The Borrower (22 page)

“Is it albuterol? Like an emergency inhaler?” I realized I hadn’t really looked at his inhaler, or asked his entire medical history, or even monitored his breathing since we left Pittsburgh. And now I’d let him exercise on the monkey bars. I wasn’t even an adequate babysitter.

“I just take it when I need it, but I’ve had to use it a lot lately.”

I stared ahead at the road in panic a few moments before assessing my options. At least it wasn’t a regular medication that his asthma would spiral without. I could get him something over the counter, or in the worst case I could take him to an ER and say we had no insurance, maybe call my father for the bill. I could eventually use it as an excuse to take him home.

“How bad does it get?”

“It gets as bad as last night. My doctor said I should take this purple kind that you take every day, but my dad said I’d just get addicted to it, so I’m not allowed to.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘That’s nice.’ ”

“It’s just that really you shouldn’t say religious words unless you really mean them, because that’s one of the Ten Commandments.”

“Right. Sorry about that.”

I spent the next ten miles making myself a mental Ten Commandment scorecard for the past month, which looked something like this:

I had a hard time remembering them all, but the hours spent helping my rather slow childhood friend Brooke with her
CCD
homework had apparently added
something
to my cultural literacy, if not to my actual moral code. For good measure, I added the Seven Cardinal Sins:

Consider it quantitative proof. I have horns for a reason. And yet what criminal, in the midst of the crime, really and deeply believes she’s evil? In our minds we’re all Jean Valjean, Martin Luther King, Henry David Thoreau. I was Gandhi, marching to the sea for salt. Look at the blisters on my poor, bare feet.

Somewhere on Route 80: “Let’s talk about books.”

“That’s a great idea. Okay, books. What’s the next thing you want to read?”

“Well, I think I want to read
The Hobbit
. This one guy, Michael, in this class I go to, he said it was very good. Have you ever read it?”

“You haven’t read
The Hobbit
?” I practically screamed it at him, missing my chance to talk about his “class.” Of
course
he hadn’t read it, I realized. He wasn’t allowed to read books with wizards. Not real wizards, at least. Oz the Great and Terrible was probably only acceptable for being a humbug. I said, “Once we’re back in Hannibal, I’ll check it out for you.” But I really couldn’t envision a scenario anymore when both of us would be back in Hannibal and I’d still have my job and Ian would gallop down the steps every day to see me. “So you said your friend’s name was Michael? Is he your age?”

“Yeah. But that’s not really what I meant by talking about books. I mean fun stuff, like if you go to heaven and it turns out that one of the things you can do there is you can be anyone in any book, whenever you want to, but you can only choose one person, who would you pick?”

“Wow. I have no idea. What about you?”

“I think definitely the
BFG
. Because then you could be in
two
Roald Dahl books. Because the
BFG
is in one chapter of
Danny, the Champion of the World
, right? Except I wasn’t allowed to read it, but I remember after you read us
The BFG
you showed us that part. Do you remember that? You held it up to show us.” I liked the image of a big, friendly giant Ian stomping through the streets of Missouri, crushing Pastor Bob underfoot.

I thought for a while. “In that case, I think I’d be Theseus. Do you remember him?”

“Was he the guy with the Minotaur, and he had the ball of string?”

“Right. And my reason is, he shows up in probably hundreds of different books. He’s in a Shakespeare play, and all the Greek and Roman writers used him. There are probably some battle scenes that would be too violent, but I’d spend most of my time in Shakespeare, anyway.”

“And you could be in
D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths
!”

“Definitely.” It didn’t take a psychoanalyst: I wanted to be the guy who could get himself back out of the labyrinth, the guy who could roll the string back up to where he started.

“Okay, the other thing is, if you’re a
writer
, and you go to heaven, you get different rules. Then you can be in any story you ever wrote, and you can jump between all the different people. So Roald Dahl could be the
BFG
one day, and then he could be Charlie, and then he could be the centipede in the peach.”

“So tell me more about your friend Michael.”

“He’s really not my friend. He definitely picks his nose.”

“Do you have other friends at your class?”

“We’re really very busy the whole time. They don’t really let us have a lot of just conversations. And the good part is, sometimes they give us doughnuts. You know what’s good? If you ever went to prison, you could just keep your same job. Don’t they have libraries in prisons? Hey, about ten seconds to New York!” We could see the large signs ahead, advising us of local traffic laws and tourist information. Ian took off his hat and started singing “Erie Canal.”

I wondered if each individual state line we crossed was an additional felony charge, or if crossing the first was as criminal as you could get. I could feel the quality of the tar become smoother under the wheels as the New York Highway Commission took over. It made it feel somewhat more official and monumental, although I always wished there would be a big arch to pass under. “Buckle Up” signs just don’t have the same appeal as passing through city gates or checkpoints. I tried to imagine Persian emissaries following the Via Appia into Rome, greeted by nothing more than a “Check Your Harness” sign. It would never do. Something had been lost. Not that I wanted a checkpoint right then.

Crossing the border into Russia in a college choir bus, post-communism, I’d felt ridiculously privileged, and tried hard to think about my uncle, who died trying to get out, and my father, who ran and swam and broke his leg. And there I was, getting my passport cursorily checked by the burly border guard who had mounted the bus. He wouldn’t have known by my truncated surname, my straight teeth, my sneakers, that I considered myself Russian. That the stolen dry cleaning, the head on the pike, the horrible joke about the cat and the mustard, made me feel more Russian than American. I had tried very hard, at the time, to think something profound about expatriation.

Now, older, running away—if not from my country, then from everything I’d ever known—I felt something perhaps a little more real. To tell the truth, it was still an effort, in this age of cheap flights and e-mail and long-distance phone calls, to imagine what it meant for my father and his brother to pack up and leave, to understand that everyone they’d ever known in twenty years of life they’d never meet again, that they’d either die in the sweaters they were wearing or live in them for the next three months, that they, who had spoken such beautiful Russian, would become awkward, accented foreigners. That their children would belong to some other place.

I wondered if (when they started looking for me, plastering my face in the post office) I could really leave my country—send Ian home and flee to Canada with Anya’s coins and never come back. It would be nice, in a way. To look at America from the outside, to feel like the underdog instead of the overlord. Or I could move to Australia, land of criminals and exiles. I already knew the song.

As we pulled into the next gas station, my cell started ringing. “Don’t,” I said, because Ian was reaching toward the dashboard, where the phone was balanced. I picked it up myself as I parked next to the pump.

“It’s me,” Glenn said. I handed Ian a five-dollar bill and nodded toward the Speedee Mart. He skipped up to the doors.

“So I had this crazy day,” I began. I got out of the car and started half-consciously pumping gas.

“When are you going home?” His voice was too loud and too thick, and if I’d been the one to call I’d have thought I woke him up. I managed to remember that I was supposed to be in Cleveland, still.

“Soon, I think. I mean, I can give you a lift back, I’m just not sure quite when.”

“I found a bride.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I already found a ride.”

“Great. I mean, that’s fine.”

He let out a groan or a yawn, I couldn’t tell which. “I take it you’re not my date next weekend for the thing.” He had another concert, a second performance of the Mr. Clean Remix, which apparently was getting critical acclaim in whatever limited-circulation music news zines reviewed minor modern orchestra pieces premiering in St. Louis. “I mean, you said my piece sounded like a cartoon song, so . . .”

“I’ll make it if I can,” I said. “I’m probably going back to Chicago for a while to help my friend. That’s the issue.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Speaking of which, that guy called.”

I immediately thought police. “Guy?”

“Your retarded friend. Rambo, whatever. He asked if I knew about a kid from the library.”

It didn’t make sense, and I needed to know more—for instance, when exactly did this call take place?—but all I wanted to do was get off the phone, which was suddenly slipping out of my hand with sweat. Somehow, the only question that came out was “How did he get your number?”

“Fuck do I know? Because he’s in love with you and he stalks you. Look, do I need to call the cops on you, Lucy?”

“What in the hell for?”

“You tell me.”

“For not going to your stupid concert? For helping my sick friend? I know about the library kid. I talked to Rocky, and I’m incredibly upset.”

“It just seems strange. I mean, that guy said you already gave the bone marrow.” So he’d called Glenn
after
our conversation just a few hours ago. A very bad sign.

“He was wrong.” The gas pump clicked that it was done. Ian would be coming back out any second.

“You’re not a very good liar.”

“I’m an excellent liar. I told you I liked your orchestrated commercial jingle.”

I said it on instinct, if only to get rid of him. It wouldn’t be a bad thing for him to be gone and silent and so angry that if Rocky called him back, all he could say was that he hadn’t heard from me in days and hoped I burned in hell.

What he said to
me
was “Don’t ever call me again.”

I pulled back up to the doors of the store and waited for Ian. Despite the vague and inexplicable urge to cry, it was all a relief. Because now that there was no more Glenn, and now that Rocky was probably realizing what an awful person I was, there was nothing really to go home to—except Ian, who wasn’t even there but
here
, coming out of the store with his coat on backward, arms and sleeves tucked up so it looked like his wrists were sprouting from his shoulders. It seemed strange now even to think of Hannibal as home. Chicago was home, the Labaznikov house was a sort of home, and certainly my car was home. Hannibal was a distant memory.

We went a few more exits, Ian reading aloud to me from the magazine he’d bought with his five dollars—some sort of off-brand teen star-stalker with a photo of a shirtless movie star on the cover, one whose name I didn’t know, although I recognized his scruffy goatee and alarmingly pale eyes. (“What’s a fiancé?” Ian asked. “What’s a rehab?”) Every car had started to look like a police car, every noise sounded like a siren. I wondered if Rocky had taken his suspicions to the Hannibal PD, or if he was working freelance, sorting out the clues on his own. He would have been the one to find the lights on, the one to know how close I was with Ian.

Ian had collected thirty points in our game for rhyming Lucy with “goosey,” and thirty more for insisting that “librarian” rhymed with “Ian,” when he fell asleep—his head tilted back and his glasses falling down his face. I leaned toward him every few minutes to hear if he was wheezing, but all I heard was the gurgle of someone sleeping with his mouth open.

Not long after, I noticed a car behind us on the highway that was a copy of mine: powder blue, rusted, Japanese. I thought of waking Ian up to claim my forty-five points, but I was enjoying the quiet and he needed his rest. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman driving—the low sun reflecting off the windshield completely washed out the face—so I couldn’t help but imagine it was a woman who looked like me. My twin—only her greatest guilt wasn’t riding shotgun, her mind wasn’t playing a constant loop of grieving parents and vindictive ex-boyfriends, she wasn’t starring in the next act of her family saga of shame and flight and idiotic idealism.