by Kathy Parks
Dedication
To Michael Parks,
My Vanya
I have a family.
And they have me.
They have me.
They have me.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Part Two
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Part Three
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Kathy Parks
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
* * *
Grigoriy and Nika Osinov were young university professionals when they vanished from Moscow in 1987. They did not lock their door on the way out. Mrs. Osinov neglected to even take her purse. The landlord at their tenement building, which overlooked Tverskaya Street, found the apartment eerily pristine. The table was set. Food still in the refrigerator. And something that, in light of the rumors of sorcery, terrified him: the startling movement of a crow, which had been sitting on the table, suddenly flying out the open window.
Dr. Daniel Westin
New York Times article
* * *
One
My mother puts a lot of stock in dreams. She says she dreamed of me before I was born, knew the color of my eyes and hair. She named me Adrienne in her sleep, and that’s the name she gave me when I came along, blond haired and blue eyed just as she’d predicted. The night I lost my father, she dreamed a heart-monitor line went flat. But I’m not a superstitious person, or one inclined to believe in the magical or the supernatural. So I’m not alarmed, just annoyed, when, the morning my stepfather and I are leaving on our trip, Mom wakes from a nightmare about what will happen to us in Siberia.
She’s talking about it, totally agitated, when I wander in for breakfast. She’s flipping pancakes as she speaks. The pancakes are falling apart. Dan, my stepfather, watches her. He is on the tall side, thin, and his teeth are a tiny bit too big for his mouth, giving people the perception he is smiling.
But he’s not smiling right at the moment. The look on his face says, Oh shit, we were almost home free and now this stupid dream.
Jason, the stepbrother who was foisted on me seven years ago, lounges at the breakfast table in an old T-shirt and board shorts, looking amused. He’s just jealous because he wanted to go on this trip—if only to meet some Russian girls on the way to Siberia—and I’m going instead. Or, I think I’m still going.
“It was terrible!” Mom exclaims.
I glance at Dan. “Let me guess. Mom had a dream.”
“Just a dream,” Dan says quickly, directing that at Mom more than at me, his tone reassuring and just a little dismissive. “Dreams mean nothing. They’re just chemical reactions in the cerebral cortex that occur during REM sleep. . . .”
Great, Dan. Calm her right down with geekspeak.
My real father was a quiet district attorney, a man of few words, with body language that never gave away his game. Dan is a frenetic anthropologist with jazz hands. His hands are busy right now, in the air, helping form his nonsense about REM sleep.
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Mom.” I go to her and touch her shoulder, feel the tension there. She flips another pancake. It tears in half. I’ll be having scrambled pancakes for breakfast, with a side of nightmare.
She shakes her head. “You and Dan were sleeping in tents, and then they came through the woods with knives and sliced your tent open.”
They. She’s talking about the Osinovs, the family of mysterious Siberian hermits Dan has been studying for years. He’s an anthropologist at the University of Denver, and a very well respected one—at least he was . . . until last month.
“Then what?” Jason asks. My stepbrother seems eager to hear about horrible things done to me even in my mom’s subconscious. He’s thoughtful that way.
“I woke myself up screaming.”
“Sorry, Jason,” I say. “She didn’t get to the beheading part.”
“Stop it,” Mom orders, shooting me a fierce look. “This isn’t a joke.”
I roll my eyes. Some girls are stricken with Resting Bitch Face. I’ve got Argument Bitch Face, in which my mild features turn into an unconscious embodiment of Teenage Attitude when I’m about to state my case. And my voice. I can’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice at such times. It’s like trying to take the calories out of a cupcake. What I want to say out loud but cannot is that the crazy, possibly murderous Osinov family won’t sneak up on me with knives because there is no family. They’re just another legend like bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. But I can’t say that out loud because Dan has based his entire academic career on them. Dan’s article “The Vanished: The Story of the Osinovs” was published three years ago in the New York Times and made him a star. That is until Sydney Declay, badass journalist and my own personal hero, wrote the now-famous article in the Washington Post last month debunking the whole thing.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Dan assures her, rising on his toes like he always does when he’s excited, which is often, jazz hands going, words pouring out. “Remember I’ve done it twice, and Adrienne is a smart, responsible girl, and she’ll be with me at all times, please, honey, this is a trip of a lifetime. . . .” He lowers his heels to the ground, raises them again, as though performing an exercise to strengthen his calves.
“A trip of a deathtime,” Jason chimes in.
I glare at him. “Shut up, Jason.”
He laughs evilly. Dan pauses for breath. Mom shakes a dollop of butter onto my sad pancake, sloppy as an unmade bed. Her eyes are troubled. I’ve been begging to go for months, have finally gotten permission, inoculations, a ticket, everything, and now it’s all going to hell.
It’s rare that Dan and I find ourselves on the same side. Sure, he usually wants to be on my side. He’s still trying to fill that void where my father used to be. It’s weird to be allies with him. But I find myself drifting over next to him as though our argument will be more powerful if we are standing closer together.
“Adrienne wants to be a reporter,” Dan says. “She needs to see the world.” A wave of guilt rushes through me at his words. I wish I believed in his Russian family. But it’s like belief in anything. I need proof, and wouldn’t he have found it by now if it existed? Besides, Sydney did an amazing job of discrediting him with her article.
“I wouldn’t bring her if I didn’t think it was safe,” he adds.
I join in the argument. “I’ll be going with a whole crew.” Two people at least. “And a guide.”
“Dan, she’s a seventeen-year-old girl!” Mom protests.
“Eighteen in three months,” I say.
Jason’s already halfway through his pancake. “I’m nineteen. And I’m a guy.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask. “Like, a girl can’t make it in the woods? Besides, why do you want to go? You’re not interested in Russia. You’ve never been out in the woods, and you’re not a reporter.”
“You’re not a repor
ter,” Jason sneers. “Editor in chief of the Rosedale High student paper means absolutely nothing.”
“My article on fracking ran in the Denver Times, douchebag,” I shoot back.
“Jason,” Dan said severely, “stop making fun of your sister. At least she has goals. She didn’t flunk out of community college for missing half her classes.”
Jason winces. I stifle a snicker.
“Whatever,” he says. “Siberia sucks, anyway.”
“It’s freezing there,” Mom says. She stares down at the new pancake, wanting to guard it till it grows up perfect.
Dan’s getting annoyed now. It’s two hours before we leave for the plane, and I can see the exasperation on his face. “We’ve been over this again and again. Siberia warms up in June.” His hands rise in the air. Is he trying to communicate heat rising off the earth? Who knows.
“Unless there’s a freak snowstorm,” Jason pipes in. “You’ve mentioned that possibility, Dad.”
“God, Jason.” I’m exasperated now. “Don’t you have anything better to do than ruin my trip? Go fail at something.”
Mom’s pancake is now burning, and she hasn’t noticed. Dan reaches over and moves her pan off the burner.
“Are you packed, Adrienne?” he asks pointedly. “You need to double-check your supplies.”
Mom gives him a look. She has a pretty mild appearance. Hair down to her shoulders, a heart-shaped face. But her eyebrows are monsters. They can take an argument and bend it like a pretzel. And now her eyebrows are slowly contorting.
“The dream,” she says again, as though those two words are all she needs to keep me in Boulder all summer.
I let out my breath. “You can die anywhere. At any time. Out of the blue. Just minding your own business.”
Mom gives me a look. I see the grief that never goes away. I shouldn’t have said this.
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugs. We’re great communicators.
I quickly change the subject. “Imagine how this will look on my college applications. And you know I have to get a scholarship to go to Emerson. You know we can’t afford it.”
I realize that in trying to divert Mom’s attention, I’ve accidentally slammed Dan and his habit of draining our money away on his fruitless wild-goose chases.
“You know what I mean,” I add lamely.
“The university is providing a Thuraya satellite phone,” Dan says, ignoring my remark. “That’s the best there is. We’ll be in constant contact with the outside world.” He seems weary, dejected. His hands aren’t waving anymore. They’re hiding in his pockets. Maybe I’ve made him sad with the budget talk.
“Bears.” My mother quickly moves on to other arguments. “Wolves.”
“Osinovs,” Jason pipes up.
“The guide will have a gun, and we’ll all carry bear spray,” Dan insists. One hand struggles free of his pocket, points a finger for emphasis. “This is not some crazy stunt.”
“And this family?” she asks. “This group of hermits or lunatics or whatever they are supposed to be? What if Adrienne runs into them?”
“Based on all my research,” Dan retorts, using the kind of professorial sentence structure that usually annoys me but now might bolster my case, “the Osinovs were a harmless yet eccentric couple when they disappeared thirty years ago. I don’t believe these crazy tales of their being dangerous.” He doesn’t mention his source, Yuri Androv, and his tale of being captured and menaced by the legendary family before he managed to escape.
“Your source says the family kidnapped him,” Mom reminds Dan.
“And if you read the article—” Dan retorts.
“I’ve read the article, Dan.” Mom’s getting pissed.
“If you read the article,” he insists, “you’d know that I don’t believe he was ever in any danger. Yuri exaggerates. But I do believe he was at their campsite. Too many details ring true. The Osinovs wouldn’t have hurt him.”
The Osinovs. He must have said that name ten thousand times. And I’m really sick of hearing it.
Mom flips the burned pancake onto a plate. I know she will eat it herself because she hates waste and because she’s the mom. She tries one more time. “Okay, Dan, but something you’ve never explained is why now? What’s the hurry?”
I study Dan’s face to see the reaction. He looks flustered. He doesn’t say anything at first.
I know a secret. I know why now. I know what’s the hurry.
There’s a very fine line between being a reporter and a snoop, and I crossed it last month, a few days after Sydney Declay’s article came out. I got the mail that day and noticed a letter for Dan from the chairman of the anthropology department. That night, I watched Dan’s face as he read it. Something was up. Something urgent and serious. That night, after everyone was asleep, I went into his office, found the letter, and took a photo of it with my iPhone. It began: “Dear Dr. Westin . . .” A sure sign that Dan was in trouble because he and the chairman had been friends for thirty years. Why such an icy greeting? As I read on, I found out why: Sydney Declay’s article had not only humiliated Dan, it had embarrassed the entire university, and if Dan didn’t find proof of the Osinovs, they were going to pull his grant.
He’d already taken out a second mortgage on the house. I had learned that from another midnight raid. So that’s why now. I watch Dan’s face go dark.
“Because,” he says at last. “Next year it will be too late.”
“Too late for what?” Mom asks.
Dan doesn’t answer.
The look on his face makes me wince. But whenever I start feeling too bad for him, I think of all the things he’s ruined. Like my life. Like our well-built, well-balanced family that liked to hike in the woods and believed in very little except one another. Then my dad died and Dan swept into the house, bringing his dumb son and his belief in the Osinovs. It reminded me of a particularly fervent brand of Christianity, except the Osinovs weren’t coming back; they were supposedly here already. Dan has the glassy-eyed stare of the true believer. He never misses a chance to tell me about some new detail he’s found through his research—all word-of-mouth, legend, rumor. Things my father would have dismissed from any trial. The tool that Yuri Androv, his main source, claimed the eldest son used to cut firewood. The mystical powers of the father. The fishermen downstream who claim to get a glimpse of two brothers fishing from a crude boat. The shoe sole—Grigoriy Osinov’s size—found at the remains of an old campsite, along with a charred biography of the life of Carl Linnaeus, the botanist with whom Osinov was obsessed. The letters Osinov wrote his cousin detailing his escape plan. Every tiny item in the proof of their existence has been discussed at the dinner table.
And I’m tired of that life.
Tired of Dan’s religion.
Yes, I want to write the article and get into journalism school. But I also want to be free. Free of the Osinovs forever.
Jason doesn’t go to the airport with us. He’s got a very important Call of Duty: Zombies battle to fight in the rec room downstairs. Mom, of course, has to go with us to make me feel guilty every mile to the airport. Soon as we pull out of the neighborhood, she starts in again. Am I sure I’m going to go? Why don’t I stay home with her this summer? In return, she’ll take me to Montana. Haven’t I always wanted to go to Montana? It will be just the two of us. . . .
From the back seat, I watch Dan’s hands tighten on the wheel. I know they are dying to join the argument. “Martha, stop trying to bribe her with a trip to Montana. She wants to go with me!”
He and Mom start at it again, and I decide it’s a good time to tune them out. I take out the Dictaphone I bought online—the same one Sydney Declay uses—and speak softly into it.
It’s a bright, clear summer day outside as we set off for Denver International Airport, full of those plans and dreams and expectations that always happen before a trip, but this trip is bigger, deeper, darker, and more vast than any I’ve taken in my life. I wonder, What is th
e day like in Siberia? Will the landscape represent the one whose—
Dan gasps. The tires screech as the car brakes hard, out of nowhere, jerking me out of my reporting. I can hear Mom shriek as I’m jerked forward and back again. The Dictaphone flies out of my hand. The car is still. A brief silence and then Mom whips her head around.
“Adrienne! Are you okay?”
“I’m okay, Mom,” I manage shakily. I’m confused and disoriented and rattled. It’s like Siberia reached out a paw from across the world and disrupted a simple thing like a car moving down pavement.
Dan peers into the road ahead.
“Dan!” Mom has a hand on her chest, breathing hard. “Why did you slam on the brakes? Are you trying to get us killed?”
He turns to her, eyes wide. “Did you see the little girl?”
“Little girl?” Mom echoes. “What little girl?”
My heart steadies. I look around us. We’re alone.
Dan shakes his head. “I’m telling you, there was a little girl standing in the middle of the road.”
Two
By some miracle, there are no other incidents before we arrive at the terminal, although I’m still a bit rattled from the near-accident we had on the way to the airport at the hands of some jaywalking phantom. And I’m feeling a little whiplashed, not the best condition to be in when you’ve got such a long flight ahead of you.
Dan saw a ghost in the road, almost killed us, I whisper into my Dictaphone. Good times already.
Dan and I get out and Mom tells us goodbye. “It’s so hard to be a parent,” she whispers, holding me tight.
“We’ve got to hurry,” Dan says, glancing at his watch. “There might be a line.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” I reassure her, extracting myself from her grip. “I’ll text you when we land.”
I watch her kiss Dan goodbye. He’s dressed up in Anthropology Geek activewear: chino pants, flannel shirt, a Gore-Tex upland field hat, and Birkenstocks. He’d wear Birkenstocks to the moon. It’s still hard to see him kissing her when my dad should be there instead. The two men have different kissing styles. Dad turned his head a certain way, used his hands more. Dan still looks awkward doing it, like he’s on a first date.