerve-wracking when Nicholas exited the highway for the town where her birth mother lived. “This is bigger than I thought it would be,” she told him, peering through the black night at the numerous high-rise apartment blocks that rose from the wintry landscape. Thousands of windows, it seemed, shone with the glow of lamplight. “It's really a city, not a town.”

“I bet there are a hundred thousand people living here.” Nicholas drove the Renault over a river lined with trees on both banks. “And more in the summer when people come to their
dachas
to escape Moscow.”

Veronica knew about those second homes, required by law to be small, owned by ordinary city dwellers as well as the wealthy and powerful. Back when Russians were severely restricted in owning property, the tradition of the
dacha
allowed them to call a plot of land their very own.

Old and new were cheek by jowl here: a glass office building next to a Russian Orthodox church built of white stone, with multiple spires and an onion dome painted a brilliant gold. They also came upon a low-slung mint-green train station that had the look of having stood in that exact spot for a century.

“This must be a stop on the Trans-Siberian railroad,” Nicholas said. “Hold on a minute. I have to check the directions.”

The Renault rolled to a stop on the side of the road. Veronica remained fascinated with the scenery even though it had stopped changing. “Isn't this place big enough to have an orphanage? Why did my mother take me to Moscow?”

Nicholas looked up from his cell phone, glowing in the dark. “I can think of any number of reasons. Maybe she thought she'd go back and get you the next day if she left you at an orphanage nearby. Maybe she was embarrassed to leave you where she lived, where she knew people. Or maybe she thought you had a better chance of being adopted if she took you to Moscow.” He turned his dark eyes to hers. “That's one thing you could ask her,” he added gently.

It struck Veronica then.
My birth mother must be as nervous as I am.
Maybe even more so. She might think her daughter was angry with her for giving her up.

There certainly had been times when it pained Veronica that
she
was the baby her birth mother had relinquished. Why her and not another? What was wrong with
her
? But eventually she came to think of her birth mother as a tragic figure who was forced to make an impossible choice, a sort of Russian Fantine who had to allow another to raise her beloved Cosette, never a day passing that she didn't wish life had dealt her a different hand.

Veronica shut her eyes.
I can tell her I know she loved me. I can tell her I'm not angry and never really was.
Now, at the end of her birth mother's life, all that mattered was giving her the peace that would come from seeing the child she had been forced to abandon. By coming all this way, Veronica could help heal the last open wound of her birth mother's life.

Nicholas broke into her thoughts. “It's not far from here. Shall I keep going?”

“I wish I'd brought something. I didn't think to bring something.”

Nicholas smiled. “You're bringing all you need, Veronica.”

She nodded, hoping he was right, and motioned for him to drive on. He made a turn and rolled the Renault up a commercial strip, identical concrete apartment towers rising above small storefronts, banks, and restaurants. Leafless trees lined both sides of the street, along with cars that had seen better days. Scattered neon signs made a feeble attempt to light the glacial night. A few pedestrians hastened along the sidewalks, so bundled against the cold that Veronica could see almost nothing of their features.

Then Nicholas stopped at an intersection, and Veronica found herself staring at a young woman who couldn't seem to decide whether to cross the street. She hesitated at the corner and gazed beyond the Renault at something well behind it. Unlike everyone else, this woman's head was bare. She had long straight hair, dyed so platinum blond it was nearly white, and her eyes were heavily made up with liner and mascara. She'd gone overboard with the makeup, but she was dressed all in black and stylish in her own way. Now Veronica saw she held a cell phone to her ear. She might have been standing at Union Square in San Francisco.

That might have been me if I'd grown up here.
Veronica would be living one life instead of another. No one could know if it would be better or worse. But she would have grown into that confident young woman only if she'd found a way to triumph over her birth mother's poverty. That would have been no mean trick in any country, let alone this one.

And you would never have known your parents. You would never have become an opera singer.

It was her destiny to have parents who could make her dreams come true. Yes, they'd had to scrabble hard. It had been a never-ending struggle to afford singing lessons, piano, all the training required to hone the gift of their daughter's voice. But Veronica knew they believed it had been worth it, as did she. Veronica wouldn't be who she was if she couldn't sing. She would be a pale shadow of herself.

Nicholas continued through the intersection and made a few more turns. Then he slid the car into a parking space and cut the engine. He gestured to the concrete apartment tower across the street.

“Is that it? We should go in,” she added, stating the obvious. Still, something kept her from exiting the car. “Did you ever try to find your birth mother?”

“I never did.”

“Did you think about it?”

He seemed to weigh his words. “I considered it. But when it came down to it, I just didn't care to unwrap the past.”

His words hung in the air.

“I know I may be disappointed,” Veronica said into the silence. “I have a mental image of my birth mother, and I know it may turn out not to be true.”

Nicholas said nothing.

She went on. “My parents would be crushed if they knew I was doing this. They've been so wonderful to me all my life. All they've ever done is love me.” She had to stop speaking.

Nicholas leaned closer. “Veronica, you're not doing anything wrong by trying to meet your—”

“That's another thing. My parents named me Veronica.” A rogue tear escaped. “They had another name picked out, but in the end they kept the name my birth mother gave me. Veronika. Do you know how much that means to me?” Now she was on the verge of sobbing.