She lies with her eyes open, wondering if Andrei is as racked with guilt as she is, hoping he is also awake in his house in Ivanovo, staring into the night. Hoping but far from certain, since this is the time of night her hope often turns to doubt. Did Andrei’s face ever darken over Marik’s death? She never heard him lament placing the shell into Marik’s hand. Shouldn’t Andrei have known that what he drove Marik to do was within the realm of danger? Shouldn’t he wake up at least as often as she does, the weight of Marik’s death constricting his chest? The thought takes her places that only emerge late at night, when everyone is asleep, when the layer of everyday life is stripped away and there is nothing, not a glimmer of light, to detract from the darkness. Terrifying places that she is not ready to acknowledge. To escape from them, she thinks of what happened after Marik died.

She saw Marik’s mother only once after the accident in the woods, as Marik’s death was referred to in their family, when her mother, Grandma, and Sasha went to his funeral at the same cemetery where Uncle Sima had been lying for fifteen years. The new section, with a freshly dug grave awaiting Marik’s coffin, was at least a kilometer from Uncle Sima’s; so many had died since then that the cemetery had swollen past its original fence and spilled onto the field leading toward the underbrush that marked the edge of the forest.

As they walked along the alleys of the dead, she thought it was ironic that Marik’s grave would overlook, for all eternity, as Grandma whispered in her under-the-breath prayer, the woods that killed him. Or was it the remnants of the war that killed him? Or was it Andrei, with his goading and mocking? Or maybe—a thought that still stings—what killed him was her abandoning them by the fire, two stubborn boys who wouldn’t budge, two friends who for a moment became blinded by rage and who had no one to shake them back into their own truth. Maybe what killed Marik was her betrayal.

Marik’s mother stood by the open grave, in a black coat and black fur hat, her hands clutching the edge of the coffin above Marik’s head, as if this were her only support, as if without holding on to it, she would lose her balance and fall.