Prologue: The Third Night
Kestrel Bay, Michigan — October 1992
On the third night after the child was born, three women came up the stairs of the house on Kestrel Street, and the house let them in.
Katya Petrova heard them before she saw them: the creak of the third step, the particular sigh of the screen door that no one but family could open without waking her. She was twenty-seven years old and six days past the birth, and she lay in the dark with her daughter asleep against her chest, and she was not afraid. She had been waiting.
The first woman came in without knocking. She was small and quick, with hands still warm from whatever she had been holding — a kettle, a loaf, another woman’s labor. She crossed to the cradle and looked down at the sleeping child and smiled, and the smile had pity in it.
“Vera,” Katya said.
The second woman came in on a draft of cold air, as though she had brought the October with her. She was tall and grey and she stood at the foot of the bed and did not smile at all. She smelled faintly of turned earth and clean linen. She looked at the child the way a person reads a stone to know the weather.
“Marta,” Katya said.
The third woman took the longest to come up the stairs. They heard her rings on the banister, one slow step at a time. She was dressed in a good black coat, and she wore gold at her throat and gold at her wrists, and when she entered the room the little lamp seemed to lean toward her. She did not look at the child first. She looked at Katya, and she looked at the room, and she looked at everything in it the way a woman looks at a house she is deciding whether to buy.
“Danica,” Katya said, and her voice was the first one that shook.
The three women stood around the cradle. In the old country they had names that people did not say aloud, because to say a fate aloud was to fix it. They were the sudenice, the ones who come on the third night. They were the ones who decide what a life will be.
“Her name is Marina,” Katya said. “She will be called Marina.”
The Angel of Life spoke first, because life always speaks first, and always too soon. She laid her warm hand on the child’s chest and leaned down until her mouth was almost touching the small, laboring heart.
“You will be loved three times,” she whispered. “And you will lose love twice. When the third love comes, do not turn it away — or you will have saved no one, least of all yourself.”
The Angel of Death spoke second. She did not touch the child. She only looked, and her look was long and level and without cruelty, the way winter is without cruelty. She did not lean down. She spoke from where she stood, and her voice settled over the cradle like the last light going out of a room.
“You will die the way your mother dies,” she said. “At dawn, alone, with a secret shut in your hand. Guard your heart, and you may hold your hour a little longer.”
Then the Angel of Prosperity spoke, and she was the only one who smiled as she did it. She took off one of her rings and turned it over in her fingers, watching the gold catch the lamplight, and she did not put it back on.
“Gold will follow you all your days,” she said. “It will buy back everything but the one thing it took. Spend it, and someone bleeds. Hoard it, and you do.”
The three of them stood a moment longer, and then they went, one by one, down the stairs and out into the dark. The screen door sighed. The third step creaked. The house settled back into its ordinary breathing.
Katya lay in the dark with her daughter on her chest and listened to the three women walk away down Kestrel Street, and she understood — in the way a woman understands a thing in her body before she understands it in her mind — that a price had just been named, and that she would be the one to pay it.
She had been told, once, by a fortune-teller in Ohrid, that her daughter would be the best thing that ever happened to her and the reason she died. She had laughed at the time.
She was not laughing now.
“Marina,” she said, into the dark. “Whatever they told you — you don’t have to believe it. Do you hear me? You don’t have to believe a word.”
The baby slept on, and did not answer, and in the morning Katya Petrova woke to a daughter with her mother’s grey eyes and her father’s stubborn mouth, and four years, almost exactly, left to live.
