Part 275: Saying Yes
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Both Fraulein and Elsa were sitting behind Fraulein's desk when Igor entered the office. He was in no mood for one of Fraulein's lectures, nor did he want to look at Elsa's silent head shaking. These past few weeks, Igor had been fighting to keep himself together. No one else would have understood, but damn it, Yuri Groznik was the closest thing to a father that Igor ever had. Now that Yuri was dead, Igor kept remembering all the good times—Yuri teaching Igor how to drive a car, Yuri sending care packages to Igor's grandmother in Bryansk, Yuri taking Igor to soccer games. Yes, the man was evil. Yes, the man was abusive. And no, Igor didn't want to be like him. But *someone* had to mourn Yuri's death, at least a little bit.
Of course, Igor had said nothing to Fraulein about any of this. He also kept his mouth shut whenever he was around the Lyubovskys. Uncle Vladi was distraught when Coreen broke the news about Yuri. "I should have slit that son of a bitch's throat while I still had the chance," he lamented as he opened the first of many bottles of malt liquor. (Eventually, he would progress to the harder stuff.) "But what did I do? Nothing! I let that man carry on with his life when I should have gone after him." Uncle Vladi had been on a bender ever since then.
"I understand," Fraulein began, glaring at Igor from across the desk. "That Justine Auberon has asked you to be her new coach."
"Yes, we talked about it," Igor replied. His most recent conversation with Justine took place just yesterday. Tour On Ice was arriving in Detroit on Thursday and the skaters would be staying in town until Sunday morning. Justine wanted to meet with Igor during that time and perhaps do a workout on the ice together. She admitted that she'd had some trouble at the beginning of the tour, but she swore she'd been behaving herself lately and that she would take her training seriously if Igor decided to coach her.
"I don't want that girl anywhere near this rink," Fraulein informed Igor. Elsa nodded her white-blond head in agreement. "She's trouble, and we don't need someone like her here. Especially not during an Olympic year."
Igor was afraid something like this would happen, which was why he hadn't said yes to Justine already. But he did want to coach her. First of all, he could use the extra money. Second and more importantly, Igor needed the experience. As the Olympic season approached, he found himself thinking about Mia Oppenheimer's meltdown and how he'd had no idea how to handle it. As a coach, Igor had fallen off the proverbial horse at that Olympics and he absolutely had to get back on it. Despite Justine's personal problems—or perhaps because of them—Igor didn't feel weighted by too many expectations. If she messed up, nobody would blame him. This low-pressure, low-risk situation would be ideal for Igor to test the Olympic waters once again. Yes, he would probably be going to the Olympics even if he didn't coach Justine, but he would only be there as Mitzi's assistant. That wasn't enough. Igor wanted to pilot the plane himself. Four years from now, Au'jean would be ready for the Olympics and Igor wanted to take her there as an experienced coach, not as a bumbling idiot who had no idea what he was doing. He tried to explain this to Fraulein, but she cut him off with a wave of her hand.
"You're already getting all the experience you need," she said. "You've done the Junior Grand Prix events, you've done some regular Grand Prix events, you've been to Nationals, you've been to Junior Worlds, you've been to senior Worlds--"
"The senior competitions last year were with Mitzi's pairs," Igor reminded her. "I need to do more senior ladies competitions. And I need to do these competitions with *my* students, not other coaches'."
"You will get your chance," said Fraulein. "Au'jean will be age-eligible for the senior Grand Prix in the fall of 2006. That's only a year and a half away. She needs your attention, and Justine would take away from that."
Igor disagreed. "Au'jean needs to train with a skater who will push her to do better. Is not good for her to be the best one always." His other students were great kids and each one was talented in his or her own way, but Au'jean was far ahead of the rest of the pack. She was rarely allowed on the ice with Fraulein's elite group—Kylie Yee's and Cindalee Gomez's mothers had made sure of that—so Igor needed to bring in someone new, someone who could challenge her.
"Justine will be a bad influence on Au'jean," Fraulein insisted. "She will be a bad influence on *all* of your skaters."
"I don't think so," said Igor. "I think it's the other way around—my kids will be good influence on Justine. And I think I can help her."
"Help her? In what way can *you* help *her*?"
"I use to have same problems as Justine." Igor did not go into detail, but he was thinking specifically of too much booze and too much sex. "Not too many coaches know what is like. But I do. And I can help."
Fraulein shook her head in disbelief. "Justine will never change."
"People use to say that about me," Igor reminded her.
Finally, it was Elsa's turn to speak. "What if Justine changes *you*?"
"Yes," said Fraulein. "She could very well drag you back into your old ways."
"It won't happen," Igor told them. "Look, I go over to the Lyubovskys' all the time. Vladi and Milla are always drinking, but I don't get drunk with them."
"But Justine is an attractive young woman who repeatedly throws herself at every available man," said Fraulein. "Can you honestly say you won't feel... tempted?"
"I don't sleep with my students," Igor replied. But nothing he said could convince Fraulein and Elsa to let Justine train at the Zug Island Skating Center.
Driving home from the rink, Igor found himself thinking of Yuri. "Why do you let those old broads rip your d-ck to shreds like that?" Yuri would have said. "You don't have to take their sh-t. You're young, you live in a free country, you've had offers to coach at other rinks. Those women are holding you back. You've got to get away from them!"
If only it were that simple. "I can't abandon my skaters," Igor told the ghost in his head.
"Take them with you. It's been done before."
"But their funding?" Igor quickly found the answer to his own question. "The sponsors have spent a lot of money on my skaters. They want to see results. If I can convince the sponsors that we'll get better results if we move to Lahser or some other rink..."
"You can do it, Igor. Between you and Fraulein Helga, which one has the best skaters?"
"Well right now, she does..."
"Cindalee Gomez? If they held Nationals tomorrow, Au'jean would run that girl into the ground. And Kylie Yee? You don't think Au'jean can beat Kylie Yee?"
"Maybe not this year, but in the long term..."
"And who does that old Austrian b-tch have coming up behind those girls?"
"Nobody."
"That's right. Nobody. She's getting ready to retire. Sure, you'll probably get to be the boss after she's gone. But when will that happen? In three years? In five years? In eight years? You really want to stick around and put up with that woman's bullsh-t every day for the next eight years?"
"No," said Igor. "If this were one hundred percent about my career, I would leave. But there's Heidi. What if I never see her again?"
Yuri's ghost didn't have an answer for that one. Igor decided to drive over to the Lyubovskys'. Coreen and Milla were the only ones home.
"We were just about to head out the door," Coreen told Igor. "I've got to pick Alexandra up at the store and take her to her skating lesson over at the Lahser rink. Do you want to come along?"
"Yes." Igor got into the SUV with Coreen and Milla. Milla did not utter a word during the entire drive, but Coreen quickly started talking about Uncle Vladi.
"I'm glad he went to work today. It's good for him to keep busy. With Larissa coming to town... Well, it's best if we don't tell her how Vladi's been lately." Coreen sighed at the windshield. "That girl has no idea how hard it is for him to deal with all of this. The last thing Vladi needs right now is her yelling at him about his drinking or about all the things he did wrong when she was a kid. Doesn't she realize how much he loves her?"
"I-I don't know." Igor wondered if this was what it would be like when Heidi reached adulthood. The way things stood now, he planned to spend as much time with her as possible, and then when she turned eighteen he would tell her that he was her real father. But would she hate him for that? Would she scream at him and slam doors in his face because he didn't fight for custody when she was little? Or, if Igor did fight for custody, would Heidi hate him for dragging her through a lengthy court battle?
"Fraulein *is* my mother, and we were doing great!" Igor imagined the adult Heidi yelling at him. "Why did you have to come along and mess everything up? You ruined my whole childhood with all your lawyers and your social workers and your judges! Why couldn't you just leave us alone?"
Igor soon found himself pouring out his troubles to Coreen, as he had done on many previous occasions. "Well, I don't know anything about coaching," Coreen responded after a long pause. "But you've got to do what's best for your career, not what's best for Fraulein's career. If you want to coach Justine, then I think you should give it a try."
"What about Heidi?" said Igor. "If I make Fraulein mad, I never see her again."
"Igor," Coreen said softly. "Maybe it's time to let Heidi go. For now at least. I mean, you *do* want to get married again someday? And you *do* want to have children with your wife?"
"Yes. But that's someday. I am not dating anybody now." The last girl Vladi Jr. had fixed Igor up with was so dumb that she thought Moscow was a separate country that had broken away from Russia.
"But I thought you and Tammy Sue... You two have been getting friendly lately."
"Kind of," Igor admitted. "But not like boyfriend and girlfriend. We never even go out on date."
"Maybe you should ask her?"
"Maybe. When the tour is over. You think she say yes?"
"I hope so." Coreen smiled. "I've been wanting you and her to get together for a long time now. But you've got to promise me, if things get serious between you and her, you will tell her the truth about Heidi."
"Yes, I will tell her—if things get serious. I know she'll get mad at me when I tell her."
"I'll help her work through it," Coreen reassured Igor. "And she will. That was a long time ago when you made that mistake with Mitzi."
"Yes, very, very long time ago."
"You have to look toward the future, Igor. If you want to have a wife and kids someday, you've got to do what's best for your career now. And maybe in the long run, this is also what's best for Heidi. You can put money away for her college education, or to hire lawyers for the custody case, or whatever. You can't do much of anything for that child as long as Fraulein is in control of everything."
"I know." Between Coreen and Yuri's ghost, Igor had gotten all the advice he needed and he had made his decision.
He was going to coach Justine Auberon.
Britannia made sure not even one scrap of paper fell out of any of the notebooks as she took them out of her mother's desk drawer and stacked them exactly in the right order. For weeks, she had been coming downstairs every night. For weeks, she had been reading her mother's manuscript. And for weeks, Britannia's daddy had been calling her on the phone and asking her if she was "still planning to tear up your mother's book before it's too late".
But Britannia couldn't do it. She could not bring herself to rip even one page. "But it's all right," she tried to reassure her daddy when he called her from Philadelphia last week. "Mother hasn't written anything that would make a judge taken Axel and me away from you."
Britannia went on to explain that her mother had written that even though she had Britannia's daddy were divorced, he was "still the father of my son and the adopted father of my daughter. I will not reveal anything here that might embarrass my children or damage their relationship with their father." Britannia had coped the words from this page so she could read them aloud and prove to her daddy that he didn't need to worry so much about the book.
"That's all?" It didn't sound as if Britannia's daddy believed her. "She hasn't written anything else about me?"
"Not much."
Britannia was too embarrassed to say anything about the lines that came immediately after the ones she'd read over the phone. "Let it suffice to say that Leroy cheated on me, and I cheated on him," her mother had written. Then she went into a bunch of painful-to-read details about her affair with some Detroit-area athlete named "Richard". It was horrible, how Britannia's mother had cheated on her daddy like that. But it said in the book that Britannia's daddy had cheated, too!
"The main problem with our marriage was that I thought I could change Leroy," Britannia's mother had written. "But he immediately went back to his old ways. He abandoned his plan to quit skating and obtain a college degree. He berated me for not letting my daughter enter any skating competitions, even though he was well aware of my history. Skating was more important than my feelings. Skating was more important than my daughter's health and well-being. Skating was more important than EVERYTHING."
Still, that wasn't so bad compared to Britannia's biological father. His drug habit was much worse than VH-1's "Behind the Music" had made it out to be. However, Britannia's mother wasn't blameless. She did drugs, too! At one point, she had "tried everything at least once." But she was "strictly a recreational drug user. I was one of the lucky ones who didn't become addicted. When I wanted to stop, I stopped."
Yes, Britannia's mother had done it all. She flashed her boobs at the workers at her family's country club. She smoked, drank, and took drugs. She cheated on both of her husbands. Oh, it was awful! At times, Britannia couldn't even look at her mother, knowing all the things she had done.
Tonight, Britannia stumbled onto a passage about how her biological father took off with some groupie, so her mother got even with him by having sex with *two* members of an unnamed rival rock band, one of whom "has since passed away."
God, was there *anything* Britannia's mother hadn't done?
To keep herself from hating her mother too much, Britannia started rereading some of the passages that dealt with her mother's parents and the abuse. She told herself that her mother couldn't help being the way that she was. But still, sometimes it was hard to feel sorry for her.
Cassandra was too excited to sleep. This was partly because of Eliot—they had had such a wonderful two hours together at the motel! Things were going well at the Literacy Center, too. One of the non-readers Cassandra had been working with had just tested at a fourth-grade reading level. And when Cassandra arrived home and checked her email, there was a note in her box from Sonja Wang. Larissa had told her about Cassandra's book and Sonja was "very interested" in doing an interview!
They would meet this weekend, the exact time depending on Sonja's tour schedule and when Cassandra could find someone to take care of the kids. Sonja's sole condition was that Cassandra not ask her anything about "that time my mother and I spent in the Caribbean." It sounded like a reasonable request, so Cassandra agreed.
Sonja Wang—*nobody* could get an interview with her these days. Cassandra's mind was racing a million miles a minute, thinking of all the questions she would ask and all the topics she and Sonja would cover. She really needed to write some of this stuff down while it was night and the kids were asleep. In the morning, Cassandra would be too busy chasing Alasdair around the house and trying to figure out exactly why Britannia was in a foul mood this time.
Yes, now was the best time to get some work down. Cassandra put on her robe and slippers and headed downstairs.
Footsteps. Britannia opened the desk drawer and tried to put the notebooks away, but papers came spilling out onto her lap, onto the desktop, and all over the floor. Suddenly, she felt her mother's hand grabbing her shoulder.
"Britannia! What do you think you're doing?"
Text Copyright © 1997-2004 Jennifer Lyon
