Notes from My Captivity(41)
It’s time to put my plan into motion. Very quietly I crawl across the floor toward him, being careful not to rest too much weight on my broken arm. I just need to get him to like me—as a person or an object of intense desire or whatever—and then have him get me the hell out of here. I’m amazed at my own courage as I approach him and whisper in his ear.
“Menya zovut Adrienne.”
My name is Adrienne.
Yes, I know his little sister already announced my name to the family, but it wouldn’t hurt to say it again. I have a name. I am a person. I am an object of desire.
His eyes pop open and I jerk instinctively. He moves his gaze to me, stares at me.
“Menya zovut Adrienne,” I say again.
He shakes his head. I’ve scared him. Maybe I’ve been too aggressive. Came off like those girls at parties you find draped all over the football players. The ones the other girls talk about. I start to crawl back to my place on the floor, but suddenly he grabs my arm.
I stifle a shriek as he pulls me toward him.
“Menya zovut Vanya,” he whispers in my ear.
Fifteen
The next few days pass in relative peace. Clara seems delighted to have me around. Vanya is openly curious with short-lived stares and then bursts of shyness, his face flushing red. Scowly grumbles and growls. Silently I experiment with new variations of his nickname. Scowletariat. Scowl Doggy Dog. Oscar Scowlarenta. My presence is clearly not a pleasure to him, and I remember how I once treated my new brother when he appeared in my household so long ago. Fifty Shades of Scowl has the same long-suffering stare. Maybe he liked his family just fine before I came along. And it’s hard to know what the mother is thinking. She neither smiles at me nor talks to me directly, although sometimes I do catch her looking at me and then looking away when I notice. It’s strange. She seemed so ferocious at first—what with that severe expression and disgruntled owl friend of hers—but from time to time, there’s something soft in her gaze. I’m not sure what it means.
In the following days, I watch and learn and try to stay out of the way as I plot my strategy with Vanya. I’ve got to figure out his movements during the day and night. How I can catch him alone without his scary big brother around.
It is Clara who serves as my tie to this strange family. She is the one who leads me to the outhouse and stands patiently outside. She is the one who pulls green, moist shoots out of the ground, takes a bite first, and then offers to me something that tastes very much like celery, nodding approvingly when I swallow it. She’s the one who loves the words from me she doesn’t understand. And so I give her words. I’m glad to.
My own voice comforts me as I tell her a story of my father from our camping days, of how he accidentally set the tent on fire, pantomiming the action while I describe it, and she suddenly lets out a peal of laughter and claps her hands together. She shouts out a word that is lost on me. She repeats it in a pleading voice, the same word, over and over, even clasping my hands, and finally it dawns on me that she wants to hear the story again.
So I tell it once more, to her great delight. She makes me tell the story three more times, and then she gets up out of the grass, motioning for me to stay seated while she wades away, first through ferns and then sunflowers, leaving me there with the sun shining bright in a sky that has one drifting cloud.
I wait for her. It’s almost pleasant out here, considering the circumstances, the air so warm it could be the same degree of sunshine they’re enjoying right now in Boulder. I think about my mom. Dan told her that since we had no cell signal out in the wilderness, not to expect any messages from us for two weeks unless we ran into trouble, so she’s going on about her life right now, completely unaware that her husband is dead and her daughter is a captive. In that part of the world, the civilized part, it’s a Saturday—if I’ve counted the days right. I can’t imagine it being a Saturday here. It’s way too wild and exotic for that.
And yet I can smell honeysuckle. And yet I can see butterflies. And yet the breakfast I was given this morning, something of a cross between Cream of Wheat and mulch, wasn’t entirely terrible.
Clara returns, a stack of birch bark in her arms, each piece the size of a postcard. She flops across from me, breathing heavily. She wipes her face and smiles brightly, then hands the top sheet of birch bark to me.
I look at it, shocked. It’s a drawing that looks like it was done with a stick dipped in the ashes of a fire, and it is a perfect image of her, down to the eyebrows and the curve of her face.
“Clara,” she says, pointing.
I wonder how she did it. I don’t recall seeing a mirror around the hut, but maybe the mother has one stashed away that she borrows to study herself. The girl has talent, that’s for sure.
I smile big at her. Dig around in my mind for a word I know that will convey how impressed I am.
“Potryasayushche.”
Incredible.
And it is. It’s her face, her expression, her nose and eyes and mouth. She carefully sets the self-portrait aside and shows me the next one.
Why, if it isn’t Luke Scowlwalker.
She’s captured her moody older brother exactly: the broad face and the large thick lips. The stern and world-weary expression, the disagreeable brow line. The shading gives dimension to his scruffy beard, the shape of his nose. Once again, it’s an amazing reproduction.