The Secrets We Kept

by Lara Prescott

everything, every little thing, felt altered in the way it does when the world you’ve known is about to change.

Our ages hit me as if jumping into a freezing river, and I wondered if we had anything left in us to sustain all that was to come.

It was these silences, the taped mouths of friends, that cut the deepest.

“They won’t take what’s mine again,” I told my son, as we gathered sticks from the forest. “I’d rather destroy everything.”

“The sky is falling, and I sought to write instead of building a roof to protect myself and my loved ones. Has my selfishness no bounds?

Now I could go on. I would go on. They could put him in the ground, but not me.

“I can’t wait for their darkness to befall me. I’d rather step into the dark than be pushed,” he said.

And if that didn’t work, I knew another sun would come up anyway, and I’d go on. It’s what Russian women do. It’s in our blood.

Anger is a poor replacement for sadness; like cotton candy, the sweetness of revenge disintegrates immediately.

As I thought of all the paths I didn’t take, the loss came over me like a lead blanket.

He’d rather die as a traitor on Russian soil than live as a free man abroad.

They wanted him to grovel, to bow down. He would not, but neither would he confront them. His inaction was seen as weakness, both by those watching the affair unfold from afar and by me.

I thought of his oversized ego in his prime, and the diminished man Zhivago had left behind.

And even if I was forever branded an adulteress, a seducer, a woman after money and power, a homewrecker, a spy, I was content knowing at least Lara would survive me.

Doctor Zhivago is both a war story and a love story. But years later, it was the love story we remembered most.