Notes from My Captivity(15)

“Oh,” he says. “Where does he live?”

“He doesn’t,” I say.

“Doesn’t?”

“Doesn’t live.”

Sergei smiles. “The bear ate him?”

I look at him evenly. “Some things,” I tell him, “just aren’t funny.” Sergei’s smile fades. I turn off my Dictaphone and look upriver. It’s not like my father has ever really left my mind these past seven years. But the farther we journey up the river, the more I think of him. Maybe it’s because this trip—not the crazy quest but the scenery and the adventure—would have been right up his alley. Maybe because this is the first step to becoming something he’d be proud of. Maybe because he was taken from me so quickly and so young. I don’t know the reasons, but I feel his presence here, somehow. Maybe when you die you get frequent flier miles everywhere the universe goes.

In the late afternoon, we pass the last remnants of civilization: the settlement of Qualiq. About a dozen small wood-frame houses and what looks to be a central lodge are gathered by the river. As we pass, we hear the howling of dogs. It’s different from the dog howls I’ve heard before. It’s clear and unearthly, some kind of warning or regret.

“The old people believe a dog’s howl means death,” Sergei says.

“In my world,” I counter, “it means someone needs to shut up their fucking dog before the angry neighbors call the police.” It’s gotten colder as the sun moves lower in the sky, and I put my fleece jacket back on. I mumble into my phone: dogs, death, omen.

We have lunch at fifteen knots. No slowing down. I eat cold Stroganoff out of a pouch and wash it down with water from a canteen. Sergei steals my recorder and speaks into it in a high sweet voice that I guess is supposed to be mine.

“We are not yet a full day on the river, but already I am falling for the Russian. As he guides the boat, I see his muscles ripple, and my heart beats faster. How can I speak of my feelings? I am burning with des—”

I grab the recorder away from him and speak into it quickly. “The weakling Russian is quickly proving himself the least popular member of the crew. There is talk of throwing him overboard. Tensions are rising—”

“Hey,” Dan interrupts. “We’re talking over here.”

As we go deeper into the wilderness, the cliffs loom higher around us, sometimes blocking out the sun and immersing us in shadows. I watch Lyubov and Viktor filming. Dan’s right. They are total pros when it’s time to work. They don’t joke around. They speak in low voices. Whenever a rapid approaches, Sergei squints his eyes and looks intense, the crew members hold on to their cameras, and all conversation dies until the rapid releases us and the water smooths.

I realize that my article so far is kind of all over the place. Notes on everything from how bright the flowers look to how crystal-blue the sky, to my flirtation with Sergei to Lyubov’s Fifty Shades of Grey obsession. It’s all very interesting, but Sydney Declay would ask, What is the backbone?

I glance over at Dan. He’s talking about the first encampment they found, about the sole of the men’s Newfield shoe found there. “Size ten,” he says meaningfully. “Grigoriy Osinov’s size.” (Or, as Sydney Declay pointed out, the size of twenty million other Russian men.) The water is gentle in this stretch—so Dan’s not interrupted by the sudden roil of current. He’s gotten so excited, he’s ditched the serious professor demeanor and is talking faster and faster. Gesturing with his hands. He’d be rising up on his Birkenstocks if he weren’t in a boat. His eyes have that strange sort of light in them I’ve seen before when he goes off at the dinner table.

Dan believes. Dan has taken a few artifacts, some rumors, and some interviews and diary entries and made them into a certainty. Maybe I’m jealous of him. I remember the last time I truly believed I could make contact with my father.

After he died, my mother found two grief support groups, one for adults and one for kids, that met at the YMCA. I didn’t have much to say in my group. Everyone had lost a brother or a sibling or a mother or a father. One small girl with wild red hair was there because she’d lost her grandmother, which I didn’t think really measured up. Everyone loses their grandparents. She made up for her low Grief Quotient by having more memories and details of her dead relative than anyone else: the incredibly fluffy biscuits she’d made before she took the recipe to her grave, the flowered dresses she’d wear, the scent of lavender, her habit of giving Christmas gifts in cold-cream boxes, her country expressions like “long in the tooth” and “going to hell in a handbasket,” the old untuned piano in the house she kept spotless, her specific prayer for good fishing weather . . . and on and on and on. Dumb Red-Haired Girl and her grief dominated the group through sheer volume, taking up so much time, the group leader had to continually warn her to wrap it up.

The only interesting thing about the endless grandmother tale was that the old lady had died from a fall down the stairs, not pneumonia or cancer or other old lady things. She’d slipped one day, and they found her at the bottom of the staircase, although Red-Haired Girl dragged out the fall itself with her imagined play-by-play, every flail and cartwheel, even mentioning the shattered ceramic coffee mug found beneath her body.

I said as little as possible. My grief was my own, and I would strictly guard it. The world had fumbled away my father and punished the wrong people for it and buried his story and put a new one in its place: the story of a blond girl who really didn’t mean to hurt anyone.