Notes from My Captivity(70)

I really want a pretzel.

And I would not be sure that any part of this actually happened, except for the scars I’ll have for the rest of my life and for the knapsack I wouldn’t let anyone take away from me. Inside the knapsack are two items: Vanya’s notebook and a stone.

I don’t know what the stone means. Maybe, Don’t forget me. Maybe, Things are actually very simple. Maybe, I want this back someday.

I’m not near a laptop, or a cell phone, or any device at all, but to hear the nurses talking, it’s quite the worldwide story: how I went into the forest with my father, his crew, and a guide, and showed up nearly two months later, bear-clawed and half-alive, on someone’s front porch in Qualiq.

Men who wear official-looking uniforms have been in and out of the room, asking me questions. And they have so many. But I haven’t said a thing. Because I don’t know what to do. Tell the truth and prove Dan was right? Or lie and let his legacy suffer for no reason?

A nurse comes in. “Sydney Declay called for you again,” she says. Sydney Declay is amazing. All calls are screened at the front desk. But somehow hers keep making it up to the nurses’ desk over and over. The nurse adjusts my IV. “Do you want to talk to her?” she asks.

I shake my head. She leaves and I look over at the knapsack. It’s not her story. It’s not mine, either.

My mother and Jason fly to Moscow to see me. They’ve been briefed on my rescue and on Dan’s death. Although I know they are coming, it’s still a surprise when they enter the room, moving slowly through the doorway, still blinking, shell-shocked and jet-lagged and in the first stages of grief.

I’m still sedated, and my head swims a little when I lift it to see them. It’s almost a dream as they approach me. They both look so tired and worried.

My mother gets to me first. Embraces me tightly. My time in the woods has sharpened my senses and I sniff not only her cologne but her hand cream as well and the new sweater she’s worn without washing.

“Adrienne,” she begins, and starts to cry, won’t let go.

I cry, too.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“Sorry for what?” she manages.

“Sorry for everything. Just sorry that it happened.” She lets me go, fishes in her purse for a Kleenex. “Dan was brave,” I add, and she starts crying again. Jason cries, too. Now both of them are hugging me, and we are all crying. My mother looks a few years older. So does Jason. They lean over my cot, giving me that awkward hug people give when one person’s standing and one is lying down. The nurse hovers nearby, watching the IV drip like a hawk.

I have a family and they have me.

They have me.

They have me.





Twenty-Eight


The leaves are turning color in Boulder. A blanket of snow covers the mountains. I haven’t gotten out my skis yet. I haven’t been doing much of anything. I’m waiting for next spring to go back to my senior year of high school. I just wasn’t ready for it yet.

We’re all trying to adjust to life without Dan. We did give him a memorial service, in an overflowing church. I think he would have appreciated so many of his colleagues and friends being there.

I got up and spoke for Dan. I told everyone at the service the story of how he died. I told them what I told the reporter for the New York Times—that Dan was right, that there was a family. But I tell the story in my own way.

Some would call it a lie.

But, you see, I had no other choice. I had to clear my stepfather’s name. I had to protect the Osinovs. There was only one way I could do both.

So maybe I’m not a reporter, after all. Maybe it’s enough, right now, to be a sister and a daughter and a friend and figure out what I’ll be later on in life. There’s still so much to learn.

What I wanted to tell them was that Dan is still here. I didn’t see him that night; he did not come back to me. I’m not sure why. But I know Dan exists in a place that’s just beyond our modern senses. In a belt of colored light, under a full moon. He’s with us.

We are all together, the living and the dead. It doesn’t matter who believes me. I believe me.

Dan taught me that’s all that really matters.

I spend a lot of time drawing, and writing. I walk in the woods, snow crunching under my feet, and think about the Osinovs. I wonder if they’re cold. If the summer harvest is sustaining them. I get the Russian news and I always look for the weather in Siberia, marveling at how they can survive year after year. I wonder if Gospozha still nods when she speaks, if Clara is still singing modern songs in her own strange way. I wonder if Marat has joined the loved ones who visit them all when the sky turns colors, if Marat will let Clara run her fingers up his arm like a spider.

If he smiles at that.

If he knows I love him, too.

I hope so.

I hope the time is right for magic, for the bowl of tea to be passed around, and time to collapse, and loneliness to dissolve and joy to be found, the pure joy of reunion.

And of course, I think of Vanya. Beautiful Vanya. It is fair to say that I am brokenhearted over him. Just before I go to sleep and I’m fading out into a world that includes all worlds and all possibilities, I feel his arms around me. I hear his voice. I write to him, long letters on notebook paper that I put away in a drawer. There is no address to send them to. There is no map to his footsteps. And unlike the frost, half-melted, that makes the trees in the drunken forest lurch, his memory is solid and whole and eternal and will always hold me up straight.