Losing Francesca (26 page)

Of course, there's that little thing called the International Date Line and as soon as we pass it and land at Nadi International on Fiji's largest island, the new day is well on its way and the worst day of my life is almost yesterday's yesterday. I walk down the stairs of the jet and breathe in the heavy tropical air. An air-conditioned car drives us a half mile down the road to a small building near the helicopter where a customs agent meets us and checks our passports. It's a formality. My dad could hand over any passport and they'd be happy.

Two of the agents call me by name and ask me how I'm doing. Of course they call me Filia, because that's my name here. Apparently the Cleveland News doesn't reach to Fiji. They have no idea that I was being held in America. One says I look tired after I come out of the bathroom, and Nic interrupts him and shuffles me over to the waiting area and sits me down in a plush red chair that faces another helipad.

"Are you hungry, Filia?" Nic asks me in Romanian.

"Yes," I say, because I am. "But I'd like to wait until we get home."

He nods and walks off to talk to my father and Sophia slips into the chair across from me. "You need to sleep. And get out of those clothes."

I say nothing. I don't know what to say.

"We're calling doctors in, Fee. Someone you can talk to about what happened. You need someone to talk to."

"He should've let me say goodbye," I say to the window. "I should've been allowed to say goodbye."

"Fee, you are not that girl, you have to accept that."

"I know," I say to placate her and then let out a long sigh. "I'm just spinning, Sophia. My world is spinning. I'm not sure what I feel right now, I just know I don't want to share it with you, or Dad, or counselors who want me to talk about it until it's meaningless. Because…" I look over and find my dad before I say the rest. "If you want me to be truthful, I'm going to miss those people."

"Just give it time, sweetie." She reaches over and takes my hands in hers and gives them a little squeeze.

I count the seconds and when I get to five, I pull my hands back.
I've already lost the battle with time,
I want to say.
I've lost that day, as well as the one in between now and then. It's a trick, I was tricked into another tomorrow as we crossed the ocean.

Luckily I say none of this out loud because she'd probably cart me right over to the hospital. I just say, "Yeah, time. I just need time."

But all I can think of is Brody and the time that passed between the day he learned about Fiona going missing and the day he learned about Fiona coming home. How is he dealing with the time that has passed since my dad stole me off the Sullivan farm?

"What are we waiting for?" I finally ask a question about what's going on around me. Not that I care really, I just want to know how many minutes it will be before I can go into my room and close the door and empty my pockets. I have three secrets in my pockets, and I desperately want to take them out and look at them.

"Here we go, they're ready," Sophia says.

My dad grabs Sophie's hand and Nicolae grabs mine and we walk across the polished tile floor to the opposite side of the building where our pad is located. I duck as I pass under the rotating blades, then get in and buckle myself up. Nic turns after he's buckled to check me, then gives me a thumbs-up.

It's a thirty-minute 'copter ride to our island, and forty minutes later I'm finally in my room.

I have lived in this room for as long as I can remember. Right now the foldaway doors that lead to the beach are open, so one entire wall is nothing but air. The sheer white curtains blow in the almost constant tropical breeze that crosses our island, and I can feel sandy grains between my now bare feet and the polished tile floor.

My bed faces the open wall, which looks out on my own private white-sand beach, so if the doors and curtains are open, the first thing I see when I wake up is paradise. The water varies between a turquoise blue to a light green that is almost too beautiful to describe with words. The boardwalk at the bottom of my ground-floor terrace steps takes me right to the water and I can end all my days falling asleep to the rhythmic crashing of waves if I want.

But, as ironic as this sounds, I don't care for the breeze or the wafting sand that finds its way into my room and under my feet. So I fold the doors closed, pull the sheer curtains, pull the blackout curtains, and switch on the air conditioner.

This is how I prefer my paradise right now, thank you. Dark and cool.

I reach into my pocket and pull out my three secrets.

Brody's phone and the two nameplates that say
Sweetness
.

Last week was a dream. That's what Nic kept telling me whenever he could find me alone on the jet.
It was a dream, Faina, just wake up now.

But I had the proof in my pocket. It took every ounce of willpower not to rub the nameplates together in front of them. It took even more not to turn Brody's phone on and look at the picture we took on the beach, but I did turn it on once. Just once when we got to Nadi and I went to the bathroom alone.

My days are so screwed up from the travel and the Date Line, I have no idea if that was yesterday or the day before that or the day before that. It hurts to think about it.

I open my bedroom door slightly and listen. I can hear muffled voices but I can't catch any words beyond my name. I close the door quietly and twist the lock. Then turn Brody's phone on.

There are no messages and it says 'not in range' in the upper left corner so there's no service and no internet. Of course, I never expected it to actually be in range, we're on a freaking island in the middle of nowhere, the satellite access here requires a password that I am not privy to. And I don't want to upload it anyway, not yet. Besides, my laptop is in my dad's office anyway. He never lets me keep it in my room.

But I don't need any of those things to look at the picture.

And that's all I want to do. Look at that picture of Brody and me in the moonlight on the Lake Erie beach. I stare at his lips, his blue eyes that squint with his smile, and the blond scruff on his chin. The nameplates clink in my hand as I rub them together.

It wasn't a dream.

"It wasn't a dream," I say out loud. And no matter how many times they make me repeat it, this time, I will not forget.

Chapter Thirty-Nine- Faina

I expect my dad to return to work in Russia after I settle in, but he doesn't. He stays, he watches me, he tickles me like I'm his baby again. He laughs with me and this morning he surprises me with a ride on the beach with those stupid ponies. His horse is not a pony, it's some ridiculously large draft thing that walks so slow it makes me crazy. But that's how my dad likes his horses. Big and slow.

As soon as we get off to grab a few bananas from a tree, they start walking home without us. We trail behind them, talking and enjoying each other's company alone for the first time in a lot of years.

Ever since Sophia came along he's pretty much left the parenting stuff up to her. It's been a very long time since he's paid so much attention to me. A very long time.

We stop our homeward journey near the edge of a long sloping hill that leads down to a beach we normally ignore. And we just stand there looking out at the water.

"What?" I ask, getting nervous with his silence.

"I just want you to know that I love you, Faina. I have always made these decisions about your life based on fear."

I squint up at him through the blazing afternoon sun. "Fear?"

"Fear that the world would discover who you are."

My heart thumps. A single knock that almost makes my knees buckle. "Who am I?"

He smiles and his gray eyes catch the light, setting off a sparkle from the lights and darks in there. "My daughter. You are my daughter, Faina. And this is a very dangerous person to be. People want to kill you, people want to steal you, people want to hurt you and lie to you and make you doubt me."

He takes my hand.

"And I do all of this"—he waves his hand at our island—"to protect you from them. But it's gone past that now. You've been exposed, and I can't take the chances I used to. I can't be with you all the time, and yet I need you to be safe. Do you understand this?"

"Of course, Daddy." And I do, it's hard to argue with safety.

He smiles at the affectionate term because I don't call him that often and for the last few weeks I haven't really been a lot of fun. I cried, I pouted, I stayed in my room, I refused to eat, I even swore at them a few times. Not the F-word like I did Frank. My father is tolerant, but I'm not sure he'd be
that
tolerant.

And they flew in psychologists and doctors to check me over. They made me talk to them and admit my feelings. And even though I really wanted to keep it all bottled up inside, it helped. It helped a lot, actually, to let it out. To admit that Frank was nice, that he gave me a horse, that Sean was the perfect big brother, that Brody was someone I wanted to love.

And they tell me it's OK. I do not have to feel guilty for feeling like this. And somehow, that makes all the difference. They are not mad at me for liking those people, or liking the horse or the boy. It's OK.

It kinda threw me, actually. It was unexpected. It validated me. It made me count in a way that was new.

"I'm glad, Fee. Because your mother and I have made a decision about your future and I hope you see the logic in it."

I swallow. "What decision?"

"Nicolae has been a good friend to you, he's taken care of you, he's been a part of your life since you were a little girl."

That's all true. I've known Nicolae since I was maybe five or six. He's five years older than me, so he came to live with us when he was ten or eleven, I guess. We've grown up together. He taught me a lot of things, including his language. But it doesn't take a genius to see where this is going and my mind starts racing. I watch my father's lips but I lose track of his words.

He shakes me by the shoulders a little bit. "Did you hear me, Faina?"

I shake my head. "No."

He nods his. "Yes."

I try and turn away but he is prepared and his grip on my shoulders tightens a bit. "You will marry him and he will take care of you. He is the only one I can trust."

"No."

"Yes, Faina. Yes. It's settled." And then he takes my hand and starts leading me down the hill to the path that will take us back to the house.

I am to marry Nicolae Cretu. It's settled. My dad thought it up, my mom agreed, and Nic is on board.

They've settled me. I tried to say no. In fact, I did say no, twice. But I'm not even sure my dad heard it. It's almost like no doesn't even register.

I am to marry Nicolae Cretu
, I think again in my head. I've been doing this all day. Mrs. Nicolae Cretu. Faina Cretu. It's not bad, I admit. His name could be worse. It's very Romanian, but I guess that's the point when I think about it. For all intents and purposes, I am Romanian, not Russian. Being Russian is dangerous, being Romanian safe.

It's the whole reason he came to live with us in the first place, to extract the Russian from me and turn me into a Romanian. If I ever get caught with my father I can pretend to be Romanian. And I have this act down so well, I'm even starting to believe it.

It's the same reason why all our staff is American, why Sophia is American. Why my real mother was American, I guess. Because if I get caught
away
from my father, I can just be American.

I scheduled my own flight to America for my summer holiday. Usually Sophia takes care of this stuff, but she was busy and I was eighteen for freak's sake. I should be able to handle my own stupid plane reservation. I never thought it would be a big deal to use the Francesca passport. How could I have known? I just panicked when the TSA picked me up in LA, that's all. I panicked. I was Francesca, pretending to be an Italian girl on holiday, and then when the TSA picked me up it was too late to change the story and be an American.

I panicked and everything spiraled out of control.

I'm not Faina Saburov, Russian-born daughter of Viktor Saburov. I am anyone else
but
her. And I learned all these languages and went to school in all these countries for one reason only. To slip into these other identities should it ever become necessary. Because being my father's daughter is just too dangerous.

He's been changing me into someone else my whole life.

One of the very few details I've learned from listening to my unsuspecting father speak Russian in front of me is that the tiny Eastern European country of Moldova is where he has the most power, where he conducts the most business, where he spends most of his time when he's not in Russia.

And since the whole breakup of the Soviet Union, things in Eastern Europe have been fragile. My dad is a Moscow-backed official in Moldova. And I've looked it up, I've looked up what they do in Moldova, it's not like I just turn my head to the tattoos, the security, and the secrets. I might not understand what he really does, but I know it's illegal. I know that he's
very
unpopular in Moldova. Unpopular to the point where lots of people might want to kill him, or his wife, or his daughter.