by Kim Purcell
“Do you like Los Angeles?” he asked.
It was a funny question. If she told him how much of Los Angeles she’d actually seen in almost six months, he’d be shocked. “My life here is okay. Some people have bad life in Moldova. I am lucky, I think. But I miss my family.”
“You don’t talk to your parents?”
She shook her head. “My mother and father are dead.” She stopped—had she really just said that? She never said it to anyone, not like that, but in English it was easier somehow. “And my babushka, she cannot call.”
A car drove down their street and Hannah listened. It didn’t stop, but Sergey and Lillian could be coming back any moment. She stood up. “I must go.”
Colin stood up with her. His round cheeks were red and his eyes looked miserable. “I’m sorry,” he said. “About your parents.”
She nodded.
The back porch door opened and Colin’s mom stepped outside. She was wearing red and blue plaid pajamas—a top and a bottom, the kind men wore. “Oh, it’s just you,” she said, looking down at them. “You scared me half to death. I was sleeping when I heard the siren and then some voices outside. I thought maybe it was your father.”
“Nah, it’s just me and Hannah.”
“Hello, Hannah,” she said, her eyes smiling kindly. She walked down to the bottom step and reached out her hand, shaking Hannah’s hand firmly. It was her first real American handshake with a real American. She hoped she did it right. “I’m Liz. You two can come inside, you know. We have some cookies.”
“Mo-om,” Colin said. The expression on his face was pained, and it was so familiar that Hannah smiled. Maybe parents were the same everywhere too.
“Thank you,” Hannah said. “I must go.” She glanced at Michael’s bedroom window, getting more anxious. She’d been gone too long.
Liz ran a hand through her curly hair and studied her with worried eyes. “You don’t go to school?” she asked.
“I finish,” Hannah said, taking a step back, but not wanting to be rude.
“You don’t get out of the house often, do you?” she said.
“No,” Hannah said, worried by how many questions she was asking. She heard another car. She couldn’t tell if it had stopped or not. What would Lillian do to her if she came back right now and found out that she wasn’t in the house? “Nice to meet you. I go now. It is later.” She hurried away from them and down the path.
“Hannah, wait,” Colin called.
She looked back and saw Colin trotting after her. “You don’t have to go,” he said.
“The children, they are alone,” she whispered. “I am too long here.”
His eyes widened. “Oh.”
“I see you tomorrow.”
“When?”
“Twelve.”
He blinked. “Okay.”
She turned then, and ran around his pink stucco house, through his gate and her own, along the gravel, around the white house, and through the back door. She hurried across the kitchen and sprinted up the stairs to Michael’s room. He was there. Thank God. He’d kicked off his blanket and he was lying on his bed in his train pajamas with his little legs splayed out, his head resting on his pillow, his cheeks flushed, eyelids closed. He looked so peaceful.
She checked in Maggie’s room. The bed was empty. The pink sheets and white frilly comforter were all twisted up, but there was no Maggie. She hadn’t even really worried about her. Where was she?
She checked the upstairs bathroom next to the office, where Maggie usually went, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the master bathroom either—or the master bedroom. Hannah tried the door to the office. It was locked. She started to panic. She ran downstairs and searched all the rooms. The garage. Maybe Maggie was waiting for her there.
Hannah threw the garage door open. “Maggie!”
A cold empty garage greeted her. She ran back up the stairs, into Maggie’s bedroom, and patted the down comforter, hoping to find her thin body somehow hiding under it. All she found was one of Maggie’s dolls, the gaunt one with the frilly yellow dress.
Her stomach heaved.
Then she remembered the time Maggie had fallen off the bed and slept on the floor all night. Lillian had talked about it at the breakfast table. Hannah crawled over the bed and looked down. Sure enough, there was Maggie, curled up on her side, on the hardwood floor, her dark hair fanning out behind her.
Hannah picked Maggie up, put her on the bed, and pulled the white down comforter over her. Maggie chomped with her lips as if she had gum in her mouth. It was such a sweet, little kid thing to do. She really loved these kids. Maybe too much, she thought, as she walked slowly down the stairs, her body shaky from adrenaline.
There was a double beep outside. Lillian’s heels came up the driveway. The door unlocked and Hannah met her in the foyer. Lillian’s eyes were red and puffy from crying. She looked terrible, even in the black dress that made her skinny body look even skinnier.
Hannah pretended not to notice. “I was just checking on the children.”
Lillian stared at her. “This is all your fault,” she said slowly.
It hadn’t gone well at the club.
“The children are fine,” Hannah said, and hurried away from her, down the hall toward the garage. She felt Lillian watching her.
Chapter Forty-six
It was eight in the morning, the last day of school before Christmas break, and Lillian had locked herself in her bedroom. Once again, Sergey had not come home. Over the last few weeks, he’d been noticeable absent on many mornings. Hannah knocked on her bedroom door. “Go away,” Lillian barked. “I’m sick.” Hannah went to the kitchen to break the news to Maggie, who’d have to miss school.
Maggie waved her cereal spoon in the air. “It’s the last day of school before Christmas. There’s a party.” Her voice was winding up into a panic. “We have a gift exchange. It’s the last time I’ll see Roberta, until, like, next year! They never let me do playdates during the holidays.”
“Go tell your mother,” Hannah said, not wanting to get involved again. “She says she’s sick, but I’m sure she forgot about the party.”
Maggie went upstairs.
Their voices got louder. Hannah heard Maggie yell, “I want Papa!” in English.
Lillian answered, “He’s gone to Russia. You might never see him again.”
Hannah listened with horror. Lillian had no idea what it was to be a child and hear she’d never see her father again, her father who loved her more than anything in the world. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be.
“You’re lying!” Maggie yelled. “He wouldn’t leave me here with you.”
Lillian screeched, “Hannah!”
Hannah hurried out of the kitchen to the bottom of the stairs. “Yes?”
Lillian stood at the top of the stairs, her eyes red from crying. She pointed a finger at Hannah and jabbed the air. “I told you to keep them out of my room.”
Maggie squeezed past her mother and rushed down the stairs toward Hannah, her face panicky, her hazel eyes unfocused. Hannah caught her at the bottom and Maggie sobbed into her shoulder. Hannah looked up the stairs and saw a flash of regret in Lillian’s eyes.
“It’s her last day of school,” Hannah explained softly. “They have a party.”
Lillian’s eyes hardened. “You take her. Go ahead. Walk five miles there and back.” Lillian slammed the door. Even at the bottom of the stairs, they could hear the click of the lock.
Maggie burst into tears.
“Shh. Shh. Shh.” Hannah stroked her hair, trying to soothe her. Why couldn’t Lillian just drive her? Nobody would see what she looked like. She could put on a hat and glasses and stay in the car.
“I’m going to be the only one not there!” Maggie cried.
&nb
sp; “I’m sorry,” Hannah said, not knowing what else to say.
Maggie looked up, sniffling, and then whispered, “You could take me.”
“Oh no,” Hannah said, shaking her head.
“She said you could.”
Lillian had said it. No matter what, she couldn’t deny it.
“Do you know how to get there?” Hannah asked.
“I think so,” Maggie said in English, then nodded. “You go down Santa Monica Boulevard. My friend Sophie, she gets a scholarship ’cause she’s, like, really smart, and she takes the bus.” Maggie grabbed a notice from the refrigerator. “Here’s the address. You could ask the bus driver.”
“How will you get home?” Hannah asked.
“Roberta’s mom can take me.”
Hannah thought for a moment. Maybe on the way home, after she dropped off Maggie, she could buy a phone card and call Babulya. No. It was crazy that she was considering this. She’d be in a lot of trouble.
“Please?” Maggie said.
Hannah remembered her last bus trip. It had been so much fun. As long as everyone was okay, Lillian would cool off about it. Eventually.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll go.”
“Yes!” Maggie said in English. She threw her arms around Hannah’s neck and kissed her cheek. “Thank you. You’re the best!”
Just for that, it was worth it, Hannah thought. She turned on the television in Michael’s room and closed the door, so Lillian would think they were in there. That should buy them some time. Then she wrote a note for Lillian and left it in the middle of the kitchen table. But she hoped Lillian wouldn’t get up to read it. If she was lucky, Lillian would just stay in bed all day.
She took some money from Lillian’s purse—after all, it was for her children—then grabbed two truffles from above the refrigerator and pulled Michael close. “We’re going to play a game,” she whispered. “It’s the quiet game. We’re going to tiptoe out of the house, sit in the stroller, and go down the sidewalk without talking. Whoever stays quiet the longest gets a candy.” She showed him the chocolate.
“I want a candy!” he yelled.
“Shh,” Hannah said. “First, let’s put on your shoes and then we’ll go outside.”
She put on his shoes and grabbed the extra stroller from the garage. Maggie handed her a white sun hat, which belonged to Lillian. “For your hair,” she whispered. Maggie was embarrassed about her hair. Well, she could hardly blame her. She put on the hat and opened the front door. Miraculously, Michael didn’t talk and neither did Maggie.
At the end of the path that crossed their lawn, Maggie stopped. “I forgot my present.”
It was on the floor in the foyer, inside the house. “Do you need it?”
“Yes!”
Hannah handed Michael a chocolate truffle, ran back into the house, and grabbed the present from the floor. Automatically, she looked for a mirror so that she could turn around in front of it three times to take away the bad luck of returning for a forgotten item. But there was no mirror by the front door. Forget it, she thought. It’s just a silly Moldovan superstition.
An hour later, they were lost.
They were walking down the greenbelt on Santa Monica Boulevard, past the mansions of Beverly Hills, and they couldn’t find the school. Hannah had brought a notice from the school with the address on it and the bus driver had told her where they needed to get off, but they couldn’t find the street.
“I’m so late, I’ll have to get a note,” Maggie said, speaking Russian as she always did when she was upset. “My teacher will be angry and they probably started the party already and someone else will get my Secret Santa gift and I’ll have to keep Paavo’s stupid doll.” This was the thing she’d wrapped for the secret gift exchange.
“Out!” Michael said, kicking with his feet. He hated the stroller, but Hannah figured if she took him out, they’d be standing on this spot all day. She pushed the stroller forward.
A black cat walked in front of them. More bad luck.
Hannah was filled with a terrible feeling of dread. It sat on her bones like fungus. She turned to Maggie. “We have to go back home.”
“I’m not going home!” Maggie whined in tearful Russian and then muttered in English, “Idiot.” As if she didn’t understand. Hannah bit her lip, surprised by how much it hurt to hear Maggie say this. It was different when it was Lillian.
She watched Maggie march ahead. “Maggie,” she said in English, “I am not idiot. We do not find school.”
They saw a Latino man pushing an ice cream cart, jingling the bells down the street. “Stop,” Maggie yelled, running after him. The man turned and opened his cart. She turned to Hannah. “Can we?”
Hannah nodded. The children chose their colors of flavored ice on a stick, Hannah paid with money she’d found in the laundry, and then, in Russian, Hannah told Maggie to ask him where the school was. Maggie asked in her perfect English.
He gave them a smile filled with holes from missing teeth. He reminded her of people back home. “No English.”
Hannah couldn’t help but laugh. Just her luck. She showed him the address on the newsletter from Maggie’s school and he pointed down the street. “Derecha,” he said, and then pointed to the right. It was worth a try.
They turned right, walked for five minutes, and finally, they found the street that was on the paper. “Which way?” Hannah asked.
“That way,” Maggie said, pointing to the left.
They kept walking. After a few minutes, a beautiful park came into view with a large wooden play structure that had four metal slides, gymnastic bars, climbing ropes, and a playhouse. Hannah had never seen anything like it.
“Playground!” Michael yelled.
“There it is!” Maggie broke into a run and sprinted ahead, down the sidewalk, toward the park. What had she seen? The park? The school? Maggie was eight years old, and at that age, Hannah had already started taking buses by herself around Chişinău, but Hannah knew it was dangerous to let any child out of your sight in America.
“Maggie, wait!” Hannah ordered, but Maggie kept running.
Halfway up the block, Maggie ducked behind some parked cars, and Hannah could no longer see her. She imagined her getting hit by a car or, even worse, disappearing somehow. She remembered Rena’s sick words that she’d sell Maggie.
Hannah started sprinting down the sidewalk with the stroller. “Maggie!”
Michael dropped his blue ice on a stick and began to wail. Hannah stopped, picked it up, threw it on the stroller’s tray, and ran with the stroller, bumping it over the gravel walkway.
“My ice,” Michael cried. “Dirty!”
“I’ll clean it! Don’t touch it,” she said, then yelled again, “Maggie! Come back!”
But Maggie didn’t reappear.
The wheels of the stroller got stuck in a crack between two concrete slabs that were pushed up by the roots of a gigantic tree. Hannah lifted up the stroller and continued running down the sidewalk after Maggie.
She reached the parked cars where Maggie had disappeared and pushed the stroller into a parking lot in front of a large white building with pillars and double doors in the front. It looked like it could be a school, but it could also be another oversize mansion.
Maggie was standing by a side door, talking to a tall man, probably her teacher. He looked up at Hannah, stepped back into the school, and yelled something. Maggie looked over her shoulder, frightened.
“Maggie? Are you okay?” Hannah called in Russian.
A short black police officer marched out of the building. He looked at Hannah. Her heart jumped in her chest. She was sure she was going to jail.
The police officer pointed at Michael and asked Maggie something. Michael had a dirty blue chin speckled with grass from the flavored ice, wh
ich he was still licking. She didn’t want to take it away, though, since he’d finally stopped crying. She reached into the diaper bag to get some wipes to clean his hands and face before anyone thought she was neglecting him.
“Maggie!” It was Lillian. Oh my God. She jerked up and dropped the wipes on the ground.
Lillian ran out of the school and swept Maggie up in her arms. She kissed the top of her head a bunch of times before putting her down. Hannah had never seen her give Maggie this much affection, ever.
“I was so worried, my love,” Lillian exclaimed in Russian.
Maggie looked up at her mother, stunned. “We got lost,” she said in a small voice.
“Everything’s okay, then?” the teacher asked, patting Maggie on the back.
“I am sorry,” stammered Lillian. “My niece, she does not tell to me anything. I deal with her.” She ran her hand over her messy hair, trying to smooth it down.
“Don’t worry about it,” the teacher said. “Come on, Maggie.”
Maggie went into the school with the teacher, glancing back at Hannah with a worried expression. The officer lifted his finger at Lillian and asked her to wait, saying, “I’ll be right back.” He followed the teacher and Maggie into the school.
Lillian marched toward Hannah, her face a mask of fury.
“I left a note,” Hannah said, stepping back.
“How dare you take my children anywhere without my permission!” Lillian raised her hand and slapped Hannah hard across the face. The skin on skin made a lightning-through-the-sky sound. Hannah lost her balance and fell to the ground. She blinked. For a moment she couldn’t see. Her face burned as though someone had just thrown a pot of hot water on it.
The police officer ran out of the school. “Ma’am, ma’am,” he said. “You can’t do that.”
Lillian reached out her hand and helped Hannah up. “It’s okay,” she said loudly in English, patting Hannah’s back.
Hannah stood up and looked at her in confusion.
“Don’t say anything to him,” Lillian hissed in Russian. “He’ll put you in jail.”