Part 74
Oksana was able to tell her son of some of the happier times she had thought of on the way over while he was asleep, here and there during the visit. It was easier to deal with him with her family around. He was in a much better mood than she'd ever seen him in since finding him; more like the good-natured boy she had remembered.
When he first realized that his grandmother believed him to have been "away at college," she had a moment's discomfort. Fortunately, he apparently saw no reason to go against that story, and only she was able to detect the sarcasm of "Yeah, Mom liked the town my school is in so much that she and Pete moved there."
Oksana was further greatly relieved that he saw the proprietary of using the usual address for a son to his mother.
Sander was charmed enough by the entirely new experience, for him, of having blood relatives beyond immediate family, who even looked like him, that he was generally happy and no longer interested in whatever he might otherwise have argued with her about.
So she told him of taking him to work, as a baby, and going to the beach, while walking about the park of the Novo-Tikhvin Nunnery with her brother Vadim and his family, watching the children run around while Vadim and his wife admired one of the ponds.
They took another walk on their own when he wanted her to show him where she had gone to school, and she got a chance to tell him of her girlhood, something she had never seen the advantage of before, and was amazed at how dense she must have been not to have seen it.
He thought the city was very nice; she agreed but said it had been gray and dull when she had lived there as a girl. It was lightened up with the lifting of the iron curtain. Now there were tourists and visitors from around the world, and it just seemed happier. Sander even seemed to have some compassion for her when she described what it was like back when she was a teenager.
She had run away too, though in a different way and from different causes. She had been concerned that he would think ill of her for abandoning the family he obviously had reason to find so charming, but he did not.
The city's architecture was very distinctive. It was lucky that Oksana's sister-in-law Marina was a graduate of architecture school, who went along and explained things to Sander, who listened unusually well and asked Marina questions and talked about it later such that Oksana thought he actually learned something from it. She noted this down on her laptop that night, to tell Kathleen about it.
On the flight back, Sander came up with more stuff out of the blue. Rather than discuss what any normal person would then have discussed, his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins and Yekaterinburg, her son again threw her for a loop by spending most of the flight from Yekaterinburg to Munich trying to argue the case Sergei coming over for Thanksgiving dinner. She mentioned this holiday and was only thinking she would try to convince him to come over, and before she knew it, she was in a discussion about Sergei.
Reason one was that Pete could see his father, the benefit of which seemed so self-evident to Sander it looked to be a burdensome project to try to talk him out of it. Argument two was that she herself could be right there and in control. She could hire the entire off-duty Port Charles police force. Argument three was that there could be several people there as a buffer, so that she need hardly talk to Sergei, who could not abscond with Pete without several witnesses to his dastardly crime. Sander would come himself, he assured her. Then there was Rosa and her nieces, Lisa and Diana. There was the entire Connor-Quinn family; Oksana agreed that, Sergei or no Sergei, as a nice way to show them some appreciation. There was Alexis, though she had brothers she might go to; still, she might drop by. Or invite the brothers, too, and maybe the nephew and his fiancee. Or invite the entire homeless shelter, or the National Guard, he continued, his list getting more and more absurd.
Oksana almost laughed in relief that on the flight from Munich to JFK, he fell asleep. The Atlantic crossing was peaceful. He was awake for the flight from JFK to Port Charles, but after she had those hours of peace to think, and considering that he continued to forget his awful use of her first name; she was afraid the sight of the city of Port Charles alone would mess that up; she agreed to the Connor family and the others, and said she would think about Sergei very seriously and talk to Peter about it. This appeared to be satisfactory to him, and he reverted to questions about his grandparents that he had not wanted to ask them.
Oksana sat back and felt more considerable more relaxed than she had since finding him, and answered these less stressful questions.
