Notes from My Captivity(66)

My baby, my baby.

I am not afraid. This feels natural. An ordinary visit on an ordinary night.

The little girl whispers into my ear, He is here, in a language made of all the languages, and she turns me around.

My father is standing there in front of me.

He is alive.

He is that same exact man taken from me when I was ten. He’s wearing the same jogging shirt and shorts. His hair is as it was that night, growing out, the top a little curly.

For a moment I stand frozen in place. For so long I’ve waited for him, hoped for him, and now it seems too good and real and natural to be true.

“Dad?” I whisper.

He smiles. “What did I miss?”

Tears run down my face. “Everything.” I rush to him and throw my arms around him, feeling his stubble against my cheek and the warmth and substantiality of his body as he holds me.

“Adrienne,” he whispers. “The messes you get into.” That lighthearted voice has not lost its tone in seven years. It’s traveled thousands of miles to tease me.

“Is it really you, Daddy?” I ask him, ear against his heartbeat, nose against his shirt that smells of his jogging sweat. I’m afraid to let go. Afraid that I’m only holding cold night air in my arms and I’ll realize that at any second. And I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to wake up in this moment alone and cold in Siberia without him.

“It’s me,” he reassures me, and he’s still real and still warm.

I release him and look up at his face. “I have so many questions. So much to tell you.”

“I already know.”

“But where have you been?”

“With you.”

“Here?”

“Everywhere.”

He strokes my hair and kisses my forehead. He whispers in my ear. “You’ve found me again. Now go home, Adrienne. Go home to your family, or you’ll die here this winter. There’s not enough food for you. There’s not enough food for them with you here, either. Go home, because you have a story.”

“The story of the Osinovs?”

He shakes his head. “The story of you.”

“Me?” I’m puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

He smiles. “Your story is forgiveness.”

I’m dumbfounded. “Forgiveness? Of what?”

Somewhere the other family members are still embracing, rejoicing. But now my father and I are locked in our private conversation.

“Say her name,” he says. “Say the name of the girl who killed me. Because I forgive her. And everything is good.”

This is the last message I expected.

“But Daddy—”

His voice is kind, but he’s not asking. This is an order. “Forgiveness is your story.”





Twenty-Four


The next morning, I wake up in the hut, staring at the ceiling. I’m not sure at first if I imagined it all. I blink. My eyes adjust to the old beams of the ceiling. The family stirring, the light coming in.

No, it was real. It happened.

Our loved ones are gone, but only gone in a way that water is gone when it turns to vapor. The people in the small hut share a sleepy contentment. I’m filled with a peace I haven’t had in years. I saw my dad last night. He spoke to me. He was alive and no one can tell me different.

Clara goes with me to fetch the water, holding my hand. I want to tell her about the night before, how it made me whole again, and thank her so much for the gift of my father, but I sense that this is something not meant to be spoken of by light of day, so I say nothing. Instead we sing the Rolling Stones song I taught her, “Ruby Tuesday.”

Clara understands the melody if not all the words. “Goo . . . dy ooby dooday, oo koo put a nae don oo . . .”

The air is crisp and cold. I am the happiest that I can ever remember being since my father left me.

But he didn’t leave.

This is the truth I’ve found out here, with this family and with this girl.

“Ya schastliva, Clara,” I tell her as we dip the water.

I’m happy.

She looks at me, eyes wide. Smiles. Answers me in a sweet burst of dove talk, and we walk back to the hut together.

As the sun goes down, my good mood fades. The potatoes are small. Some animal got into the stored nuts. And the fishing net was pulled in full of fish, whose weight broke the twine, and they all escaped. It’s time for me to leave. And I’m beginning to realize something.

I might be falling for Vanya.

Maybe I never realized it fully before, but now that it’s time to go, it hits me. It’s not like in America where we can text and FaceTime until one of us takes a plane to the other. This is a different world I’m going to. And it’s quite possible when I leave that I will never see him again. I know now that my father is with me always. But Vanya is here, in the wilderness, in the legend of the Osinovs. And I can’t stand the thought of leaving him.

His family isn’t stupid. They know about us just as certainly as they know a wolf is nearby, or a squirrel is on the roof, or it’s about to rain. How could they not? Today at breakfast Vanya and I held hands openly in front of the family. Marat looked on with clear disapproval but said nothing. He and I have an unspoken agreement to leave each other alone, and that is fine with me. In another world, Marat would be living in another state with his family and we’d talk perhaps twice a year and exchange terse Christmas cards.