Notes from My Captivity
Kathy Parks
Dedication
To Michael Parks,
My Vanya
I have a family.
And they have me.
They have me.
They have me.
Part One
* * *
Grigoriy and Nika Osinov were young university professionals when they vanished from Moscow in 1987. They did not lock their door on the way out. Mrs. Osinov neglected to even take her purse. The landlord at their tenement building, which overlooked Tverskaya Street, found the apartment eerily pristine. The table was set. Food still in the refrigerator. And something that, in light of the rumors of sorcery, terrified him: the startling movement of a crow, which had been sitting on the table, suddenly flying out the open window.
Dr. Daniel Westin
New York Times article
* * *
One
My mother puts a lot of stock in dreams. She says she dreamed of me before I was born, knew the color of my eyes and hair. She named me Adrienne in her sleep, and that’s the name she gave me when I came along, blond haired and blue eyed just as she’d predicted. The night I lost my father, she dreamed a heart-monitor line went flat. But I’m not a superstitious person, or one inclined to believe in the magical or the supernatural. So I’m not alarmed, just annoyed, when, the morning my stepfather and I are leaving on our trip, Mom wakes from a nightmare about what will happen to us in Siberia.
She’s talking about it, totally agitated, when I wander in for breakfast. She’s flipping pancakes as she speaks. The pancakes are falling apart. Dan, my stepfather, watches her. He is on the tall side, thin, and his teeth are a tiny bit too big for his mouth, giving people the perception he is smiling.
But he’s not smiling right at the moment. The look on his face says, Oh shit, we were almost home free and now this stupid dream.
Jason, the stepbrother who was foisted on me seven years ago, lounges at the breakfast table in an old T-shirt and board shorts, looking amused. He’s just jealous because he wanted to go on this trip—if only to meet some Russian girls on the way to Siberia—and I’m going instead. Or, I think I’m still going.
“It was terrible!” Mom exclaims.
I glance at Dan. “Let me guess. Mom had a dream.”
“Just a dream,” Dan says quickly, directing that at Mom more than at me, his tone reassuring and just a little dismissive. “Dreams mean nothing. They’re just chemical reactions in the cerebral cortex that occur during REM sleep. . . .”
Great, Dan. Calm her right down with geekspeak.
My real father was a quiet district attorney, a man of few words, with body language that never gave away his game. Dan is a frenetic anthropologist with jazz hands. His hands are busy right now, in the air, helping form his nonsense about REM sleep.
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Mom.” I go to her and touch her shoulder, feel the tension there. She flips another pancake. It tears in half. I’ll be having scrambled pancakes for breakfast, with a side of nightmare.
She shakes her head. “You and Dan were sleeping in tents, and then they came through the woods with knives and sliced your tent open.”
They. She’s talking about the Osinovs, the family of mysterious Siberian hermits Dan has been studying for years. He’s an anthropologist at the University of Denver, and a very well respected one—at least he was . . . until last month.
“Then what?” Jason asks. My stepbrother seems eager to hear about horrible things done to me even in my mom’s subconscious. He’s thoughtful that way.
“I woke myself up screaming.”
“Sorry, Jason,” I say. “She didn’t get to the beheading part.”
“Stop it,” Mom orders, shooting me a fierce look. “This isn’t a joke.”
I roll my eyes. Some girls are stricken with Resting Bitch Face. I’ve got Argument Bitch Face, in which my mild features turn into an unconscious embodiment of Teenage Attitude when I’m about to state my case. And my voice. I can’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice at such times. It’s like trying to take the calories out of a cupcake. What I want to say out loud but cannot is that the crazy, possibly murderous Osinov family won’t sneak up on me with knives because there is no family. They’re just another legend like bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. But I can’t say that out loud because Dan has based his entire academic career on them. Dan’s article “The Vanished: The Story of the Osinovs” was published three years ago in the New York Times and made him a star. That is until Sydney Declay, badass journalist and my own personal hero, wrote the now-famous article in the Washington Post last month debunking the whole thing.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Dan assures her, rising on his toes like he always does when he’s excited, which is often, jazz hands going, words pouring out. “Remember I’ve done it twice, and Adrienne is a smart, responsible girl, and she’ll be with me at all times, please, honey, this is a trip of a lifetime. . . .” He lowers his heels to the ground, raises them again, as though performing an exercise to strengthen his calves.
“A trip of a deathtime,” Jason chimes in.
I glare at him. “Shut up, Jason.”