The chime of the doorbell slips past the cracks where the front door fits into its frame, ringing softly and lingering like an echo. Simon shifts and tugs on the sleeve of his dress shirt, leans harder on his cane as footsteps sound from within the house, muted and enduring in the strange faux-echo of the closed door. His hand slips on his cane, his dry skin rasping against the polished wood as a woman opens the door, a dish towel in the other hand and a ring of white soap suds cutting a sharp line across her forearm. She tilts her head to the left and Simon stares, feeling a sudden odd tightening in his chest.
She doesn't smile as she looks him up and down, only sighs when her gaze returns to his eyes. "You must be Mr. Crawley."
He manages a nod, just a single, sharp upward jerk of his head, and says, "And I suppose you're Natasha. Anna's daughter."
Natasha's head is still cocked to the side as she stares at him for a moment. Then she straightens and lifts the dish rag to wipe away the soap suds encircling her arm. "She's in the living room," is all Natasha says. She turns sharply to lead Simon through a door to her left, tossing the towel over her shoulder and stooping along the way to scold a small child who hangs off the old stair banister, its wood groaning and swaying under the added weight. Simon follows Natasha into a large room fit with a TV, a couch, and a rocking chair where an old woman sits, rocking herself slowly back and forth to a silent, steady beat.
Simon pauses in the doorway, feeling suddenly as though his feet are once again sunk ankle-deep and immobile in the mud as he remembers the day when, a lifetime ago, he and the old woman in the chair waded through a Russian bog in their street shoes. They'd emerged shoeless in stocking feet with mud between their toes.
Simon hears the thump of the door against its frame as Natasha leaves, but he doesn't move, only listens to the slight hitch in his own breath. When he walks toward Anna, she does not turn to look. He wonders if she can hear the sound of his feet against the floorboards or if her hearing is slipping along with everything else, like a stopper's pulled from the drain in her mind, letting it all rush out. He lowers himself carefully to the edge of the couch by her side and thinks of nothing to say. There has been only one thing on his mind since he caught sight of her daughter.
"She looks like you."
Anna turns to face him now, an odd, vacant pallor fogging the once-bright blue irises. "Who? Natalia? We're not related." Her lightly accented voice is listless and a little slurred.
"Not Natalia. Natasha."
She shakes her head, resolute. "Natalia. My sister's name was Natalia."
Simon's brow creases and he leans forward intently."You had a sister?" He pauses for a beat, listening to the wood of the chair tapping against the wood of the floor and waiting for an answer that doesn't come. "A sister named Natalia? Why—"
Anna's body jerks sharply, the pale blue eyes darkening, the lines on her forehead sharpening. "Natalia." She is staring at a point just over Simon's left shoulder. He glances toward the wall at his back and sees nothing but smooth white paint. She is speaking to someone, but it isn't him. "I'm sorry, Natalia. I'm sorry." "Sorry? Anna, why are you sorry?" His voice rises and cracks with panic and age, his desperation mirrored in her eyes, the blue irises now dark and wild like the sky over a raging sea. She covers her face with one age-spotted hand and moans into her lined palm. "I didn't mean it, Andrei.
I didn't. I'm sorry. The ice was so thin, Andrei. So thin. You could see the pebbles on the bottom of the river. Natalia was making rhymes with my name, the way I hated, calling me every name except my own, and I pushed her. I pushed her, and she stood there, and then she fell. And then she was gone. They found her shoe when the ice thawed, remember? And then I left. I'm sorry." Anna moves her hand away from her face to grip the arm of her chair, so tightly the skin over her knuckles glows white. "The ice was so thin. And her little red shoe in the bushes, like a grotesque rose. So thin you could see right to the bottom, to the pebbles. Do you remember when we used to dive to the bottom, grab them by the handful? I pushed her, and then she called me Spider, and then she fell. You remember that game, Andrei, making rhymes with my name, taunting me? You did it first. I hit you to make you stop and you said, 'Spider' like you were spitting at me, and neither of us knew why."
Something clicks within Simon's mind, an old, disjointed memory snapping into place. "Spider. That's what the other soldiers called you."
"Andrei saw it first." She stared out across the living room, toward the far wall and beyond, through the thin ice over the river to a lone red shoe caught in a tangle of branches. "And then Natalia saw it, and then she fell." Anna's smile is jagged, an open wound cut across her face. "I'm a spider. A killer. She was the first." Simon sighs and rests his hand gently over hers, loosening her grip on the rocking chair's arm. "It was an accident, Anna. It wasn't your fault."
"Do you know how many men I killed?" Her voice is hollow, dead, like Russia in winter.
"That was war."
"Yes. Yes it was."
The silence stretches out between them like the years Anna has forgotten, the years since he last saw her face, in a Russian field when the wildflowers were blooming. He thinks of that field and remembers a Russian saying, one he learned from an old barman in Moscow: look for wind in a field; it cannot be caught in a net. He wonders if she'd cast her net, after he was gone. Finally he asks, "Do you remember Budapest?" Her smile softens, the lines across her forehead smoothing out until he can see them only faintly. "Yes. The city that is two cities. We stood between Buda and Pest, and Simon kissed me. He was the first man I kissed and did not kill." She says nothing more, and Simon doesn't know what else to say. He thinks about leaving, but stares into Anna's lost eyes and settles back into the sofa instead.

Natasha and Simon stand side-by side in the kitchen, washing the dishes after dinner. Natasha hands him a dripping, scrubbed-clean plate and speaks in a tight voice. "She was engaged to be married when you met her, you know."
"I… I didn't. She never said."
"No. No, I don't suppose she did. I don't blame you, really. Things happen in wartime, I know that, but that's not really relevant to me, not here. Not now. You have to understand. I grew up with a brother named after a man I'd never met—never knew existed, even. A man who wasn't my father. A man who'd left my mother years ago in a field in Russia in the spring."
"She said I was the first man she kissed and didn't kill." Simon doesn't know why he tells her this. Maybe he just wants someone else to know. He sighs, his fingers catching against the rough dishcloth between a blue ceramic plate and his weathered hand.
"You're wondering about my father." Natasha is quiet for a moment, and then she sighs. Simon stares down at his hands beneath the cloudy surface of the dishwater, the wrinkles in his fingers deeper now from the soap and the water. Natasha scrubs at her eyes wearily with the dry patch of skin by her elbow. "She… she doesn't remember my father."
Simon's shoulders hunch further. "I'm sorry."
Natasha looks up, stares straight into his eyes. "She remembers you."
"I'm sorry," Simon says again. There is nothing else to say.
As Simon slips into his coat and grabs his cane from its place leaning against the door frame, a pair of blue eyes watches him from the staircase. Suddenly, a child's voice calls, "Hello."
The child steps closer and Simon recognizes him as the boy who'd been hanging off the unsteady banister. "Hello. What's your name?"
"Simon. After my great uncle." His voice is high and sweet. Springing down the stairs, the child stops in front of Simon and smiles up at him. Simon smiles back, but the boy is distracted suddenly, his gaze shifting toward the middle distance between them where a spider hangs suspended on a silk thread. He reaches out a hand and the spider drops into his palm. "Here," says the boy, holding it out to Simon. "You can put it outside on the porch. I don't like to squish them."
Simon takes the spider. "Thank you," he says, then opens the door and steps outside. As he heads down the stairs toward the garden pathway, he stops to place the small spider gently on the white-painted porch rail. He looks back at the living room window behind him and says, quietly, "Goodbye, Anna," then walks through the front yard and disappears out of sight behind a large hedgerow on the roadside.