by Haley Tanner
But she cared so much for Lena, like her own child.
All of this crowds Rasia’s mind, all at once, and she hasn’t even scratched the surface. And still her son sits forlorn beside her, destroyed by sobbing, leaking snot onto a nice clean T-shirt.
THERE IS NOT PUNISH
…
Rasia realizes that she can no longer assume anything about her son when it comes to Lena.
“What has been going on between you two?” she asks. This seems like a good question, a good wide net. Vaclav looks at her like he’s trying to decide what to tell her.
“Listen,” she tells him, “no one is being angry at you, you are not in trouble, there is not punish. Stop making strategies, stop thinking like her. Just tell me what is going on here.”
Vaclav’s face shows that he is trying to strategize, to scoot his battleship into less dangerous waters, if he can find them.
“What do you mean, ‘stop thinking like her’?” he says. He’s stopped crying, and now he looks angry, at Rasia.
“With the strategies and the conniving! With lying and stealing and cheating, and making this and that happen in secret! Secrets! Vaclav, see! She is like a squirrel, always hiding some rotting secret under this rock, under that tree, under the bed, in the pillowcase! This is not the way!”
“What are you talking about, Mom?” he asks.
“How long she has been back?” she asks.
“She’s not back, she’s always been here! Always been in Brooklyn, she never left.” He says this like Rasia is the jail master, some warden person who has been hiding Lena from him all this time.
“You are avoiding the question. Don’t be stupid. I just found you, in my house, sneaking around when you thought I would be at work, doing sex, which I can’t believe, and with Lena, who you should have told me you were seeing! Don’t be stupid. I am getting answered. How long?”
“I don’t know, a little while,” he says, looking down at the table.
“You have been lying to me. You have been sneaking, and why? I ask you, how is your day today, my loving son, and you say nothing, you lying sack of I don’t know what lies as much as you! Why do you hide this from me?”
“Why do you need to know? You need a full report, every day, on who I see, like Big Brother?” This reference is lost on Rasia. What is not lost is Vaclav’s attempt at anger, at teenage rebellion. He wears it poorly, self-consciously, awkwardly. Rasia decides to retaliate with something she wears equally poorly, victimhood, sadness.
“ ‘Need to know’? Oh, Vaclav. I thought that we were close; I thought that you could tell me anything, because you know that my love for you is bigger than the ocean I put between me and my own mother in order to give you this life. I thought, you, my only son—I thought we were close. I had no idea I was so wrong.…” Vaclav stops looking angry at Rasia, and tears come to his eyes again.
Is Rasia pleased that she has made Vaclav cry? No, but she is pleased that he has dropped the act of seeming somehow angry with her, of deflecting all her inquiries with misdirected fury.
“How did this happen?” she says. She lets some moments pass, because she knows he wants to tell her, but he is afraid.
“She called me. We met up after school, I dunno.”
“What about Ryan?” she asks, remembering the name, saying it perfectly. Knowing she is, as they say, out of the picture. Vaclav only sobs harder.
Rasia is feeling very deeply for Ryan, because it is happening a lot to girls who are nice, and kind, and sweet, that they get their hearts pulped like a tomato in a can by boys who leave them for the wild ones who jump up on the beds and say “Woo-hoo, let’s go.”
“So why did you lie about this from me?” Rasia asks.
“It’s to me, Mom. You should say ‘lie about this to me.’ ”
“Listen,” Rasia says, “it is a truth you are keeping away, so I say, from me. And stop with the English lesson, Mr. American, I’m asking you something. Why keep a secret? You think I wouldn’t approve? You just hate me so much?”
“Obviously I don’t hate you. She didn’t want anyone to know about going to find her parents and stuff, and I don’t know, I don’t know why it had to be a secret, but it did.” He can’t remember anymore why he agreed to keep Lena a secret from his mom, or how he started lying about it.
“What do you mean, ‘going to find her parents’?” Rasia lowers her voice, and she says very, very gently, “Where were you planning to find her parents?”
Vaclav is too exhausted to lie.
“Russia,” he says. Rasia takes a deep breath, calms herself, reminds herself to be glad that Vaclav has told her. She feels, though, like she has opened the freezer and found a land mine on top of the ice trays, and she is now carrying it gently out of her house.
“Russia?” Rasia asks, gently, evenly.
“Yeah.”
Rasia thinks about the country she left, about what she went through to leave it, about all of the things that were awful, especially about all of the hard decisions to be made, and she thinks now about how in a few short days, this girl has dragged her son into a snake pit of lies, and sex, and beyond that, beyond that, she is planning to take him, with her, to Russia, to try to find missing people, the kind of people who abandon their baby, to go poking around the underbelly of a giant ex-Soviet monster.
“You were going to go with her? To Russia? When?”
“I don’t know, Ma, we didn’t buy the tickets yet.”
“When were you going to tell me?” she asks.
“Eventually,” Vaclav says, trailing off, because when he thinks about it, there was no “we’ll tell them eventually” in Lena’s plan. In Lena’s plan, not explicitly but definitely, was the assumption that the mothers, the families, could not know, because they would not allow the plan to happen, and the plan had to happen, so the families had to be lied to. Vaclav remembers leaving the house to sneak out and take the train to Lena’s house early in the morning. He can see now what Lena wanted him to do: to run away, to get on a plane, to not tell anyone, to disappear. I could never do that to my mom, he thinks, at the same time he is terrified because he was well on his way, and he knows it.
“She didn’t want to tell her mom either,” he says, to soften things.
“She has a mom?” Rasia says, aching with joy and sadness for Lena to have a mother who is not Rasia.
“She was adopted. She really likes her mom.” Vaclav takes a deep breath. “I don’t know what happened.” Of course he doesn’t. Lena comes back, and she whispers things and she makes him feel good, and she has secrets, and plans, and mystery and power. Rasia wonders, though, if Lena had any idea what was going on, what was happening. Lena is a hurt person. Lena is a sad person. Rasia has a whole section of her heart devoted to tender feelings for Lena.
Rasia knows—well, maybe not knows, but it is her best guess—that Lena had no idea what was going on either. It was not her idea to come and get Vaclav and break him down and make him lie and all this. She is a girl who is lost and is looking for something. Lena is thinking that maybe Vaclav can help her get this something. Beyond that, Lena is operating without full instructions.
FATHER KNOWS BEST
…
Vaclav puts his head down on the table. He tries to understand why Lena would run away from him. He cannot understand. He cannot imagine running away from Lena.
When the door opens, Vaclav knows who it is. He does not pick up his head. Vaclav’s dad comes home at the same time every day.
Oleg, upon arrival in the kitchen, notices that there is nothing cooking for dinner, and that Vaclav and Rasia both look like they have been crying.
“What?” he says, looking at them, going to the freezer for vodka.
No one answers him.
“What is it? What is tragedy?”
“Lena’s back,” Vaclav says, through snot and tears.
“Lena?” Oleg says, as if she weren’t the center of the universe.
“Yeah, Le
na,” says Vaclav.
“Oh, the little girl, with the Aunt’s boyfriend who diddled her? This one? That guy was scum. They kill him in prison.”
Rasia’s face is frozen. Vaclav feels like his face is coming apart from his skull.
Oleg looks at Rasia, and he sees that he told something he was not supposed to tell.
“What?” Oleg says.
“He shouldn’t know this,” Rasia says, softly. “I don’t want him to know.”
“Why?” says Oleg. “He is old enough to understand.”
“Oleg,” Rasia says. “Enough.”
“Mom, is that true?” says Vaclav, quietly, carefully. “You said that you called the police because her aunt wasn’t taking care of her.”
“I called the police,” she says. “Because of what I saw.”
“You saw?” he asks. “What did you see?”
“Not what I saw, what I knew. I knew for too long,” she says, and then her head goes down because she is starting to cry. “I knew, and then I saw. So that I could not ignore anymore.”
“What did you know?” Vaclav says. He says this because he is trying to disbelieve the diddling comment. He is wanting it to be something else. He is wanting it to be anything else.
“These are things that are unspeakable! You know what it is. Vaclav, to make me say this, don’t punish me. I’m sorry, I had to do what I did. It’s hard to live with, and who knows, I tried.” Rasia and Vaclav are both crying now, and Oleg looks like he is watching a soap opera in a foreign language.
“What did you know?” Vaclav says quietly. “What did you see?” He is refusing to believe. He is refusing to understand. He is the silence before a bomb explodes. He is the tick, tick, tick, tick before the boom.
“Vaclav, she was a child and there was no one to care for her; it was a bad situation. What do you want me to tell you?”
“That’s not it,” Vaclav says.
“Vaclav, what does it matter now?” Rasia says.
“You have to tell me. When she left, you just wanted to pretend that she never existed, but I was just a little kid, and my heart was broken,” Vaclav shouts, because he can’t help it. He shouts, gasping for air, “She was gone, and my heart was broken. I just need to know; she was here and then she was so gone for so long, but I never stopped thinking about her, never, and then she was back, and now she’s gone again and I can’t stand it. Please, Mom, please, Mom, please, Mom, please …” His voice trails off because he has run out of air.
He is asking her what happened, but he knows what happened. He is asking her to make it not true.
“Vaclav,” Rasia says.
“Please tell me what happened,” Vaclav says.
“I told you,” she says.
“No,” he says.
“The man, he did terrible things to her.…”
“No,” he says.
“I suspected,” she says.
“No,” he says.
“I was not sure. She stayed home sick from school, and I was worried about her, she had been so skinny, and she wasn’t eating well. Do you remember? She would eat nothing, and then everything? I thought something might be wrong, and she had no one to take care of her, so I went over there to check on her, and I walked in, and I saw,” she says.
“No,” he says.
“I saw him.” She chooses her words carefully, terrified. “I caught him.”
“No,” Vaclav shouts. “No. No. No. No.” His shouts become screams, and his screams become lightning tearing apart ancient trees, and the lightning becomes continents ripping apart, and the ripping becomes the earth splitting in two pieces, and the sky tearing from the earth, the darkness from the light.
Vaclav runs out of the room, into his own room, leaving her there with his father, leaving her sitting there, alone.
Oleg sits next to Rasia at the table and takes her hand in his hand.
“I did the best I could,” Rasia says, to the room, to her husband, to herself.
UN-FORGET, RE-REMEMBER, RE-FORGET, UN-REMEMBER
…
Lena can’t catch her breath. Lena can’t un-see what she is seeing. Lena decides on the train that she doesn’t want to tell anyone ever. She doesn’t want to tell Vaclav, or to ever talk to him again. To tell anyone would be impossible anyway; she could never give flight to the things she is seeing in her mind by attaching them to words, setting them loose. She decides to forget. She decides to forget again. She wishes she could turn off her brain. She tries not to think, not to think anything at all, but the feeling of hands holding her down, pulling her knees apart, is in her body, and it won’t go away.
Lena keeps seeing Rasia’s face, not her face today but her face in the doorway at her aunt’s house, when Lena was nine. She can remember now that she knew that Rasia was there, to save her, and that the horror on Rasia’s face terrified her.
She feels a familiar feeling, like she has done something hideous. She tries to tell herself that nothing is her fault. It’s not Lena’s fault that Rasia knew she was alone in that house, with Ekaterina, with the kind of people Ekaterina knew, vulnerable and unprotected, night after night. It’s not Lena’s fault that she was born Lena. She has stayed far away from that world, from that place, from that time, from all that hurt and all that mess, away from Vaclav, and Rasia, whose face is part of the disgusting loop playing in her mind; Rasia will only remind her of it. It was better before she went back, before she remembered. She should stay with Em and move brightly into the future. With chamomile tea and Em’s friends, who bring lovely produce to the house. With Em’s friends, who sit outside to watch the stars and drink wine and bitch about men. With Em’s really great music, with the solid French farmhouse distressed wood furniture, with the quilts and the chandeliers.
Lena is on a train moving toward better, and she’s already starting to forget. Emily is a god who came to earth and saved her. She is the sun around which Lena will orbit for the rest of her life. She is the center of Lena’s new cosmology. Lena’s parents don’t exist. Vaclav does not exist; Rasia does not exist. Her aunt does not exist, and the man does not exist. Emily is a bastion of trust and warmth and safety, has always been and will always be. Lena is born again, and moving toward the sun on her train under the ground, she feels nothing.
When Lena gets home, the smell of her house hits her as she’s opening the door, and it’s bright and clear, like open windows and shampoo.
Lena finds Em in the kitchen. Reading in the window seat. Something is cooking on the stove, vegetable soup, not canned soup, not heavy winter soup, not borscht, just a light vegetable soup, which will be golden and perfect, and have some carrots, and squash, and bright green zucchini, and Em will put it in a big earthenware pot because she’s such a hippie, and she’ll put out a crusty bread, and there will be wine, which Lena can try.
The table is set, and there are flowers on the table. They’re not regular flowers, they’re a flowering branch from a tree. Em looks from her book and sees Lena looking at the flowers.
“I took a walk today, and I could not resist those. Aren’t they just amazing? I tore them off a tree, and I immediately thought, Well, if everyone did that, there would be no flowers for anyone, but still. And I hid them in my shopping bag the whole way home, I was so afraid, like someone was going to arrest me.”
Em sees the look on Lena’s face and stands up. The moment she says, “What’s wrong?” Lena is like an egg hitting the floor, she comes apart everywhere.
RING, RING
…
In his room, Vaclav dials the phone.
The person who picks up the receiver on the other end is laughing with someone else. She says hello, and her voice is warm and loose. There is music playing in the background.
“Hello, am I interrupting you?” Vaclav says. This is not proper phone manners. This is not what he meant to say.
“Oh, no,” she says, “we just sat down to dinner! No worries. How can I help you?”
“Umm, this is Vaclav
calling for Lena, please, if she’s available,” he says, but the lady doesn’t respond; she didn’t hear him.
“I’m sorry, honey, who is this?”
“My name is Vaclav,” he says.
“Lena can’t come to the phone,” she says, her voice suddenly serious, but then she adds, softly, “I’m so sorry,” and hangs up.
It occurs to Vaclav only after she has hung up that this sweet, warm voice must have been Lena’s mom, her new mom, her real mom, her adoptive mom, whatever.
Vaclav is angry at her for not letting him talk to Lena. He has to remind himself that she’s been Lena’s mom for seven years, and she probably knows Lena better than he does, which is sad to him. And suddenly, everything is sad to him, his bedroom, lonely and dark, his mom crying in the kitchen, the cruel happiness at Lena’s house, the darkness outside, and it all seems totally lonely, far too lonely.
Emily returns to Lena, who is wrapped in a blanket on the sofa. Although it broke Emily’s heart when Lena told her that she could not bear what she had remembered, could not go on living, Emily knew that actually, Lena could go on living, that she might finally begin.
GO TO MOSCOW TO FIND OUT
…
Vaclav wakes up early the next morning and gets dressed in his room. He decides not to brush his teeth, not to shower, not even to pee. He does not want to talk to Rasia. If he goes into the bathroom, she will hear, she will know he is up and getting ready, and she will try to stop him. He will pee at McDonald’s, he tells himself; he will buy a pack of gum. Nothing will stop him from going to Lena.