by Debra Dean
Now she no longer has the strength to expend on unnecessary journeys through the museum. The rigors of work, the urgencies of the body, and the metric tick from meal to meal absorb what little energy she has left. She must rely entirely on her memory, and, cell by cell, she can feel those memories fading. Even when she is able to reconstruct a picture, it is nothing more than pigment on canvas, without any feeling or meaning. The Benois Madonna, the Madonna with Partridges, they are all just pictures, nothing more, a fable concocted to lull the masses into compliance. That she once prayed to paintings—not even to the paintings themselves, but to the places on the walls where they had hung—seems inconceivably ridiculous. She has stopped asking for miracles; in fact, she can scarcely imagine what there is left to desire.
She is cold. If she falls asleep, she will freeze.
She feels the pull of death. What a relief it would be to relax into nothingness. To follow the long line of souls—Aunt Nadezhda and Uncle Viktor, her parents, her beloved Dima—the throng that has already abandoned the city for other realms. She might simply go to sleep up here on the roof and be gone within the hour.
In the distance, she hears the drone of incoming planes. She no longer feels fear at their approach; the incessant air raids have blunted her fear and taken on the dull quality of other daily routines: standing in lines, eating, sleeping.
When the lead plane, a lighter Heinkel, releases a string of parachute flares, she watches the pink fireflies of light floating, drifting slowly down like a surreal fairy ballet. Shadows of the city leap and dance in their light. A corner of her mind recognizes that what she is seeing is strangely beautiful, but it is an abstract idea, a memory of beauty, and it does not touch her.
She is watching, a dispassionate observer, someone halfway gone already, when she feels something move inside her. She puts her hand on a spot just below her ribs and moves it slowly over her belly. Pressing down on one place, then another, she searches her abdomen as though for an injury. After a minute or two, there is a responding jolt under her palm. She startles and presses back and feels the lump swim away from her hand.
Someone is here with her, not Zeus, but an invisible presence nonetheless, a small life trying to kick its way into this world.
The search expands exponentially all day, mushrooming from a private concern into a full-scale public drama. An incident command post is set up at the high school, and as volunteers arrive in the cafeteria, they are divided into teams and assigned a leader and a swath of the island to search.
The family seems to be cordoned off from the gathering crowd by their misfortune. Though people cast sympathetic sidelong glances in their direction, the barrier is crossed only by officials. Mike Lundgren, the fireman assigned as the family’s liaison, comes over to the long cafeteria table where they are sitting, carrying a cardboard tray of coffees balanced on top of a large box of pastries.
“You folks want some coffee and a roll?” he offers.
Dmitri’s dull gaze is fixed on some interior distance, and he doesn’t answer, but Naureen thanks Mike. She fixes a cup of coffee for Dmitri, prying the paper off a creamer, shaking in a packet of sugar, and setting it in front of him. Then she picks out a muffin for him and a napkin and urges him to have a little something to eat. He stares at the coffee and muffin as though he doesn’t register what they are.
Mike looks over a clipboard. “I’ve just got a few more questions. Sir?” He waits for Dmitri to acknowledge him. “Just a few more questions. No heart condition, no diabetes or hypoglycemia, right? Medications. What medications does your wife take?”
Helen interrupts him. “We already went over all of this with the sheriff.”
“Yes, I’m sorry about this, but I need to make sure it’s all accurate for our report. Sir?”
Dmitri looks up, his eyes bleary and slow, and Mike repeats the question twice before Dmitri nods. He recites a list of drugs, unfamiliar to Helen, and then as Mike pauses over his pad, Dmitri repeats them more slowly.
While Mike is writing down the names, another fireman comes over and stands waiting.
“Excuse me just a moment.” The two men step a few feet away and confer in quiet voices.
Helen’s heart spasms. When Mike returns to his seat, she croaks, “What is it? Did they find her?”
“No, ma’am. He was just telling me they’ve finished setting up the first teams and they’re getting ready to move out.”
Dmitri rises and tries to extricate himself from between the bench and table. “I will go with them.”
“We’ve got plenty of volunteers, sir.”
“I will go look for her,” he repeats.
He looks at Dmitri skeptically. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. How about we put your son and daughter out there, and you stay here, where we can keep you apprised of the whole search?”
Dmitri isn’t mollified. He remains standing, waiting for Helen to slide out and release him. Instead, she puts an arm around him and coaxes him to sit down again.
“You heard Mike. They’re going to find her, and she’s going to be fine. But you’re not going to help her by wearing yourself out any more,” she says.
He is persuaded to stay at the command post only after Helen agrees to stay behind with him, and Andrei and Naureen promise to call periodically and check in.
All morning and into the afternoon, people continue to come and go, filling in log sheets or grabbing a bottle of water before they head back out, cell phones pressed to their ears.
At the edge of the fray, Mike Lundgren has unfolded a couple of canvas chairs for Helen and her father, but Dmitri seems determined to prove that he is fit enough to join the search. Periodically, he gets up and drifts around the cafeteria, offering to help volunteers who are unloading donations: cases of pop and bottled water, boxes of sandwiches and chips and trail mix, even sunscreen and bug spray. He gathers up every rumor or bit of news as it filters in and then reports back to Helen. His latest mission was to check out the arrival of a dozen or so military-looking types, conspicuously outfitted in bright orange caps and vests and shouldering fifty-pound packs, who strode into the courtyard outside the windows about a half hour ago. When he returns, he is escorted by Mike Lundgren.
“They are a professional search and rescue unit,” Dmitri tells Helen. “They came on the noon ferry.”
“I wonder, do you happen to have your dad’s room key?” Mike asks her.
Helen picks up her purse and starts rifling through it.
“The dogs need something with her smell on it,” Dmitri says, pointing out a pack of hounds milling excitedly near the door. “They give them something with her smell on it, and the dogs find her.”
Helen finds her own key but not her parents’. She can’t recall if she ever had it, or if she left their door unlocked. Her brain feels sodden.
“It doesn’t matter,” Mike says. “We can get one from the desk clerk. Mr. Buriakov, are you sure I can’t talk you into going back to your room and getting a little rest? You’re looking a little wobbly.”
Mike would probably like to get Dmitri out from underfoot, but it’s also true that, if possible, Dmitri looks even more disheveled than he did this morning. He’s still wearing his pajama top under a windbreaker, and his face is alarmingly ashen.
“I’m okay here,” Dmitri says, and sits down to make his point.
“But maybe your daughter would like to freshen up.” Mike looks directly at Helen as he speaks, appealing to her as a co-conspirator.
“Actually, that sounds like a good idea, Papa,” she says. Dmitri may be past caring, but she is suddenly uncomfortably aware of what she must look like—those victims you see on the evening news who have been rousted from their beds by disaster, a tornado or fire or flood. She runs her tongue self-consciously over her fuzzy teeth.
“I should stay here,” Dmitri says, “but Elena, you can go. She can help you choose something of Marina’s for the dogs.”
Mike, beaten at his gam
e, suppresses a smile. He thinks for a minute. “Well, how about this,” he counters. “There’s a couch in the school counselor’s office. Would you at least lie down there?”
Dmitri agrees, but only after extracting a promise that he will be informed if anything, anything at all, develops. Mike waves down a volunteer.
“Can you find someone to unlock Ginger Cantor’s office for Mr. Buriakov? He’d like to lie down for a while.”
He turns to Helen and offers his arm as though they are at a dance.
“Ma’am?”
“Please. Helen.”
“Helen.”
“You know, you don’t need to go with me,” she protests, foolishly flustered.
“Happy to,” he says, and he seems genuinely to mean it.
In the cab of Mike’s truck, Helen feels safely out of her father’s earshot for the first time today. She asks Mike about the dogs.
“Is it that serious? I mean, they just look so ominous.”
Mike nods but doesn’t speak right away. “Usually,” he begins, “we get a call like this, and the missing person turns up pretty quick, no harm done.” He studies the road as though he may find the rest of his words on the pavement. She has noticed that he seems to weigh everything he says, and she wonders if this is his typical demeanor or a caution specially adapted to the situation.
“When it goes on more than an hour or so, you gotta take all the precautions.”
“This happens a lot?”
“It happens. We’ve got a guy takes off every couple of months. He used to be a runner, so he’s pretty easy to find. Sticks to the roads mostly.”
Mike swings the truck in the fire lane in front of the Arbutus and shuts off the engine. “I wouldn’t worry too much just yet,” he offers. “Some of them hide like children. Last year, we looked for this one lady for almost eight hours and then we found her under her own house. She was squeezed in a gap behind some shrubbery.”
She has heard this story already, from the deputy. Helen does a quick calculation. Marina has been missing longer than eight hours already. She wonders if there are other stories, ones without happy endings.
Upstairs, they retrieve a clean shirt for Dmitri and a pair of Marina’s knee-highs, which Mike drops into an evidence bag. He says he’ll come back for her later, if she wants to rest or clean up. They’re standing in the hallway between the two rooms, and Helen looks at the door to her room.
“I think I’m past sleep,” she decides. She’s shaky and buzzing on too many cups of coffee, but more to the point, the prospect of being alone with her thoughts is too unsettling. “Can you wait, though, for just a minute or two, just long enough for me to brush my teeth? I don’t want to hold things up.” She gestures to the evidence bag.
“You do whatever you need to do,” he says, and leans back against the wall. His eyes are steady and warm. “I’ll be here.”
A flush of gratitude nearly undoes her, and she turns away quickly and fumbles with her door key. Inside, she hurriedly brushes her teeth and washes her face. She fluffs up her hair, dabs some concealer under her eyes, and avoids studying her reflection. She chastises herself for her ridiculous vanity. It’s not as though he’s waiting to take her on a date.
When they get back to the high school, the search and rescue team has already headed out, and Mike needs to take the evidence bag to them. He points out to Helen where the counselor’s office is located, across the courtyard, and promises to check back periodically and keep them briefed.
Dmitri is lying on a couch, but when she peeks into the room, his eyes click open like a china doll’s.
“What is it? Did they find her?”
“We were only gone a few minutes, Papa,” Helen says. “Were you asleep?”
He shakes his head no and sits up. “Where could she go, Elena?” He has asked this question or some variation of it at least twenty times today.
“I don’t know, Papa.”
“It’s not so big an island.”
“Mike says they hide sometimes.”
She settles into a deep chair with sprung cushions and flips absently through an old, dog-eared copy of the Smithsonian magazine. She tells Dmitri about a glass harmonica invented by Benjamin Franklin. She reads him an article about the great blue heron. He asks her again how come it is taking them so long to find Marina. She repeats the more upbeat theories he has heard already, that she may have found a warm place to curl up and sleep—a toolshed, an unlocked car. There are vacation homes empty all over the island, even in high season. Periodically, Helen gets up and takes another stroll around the courtyard outside.
And so the warm afternoon ticks away into evening. As promised, Mike comes in every hour or so to brief them, even though there’s nothing to report. He brings offerings of coffee, sandwiches, bags of potato chips, and fruit and candy, all of which she sets aside but then ends up eating. This is how she marks the slow passage of time, in one-hour increments, each separated into smaller units of Fritos or grapes or Kit-Kat bars. Andrei calls twice to see how they are doing, and Helen tells him that they are doing fine. Later, there is dinner in the cafeteria, trays of lasagna and bowls of three-bean salad and coleslaw provided by the women of Drake Presbyterian.
Eventually, the light drains from the sky outside. At first, it seemed inconceivable that Marina could simply vanish, and though Helen was worried, at some deeper level she believed her worries were unfounded. Any moment, her mother would turn up, confused but unharmed. But with each hour that has elapsed, that outcome has seemed increasingly remote, and now, with the coming of dark, Helen realizes that, on an unconscious level, she is bracing herself against an unspecified horror. Dmitri, too, has retreated back into himself; he no longer asks any questions, and even when Mike comes in he registers no interest. Mike suggests again that they go back to the hotel, but he gets nowhere; Dmitri has set like concrete and will not be moved any farther to the periphery. Instead, a cot and blankets are brought in, though these too seem outside the private conditions of his vigil. If he cannot go and search for his wife, perhaps he can bring her back by force of will.
Helen flips through a magazine, waiting for something to grab her attention. She can’t sleep, either, but neither can she focus enough to read anymore. She gets up and crosses over to a rack of pamphlets on the wall: how to prevent sexually transmitted disease, how to recognize depression, how to choose the right college or career, advice against methamphetamine use and smoking and alcohol. She is glad her children are grown. Given the limitless risks, it seems a miracle that any children survive into adulthood—and deeply unjust that one may survive and then find at the other end of life not rest but a new set of dangers.
“Are you sure you don’t want the cot, Papa?” she asks. He shakes his head like a slow metronome.
“I think I’m going to try this again.” He doesn’t respond. She feels guilty, as though she is giving up on her mother or abandoning him.
She walks over to the couch and, sitting down beside him, takes his hand. His mouth shifts a little, but he doesn’t raise his eyes or otherwise acknowledge her. His hand is limp in hers.
“We have never spent a night apart,” he says eventually.
“What about the war?” she asks.
He brushes the comment off, and she’s not about to force the issue. But she doesn’t know what else to say, either.
“Well, okay,” she says, squeezing his hand, and rising to her feet. “I love you.”
He nods. “I love you also, Lenochka.”
“Do you mind if I turn off the overhead light? I can leave this lamp on.”
Lying on the cot, she stares at the ceiling. A random design of holes is punched into the acoustic tiles. She searches idly for patterns, as one might scan the night sky for crabs and hunters and lions. Here is what might be a face with one eye, there a dog with an enormous tail. Only a desperate need for sense, she thinks, could connect these dots into pictures, or the constellations into a meaningful universe.
Katya Kostrovitskaia, a worker on the museum’s crash rescue team, approaches them as she is leaving. Her cheeks are flushed. “It is marvelous,” she tells them. “The steam is not so hot as the old days, and there are no birch branches to make vaniks, but feel,” she says, and wraps Olga’s hands in her own. “They are still warm.”
Finally, they reach the front of the line and hand over their tickets. They enter an anteroom with rows of benches where, with a few dozen others, they disrobe. “Deposit your clothing with the laundry workers,” an attendant requests. “It will be disinfected and held for you. Your time will be limited to two hours. Please return to the anteroom and collect your clothing before the two hours has elapsed. May your steam be easy.”
Marina sits down beside Olga and gingerly begins to remove her boots and roll down the top layer of stockings. She has lived in these same clothes from week to week, sleeping and working swaddled in so many layers that her body has been disguised even to herself. While climbing the Jordan Staircase, she studiously avoids her reflection in the mirrored walls, but when she washes herself in a darkened corner of the shelter, sponging her neck and arms and up under her skirts, she has felt the bones of her body surfacing, one by one. Whether she is sitting or lying, they stab against her skin.