Right Where You Left Me

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  For my daughters, Lulu and Tillie

  One

  My father specializes in devastation. Not coups and wars—intentional and systematic—but nature’s acts of violence, random and indiscriminate, destroying regions on a whim. Tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes.

  The muted TV broadcasts images of rubble and tears. An anchorwoman with enormous hair wrinkles her brow and mouths something heartbreaking. Death tolls and numbers of the missing. Dad will fly into the eye of the storm.

  When I come home from school, I find him folding sweaters and thick socks, stacking them neatly into his duffel bag. Clothes intended for cold weather. He aligns the hems of a pair of jeans, long enough to fit his six-three frame. His height makes almost everything look miniature in comparison, furniture and ceilings more suited for a dollhouse. I drop my backpack to the floor, and when he walks over for a hug, he doesn’t make me feel small at all.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Earthquake in Ukraine. I’m flying into Luhansk. Want to come with me to the airport?”

  I glance at the TV, at the smoke billowing from what used to be an apartment or office building. Twenty-odd stories now pancake-flat. “Aftershocks?” I’ve become an armchair meteorologist.

  “One so far. Worse than the quake.”

  Dad writes stories that make people weep from guilt and pity. Profiles of Mother Nature’s refugees. The Red Cross’s favorite journalist. When I pick up his passport and press credentials—jeremiah lang, reporter, SAN FRANCISCO TRIBUNE—I want to toss them in the trash or hurl them off the Golden Gate Bridge. Anything to keep him here.

  We head to the car. It’s our routine: He drives to the international terminal and I drive myself home, keeping his car until his return. A temporary ownership, freedom that doesn’t really make up for his absence. At least I’ll have the car for my sleepover tonight at Emma’s. He’s a distracted driver, restless, tapping his foot and messing with the stereo. He becomes obsessed with different kinds of music: jazz, Icelandic pop, Puccini, Amy Winehouse. He researches and reads and downloads, forcing me to listen, lecturing me about the legacy of Etta James and the enduring power of La Bohème.

  My mom says he is more of a teenager than I am. She means this as a compliment.

  We listen to this Cuban hip-hop band that I liked at first but now makes my ears bleed from repetition. If I didn’t love him so much, I’d delete the album from his library. He tells me about the dichotomy that is Cuba, about his recent trip to Havana to do an anniversary piece, of seeing police on every corner. Dad, a baritone storyteller, should work in radio. I am his dedicated audience, listening to details until I feel like his fellow traveler. It’s been ten years since Hurricane What’s-his-name paid a furious visit, but you couldn’t tell now. All Cubans have housing and education and health care. The government values the arts, funding musicians and painters who promote its agenda and locking up those who don’t. Bookstores are state-run, peddling propaganda and nothing more.

  “I drank in Hemingway’s favorite bar, but I couldn’t buy one of his books,” he says. “Hemingway loved Cuba. He had a house there. It’s a museum now. I can’t wait to take you there, Charlotte.”

  “I’ll add it to the safe list.” I feel compelled to travel to the countries he’s visited and document the rebuilding and healing. I’d blow through rolls of film and fill up all the space in my phone with photos. It’s selfish, but I need to replace the images in my head, the ones of orphans and widows and ruin. Thailand, Haiti, Nepal, and Ecuador. Now Ukraine. Havana meets both of our criteria. Dad has enough airline miles for us to fly anywhere at least ten times over. But my parents prefer to take me to what they regard as safer places: Montreal, Oaxaca, Venice.

  I’m not sure how they define “safe.”

  Mom’s pushing for an Alaskan cruise. She wants me to see snow, but not in her homeland. Too many memories. Too much grief.

  He taps the steering wheel to the rhythm. I look out the window, at the concrete and stucco landscape. I pull my camera from my backpack and take the cap off the lens. I started doing this a couple of years ago, taking a good-bye picture each time he leaves. When I get home, I’ll print it out and tape it to the fridge. “Did Mom give you a list?” I ask.

  “She wanted me to bring a second suitcase.” He smiles when he says this.

  They met when he had just started at the newspaper. His editor sent him to St. Petersburg to cover the flooded Neva River. Out of the entire newsroom, Dad was the only one remotely familiar with Russia—he’d taken a class on Russian lit and knew a handful of useless phrases. Apparently, Tolstoy is responsible for his career.

  Mom, just finishing college, was his translator. She still pines for her favorite lotion and tea from home, brands too obscure to buy online.

  “Your mom said to tell you she’ll be home late tomorrow night, after her cooking class,” he says. “I made a lasagna for you guys. I should be back in a week. Maybe earlier.”

  Mom is a baker, and Dad loves to cook. Dad travels the world, but Mom is more absent. I’m an only child, accustomed to being alone in the house, wandering the halls like a ghost. Sometimes I like it this way.

  But not today.

  We exit the freeway, and I want him to drive at a snail’s pace, inching along at five miles per hour. I’ll endure more of his hip-hop. I’ll ask more questions about Cuba and Ukraine. I’ll recite trivia about extreme weather. I’ll promise to go to Dad’s alma mater, NYU, even though I won’t know if I got in for a few weeks, even though I really want to stay home and go to Berkeley. I’ll even speak Mom’s Russian.

  I spot the airport, magnificent with its glass facade and dangling vines, and I want him to slam on the brakes. I don’t want him to leave. I don’t want to spend the week alone in a silent house with my mother. But I don’t tell him this. I don’t say, Stay. I’ve inherited Mom’s light blue eyes and reserve, so I just reach for his hand until we idle in front of a skycap.

  “I’ll be back in a few days, kiddo.”

  “I’ll be here,” I say. “Right where you left me.”

  He kisses my cheek. I tell him I love him. Before I climb into the driver’s seat, I snap his picture. He gives me his usual over-the-top grin. I watch him carry his duffel bag through the doors, beneath the departures sign, until he disappears into a crowd of tourists.

  I don’t leave until an airport cop pats the hood of the car and waves me away.

  Two

  Dad is a bridge between my mom and me. A conduit, nearly electric in intensity, drawing us together. Without him, we circle around each other, two planets suddenly out of orbit.

  Even though I’m tired from staying up way too late at Emma’s, and wiped from an essay test in English, I wait up long past dinner, watching the earthquake coverage and refreshing a couple of news sites, but she doesn’t come home until late, too late for me to stay up. My friends, all on the school newspaper, stay up with me, texting details we see on TV, searching for a glimpse of Dad.

  It’s too late to call them, especially on a weeknight, even though we’re awake, texting so fast that I almost can’t keep up.

  I want to text Josh, who’s also on the paper, but we’ve never texted before. Five days ago, he kissed me.
For the first time. Hopefully not the last. Only earthquakes could preoccupy me more than Josh. I don’t have his number.

  I’m a huge fangirl of this one news anchor who wears frosty pink lipstick and matching dresses. She reads the teleprompter like she means every word. She’s tender but strong. I think she’s perfect. My friends disagree, describing her as sentimental and a bad dresser. They can be a little judgmental.

  I wake early to sounds in the kitchen. “Dobroye utro,” Mom says. Good morning. She offers me a distracted smile, which, with her asymmetrical eyes, a leftover from her stroke, creates the illusion that she’s winking. Years of yoga got rid of her limp, but there’s nothing she can do about her face.

  She’s disfigured from giving birth to me. I swear I was born into this world feeling guilty for hurting her, even if I didn’t mean to. Even if it was out of my control.

  Nature can be cruel to the earth and to the body.

  She’s been up for hours, cooking downstairs until Nadine, who owns the bakery, arrives to open the store. They’re kindred, Mom and Nadine. Both from St. Petersburg. Both baking prodigies. Both preferring quiet over conversation. My parents moved into the flat before I was born. Mom started helping downstairs out of homesickness and grief, restless with a newborn, in desperate need of company. Over time, my parents bought the apartment and Mom took on more responsibility at the bakery. She’ll buy it whenever Nadine is ready to pass it down. I used to bake with them more, before I joined the paper and the cross-country team. Now I’m there only on Saturdays, Nadine’s day off. It feels like a family business.

  If I cared about flour, sugar, and butter more than running and photography, maybe we’d be kindred too. I share the same serious streak. Mom says it’s because we’re Russian. I have an old soul. I’m self-contained. Dad thinks I’m serious because I’m an only child, a mini-adult. Maybe we’d be a normal family if my sister had lived, the two of us playing and screeching and fighting like other kids.

  When I was in first grade, I dumped a bag of flour over my head, a dusty ghost hoping for a laugh, anything to bring out that goofy smile I know Mom lets loose once in a while. And she did. She helped me clean up, and we spent the day baking. She sounded giddy when she relayed the story to Dad and then, later, Nadine. But the next day, we returned to our serious silence.

  Even though she’s only fifteen years older than Mom, Nadine is like my grandmother. When I was little, I called her Babushka. When she turned fifty-five, Nadine made me stop, saying it made her feel too old. I call her Tatya Nadine now, aunt. Still, she mothers us, Mom the most.

  Flour dusts Mom’s shirt, and she smells of chocolate and baked apples and sugar. I want to bottle the scent and carry it with me.

  “How was last night?” I don’t ask what time she finally came home from teaching her cooking class at the cultural center. I don’t insist that she have a curfew until Dad returns, even though I want to.

  She gives me this look, one I’m used to. It’s like she knows my face but not my name—like I’m an acquaintance she hasn’t seen in a while. I want to say, Hi, it’s me, Charlotte. Remember? You gave birth to me seventeen years ago. I don’t have a clue what’s in her head.

  “Khoroshiy.” Nice. “We had a good group of people for a Wednesday. Almost a dozen.”

  A loaf of bread, fresh from the oven downstairs, steams on the counter. I reach for it and begin to rip off a piece.

  “Stop, Charlotte,” Mom says, reaching for a knife. I should know better. It’s bad luck to tear bread with your hands—you must use a knife. If you don’t, something awful will happen, so bad that your life will be broken. Mom’s not normally so superstitious, but whenever Dad’s away, she follows all of her old-world customs. There are too many for me to remember, especially when I haven’t had coffee.

  “There’s sesame roll in the oven,” she says as she slices me a piece of bread.

  “Do you have anything going on tonight?” I ask, brushing the hair out of my face.

  “Nadine and I need to go shopping. I’ll bring you home some mu shu pork. Vash lyubimyy.” Your favorite.

  She says this with her back to me, busy peeling a pear over the sink.

  “Have you heard from Dad?” I ask. “I put his good-bye picture on the fridge.”

  There. She turns around. Now she looks at me—really looks at me—and shakes her head. “It’s too soon. The power and cell towers are still down. Maybe one of the TV reporters will loan him a phone.” She walks over and smiles at the photo. “That’s a good one.”

  Dad writes about the aftermath of disasters, taking backseat to the breaking-news reporters who haul generators across oceans. He stays after they broadcast their flurry of initial coverage. Dad’s articles remind us that tragedy lasts longer than a news cycle. Some people call his work fluffy and sentimental. I want to push them into an active volcano.

  “Will you text me when you hear from him?” I ask.

  She must hear the worry in my voice because she smiles softly. “Of course,” she says with a nod. She’s graceful but precise in her movements, something she learned from studying dance. Mom always looks pretty, even wearing an apron and sweaty from a hot kitchen. Her hair’s in a high ponytail, and it makes her look younger, more like one of the grad students at the nearby college. She slides the peeled pear across the counter. “Eat, Charlotte. You don’t want to be late for school.”

  We settle into yet another spell of silence. It hangs around us like wallpaper. As I pour a cup of coffee, I’m overcome with the urge to howl or yodel or scream—anything to fill the room with noise. I miss Dad, who barrels through the apartment, insisting we listen to public radio or music or passages from news articles or awful jokes and puns.

  “I better shower,” I say, leaving the room so quickly that my coffee almost sloshes over the mug’s brim.

  When I reemerge dry and dressed, Mom’s gone. She left some sesame roll, warm as I take a bite. On a sticky note, she wrote, Have a good day at school. I fold it in half and slip it into my pocket.

  A squirrel performs a high-wire act on one of the slim branches of our giant spruce tree. I think we meet eyes for the briefest moment, and I convince myself it’s Mom in animal form. A game I play: casting my family as various Russian folktale characters, people and spirits from books Mom read aloud to me when I was in elementary school.

  She is Samovila, the elusive, shape-shifting forest goddess, who might visit a normal human—if they’re lucky. If they interest her. If she has some free time. She might share her magical gifts. Might. Only if she deems them worthy to listen to her stories and share her secrets.

  I turn around before the squirrel runs away.

  * * *

  When I climb into Dad’s car, it’s too easy to imagine what could go wrong: a head-on collision, running over a bicyclist, some other catastrophe. I’m not a paranoid person—the opposite, actually—but the hours following Dad’s departures are always filled with the awareness of how everything can change in an instant.

  Continental plates collide, wildfires consume, tsunamis swallow.

  Sisters don’t wake up from naps.

  School is my antidote. Boredom and monotony have a way of killing my perspective. I distract myself with more important things, like crappy quiz scores, college acceptance/rejection anxiety, and how my locker neighbor is hoarding large volumes of candy.

  I hear Emma before I see her, the tumble of books and subsequent profanity announcing her arrival. Chaos follows her like a loyal dog.

  I don’t bother racing to her aid. At least one or two boys will scramble to pick up her stuff. I’m equally cute, or so I’m told, but Emma’s goofy, her clumsiness more slapstick and endearing. Dad says I hide behind my camera too much. If I’m going to be a journalist like him, I need to ask more questions. I need to see the whole story and not just the shot.

  Emma’s hair is stacked high on her head, a messy bun that somehow looks perfect. With her long, wavy red hair, she looks like she stepped ou
t of a Botticelli painting. Her mom must be on a business trip because Emma’s wearing a pair of ripped jeans and an almost sheer T-shirt—clothes, according to her mother, meant for the weekend, not for school.

  Her parents keep a spotless house. They’re minimalists, appreciating what they call “clean lines,” which means bare walls and expensive brown furniture. It’s the kind of house you see in magazines. I think it’s stark and cold. Sitting in the living room feels like wearing a pair of stilettos, shoes that force you to walk slowly and with caution.

  I call Emma’s house “the bunker.” Brushed concrete walls and vaulted ceilings. It seems safe in the event of nuclear war or zombie apocalypse.

  Mom hates it because it reminds her of the Soviet Union, that utilitarian architecture she says was designed to house the masses.

  Unlike their severe decorating style, Emma’s parents are warm and generous. They let her and her brother decorate their rooms to their liking. Mr. and Mrs. Archer impose two rules: Dirty clothes belong in the hamper—not on the floor—and food must be disposed of on a daily basis. No rotting pizza or moldy Girl Scout cookies. Thin Mints spoil with remarkable speed.

  “I’m starving,” Emma says. “I’ve been living on Pop-Tarts and takeout. Oh, and I got a C-plus on my stupid chemistry exam.”

  “That’s still better than last time,” I say. Emma nails anything that involves words, but when it comes to numbers or labs, she gets paralyzed. She has the most lopsided SAT scores on the planet—near perfect in verbal, bottom tenth percentile in math. Right now, the periodic table is killing her. She waits till the last minute no matter how hard we try to get her to start early. Her parents won’t find out unless she gets a D. If they did, they’d hire an army of tutors and we’d never see Emma again. We won’t let that happen.

  We carry our trays of barely edible food toward the spot in the cafeteria claimed for the Editorial Roundtable, the name we gave ourselves, “we” being those of us who run the school newspaper. We’re exclusive and terrifying. We have the power to publish an unflattering photo or elevate someone’s social status with a single story.