Vaclav & Lena (26 page)

The girl seems upset, and she starts trying to get out from under Vaclav, and she turns her head, and Rasia sees (as in a dream that you are having in which everyone wears the wrong faces, and doors open to the wrong thing, and your grandfather is alive again but with the body of a horse) that this girl, she is a person back from the dead, from another world, from another time.

Rasia is angry and scared. Lena should be far away for her own sake, far away from memories that must be so awful for her, they are hard enough for Rasia, who is a big woman and tough like she’s made of frozen potatoes. Here is the little girl that she loved like her own, that she still wants to hold, and rock to sleep, and tell stories to, and protect. Here she is, little Yelena, back from outer space, from death, from her next life, from never-never land, from wherever they sent her.

LENA REMEMBERS
…

I
t all comes together when she sees Rasia’s face. She remembers. She remembers, and she can’t get her clothes on fast enough, and she runs.

Vaclav runs after her, but she is too fast. By the time he is at the door, she is gone.

THE PLANET AND THE DUST
…

V
aclav can’t see where Lena has gone. He runs three blocks in one direction, then worries that she has gone the other way and runs three blocks in the other direction. She is gone; he has lost her. He runs as fast as he can. He runs one more block, one more block with tears stinging in his eyes, until he can’t run anymore.

Rasia is sitting in the kitchen at the table, waiting, when he returns.

They don’t know what to say to each other.

Rasia is so overwhelmed; where to begin? It must be talked about. Vaclav is not a not-talk person. This is because he is American; he can’t not-talk about anything, he must talk about everything. Rasia can not-talk about anything. Still, she is trying to be, for his sake, an American mother. An American mother for an American son. This is what he wants and needs. To talk about this, though, this is too much.

First they make eye contact. She can hold it longer than he can. He can’t hold it at all. He looks down at the floor and makes a sound, a tiny little sound, a sound Rasia can barely hear. Rasia’s heart starts to break a little bit, because this is a sound like a baby makes when they are just making sounds, no words.

Then he says, “I don’t think I can handle this, Mom,” and when he says that word,
Mom
, his lip starts to tremble, and she can see it in his eyes that he is going to cry, and it has been a long time since she saw him cry. She can’t remember when. Not since he was young enough to skin his knees.

“This is too much for me,” he says now, and Rasia agrees. Lena was too much for her too.

She should have known that when Lena came back it would be secret, it would be sneaking and lying. With that girl, it was always sneaking and lying. Always. Not her fault, what could she do but sneak and lie, so much shame in her life and so much sadness. Always stealing and squirreling away things from Rasia’s fridge, always her tiny hands trying to steal things, useful things from the bathroom, from Vaclav’s room, from the linen closet, everywhere.

Whenever Rasia would take Lena home to tuck her in at night, after Lena fell asleep, Rasia would check her backpack and see the homework that Vaclav was doing for her, the toilet paper she was stealing from the house, the little bits of snacks, a tube of toothpaste, a notebook, a piece of bread. She wanted to help, so she used the backpack like a shopping list. She would leave toilet paper for her, toothpaste, a new toothbrush, snacks for school, extra sandwiches. She would leave these things at Lena’s house when she fell asleep, and she would leave them out at her own house for Lena to take. Still, Lena snuck and stole. Maybe because there was an endless list of things that she needed, or maybe it was because shame and survival were already in her. Maybe the sneaking and lying and conniving were something she would do forever.

Still, Rasia is surprised. She thought that Lena would not be more powerful than Vaclav.

She is. Lena is like a planet, and Vaclav is like a little piece of dust. Lena is a bull, and Vaclav is a piece of string tied around its neck. Vaclav is a chip of paint on the exterior of the Sputnik satellite. Rasia tells herself that the power that Lena has over Vaclav is because she is a girl and he is a teenage boy. But she always had this power over him, even when she was a little scrawny weed and Vaclav had eyes only for David Copperfield. This power that Lena has, over a nice boy, it comes from the way that she learned to get power when she was young. Vaclav is a nice boy who struggles for nothing. Lena learned how to grab power early. Is this her fault? Rasia will be the first one to tell you that no, it is not. Rasia saw firsthand that this is not at all the little girl’s fault. Does this, the fact that the girl is not to blame, mean that Rasia wants the girl (now even stronger, more powerful, more dangerous, armed with breasts and hips and lips and those eyes like oil slicks in a puddle) around her son? No, she does not.

But she cared so much for Lena, like her own child.

All of this crowds Rasia’s mind, all at once, and she hasn’t even scratched the surface. And still her son sits forlorn beside her, destroyed by sobbing, leaking snot onto a nice clean T-shirt.

THERE IS NOT PUNISH
…

R
asia realizes that she can no longer assume anything about her son when it comes to Lena.

“What has been going on between you two?” she asks. This seems like a good question, a good wide net. Vaclav looks at her like he’s trying to decide what to tell her.

“Listen,” she tells him, “no one is being angry at you, you are not in trouble, there is not punish. Stop making strategies, stop thinking like her. Just tell me what is going on here.”

Vaclav’s face shows that he is trying to strategize, to scoot his battleship into less dangerous waters, if he can find them.

“What do you mean, ‘stop thinking like her’?” he says. He’s stopped crying, and now he looks angry, at Rasia.

“With the strategies and the conniving! With lying and stealing and cheating, and making this and that happen in secret! Secrets! Vaclav, see! She is like a squirrel, always hiding some rotting secret under this rock, under that tree, under the bed, in the pillowcase! This is not the way!”

“What are you talking about, Mom?” he asks.

“How long she has been back?” she asks.

“She’s not back, she’s always been here! Always been in Brooklyn, she never left.” He says this like Rasia is the jail master, some warden person who has been hiding Lena from him all this time.

“You are avoiding the question. Don’t be stupid. I just found you, in my house, sneaking around when you thought I would be at work, doing sex, which I can’t believe, and with Lena, who you should have told me you were seeing! Don’t be stupid. I am getting answered. How long?”

“I don’t know, a little while,” he says, looking down at the table.

“You have been lying to me. You have been sneaking, and why? I ask you, how is your day today, my loving son, and you say
nothing
, you lying sack of I don’t know what lies as much as you! Why do you hide this from me?”

“Why do you need to know? You need a full report, every day, on who I see, like Big Brother?” This reference is lost on Rasia. What is not lost is Vaclav’s attempt at anger, at teenage rebellion. He wears it poorly, self-consciously, awkwardly. Rasia decides to retaliate with something she wears equally poorly, victimhood, sadness.

“ ‘Need to know’? Oh, Vaclav. I thought that we were close; I thought that you could tell me anything, because you know that my love for you is bigger than the ocean I put between me and my own mother in order to give you this life. I thought, you, my only son—I thought we were close. I had no idea I was so wrong.…” Vaclav stops looking angry at Rasia, and tears come to his eyes again.

Is Rasia pleased that she has made Vaclav cry? No, but she is pleased that he has dropped the act of seeming somehow angry with her, of deflecting all her inquiries with misdirected fury.

“How did this happen?” she says. She lets some moments pass, because she knows he wants to tell her, but he is afraid.

“She called me. We met up after school, I dunno.”

“What about Ryan?” she asks, remembering the name, saying it perfectly. Knowing she is, as they say, out of the picture. Vaclav only sobs harder.

Rasia is feeling very deeply for Ryan, because it is happening a lot to girls who are nice, and kind, and sweet, that they get their hearts pulped like a tomato in a can by boys who leave them for the wild ones who jump up on the beds and say “Woo-hoo, let’s go.”

“So why did you lie about this from me?” Rasia asks.

“It’s
to
me, Mom. You should say ‘lie about this
to
me.’ ”

“Listen,” Rasia says, “it is a truth you are keeping away, so I say, from me. And stop with the English lesson, Mr. American, I’m asking you something. Why keep a secret? You think I wouldn’t approve? You just hate me so much?”

“Obviously I don’t hate you. She didn’t want anyone to know about going to find her parents and stuff, and I don’t know, I don’t know why it had to be a secret, but it did.” He can’t remember anymore why he agreed to keep Lena a secret from his mom, or how he started lying about it.

“What do you mean, ‘going to find her parents’?” Rasia lowers her voice, and she says very, very gently, “Where were you planning to find her parents?”

Vaclav is too exhausted to lie.

“Russia,” he says. Rasia takes a deep breath, calms herself, reminds herself to be glad that Vaclav has told her. She feels, though, like she has opened the freezer and found a land mine on top of the ice trays, and she is now carrying it gently out of her house.

“Russia?” Rasia asks, gently, evenly.

“Yeah.”

Rasia thinks about the country she left, about what she went through to leave it, about all of the things that were awful, especially about all of the hard decisions to be made, and she thinks now about how in a few short days, this girl has dragged her son into a snake pit of lies, and sex, and beyond that, beyond that, she is planning to take him, with her, to Russia, to try to find missing people, the kind of people who abandon their baby, to go poking around the underbelly of a giant ex-Soviet monster.

“You were going to go with her? To Russia? When?”

“I don’t know, Ma, we didn’t buy the tickets yet.”

“When were you going to tell me?” she asks.

“Eventually,” Vaclav says, trailing off, because when he thinks about it, there was no “we’ll tell them eventually” in Lena’s plan. In Lena’s plan, not explicitly but definitely, was the assumption that the mothers, the families, could not know, because they would not allow the plan to happen, and the plan had to happen, so the families had to be lied to. Vaclav remembers leaving the house to sneak out and take the train to Lena’s house early in the morning. He can see now what Lena wanted him to do: to run away, to get on a plane, to not tell anyone, to disappear.
I could never do that to my mom
, he thinks, at the same time he is terrified because he was well on his way, and he knows it.

“She didn’t want to tell her mom either,” he says, to soften things.

“She has a mom?” Rasia says, aching with joy and sadness for Lena to have a mother who is not Rasia.

“She was adopted. She really likes her mom.” Vaclav takes a deep breath. “I don’t know what happened.” Of course he doesn’t. Lena comes back, and she whispers things and she makes him feel good, and she has secrets, and plans, and mystery and power. Rasia wonders, though, if Lena had any idea what was going on, what was happening. Lena is a hurt person. Lena is a sad person. Rasia has a whole section of her heart devoted to tender feelings for Lena.

Rasia knows—well, maybe not knows, but it is her best guess—that Lena had no idea what was going on either. It was not her idea to come and get Vaclav and break him down and make him lie and all this. She is a girl who is lost and is looking for something. Lena is thinking that maybe Vaclav can help her get this something. Beyond that, Lena is operating without full instructions.

FATHER KNOWS BEST
…

V
aclav puts his head down on the table. He tries to understand why Lena would run away from him. He cannot understand. He cannot imagine running away from Lena.

When the door opens, Vaclav knows who it is. He does not pick up his head. Vaclav’s dad comes home at the same time every day.

Oleg, upon arrival in the kitchen, notices that there is nothing cooking for dinner, and that Vaclav and Rasia both look like they have been crying.

“What?” he says, looking at them, going to the freezer for vodka.

No one answers him.

“What is it? What is tragedy?”

“Lena’s back,” Vaclav says, through snot and tears.

“Lena?” Oleg says, as if she weren’t the center of the universe.

“Yeah, Lena,” says Vaclav.

“Oh, the little girl, with the Aunt’s boyfriend who diddled her? This one? That guy was scum. They kill him in prison.”

Rasia’s face is frozen. Vaclav feels like his face is coming apart from his skull.

Oleg looks at Rasia, and he sees that he told something he was not supposed to tell.

“What?” Oleg says.

“He shouldn’t know this,” Rasia says, softly. “I don’t want him to know.”

“Why?” says Oleg. “He is old enough to understand.”

“Oleg,” Rasia says. “Enough.”

“Mom, is that true?” says Vaclav, quietly, carefully. “You said that you called the police because her aunt wasn’t taking care of her.”

“I called the police,” she says. “Because of what I saw.”

“You saw?” he asks. “What did you see?”

“Not what I saw, what I knew. I knew for too long,” she says, and then her head goes down because she is starting to cry. “I knew, and then I saw. So that I could not ignore anymore.”

“What did you know?” Vaclav says. He says this because he is trying to disbelieve the diddling comment. He is wanting it to be something else. He is wanting it to be anything else.