Ring of Truth (23 page)

I beat you to it,
her mind screamed
. I've already started considering it
...

“You know what?” She wrenched the ring off her finger and flung it in her handbag. Her mind was already telling her things she didn't care to hear, and she was not eager for the ring to chime in. “I really appreciate everything you're doing for me, Nicholas, you are truly going above and beyond. But I don't want to talk about this anymore.”

She twisted her body away from him to put an exclamation point on her dismissal and stared resolutely out the window. None of the scenery was clear, though, not with the impenetrable darkness, the swirling snow, or the tears blurring her vision. She was left to her thoughts, which were no comfort at all, even with the ring banished from her finger.

She didn't shed one tear on meeting me. I was a sniveling mess, but she was as unemotional as could be. She didn't ask a single thing about the parents who raised me. She didn't want to know if I have brothers or sisters in California. She didn't care what my favorite subject was in school or did I play any sports or did I have a dog or a cat or a fish. Do I have a favorite holiday? Was I ever in love? Am I in love now? Maybe with the mysterious somebody who gave me this damn ring?

Maybe a few days ago the ring had given Veronica clarity and courage, but now it was just irritating her.

Know thy heart.

Her reply to that directive was to kick her handbag deeper into the footwell.

As promised, Nicholas deposited her at the Kudrinskaya Building. She was retrieving her handbag from the depths of the footwell when he forestalled her by laying a hand on her leg. “I'm going to send some dinner to your apartment, because you have to eat and I bet you don't have any food up there. What unit are you in?”

She told him.

“I'll call one of my favorite places. They're still open and they're fast. They service the embassy all the time. I'll have them include a bottle of wine.”

She wouldn't protest that most nights. She certainly wouldn't tonight.

She forced herself to look Nicholas's way. “Please forgive me for being an ungrateful snot.” He shook his head. She continued without letting him speak. “You've already done so much for me but I want to ask you for one thing more.”

“Name it.”

“I want to arrive early tomorrow at my mother's. Maybe even a full hour earlier than we said we'd show up.”

“Fine. We'll miss more of the traffic that way.”

“I'm forcing a really short night on you.”

“The ambassador does that all the time. No problem.”

He smiled, but she refused to be charmed. At the moment Nicholas seemed in league with the supposedly truth-telling ring, which meant he was on the outs with her.

He went on. “May I ask why you want to get there so early?”

She told her final untruth of the night. “I want to have as much time as possible with my mother.”

Nicholas nodded. She had the idea he didn't believe her but that didn't come as a surprise. She already understood he would be a hard man to fool.

The next morning Veronica found out that Nicholas was a soothsayer. As he had predicted, they entered her birth mother's apartment to have Fedosia greet them with the news that the doctor had already made his house call.

Veronica wordlessly shed her coat, scarf, and gloves. So. She was to believe the doctor had come and gone. Even though she was standing in this apartment before eight a.m. and Fedosia had said the doctor wouldn't appear until nine at the earliest. And that was not even getting into the dubious assertion that doctors in Russia's less than world-class healthcare system made house calls on impoverished patients.

Earlier that morning Veronica had established a guiding principle for what she knew would be a difficult day, the last day she would see her birth mother alive. It was this: She would not be upset or disappointed or disillusioned if her birth mother asked for money for medical treatment.

It was not a crime to be poor. It was not a crime to request help from someone more fortunate than you. And if ever there were an understandable reason to ask, saving one's own life was it.

In fact, Veronica thought as she dressed for the day, asking for help requires that you swallow your pride and risk humiliation. It takes guts. And Veronica would admire her birth mother for having guts.

With this guideline in mind, Veronica felt confident returning the ring to her finger. She had left it on the bedside table while she slept, not wanting to risk another nightmarish dream. But after her shower, she slipped the ring back on and reminded it, with some asperity, that she
did
know her heart. After all, that's how she had gotten to Moscow in the first place. And now her heart's desire was to help her mother financially any way she could.

Now Veronica stood in the minuscule entry of her birth mother's apartment and handed Fedosia the box of
pastila
, pastries made with sweet apple paste, that she had purchased en route. Nicholas had recommended them as a delicacy, and she had wanted to bring something special. “How did the appointment with the doctor go?” she asked Fedosia.

Fedosia replied with atypical animation. She was wearing the same clothes she'd had on the night before, but this morning everything about her was amped up.

“They've had good news,” Nicholas translated. “The doctor said that indeed your mother is a candidate for a special treatment that might save her life.”

Nicholas relayed this information as if he were a newsman under the strictest injunction to appear impartial. It was only because of the prior night's conversation that Veronica knew he didn't believe a word Fedosia was saying.

There would be no
I told you so's
from him, Veronica realized. And he would leave it entirely up to her to judge the veracity of what she was hearing.

Veronica found her birth mother in the same bubbly mood as Fedosia. Mother and daughter exchanged kisses and smiles before Veronica settled on the pull-out bed, clasping her mother's hands. “This is pretty incredible news from the doctor! Tell me everything he said.”

Nicholas duly translated. Despite the momentousness of this new treatment option, it soon became clear the doctor had offered remarkably few details about it. The treatment would have to be done in Moscow, in a cutting-edge facility. For that reason it was expensive. But there was an excellent chance it would prolong her mother's life by years, and really, it was nothing short of miraculous.

Veronica pivoted to face Nicholas, who was once again in the fold-out chair Fedosia had carried from the adjacent room. “Do you understand exactly what it is my mother is suffering from?”

“I haven't been able to pin that down. Both Fedosia and your mother keep saying it's complicated and has to do with why she retired early.”

“And this treatment is available now because—”

“Apparently it's new. I asked if it was experimental, and your mother said yes. But the doctor is very confident about it, especially in her case. She says,” he finished, “that it's the only thing that's given her any hope.”

Extraordinary timing, it had to be said. The miracle cure raises its head just as Veronica touches down in Russia. She turned back around to face her mother. “When does the doctor want to start this treatment?”

At that, her mother looked away and shook her head, as Veronica had an inkling she would. Perhaps Veronica, too, was a soothsayer. Or perhaps she had merely heard the word “expensive” in Nicholas's translation.

Eventually her mother spoke, and Nicholas translated. “The problem is that the treatment is expensive,” he repeated. “Since it's experimental, it's not covered by the basic healthcare program. Only people who can afford it can get it.”

“What do your children say about it?” Her children who were not around today, either, who, like the grandchildren, were never around, no matter that the matriarch was on her deathbed getting word of an astounding last-minute reprieve or that their long-lost sister from America had suddenly materialized in Moscow.

“Of course her children are desperate for her to live,” Nicholas translated. “They would do anything they possibly could.”

Except be by their mother's side.

“But they can't help,” Nicholas went on. “None of them has any money.”

Veronica's mother chose this moment to grip her hands and squeeze. Hard.

Veronica wanted to help—she'd come here with that intention—but how in the world could she afford to pay for an expensive medical treatment? True, she did have some savings. And maybe she could take out a loan.

She looked into her birth mother's aqua eyes, boring into her own, asking a question that needed no words to be understood.

Veronica answered. “Do you want me to pay for this treatment?”

The moment Nicholas translated, and even though Veronica hadn't yet agreed to pay for anything, her mother burst into tears.
Now
her tears flowed. She pulled Veronica into a bear of a hug—revealing a grasp that was astonishingly strong for a dying woman—and wept copiously. A wail even escaped her lips and ascended to the heavens.

As Veronica held her mother, she struggled to understand how it could be that her wishes were coming true and still she felt nothing, nothing at all. Now, there was a real chance her birth mother would live. Now, her birth mother was overcome with emotion, thanks to her beloved Veronika saving the day.

Fedosia, by now also a fountain of tears, came over to give Veronica's birth mother a hug. Veronica rose to walk across the room. She exchanged a glance with Nicholas, whose steady gaze neither accused nor endorsed. He was leaving it all up to her, as she had known he would.

Veronica watched the tableau of her mother and Fedosia hugging. This wasn't like last night anymore. The discussion of the miracle treatment and the expense involved wasn't coming from Fedosia alone. It was coming from her mother, too. It was coming from both of them.

Nicholas made a restless move and rose to his feet. He spun away as if he'd had enough.

Veronica watched him pull his cell phone from his trouser pocket. “Nicholas,” she said to his back, “will you please ask my mother if I should get in touch with the doctor to find out how to pay for the treatment?”

He turned back around and nodded without enthusiasm. His question broke the hug between Veronica's mother and Fedosia, who shook their heads in unison. “They're telling me the doctor doesn't want to be bothered with that kind of detail.” Again his voice betrayed no reaction. “It's better if you do a wire transfer straight into your mother's account.”

Veronica nodded slowly. Fedosia stood to allow her to resume her rightful place at her beaming mother's side. As she sat, Veronica understood why it was that she felt so hollow. Later she wondered if that was what gave her the strength to speak her next words. That, or the ring, that damn ring, that kept pushing her off the highest branch whether or not she felt ready to fly.

“I wish,” she told her mother, holding her hands, holding her gaze, “that you had been honest with me.”

She waited for Nicholas to translate. She sensed his surprise as he stepped closer to do so. She felt him behind her as she watched her mother's eyes go from joyful to disbelieving.

“If you asked for money just to live,” she went on, “I would give it to you. Despite what you think, I don't have that much to give. But I would give it to you. After all, I am your daughter. And you are the woman who gave me life.”

Veronica had to pause as her throat constricted and her eyes filled with tears. Her birth mother remained dry-eyed.

“But I won't be tricked into it. Which is what's happening, because you're not being honest with me.”

Veronica had to force the words out. Then she had to listen to them hang in the air as she waited for Nicholas to translate. She felt her mother withdraw her hands and watched her eyes narrow. She had known she would anger her mother, but she told herself that's what happened in families. Family members got angry at each other from time to time. Then they forgave and they forgot. That was as long a thread in the tapestry of family life as love and devotion.

She glanced at the ring, whose gemstone sparkled with white light. No surprise there: Veronica understood by now it sanctioned everything that required courage. Funny how often courage was required to get at the truth.

Veronica swallowed hard and spoke again. “I'm sorry but I don't believe any of this about the so-called special treatment. It doesn't add up, none of it does, and I just don't believe it. I think you made it up so you would have an excuse to ask me for money.”

Her mother began to blubber in protest, but Veronica stilled her.

“Stop, please stop. Just be honest with me. Tell me once and for all. Is there really a special treatment?” Taking in her mother's sturdy build and rosy cheeks, she heard herself go one step further. “And are you really so sick that you're dying?”

Nicholas finished his translation. Veronica's mother said nothing. Veronica kept her gaze on her mother's flushed face, saw, though she wished she didn't, the calculation in her eyes, the weighing of what to say and what not to say. In the silent room she listened to the relentless tick tock of the wall clock in the kitchen, counting off the seconds while her mother put Truth on the scales of her mind. All four of them, it seemed, were suspended in a breathless moment, anticipating something, no one knew what, like those few seconds before the curtains part and the first notes of the opera ring out.

Finally her mother spoke, her voice firm and her eyes hard. “I'm shocked you're asking me this,” Nicholas translated. “Every word I told you is true. What kind of woman are you who believes a mother would tell her daughter she's dying when she's not?”

“I don't want to believe it—” Veronica began but her mother cut her off with a comment she could tell was biting though she didn't understand a single word.

Nicholas didn't immediately translate.

“What did she say?” Veronica asked him without turning around. She had to ask a second time before finally he responded.

“She said she can tell you don't have children because no woman who bore a child could ever suspect such a thing.”

That propelled Veronica to her feet. She knew, she
knew
, her mother was lying. And she was in no mood to get a lecture on maternal love from the woman who had given her away. “I get that you know more about bearing children than I do. So maybe you can explain something to me. Why exactly did you give me away? I keep hearing that you would've had a hell of a time raising a fourth child on your own. But you and I both know what was very likely to become of me if you left me at an orphanage.”

In Russia the stigma attached to orphans was horrible. People seemed to blame the children, innocent as they were, for being abandoned by their parents. The vast majority of orphans were never adopted, and at age eighteen they were unceremoniously released into the streets where chances were excellent that they would become thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, or a tragic combination of all three.

Her mother sputtered. Nicholas translated. “I wanted a better life for you,” he said. “And I knew you'd be adopted.”

“How? How could you possibly know that?”

As she watched her mother struggle to frame an answer, and as Fedosia raised her voice to Veronica, saying who knew what, Veronica suddenly felt herself filled with the same reckless abandon she'd felt when she told Rinaldo he could take his rehearsals and shove them because she was flying to Moscow to meet her dying birth mother.

“Is that why you took me to Moscow?” she asked her mother. “Is that why you carried your newborn all the way to Baby Home Number 30 at Kudrinskaya Plaza?” She prayed Nicholas would translate verbatim without questioning her, and apparently he did.

Her mother replied with vigor. “Yes,” Nicholas translated. “I carried you all the way there so you would be adopted.”

“Because I'm sure this town is big enough to have its own orphanage. But instead you carried your four-day-old baby all the way to the middle of Moscow, where the embassies and the foreigners and the rich Russians are, because chances were much better there that a wealthy family or maybe a family from overseas would adopt me and give me a better life. Is that right?”

“Da! Da!”
her mother cried after Nicholas translated.
Yes! Yes!

“Do you think about me every April? When the flowers start to bloom? Do you think about carrying me to the orphanage then? Because that time of year I always think about you.”

“Yes, always in spring,” Nicholas translated, and though for a few minutes now Veronica had had little doubt, at that moment she knew for sure.

“Just so you know, Nicholas?” She spun around to face him, turning her back on the impostor beneath the fraying blanket. “My birthday is in October.”