Notes from My Captivity(54)

I look behind me and listen hard. No footsteps. I’m alone. And I realize how few times I’ve really been alone in the past month. Maybe I shouldn’t have come here. But I want to see those journals again. Maybe there is some clue to Vanya that I can discover there. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. Something that might explain how to get close to him again.

I turn and shove my hand into the hollow of Vanya’s tree and feel around. My hand touches his notebook. I take it out and reach back in. I touch two more books, withdraw them. Stare at the covers.

An American in Russia: A Complete Field Guide to Familiar Words, Phrases, and Idioms.

Fifty Shades of Grey.

I don’t have time to ponder the irony of a Russian hermit learning English from a field guide and a sex novel. I realize that Vanya was there for the murders at the camp—maybe not as a participant, but he didn’t stop his brother. He was too busy grabbing plunder. I reach my hand into the tree a final time and touch something completely foreign in these woods. My breath catches in my throat as I draw out the object and stare at it.

It’s my recorder. Saved from the fire, intact. I turn it on. The light glows faintly. I hear my own voice.

It’s the third day on the river. Viktor’s got his shirt off. He’s really pale. Lyubov tells him to put it back on. Dan adds to the freewheeling sense of fun by staring grimly at a map.

The recorder slows and stops. The light goes off. I have lost myself. Lost who I used to be. I’m just a primitive, dusty, tangled-haired girl holding a gadget from a distant world. I stare at it. It’s a hunk of metal now. Enough heat and pounding and maybe you could make a spearhead out of it.

“Adrienne.” I jump at the sound of my name. Vanya is standing there. I don’t know when he slithered up through the woods. He’s caught me with all his possessions. The ones he stole from other people. I’m suddenly afraid of him. And yet, I’m angry, too. So angry that he’s not what he seemed to be. I hold out the recorder. “Why, Mr. Technophobe, would you hold on to this?”

He must understand at least the first word, why, because he lowers his eyes. “You,” he says. “You speak.”

“Uh-huh.” My tone is completely lacking in warmth and civility. “And my friends speak. Who are dead. And my stepfather. Who is dead. I guess saving the solar charger was too much trouble for you.” I let the recorder fall to the ground and pick up the books. “And these. These explain why you learned English so fast. And you’re probably learning how to treat a lady too. What are you going to do, make me a pair of handcuffs out of vines?”

Vanya looks bewildered. I’m talking too fast for him to understand, I’m sure, but my tone is unmistakable.

I throw down the books. “You were there, Vanya. And maybe you could have saved them. But you didn’t even try, did you?”

He is shaking his head. I can almost see the stream of language flood his ears and get tangled up inside him like panty hose in the dryer, knotted, useless. I speak slower.

“What happened . . . to . . . my . . . friends?”

His eyes widen as the words register. Then suddenly he lunges forward and grabs my hand, pulling me off balance and into the woods.





* * *



The Osinovs invite belief, not idealism. One day when I finally meet them face-to-face, I may find out they are not the family I want them to be, that they are the family they are.

Dr. Daniel Westin

New York Times article



* * *





Nineteen


The cold water had preserved Dan. Sergei and the crew were not so lucky, as though luck of that sort would matter when you’re dead. I smell them before I see them. The odor is terrible. The reek of death, that bracing rot, hits me before I even see the bank.

I stop. “I don’t think I want to see them,” I tell Vanya in a shaky voice.

“Come,” he says sternly. He tugs at my hand. Reluctantly I allow him to lead me down through the brush at the edge of the woods to the bank where the bodies lie. I put my T-shirt over my face and don’t care that this exposes quite a bit of my stomach. I thought they’d be naked, in the positions that they died in. Instead, they lie partially covered with branches whose leaves have paled into a sickly yellow. Animals have gotten to them, scattering rotten parts around the bank. I see bones. I see a scalp, a black hand with bones sticking out of the fingers.

I turn away and vomit. When I turn back, I see Vanya approaching the pile. His shirt is also pulled over his face. He reaches his hand beneath the branches, feeling around.

“What?” I shout at him. “Forget something? Fifty Shades Darker? Well, it’s not there. Why don’t you just leave them alone? Haven’t you done enough?”

I can’t look at what they’ve become. Instead, I rush back into the woods and lean against a tree, waiting. If I close my eyes, I know they’ll be alive again. Lyubov reading her trashy novel; Viktor laughing. Dan gnawing on his pistachio nuts, letting their shells trail down the current. And Sergei. The smile he wore when he was flirting. Even his scowl of drunken intention, frightening as it was at the time, meant he was still warm and breathing. Still making mistakes and living to regret them.

Vanya’s footsteps move up behind me. I’m not afraid of him anymore. Why should I be afraid? What is there to worry about now that everyone is gone? Why should I be the one left anyway? I turn around.