Laurie Boris

Hi. It’s been a while. Here’s something I’ve been working on from a new novel project. I hope you like it.

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In an upstairs dressing room of the opulent estate just outside Moscow, Feodora sits in an antique wooden chair facing the window, the skirt of her wedding dress draped carefully around her. Outside, a white tent has been staked into the grass for the reception, tables and chairs beneath it. Under a second tent is an array of microphones and instruments. Even the sky, clouds holding back the sun, seems to be waiting. None of this can start without her. It’s a feeling of power and sadness all at once.

There’s a knock on the door. Please don’t be Mama. She’d refused to let Mama help with the wedding dress, to see how tight it had become since the fitting. She readied excuses. Stress eating. Not something completely unknown to her.

“Fedya, can I come in?”

It’s her father. Her anxiety spikes for a different reason. She grants him entrance to her private room, her sanctuary, maybe the one last moment she would have for herself, before everything in her life would change.

“Papa.” Her voice cracks.

Her father smiles. As a general in the Russian army, he was not a man accustomed to smiling, and it looks awkward on his face. Or that could have been the situation. It has always seemed to her that he was a man who’d wanted a son and never got over being unprepared to raise a daughter. His gaze searches the small room for a second chair, moves it next to her and sits, careful not to crease his uniform pants.

“You look beautiful,” he says finally.

She does not feel beautiful. Mama’s salon girl did a horrid job with her hair. It looks nothing like the movie star photo Feodora had shown her. The nails were not done as she’d asked, but there’s no time to fix it. The careful makeup she’d applied herself was doing a woeful job of concealing the insomnia beneath her eyes, the three new pimples that had appeared overnight, and ice packs and contour cream can only do so much to distract from the puffiness of her face. She wants to burst into tears but holds firm. As bad as it is, she does not want to redo her makeup.

The hard lines of his face soften. He reaches out a hand, as if wondering if he should touch her with it, but then withdraws.

“Mama asked you to come check on me, yes?” Feodora says, to break the tension, to distract herself from a possible onslaught of tears.

Papa shrugs. “Your mother was wondering…if you were okay.”

“I’m fine,” she says automatically, much too brightly, pushing out a smile. “Peachy wonderful. It’s my wedding day and you’ve spent a bundle on it. Why would I not be fine?”

Papa moves a little closer. This time he extends a hand and touches her forearm. His palm is cold, clammy. She flicks a gaze at it, and he pulls it away.

“You know”—he clears his throat—“it’s still not too late to change your mind. To hell with the money.”

She drops her gaze to her lap. The yards and yards of expensive, silky fabric. “I know you don’t like Mikhail, Papa.”

“We have our…differences.” That’s a charitable way of putting it, and Feodora works to contain her derision, remembering the many dinner table arguments, mostly about politics and the war, that had ended in the two of them leaving early, often not even bothering to feign an excuse. “But. You are a grown woman now and it’s a fruitless endeavor to tell you what to do. It has always been.”

“He loves me,” Feodora says, near tears again. “He’ll be a good husband, he’ll take good care of me. You’ll see. He’ll prove you wrong.”

Her father has no response to that. He looks smaller now. A toy soldier in his toy general’s uniform. “Tell Mama five more minutes,” she says, and he leaves, closing the door behind him.

Feodora sniffs, dabs at her eyes with a tissue, checks her face in the mirror. The caterers move in, preparing food stations, an aroma of seafood reaches her and she winces. A young man in a black suit straps on a guitar, hits an irksome chord. She presses a hand to her belly.

Did Papa notice? Do they know? And worse, had they told Mikhail? Her fiancé will be so angry with her. He always asks about her birth control. He wanted them to wait. He wanted them to travel together and have fun before the children came. Not be like those other couples he disdained, who start having kids immediately and drop off the face of the earth. They were different, he’d said. They were special. He loved her slender body, the breast implants he’d bought for her, and he didn’t want her to change.

Everyone has secrets, she tells herself. And for now it will be best for everyone to keep this one. She’ll tell him after the wedding. After the expensive honeymoon trip he’d planned for them. After…well, she’ll figure that out later, the when and the how. She takes a deep breath, gathers up her dress, pastes on a smile and heads downstairs.