Notes from My Captivity(51)

In fifty years, I’ll get to Spanx.

As I attempt to describe these things, they haunt me. A Kleenex is a tiny miracle ruined by snot. A lightbulb should be worshipped as a god. M&M’S are nature’s perfect food. The thought of butter makes me want to cry.

I miss everything.

Vanya’s eyes don’t blink. He barely breathes. The modern world is a religion—dangerous, beautiful, fantastic—and he struggles to believe.

He’s never seen a dog in his life. He’s never had to decide between paper or plastic. He’s never been to get his hair cut, or used a crosswalk. He’s done the things that boys all over the world do: skip rocks across the water, climb trees, whittle on sticks, learn to swim—but he’s never gone on to Algebra or baseball or sexting. He’s stuck with what he has, and I don’t know if it’s helpful or cruel to let him know what he’s missing.

Could it be that Vanya wants to escape here just as much as I do? I can’t imagine the woods and those few books can keep up with his seemingly endless curiosity.

He gets wildly excited when I tell him about planes. He points at the sky. “Ya vizhu, ya vizhu!”

I see, I see.

“You’ve seen planes?” I ask in bad Russian.

He nods excitedly, holds up three fingers. I’m hoping that, very soon, he’ll also see a helicopter. The one that might come rescue me.

The one that might not.

One afternoon Vanya leads me to a place in the woods I have never been before. I can’t really read the look on his face. We stop at a tree, it’s half-dead, leaning a little.

“It’s a tree,” I say. “Apparently not a very healthy tree.”

Then I notice that the tree has a hole in it the size of a basketball. Vanya reaches his hand inside the hole, rummaging around.

He pulls out a clothbound notebook and hands it to me carefully. It has Russian letters on the cover. I remember the words of Yuri from Dan’s article:

The younger boy in the family stole my notebook. . . .

I open the notebook to the first page and see tiny, strict handwriting on it, margin to margin, careful use made of every bit of the page, in the same way his family consumes a rabbit or bird of prey. I look at the writing wonderingly, then back to Vanya.

“This is your writing?” I ask.

He nods.

I turn the pages. “I guess you stole his pen, too,” I said.

“Stole?”

“Never mind.”

I can’t believe it. Vanya has been keeping a journal. On these pages must be life as he knows it. There must be secrets here. Lore. Amazing stories of survival and hardship. Vanya studies my eyes. I keep turning pages. Weeks, months, years. Then I see my name.

Adrienne. I had once spelled it out for him, with a stick in the dirt, and I can see he has a good memory. It’s weird to see my name appear in ink on paper. As though affirming I still exist.

I see my name farther down the page. Then again.

Vanya is writing about me.

I see another word. Krasivaya.

Beautiful.

Is that what he thinks of me, or have I misinterpreted?

Quickly he takes the notebook away. He’s seen what I saw. He puts the notebook back in the tree and starts walking back to the hut, his body tense, as though he’s told me too much.

I follow silently. I wonder what is written about me in that diary. All I know is he’s been thinking about me.

But there’s something else on my mind today.

“Vanya,” I say. “Mne nuzhno chto-to.”

I need something.

We stand at the bank of the river. We’ve been looking for flint most of the day, and we’ve had little luck. So we’ve given up, and I’ve led him here. Downstream, the remains of the boat are still caught on the rocks, the bent frame of the engine visible just above the waterline.

I’m standing near the place on the bank where my body lay after I nearly drowned in the river.

I want to know if Vanya saved me.

I tell him the story of the tragedy in English, hoping he follows some of it.

“We were trying to get away,” I say, pointing at the boat. “The boat hit a stone. . . .”

I slap my fist hard against the flat of my hand and Vanya nods, his face serious. I throw my hands in the air, spreading my fingers to indicate our flying bodies.

I don’t know how to say stepfather, and I don’t feel like trying to explain the intricacies to a man for whom a blended family is one who adopts a bear.

“Dan,” I say.

I wave my hand to where Dan’s body still lingers in the freezing river.

Vanya nods. “Dan,” he says. “Dead.”

“Yes.”

“Father?”

“No,” I say. I think a moment. “Friend.”

It’s true. Dan was always my friend, even when I didn’t want to be around him. Even when I made fun of him.

I kneel. With the point of a stick I draw the waterline and a figure of a girl beneath it.

The girl is me.

“Drown,” I say, then pant as though I’m gasping for breath.

He looks at the drawing, then at me. “Down.”

“No, not down. Drown.” As I say it again, water fills my throat, because I remember it. The frantic clawing, the aching of the lungs. And then a hand clasping mine, pulling me out. Then nothing. Just blackness and waking up in the space where now I kneel, drawing another stick figure standing above the waterline, reaching down. With the point of my stick I approximate the two hands clasping, the savior and the saved.