The state line had given her twenty minutes of distracting activity, backing up, photos, rechecking of Max’s seat belt, all wonderful. But now there was no escaping the landscape. The mountains had gone, correcting her expectation that there was no flat land in the West. She understood why the sky seemed so sovereign—nothing cleaved it. For some reason, peaks had been less frightening to her than all this flat nothing. First shock, and then pancaked by nothingness: It was not unlike adoptive mothering, the American West. The sun burned the prairie with summertime force; it was impossible to imagine the weather of which Marion had warned, though she enjoyed thinking of its threat because it was a reminder of him. All at once, she hated Montana, flat, featureless, and demonic, and wished instead for South Dakota, which felt familiar and settled, and also had Marion in it. If the rest of Montana was like this, she would understand very well why Laurel and Tim would have wanted to save their son from it. She tried, and failed, to keep her mind off Marion. She chewed on the cud of his name. She imagined living with him in one of the homes they passed. What did they do in those homes that remained standing and pretty, what correct choices had they made? And what had those who’d lived in the other homes done wrong?
She flicked on the radio, but there was only static. She turned the dial with infinitesimal slowness, but still nothing. She was dizzy. She turned to Alex and asked him to pull over so she could pee.
“Where?” he said.
She raised her hands in exasperation—up and down this prairie all of China could pee. “There.” She pointed to an unpaved turnoff, the roadway raised above the lip of a field. Beneath the slope, she could be private. Alex slowed down. “Not too far,” she admonished him as they turned off the main road. The side road was badly rutted; a rainstorm would have sunk anything but a tractor with balloon tires. A sign from the Montana Department of Agriculture said it was a winter wheat field, experimental because a seed specimen from North Dakota had been grafted with one from Montana. Maya had paid for the experiment with her taxes. Alex unlocked the doors.
Maya scrambled down the slight incline like an animal without adequate prehensility. She had not been brought up by this landscape and had not evolved the necessary adaptations. She did not have to pee. Assured she was out of view, she lay down on the itchy young wheat and closed her eyes, trying to steady herself. With a welling of guilt, Maya wished that no Alex and Max awaited her on the brow of the hill. She would hold out her thumb—didn’t people do that here—and get a ride back to the Badlands. Then she remembered that Marion would be long gone. Well, it didn’t have to be so in her mind. She saw why her mother liked to tell stories.
For steadiness, she spread her arms. A little better. She closed her eyes and counted, one, two, three, three, three, and carefully opened them. All was still rolling. She shut them again. She ran her arms up and down through the wheat, nausea in her stomach. Flecks of wheat stubbled her arms, making her itch. From far away, Marion asked her to get calm. Again, she opened her eyes. This time, there was a little more steadiness. Close, open, close, open, until her heart was beating less badly.
She made quite a sight rising above the slope, winter wheat clinging to her hair, sweater, and cheeks. Alex and Max, a window per man, eyed her with worried antipathy.
They had been playing tic-tac-toe. Alex was careful to lose.
“Are you all right, Mama?” Max said cautiously.
From the front seat, she made herself pull his ear. “Of course, Mama’s all right,” she said. She wanted them gone. But there was nowhere here to go away from each other. Here, where there was more space to disappear than anywhere she had known—a mother with a felonious heart could ask for no better place than the prairie of eastern Montana—you huddled together, your protections against the surroundings already so meager.
“I’d like to drive,” Maya said.
Alex went from impatience flecked with concern to his look of straining to comprehend. He expected her to read in it all the skepticism he wished to communicate without having to state it explicitly in front of their son. But she would not grant him that favor of intimates. Alex clucked his tongue. “You don’t know how to drive on the highway,” he pointed out.
“Precisely,” she said with false reasonableness. “If I did, you wouldn’t have had to come and chauffeur your wife up and down the moon.”
“Maya,” he said chidingly. Not with Max in the car, the rest of him said.
“Where would I learn if not here?” Maya said, and pointed to the road, straight and empty, though the lanes seemed narrower than back home.
“Now, you want to learn?” Alex said.
“Now,” Maya said.
“What if we see a policeman?” he dug into her. “We’re on a short leash and you don’t have a license.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Alex checked the rearview window. “Maxie,” he said, turning around. “You’re going to be all right back there?”
“I want to drive, too,” Max said, blinking twice.
“I will drive for a little bit, and then you will go in my lap,” Maya said before her husband could answer. “And we’ll learn together. How does that sound?”
Before Max could reply, Maya opened her door, commencing the car’s dinging. As Alex and Maya passed each other at the hood, he looked at her but she did not look at him.
Montana Rte. 212 was actually an inferior place to learn driving—the straight line of the road required negotiation of no four-way intersections, parking restrictions, K-turns, or merging. (Alex had insisted on taking the interstate from the Badlands, which would have spat them out near Billings, only two hours from Adelaide—he imagined an evening visit with Laurel and Tim, and an early start back the following morning; though this was more driving than he wished to do in a year, he would have been happy to strain himself if the strain was aimed eastward—but Maya had asked for the local road.) Montana 212 required little outside Drive, with occasional sharp deployment of the brakes though they were going no more than forty. Alex harassed Maya from the passenger seat, his feet tapping his mat as if he were the one at the wheel. He leaned forward as if riding out stomach pain. He couldn’t understand why a job had to be performed poorly when there was someone around to perform it the right way. Maya relished his discomfort.
“Uh-oh,” she said.
“Uh-oh,” Max copied from the backseat.
There was a battered sedan pushing up from behind. The way to find other cars was to go forty on the highway and they would find you. The sedan, a sickly green Taurus, gained on them quickly.
“Alex, what do I do?” Maya said.
“It’s okay,” Alex said. “It’s okay.”
“Uh-oh!” Max shouted.
“Should I stop? Should I slow down? Does he want to pass?”
“Maya, how can I know?” Alex said. “Just stay steady. Don’t slow down. Don’t do anything. If you’re too slow for him, he’ll do what he has to.”
“And what is that?” she asked, but Alex was silent. He was full of recommendations when no emergency presented itself, but now he sat wordlessly.
She grasped the wheel with two hands as the Taurus loomed.
“Uh-oh!” Max shouted. There was a note of madness in his voice.
“Max!” his father howled.
“It’s getting into the oncoming lane!” Maya shouted.
“He’s going around you,” Alex said.
“What do I do?”
“Don’t do anything,” Alex said. “Do not do anything, Maya. Let him do it.”
The Taurus blew by on the left with such force that Maya shrieked and yanked the steering wheel hard to the right. The Escape demonstrated itself to be unexpectedly lithe and followed her command too obediently. However, Maya managed to turn the wheel again, righting them before the car reached the edge of the road. In the second before she managed the correction, she heard Alex shouting her name with something like hatred. He was not lunging toward her, or the wheel, or t
heir son; he was shouting her name with hatred at the top of his voice.
Alex did not wait for the shock to subside before he yelled for her to pull over, pull over, pull over. They were hardly stopped before he flung open the passenger door. As they crossed at the hood, now she sought him out but he ignored her chastised, relieved look. There was such enmity in Alex’s eyes that he was too embarrassed to look at his wife. Maya felt the dour satisfaction of the more generous side. Then she wondered if she had asked to drive only because Alex did not know how to teach and she knew it would breach the anger that he was keeping in such magnificent, magnanimous check.
+
An hour outside Adelaide, the earth started climbing. First, there were hills, patchy and tentative, then, all of a sudden, mountains upon mountains. Maya eyed them with gratitude; she willed them to keep rising. Even Max stirred at their sight, leaning into his window. Emerald firs rose off the flanks in neat rows like heads in a choir, the cottonwoods among them so gold they looked like bullion bars. The Escape was soaked by a shower that arrived from nowhere and disappeared just as instantly. Max shrieked when the first heavy drops stunned the roof. They were pounded on for ten minutes, Alex clutching the wheel and straining to see. Then it was over and clear, an argument settled. The sky came back with a histrionic palette of yellows and pinks.
And then, with no warning, Adelaide was growing around them, the windshield suddenly full of tackle shops, muffler specialists, diners. The road had been so lulling that they had taken several lights before Maya remembered why they were here. Laurel and Tim could be eating in that diner. Max might lay eyes on his birth parents as a conscious being for the first time in his life. Maya had reassured Alex that they would visit the cowboys alone, and that if Laurel and Tim became demanding, they would be told Max had not come on the trip. But what if Laurel and Tim were not patiently awaiting the Rubins at 2207 New Missouri Trail South? What if they were living, breathing beings walking around town? Would they recognize their son? Would they stir recognition in Max?
“Town of bars, town of churches,” the laconic legend underneath the Welcome to Adelaide sign said; no other comment appeared, not even the date of settlement, save for the words “Adelaide, Australia 8830km (crow only),” sided by a kangaroo silhouette. Some inner flag raised by the symbolism of their arrival, Alex pulled over on the gravelly shoulder. Traffic had been picking up steadily; they were at the edge of a veritable metropolis. They felt the accomplishment of having made it to some other side.
Maya put her hand on Alex’s forearm. “Let’s go to the hotel first. Please.”
Alex looked ahead, both hands on the wheel. He had been hoping to go directly to Laurel and Tim’s, but they couldn’t very well show up with Max. Setting off his blinker, he pulled back out on the road.
A series of mountain ridges loomed behind the town, each paler than the previous, like the paint lightening with each swipe of a brush. At every intersection, an unobstructed view ran to the foothills, Maya craning to get the particulars—it looked like they simply began, with as little ceremony as the town itself, at the edge of the last backyard—before Alex sped on and another brick building briefly covered the view. The kangaroo stared at them from the galvanized roof of a gas station, the medical clinic, and even the park in front of city hall, as if the other Adelaide had equal claim to the place.
There was only one lodging in Adelaide, the Dundee, a four-story brick box with mullioned windows. Trying to get inside with their bags, Maya, Alex, and Max were halted by the exit of a procession of elderly tourists. These were hauling commemorative take from the gift shop: a silver-plated replica of a revolver; a poster with close-ups of bullet holes; a phlegmatic-looking piebald brown cow that came alive with pinging bullets when you violated its udders. The caravan crossed traffic in a humming, neat single file to a massive coach slumped on the other side of the road.
“Germans,” the woman at check-in said. Her nameplate said: “Wilma Gund, Boss.” “They love this stuff.” She pointed at the wall behind her. Obediently, Maya and Alex studied the massive brass plaque hanging there. An old film director, his name unknown to Maya, had stayed in the penthouse. He had shot a dozen holes in the copper-plate ceiling before relocating his muse and finishing a screenplay in one booze-powered night. Visitors were invited to come view the bullet holes, which remained unmended; for a premium, they could stay in the suite itself on the understanding that in the afternoon it would have to be surrendered to walk-throughs. In a wall of photographs next to the plaque, Wilma Gund embraced one or another artistic personage, all unknown to Maya. In fact, it had become something of a pilgrimage spot for blocked writers, poets, playwrights, and screenwriters.
Alex nodded at the burgundy stairing, each carpeted step popped to reveal honeycombed netting, and asked if the entire hotel was being kept in its ancient condition in tribute to the director’s experience.
“You don’t like marble staircases?” Wilma Gund said icily. “We did add the Wi-Fi for your convenience.”
There being no elevator, Alex heaved their suitcases up the stairs with grim déjà vu: Europeans also liked elevatorless buildings with narrow, vertiginous stairs, and it was up steps just like these that Eugene had hauled the family’s five suitcases in Vienna, the first place the Rubins had reached after leaving the Soviet Union, as little Alex got tangled in his legs trying to help.
This was why the Germans flocked here—they were drawn by amenities that had been contrived specifically in the name of inconvenience. Alex loved America, or what of it he knew, though, being satisfied with what he knew, he had no great need to search out more: the obscenely large coffees, the oversized couches, the one million little appurtenances that came with the blender and anticipated every blading and liquefying and pureeing maneuver he might desire to take up. Unlike most Russian husbands—and unlike most husbands, period, though this was less noted than it should be, he felt—Alex loved going to department stores with Maya; while she bought clothes or what the house needed, he held court with the salespeople in the housewares and home-appliance departments. Only the most hardworking country in the world could come up with conveniences like the ones offered by the shiny objects on the shelves. No country worked harder for you, and if it was motivated to do so by the prospect of claiming your dollars, so be it. This is something Maya did not understand about Alex. Did she think him cheap? He wasn’t cheap. He paid, paid happily—but only for the things that deserved it. Maya paid indiscriminately. Maya paid out of feeling.
In case Maya had been wondering whether Max preferred campsites to hotel rooms, her son’s romp across the beds of Room 31 answered her. He leaped around and shouted. Flying from one bed to another, he delivered a kick into Alex’s spine. Alex clutched his back in agony.
“Max?” Maya said. “You’re dusty from the road. I want you to go to the bathroom and wash up.” Max climbed off the bed, embraced his father, and bounded off.
Alex watched the bathroom door close. Rapidly healed, he let go of his back.
“Can’t we just get on with it?” he said. “We’re here to find the two of them—so let’s find them.”
“Why didn’t you speak up, Alex?” she said. She battered the hair at her temples. “When I asked you to drive to the hotel. Order me around, Alex. But order me by speaking, not by not speaking. You are like a general who doesn’t fight, only waits for conditions to kill the other soldiers one by one.”
“I am trying to respect you,” he said.
“Alex,” she clasped her hands in front of her face. “Please. Please save me from your respect. Please stop respecting me.”
He swung his hands at the ceiling and looked away.
She flopped down on the bed, kicked off her flats, and massaged her toes. “It’s my birthday tomorrow,” she said. “You want to hunt them down tonight, get some answer as if it’s a folder they forgot to give us, and spend my birthday racing across America so I can have the pleasure of cooking a meal for everyone.”
“Birthdays are meant to be spent at home,” he said.
“This is his home,” she said.
Alex stood, grasping his back once again. “In case you haven’t noticed, he’s been nothing but frightened for the past forty-eight hours. He wants to go home. Which is in New Jersey.”
“He seems better now,” she said feebly.
“Better than what? Better than frightened and miserable?”
“He hasn’t done anything dangerous while we’ve been out here.”
“We’ve been out here for two days.”
“So,” she said. “Let’s give him some time. We can’t tell anything yet. We’ll go home and he’ll go right back to what he was doing before.”
“Maya!” he shouted at the ceiling—the floor of the film suite. To Alex, it was an especially offensive version of a nightmare: to pay extra for a hotel room so as to have the pleasure of a hundred Germans trooping through in the afternoon. “How will we know something’s changed?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But we’ll know. We will get some kind of signal. We’ll know.”
“He wants to go home, there’s your signal,” Alex said. “For anyone actually paying attention to him, it’s quite obvious. For anyone actually paying attention to him instead of herself.”
She slapped him. Alex smiled in astonishment. “You forgot to call me a whore,” she said. She swept their suitcase from the ottoman next to the bed, imagining a dramatic spill of its contents out onto the floor, but it only thudded on the carpet. She stalked toward the door.
“Where are you going?” he demanded.
“To fix it, Alex,” she said. “As always, I am going to fix it.”
+
Maya returned thirty minutes later. Alex was seated where she had left him. Max had emerged from the bathroom and was unpacking the clothes that Maya had punted to the floor. Had he heard their argument? Alex’s face broadcast so many accusations at Maya that it was impossible to discern whether this was one of them.
She knelt in front of her son. “Max, darling—are you hungry? If you could have anything, what would it be?” As soon as she uttered the words, she paled because she thought Max would say: “I want to go home.” But Max, who seemed grateful to come to a standstill, cocked his head in a funny way and said, “Anything?”
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