Sveta’s obviously been here, because the flat smells like lemon, the rug by the door is crumb-free, and the shoes are lined up in neat little rows. Justin wrestles off his sneakers and he and Chloe run for the television in our family room. I am just closing the door when I feel hands on my waist.
I jump, and gulp down a scream.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” Chase is behind me. I turn, barely stifling another scream.
“What are you wearing?” And I’m not talking about his jeans or his black WorldMar T-shirt, but the rather large, um, animal on his head, and the fuzzy sheepskin boots on his feet.
“I’m a Cossack.”
“You’re a crazy person.” I touch the hat, which makes him look like an eighties rock star with fuzzy brownish-blond hair that extends down over his ears, adding a distinctly basset-hound aura.
“I got you one, too.” And without warning, he pulls a matching hat out from behind his back and plunks it on my head. It engulfs me and I can’t see. “It’s red fox. Cool, huh?”
No, actually. Not cool. Sweltering.
“This is your idea of no pressure?” I push the hat up with one finger. But he’s grinning at me, working his devastating powers of persuasion.
He lifts a shoulder. “If we don’t go, we’ll wear them in Gull Lake.”
“Where?” At the annual ice-fishing festival? At a three-day dogsled race?
“Maybe when I shovel the driveway.” He picks up the tassel attached to one of my basset ears and tickles my chin with the fuzzy ball at the end.
And right then, I know. I can’t doom my man to a life of fixing water heaters all winter and putting in the dock each spring. It might be fine for my father, but Chase was born for adventure. For challenges.
For Siberia.
I close my eyes. Sigh. “Promise you’ll find me a house with a backyard?”
He wraps those muscled arms around me and pulls me tight, my head against his chest. He smells good, of soap and shaving cream. “That’s my girl,” he says softly.
Yeah, I’m his girl. Chase’s girl. And his girl isn’t going to hold him back.
Which, by the way, isn’t the same as submission. Just so we have that straight.
He leans back, lifts my chin with his hand and runs his thumb along my cheek. His gaze wanders over my face, one side of his beautiful mouth lifting into a smile a second before he kisses me.
And let me tell you, Chase knows how to kiss.
This is the right decision. I can feel it in my stomach and all the way down to my bones. Peace.
I wrap my arms around those strong shoulders and deepen our kiss.
When Chase finally pulls away, I’ve forgotten that we have kids, forgotten that he’s practically tricked me into moving to a snowy nowhere, forgotten that I’m still wearing a dead fox on my head.
Until he nuzzles into my neck and whispers, “We’re going to have so much fun.”
There’s that word again.
Chapter Four
“I’m so proud of you, Josey!”
Daphne is sitting on her sofa, bouncing Chloe on what’s left of her lap as I clear off the fold-out table from dinner. I hear Chase in the kitchen talking to Daphne’s husband, Caleb, his voice bubbling with excitement as they do the dishes, good domestic men that they are. I am still in shock over my impulsive yes, and something akin to buyer’s remorse has haunted me for a week.
Especially when Chase brought home my own pair of fuzzy, sheepskin-covered Cossack boots. Never in this lifetime, Bub. But he was so thrilled, his eyes dancing as he pulled out mini-boots for Justin and Chloe. What’s a girl to do?
I swear, the boots will never leave the house with my feet in them.
Daphne’s enthusiasm for our sentence to Siberia has me smiling, though. She looks at life through rose-colored glasses, and it’s catching. It helps that summer is giving way to fall in Moscow, and the slight breeze filled with the scent of leaves filters in through her open windows. Outside, the sun is still high, and the sky a turquoise blue over the Volga. It’s the kind of sunny Sunday that would have found me, in a previous life, playing touch football outside after dinner with Chase and my younger brother, Buddy.
“It’s just for a year, Daph—not even that, really. Just until summer. Voices International only has nine months left of their gig with the Russian Ministry of Indigenous People.” I am folding up the golden tablecloth to catch the crumbs. “I can do anything for a year.”
Daphne lets a wriggling Chloe down. She promptly runs off to tackle her brother, who is playing sweetly and quietly in the next room. “Still, it’s not every woman who would let her husband drag her thousands of miles into the endless tundra just so he can watch people.”
Oh, thanks for putting it like that. I wad the tablecloth into a ball and stand up to take down the table. In Russia the kitchens are so small, a group larger than three requires the use of the foldout table in the family room.
Daphne runs her hand over her stomach. “Especially when you want to go home, when you’ve been looking forward to this for four years.”
Only making it worse here, Daph.
“I have to tell you something.”
The look on her face has me sitting back down. She doesn’t meet my eyes. “Caleb and I are moving stateside.”
I wait for more, something like, “to have the baby.” Or, “for a year.” But nothing follows. I raise my eyebrows, and my voice betrays my surprise. Caleb has lived in Russia longer than anyone I know. I thought for sure they were lifers. “Permanently?”
She looks up, and her eyes are teary. “I guess submission is harder than I thought.”
Uh-oh, the bubble has popped. I wisely say nothing (see? I’m learning!).
“Caleb wants our baby to live in America, to be around family.” She sighs, and for the first time I realize that we are living each other’s lives.
I want to be in America, living around family. She desperately wants to stay in Russia.
I finally get why she’s proud of me. I put my hand over hers. “I’m proud of you, too.”
She sighs and looks up. I’m thinking she’s running our last conversation over in her mind, the one about someone having to compromise to make a marriage work. The expression on her face tells me that words are easier than actions.
Her voice drops. “What if he’s wrong?”
I frown at her. My voice also drops. “Wrong about what?”
“What if we’re not supposed to go home? What if we’re supposed to stay in Russia? What if we’re missing the opportunity of a lifetime to change hearts and minds, to help people see that Jesus loves them?”
Okay, see, this is why I should never be Daphne’s mentor, even though she once wanted me to. Because she is deeper than me. More committed to the eternal.
My primary worry has been about what I’m going to do for bagels and coffee out in the Siberian wasteland.
I stand up again, folding the legs of the table, lowering down one side, then the other.
“Caleb will move it back to the wall,” Daphne says, but I pick up the table, moving it myself.
Then I sit beside her.
“I don’t know, Daph. But I have learned that when I leap off the edge of my own understanding into the great unknown of faith, God has a way of catching me.”
I’m not sure where that came from, but I believe it.
Please, God, make me believe it.
“You’re going to be amazing in Siberia,” Daphne says, reaching over to hug me.
I just hope to be warm.
Russia is a very large place. According to Chase, it’s two and one-half times the size of the continental United States. Two and one-half. I know—it was hard for me to grasp, too, until Chase bought a map at the renock (read: market) and spread it out on our living-room floor. It barely fits between the black leather couches, even with the duct-taped glass coffee table pushed into the hallway.
I can lie down on this map, spread-eagled, and sti
ll not reach from one end to the other.
“Where are we going to live?”
“This is Moscow,” Chase says, pointing to a dot on the far left of the map. At the moment, I don’t care so much about where we’re going but more whom I’m going with—Chase is looking devastating today with his dark-blond curls and two-day beard. He’s stretched out on his side, one hand propped under his head, wearing a pair of faded jeans and his brown T-shirt bearing the wreckage from supper. Chloe doesn’t love oatmeal.
Hey, oatmeal is a perfectly decent food choice any time of the day.
Chloe and Justin are asleep for the night—or rather, they’re in bed. I can still hear Chloe singing to anyone who will listen.
“And we’re going here.” Chase has to sit up to move his hand to the other end of the map. He peers closely at it, finds a speck the size of a mustard seed, points to it and smiles. “Bursk.”
I look back at the Moscow dot. “There’s a size difference.”
“That’s because Bursk is really just a village.”
Now when I hear the word village, I think of quaint German towns, houses with thatched roofs, outdoor bistros, artists painting on the sidewalk while pigeons coo at their feet. I hear the jingling bells of bicyclists and picture their handlebar baskets filled with crusty bread and a spray of daisies. I can even smell the bread baking from a nearby bakery.
Village means quiet. It means provincial. It means…vacation.
I’ve been on a Russian vacation. I’m no longer that ignorant girl.
But I am hopeful.
“Where’s the nearest town?”
“Two hours by boat.”
I narrow my eyes. Did he say boat? I sit up and move his hand away from the speck. I read the name of the narrow strip of blue next to it. It’s in Russian and I sound it out. “Amore.”
“Amur, yes. It connects the village—”
“Stop saying village. It raises too many expectations. Let’s call it a…small town.”
“A very small town.”
“How small are we talking?”
“Less than five hundred.”
I lie back on the floor, staring at the ceiling. I grew up in a small town and more than anything, I long for my children to know the charm of small-town living. But not an on-the-backside-of-the-world small town.
“Less than five hundred, Chase?”
“The people were once nomadic. Only when the Soviet Union was formed did they settle down in one location. They’re still mostly hunters, and they make their living hunting and trapping animals for fur. That’s why Voices International wants us to study them. They want to figure out ways for them to survive in today’s capitalist Russia without having to compromise their society or culture. Too many of their children are abandoning their heritage and moving to cities like Khabarovsk or Vladivostok or even Irkutsk, and forgetting the family and life they left behind. It’s destroying their culture and possibly their future.”
I get it. And I agree with Voices International’s mission. I do. And I believe he can help.
I believe we can help. That old feeling—the one that churned in me right before I took off for a year so long ago to teach English in Russia—burns inside me. We can make a difference, change the landscape from despair to hope for these people.
See, inside me still simmers the idea that I can change my world…their world. Our world.
There’s the eternal perspective I’ve been waiting for.
However…
“Is it really in Siberia?” Even the word makes me shiver. Yes, I’m a Minnesota girl and can handle a few snowdrifts, but I also remember in my college days reading something about Stalin sending people east, to the Gulag, to Siberia—and we’re going there by choice?
“Everything east of the Urals is Siberia.” Chase draws an invisible north-south line down the mountains on the map. The line is a lot closer to Moscow than that little blip in the east.
“How cold do you think it gets?”
“You do remember the fur part, right?” Chase leans over, kissing me quickly. “I’ll keep you warm.”
Yeah, sure you will. I give him a playful push away. “No, seriously.”
“Siberia is actually hotter than people think. They have summer, and the snow does melt, and Bursk isn’t any farther north than Moscow.”
I’m not appeased. “How far is it from here?”
“By plane or train?”
Oh, no. “Plane, please.”
“Nine hours.”
Okay, nine hours. That’s nearly as far as it is from here to Boston. Not terrible. However, my stomach has knotted. I do not want to ask this next question. Most wives wouldn’t even have to think about it. However, most wives aren’t married to Adventure Boy. “And by train?”
“Seven days.”
“Please don’t tell me—”
“We’re taking the train.” He scoots over on the map, right down the Volga River, to where I’m perched on the border of Ukraine. He’s got a twinkle in his eyes, and I know he’s cornering me so I can’t flee. “Seven days in our own train compartment on the Trans-Siberian Railway, watching Russia drift by.”
He tucks his arm around my waist and leans over me.
Oh, Chase. I trace the well between his collarbones with my finger, trying not to smile. “Why can’t we fly?”
“Voices International is on a tight allotment. We either fly with just four suitcases, or we bring our belongings with us on the train.”
Four suitcases or a train for a week. Shoes, think of your shoes, Josey. I know that my style standards have plummeted to an all-time low from those days when I wore my leather pants without shame, but here’s a fact: feet stay roughly the same size regardless of waist size.
My saving grace. Still, right behind the realization that Chase has opted for more suitcases (catching on, are we, Chase?) is a sinking feeling at his word, “tight.”
“Just how ‘tight’ is this allotment, Chase?”
His face does the math for me. Oh.
“It’s just for a year,” he says. “We can tap into our savings.”
What savings? That $5467.42 we’ve saved over the past four years? Sure, that’ll get us real far.
“C’mon, GI, the train. We’ve always wanted to take the train.”
That sounds a lot like a he-we to me. You know, the we that really means he.
But nestled here in Chase’s strong embrace…“It does sound romantic.”
“We can go to the dining car. Read a book. Sleep late—”
“Mommy!” Justin shoots out of the bedroom, his jammies off, of course. He’s just in his cloth pull-ups and plastic pants. “Chloe is kicking me!”
Of course she is.
Chase rolls over to his side and scoops up Justin. “C’mon, buddy. We’ll go have a talk with Chloe.”
Good luck with that.
I watch him throw Justin over his shoulder and tickle him as they disappear into our bedroom. We’ve been living in a one-bedroom flat for four years now, pulling out the sofa bed every night in the living room just like the Russians do. Chloe and Justin share a double bed in the room where we keep our clothing. It’s cramped, their toys shoved up against every wall, and shoes and coats overflowing by the door. Our flat isn’t much bigger than one of the cabins back at Berglund Acres in Minnesota.
Please, Lord, I want a house.
They have to have houses in a village, right?
When we first got married, Chase and I (okay, just I) wanted to buy a cute little Cape Cod I’d found in the middle of Gull Lake. This was, however, before Chase lost his job—or rather, before he finally told me he lost his job—and found another in Moscow. I never dreamed I’d spend four years surfing the subway and shopping in the open market in Moscow. But the Josey who still lives under long blond hair that needs a cut and wears faded yoga pants loves the city life, the bustle of Moscow.
A village. It might be quaint.
Please let it be quaint.
; I hear Chloe now, laughing. I give it five minutes before I have to go in there and calm everyone down.
But listening to the ruckus makes me smile. Chase can make anyone laugh with his disarming grin and the twinkle in his blue eyes. His charm snuck up on me when we met in kindergarten, and by the time we were in third grade, he and I spent every waking moment racing bicycles, building woodland forts and swimming in Gull Lake. I don’t remember life before Chase.
Frankly, I don’t want to.
I love that Chase doesn’t doubt that I’ll move to the end of the earth with him, that I can keep up with him. Especially that I believe in him.
In us.
We can do this. We can change the future for this little town, this people. We can help them survive, keep their traditions, entice their young people to stay. And a good Minnesota girl knows how to stretch her pennies.
Maybe I’ll grow a garden. Learn how to put up beans.
I roll over and trace the length of the map with a finger. Its smooth shiny surface flows under my skin as I travel over the Urals, across steppe, tundra, rivers, forest and finally to tiny Bursk, the village on the Amur River.
Bursk. Sounds an awful lot like Burrrrr, doesn’t it?
It’s just a year.
I can do anything for a year.
Chapter Five
“You’re Going to be Fine”
Dear Jasmine,
Thank you for the anniversary card. No, I can’t believe that Chase and I have been married for four years, and I have to agree that it’s convenient Amelia’s birthday falls on the same day as our wedding anniversary. Although you’d think, then, I’d remember to send her a birthday card. Her party sounds great! I love it that little Clay stuck both of his grimy hands in the cake—that’s a one-year-old for you! Good idea making two cakes. I can just imagine Dad, Mom, Uncle Bert and Aunt Myrtle standing around the grill, watching your two little ones splashing in Gull Lake. I remember those days of summer, running barefoot, lying out on the beach. Did I mention Chase and I went to the Black Sea just a few weeks ago?
Get Cozy, Josey! Page 4