The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Thank you so much for telling us. They can fix that at a garage, right? I mean, we’re from out of state as you can see, we’re traveling, so we’ll need to get it fixed right away. In the morning.”

  She chewed her gum and looked past me into the car. We looked remarkably unsuspicious, for the number of laws we had broken. “I’m gonna write you a warning,” she said. “Welcome to Pennsylvania.”

  “We’re visiting the Liberty Bell!” Ian shouted. But she’d already gone back to her car to fill out the form.

  I was just breathing my relief when I realized there was now a computerized record of our being in Pennsylvania on this date. I wondered if they listed in their report the number and ages of occupants in the car, the way they listed the car’s make and color. I was glad again that we hadn’t taken my father’s Mercedes. Who knows what would have come up on the police scanner then.

  The cop handed me the warning, and we drove off. The sky had turned dark as we sat there.

  “She didn’t even yell at you,” Ian said. “My mom gives much better warnings than that.” It was the first time he’d directly mentioned his parents since we left.

  “It wasn’t that kind of warning,” I said, although it might have felt good to be yelled at right then.

  24

  The Labaznikov Special

  It was after seven when we got to the suburb where Leo and Marta Labaznikov lived.

  “Labaznikov,” Ian chanted from the backseat. “La-baz-ni-kov, La-baz-ni-kov. One Labaznikov, please.”

  The town was depressing, a collection of small mid-twentieth-century houses built on about five different floor plans, as if you wouldn’t notice they were all basically the same if they alternated which side the chimney was on.

  “Yes, I’d like the Labaznikov special with extra mustard, sir. I shot him in the head with a Labaznikov.”

  I found the house and pulled in behind the red and black BMWs, shiny fraternal twins that looked rather out of place in the little driveway. I knew the Labaznikovs from various parties I was stuffed into dresses for as a child, where I had run around under the tables with fifteen other children, all of whom spoke fluent Russian to each other. I knew about ten words, most of which had to do with food. My only full sentence was “Ya ne govoryu po russki”: “I do not speak Russian.”

  When I reached back for the box, I realized Ian was undoing his seat belt. “You stay here,” I said. “It’ll be about thirty seconds.”

  “I have to pee!” He opened his door. “And I’ve always wanted to meet a real live Labaznikov!” And because I was operating with half a brain, I got my lies confused. Or rather I forgot my first lie, to my parents, that I was only watching Ian in Chicago, and was driving out east by myself to visit college friends. I remembered it with my finger halfway to the doorbell, and started to tell Ian that if he waited in the car, I’d pull over at the next bathroom.

  But there was Marta Labaznikov, flinging the door open and performing the backward-leaning, open-armed welcome gesture commonly associated with movie versions of old Italian women. My father’s Russian friends became more affectedly European the longer they stayed in the U.S.

  “Lucy, you used to be so little!” she cried. If I were overweight, I’d have been offended, but she was simply remarking on the miracle of my no longer being seven years old. “And this is the poor motherless boy!” She swooped Ian into what must have been a suffocating hug. Marta was not a small woman. I wondered if my father had simply told her the story of Ian and she was inferring that he was the same child, or if he had known or guessed that Ian would still be with me and told her to expect two of us. In either case, I could see we weren’t getting out of there anytime soon, which might have been fine but for the thick, chemical smell in the air, like cat litter but stronger. My throat was suddenly tight.

  Leo appeared now behind his wife, with the same Italian-woman move. I was surprised how shriveled he’d become, how his head was covered with pale brown spots. I wanted to exclaim, like a Russian grandmother, “Look how old you’ve grown!”

  Leo moved stiffly forward in the hall, pointing a swollen-knuckled finger at Ian, who had finally been released from Marta’s bosom. “I have a question for you,” he said. Ian looked startled and, for the first time since we’d run away, truly scared. “What is in common,” Leo asked, “between furniture and a sentence?”

  “I remember that one!” I said, more to calm Ian down than anything. Riddles were Leo’s primary way of relating to children. He used to come up to me at my father’s birthday parties and say, “Who is bigger? Mrs. Bigger or Mrs. Bigger’s baby?” and I’d say, “The baby is just a little bigger!” He always seemed startled that I could answer. Now Ian looked up at me with a mixture of relief that Leo wasn’t interrogating him and confusion about what I could possibly mean.

  “They both have periods,” I said.

  Ian laughed. “Oh, I get it! Like period furniture!” He might have been the first child in history to understand that joke.

  I hugged Leo gingerly.

  Once our coats were off, I handed Leo the Hush Puppies box, and instead of opening it he stared at the dog on the lid. “Who wants to look at a dog that’s so sad?” he said. He patted the lid with his palm and put it on the living room coffee table.

  “Okay!” said Marta. “So now we eat! Leo, you give the tour, and I get the table ready.” I found myself not protesting.

  Leo walked us into the dining room, his left knee bending a tiny, deliberate bit with each step, like it was made of rusted metal. “This is Anya,” he said. He stopped at the buffet table of photos in silver frames and held up a picture of a teenager with ’80s hair and a turquoise shirt. “You remember this beauty?” I did. She was my age and I recalled my parents saying she’d gotten into drugs and run away. “Two babies now! One is five, one is two. Two boys! No husband!” Ian was squinting at a photo on the edge of the buffet. “And that is little Dora!” Leo said. Ian picked up the picture. It was a studio portrait of a ferret, its face filling up most of the frame, a mottled blue backdrop. I looked at the wall, instead, to keep from laughing.

  “Is she yours?” Ian held it close to his own face.

  “She died in 1998. Now this one, she still is with us. This is Clara.” He pointed at another picture, this one a snapshot of Marta holding a ferret against her cheek. “And this is Levi, and this is Valentina.” I saw now that almost half the photos on the buffet were of ferrets, or family portraits in which a ferret was just a fuzzy ball on Leo’s lap. So that was the smell. Ferret and associated byproducts.

  “Anya loved ferrets when she was thirteen, and so since then we have always had ferrets. Anya was very sad when she was thirteen, and she wrote beautiful poems. I can show you later. So we had to make her happy, and we ended up with ferrets.”

  “Teenagers are very dangerous,” Ian said.

  Leo clapped him on the back. “I like this one!” he shouted. Leo’s English was significantly smoother than my father’s, although they’d come to America around the same time, from the same town. Leo’s older sister had been my father’s babysitter and first (and unrequited) love.

  After we toured the ground floor, Leo took Ian into the basement to meet the ferrets. I bowed out by offering to help Marta in the kitchen. She was making spaghetti with meatballs and a loaf of garlic bread. I expected her next to tell me I was too thin and call me cara.

  “Your father says the boy lost his mother,” she said. She was washing lettuce in the sink and shouting above the water.

  “No, not quite. She made a suicide attempt, but she’s okay.”

  Marta shook her head. “Oh, they always succeed sooner or later. How hard can it be? This is a crazy country, that people want to kill themselves. Other countries, people struggle to stay alive every day, they run between the bullets, they eat five little pieces of rice, and here the people say, Oh, stay alive in this beautiful country with lots to eat? No thank you, not for me.”
/>   I was sure there were plenty of suicides back in the country that invented Russian roulette, but now was not the time to say so.

  “This is so sad,” she said, “to be an orphan in America, but surely he will get adopted. People always want to adopt a white child.”

  I stirred the spaghetti, dumbfounded. I finally managed to explain that I was driving Ian to Vermont to stay with his grandmother. “It was a change of plans,” I said. “So my parents didn’t know about it. It’s a good development. She’s a very stable woman, very capable.”

  Ian came up a minute later, proudly showing me the three red marks on his thumb where Valentina had bitten him.

  “Wash that out,” I said. “With soap.” I didn’t want to think what Ian would be like rabid.

  Soon we were sitting in the dining room, the smell of garlic mercifully covering the smell of ferret. We all fell silent when Leo raised his hands solemnly over the food. He closed his eyes. “As we say in the Old World,” he intoned, in a voice like a priest, “Don’t choke.”

  Ian laughed and practically dove across the table at the garlic bread. Up till then, he’d made a point of bowing his head before meals, and it seemed each prayer had gotten longer. I doubted he was really praying, the way he scrunched his face solemnly and kept flicking his eyes open to see if I was watching. But tonight he seemed to accept Leo’s joke as blessing enough.

  He impressed the Labaznikovs with his litany of world capitals, and he even knew all those new ones—Tashkent, Dushanbe, Zagreb. Marta clapped and gave him more salad.

  After cookies, Marta said, “I’ll show you your rooms.” I hadn’t wanted to stay, but it was a night without a hotel bill. She put Ian in a small guest room and me in Anya’s old room, preserved exactly as Anya must have left it at age seventeen. Sketches of hands and feet were still thumbtacked to the walls, and romance novels and schoolbooks shared the shelves with a snow globe, an African mask, and a bottle with layers of colored sand. I wondered if she’d been back in the room since she ran away from it.

  I snooped around, pawing through the clothes that still hung in the closet, the high school papers stuffed in a desk drawer: “Salinger’s Use of Hyperbole in The Catcher in the Rye.” I remembered playing Monopoly with Anya once in someone’s basement, while the adults drank and had dinner upstairs. She had started to cry when I took her last five-hundred-dollar bill, and then claimed it was allergies. “They must have had a cat once in this house,” she said.

  It occurred to me then that no one would miss anything from this room. I went through the closet, picking out the few things that weren’t baggy and black. I found a few T-shirts, three decent sweaters, and a pair of ripped jeans. Her sock drawer had only single, unmatched socks, but I grabbed a few anyway. I got books off the shelf for Ian—Johnny Tremain and a biography of Henry VIII. There was Anne Boleyn’s smiling face, lined up with the other wives at the bottom of the cover, her head about to roll. Ian would love it. I put these all in the shopping bag I was using as my suitcase, along with a bottle opener, a notebook, a washcloth, a flashlight, a Tupperware container, a bottle of stale perfume to cover the smell of fries in the car, and ten cassette mix tapes that at least would probably not contain the Australian national anthem. I opened the bee-shaped piggy bank on her nightstand and was surprised to find a handful of coins—what runaway leaves money behind?—until I realized they were Canadian. I could picture her sitting on her bed the night before she ran away, carefully sorting out the American coins and calculating how far she could get on the bus. I put the coins in my pocket. At least if I had to escape to Canada, I’d be able to pay the highway tolls.

  I changed into a white summer nightgown from the dresser and put a gray sweatshirt over it. They both smelled musty, but it was better than sleeping in my clothes again. I lay on the bed and called Tim. Every day that went by, more mail would be piling up in my box, until the mail lady would have to leave it on the lobby floor. It was only a matter of time before the local press descended on my neighbors to ask whether I was the quiet type who kept to myself. I held my breath while his phone rang, and half expected the police to answer.

  “¡Hola!” Tim shouted. “¿Quién es?” There was loud music behind him.

  “It’s Lucy,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Lucy!” I was trying not to yell.

  “Lucy!” cried Tim. “I’m so sorry, honey. We’ll turn it down.”

  “What?”

  “I’m so sorry. It’s Lenny’s birthday! You can join us if you want!”

  “Oh—no. No, I’m under the weather.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. We’ll tune down so you can sleep. Anything you need?”

  “No, no thanks. No. I’m fine.”

  “Okay, ciao, bella!” For a moment I wondered—I truly did—if the real Lucy Hull was still back in Hannibal, lying in her own bed reading Wodehouse or Highsmith or Austen, listening to Tim’s Spanish-Italian fiesta and trying to sleep. And the real Ian Drake was cross-legged on his bedroom floor, turning a Pastor Bob worksheet into an origami aardvark.

  And all the while the two of us out here, floating eastward across the country, we were phantoms, acting out what might have been, or what should have been. Or we were a nightmare in the fevered brain of the real Lucy Hull.

  But no, it was the other way around. The Lucy in Hannibal was the phantom. She always had been.

  In the sad, stale room there was

  a theme paper

  and a bottle of sand

  and a charcoal sketch of a man’s hand

  and there were three Russian dolls on a shelf on the wall

  and an African mask

  and a dented flask

  and a dusty window pane and Johnny Tremain

  and the sound from outside of late freezing rain.

  Goodnight Anya’s bed.

  Goodnight Anne Boleyn’s head.

  Goodnight neurotic ten-year-old boy.

  Goodnight piggy bank of foreign currency.

  Goodnight cigarettes and goodnight shoebox.

  Goodnight drawer full of unmatched socks.

  Goodnight ferrets

  Goodnight lights

  Goodnight sirens in the night . . .

  25

  Runaway Nation

  I tried for three hours to sleep, but the room was cold and I hadn’t eaten enough and I kept thinking about the shoebox. Marta had put a night-light in the hall, and it saw me to the top of the stairs, where I stood and waited for my eyes to adjust.

  It occurred to me that I could leave right then, drive away and let Ian wake up with me gone. The Labaznikovs would get him home. But then they’d have to tell the police how they met him, and I’d have to live on the lam in Canada with my $2.35 in coins. And more to the point, if I hadn’t driven him home the first night, if I hadn’t left him at the museum in Cleveland, if I hadn’t run out on him at a gas station and called the police by this point, I wasn’t going to abandon him now, either.

  I walked carefully down the stairs, the ferret stench growing stronger with each step. The box was still on the coffee table. I was surprised Leo had left it here, this illicit treasure I’d so carefully stashed under my hotel bed, this fourth comrade on the yellow brick road through Ohio. My father’s packing tape still secured the lid. I realized then that I hadn’t even been there when my father sealed it up. Who knew what he’d slipped in at the last minute. I picked up the box and shook it gently. It was heavier than it should have been for the number of receipts he’d shown me, and something more solid than individual pieces of paper was sliding back and forth: a rubber-banded stack of bills, maybe, or a small box within the larger one. I couldn’t undo the tape without ripping the whole thing. I found a pencil in the kitchen and jammed a ragged hole in one of the bottom corners, small enough that Leo could convince himself he’d just missed it before. I put my finger inside and felt around. There was something solid. I remembered the flashlight upstairs and went back up for it.

  W
hen I got to Anya’s room, Ian was standing in the doorway. “I can’t breathe,” he said. His shoulders were up around his ears and I could hear his squeaky wheeze from where I stood. “I took my puffer, but it didn’t help much. Do you think I should take it extra?”

  “No, that’s a bad idea.”

  “But I . . . CAN’T . . . BREATHE!” Now he was breathing far too quickly. If I hadn’t been through this a hundred times myself as a child, I’d have thought he was dying. A light flicked on at the other end of the hall, and Leo came out rubbing his arm across his eyes. He wore a matching pajama set, white with blue stripes. He turned on the hall light, and Ian sank to the ground, crying and hugging his shoulders. Marta came out behind Leo in her bathrobe.

  The Labaznikovs swept Ian downstairs, Marta making clucking noises and Leo clapping him on the back and saying, “We’ll get you fixed up, good as new, all full of air!” I followed, glad I’d put the shoebox back in place.

  We sat in the kitchen while Marta brewed a pot of coffee. I thought at first it was for the adults, to keep us awake, until she poured Ian a big mug of it and thinned it out with sugar and milk. My father always wanted to give me coffee for my childhood asthma attacks, but my mother refused. “You want her to end up four feet tall?” she would say.

  Ian started blowing on the coffee and sipping it. “I have . . . my mom’s . . . Starbucks. . . . all the time,” he managed between breaths. She must have handed it off to him once she’d drunk her ten calories’ worth. But no, it wasn’t fair of me to think bad things about his mother now. I stomped on my own foot under the table.

  The Labaznikov kitchen was painted pale yellow, with little pots of herbs above the sink. The clock on the wall said 3:10. Ian finished his coffee, and his shoulders went down a little. “It’s stress,” Marta whispered. “Because of his poor mother.” She meant the fake, suicidal one, of course, not the real, anorexic, evangelical one. I nodded. She poured Ian another cup, poured three more cups for the adults, and put another pot on to brew.