“Not with this knee. I couldn’t make a two-kilometer march, much less an all-day advance. I’m done as a soldier. It’ll be sniper instructor duty for me, and you’ll be heading back to the fight.” He pushed a strand of wet hair off my forehead. “It’s too soon. I know that. But this is what we have. Before there’s danger and bullets flying again, and we run out of life.”
Lyonya, I thought. Kostia was thinking it, too.
“You still love him. You still miss him. So do I. Six months or six years or six decades, we’ll still miss him.” Kostia’s eyes were black and still. “I wasn’t even jealous, him winning you. You picked the best man I knew. I wasn’t going to break with my friend over that, or my partner.”
There was pain there in his voice, but well-buried. He’d paved it over at the time, matter-of-factly, because in his eyes it didn’t matter that he’d lost. I remembered Alexei’s narrow-eyed glance assessing every man who visited me in the hospital battalion: a dog keeping an eye on a discarded bone, not wanting anyone else to have it . . . while Kostia had just quietly gone on being my other half, being Lyonya’s friend, keeping it complete: the three of us.
And now it was just the two of us, the ones who’d loved Lyonya best.
“That’s all.” Kostia blew out a long breath. “I’m just—I’m not waving you off to war without telling you I love you. ”
I was shivering with cold and something else. My mouth burned. I reached out, tangling my hand in his shirt again, but unable—for the first time in our partnership—to look my shadow in the eye. “I feel it, too,” I heard myself say, so quietly. “Maybe I’ve felt it for a long time. But I’m still . . . mourning my dead.”
All my dead, not just Lyonya. Still fighting my way free.
Kostia’s fingers folded over mine. “So am I.”
He released my hand, took the canoe by its prow, and began towing it back toward shore.
“LYUDMILA!” MRS. ROOSEVELT’S voice suddenly sounded. I looked up as I crossed the lawn toward the big house and realized she was leaning out of a first-floor window. “What on earth happened?”
“Swimming,” I said through chattering teeth, arms crossed across my soaked dress. “Without a bathing costume.” Yuri, tramping along behind, hadn’t offered me his coat. Wasn’t part of his directive.
“It’s far too cold for bathing,” the First Lady scolded, sounding like my mother. “Come here at once. ”
I was too numb to resist. I followed the wave of Mrs. Roosevelt’s hand toward the vestibule on the side, where she met me and began clucking. “You may stay outside,” she told Yuri politely but unmistakably, and even he didn’t say a word about his directive to the First Lady as she wafted me into her private quarters. I gave a disjointed explanation about the canoe, hesitating to walk on her exquisite carpets in my soaked shoes, but she shooed me into the attached bathroom and put a big soft towel into my arms. （American towels! I never ceased to marvel at their fluffiness. I was still undecided about hot dogs, but American towels, now . . . ） “Undress here, I’ll be right back.”
“Izvinite, I can go to my room,” I began, but there was no stopping her. By the time I came out of the bathroom, wrapped up in towels, leaving a pile of wet clothes on the edge of the First Lady’s bathtub, she was back with a pair of pajamas and a sewing box. She smiled at my scarlet face, called a maid for my wet clothes, then turned with a matter-of-fact expression as if she was entirely accustomed to have half-naked Soviet snipers dripping on her Persian rugs. “Change into my pajamas, dear.”
“W-we are not the same height,” I said, teeth still chattering.
“No matter, I’ll take a hem in the sleeves and legs.”
“B-by y-yourself?”