t was one of those rare crystal-blue days in downtown Seattle when Mount Rainier dominated the city skyline. The waterfront was empty this early in the season; soon, though, the souvenir shops and seafood restaurants along this street would be wall-to-wall tourists. But now the city belonged to locals.

Meredith stared up at the giant cruise ship docked at Pier 66. Dozens of passengers milled around the terminal and lined up for departure.

“You guys ready?” Nina asked, flinging her backpack over one shoulder.

“I don’t know how you can travel so light,” Meredith said, lugging her suitcase behind her as they made their way to the bellmen waiting by the exit doors. They handed off their luggage and headed for the gangplank. As they reached it, Mom stopped suddenly.

Meredith almost ran into her. “Mom? Are you okay?”

Mom tightened the black, high-collared wool coat around her and stared up at the ship.

“Mom?” Meredith said again.

Nina touched Mom’s shoulder. “You crossed the Atlantic by boat, didn’t you?” she said gently.

“With your father,” Mom said. “I don’t remember much of it except this. Boarding. Leaving.”

“You were sick,” Meredith said.

Mom looked surprised. “Yes.”

“Why?” Nina asked. “What was wrong with you?”

“Not now, Nina.” Mom repositioned her purse strap over her shoulder. “Well. Let us go find our rooms.”

At the top of the gangplank, a uniformed man looked at their documents and led them to their side-by-side cabins. “You have places at the early seating for dinner. Here’s your table number. Your luggage will be brought to the cabin. We’re serving cocktails on the bow as we pull out of port.”

“Cocktails?” Nina said. “We’re in. Let’s go, ladies.”

“I will meet you there,” Mom said. “I need a moment to get organized.”

“Okay,” Nina said, “but don’t wait too long. We need to celebrate.”

Meredith followed Nina through the glittering burgundy and blue interior to the jutting rounded bow of the ship. There were hundreds of people on deck, gathered around the swimming pool and along the railing. Black-and-white-uniformed waiters carried bright, umbrella-clad drinks on sparkling silver trays. Over in an area by a food stand, a mariachi band was playing.

Meredith leaned against the railing and sipped her drink. “Are you ever going to tell me about him?”

“Who?”

“Danny.”

“Oh.”

“He was totally hot, by the way, and he flew all the way out to see you. Why didn’t he stick around?”

Behind them, the ship’s horn honked. People all around them clapped and cheered as the giant ship pulled away from the dock. Mom was nowhere to be seen. Big surprise.

“He wants me to move to Atlanta and settle down.”

“You don’t sound very happy about that.”

“Settle down. Me? I don’t just love my career, I live for it. And really, marriage isn’t my thing. Why can’t we just say we’ll keep loving each other and travel until we need wheelchairs?”

Even a month ago, Meredith would have given Nina platitudes, told her that love was the only thing that mattered in life and that Nina was getting to an age where she should start a family, but she had learned a thing or two in the months since Dad’s death. Every choice changed the road you were on and it was too easy to end up going in the wrong direction. Sometimes, settling down was just plain settling. “I admire that about you, Neens. You have a passion and you follow it. You don’t bend for other people.”

“Is love enough? What if I love him but I can’t settle down? What if I never want the white picket fence and a bunch of children running around?”

“It’s all about choices, Neens. No one can tell you what’s right for you.”

“If you had it to do over again, would you still choose Jeff, even with all that’s happened?”

Meredith had never considered that question, but the answer came eff ortlessly. Somehow it was easier to admit out here, with nothing but strangers and water around them. “I’d marry him again.”

Nina put an arm around her. “Yeah,” she said, “but you still think you don’t know what you want.”

“I hate you,” Meredith said.

Nina squeezed her shoulder. “No, you don’t. You love me.” Meredith smiled. “I guess I do.”

The hostess led them to a table by a massive window. Through the glass was miles of empty ocean, the waves tipped in light from a fading sun. As they took their seats, Mom smiled at the hostess and thanked her.

Meredith was so surprised by the warmth in Mom’s smile that she actually paused. For years she’d taken care of her mother, fitting that chore into all the others on her busy schedule. Because of that, she’d rarely really looked at Mom; she’d moved past and around her on the way to Dad. Even in the past months, when so often it had been just the two of them, there were few moments of honest connection. She’d known her mother as distant and icy, and that was how she’d seen her.

But the woman who’d just smiled was someone else entirely. Secrets within secrets. Was that what they’d discover on this trip? That their mother was like one of her precious Russian nesting dolls, and if that were true, would they ever really see the one hidden deep inside?

Handing them menus, the hostess said, “Enjoy your meal,” and left.

When their waiter showed up a few minutes later, none of them had spoken.

“We all need drinks,” Nina said. “Vodka. Russian. Your very best.”

“No way,” Meredith said. “I am not drinking vodka straight shots on my vacation.” She smiled at the waiter. “I’ll have a strawberry daiquiri, please.”

Nina smiled. “Okay. I’ll have a straight shot of vodka and a margarita on the rocks. Lots of salt.”

“The vodka and a glass of wine,” Mom said.

“And the A.A. meeting has come to order,” Meredith said.

Amazingly, Mom smiled.

“To us,” Nina said when the drinks arrived. “To Meredith, Nina, and Anya Whitson. Together for maybe the first time.”

Mom flinched, and Meredith noticed that she didn’t look at them, not even when they touched their glasses together.

Meredith found herself watching Mom closely; she noticed a tiny frown gather at the edges of her mouth when she looked out at the vast blue sea. Only when night fell did she seem to lose that tension in her face. She followed the conversation, added her three new answers to the pot. She drank a second glass of wine but seemed to grow more agitated than relaxed from the alcohol, and when she finished dessert, she stood up almost immediately.

“I am going back to my room,” she said. “Will you join me?”

Nina was on her feet in an instant, but Meredith was slower to respond. “Are you sure, Mom? Maybe you should rest tonight. Tomorrow is okay for the story.”

“Thank you,” her mother said. “But no. Come.” She turned crisply on her heel and walked away.

Meredith and Nina had to rush along behind her through the busy passageways.

They went into their own room and changed into sweats. Meredith had just finished brushing her teeth when Nina came up alongside her, touching her shoulder. “I’m going to show her the picture and ask who the children are.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“That’s because you’re a nice girl who follows the rules and tries to be polite.” She grinned. “I’m the other sister. You can say you knew nothing about it. Will you trust me on this?”

“Sure,” Meredith finally said.

They left their stateroom and went next door.

Mom opened the door and led them into her spacious suite. As expected, the cabin was as neat as a pin; no clothes lay about, no personal items were anywhere. The only unexpected find was a pot of of tea and three cups on the coffee table.

Mom poured herself a cup of tea and then went to a club chair positioned in the corner of the room. She sat down and put a blanket over her lap.

Meredith sat in the love seat opposite her.

“Before you turn out the lights,” Nina said, “I have something to show you, Mom.”

Mom looked up. “Yes?”

Nina moved closer. In what felt to Meredith like slow motion, Nina pulled the photograph out of her pocket and handed it to Mom.

Mom drew in a sharp breath. What little color her face held drained away. “You went through my things?”

“We know the fairy tale takes place in Leningrad and that some of it is real. Who is Vera, Mom?” Nina asked. “And who are these children?”

Mom shook her head. “Do not ask me.”

“We’re your daughters,” Meredith said gently, trying to soften the questions her sister had asked. “We just want to know you.”

“It was what Dad wanted, too,” Nina said.

Mom stared down at the photograph, which vibrated in her shaking hand. The room went so still they could hear the waves hitting the boat far below. “You are right. This is no fairy tale. But if you want to hear the rest of it, you will allow me to tell the story in the only way I can.”

“But who—”

“No questions, Nina. Just listen.” Mom might have looked pale and tired, but her voice was pure steel.

Nina sat down by Meredith, holding her hand. “Okay.”

“Okay, then.” Mom leaned back in the seat. Her finger moved over the photo, feeling its slick surface. For once, the lights were on as she started to speak. “Vera fell in love with Sasha on that day in the Summer Garden, and for her, this is a decision that will never change. Even though her mother disagrees, is afraid of Sasha’s love of poetry, Vera is young and passionately in love with her husband, and when their first child is born, it seems like a miracle. Anastasia, they name her, and she is the light of Vera’s life. When Leo is born the next year, Vera cannot imagine that it is possible to be happier, even though it is a bad time in the Soviet Union. The world knows this, they know of Stalin’s evil. People are disappearing and dying. No one knows this better than Vera and Olga, who still cannot safely say their father’s name. But in June of 1941, it is impossible to worry, or so it seems to Vera as she kneels in the rich black earth and tends her garden. Here, on the outskirts of the city, she and Sasha have a small plat of land where they grow vegetables to carry them through the long white Leningrad winter. Vera still works in the library, while Sasha studies at university, learning only what Stalin allows. They become good Soviets, or at least quiet ones, for the black vans are everywhere these days. Sasha is only a year away from finishing his degree and he hopes to find a teaching position at one of the universities.

“Mama, look!” Leo calls out to her, holding up a tiny orange carrot, more root still than vegetable. Vera knows she should chastise him, but his smile is so infectious that she is lost. At four he has his father’s golden curls and easy laugh. “Put the carrot back, Leo, it still needs time to grow.”

“I told him not to pull it up,” says five-year-old Anya, who is as serious as her brother is joyous.

“And you were right,” Vera says, struggling not to smile. Though she is only twenty-two years old, the children have turned her into an adult; it is only when she and Sasha are alone that they are really still young.

When Vera finishes with her garden, she gathers up her children, takes one in each hand, and begins the long walk back to their apartment.

It is late afternoon by the time they return to Leningrad, and the streets are crowded with people running and shouting. At first Vera thinks it is just the belye nochi that has energized everyone, but as she reaches the Fontanka Bridge, she begins to hear snippets of conversation, the start of a dozen arguments, a buzz of anxiety.

She hears a squawking sound coming through a speaker and the word—Attention —thrown like a knife into wood. Clutching her children’s hands, she wades into the crowd just as the announcement begins. “Citizens of the Soviet Union... at four A.M. without declaration of war... German troops have attacked our country....”

The announcement goes on and on, telling them to be good Soviets, to enlist in the Red Army, to resist the enemy, but Vera cannot listen to anymore. All she can think is that she must get home.

The children are crying long before Vera gets back to the apartment near the Moika embankment. She hardly hears them. Though she is a mother, holding her own babies’ hands, she is a daughter, too, and a wife, and it is her mother and husband whom she wants to see now. She takes her children up the dirty staircase, down hallways that are frighteningly quiet. In their own apartment, no lights are on, so it takes her eyes a moment to adjust.

Mama and Olga, still dressed in their work clothes, are at one of the windows, taping newsprint over the glass. At Vera’s return, her mother stumbles back from the window she’s been covering, saying, “Thank God,” and takes Vera in her arms.

“We have things to do quickly,” Mama says, and Olga finishes the window and comes over. Vera can see that Olga has been crying, her freckled cheeks are tracked in tears and her strawberry-blond hair is a mess. Olga has a nervous habit of pulling at her own hair when she is afraid.

“Vera,” Mama says briskly. “You take Olga and go to the store. Buy whatever you can that will last. Buckwheat, honey, sugar, lard. Anything. I will run to the bank and get out all our money.” Then she kneels in front of Leo and Anya. “You will stay here alone and wait for us to return.”

Anya immediately whines. “I want to go with you, Baba.”

Mama touches Anya’s cheek. “Things are different now, even for children.” She gets to her feet and grabs her purse from the other room, checking to make sure that her blue passbook is there.

The three of them leave the apartment, closing the door behind them, hearing the lock click into place. From the other side, there is crying almost immediately.

Vera looks at her mother. “I cannot just leave them here, locked in—”

“From now on, you will do many unimaginable things,” her mother says tiredly. “Now let us go before it is too late.”

Outside, the sky is a beautiful cloudless blue and the lilacs that grow beneath the first-floor windows scent the air. It seems impossible that war hangs over Leningrad on a day like this... until they turn the corner and come to the bank, where people are jammed together in a crowd at the closed door, waving their passbooks in the air and screaming; women are crying.

“We are too late already,” Mama says.

“What is happening?” Olga asks, pulling nervously at her hair again, looking around. Beside her, an elderly woman makes a moaning sound and thumps to the ground in a heap. In seconds she is lost amid the crowd.

“The banks are closed for now. Too many people tried to take out their money.” Mama chews on her lower lip until blood appears and then leads them down to the grocer’s. Here, people are leaving with whatever they can carry. The shelves are practically empty. Already prices are doubling and tripling.

Vera has trouble making sense of this. War has just been announced and yet the supplies are gone already and the people around her look dazed and desperate.

“We have been here before,” Mama says simply.

In the store, they have only enough money for buckwheat, flour, dried lentils, and lard. Carrying their meager supplies back through the crowded streets, they make it to the apartment at just past six.

Vera can hear her children crying and it breaks her heart. She opens the door and scoops them up. Leo throws his arms around her neck and hangs on, saying, “I missed you, Mama.”

Vera thinks then that she will never again follow her mother’s advice about this one thing: she will never leave her children alone.

“Where is your papa?” she asks Anya, who shrugs her small shoulders.

He should have been home by now.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” her mother says. “It will be difficult to get through the streets.”

Worry gnaws at Vera, though, sharpening its bite with every passing minute. Finally, at eight o’clock, he comes into the apartment. The side of his face is dirty and his hair is damp with sweat.

“Verushka,” he says, pulling her into his arms, holding her so tightly she cannot breathe. “The trolleys were full. I ran all the way here. Are you okay?”

“Now we are,” she says.

And she believes it.

That night, while her grandmother snores in the hot darkness, Vera sits up in her bed. The big crisscross of tape and newsprint on the windows lets only the merest light through. Beyond it, the city is strangely, eerily silent. It is as if Leningrad itself has drawn in a sharp breath and is afraid to exhale.

In this shadowy darkness, their apartment seems even smaller and more jumbled. With three narrow beds in the living area and the children’s cots in the kitchen, there is barely room to walk in here anymore. Even at mealtimes they cannot all be together. There isn’t enough room at the table or chairs to go around it.

Not far away, Mama and Olga are awake, too, sitting up in their bed. Beside Vera, Sasha is as silent as she’s ever seen him.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” Olga says. At nineteen, she should be thinking of love and romance and her future, not war. “Maybe the Germans will save us. Comrade Stalin—”

“Shhh,” Mama says sharply, glancing over at her sleeping mother. Some things can never be said aloud. Olga should know this by now.

“Tomorrow we will go to work,” Mama says. “And the next day we do the same, and the next day after that. Now we must go to sleep. Here, Olga, roll over. I will hold you.”

Vera hears the squeaking of the tired bed as they settle down to sleep. She stretches out beside her husband, tries to feel safe in his arms. There is too little light to see his face clearly; he is just gray and black patches, but his breathing is steady and sure and the sound of it, in rhythm to the beating of her heart, calms her down. She touches his cheek, feels the soft stubble of new growth, as familiar to her now as the wedding band she wears. She leans forward to kiss him, and for a moment, when his lips are on hers, there is nothing else, but then he draws back and says, “You will have to be strong, Verushka.”

“We will be strong,” she says, holding him in her arms.

Two nights later they are awakened by gunfire.

Vera launches out of bed, her heart pounding. She falls over her mother’s bed as she tries to get to her children. Gunfire rattles the thin windows, and she can hear footsteps in the hallway and people screaming.

“Hurry,” Sasha says, sounding surprisingly calm. He herds them all together while Mama takes as much food as she can carry. It is not until they are outside in the street, huddled with the crowd of their neighbors beneath a pale blue sky, that they understand: these are Russian antiaircraft guns, practicing for what is to come.

There are no shelters on their street. It is Mama who organizes the people in her building: tomorrow they will go to the storage area in the basement and make a shelter.

Finally, amid the sound of gunfire and the preternatural silence between bursts, Sasha looks down at Vera. Leo is asleep in his arms (the boy can sleep through anything) and Anya is beside him, worriedly sucking her thumb and caressing the end of her blanket. It is a baby habit that was long gone before the start of the war and is now back.

“You know I have to go,” Sasha says to Vera.

She shakes her head, thinking suddenly that this gunfire means nothing; the look on her husband’s face is infinitely more frightening.

“I am a university student and poet,” he says. “And you are the daughter of a criminal of the state.”

“You haven’t published any of your poetry—”

“I am suspect, Vera, and you know this. So are you.”

“You cannot go. I won’t let you.”

“It is done, Vera,” is what he says. “I joined the People’s Volunteer Army.”

Mama is beside her then, clutching her arm. “Of course you are going, Sasha,” she says evenly, and Vera hears the warning in her mother’s tone. Always it is about appearances. Even now, as the gunfire explodes all around them, a black van prowls in the street.

“It is the right thing to do,” Sasha says. “We are the Soviet Army. The best in the world. We will kick the Germans’ asses in no time and I will be home.”

Vera feels little Anya beside her, holding her hand, listening to every word, and so, too, their neighbors, and even strangers. She knows what she is supposed to feel and to say, but doesn’t know if she has the strength for it. Her father had once said to her much the same thing: Do not worry, Veronika Petrovna, I will always be here for you.

“Promise you’ll come back to me,” she says.

“I promise,” he says easily.

But Vera knows: there are some promises that are pointless to ask for and useless to receive. When she turns to her mother, this truth passes between them, and Vera understands her own childhood. She will have to be strong for her children.

She looks up at her husband. “It is a promise I will hold you to, Aleksandr Ivanovich.”

In the morning, she wakens early; in the quiet darkness, she finds her one photograph of them, taken on the day of their wedding.

She looks down at their bright and smiling faces. Tears blur the image as she takes it out of the frame and folds it in half and then in half again. She tucks it in the pocket of his coat.

She hears footsteps behind her, feels his hands on her shoulders.

“I love you, Veruskhka,” he says softly, kissing the side of her face.

She is glad he is behind her. She is not sure she has the strength to look him in the eyes when she says, “I love you, too, Sasha.”

Come back to me.

In no time at all, he is gone.