The Borrower Page 17

  “I love Russian breakfast!” Ian said.

  “This is not Russian breakfast!” Leo shouted. “This is how Russians eat in America!”

  We ate better than we had since we left Hannibal. Leo forced two beers on me, after which I knew I couldn’t drive yet. And Ian didn’t want to leave. He went down to see the ferrets again, asked Marta if she had any pictures of Russia (why, yes, she did) and asked Leo to explain what, exactly, communism was. This took about an hour of monologue, but at least did not include my father’s joke about the cat and the mustard. I’d helped Marta with the dishes, Leo had smoked another cigar, and Marta had started putting out plates for lunch, but apart from Ian’s foray into the basement, we hadn’t even left the kitchen. I suddenly wondered if the shoebox was still there. I hadn’t noticed it on my way down.

  Marta put a glass of milk in front of Ian, and he beamed up at her. This might well have been his idea of heaven. “There!” Leo said. “A glass for Glass!”

  “What?” Ian said.

  “A glass for Glass,” I repeated, willing him to hear the capital G.

  “I don’t get it.”

  I said, “Your last name. Is Glass.” But by this point, Marta and Leo were glancing at each other, amused.

  I knew, though, that I didn’t need to worry. This was the thing about people who did favors for each other, who passed illicit shoeboxes in the night: they didn’t ask questions if you didn’t. And if anyone in a uniform ever came looking for you, they wouldn’t say, “My God, is she okay? I have an envelope with her last address!” They’d say, “We no speak good English. No, we never hear of such a young lady. We—how you say?—never met.”

  It was two o’clock when we got up from the table. I reminded Ian that his grandmother was waiting for him and thanked the Labaznikovs for their hospitality. Back in the living room, I saw that the shoebox was gone.

  Of course it was, I realized. It was nothing more than the cigars Leo was smoking at breakfast. Cuban cigars that my father must have picked up in Argentina, a thank-you gift to Leo for some favor, past or future. Then again, there was probably some money stuffed in there for padding, too, maybe a few illegitimate receipts. I didn’t have the energy to care anymore. Who was I to blame him for his cigars, his money laundering—I, who was laundering a child?

  When we had our coats on and bags in our hands and were almost out the door, Marta said, “We have to take a picture!” She scurried upstairs for a camera, and for a moment I considered sprinting out the door with Ian before our presence could be immortalized. If Leo hadn’t been there, I might have. I tried to catch Ian’s eye, but he was systematically squeezing the leaves of all the plants in the Labaznikovs’ living room to see if they were real. Leo said to me, “Lucy, we will see if you remember. What is three Russians?”

  “A revolution.”

  “Very good! And here we are three Russians in this house!”

  Marta appeared again with the camera and arranged us in a row, me and Ian and Leo, and backed up to snap the picture. Just as she said, “One, two, three!” Ian put his hands in front of his face and peeked through the slits of his fingers. The camera went off, and Marta said, “Oh, one more so we can see you!”

  “I’m very self-conscious,” Ian said. Of the thirty or so pictures of the Winter Book Bash that were currently on the display board at the Hannibal Public Library, approximately twenty featured Ian Drake sticking his face in front of someone else’s and displaying a happy mouthful of orthodontia. “I’m afraid the camera will steal my soul.”

  “He’s just shy,” I cut in before they could ask what they were teaching, anyway, in the schools these days. I thought what a strange photo this would seem in the newspapers, if we were ever caught. Hull, Drake (behind hands), and unidentified Russian man at private home near Pittsburgh. Note suspicious cowlicks in hair of both kidnapper and victim.

  Marta let it go at that, and we got out the door with a series of smothering Russo-Italian hugs and a brown paper bag full of sandwiches. “What is the difference between a piano and a fish?” Leo shouted from the porch when we were halfway to the car.

  “You can’t tune a fish!” Ian called back. He beamed at me. This was clearly the finest individual moment of his life.

  “Poka!” the Labaznikovs called. “Udachi!”

  As we backed out, I caught a look at myself in the rearview. My hair was even worse than I thought, greasy clumps jutting out from my head at odd angles. “We look pretty terrible,” I said.

  “We’re the Ferret-Glo twins!” And he proceeded to make up a song about it.

  27

  The BFG

  It felt awful being back on the road. With every mile, our car was starting to feel more like a submarine, something we weren’t even allowed to emerge from. Outside our little capsule was a different element, a substance from which our lungs were not suited to extract oxygen. Inside, we were cramped and coated with grime and cracker crumbs. Our bodies had taken on the contours of the car seats.

  I realized I had to bite the bullet and call Rocky when I knew he’d answer. He never worked Friday afternoons, even when we were short-staffed, even on those rare occasions when the children’s librarian vanished to commit a felony. Ian and I stopped for milkshakes at a McDonald’s with an outdoor playground, and I sat on a picnic bench to call while Ian swung from the monkey bars. He wasn’t able to pull himself across them, just swing from one bar until his arms gave out and he landed in the wood chips. Then he’d climb back up and do it again.

  “Rocky!” I said when he answered.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Lucy.” He never needed me to identify myself. Had he written me out of his world this quickly, or was he just mad that I hadn’t called yet?

  “Oh. You sound hoarse. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, just a little exhausted. Still in Chicago.” I told him again about my sick friend, even said her name was Janna Glass, and made it sound like a planned trip. An extended illness. I said I’d donated bone marrow yesterday, but left out anything about her son or driving east. I felt like I should be making a list of what I said to whom. “It hurt like all hell,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “Is everything okay downstairs?”

  He was quiet, which was my opportunity to act surprised and concerned, but I didn’t have much air in me. I managed, “What’s wrong?”

  “Look,” he said, “I have to ask you something. Okay, Ian Drake? The boy who hangs out downstairs all the time?”

  “Sure.”

  “He’s—no one exactly knows where he is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s missing.”

  “Do you mean the library doesn’t know, or his parents don’t know?”

  “Neither. He’s, like, officially missing. Police and everything.”

  “Shit. Did he run away?”

  “Well, there’s some kind of note, but they’re not saying what it was.”

  “So what did you need to ask me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You started by saying you had to ask me something.”

  “Oh. I guess I meant tell you. Are you okay?”

  “No. Not really. That’s pretty awful. How long has he been gone?”

  “A few days. I think he vanished while you were still in town, even. Did you see him on Sunday?”

  I tried to think, honestly. Monday was when I found him . . . He must have been there Sunday afternoon to hide, but Sarah-Ann was working at closing, not me. “No. He came in Friday, I think. He only returned books, which is really unusual for him. But the records would be in the computer.” They actually would, this time, since the books he returned were ones for his school report on the Cherokee. “Didn’t you look?”

  “Yeah. I just thought you might have talked to him or something.”

  “No. He was just in and out. If he were running away, you’d think he would have checked out some books. Have they—have the police, like, come in
to the library? Have you talked to them?”

  “It was weird. They talked to Loraine for a couple minutes, and then they specifically asked to talk to Sarah-Ann. They said the mom wanted them to talk to her.”

  “How bizarre. Did they?”

  “For about two seconds. If I could’ve rolled downstairs to eavesdrop, I would have. My guess is they realized pretty fast how batty she is and just gave up. She was asking me later if Ian was the Asian kid with the crutches. Seriously, I would have paid cash money to see that police interview.”

  I wanted to laugh, but I reminded myself I was supposed to be in shock. “Do they think he ran away?”

  “I don’t know what they think. I think he ran away.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Didn’t you say they were so terrible to him? The parents? And there was that weird letter you found.”

  I was silent for a while, which I figured was the best way not to talk myself into a corner.

  “Lucy?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I know you two are close.”

  I said, “I have to go,” and hung up while I was still ahead.

  Ian was navigating us in a straight line now, right along the interstate, where before he’d been taking loopy detours. He had the atlas open on his lap.

  About forty miles later, when I thought my right foot would fall off, Ian started a game. “So, you know how a white horse is worth fifty points?”

  “In what?”

  “When you’re driving. It’s fifty points. That’s the most you can get. And a pink Cadillac is also fifty.”

  “Okay,” I said, remembering this vaguely from my childhood.

  “A car with one headlight is ten points. But these are all only if you see them first. You have to call it out.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, the way I play, there are a couple others. Any word you see that rhymes with either of our names, first or last, that’s worth thirty. And it’s forty-five points if you see our exact same car. But it has to be the exact same, not just the same color.”

  He was talking so fast it was hard to understand him. “What’s wrong with you?” I said. “Why are you doing that?” He had his hands crossed over his chest, grabbing opposite shoulders.

  “It’s just a little hard to breathe still,” he said. “I don’t think it was just the ferrets. I’m actually low on my puffer.”

  “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 ga
tes 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.