Free Moscow but Dreaming by Ekaterina Sedia

leisure boats. You sigh into the phone and try to ignore all of her unvoiced complaints.
    “Mom,” you finally say, “do you remember that family that used to live next door, when I was little? The one with seven kids?”
    “Vorobyev,” she says, her memory as flawless as always. “The youngest boy, Vasya, was such a sweet kid. Always running around in those girls’ coats from his older sisters.”
    That’s right, you now remember, those were plaid, too-short girl coats. No wonder everyone teased him; no wonder his unperturbed demeanor incited them to violence—there was no point in such savage humiliation as a girl’s coat unless its victim would acknowledge it as such.
    “Vasya Vorobyev,” she repeats. “Too sad about him.”
    “What have you heard?” Your heart seizes up and it’s ridiculous, you haven’t thought about that kid in decades. In forever. “What happened?”
    “Anya, his mother, used to call me sometimes,” she says. “He’s dead, in Osetia last year. Now she’s dead too—her heart gave out after that.”
    “Too bad.” You are numb now, numb to the tips of your fingers, and they almost drop the receiver. A deep chill settles in at the loss you aren’t sure you’ve suffered. “Do you remember why was his father was defrocked?”
    “No. Why would you care about something like that?”
    “I don’t,” you whisper, and say goodbye. You spend the rest of the day watching TV and pacing and drinking buttermilk straight out of the bottle that fits so comfortably into one hand, and you keep thinking back to the days when you needed two to hold it.
    The boy who defended you sometimes. You’re glad to have a name, but in your mind he’s still that boy—the boy. You’re glad to be dreaming about him the next night—at least there he is alive and little, even as other people’s hands press his face into the dirty pavement, his teeth making an awful scraping sound that makes you cringe in your sleep. They leave, but not before making lewd gestures in your direction, and you wait for the boy to stagger up, his feet shuffly and his knees buckling under him. He totters but remains standing. You feel lucid even though it is a dream and in it you are still small. “Why was your father defrocked?”
    “Why does it matter?” He lisps a bit, his tongue thoughtfully exploring the ragged edge of the chipped front tooth. He doesn’t seem to know that he is in your dream.
    “Because I need to know what did he do that was so awful, to bring you here. What was it that you were paying for?”
    “Looking for the prime mover, huh?” He drops the pretense of childhood and for a second becomes terrifying—still a kid, but somehow older and deader. “I don’t know why. Who knows why shit happens, huh? Who knows why you don’t tell anyone about them dragging you under the stairs. Why you never told them—”
    Your face burns with exposed shame and you snap away from him, the hem of your gabardine dress twirling around your legs, long and smooth and brown in your first pair of nylon pantyhose. “Fuck off,” you mutter darkly. And yet you understand his point, the essential impossibility of revealing one’s secrets—especially if those secrets are not one’s fault. We can get over the wrongs we do, but we cannot forgive ourselves for the wrongs done to us, for our own helplessness.
    “Don’t be like that.” He catches up to you and walks with you across the paved yard, the large puddle in its center only nascent. It must remind him, you think, and then you are suddenly not sure whether the puddle incident happened before or after the chipped tooth.
    You sit in your bed upright, your heart strumming against your ribs. You have to go to sleep, you tell yourself, you have to get up early tomorrow, but then you remember it’ll be Saturday. So you give up and pull on a pair of jeans and tuck your nightgown into them, throw on a jacket and run down the stairs and across the street—like a