The next day, Rosa was in the room, fussing over the blankets on Zander's bed and anything else that he needed. Zander actually submitted to this with the minimum resistance possible, to Quinn's great amusement. She was glad he hadn't turned on the wearing of the green because of the run-in downstairs. But guys didn't get superstitious about things like that.

He wouldn't talk to Oksana though. She and Alexis were out in the lounge.

Quinn was passing by with Elizabeth Webber's medication when she heard Oksana say: "He talks to Rosa. She's not even his mother!"

"That's precisely why it is easier for him to talk to her," Alexis said, soothingly. "Try again. I don't feel like his refusal was iron clad. Just a hunch. I'll go with you."

Quinn ran after them. Zander was doing pretty well now. But her professional instinct was to be there in case it became necessary to throw Oksana out of the room. Man, she thought. My life will be so much easier when he's finally gone!

Quinn had to give Oksana some credit for brazenness, in spite of what Alexis had thought. Like her son, Quinn thought.

She stood at the doorway.

"Oksana," he said, as if greeting a minor acquaintance he had seen only a few days before.

"He's really taking my advice," Quinn whispered to Alexis, "further than I thought. I suggested using his parents first names as a way of talking about them without just saying he and she all the time. I didn't think he'd use them on them directly."

"It's still a good idea," Alexis whispered back, turning her head. "Maybe it even makes it possible for him to talk to her at all. He has something to call her, you know?"

But Oksana said, "Why you call me that?"

"It's your name, isn't it?"

"I want to help."

"Thank you for the family background."

"Dr. Quartrain thinks you don't probably don't have this, this disease."

"Quartermaine."

"Dr. Quar -ter-maine," Oksana repeated, slowly, stepping into the room. Rosa, sitting in a chair, stared at Oksana, then got up and went to her.

"Ms. Oksana, it is so good to see you," she said.

"Rosa," Oksana smiled. "It is good of you to come all this way just to see Aleksander."

"Peter called me and told me – I was so happy! I had to come. He has grown up! So handsome!"

Zander rolled his eyes, but not without a shadow of a smile.

"Yes," Oksana said. She went a few steps further. "I have some stuff for you," she said. "Your birthday presents for 17 to 20. From me and from Peter."

"Me too," Rosa said. "That's what we did, Aleksander, to prove to ourselves we would see you again."

"You're not buying me off," he said, angrily, forgetting Rosa and looking at Oksana.

"I'm getting close to wanting to close this scene," Quinn said, in an undertone, to Alexis.

"What you so angry about, Aleksander?" Oksana asked.

His eyes widened. He looked at her in amazement. "Oh, nothing," he said sarcastically. "I'm just being unreasonable."

"All this because you wanted to go back to Moscow! Instead of go to Daytona Prep! School's better here. Everybody over there wants to live here. It wasn't legal anyway! You had nothing in Moscow."

"No, Oksana, nobody wants to live in Moscow, especially not me. I had nothing there. Oh, there was this little thing. My father. But that would be the same as nothing to you, wouldn't it?"

Oksana looked stunned.

Alexis stepped in then. "OK," she said, tugging at Oksana's arm. Oksana backed out somewhat obediently, but backwards, still staring at her son as she followed Alexis out.

Rosa went back and started fussing over Zander.

Alexis got Oksana to sit down in the lounge, and walked back over to Quinn, looking at her a wide-eyed face of sympathetic aggravation.

"I promise you - " Quinn said to Alexis, "I know you might have missed it in all that confusion - but he was staring at his father with every bit as much fury as he looked on Oksana with."

"Hmmm," Alexis said. "I think I'll ask Sergei to hang around a little while. He's got to do his EKG today. Do you think your patient is up to it?"

"Yeah," Quinn said, slowly, considering. "This actually wasn't bad, in a way." She explained Paul's opinion to Alexis.

Alexis nodded. "Though I am ready to knock her silly," she said. "Can't believe she's arguing with him already. She really seemed to refuse to see any right for him to be angry, did you think so?"

"Maybe she'll get it when she's had a chance to think some more."

"She makes it sound like he's a spoiled brat who just didn't want to go to school," Alexis fumed, "Like she missed the part that she and her ex trapped him in their perpetual, sick conflict. Like continual emotional turmoil is just a little inconvenience for an 11-year-old."

"Like she doesn't even get that he's got any feelings of his own," said Quinn, "I think she only sees her side of it."

"I have an idea," Alexis said. She headed back for Zander's room.

She came back out with "Understanding the Effects of Divorce on Children," "Family Breakdown," and the "Journal of Marriage and the Family."

"You're brilliant," Quinn said, with a smile.

"Here Oksana," Alexis said, going over to her. Oksana was already recovering, but said, rather helplessly, to Alexis: "I don't know what to say to him."

Alexis plopped the books down on a coffee table in front of Oksana. "Read this."

"Read that? What is it?"

"Just some clues. For what you seem to be clueless about – now you've found your son. I think you're a very focused person, Oksana, and you've been focused on finding Aleksander. You've done that. Now for the hard part."

Oksana took the books, looking up at Alexis doubtfully, but she took them.