The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,133

if you have it.”

“Say, c’mere,” I said. I was standing by the window, looking down at the pool.

“Eh?”

“Come look. I want you to see this.”

“Just tell me,” muttered Boris, from the floor. “I don’t want to get up.”

“You’d better.” Downstairs it looked like a murder scene. A line of blood drips wound across the paving stones to the pool. Shoes, jeans, bloodsoaked shirt, were riotously flung and tossed. One of Boris’s busted-up boots lay at the bottom of the deep end. Worse: a greasy scum of vomit floated in the shallow water by the steps.

xxiv.

LATER, AFTER A FEW half-hearted passes with the pool vacuum, we were sitting on the kitchen counter smoking my dad’s Viceroys and talking. It was almost noon—too late to even think about going to school. Boris—ragged and unhinged-looking, his shirt hanging off the shoulder on one side, slamming the cabinets, complaining bitterly because there was no tea—had made some hideous coffee in the Russian way, by boiling grounds in a pan on the stove.

“No no,” he said, when he saw I’d poured myself a normal sized cup. “Very strong, very small amount.”

I tasted it, made a face.

He dipped a finger in it, and licked it off. “Biscuit would be nice.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Bread and butter?” he said hopefully.

I eased down from the counter—as gently as I could, because my head hurt—and searched around until I found a drawer with sugar envelopes and packaged tortilla chips that Xandra had brought home from the buffet at the bar.

“Crazy,” I said, looking at his face.

“What?”

“That your dad did that.”

“Is nothing,” mumbled Boris, turning his head sideways so he could wedge the whole corn chip in. “He broke one of my ribs once.”

After a long pause, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I said: “A broken rib’s not that serious.”

“No, but it hurt. This one,” he said, pulling up his shirt and pointing it out to me.

“I thought he was going to kill you.”

He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Ah, I provoked him on purpose. Answered back. So you could get Popchik out of there. Look, is fine,” he said, condescendingly, when I kept on looking at him. “Last night he was frothing at mouth but he’ll be sorry when he sees me.”

“Maybe you ought to stay here for a while.”

Boris leaned back on his hands and gave me a dismissive smile. “Is nothing to be fussed about. He gets depressed sometimes, is all.”

“Hah.” In the old Johnnie Walker Black days—vomit on his dress shirts, angry co-workers calling our house—my dad (in tears sometimes) had blamed his rages on “depression.”

Boris laughed, with what seemed like genuine amusement. “And what? You don’t get sad yourself sometimes?”

“He should be in jail for doing that.”

“Oh, please.” Boris had gotten bored with his bad coffee and had ventured to the fridge for a beer. “My father—bad temper, sure, but he loves me. He could have left me with a neighbor when he left Ukraine. That’s what happened to my friends Maks and Seryozha—Maks ended up on the street. Besides, I should be in jail myself, if you want to think that way.”

“Sorry?”

“I tried to kill him one time. Serious!” he said, when he saw the way I was looking at him. “I did.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No, is true,” he said resignedly. “I feel bad about it. Our last winter in Ukraine, I tricked him to walk outside—he was so drunk, he did it. Then I locked the door. Thought sure he would die in the snow. Glad he didn’t, eh?” he said, with a shout of laughter. “Then I’d be stuck in Ukraine, my God. Eating from garbage cans. Sleeping in railway station.”

“What happened?”

“Dunno. It wasn’t late at night enough. Someone saw him and picked him up in a car—some woman, I’d guess, who knows? Anyway he went out drinking more, made it home a few days later—lucky for me, didn’t remember what happened! Instead he brought me a soccer ball and said he was drinking only beer from then on. That lasted one month maybe.”

I rubbed my eye behind my glasses. “What are you going to tell them at school?”

He cracked the beer open. “Eh?”

“Well, I mean.” The bruise on his face was the color of raw meat. “People are going to ask.”

He grinned and elbowed me. “I’ll tell ’em you did it,” he said.

“No, seriously.”

“I am serious.”

“Boris, it’s not funny.”

“Oh, come on. Football, skateboard.” His black hair fell in his face like a shadow and he tossed