Lone Star (17 page)

Why another church? I asked Mason. We just went to the Dome Cathedral. He had no answer. He said there were forty-two churches in Riga center, and shouldn't we try at least one more? They also sell kaftans around here, I said to him. Do you want to try one of those, too? He had no response. Blake told me to stop arguing. What about Mason? I said. And what about you and Chloe? He's got some nerve.

Mason and Chloe held hands the whole day, but Blake held his Frommer's guide and his journal, and had no hands for me. When I asked him to put it down for just
one goddamn minute,
he said it was time to catch the train back, that we promised we'd be back by seven.

I don't understand why Chloe is acting the way she is. She never wanted to come here. She's been beautifully miserable for two months, ever since Moody proposed this crazy idea. I thought she and I would see eye to eye on the whole Eastern Europe thing, bond over our dissatisfaction, but for some reason she's pretending to like it. She's got to be mad at me. Why else would she be acting all happy, skipping, tugging on everybody's sleeve, wanting ice cream and napoleons and strudels? It's an act. Chloe, who can't be persuaded to pinch even one of her dad's Miller Lites, is drinking Black Balsam and smacking her lips about how delicious it is! And also, I mention this in passing, she is wearing a pink blouse. Yes, it's over jeans, but on her feet are thong sandals, and she has painted her toenails red. Chloe. Toenails. Painted. Red. What's happening to the world? She has put on a little makeup, as if she's trying to look pretty for Latvia. It's weird, frankly.

Whatever, I don't care. I told her she shouldn't be eating those strudels anyway. I was being constructive. I was
trying
to help. Of course she took it the wrong way. And the boys took her side! Blake said, we're on a Roman Holiday. We eat what we want, drink what we want, do what we want. Eat the napoleon, Chloe, he said. Eat two strudels. We stood in line an hour to buy a stupid pastry! Can you imagine? On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, to stand in line, like we're in Russia or something, like the Berlin Wall never fell, to get a napoleon. To eat an eight-hundred calorie dessert and get fat, and for this we wait an hour.

With the baked goods in hand, we walked forever to the canal because Chloe wanted to, and strolled excruciatingly slowly under the trees by the water, eating pastries. All the insects were out, and again I'm the bad guy.

Blake is driving everyone crazy with his story research. I could scream. I've been quiet about it, letting Chloe express our mutual skepticism, but now she's suddenly pretending she's on board. Suddenly
I
have to be the voice of reason. He's never going to win it because there'll be a thousand entries, including a hundred from the Academy, and no matter how good his story is—someone else's will be better. I wish somebody would remind him of this. Chloe used to, back in Maine, but here, she's asking him questions, discussing things, fake-listening. Tell me about these spies, she says. Why are there so many secret agents, double agents in Riga? What do they want with a blue suitcase?

That's the question, he says. The old lady dies, and the innocuous blue suitcase in her bedroom vanishes. Who took it?

Riga spies? says Chloe.

We're ambling down the river promenade, the others eating cherry strudel and listening to Blake tell us about the size of the engine in the truck he's going to buy with the prize money. The lunatics have left the asylum.

“Blake,” I say, as gently as I can, “don't you think there will be
so
many other story entries? I mean, don't you think you should . . . I don't know. Not divvy up the bear until the bear is
dead? The chances of winning are minuscule. There's bound to be one better than yours, no?”

And he says, “Lupe told me never to compare myself with other people because, she said, there would always be someone worse and someone better than me, and I would become either vain or bitter. Just keep your eye on the prize, she said.”

Who in the flipping world is Lupe?

I smile, elegantly, politely. I walk next to him, gaze at my gait, my ballet flats, my legs in my miniskirt. I'm hot, I'm trying not to sweat, and I don't listen to a word he says anymore.

I'm thinking about Martyn. I wonder how much he misses me.

It's brutally hot out. And humid like Houston. So unpleasant to walk around. We should be at a beach in Barcelona, not here. At least I look good. I caught my reflection in the shop windows; a thin wan girl stared back, a slender profile. Cheekbones. Tiny denim skirt, green T-shirt, lavender belt. Chloe caught me looking at myself, smiled, and said, “The question the philosophers ask is, when you walk past a shop window, do you (a) look to see what's inside, (b) look to see what's in the window, or (c) look at yourself? We know what your answer is.”

Why did this annoy me? “Oh, and I suppose you never look at yourself?”

“No, my answer is all three,” she replied.

On the way back we had no one on our train, and it still stunk like a skunk. I can only imagine how much fun it's going to be tomorrow.

Back at Varda's they fed us well.
Pienaˉcis mans Kungs,
Varda said again with open hands. We ate half a pig tonight. I have to admit it was delicious. Sabine was there, with her husband, Guntis. He was also making eyes at me when no one was looking. They all got dressed up. Guntis wore a tie! Sabine wore a red jacket over her peasant dress.

You ask if I have a future with Blake.

Exhibit number one: By the canal under a tree on a bench
I'm studying the schedule for the Opera House, piano recitals, cello concertos. And Blake, Mason, and Chloe are barefoot on the grass, hopping on one foot to see who can do it the longest. With cherry strudel all over their faces. And then they run over to the bench where I am sitting and paw me with their sticky hands, yanking me up and trying to make me skip as well. I'm a young woman, I said to them. And you are children. I do not skip.

Exhibit number two: He never stops eating. He eats at every place we stop. No, that's not correct. He seeks out places to stop so that he can eat. Leave it to me, he says. I know where I'm going. And it's always to a café. He had cold beet soup with chopped egg in it. He had a potato pudding with bacon, and fried rye bread with garlic, and then tried to kiss me! He drank that Black Balsam. And at Varda's, he ate the pig and sardines, and sour porridge, and dried pork in a bun. He had blood sausage! And mushrooms with onions. That man has an iron stomach. Nothing fazes him. A few years ago, he actually ate some webcaps. He thought they were white mushrooms. He was in the woods with some of his dirtbag friends after a rain, getting up to no good, I'm sure, drinking, maybe even smoking, looking for some other kind of mushrooms, I bet, though Blake would never admit it. But he was clearly impaired because he'd been picking mushrooms since he could suck his thumb and never before mistook fatal for edible. His friends nearly died. Three of them were in the hospital for months. Major kidney damage. One of them is still on dialysis. One got lucky and had a transplant.

But Blake? I'm not saying he didn't throw up, and for weeks had a reduced appetite, and even a headache once, he swore. What I'm saying is, the man ate fool's webcap, the most poisonous toadstool in the world, and walked away with a stomachache.

He should write about
that
. He's got a lot he can write about. He doesn't need hidden treasure in an old lady's suitcase. He has a poisoning, a fateful accident, a sick dog, a critically injured
father. But who listens to me? That's why I say nothing, even when he asks. Because he thinks he knows everything.

We should have brought some cherry strudel to Carnikava. Because Mason and I decided that we're not crazy about Latvian food. It's all pickled. Everything. I tried to ask Carmen about it tonight, but she didn't know what I was talking about. As in, of course it's pickled. What else would it be? I mean, everything is pickled. The cabbage. The sausage. The tomatoes. The eggs, for God's sake. Who pickles eggs? Latvians, apparently. The potatoes tasted pickled, but that's because they were doused with pickled cabbage and pickled tomatoes and pickled pickles.

I know, I know. Preservative, schmervative. I don't care. Mason doesn't care. He wants Burger King. I'd like a steak. Or a paella. How soon until we can have some tapas and empanadas? There's an entire Poland to get through first, and I bet they like things pickled there, too. I blame the Communists.

Chloe

The girls got up at sunrise to catch the commuter train to the city. The Liepaja train was leaving Riga at six in the morning. The boys dared think they could continue to slumber and not see the girls off. Silly boys.

Chloe didn't want to remind Hannah how unsophisticated she really was, how she'd never been on a train before yesterday. She was nervous to travel just the two of them. She wished the boys were coming with them.

The Liepaja train was nothing like yesterday's rambling, falling-apart commuter rail from Carnikava to Riga. It wasn't rows and rows of wooden seats. Oh, to be sure, the Liepaja train, built sometime before the Glorious Bolshevik Revolution, was also falling apart, but the cars on this train were divided into small compartments with seating for eight. Hannah informed Chloe that first class had white linen on the seats and only six people per compartment, but cost three times as much. Chloe and Hannah could not afford first class. Fortunately, the train wasn't full. In their stall there was only a mother with a baby, but at the next stop, in Jelgava, a teenage girl got on. She was around their age and spoke no English but was provocatively dressed, as if the two went hand in hand.

Clearly the strumpet wasn't headed to an orphanage, because
today even Hannah had dressed down. She was neat but covered up. Hannah could look elegant wearing a man's shirt, Chloe thought, whereas she herself had only two speeds: matron or slut. Elegant was not an option. Today, so as not to provoke the orphans or the pastor at the Lutheran day-care center, Chloe chose matron. She wore khaki pants and a long-sleeved, lightly checkered blue shirt, buttoned up to her throat. She twisted her hair into a schoolmarm bun. Her makeup, fleeting at best and hastily applied at four
A.M.
, had melted off after ten minutes in the stifling broiling oven of the carriage. Her shirt and bra stuck to her body and the socks to her feet, as if she'd stepped into a Chloe-sized puddle. She sat and tried to read, but outside was countryside and marshland, distant hints of sea, farms, silos, dirt roads passing by. She stared out the window and daydreamed of being a stilt walker caked in charcoal dust on the Ramblas in Barcelona.

They seemed to stop every other minute. Jelgava, Dobele, Broceni, Saldus, Skrunda. The train would pull into the well of a station and then shut down its engine. After an eternity, it would start rolling again. The mother and her baby left; an old man and his wife replaced them. Then they left. For a while it was just three people in the cabin: Chloe, Hannah, and the strumpety chick. Then the girl left, to go be a harlot elsewhere. Chloe's mother would have had a few choice things to say about her. Hannah was oblivious. She was sound asleep.

The train chugged west, until there was no more west, just the sea, and finally after three hours the train stopped. The white signs outside read Liepaja. Chloe wished she knew something about Liepaja. She should've read up on it. She should've asked Blake. Now it was too late. The chipping green stucco station with its cracked redbrick windows awaited.

Immediately noticeable was the drop in temperature. Chloe had ignored the gradual cooling on the train. She had stopped feeling hot but was still damp; then she was damp and comfortable; then damp and slightly chilly. Now, getting off the
train, she wasn't chilly. She was cold. It was overcast and very windy and about to rain.

“What happened to the weather?” said Hannah, wrapping her frowning arms around herself. “Holy crap, it's like a tornado. Why is it freezing? It must be fifty degrees!”

Didn't Blake say something about this? Chloe wished she'd listened more carefully. She hadn't believed him, even this morning when he told her to bring a jacket. What are you, my mother? she'd said to him.

“You didn't want to walk in Riga either,” Chloe said, “and it wasn't cold there.”

“It was crazy hot,” Hannah said. “Besides, I didn't want to walk to where you three were headed. A mosquito-infested canal.”

The girls sprinted to the end of the platform, looking for a taxi. Chloe's poorly secured bun was no match for the gale. Gone was the thought of walking to the orphanage two miles away on Labraga Street.

They jumped into the first cab they could find. It smelled disreputable and was driven by a man who not only could not speak a gasp of English but, judging by his expression as he studied the piece of paper with the directions, couldn't read a lick of Latvian either.

Liepaja was gray and wet and nearly deserted. For some reason it took a long time to drive two miles in no traffic to Labraga Street, where the cabbie pulled over by a small, leafy park. He demanded from the girls a small fortune. Thirty-two latu. Wasn't that nearly sixty dollars? Chloe protested. “Too much. No.”

He raised three fingers, then two, and repeated what sounded like
trees met with Vivi
. Chloe opted for dumbness and blindness. She counted off five latu. He scratched out “32” on an old coffee-cup lid and thrust it in her face.

“Just give him the money and let's go,” Hannah said.

Chloe gave him two more. “Seven latu,” she said. “But that's it.”

He got loud. Hannah was already out of the cab, but
the driver was grabbing at Chloe's shirtsleeve, shouting his incomprehensible blackmail.

A door opened. A tall man draped in black cloth came down the stoop from the beige building, shouting at the driver and pointing down the street. He pulled Chloe firmly from the cab.

“How much did you give him?” he asked in accented English.

“Seven latu.”

“Too much. He's abusing you.” He yelled at the cabbie again, who screeched away, gesticulating and yelling back.

The man introduced himself. He was Reverend Kazmir, the director of the day care and the pastor who had opened the home for children eleven years ago. He was serious and had a lot of thick, gray, well-groomed hair for an old man. He made Chloe feel self-conscious about her own uncharacteristically messy coif.

After he ushered them inside, he told them that when the Communists retreated back to the dying Soviet Union they left in their leprous wake a complete disintegration of a wonderful city, pockmarking it with vast unemployment and an even vaster drug habit. “Drugs are a very big problem in Latvia, I am ashamed to admit,” the reverend said.

Chloe told him it was nothing to be ashamed of, but she had to admit she was slightly frightened. How was she going to find a boy for her parents in a town like this? Her father was the chief of police. Order was what he craved. But drugs were chaos. Here, the adults smoked, shot up their arms full of H, had drug-addicted children, and then tried to escape, except there was nowhere to run to. Often their only escape was prison, where they were shipped off, almost happily, leaving their children behind. The kids went to school, haphazardly at best, and afterward some of them came to Kazmir's place. He and his assistants helped them with homework, taught them to paint and pray. But mostly the reverend organized photographs and folders documenting their life stories, which he then sent
to a nonprofit group in Dallas that arranged Eastern European sponsorships and adoptions.

Hannah, impatiently tapping on the table while the reverend talked, abruptly asked when they could see these supposed children. Chloe knew her friend's problem. She shared it herself. The girls were famished. They'd had a hunk of bread and a cup of tea six hours ago. While Hannah had slept on the train, Chloe didn't want to leave her friend alone and traipse off to the dining car. And when they got off the train, the extortionist cab was waiting.

The reverend shook his head and explained in detail how the procedure worked while the girls twitched and starved. This was not a zoo. Chloe and Hannah did not walk by the cages where the children sat on display. The girls would remain in his office and he would bring them the files of the available children. They would take their time and look through the photographs, bios, and personal notes. If they found someone potentially suitable for Lang and Jimmy, a room would be set up where they could meet this boy or girl face-to-face. Then the reverend left.

“I'm so hungry, I'd eat pickled bread at this point,” Hannah said as they waited for him to come back with the files. “Please, I beg you, choose someone quickly. It's all the same. Don't dawdle. Pick someone, anyone. Because after, we'll still have to meet him, and you know there'll be loads of paperwork. We don't have all day.”

“Actually, we do have all day.”

“The quicker you choose, the quicker we can get out of here. What time is it now?”

“Eleven, I think.”

“What time is the train back?”

“We just got here!”

“I know when we got here. I'm asking when the train goes. I don't want to miss it. There's only one a day, right?”

“It's at five. You're not the only one who's hungry, you know.”

“I know. But it's harder for me. I don't have any fat stores.”

The reverend returned carrying not files but a tray. On the tray was a pitcher filled with dark drink, sandwiches, some fruit, and some (pickled!) salads. There was herring and even a cheesecake.

Chloe wanted to cry, she was so grateful. For this she would sponsor all the children and an adult or two as well.

“I thought you might like a little refreshment after such a long journey,” the reverend said. “Why don't you start, and I'll be back in a few minutes with the folders. Please try the
kvas
. It's our national beverage. Made from bread. It's very good.”

“It could be made from lead at this point,” said Hannah, pouring the drink so quickly she spilled some on the sandwiches. It was good. Thick like a meal. Before the reverend returned, the sandwiches were gone, the cheesecake gone, the raspberries, potato salad, the herring and most of the bread. Only sauerkraut remained, lonely and acidic in the corner by the discarded crusts.

Lowering the stack of paper to the coffee table, the reverend glanced with amusement at the empty tray, then at the girls. “After a meal such as this, a nap is needed, don't you think?”

Chloe couldn't agree more, having gotten up at the godless hour of dawn. Hannah was nodding, too!

“What are
you
nodding for?” Chloe grumbled, quite drowsy. “You didn't watch
me
sleep for hours on the train.”

“I wasn't sleeping, I had my eyes closed.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Really. I wasn't sleeping.”

Why did that irk Chloe? Hannah wanted to have it every which way. Sleep on the train, yet be tired now. Chloe couldn't be the only one tired, oh no. Hannah had to be hungrier, and sleepier. And thinner. Ugh.

Chloe spread out the folders on the coffee table and opened them one by one. Hannah leaned back against the cushions and
closed her eyes. Chloe yanked on her linen sleeve. “You're not here to nap. You're here for moral support, and to help me. Let's go, missy.”

Apathetically leaning forward, Hannah studied the faces of the children and the notes in their files. “This is my favorite,” she said. “Kristine: seven years old. When she grows up, she wants to be a cleaning lady. Pick her.”

“What did I tell you? Ignore the girls. Only boys.”

“Are you serious? Why?”

Chloe turned to stare meaningfully at Hannah.

“Ah, okay,” Hannah said. “How old?”

“The age Jimmy would be now, I guess.” Chloe leafed through the folders. “Around seven.”

“How about this one? Nicole: six years old. The one place in the world she wants to visit is a swimming pool. Pick her.”

“I told you, no girls.”

“She's cute, though.”

“If it's a girl, move on. Find a boy.”

“Wow. And you said you weren't Chinese. Don't like the girls, do you? Yup, Chinese through and through.”

Hannah

Chloe told me not to look at the girls, but it's only the girls that interest me. After seeing sweet Kristine with her big dreams of becoming a cleaning lady, I searched through the girls. And why not? I didn't come here on a job. I'll admit, some of them looked as if they'd be following in their parents' footsteps soon if they weren't already. I asked the reverend if all of the children were orphans.

“Not all,” Kazmir said, presiding over us behind his big desk. “Many have parents. Sometimes the parents are in prison since they can't find any work besides dealing drugs. But the children can leave here and go home at any time. However, here we have food. It's warm in the winter.” He paused. “The drug
laws have become very strict in Latvia. Sometimes the parents, even when present, have six or seven other children to take care of. There is no adult supervision. Being here is better than wandering the streets. We offer them art, singing lessons, Bible study, sports, English. By the time these children are twelve or fourteen, they're expected to work, make money. Many drop out of school at fourteen. Some turn to drugs.” He pressed his troubled hands together in supplication. “We have sixty-five children here. Most are good kids, don't worry. They just need a little help.”

“Don't we all,” I said.

Here's what I remember. I was twelve years old and a couple of my friends called me to hang out. Sure, my mother said, as long as one of their parents can pick you up and drive you back. Not a problem, I assured her. She and Dad weren't even divorced yet, but he was out. I called Chloe to see if she wanted to come along. I heard her mother yelling in the background while she put her hand over the phone. Abruptly she hung up without even replying to me. But through my windows I heard her mother yelling. The whole lake heard. Are you out of your mind? It's eight o'clock on a school night and you're twelve years old. Where do you think you could possibly be going? What universe do you live in? She stayed home. I went out. I pitied her. Poor Chloe. I'm so grown-up, I thought, and she's going to be a baby forever.