Sometimes in the silence of an unfamiliar hotel room, Victor would lie back on the lumpy mattress and remember. He'd made a sort of game out of it, seeing how far back he could go if he strained at the half-formed images, more feelings than anything else.
He remembered the apartment in Khimki, small, but bright, the furniture made of oak. He remembered his father's voice, deep, commanding, a voice that always caused a little pocket of dread in the pit of Victor's stomach. There was no face to go with the voice, but he remembered his father's shoes—big black things like boats, the leather worn but always freshly polished. He remembered the day the shoes disappeared and his mother sat at the kitchen table for hours, staring out the window at the apartment complex across the street, unmoving, regardless of what Victor did.
He remembered his mother. Her heart-shaped face, her silver hair, her bright, sea-colored eyes. He remembered the softness of her willowy figure as her belly grew, despite the fact that he'd begun to see her eat less and less.
Every night he would sit in her lap and she would brush his hair and sing to him. Always the same song, slightly lilting, but beautiful and soothing. He remembered falling asleep to it every night, never quite hearing its ending, or feeling the soft kiss his mother pressed into his temple.
He remembered stumbling across the ice for the first time, his hands clutched tightly in his mother's hands, how she moved with such grace across the ice, as if she was floating. How when she was on the ice she smiled, really smiled her lovely, lopsided smile.
Victor remembered loving that smile more than anything.
He remembered when his mother grew too big to skate any longer, instead sitting on the side of the little ice rink, watching him glide across the ice, no longer clumsy. She'd clap as he spun and danced, making up his own routines.
"My beautiful little ice prince," she'd say to him afterwards, wrapping him in his thick wool coat. He remembered clinging to her as they walked home, a fistful of her skirt locked in his tiny fist.
He remembered when she'd brought home a little bundle of blankets and knelt down to show him the little face peeking out, rosy-cheeked and silver haired.
"Meet your baby sister, Vitya."
He'd looked up at his mother, bursting with excitement. "She looks just like me!"
His mother had laughed at that, and Victor spent hours staring at his baby sister, telling her stories and dancing for her, trying to make her smile, to make her laugh.
"Mama?" he asked one day, when his mother sat at her vanity, still and staring.
"Yes zoloste?"
"When can we take Valya skating?"
"Not for quite a while dear. Not until she can stand," she'd laughed. After that Victor spent much of his time trying to teach Valya how to stand.
He remembered finally being able to take his sister out on the ice, one of her hands clutched in his own, the other in his mother's. He remembered Valya's excited peals of laughter, the flush in his mother's cheeks, her wonderful, crooked smiled.
And then he'd shut his eyes, hard, as if he could suffocate the memories, because now he knew that was the last time they'd all be together and happy. The last time he'd see his mother smile like that.
And he'd turn over in the lumpy hotel bed, in the room that was empty but for him and the sound of his ragged breathing.
