Right Where You Left Me Read online

  He smiles and shakes his head. “They actually called me.”

  “Mr. Rodriguez, we’re going to ask you to stop there,” the round one says.

  Mom sits up in her seat. “We have a right to know everything that you’ve told Miguel. What are you doing in Ukraine? Vy govorite Ukrainskiy? Do you speak Ukrainian?”

  At the sound of Russian, the agents exchange another look. “We have people on the ground,” the tall one says.

  It doesn’t matter what she’s wearing. When Mom sits with her ballet spine, her head still, her eyes clear, everyone pays attention. Yes, she’s beautiful, but what they really react to is this. Her presence. It’s the strangest combination of poise and fragility. I don’t know how else to describe it. Nadine says it’s a sign of someone who was once very strong and then broke, shattered inside, which is what happened when my sister died and Mom had her stroke.

  I don’t want this porcelain-doll Mom. I want the Mom from the other night, the one who watched two sci-fi movies with me. The one who polished off a dozen cookies. The one who made me believe we might get through this.

  The agents sit attentively while Mom details her family tree, relatives in St. Petersburg, a cousin in government. The agents look intimidated and impressed. The tall one takes notes. The sidekick stays quiet, and he hasn’t looked at anyone but me and Mom.

  “Why did they call you?” I ask Uncle Miguel. “And not Mom or the government? What do they want?”

  He takes a deep breath and pauses. I notice that he doesn’t look at the agents, just at me, and I understand that Uncle Miguel won’t hide anything. I’ll hound him until I know every last detail. I’m like Dad that way.

  “They have demands,” he says. “Ransom and other things. They want the newspaper to pay. They want publicity for their cause.”

  “Which is?” I ask.

  “They want to be a part of Russia,” Uncle Miguel says. “Not Ukraine. Like most wars, they’re fighting over land.”

  The tall agent shakes his head. “Mr. Rodriguez—”

  “He’s talking to me,” I say. “That’s good about the ransom, right?” I look at everyone in the room. “Just pay it.”

  The round one looks at me like I’m a kindergartener, and the urge to scream returns.

  “The United States does not negotiate with terrorists. I’m sorry. I know this is hard to hear, but there will be no ransom. We’re doing everything we can to bring your father home. This is Raj Singh. He is a family liaison and will be your contact going forward. He’ll keep you informed of all developments. You can call him anytime. Know that this is a priority.”

  Raj Singh leans forward, places his business card on the table, and shakes our hands. He can’t be that much older than me—midtwenties, tops. He looks younger than Megan. With his perfectly combed dark hair and perfectly square jaw and perfectly long and proportioned nose, he looks like a prom king. Someone who belongs on a college campus rather than in my living room. I wonder if this is his first job. If we’re his first case.

  “I don’t care what the policy is. Just pay the ransom,” I say. I want to sound strong, but it comes out a little desperate, a little pleading. “Bring my dad home.”

  The agents shake their heads in unison. They’re choreographed in their movements, well rehearsed in disappointing the powerless.

  This time, it’s Uncle Miguel who takes my hand. I don’t ask any more questions of the agents, knowing they’ll give vague answers. I’ll save them for him.

  Twelve

  Mom’s in the kitchen. She faces me, and I see that she’s in a whirlpool of grief. Her eyes are so swollen, she looks like she flew through a windshield. She pulls another loaf of kalach from the oven. It warms my hand, and I realize I’m freezing. Goose bumps line my skin, and I feel so shaken that my teeth might chatter. I need something to ground me, but Mom is too unhinged to help.

  “What are you going to do now?” I ask after taking a bite. I want the flavor to comfort me like usual, but it doesn’t. I barely taste it.

  “I need to make some phone calls. My cousin is going to try to get information.”

  “Viktor?” I ask. I’ve never been to Russia—I’ve never even seen snow—but I am familiar with Mom’s family tree. Only her sister, Tatya Rayna, visits, and she hasn’t been here since freshman year. “I thought he was in the agriculture department.”

  “Government is government,” she says. “He knows people.” Mom furrows her brow, a relief, because it makes her look serious, which is close enough to looking strong. “Why don’t you go for that run? Running always makes you feel better.”

  “Now?” I ask. At first, I’m hurt, and then I see the tears stockpiled behind her lashes and understand that she needs the apartment to herself.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Before traveling, it’s good luck to sit for a minute and quietly prepare for a journey. Dad never did this, and although I’m only going to the beach, I close my door and rest on my bed. It is a gift for Mom, along with my absence.

  When I walk past her in the kitchen, she’s facing the sink and window, head bent, crying. I want to stay. I’d do anything to comfort her. To feel less alone.

  I go downstairs and into the bakery. Tatya Nadine sits behind the counter. I don’t know who needs her more: Mom or me.

  “Will you check on her in a little while?” I ask. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Come here, moya lyubov’.” My love. When she wraps her arms around me, I allow myself to cry—really cry.

  “I feel like I’m losing her, too,” I say. “She’s going to stop talking again. I know it.”

  Nadine shakes her head. “No, that won’t happen. I know your mother. She’s stronger now. Nothing is like losing a child. And you can’t give up hope. Your father is alive. He’ll come home.”

  I cling to her, holding even tighter, worrying I’ll bruise her plump arms. Tatya Nadine knows Mom better than anyone, maybe even Dad. She nursed Mom after my sister died and then again when I almost killed her.

  Lena died of crib death at eleven months old. Mom had me a year later, way too soon, according to her doctor. I don’t know much, hardly any details. Just how long she labored to have me, the emergency cesarean section, a staggering amount of lost blood. And then, after I was born, how the preeclampsia caused her blood pressure to soar, setting off a stroke that almost took her from us forever.

  The first time Mom stopped speaking—not a word for two and a half months—was after Lena died. Then she became pregnant with me and her voice returned. The second was for four months after I was born, the first sixteen weeks of my life. I entered the world without hearing her voice, coos, lullabies. Nothing but her heartbeat and tears.

  They blamed the stroke. I blame myself.

  I’ve heard bits and pieces of the story, of Mom’s grief, of her periods of silence. I’ve overheard more—hushed phone calls to her sister in Russia, whispered confessions. That part of her wishes she had died instead of surviving the stroke. That sometimes she can’t bear to look at me without seeing my dead sister. She worries I was born with a curse, that I was born a potercha, the troubled spirit of a dead child who takes the form of a blackbird that summons lightning and storms. When a blackbird rests on a windowsill, Mom leaves the room, pale-faced and unwilling to meet my eyes.

  Sometimes Mom drinks too much wine before she calls her sister. Sometimes she isn’t as quiet as she intends.

  While Mom worries that I’m a potercha, I wonder if she’s Umershey Materi. The Dead Mother.

  A long time ago in some Russian peasant village, a couple had a baby boy, but the wife wasn’t as lucky as Mom. She died in childbirth, and the baby was left both motherless and hungry. He wouldn’t drink from anyone else. The father was wrecked at the thought of also losing his son.

  Desperate, he hired an old nanny to help take care of his baby, who still wouldn’t drink and cried all day long. They tried everything to get him to drink water or cow’
s milk. Nothing worked. But the baby slept through the night.

  Even though the baby cried all day long, he plumped up; he wasn’t dying of starvation. After several more peaceful nights, the father and nanny freaked out.

  When the baby went to sleep, both of them huddled on the nursery floor. They heard the door creak open and saw a shadowed figure approach the cradle. She lifted the baby to her chest. He cooed and cuddled. Through the darkness, the father and nanny tried to identify the woman, but it was too dark to see. They speculated about who this mystery woman might be. Why did she come in secret? If she was a wet nurse, couldn’t she help during the day? She was saving the baby’s life, but her secrecy scared the hell out of them.

  The next night, the nanny had the idea of placing a candle near the crib. Right on time, the door opened at midnight, and they saw her, the baby’s dead mother dressed in her burial clothes. She held the baby as he nursed, only now the father and nanny understood that he drank from a dead woman. They could see her face, her features still clear, and recognized her bittersweet smile and expression of a love that transcends death.

  Who knew how long she would have come. Weeks? Months? Years? Maybe, only in moonlight, she would have taken care of him throughout his childhood. But they would never know, because as soon as the candlelight revealed the ghost mother, she vanished with a look of anguish worse than death. The father rushed to the cradle, ready to comfort his son, but as he lifted him up, he saw that the baby was dead.

  Part of Mom died with Lena, as though our mother continues to care for her beyond the grave. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her to dress me in Lena’s clothes, wrap me in her blankets, and lower me into Lena’s crib every night. The thought splits my soul in two.

  I want to measure her heart, see if it’s reached capacity. How much grief can Mom endure? First Lena. Maybe Dad. Am I enough, her potercha? Or will I always remind her of what she’s lost?

  I don’t tell Tatya Nadine any of this. I don’t dare. Some things shouldn’t be spoken out loud. I learned that the hard way.

  I let her hold me, grateful for her like I’ve never been. When she lets go, I ask her to go upstairs and check on Mom.

  I don’t run. I walk to the tulip garden, wishing the flowers had kept blooming for me. But I know wishes are nothing but fantasy. Something to cling to when everything is hard. When it feels like nothing will ever get better.

  I remember Megan’s words again. Be positive.

  Dad is alive. He isn’t trapped beneath ten stories of bricks. The United States government regards his return as a priority.

  Vozvrashchat’sya, Dad. Come back.

  Thirteen

  Deciding I need the exercise, I sprint home. My feet pound the asphalt, and I run faster than I have in all my cross-country years. Stay positive. Come home.

  Mom and I will get through this together. We’ll watch hours of movies. We’ll eat a staggering amount of baked goods. We’ll polish off the rest of Dad’s lasagna and we’ll order Chinese. We’ll hunker down and wait for Raj Singh, FBI Family Liaison.

  Dad will come home.

  The apartment door is unlocked again, and I bound in, eager to reassure Mom. I’m filled with adrenaline and hope. I find her at the kitchen table, alone, drinking a mug of tea. She looks worse than before, puffy and swollen from crying.

  “Good. You’re back. That was a long run. You were gone for a couple of hours. Are you hungry?” She rises and picks up a plate, filling it with apple strudel.

  I accept the food and take a bite. “Where’s Tatya?” I ask.

  “I sent her home so I could sleep, only I couldn’t sleep,” she says, smiling weakly. “But I’m going to try again now that you’re here.” Mom squeezes my shoulder as she leaves the room. I listen as she walks down the hallway, her faint footsteps disappearing when she shuts her bedroom door.

  Once, grief claimed my mother and left me with a ghost. Please don’t steal her from me again.

  The last thing I want to do is sit alone in the living room, so I copy Mom and sequester myself away. We’re in a prison or a convent or some other confined place, cut off from each other. Maybe cut off from everything. Only I leave my door open—an invitation in case she ventures out. I wish she’d do the same.

  My room is a tornado-worthy disaster. Dirty clothes and stacks of books and paper everywhere. Funnel-cloud-level damage. When did I rip my comforter? Then I see the stray pair of scissors used for my last collage.

  I’d returned the scattered photos of Dad to the box, but I couldn’t bring myself to tuck them away in the closet. Especially not now. I need him close, and his portrait is all I have.

  About a dozen containers are strewn across the floor just waiting to be tripped over. When I lift the lid of an untouched carton, I spot the prints from our Hawaii vacation last year. Mom and Dad in scuba gear. So many sunsets and sea turtles.

  Then I see the ones from the volcano. My daredevil father too close to the edge. I swear Mom almost died of a heart attack. She actually got mad at him—really, really angry—because he wouldn’t listen. She called him a child and huffed to the car. It took him ten minutes to coax her back out.

  Dad’s kind of clueless. It took him a few minutes to realize Mom was genuinely pissed. And in those minutes, the sky deepened to tangerine and crimson and prom-dress pink. The kind of sunset reserved for wall calendars and postcards. My goofy father raised his hands to the sky like he had painted those colors himself. I snapped and snapped and snapped, and every one of those pictures turned out perfectly. Too bad Mom was glaring at him from the rental car.

  That’s when I remember Mom’s book of Russian folktales. I pull it down and run my hand over the gold cover, flipping through the pages until I find it. Zsharptitsa. The Firebird, whose eyes sparkle like jewels and whose feathers are the same colors as that Hawaiian sunset. The Firebird’s song heals the sick, curing the most serious diseases, even blindness. In the middle of the night, Zsharptitsa flies through the sky, so magical that one single feather can illuminate a dark room. When it stretches its wings, it outshines the brightest star.

  It isn’t a good omen—it’s the best damn omen in the world.

  Old bio quizzes and English papers cover my printer. I sweep them all to the floor. I scan the ornate illustrations in the book and then the photos of Dad in Hawaii.

  I haven’t played with this technique since camp. It takes a few tries before I remember how to overlap the images, layering Dad and the Firebird. At first, the color is all wrong and it looks like a kindergartner’s attempt at Photoshop. When I fiddle with the saturation, the images blend together, like Dad and the bird share the same sky. Finally, it works.

  I press print and wait for the thick photo paper to emerge.

  There he is, Dad, smiling with arms raised to the sky, to the Firebird, which soars above him, almost celestial. The Firebird keeping him safe. Zsharptitsa will bring him home.

  Fourteen

  Mom picks the strangest moments to act like a regular, engaged mother. I want to stay home from school. An understandable desire given that the alternative is spending the day keeping this secret, staying quiet as my friends relentlessly ask for updates. Mom insists, though. She even packs me lunch.

  There’s no way in hell I’m going. Emma and Isaac will sense something’s up—they’re like dogs that way—and get the truth out of me. Then I’d need to keep them quiet. Impossible.

  I’ve never skipped school before. Mom and Dad let me stay home whenever I said I didn’t feel well, not something Mom is likely to do now.

  Mom gives me a listless hug. Once I’m in Dad’s car, I text Josh asking if he’d be up for a day of not talking. Does he want to see the Diane Arbus photography exhibit at SFMOMA? How invested is he in his attendance record?

  He replies quickly.

  Yes. Maybe. Not at all.

  * * *

  I pick him up a half hour later. Josh lives in Presidio Heights. The car strains up what feels like t
he steepest incline in the city, and I circle the block three times looking for his house.

  Tucked between two enormous quasi-mansions sits a small stucco house out of place in the opulent neighborhood, a pebble among boulders.

  I knock three times before he opens the door. He’s out of breath. “Sorry,” he says. “I was on the phone with my brother. He’s calling in my absence. I can always count on him to cover for me. He’s saved my ass on several occasions.”

  Josh smiles and ushers me in. I take in the mishmash of styles. Old antiwar protest posters hang above elegant antique furniture, the kind on display at the Palace of Fine Arts. A tapestry covers a chair, but it doesn’t fully cover the intricately carved wood and velvet cushion. It’s part Haight-Ashbury hippie apartment and part Pacific Heights formal parlor.

  He watches me take it in. “This was my grandparents’ house. It was never supposed to stay. They built a bunch of bungalows after the 1906 earthquake. Most of them got torn down. My parents don’t believe in throwing stuff away—good furniture, anyway. So they kept all of my grandparents’ stuff. But they’re Berkeley people, you know, activists. My dad calls it ‘intergenerational decorating.’ My room is all IKEA, though.”

  I blush at the mention of his bedroom.

  “So, you going to tell me what’s going on? Why you’re skipping school for the first time?”

  “How do you know it’s my first time?”

  “Let’s just say I’m observant.” He gives me a smile, and I find myself relaxing even though I’ve had all of my muscles clenched for hours. Even though I barely slept again. Even though I can’t believe I’m standing in the middle of Josh’s living room.

  “It’s got to be a nontalking day,” I say.