Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (6 page)

“What if you died here? In my house? I mean, fucking go next door if you want to do that.”

She went big-eyed and quiet. “I thought about it.”

A big angry weight collapsed through me like a live demolition. She tried to patch it over, take it back. “I didn’t plan it. I just saw those little pills and wanted to try them out. I didn’t want to die or anything. God.”

I shook my head. “Who
does
that?”

“I do,” she said. And then at last she started throwing up. The sound and smell of it was so familiar I felt myself shrivel up and sneak out. My body kept holding the garbage can for her but the rest of me was someplace else, staring at one little card pinned up over her head that just said
SOLVITUR AMBULANDO
and nothing else, and I wondered what it meant or if it could be a guy’s name and if so, who that would’ve been. There were all these mysteries now that no one could answer.

After a while there was nothing left in her stomach and she was seized up, gagging out yellow bile. I got her some water and she lay back. Her face was red and teary, strained like a balloon.

She said, “Don’t you have to go to work or something?”

I was keeping his printshop alive on my own now, but nobody much would notice if I opened a few hours late or not at all. So we sat together against the headboard, just breathing. A light snow started coming down outside and I think both of us dozed off for a while.

“Maybe we should take a vacation day,” she said, which woke me up. “We could turn up the heat real high and make sugary drinks.”

“OK,” I said. I had nothing against it.

“I want to go someplace really hot, you know? I want to go someplace where it’s sunny all the time.”

“You should.”

“Shit,” she said, like this was the equivalent of going to the moon.

She closed her eyes for a while and I thought she’d dozed off again. I sat watching the snow. My legs were falling asleep and my tailbone ached. I was considering sliding out of the bed when she said, “Hey, for real, can we turn up the heat real hot, just for this one day?”

I got up and flushed away her puke and turned the thermostat to seventy-nine. Underneath us, the furnace whirred into motion with great purpose, like it had finally been called upon to fulfill its dreams.

“Hey, it’s snowing,” she said. By now there were already a couple of inches on the ground. It had even covered over the hole in the Wozniaks’ roof.

I thought of something my dad used to say. “Snow is the one thing the movies have never gotten right, and therefore haven’t yet destroyed.” He was prone to grand claims like that.

She smiled and sat up straighter to get the full view of it. “Yeah, that’s true.”

We watched it coming down in its weightless way, turning the whole back yard and alley into some kind of dream. I wanted to help her somehow. “Anybody you want me to call?” I said, but she wouldn’t answer. “Anybody you believe in?”

She made a sound like wind rushing through her teeth.

“Me neither,” I said, which was just about true. The praying had been only an experiment, and look what it yielded.

A pair of little dogs started yelping at each other in the alley and Molly said, “I’d like to do something for those goddamn dogs, before I go.”

T
he extra heat brought a funny new set of smells to the house, a kind of festering mushroomy jungle quality, and it really did start to feel like we were on vacation someplace exotic. The landscape outside was powder-coated and muffled, totally uncorrupted by shovels and snowplows. We sat at the kitchen table eating sandwiches and staring dumbly out, and I knew that one way or another she was going to vanish as abruptly as she’d arrived. And even if she didn’t take anything at all, I’d spend the rest of my days going from room to room trying to figure out what was missing. But for now she was just making chewing noises and shifting in her seat, making plans.

Her idea for today was to break into the old homes of all the dogs I recognized and let them go curl up and sleep in their old beds, out of the snow. At least for the night. She said, “Don’t you think that would quiet them down a little?”

I didn’t answer.

She wanted to start next door. “While you rustle up Mabel by the collar I’ll climb in the back windows and open the door for you. I’m good at this,” she said.

“With the snow we’ll leave tracks,” I said. “From our house to theirs. It’ll be obvious who did it.”

She said, “It’s kind of sweet how you still think anybody cares.”

I went back to my sandwich, thinking it over, and she went on trying to convince me. A real hopeful look came over her face, like she was imagining that those houses inside still looked like they used to, with couches and chairs, and bowls of dog food on the kitchen floor, and beds with blankets and pillows, the whole place warm and dry. She was right that the dogs would be overjoyed at first, unable to believe the world had finally heard their appeals and decided to put things right. They’d race through the door barking, “Honey, I’m home,” and scramble on their long, unclipped claws from room to room. They’d go hunting for traces of their lives, finding foul new smells and wires exposed and puddles from burst pipes. Big empty spaces where the beds had been. They’d start making those panicky high-pitched noises and they’d look back at us, perplexed and answerless, all of us realizing together that we had no solution at all for this. We knew nothing. I knew this because I’d already tried it before.

I
NSTEAD OF THE
gold-plated onion domes Josie had hoped for, the view from their room revealed only the grimy, cement backside of the Oktyabrskaya metro station, where a few merchants had set up tables selling flimsy newsprint magazines bearing pictures of naked women. She held her map of Moscow up to the window, trying to match the city in her head with the one hulking in the half dark outside. “I think we’re
here
,” she said, stabbing at the map and looking over her shoulder to Meg. “I think the river is that way.”

“I don’t want to go out,” Meg murmured. She was suffering theatrically on the narrow bed by the wall, with her red hair splayed across her face and her arms tightly coiled around her slender frame.

They should have been happy. They were here; it was coming true. But Meg had gotten sick on the airplane, and their first Russian meal—cabbage and kasha and some kind of fried cutlet—was gurgling around in their stomachs.

Josie paced along the wide window. “Maybe some fresh air…” she said, but stopped herself. There was no sense being difficult. In their eight years together, she didn’t recall ever winning a dispute with Meg. Still, there was so much to see out there, and they only had six days. She pressed her face against the cool window and practiced sounding out the few simple words she recognized on the dozens of bright city signs—
. Meg had refused to take Russian lessons with her, claiming it was too hard a language to be able to learn anything useful in only six months, but Josie had gone ahead and taken the lessons anyway. It seemed important to try.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Meg moaned.

“Sshhh. They’ll hear you.”

To reduce costs the adoption agency had arranged for them to stay these few days in an apartment with a host family, and the walls were thin. Josie could hear their hostess, Sana, humming along with the radio in the kitchen as she cleaned up after their welcome dinner.

Josie sat down on the edge of the bed and smoothed Meg’s hair off her face. “You want to go to the bathroom?”

“There are cockroaches in the bathroom.”

“Don’t be a wuss. Every city apartment has cockroaches.”

“Not ours.”

Josie decided not to tell her that occasionally, in the middle of the night, she’d seen a lone cockroach or two scouting their kitchen sink in Chicago. “That’s because ours is a condo,” was all she said.

Meg flopped onto her other side and pressed herself against the wall. She was being childish, but Josie let it go. She had romanticized this trip pretty elaborately in her mind, had imagined them holding hands and grinning nervously: future parents. Abroad. In the homeland of the mystery child who was waiting to become theirs. She curled up behind Meg and put her cheek in the hollow between her shoulder blades. “We could just walk around the block?”

“Give it up,” Meg said, but Josie could hear she was smiling.

“You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

“God, I hope so.”

In the morning they would drive west, to an orphanage outside of town, which the Russians called a
baby home
, where they would see the boy with their own eyes.

“And then, just imagine—”

Meg stopped her. “You said you wouldn’t get your hopes up like this.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.” Meg stretched out her legs, effectively pushing Josie off the bed. “I’m sorry.” She shifted to make room for Josie again. “But you have to keep in mind all the things that could go wrong.”

Josie crossed the room and sank into the other little bed beneath the window. For months now Meg had been enforcing restrictions on their optimism. No plans, no painting the spare bedroom, no shopping for clothes or car seats. Not yet. Josie told herself this was just the businessperson in Meg, the part of her that believed that if you made your desires public you would get screwed by everyone. She brokered deals for a big real estate developer for a living, scooping up and pawning off office buildings and industrial parks. It was a world of poker faces, where nothing turned out as it seemed.

“Don’t pout,” Meg said. “Please.”

“Well, we’re here, aren’t we? Hasn’t everything gone just like the agency promised?”

“Wow, they picked us up at the airport. Wow, we’ve been sheltered and, let’s not forget,
fed
. Remarkable. Let’s sign our lives over.”

“You act like this is some elaborate con, like all of Russia’s conspiring to take your money.”

“Our money,” Meg said.

Josie pressed up to the window again and watched the strange little cars racing by around the corner. A whole world of Russians was out there, and she might never get out and meet any of them.

“I just want to protect us,” Meg said after a while. “You.”

She was right, of course. Even if the agency did everything perfectly, they would still have to wait months before coming back to pick up the child, and there was an awful lot of potential for failure along the way. The boy’s health might be too problematic, the courts might not approve the deal, or he could get whisked away by any Russian couple stepping in at the last minute. And then there was the strange possibility that they might meet the boy and somehow, somehow…not feel the right thing.

“Sometimes,” Josie said, “you’ve just got to make a leap.”

A brittle knock came from their bedroom door, and Josie realized that after all her studying she didn’t even know how to say “come in” in Russian. What good was she? She walked over and opened the door to find Sana’s daughter, Natasha, struggling under the awkward weight of a large tea tray.

“Chai,” the little girl said, her face twisted up with effort.

“Come in, come in.” Josie rushed to clear a space on the desk for the tray.

Natasha began a flurry of words in her beautiful, singsong voice, but Josie understood nothing. At last the girl reduced her comments to one word, enunciating it over and over. “Sakhar? Sakhar?”

Josie and Meg looked at each other, baffled, until finally Josie thought to say, “Spasibo.”

With great ceremony Natasha put two spoonfuls of sugar into each small cup and poured tea to the brim. Then she smiled and launched into more incomprehensible prattle. Josie thought it sounded as though the girl was asking permission for something, and they nodded, thanking her again and again. Finally she gave up and opened a drawer under the bookcase to retrieve two ragged Barbie dolls and a handful of crayons, seeming to apologize for invading what was now, temporarily, their space. Then she excused herself and rushed out the door.

“This must be her bedroom,” Josie said. They looked around at the drab, fuzzy wallpaper and the tidy, sterile surfaces everywhere. There were no traces of children’s things, no toys or primary colors or drawings tacked up on the walls. Everything was brown or forest green. But in the corner by the window, under a folded blanket, they discovered a wooden cradle so small and feeble looking that it had to have been made for dolls.

“That’s got to be a toy,” Meg said.

“I should hope so.” Josie pushed at it gently, and it rocked to and fro with an uncertain, antique creaking.

They stood staring at the tea, suddenly dazed and tired beyond words.

“You want to push the beds together?” Josie said.

Meg stepped out of her pants and folded them neatly over her briefcase on the desk chair. She gestured toward the door, toward the family beyond their rented room. “I don’t think we should.”

Josie watched Meg undress and tuck herself into the bed until she became only a faint lump under the covers. She tried her own matching low, narrow bed, but her feet hung over the end and her arms flopped down to the floor. She felt monstrous in it. She lay still for a while, pressing one palm against the low mound of fat between her navel and pelvis, where she could feel the grumbling machinery of her digestive tract and, underneath that, a faint, premenstrual throb.

Finally, unable to sleep, she got up and fished the adoption agency’s handbook out of her shoulder bag, then sat leaning against the window to catch the little bit of light from the streetlights. The cover of the booklet featured a black-and-white image that Meg had dismissed long ago as embarrassing: an adorable, gender-ambiguous baby in nothing but disposable diapers, crawling innocently across an artfully rumpled American flag. The pages that followed told little of the immense bureaucracy and expense of it all, of the social worker visits and weekend classes, the thousands of dollars spent with no guarantees, the fear and doubt and growing desire filling these many months. The book was promotional, devoted to testimonials and photos of satisfied customers. The husbands and wives in these stories had great posture and carefully ironed clothes. They thanked the Lord. They were certain the kids they brought home—
miracles
,
gifts
—would know nothing but health and prosperity in their new world.

When they’d first gotten the booklet in the mail, Josie and Meg had smirked at these pages, feeling daunted and excluded by the strange confidence of those parents. “We’re not going to do this matching Disney outfits thing,” Meg had said, pointing at one family photo. “That’s not mandatory, right?”

Over time, though, Josie found it hard not to get swept up by the pictures. The stories, the babies, pierced through her skepticism, made her previous life seem small.

She glanced over to make sure Meg was still sleeping, then pulled from the pages the snapshot they had been sent of the boy, their boy. Nikolai.

His eyes were small and set far apart, divided by a nose that seemed uncommonly flat. It was hard to get perspective on him, since he was posed alone in the photo, but he seemed small. That was common, they’d been told. He weighed, they said, only fifteen pounds, at eleven months. He wasn’t standing up or walking. He wasn’t smiling. He was sitting in the corner of a metal crib looking away from the camera. The neck of his t-shirt hung low, revealing the ridges of rib bones across his upper chest. Josie ran one finger along them, wanting to plant baby fat right there.

“You know,” Meg startled her, “I wish you wouldn’t get so attached to him yet.”

Josie closed the book guiltily. “I know. I know.” But she didn’t need to look at the picture anyway. The boy’s face was wallpapered inside her mind. She had sketched backdrops behind him too: Nikolai under the Christmas tree; Nikolai in the bathtub, surrounded by boats; Nikolai asleep in the car seat with a bottle tight in his mouth.

What she liked about these images, too, was the picture of herself and Meg they implied: focused, permanent, purposeful. A family was a thing that stretched out beyond where you left off.

T
he following morning their guide, Artur, came by after breakfast to take them to the orphanage. He was a tall, pockmarked young man who spoke excellent English, each phrase perfectly enunciated, as if there were a computer in his bulging throat stringing together separately recorded words. He helped them collect their paperwork and their bags of gifts for the orphanage, and they said good-bye to Sana and the little girl and headed downstairs in the narrow, dimly lit elevator. In addition to the agency fees and the three thousand dollar “donation” to the orphanage that were itemized on their Good Hands bill, they were advised to bring gifts for everyone in Russia, including the kids at the orphanage. They had fulfilled this charge dutifully, stuffing their suitcases with diapers and clothes, toys and baby formula. This was how things got done in Russia, they were told. What they didn’t understand, though, was how and when to offer the gifts. Did they pull out a sweater right now for Artur, or give it like a tip upon departure? Either way, it smacked of condescension.

Artur had a rickety little red car that was inexplicably missing the front passenger seat, so Josie and Meg sat together in the back, tensed up and wondering at everything they saw. They careened through the crowded streets of Moscow, swerving and screeching to a near stop every time they encountered another pothole or obstacle. Josie was relieved to find that not all the buildings were like the mysterious gray, Soviet-looking behemoths she’d seen from the apartment window; many were beautiful old stucco buildings, painted pale yellow and burgundy and pink, with elaborate porticos in front. The sidewalks were wide and crowded with people, and on every corner there seemed to be little makeshift markets with piles of fruit and vegetables. When Josie aimed her camera at them, she realized that at the edges of the markets stood rows of people holding out dresses and coats for sale, their arms spread wide like scarecrows. She took a blurred picture. Within a few minutes they were on a bridge over the Moscow River, and off to one side, in the distance, the gold domes of the Kremlin churches shimmered in the sunlight like a fantasy.

Artur offered to take them to Red Square, and Josie nodded eagerly, but Meg cut her off. “We
will
meet the baby today, right?”

“Most likely,” Artur nodded casually, without looking back at them. “If everything goes well.”