Finding My Own Way by Peggy Dymond Leavey

sleep had long been a habit in our house, begun in the days when Alex still read aloud to me. We would make a warm nest of pillows on the big bed and travel away to imaginary landscapes together. No matter where the stories took us—through the Looking Glass, to the Back of the North Wind, or into the watery depths with the Water Babies—the sound of my mother’s voice made me feel safe. I would drift into sleep watching her expressive face.
    The book I was now reading was about the last Russian royal family. I’d reached the account of the massacre in the cellar of the house in Ekaterinburg, in Siberia, in July 1918, when the Romanovs had been slaughtered. I knew the horror of what was coming, but I kept reading anyway, my heart bumping in my chest asI turned the pages. Again I was stunned by the tragedy, the description of how the entire family, some of their servants, and even the children’s pet dog had met their deaths. I didn’t know these people, hadn’t even been born when they died, but seeing their faces and thinking of my love for my own dog made me terribly sad. I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my pyjamas.
    The Romanovs, I read, were not the only victims of the civil war that followed the Revolution, only the most famous.
    According to the account, Anastasia, the youngest Grand Duchess, had been the last to die in the cellar. But what if, as Alex had hinted years ago, Anastasia had not died that night? What if she had somehow, miraculously, managed to escape? Maybe one of the assassins, in spite of the cruelty of his crimes, had a soft spot somewhere and had smuggled the girl out of there. That’s what Alex had told me some people still believed. I smiled to myself, recalling Alex’s vexation at the idea that I, as a small child, might have asked the Countess if she knew Anastasia’s whereabouts. But was it really such an absurd question?
    I set the book on the floor and slid down between the sheets to think about it, doing arithmetic in my head. Alex had been born in 1916 and Nan would be maybe twenty years older. Assuming that Nan’s friend, the Countess, was roughly the same age, she’d have been a young woman during the Russian Revolution. What had it been like for her? How, I wondered again, did she end up in Canada? Had Alex asked her these things when she interviewed her for her story? I had been there, but now I couldn’t remember.
    Suddenly, I realized how I could find out. I’d never read Alex’s finished article on the Countess, but maybe that was the place to look for answers. I climbed out of bed and hurried downstairs.
    On the shelf in the back kitchen were the two heavy cardboard boxes that I’d found the other day. I dragged them into the kitchen, where the light was better, and lifted the lids. Both boxes were packed full of layers of paper, old stories of my mother’s, some with small rejection slips still attached by rusted paper clips. “Unfortunately, this does not suit our requirements at this time.”
    Carefully, I lifted out each bundle, scanning them one by one. At the top of a carbon copy of one manuscript: “Accepted,” in Alex’s handwriting. “Liberty Magazine, October, 1948.”
    Among the typed manuscripts were rough, handwritten drafts, with little arrows moving sentences to better positions, lines crossed out, more colourful words inserted. I had reached the bottom of the second box before I found a large, accordion-style folder, bulging with columns clipped from the newspaper. If the article about the Countess had been published I was sure it would be here. I took the envelope back up to bed with me.
    There was no order to the contents of the folder, but by narrowing my search down to the year I had chicken pox, I was able to eliminate some of the clippings. I was thankful that I didn’t have to go to work that day because the birds had begun their pre-dawn chatter before I was finished