University of Nevada, Reno

Mildred and Boris

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Fine Arts in English

by

Christina Camarena

Sarah Hulse/Thesis Advisor

May, 2018

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

We recommend that the thesis prepared under our supervision by

CHRISTINA CAMARENA

Entitled

Mildred And Boris

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF FINE ARTS

Sarah Hulse, Advisor

Christopher Coake, Committee Member

Jennifer Hill, Committee Member

Daniel Enrique Perez, Graduate School Representative

David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School

May, 2018

i

Abstract

This novel is about two best friends and neighbors growing up in Hawthorne, Nevada.

When Mildred’s mother abandons her at age twelve, she and Boris—whose professor father teaches in Moscow—attack the project of growing up in their own way, guided by their instincts, intelligence, imagination and an ever deepening bond. Adolescence brings unexpected changes when Mildred's mother reappears out of thin air, hoping to make up for lost time, and Mildred's life shoots off in an unexpected direction, as does

Boris’s. They end up on opposite sides of the globe, but their friendship remains a lifeline, tethering them to one another across distance and time. In the wake of a potentially devastating situation, their friendship guides them through their greatest risks and difficulties. Over and over again, they learn that family and love isn’t always what you expect it to be, and friendship’s bonds can hold you up, even against the penultimate challenge.

ii

Dedications

This novel is dedicated to my partner, my children, and my mother, who supported me every step of the way in completing my MFA program and writing this novel. They inspire me to follow my dreams.

iii

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my mentors, Chris Coake and Sarah Hulse, whose commitment to and enthusiasm for my progress were endless; Jen Hill and Daniel Enrique Perez for their hard work on my committee; the entire MFA faculty; and my incredible cohort of the first graduating class whose support and comradery pulled me through this program and inspired me to keep going.

1

I.

The first time Mildred and Boris have sex, Mildred’s head slips over the edge of her small twin bed and hangs. Instead of scooting her back onto the bed, Boris cups his hands underneath her head and holds her steady until they are done. They don’t move much anyway, as Boris is overly concerned with Mildred’s pain level, another sweet but also annoying aspect of his character. He repeats, “Are you okay?” more than ten times.

Still, this question is much better than the one she overheard in the locker room from a girl whose first sexual partner said, “Should I call you an ambulance or something?” right after they had sex for the first time.

Mildred feels relief at getting the first time of this awkward, painful, mysterious activity over with her best friend instead of some random, creepy sixteen-year-old pervert from Mineral County High School. She can only trust Boris with such an important responsibility.

Boris takes his responsibility very seriously—he researched online, looked through books, learned a few yoga poses for them to practice in preparation, studied human anatomy, and even conducted what he referred to as “field research” as to what time Mildred’s father went into deep sleep and how difficult it was to wake him up, unbeknownst by but also much to the annoyance of Mildred’s father. Boris made flow charts and diagrams to show Mildred. Boris rules. She decided not to tell Boris about the conversations she recently overheard her father having. She suspects these odd, heated, late-night conversations are with her missing mother, Beverly.

Boris’s mother and Mildred’s father still allow them to have co-ed sleepovers, each believing the other’s child to be gay and neither willing to bring it up to the other, 2 mostly because they don’t particularly care for one another and fear an intense discussion about their children might bind them into an ongoing conversation. Since neither Mildred nor Boris have a second parent living at home, convincing the parent each does have at home to still allow these sleepovers is much easier. They purposefully allow their parents to believe the other is gay, since they agreed nothing romantic would ever occur between them. They weren’t really lying—it may as well be true. And this is also very convenient as they want privacy to try the things they can’t trust anyone else with.

Everyone at their high school thinks they are boyfriend and girlfriend because they walk around holding hands. In a town as small a Hawthorne, Nevada, this delicate balance takes a certain amount of finesse—allowing schoolmates to think they’re dating while maintaining to each parent the gayness of the other.

When Boris is done, they lie side by side.

“Are you okay?”

“Geez, Boris, stop asking me. It hurts, but I’ll be fine.” Mildred stands and goes to her private bathroom. She runs a shower and throws the shower curtain open in an effort to step confidently over the edge of the tub but the pain of stretching and tearing open reminds her to step carefully. She’s quite pleased with herself as she gingerly washes away trickles of blood and sweat.

Boris pokes his head around the bathroom door. “Let’s go see the bones in the morning.”

Mildred drives fast enough to reach Berlin in forty-five minutes, but she doesn’t have a driver’s license yet even though she is old enough. As always, they leave in

Mildred’s dad, Hank’s, car with Boris behind the wheel. Leaving him behind the wheel 3 will take an extra thirty minutes so they pull over in the desert and switch seats. Mildred cracks an Icky IPA from their stash in the trunk on her way to the driver seat. She’s sore and needs to take the edge off. Also, Boris’s silence worries her.

As Boris walks past her, he lets his hand drag across her hips. His fingertips feel like a claim to being allowed to touch new parts of her. She doesn’t flinch but doesn’t linger either. Boris is way too important to be a boyfriend. Plus, she suspects his thoughtfulness that makes him the best friend ever would make him an annoying boyfriend.

Mildred loves Berlin and she loves the Ichthyosaurus fossil. This love started when she learned how fun it was to tell people she’s from “near Berlin” and omit the

Nevada part. Just before her mother left them, they took an overnight camping trip to

Berlin, also one of her mother’s favorites, and they explored the history. Mildred asked her mother what a “company town” was.

“It’s when a company starts a town in a place where they need workers to make money. Never live in a company town, baby. No one owns you.”

“It sounds like slavery, Beverly.” Mildred had already stopped calling her mother

“Mom” by the time she was eight, except in front of her father, who seemed to be made uncomfortable by Mildred calling her mother by her first name. “She already feels like too much of a stranger,” he said once. “Already?” Mildred asked. “Just call her mom,” he said.

“Listen, Mildred,” Beverly told her, “no one ever owns you. No boyfriend, no boss, no father, nobody. In a company town, the people who work there have to work for 4 the boss, buy food from the boss’s store, buy his gas from his gas station, and pay his prices—they owe the boss their freedom. No one is the boss of your life.”

Mildred and Beverly called the trip their “world tour” since they drove from

Berlin to see the ichthyosaurus fossil and camp overnight, then on to the tiny towns of

Manhattan and Austin on highway 50, the loneliest highway in America—all three stops ghost towns and former company towns. In Manhattan, they stood in the abandoned ruins of the Nye and Ormsby County bank while Beverly lectured Mildred on the dangers of putting too much faith in the “green devil.” They put themselves in frightening situations in Austin, hoping for a ghost encounter—graveyard at night, abandoned mining shaft,

Stokes Castle in the room where Anson Phelps Stokes hung himself—but no ghosts were interested in them. They did mine a small piece of turquoise each, and when Beverly left,

Mildred found her piece and made the set of two into earrings.

She’s wearing those turquoise earrings now.

“We promised nothing changes, right?” She asks for reassurance of their blood- pinky-spit-swear, an oath they invented to be held above all others.

“Yeah, of course. Nothing.” Boris’s words are unconvincing.

At the ichthyosaurus site, Mildred runs the palms of her hands over the smooth, clean bones while Boris distracts the park ranger with questions to which he already has answers.

“But it is a dinosaur?” This one will get the guy going for a while and Mildred needs a few minutes to strum the teeth, each of her fingers touching each ancient point.

“Are those back legs or fins?” 5

After Mildred is done, they wander around the park waiting for the ranger to switch so Boris can have his turn alone with Icky.

When they arrive home that evening, Mildred hears her father inside talking loudly on the phone so she painfully climbs through her bedroom window (jeans were a bad choice, as was climbing), sending Boris home so she can spy in private. The rolled cuff of her jeans catches on a bush branch and, as she turns to free herself, she notices

Boris still standing in the same spot, watching her climb in.

“Go inside,” she tells him. “Don’t draw attention over here.” Mildred wonders if

Boris is taking over the mopey attitude she’s been working hard to shake. His is only occasional and usually when she needs to do her own private investigating and does not want a partner. But Mopey Boris has no ring to it. Maybe, Brooding Boris?

She knows who her dad is talking to and doesn’t want to share this information with Boris or anyone else, yet. This, maybe only this, belongs just to her. She sits just inside her bedroom door and listens.

“I will tell her when the time is right. Don’t try to force my hand. You gave up your decision-making status when you ran off.” Her dad’s voice sounds strained, as if he’s trying very hard not to raise it.

After the first conversation she overhead, she started a serious snooping campaign. What she found in her father’s middle desk drawer where he keeps the bills was a rolled-up copy of SF Arts. On the cover: a photo of her very own mother, her

Beverly. San Francisco seemed right to Mildred. The headline read, “Up Close: A Local

Jewel.” The article referred to her mother as “Bev Lee, local sculptor, art critic, generous teacher.” Gross. Was that a thing in the arts community—to turn one full name into two 6 smaller names? Mildred did not like the taste of it. And only six years to become a local—people there must come and go often.

“I will talk to her and if she wants to talk to you, she’ll call. Quit blocking your number and give it to me. I’m not standing in front of her with you already on the phone, poking it at her, pressuring her to speak to you. I’m leaving it up to her.”

Mildred chews her cuticles, licking the blood. Her knees lock tightly together, intensifying the residual burning between her legs. She can almost feel Boris’s hands holding her head up. Since she first heard her father on the phone with her mother and then promptly decided to talk Boris into sex, Boris has asked her many times what was up, why was she being weird? She tried to convince him nothing is wrong but loves that he knows something is off. Maybe this is why he agreed to her experiment. At first, she decided she would not talk to her mother. It was the gateway drug to seeing her again.

Her brain has scoured the universe for hundreds of plausible explanations for the disappearance and not one, short of death or extended abduction, let alone personal success as a single woman and artist with no child, ever came close to being forgivable.

Mildred’s grateful that Boris did so much research on which condoms are the safest and how to protect Mildred from too much pain. The sex was painful but not as awful as she’d been warned. She doesn’t mind Boris seeing her naked body—he’s seen it plenty of times before. As she half-eavesdrops, it occurs to her that sex probably felt good for Boris, really good, so good he might want to do it again. This will complicate things. She’s been so obsessed with getting this experience out of the way that she never really stopped to think about how Boris might react, beyond making him promise her that nothing will ever change between them. 7

But something clearly has.

Mildred stands up and unlocks her door. Her father starts and puts his hand over the phone. “When did you get home?” His question probably sounds more accusatory than he intends, but she can tell by his face that he is worried.

“I’ll talk to her.” She feels powerful in this moment, no longer a virgin, no longer a little girl—no need to be afraid of her mother’s voice. Or her own.

He stares at her, perhaps deciding if she is old enough to make this decision. He finally drops his shoulders and hands her the phone.

“Hi, Beverly.”

Her dad smiles. He clearly thinks this greeting is amusing.

“Oh Mildred, don’t call me Beverly. I’m still your mother.”

“I go by Dred, now, Beverly.”

“I’ve missed you, sweetheart, so much.”

“I saw you’re a famous artist now. Good for you, Beverly. I hear it’s hard to be an artist when you have kids, so I think I understand.”

“Oh, Millie.”

“It’s Dred, Beverly.”

“Okay, darling. I’ve really missed you. I just want a chance to chat for now, please.”

“If you’re calling to have the big sex-talk, it’s too late.” Mildred can’t resist this dig. Her father left the room to give her pretend-privacy but she knows he’s listening. She can look forward to a really awkward talk soon. 8

“May I come see you? Maybe we can go to Berlin again. Or I can fly you to San

Francisco. It’s really fun here—you would love the music and the museums. It’s a town big enough for you.”

Mildred has never heard her mother sound nervous before, her voice cracking and getting too loud and then too soft. “We can talk on the phone. That is all for now. Give me your number and I’ll call if and when I want to. No promises.”

“Can I at least explain a little bit to you, honey?”

“Are you dead? Were you abducted and held hostage? Were you trapped in a cave for the past six years?”

“No, but, is that what you wanted?”

“None of this what I wanted, Beverly. What I want is not hear your excuses. You left to start your own life without me. Nothing you say can change the truth.”

“Okay.”

Mildred saw Beverly crying once, silent tears soaking Beverly’s chest and shirt.

Mildred was six and remembers it as Beverly and Hank’s first big fight. Mildred and her father had one of their secret meetings, the ones where Hank would tell Mildred about the grown-up things her mother thought she was too young for. Afterwards, Mildred came to the kitchen for water and found Beverly sitting on the kitchen floor, crying. “Mommy,

I’m sorry.” Beverly did not look up or answer her.

“Can I talk to you again tomorrow, Dred?”

The last word comes out shaky and awkward. Mildred’s small delight at making her mother call her Dred mixes with the guilt from the many lists of wrong-doings from 9 years before. “I said maybe. Don’t push it.” Mildred uses this familiar childhood phrase against Beverly for the first time.

Mildred hangs up before her own tears start. Her father comes into the room to check on her and she gives him a quick hug and disappears into her room. She looks out her window. Boris is still in the yard between their houses, lying in the grass, staring up at the stars. She climbs out her window, pulling her favorite blue fuzzy blanket behind her, knocking notebooks and pencils off her desk. Boris doesn’t look over. She spreads the blanket out next to him, lies down, and grabs his hand.

“Sorry I talked you into having sex with me.”

“It’s okay.” He lets out one quick, rhino-snort of a laugh. He picks up funny habits from her dad. Mildred waits. When he does this, more is coming and she knows not to interrupt or he’ll forget his thought.

“I really liked it. Did you?” Boris asks.

She feels stupid for not seeing this response coming from a mile away. “I’m not really sure. It hurt, still hurts, but it wasn’t awful. Maybe when it doesn’t hurt anymore it will be fun.” She can see him wince at the end of “wasn’t awful” but decides not to address it. “I’m a girl—the first time is just different for us.”

“Are you going to want to try again or do I need to just get over it already? I need to know before I turn all sappy-in-love with the girl next door.”

“I don’t know, yet. I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t pull his hand away.

“I talked to Beverly on the phone.”

Boris scoots over onto the blanket and uses her stomach as his pillow. “And?” 10

“It’s just bones. Ancient, fossilized bones. I can visit them, like a historical site, but they can’t come back to life.”

“Maybe, Mildred,” Boris says. “Or maybe there is a full body there, frozen in ice, waiting to be thawed.”

Maybe Mildred. She likes the sound of it.

“Maybe.”

Two weeks later, Mildred’s father takes a loan out on his 401-K and he and

Mildred fly to Kona for what he terms with a chuckle their “two-thirds-family” vacation.

He has not mentioned the information he must know about Mildred and Boris recently having sex, and Mildred thinks this trip must be a combination of get away from Boris, get away from Beverly, and get away from the mopes. Mildred doesn’t even bother correcting him with the usual reminder, “You and I are 100% of this family.” Six years seemed like a long enough time to erase Beverly’s spot. Until she showed back up to re- claim it.

When Mildred’s dad asks her what’s the first thing she wants to do in Hawai’i, she answers with the one adventure she has wanted ever since she got the entire Planet

Earth DVD set for her 8th birthday: she watched the deep sea episode on manta rays over and over—the boats collecting offshore, the scuba divers and snorkelers floating around in anticipation, the divers dropping a giant spotlight on the ocean floor, its cone of light reaching back up to the surface. Then, as the sun disappeared and only the spot light sparkling in the water, the plankton gathering in the cone of light, and the manta rays swimming in to eat the plankton. Their movements were mesmerized. She’d fantasized over and over how their slippery bellies might feel against her skin, and her pulse would 11 quicken every time. A quick Google search revealed that swimming with the manta rays actually happens in Kona. Now’s her chance to make one of her fantasies come true.

“Night swim with the mantas, Dad.”

After careful deliberation over which dive company cares the most about taking care of the ocean, they decide it’s a good idea to just swim out from the shoreline. Its’ cheaper, and Mildred argues that it’s more ethically sound. It’s only 100 or so yards out into the ocean at dusk, after all, and they’re strong swimmers. Why not swim out to the boats, join the big group, and then swim back to shore?

Hank and Mildred find at spot at Shoreline Park, just south of Kona. Equipped with fins, snorkel masks, and waterproof flashlights strapped to their wrists, they jump from the edge of the lava rock out into the calm ocean water and kick their way to the circle of boats just offshore. The brightly colored, bobbing snorkel heads of the disembarking boat passengers get larger and larger as they approach the dive site. Four scuba divers lower a giant spotlight to the ocean floor in the middle of the four boats and snorkelers and divers alike float in anxious anticipation as the sea water loses its natural light and gains illumination from the spotlight.

Mildred sees a group of snorkelers nudging each other and pointing and she looks off into the increasingly darkening ocean. What appears to be a gliding silver bird grows and grows into a giant, its wings pushing water behind it in effortless pulses.

The first manta ray arrives.

Mildred clutches her tiny flashlight tightly against her chest, a move that’s supposed to attract the manta rays over to her. The ocean around her fills with three more rays, then another, then two more—mantas glide in figure eights around and through the 12 spotlight’s glow, filtering up from the ocean floor, never hitting each other, never running into swimmers, the light guiding their feeding. She wills her own shaking hands to stay put. She has promised herself this moment, no matter how wide and open their mouths hold as they filter plankton out of the water. A ray glides towards her own small cone of light. She is giddy, delighted, terrified as the massive open mouth comes directly towards her, just missing her face as its silvery top slides along her own uncovered stomach, her breath stilled in the quiver of her throat. As the creature skates away, Mildred’s snorkel mask blurs and she has to lift her head out of the water to empty it. Treading water, cleaning her mask out, she realizes it is not salt water from the ocean, but salt water from her own eyes. She takes a deep breath. Boris would be freaking out if he were here.

After the manta rays swim away, the divers and snorkelers collect in their boats, chatting and laughing loudly, and Mildred treads water, her skin cold and goose pimply.

Her dad motions her over.

“We need to get out of here,” he says.

The snorkelers and divers load back into their boats and, as the boats disappear one by one, it gets darker and darker in the ocean. Meanwhile, Mildred and her father are still a good hundred yards from the shore.

On the swim back, Mildred finds the bouncing light of her flashlight unnerving so she turns it off. She imagines catching a fleeting glimpse of a tiger shark and thinks it less stressful to not know what’s lurking in the dark around her. There wouldn’t be much she could do about it, anyway.

Back at the shore, they tread water and stare as waves crash on the once-still lava rock. They did not anticipate this development. If there were a sandy beach nearby, they 13 would divert to it and walk back to their things, but it’s a long stretch of lava rock—not ideal for climbing out of the water during this kind of swell.

“Give me a few minutes to get a feel for the surges and then I’ll pace us between sets. It’ll be fine.”

“Okay, Dad.” Mildred doesn’t mention how suddenly terrified she is. At least the adrenaline will help her move faster when it’s time to kick to shore. Treading in the dark water, blocking out thoughts of potential tiger sharks, Beverly pops in her head. If a shark bites off her leg, or even legs, or severs her spine rendering her paraplegic, would her own mother be there to help her?

No.

Her mother wouldn’t care for her, lifting her out of bed or into the bathtub. Her mother wouldn’t rub ointment on her chafed and wilted skin. Although perhaps recent communication may suggest otherwise, it’s dangerous to hope. She resigns to the fact that Beverly will not come to her aid. Her mother can’t be what she isn’t.

This knowledge makes it easier for Mildred to listen to her father and follow his directions. In the dark water, the moonlight reveals the ashen outline of the lava rock, waves crashing on the spot of fresh land—it’s their only exit strategy and she’s waterlogged and ready to get out of the ocean. One final surge of fear envelops her and she relishes the moment.

Maybe Beverly can’t be that mother, but perhaps there is room for Beverly in

Mildred’s life again, after all. Mildred has an urge to see her mother one more time and a moment of regret at how their last conversation ended. That will have to be enough, for 14 now. Instead of making promises to God, as others might, Mildred decides to make a promise to herself—she will agree to Beverly coming for a visit.

“Okay, Dred, you have to trust me. On the count of three, kick as hard as you have ever kicked in your life. Ready?”

Mildred nods, well more bobs her head harder than it’s already bouncing in the waves. “Yes.”

“One, two, three, go!”

She takes off, her arms hanging down her sides, pressing hard against the waves that carry her closer, then pull her back, then push her forward again. She pumps her legs until they burn and the fins on her feet propel her forward in a burst of speed.

The knowledge that her father would do these things her mother would not do pushes her up the lava rock, and as the ocean thinks of pulling her back into its arms, his hands yank her up and over the top, the spiny edges of fresh earth scraping miniscule slices in her flesh, and she is back on the grassy patch just past the lava rock where they began this adventure, panting and laughing. Mildred’s tears mix with the ocean water dripping from her bangs into her eyes. This is the most she’s cried in a long time. This fresh taste of a complex mix of joy and anguish, the flavor of adulthood, fills her.

After a deliciously painful shower of hydrogen peroxide to rinse staph infection from her wounds, along with multiple apologies from her father for putting her in such a dangerous situation, she turns her phone back on. A message from Boris. Mildred lets out an unexpected squeal of glee in a sharp, salty breath. She really misses him.

—What’s up, world traveler? 15

For the fifteen millionth time in their friendship, she reminds her best friend of basic geography.

—Hawai’i is not another country. But the ocean might be. A manta ray touched my naked skin and it was incredible! I want to hold a manta ray in my arms for the rest of my life! It’s what happiness feels like. Slippery, silky manta ray skin. I want my entire head in its mouth.

—Um…so now you want to be eaten by a manta ray? Yikes! It’s worse than I even imagined! You gotta learn to be happy!

—Manta rays only eat plankton—duh. And I’m pretty sure my shoulders would get stuck and when it tasted me it would spit me out. But the moment when my head is stuck—just yes.

—Wow! My own Mildred happy?! What they say about Hawai’i must be true! If it can make Mopey Mildred happy, then it is a miracle worker!

—It’s Maybe Mildred now. Even my therapist knows that. Good night, Boris.

Scare you soon.

Mildred sends a smiley face and shuts down her tablet.

Her father comes out of the bathroom ready for bed. “Hey, baby, so, tonight was probably bad judgment on my part.”

“Pretty sure it was amazing.”

“Maybe for you, but for me, I don’t ever want to put you in that kind of danger ever, ever again. I’m sorry, Dred.” 16

“It’s okay, Dad. I feel pretty good about it.” The open ocean, swimming from the shoreline, the manta rays, swimming back in the dark, the wonderfully terrifying prospect of sharks, the waves crashing on the rock—all fabulous.

“Well now I’m torn, because it’s been awhile since I’ve heard any really positive thing come out of your mouth. But still…”

He kisses her on the spot, just left of the center of her forehead, on her birthmark.

This is the spot where most of his kisses land.

“Good night, Dred. Love you.”

“Love you, Dad. Thanks for this.”

As Mildred sits in the hotel room, straining to hear the ocean waves over the snores of her father, she closes her eyes and imagines her fear of the darkness, of the water, of the possible tiger shark darting about nearby, waiting to sink its teeth into her calf, like a freshly-sharpened knife into a butter cube left too long the counter, and her stomach jumps with fear and excitement, a mixture she savors.

Mildred’s mind wanders as she enters the realm just before sleep. She and Boris lying in the grass, his mother tisking loudly away under her breath from the window,

Mildred’s father in the house rubbing his fingers along the edges of an old family photo,

Boris’s father thousands of miles away in Moscow, Mildred’s mother hundreds of miles away preparing for an art exhibition. Mildred thinks of the silvery bellied manta ray, blind, gliding figure eights in the warm Hawai’ian water, willing to try to swallow anything that can fit in its giant mouth.

17

II.

Mildred doesn’t remember meeting Boris—he’s in her earliest memories, more clearly than her own mother. They’ve always been neighbors and best friends, two odd- ducks since before their time at Hawthorne Elementary, always side-by-side, pretending everyone else is weird. At ten years old, within six months of her mother’s departure,

Mildred had already begun struggling to fit Beverly into her early childhood memories.

She wasn’t sure if Boris had always been a bigger part of her life than her mother and that was why the memories of him were so clear and reached back so far, but she worried she might be systematically erasing Beverly.

On the six month anniversary of her mother’s disappearance, Mildred decided that fourth grade math was overrated and useless and so, instead of doing homework, she sat in her window seat and watched Boris’s house. Determined to push away thoughts of both Beverly and math, Mildred focused on what Boris might be planning. He knew she wanted to avoid thoughts of Beverly and therefore he must be planning a distraction of some sort. She carefully studied the movement of the leaves on the bushes between her window and Boris’s, detecting not even a slight shiver. Where was he?

Tired of waiting, she positioned her body pillow in her desk chair and turned the lamp to dim. From across the yard it should appear as if she were sitting at her desk. She pressed in the latches on her window and inched it up, slowing down for the squeaky spot and speeding up over the crackly bump. Months of practice had gone into getting the window up without making even the tiniest of noises. She was going to sneak up and surprise him tonight before he could get her first. 18

Once the window was open the exact amount required for her to silently slip through, she shimmied her way through, feet first, on her belly, until her toes touched the ground. Then she pulled the rest of her body through, closed the window, and slipped behind the hedge.

Her favorite part—she sat in wait.

Mildred breathed as slowly and shallowly as she could without losing her breath, another task she’d practiced to perfection, allowing her to catch Boris unaware more often than he could sneak up on her, putting her well in the lead in this competition.

Lately, though, Boris had been making a come-back. His lightness and sudden burst of motor skill development were topping her patience in stealth-mode. When her dad had asked her why she wasn’t eating as much at dinner lately, she could see the worry in his face. Was it drugs at only ten years old? An eating disorder? Was she being bullied?

Emotional trauma from her mother abandoning her?

“Don’t worry, Hank. Being abandoned by my mother hasn’t left me a shell of a person. I just need to stay smaller than Boris, more agile. I’m in danger of losing my lead.”

Her dad rolled his eyes and insisted she eat all the food on her plate. “No ridiculous excuses.”

He was right. But anything to gain the edge.

“And stop calling me Hank. I hate it. The next time you call me Hank, I call you

Millie.”

The name her mother called her. 19

Her mother once told her the name Mildred infused her with deep wisdom from another time and place. But what Mildred knew is that Mildred is no name for a ten-year- old girl living in Hawthorne, Nevada. At least she didn’t call him Henry, like her mother.

She doesn’t say this aloud, though.

“Well played, sir, well played.” She never called him Hank to his face again.

Mildred realized that Boris’s light was off, a sure sign he was either on the prowl or on to her. When did this happen? She’d zoned out for a minute and missed a key piece of evidence. His window cracked open ever so slightly—she hadn’t missed too much.

Watching Boris escape his own room in his sleuthest of modes entertained Mildred to no end. He’d gotten good but his awkward and gangly limbs were funny to watch maneuver themselves, seemingly on their own without direction from his brain. She never knew for sure when Boris really thought he was being sneaky and when he was just putting on a show for her and he’d never tell.

Mildred decided to hold her position, let Boris do all the work, and then spring out at him right as he got to her window. He turned belly-up through the window, a choice requiring quite a bit of flexibility and grace, two things Mildred was working on.

He also left his window open, which was less work but gave away his whereabouts. Lazy, really. If Mildred had left her window open, he would know she was already on the prowl.

Shortly after Mildred’s mother pulled her disappearing act, a wind storm had knocked down a large section of the fence that separated their yards. Mildred and Boris had been so excited that Hank eventually just fixed the fence to naturally be open there.

He didn’t mind when Boris’s chicken came in their yard and Boris’s mother didn’t mind 20

Mildred’s pit bull, Neko. In fact, she preferred to know there was a mean-looking dog in her yard, with Boris’s dad back in Moscow again. No one but those close to them knew what a jelly bean Neko really was. Kitten was the right name for her, although when

Mildred first picked the name Neko, she didn’t even know that’s what it meant. Hank called this kind of perfect coincidence kismet. The chickens liked to climb all over Neko while she napped in the sun and in turn she tended to keep them safe in the day, scaring off hawks and coyotes. So the fence stayed open and their yards permanently connected, just as Mildred and Boris had always hoped. And the scare wars began.

Boris shuffled sideways along the fence line, his back to the worn down boards

Hank had salvaged after the storm, then scurried across the few unobstructed feet of grass to another bush and dropped down behind it. Perfect. Her timing must be exact to really get him good. The last time he’d scared her so badly that she peed her pants a little. She was in the mood for giving him a good scare.

Just as Boris leapt up from behind the bush, Mildred sprang out from the bush on the other side of the window where she’d been lying in wait. Neither of them ended up getting a sound out, her on purpose, his yell seemed stifled in his throat, but the look on his face as she tackled him back into his bush was exactly what she was looking for.

“Mildred, how did you… when did you…?” He finally found his voice.

“Aaahhh!”

Mildred laughed until tears pour down her cheeks onto Boris’s face. “I got you good! That’s what you get.” She was lying on top of him and had him in a half hug, half pin-down.

“Get off me! This bush is prickly,” Boris said. 21

“I can’t. I’m weak from laughter.”

“Ha ha. Get up.” Boris rolled her off of him and onto the ground and then disentangled his limbs from the branches, dusting off chunks of bush. He straddled her, pinning her down with his knees, and then jammed his fingers into her armpits for a tickle attack.

“Stop it! Aahhh!” She squirmed and struggled, cried for mercy, and laughed.

When Boris determined she’d been adequately punished, he let her up and gave her proper credit. “Good one. How did you know?”

“I was already out when you opened your window.”

“No you weren’t! I saw you at your desk.”

Success.

“Let’s hide in your closet with a flashlight and tell ghost stories,” Mildred answered.

“First tell me how you could be at your desk and in the yard at the same time.”

“A master sneaker never reveals her secrets,” Mildred answered.

“I’ll figure it out.”

They climbed back through Boris’s window. Boris grabbed graham crackers, marshmallows, a chocolate bar, the flashlight, and the jug of milk.

Soon after they settled in to the nest of pillows and blankets they’d built, the closet door handle wiggled and both Boris and Mildred jump, knocking heads and then rolling over giggling. 22

“What’s going on in there, Boris?” Boris’s mother’s voice rang through the door.

It wiggled harder, followed by four sharp raps on the wood. “Open this door right this instant, young man.”

Boris jumped up, unlocked the door, and pulled it open as his mother shoved her way through. “Sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean to lock it.”

After a harsh eyeballing of the situation, comprised of two fully-clothed ten-year- olds squinting their eyes from the quick change in lighting, she said, “Boris, I need to know when we have company, honey. You know this.” The stare she gave Boris was familiar—the one that says, why is that girl here again?

“Sorry, Mrs. O,” Mildred said.

“Can we have a sleepover? Please, Mom? Please please please? We’re having a closet campout.”

After a long pause, Boris’s mom finally answered. “Mildred needs to ask her father and the closet and bedroom doors stay open.”

Boris rolled his eyes. “Ten, Mom. We’re ten.” But he agreed.

Boris’s mom mumbled, “What would your father say?” Then she pulled the door closed so that only a sliver of light came through and said, “No more closing or locking doors when friends are here,” and the word “friends” had the lilt to it they know means

“Mildred” or “that girl” as interchangeable terms. “If your father were here, Boris,” she trailed off. But Boris’s father was back in Moscow for at least another semester, maybe longer. From a distance, they could hear Boris’s mother say, “I should have Henry close up that fence.” They laughed. She’d act like they were going to close the fence and then 23 there would be a report of a robbery or an escaped convict and she’d start leaving beef bones out on the back porch again for Neko to snack on.

After she was out of ear-shot, he whispered to Mildred, “If I even had a father.”

“Gertie hates me,” Mildred whispered back.

“Don’t call her Gertie. It’s weird.”

“Fine. Mrs. Angry-Ferret-Face hates me. Does she think we were doing it?”

Mildred asked.

“You don’t even know what doing it means,” Boris said, laughing and shoving her in the shoulder.

“I know it means naked,” Mildred said. “And it’s about penises and vaginas fitting together. What more is there to know?”

“Gross,” Boris said. “Why would she ever think we would want to do that?”

Mildred ran home for pajamas and more flashlights. Her dad would say yes. He said yes a lot, mostly because of guilt over Beverly leaving. Also, he trusted Boris, probably more than he’d ever trust Mildred. Mildred wasn’t offended—Boris was more responsible at age ten than most adults she knew. Boris’s mom was the undecided one.

Mildred pushed back a twinge of guilt at leaving her dad alone for the night. He claimed to be grateful that he could watch a “grown-up movie” while she was gone. She and

Boris had already watched all his “grown-up” DVDs after school while he was still at work but letting him believe she hadn’t seen them was a little gift. She wanted to believe it was a gift to him, but really she was saving her own butt. She was already figuring out that lying to “protect” others didn’t actually work. Plus, he’d have Neko to snuggle.

Boris’s mother drew the line at letting the dog in her house. 24

Mildred’s mother’s disappearance had taken time to sink in and most of that sinking had occurred after her father had finally given up on trying to lie her into a more gentle transition. Six months earlier, Mildred had come home from school and Beverly wasn’t home so she went next door and stayed with Boris until her father arrived. Hank had told Mildred her mom went on an unexpected trip. Then a week later, it had changed to how Mom needed a break, “to work on herself.” A week after, Hank had finally admitted he didn’t know where Beverly was or why she left. A letter had supposedly arrived containing information assuring Hank that Beverly was fine but had to leave them. There was no further explanation. Another week had passed when Mildred overheard her father talking to a neighbor about how he’d called the police the first week, having no idea where his wife had disappeared to. All the while, he’d been assuring

Mildred everything was fine. But everything was not fine. Maybe Hank had also been lying to himself, to cushion his own blow, and she was the accidental collateral damage.

It was probably a little of both. He probably told himself it was for her and she would give him that. After all, he was the parent who stayed.

Before returning to Boris for their closet campout, Mildred hid in her own closet with her diary for fifteen minutes—a ritual she’d done every day now for six months.

While Mildred’s mother’s disappearance was unexpected for Mildred, it did not seem that surprising for the grown-ups who knew her mother, as most close family friends’ and neighbors’ reactions had revealed. Upon hearing the news, at first their eyes would go wide and their heads tilt slightly left, and then their lips would purse and they would nod, murmuring “hm…mhm.” The concern that had made Mildred so sullen, one her father- 25 appointed-therapist, Jane, told her was a common childhood concern, was how much of the disappearance had been Mildred’s fault.

On this night, with Boris waiting for her next door, Mildred started by reviewing the list from the day before, which began with rolled eyes with dad behind mom’s back.

This line-item made every list. She turned to a fresh page, pressed it down firmly with her palm, and took a deep breath. She settled on a list of potentially forgivable reasons

Beverly may have disappeared. Mildred plans to work on a new list of reasons Beverly might have left, reasons pointing the blame at Mildred, in the morning. She didn’t want to go back to Boris’s with red-rimmed eyes. Her dad kept telling her it was okay to cry, she should cry, but she refused to allow anyone to see her and only allowed Beverly-related tears in her closet if at all possible.

For the first few months after her mother’s disappearing act, Mildred had spent hours each night listing in her notebook which of her own actions had most contributed to the departure. On these lists, she was careful to include big words to please her mother, just in case Mildred ever had the opportunity to prove in writing how remorseful she was for her behavior. The first list she wrote identified only actions from the previous week:

1. Exchanged knowing look with Dad and rolled eyes at Mom (this item had multiple check marks next to it, one for each time she recalled doing this); 2. Put a jar in the recycling can that prevented the lid from closing but didn’t take recycling out; 3.

Incorrect grammar usage despite knowing better (multiple checks); 4. Forgot to fill dog water. After the first few lists, Jane pushed Mildred to consider the possibility that perhaps her mother had not just decided to leave that week, but it had been a growing issue. Mildred chose to ignore Jane’s repeated statement that it was not Mildred’s fault. 26

Instead, Mildred dug back further, trying to excavate from her memory as many wrongs as she had ever done her mother, including every time she aligned with her father.

Tonight, with Boris watching the clock, waiting for her return, she dedicated her fifteen minutes turned to two handwritten-pages telling the story of how Beverly, trapped in a cave during an impromptu hike, dug her way out from under a boulder that somehow fell too close to the only exit. In these stories, Mildred told herself the alleged letter was made up, just another story her father made up to comfort her—at least Mom isn’t hurt or dead. There had to be a reason for Beverly disappearance, one Mildred could understand.

When Mildred finally arrived back in Boris’s closet with her own sleeping bag and pillow as well as the library book they’d checked back out on ghost stories and urban legends, Boris raised one eyebrow at how long her return had taken, but didn’t ask why.

Maybe Boris made a mental note for Mildred’s dad for later—she disappeared and seemed upset when she reappeared. Mildred knew they discussed her well-being when she wasn’t around.

“Tell me a story?” Boris asked.

Mildred loved to tell stories and Boris loved to hear them, sometimes the same ones over and over, revised. He would suggest ideas for new flourishes or word choices occasionally and Mildred would include new insights and bits she called “memories” even if they were completely invented.

“Not one from the ghost story book, yet,” Boris clarified. “One from the Mildred

Archives. Any new ideas for the San Diego Zoo story?”

Mildred loved telling this story. It was of her bus ride home from the San Diego zoo when she was six. It was also the story of the first fight Mildred remembered 27 between Beverly and Hank, the story of the alliance she and Hank built against Beverly.

Also, it was the story of how she came to understand the word glorious, one of Mildred’s favorites.

“If by ‘new ideas,’ you mean new memories of what happened that day on the bus after our trip to the zoo, then perhaps a few.” Mildred and Boris often played this game where she claimed a story to be 100% true and Boris pretended to believe her. He walked a fine line of almost-teasing which, if she decided to be offended, ended story time before it even began. The stories were as close to the “truth” as Mildred remembered. She occasionally added in small details and conversation bits in order to spruce them up for

Boris and usually omitted details too closely linked to her guilty conscious, but always remained true to the heart of the story. What Mildred didn’t tell Boris was that the real lies were the parts she purposely left out.

“This one is about a little girl named Mildred and her stuffed panda bear.” She liked to start them off as twisted children’s bedtime stories and Boris laughed and cheered just enough to make her smile but not so much to make her mad.

“Mildred clutched her small stuffed panda bear tightly to her chest on the first bus ride of her memory. A man rode the bus that day wearing dirty clothes, his hair a wild tangle of long, unwashed locks, standing in the middle of the bus, yelling ‘The truth about this country.’ Mildred’s parents sat on either side of her, her father whispering,

‘He’s probably crazy, or a veteran, or both.’ Her mother whispering, ‘Don’t stare, Millie,’ and then physically moving Mildred’s chin to lead her gaze out the nearest window.”

When Mildred thought about Beverly, she often thought of the San Diego Zoo and the stuffed panda bear she’d gotten there. The funny part was that she didn’t even 28 remember the actual giant panda they had waited in line for fifty seven minutes

(according to her father) to lay eyes on. What she remembered most was this bus ride back to the hotel after seeing the panda.

“The man zeroed in on her parents. ‘Do you teach your child the truth about

America?’ he asked.

“Mildred wondered what this supposed ‘truth’ might be. She was only six-years- old but her parents told her way more than the parents of her friends ever seemed to tell them. Did they teach her this truth?

“‘Do you?’ the man asked her parents. ‘She needs to know about these assholes, you need to tell her. This place is fucked. It’s your job.’”

Mildred took intense pleasure in saying fucked. Boris beamed with the delight of hearing Mildred say the forbidden word.

“Mildred’s mother leaned closer and said ‘Henry,’ over Mildred’s head to her father. The man started making his way towards them at the end of the bus, as the words asshole and fucked echoed back and forth between little Mildred’s ears like a ping pong ball, making her nauseous.”

Mildred paused here, feigning story telling-induced exhaustion, and took a few deep breaths, letting them out slowly for dramatic effect. Boris leaned in closer and

Mildred’s voice dropped a notch, one eyebrow lifted high above the other, her eyes open wide.

“Mildred felt her parents move in closer to her on both sides. Her mother whispered, ‘Is this our stop coming up?’ Her father’s flexed arm muscles, crossed, pressed together, triggered her own arms to squeeze tighter. ‘I’ll go first and you take 29

Dred behind me to the exit,’ her father said. Mildred knew her mother was worried since she didn’t put up any fight about the usage of the nickname ‘Dred,’ one her mother abhorred.”

Boris nodded in approval over the use of this new word. Abhorred had been the word-of-the day on Mildred’s calendar last week and she’d vowed to use it as often as possible. Her mother would be impressed with Mildred’s vocabulary when she returned home.

“As they stood, the man stepped closer, blocking the opening of the back door.

But then a tall, brown-skinned woman, bending slightly to keep her pile of braids from pressing against the ceiling, stepped up to him. Her giant, silver, sparkly platform shoes made her legs, wrapped in faux-fur animal-print lycra, seem as long and as thin as two giraffes’ necks reaching to wind together. Her tank top was also skin tight, gold sequins to match the gold in her leggings. The ruby lips were mere inches from the man’s face.

‘We do not talk to our little girls like that, sir.’ Sparkles were flying, as she beckoned for

Mildred and her parents to walk behind her, as if she were flicking a fly away, by swatting her long arm ending in sharp, manicured nails, using her own body as a human shield. ‘We do not frighten them,’ she said to the man.”

Mildred always got faster in this spot, talking so fast that her tongue could barely keep up with her lips.

“She turned her long eyelashes and large, turquoise eyes to Mildred. ‘Go on, baby.’ Then she turned back towards the man, blocking the aisle. ‘We protect our little girls, sir. We don’t threaten them.’” 30

Mildred loved doing the voices for her little-girl-self and her parents, each distinct, each a carefully practiced imitation. She was getting pretty good, especially with her father’s voice. The longer her mother was gone, the more she felt like she was just making a voice up for a character in a story. She wasn’t sure she remembered her mother’s voice correctly and worried she might forget it together. She had it recorded in some home videos but it wasn’t the same. Her impression already felt like an imitation of an imitation of an imitation, the original lost forever.

“Once they were safely off the bus and it was pulling away, taking the yelling man away with it, her father turned to her mother and said, ‘What a tranny.’ He laughed the short, choppy laugh like a rhino snorting air out of its nose in preparation for a fight— one Mildred had come to know meant relief. ‘She sure saved our asses.’

“Mildred’s mother replied, ‘Don’t use that word, Henry. It isn’t right. And don’t say a-s-s.’

“‘What is right, then?’ Her father asked.

“‘I think transsexual is what we’re supposed to say now.’

“Mildred finally caught her breath, familiar tears welled up in her eyes, a natural side effect of fear. She found her voice. ‘What’s a tranny?’

“‘Don’t use that word, dear.’

“‘Okay, what’s the other thing you said?’ In her mind, though, she said tranny, tranny, tranny, tranny, rolling the word over and over.

“Right as her father took a breath to speak, her mother cut him off. ‘You can know when you are older.’ 31

“Mildred’s father winked at her, a response she would learn that night means, I’ll tell you later.

“‘Mommy, why was the man yelling at us?’

“‘He’s probably mentally ill, Millie. It means his mind is sick. He doesn’t think the way we do.’ She paused and then asked, ‘Were you afraid of him?’

“After thinking about it for a moment, Mildred responded, ‘He seemed really worried for me,’ and imagined him pouring cough medicine into his ear, to make his brain feel better.”

These moments Mildred tinkered with as well, the comparisons, the similes, the imaginary world of her younger self. She didn’t remember ever thinking this specific detail about the medicine but it sounded better.

“But before Mildred and her father had a chance to talk later, she already had her own idea of what a tranny was—a tall, beautiful, fierce giraffe who minds all the babies, not just her own. This giraffe woman was glorious.”

Mildred’s proudest word from the original version, glorious, was her mother’s word-of-the-day for Mildred that day—Mildred was to use it three times so she would

“own it.” In that moment after getting off the bus, Mildred knew what that word meant.

The first time she had rolled this story around in her brain, she knew what it felt like to be in the presence of glorious.

Boris laid down in their closet fort on his back and Mildred rested her head on his stomach. Mildred always excluded the part of the story where her parents had gotten into the first big fight she could remember and omits her own guilt at being the cause. 32

Her dad had never said anything negative about her mother, rarely rolled his eyes back at Mildred, but an alliance had begun between them, after her glorious and fierce tranny encounter, when they waited until her mother slept and then whispered to each other, firing questions and answers back and forth. Mildred liked to pick the story back up at that part.

“Later that night, after Mildred’s mother was in bed, Mildred and her father whispered to each other in her bedroom.

“‘What’s a tranny, Daddy?’

“‘It’s a person who is really a man but dresses like a woman.’

“‘What do you mean, really?

“‘Like born with boy body parts but feels like a woman.’

“‘But she had boobies, didn’t she?’

“‘Some people have sex change operations.’

“‘What’s a sex change operation?’

“‘When a person has surgeries to change their bodies to be the opposite sex.’

“‘How did you know she was a tranny?’ Mildred asked.

“‘Adam’s apple,’ her father replied.

“‘What’s an Adam’s apple?’

“‘This thing men have in their throats.’ He put her hand on his Adam’s apple so she could feel the soft edges. She squeezed and he flinched a little but didn’t stop her.”

Mildred paused here, not to be dramatic, but because she found this a testament to her father’s love for her and it always caught her off-guard. Then she jumped back into the conversation between her young self and her father. 33

“‘Why do boys want to dress up like girls?’

“‘I don’t know. Why do you want to dress up like girls?’

“That one stumped her for a minute—suddenly it all made sense. She did choose to dress like a girl. She knew girls who dressed more like boys, too. ‘Do girls dress like boys, too?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Why does Mommy not want me to know what a tranny is?’

“‘Not sure.’

“‘When I tell myself the story at bedtime, do I say she or do I say he?’

“Her father paused, unusual for these secret back-and-forths between them, and then the question and answers changed directions temporarily. ‘You tell yourself stories out loud at bedtime?’

“‘Yes. What do I say? Which word?’

“‘I think she.’

“‘How come?’

“‘Because if she wanted to be called he, she’d dress like a man.’

“‘I need to know for sure, Daddy. It goes in the story.’”

Mildred loved this spot as well because it was the story within her story, the story of herself telling the story of herself to herself. It spun her brain in circles to think about.

“Her father agreed to get answers for her. ‘Okay, baby, I’ll find out for you.’ And he did find out—she was the correct term. Also, he found out a few more tidbits, including that only trannys can use the word tranny, and transsexual is also wrong.” 34

Mildred recalled the slightest glint of satisfaction in her father’s eyes as he told her this part, a recollection she also kept from Boris.

“‘The correct word is transgender but they can call each other tranny. And sometimes honorary trannys can say it too.’

“‘What’s an honorary tranny?’

“‘Someone who is a good enough friend of the trans ladies to become one of the gals.’

“‘How do you know, Daddy? Who did you ask?’

“‘One of the ladies-of-the-night I sometimes notice over on the corner by the

Arco.’

“‘What is a lady of the night?’

“‘They just hang out there waiting for someone who is lonely and needs a friend—they get paid to be friends.’

“Mildred made a mental note-to-self. She liked making friends and this might be something to look in to when she was old enough to be out after dark.”

This was usually the part where storytelling ended because Mildred and Boris couldn’t stop laughing and switched over to inventing scenarios of a six-year-old Mildred working on her future goal to be a prostitute.

“Can you imagine if I had told Beverly I wanted to be a ‘lady-of-the-night’ when

I grew up?” Mildred sat up because her head was bouncing too much on Boris’s stomach from his laughter.

“Mommy, is there a college degree for being a hooker?” Now Boris sat up to clutch his sides. 35

“My kindergarten picture holding the sign that says, ‘when I grow up, I want to be a hooker.’” Now they are rolling. They only learned what the word hooker meant a few weeks ago from an older boy on the playground, but they felt grown-up throwing the word around as if they’d known it for a long time.

Mildred did sometimes stop to say hello to the “Arco-gals,” as her dad called them. It was one small act of defiance against her mother, deliberately, to punish her mother for leaving. Beverly would never have approved of Mildred talking to prostitutes.

She never figured out which lady was trans. They always said ‘hi’ back to her, sometimes with a wink. Mildred relished those winks as a part of her new efforts to be done caring what Beverly would approve of.

Mildred and Boris slept on the floor of the closet that night, as they often did, surrounded by empty popcorn bags and juice boxes and candy wrappers and blankets.

Within a few months of that closet camp-out with Boris, Mildred finally gave up on the lists she wrote during her “Beverly time.” What was the point? If her mother did reappear, requesting proof of Mildred’s repentance, she already had plenty of documented evidence. Instead, Mildred started planning out the moment of return. She started with different versions of a tearful reunion—her mother would gather her up in the sort of warm embrace that incited gagging when Mildred saw it on TV as Beverly explained how she had been trapped in a cave (fill in the blank as to why she was in there) by the rock slide unable to make calls or get the word out. After months of eating bugs, licking dew, and digging under rocks with two small sticks, Beverly finally tunneled her way out, the whole time only thinking of her daughter, Millie, and how worried she must be. In this fantasy, even her father was in on the hug, gushing tears, and 36 there was hope her parents would work things out and find a way to be together despite their differences.

By the time Mildred was eleven, this story she told herself turned into a less smoochy but still tender moment in which her mother returned from secret rehab.

Mildred had never actually witnessed her mother even drink a beer, but this was her fantasy so she could do whatever she wanted with it. In this fantasy, her mother returned, healed, ready to reconnect with her only daughter, the love of her life (okay, a little smoochy), and mend their damaged but salvageable relationship. In this version, over time, the fixing became limited only to her and her mother, and her father was not a part of it—he could have his own fantasies—because this seemed more believable. Her imagination conceded that her parents were probably not a good match and never would be.

Every so often she allowed a version in which her mother was dead, shot trying to escape a hostage situation in order to return to Mildred, or from a fatal car accident after her car broke down and she was hitchhiking home. There was always a point in these versions where Mildred’s eyes would fill with tears, her throat would snag, and she would quickly shift back a safer, less sticky version.

These death visions developed further and further. The scenario included her mother trying desperately to get to her, often penciling a message on a discarded receipt found on the floor of the car moments before passing out. The tragic note would be discovered and, years later, a boy and his father would find her as a teenager, tell her the story of their dead uncle/grandfather/brother/whomever who tried to help Mildred’s mother, and hand her the note they had discovered. She even once drafted a eulogy, 37 spelling her mother’s name out with her fingertip in her memory foam pillow: B-e-v-e-r- l-y.

Mopey Mildred formed fully when Mildred was twelve and the fantasy turned from death to abandonment. Her mother left her and wasn’t coming back. And even if she did, what then? The damage was done. She could go this long without so much as talking to her own daughter. She decided that twelve years old was too old to be lying to herself that her mother even cared or was coming back at all. Her mother would call it

“being delusional.”

Once this narrative thread sewed Mildred’s story together, she stopped making the story dramatic. In these versions, she never yelled or screamed or hit or cried or begged for explanation. She simply shrugged and walked away. Sometimes her father would take her mother back, but Mildred would drift off. The version where her father accepted her mother back began making her so uncomfortable that she couldn’t fall asleep, fearful of the possibility that one of them, she or her father, would accept Beverly back and the other wouldn’t. She played around with versions in which her father yelled and cursed, but these made her stomach feel bubbly and woozy. She eventually stuck with the version where she received a letter in which her mother apologized, took full responsibility, and respected their wishes not to see her ever again. This was the version she was in the throes of when the nickname Mopey Mildred finally stuck. Only Boris was allowed to use it to her face. He was an honorary Mopey Mildred member, after all.

Soon after the kids at Hawthorne Middle School began referring to her as Mopey

Mildred, Mildred’s father heard a story from his friend about the friend’s high school daughter, who had been posting mostly-nude photos of herself on social media, and Hank 38 panicked. Mildred knew the half-nude-teenager because said-teenager’s sister was in

Mildred’s seventh grade class. Mildred and Boris were not surprised at all that this was the girl trying to get molested by online stalkers. They also recently had learned what

“sex-trafficking” was in an assembly at school attempting to teach them how to protect themselves, and agreed this girl was probably at risk, if anyone they knew was. Mildred’s father decided the best “solution” was to up the therapy prescription— twice-a-week sessions, one hour per week with her father present and the other hour just for Mildred.

He would not specify what the “problem” was in regards to Mildred, who was not posting nude photos of herself, she kept reminding him, but Mildred and Boris agreed it was to prevent Mildred from inevitably being trafficked as a sex slave.

“That girl lost her mother as well,” Hank explained to Jane-the-therapist, during their first double-session week, “and look what she’s doing.”

“Her mother died,” Mildred piped in. No one responded. Mildred had heard this at school but she couldn’t remember from whom and didn’t know if it was credible intel.

Hank also cut Mildred off from social media and YouTube, which she didn’t care much about, and limited her television to educational programming, which sent her into a week-long fit revolving around her deep-seeded yearning, no, need, for the show Freaks and Geeks, to which her father replied, “That show is half the reason why you shouldn’t be watching TV. You’re too young for those shows.” Mildred and Boris hadn’t been able to make any connections between a half-nude teenage girl and how this particular show was the problem, but Hank’s mind was made up so it didn’t matter. Mildred brought it up in therapy, hoping Jane would take her side. 39

“I’m almost thirteen…” Mildred started but then stopped and rethought her next move when she saw the look on his face. Jane did nothing to defend her.

“Have you ever interacted with strangers online?” Jane asked her.

Mildred shook her head. It wasn’t the full truth, but there was nothing worth mentioning and she didn’t want her father to overreact even more.

“Girls your age are hurt all the time, girls who have suffered a trauma, are depressed, are vulnerable. You’re the perfect target for online predators.” Jane leaned forward, scratching her yellow lined notepad with the pencil, then jammed the tip into a purple electric sharpener she kept close by for emergencies, sharpened the tip to a fine point, and returned to scribbling.

Once, during “trust building,” she had confided in Mildred that she purposely had bad handwriting in case she was ever forced by the courts to turn notes over to be used against a client—she left it up to judges and lawyers and paralegals to decipher her handwriting and codes. Mildred wasn’t sure what to make of this information or why

Jane seemed to think it would bond Mildred to her. Her father sat on the chair, not opposite Mildred like the therapist, but to the side, pressing the pink parts of his lips together until they disappeared.

“Tell me, do they still call you Mopey Mildred at school?” Jane asked.

They did, but Mildred wasn’t about to admit it to Jane or her father.

“No. They call me Dred now.” She decided any time another person besides Boris or his mother referred to her as “mopey,” they would get punched in the face and told,

“Call me Dred.” 40

In school later that week, Mildred and Boris sat together at a table, comparing their sack lunches, bartering for equal shares of each other’s desserts, when a group of girls came over to the table. One was the sister of the older girl from the infamous online pictures. Mildred knew what was coming. Mildred had complained, accidently much too loudly she had noted-to-self at the time, that those pictures were making her life difficult and questioned why she should be punished for older girls being dumb.

“Mopey Mildred and Boring Boris. Any breakthroughs in therapy yet?” the sister directed this question at Mildred.

Mildred had once run into this classmate and her older sister in Jane’s waiting room, a detail she had promised herself never to use against either girl.

“Take a hint—your mom isn’t coming back. She’s too creeped out by you and your friend here.”

Mildred stood up from her bench, opened the top of her chocolate milk all of the way across, and splashed it in the girl’s face.

“At least I have one parent who loves me, which is more than I can say for you and your slutty sister,” Mildred said.

The table between them kept Mildred from throwing that one punch.

“Just shut up about my sister,” was all the girl could manage to reply before

Mildred and Boris booked it for the closest exit.

“That was cold,” Boris said.

“That should shut her up.” Mildred fought off the tears that always welled up when she was confronted with intensity. She knew that might be the one girl who could understand her, but it was too late for that. 41

Besides, she had Boris.

But later that night, in her own closet, alone with her lists and stories that were carefully packed in an old backpack, with a short leftover-nub of a pencil, she started a new kind of list: I lash out when I get mad.

She decided to title the list “Ways to Manage Anger.” She had refused to work on this list in therapy with Jane and her father but now, in the safety of her own closet, with other lists tucked away nearby, she filled in a few lines: 1. Never yell at Boris; 2. Take a deep breath and count to ten; 3. Don’t think about Beverly when people make me mad.

She erased the word Don’t. Thinking of Beverly would direct her anger where it was most deserved. She wrote it back in. But being mad at some dumb classmate felt better. She erased it back out. But that girl was just as messed up about her own mother as Mildred was about Beverly. She wrote it back in and then erased it one more time, ripping the page with the short piece of eraser left, leaving a trail of pink eraser bits across the page beneath it.

42

III.

Sitting across the table from Beverly feels too comfortable for Mildred’s taste. It’s been over six years since they’ve seen each other in person and Mildred wants it to feel wrong but instead it feels as if very little time has passed. Her mother looks almost the same, a few more lines on her forehead, thicker make-up, brighter clothing, layers of flowing clothes, knee high boots, big clunky jewelry—this must be what artists in San

Francisco dress like. She’s clearly playing the part. Or maybe she just is the part, now.

Bev Lee, “local gem.” Beverly feels strangely familiar and foreign at the same time. She takes some satisfaction in knowing that she looks much different at almost seventeen as she did at ten years old. The boobs alone were enough to stop Beverly’s breath when they first saw each other.

The coffee shop bustles with whistles blowing, dishes clanking, chatting, and the barista laughing at jokes made by an elderly customer while a line builds up. Their table is in the window and Mildred sees a group of girls from her school walking towards them on the sidewalk. They aren’t friends, exactly, but these girls are okay and Mildred pushes down a sudden urge to leave Beverly sitting alone at the table and to run out the door to fall in step with the group.

Mildred has insisted that Beverly not be at their home—that she stay in a hotel and they meet in public places. She secretly plans to allow Beverly one visit, originally planned as an opportunity to rub it in that their home isn’t Beverly’s home anymore, but her resolve to hurt her mother dissolves with each passing moment. 43

“Mildred, I have an ulterior motive in coming here. Of course I want to see you, darling, but also, I really want you to come home with me. We’ve missed so many years together and I just want to explain things and to make it up to you.”

Of course Beverly has other plans beyond just seeing Mildred. Of course she wants Mildred to give something she may never be ready to give. Mildred says nothing.

They have spent long silences together, Beverly breaking the silence to tell Mildred a story. Really, the only thing Mildred has fully committed to commenting on is Beverly’s request to “explain herself.” Mildred wants none of that.

Beverly seems to thinks Mildred is just being difficult on purpose, but Mildred truly fears what she might say to Beverly. She still has a backpack filled with notebooks and lists from her childhood, reasons why her mother might have left, stories of what could have happened, and even though there still is a small part of her that wants to give these to Beverly, to hear the real story, to embrace her mother, she fears her own anger.

As soon as she saw Beverly’s face, she wanted to punch it and then hold it in her hands.

She also decides to never show Beverly the lists, the stories, the notebooks. Those belong only to Mildred. But what if she falters in a moment of weakness and admits any of this?

Against this urge to apologize is the counter-urge of pure fury, made worse by the fact that Beverly seems to be disregarding her anger as “being difficult.” Jane calls it

“minimizing,” a defense mechanism on Beverly’s part, probably, but still infuriating.

Mildred wants Beverly to acknowledge that Mildred has every right to be mad. Jane says

Beverly might never be able to take full responsibility. So, instead, Mildred does nothing.

Says almost nothing. Just stares and blinks and breathes. This moment is what she’s been waiting for—to find out why Beverly has really come home. 44

Beverly has fallen in synch with Mildred’s refusal to speak. She pauses an approximate amount of time after speaking, to allow for a reasonable length of response from Mildred, and then she goes on, as if nothing is strange between them. Beverly seems resigned to the silence. Maybe she knows she deserves it—this could be her acknowledgement. Or maybe she just thinks she can come here and whisk Mildred away from her home and family.

“Baby, there’s a great art school two bus stops away from my flat.”

So her mom is the kind of person who says flat instead of apartment. How

European of her.

“A good friend and mentor of mine says you are already accepted, full tuition covered by scholarships. All you have to do is send a few samples of your work. I know you still write stories and paint and…Hank sent me a few pictures and I passed them alone. They are really incredible! This is an opportunity you will never get in Hawthorne.

What a chance!”

“What kind of friend, Beverly?” Mildred surprises them both by speaking. She stops an urge to be angry with her father for giving her secrets to Beverly. It feels treasonous but she knows better. “Like, a lovah? Who did you have to sleep with to get me this ‘great opportunity’?” She can’t stop the bitterness. Better not to speak.

“Okay, Mildred. I get it. You’re angry and you’re a ‘gown-up’ now.” Beverly glances down at Mildred’s chest again and winces. “I missed out on a lot.” She pauses for a few beats, her mouth pressed tightly closed. Then she takes a breath and smiles again, more brightly this time. “Just please consider my offer. It really is a great chance! Henry thinks so, too. Talk to him about it.” 45

Mildred swallows the feeling of betrayal. Why would her father want her to leave? She skips the opportunity to correct Beverly with, He prefers to be called Hank,

Beverly.

Later, with Beverly safely contained back in her motel and Boris sitting at his desk across the yard, flickering lights in mock-SOS cries to her over his chemistry homework, Mildred is ready to ask her father about this alleged “great opportunity.”

“I know this is difficult. It is for me too. But I think you should consider what a great chance this would be. You don’t have to live with Beverly or even see her that often, but working on a relationship with her is good for you. You can’t see it but it’s true. And also, think about living in the Bay Area, going to art shows, being around peers who love art, it’ll be really amazing, baby.”

“But what about you, Dad? What about Boris?” Mildred looks at her fingernails, pulling tiny strips of hanging skin down until dots of blood appear.

“I’ll visit a lot and you’ll come home a lot.”

“But won’t you miss me?”

“Oh course! So much. But sometimes, as parents, we have to push their kids to do what is best for them, not what is best for us.”

Mildred leans into her dad and he puts his arm around her. “Bev Lee must have missed the memo on that one.”

He gives her a little squeeze of solidarity. “I’m not saying she gets to be your mother, again. I’m just saying you need her, even though you’ve trained yourself not to, and this is a great way to do something amazing and get to know her again. I’ll be so close.” 46

“But won’t you be lonely?” And won’t I be lonely? But Mildred doesn’t say that part out loud.

“Don’t worry about me. Let me be the grownup and worry about you. I’ll be fine.

I still have plenty of years to follow you wherever you move in life, always moving into apartments around the corner.”

Mildred laughs and tears finally release the choking feeling she’s been fighting for days.

“It’s going to be okay, Mildred. You might benefit from opening a tiny bit of yourself back up to her, that’s all. Not a big piece, just a tiny, tiny piece.”

Mildred thinks she might have a very, very small piece left to share. 47

IV. When Boris finally breaks the news to Mildred that he is moving to Moscow for their senior year of high school, she is already packing for San Francisco. He purposefully held out to tell her, just to see if she might show any indecision about choosing to leave him alone at Mineral County High. But indecision is not how Mildred rolls—even if she might be feeling it on the inside, that information rarely makes it to the outside. He finds comfort in knowing that she believes her move came first, not his. It doesn’t really mean anything, since his parents decided his move for him, but his sense of loyalty feels safely protected if she is the first to leave. This way, he doesn’t have to tell her how desperate he is for them to stay neighbors, how insecure he feels about what kind of love theirs is, or how much he worries that he can’t be himself without her. This way, everything is out of his hands and all he has to do is make the best of it. It makes things easier, he supposes—no regrets for him. Perhaps he will never allow himself to tell

Mildred how he really feels, although he suspects she must already know.

Mildred leaves town a week before Boris. His suitcases are already packed, with her help.

To seal Boris’s resolve to get over his romantic feelings for Mildred, he agrees to go to a high school party with some friends, in the loosest definition of the word, from his swim team. Really, they wouldn’t have even invited him if they hadn’t all run into each other at the Arco the day before and it came up, so not great friends, but enough to get an invite which will hopefully be enough to get Mildred out of Boris’s head. The next afternoon, Boris gets a text from one of these swim team quasi-friends. 48

—Mildred coming?

—She moved.

—Sweet. Parsons asking about you.

Boris isn’t sure how to respond to this. Amy Parsons. They’ve been on swim team together for years but he never really thought about her much beyond practice and meets.

Sure, he’s noticed how good she looks in her two piece racing suit and how her goggles magically don’t leave big rings around her eyes, even after two hours of practice. The more he thinks about it, the more he remembers times when she joined his lane even though there was more room in other lanes, wanting to talk between sets, and making him feel awkward—standing around in a speedo chatting with girls is hardly in his comfort zone. He shudders thinking about it. She often tried to chat him up as they were leaving practice but he usually cut her short, politely, of course, to rush home for some plan or scheme he shared with Mildred.

Could his friendship with Mildred be keeping him from having “real” girlfriends?

Could he have been the boy hiding behind doors in his high school between classes to make out with a girl, holding hands in the hallways, getting notes written in purple ink, passed down rows of students? He knows his friendship with Mildred is at least part of why he doesn’t have a large friend-group, although he isn’t sure that imaginary friend- group would exist even if he didn’t have Mildred. He’s never regretted missing football games and keggers. Besides, he’s only had eyes for Mildred. He vows to change this, maybe tonight, with Amy Parsons.

He feels a surge of gratitude to Mildred—maybe she was right. It’s better to get the really awkward sex out of the way with someone you trust. He responds to the text- 49 invite, after many changes to the exact wording in order to sound nonchalant. He can’t trust this guy.

—See you tonight, seems a safe response.

—Don’t worry. She’s no virgin.

Boris is taken aback by this comment. He’s heard this kind of talk in the locker room but has never had a comment like this directed towards him, probably because

Mildred’s always standing there ready to throat check anyone who would say this out loud. Boris decides it’s safer to not directly address this comment.

Amy lingers, nearby at all times if not at his elbow, at the party, which is basically a keg in the middle of a field far enough from a main street to be at least somewhat unnoticeable. She laughs at all the right times and leans on him when other girls join in their conversation and smells of cigarettes and perfume and beer. She asks about him, about his move to Moscow, and about his plans for college, staring at him as if every word coming out of his mouth is fascinating. A few beers allow him to believe he’s interesting and funny and handsome—a normal high school teenager growing up in

Hawthorne, thinking about graduating and taking on the world or planning their future farming or gaming career. Amy fills the emptiness where Mildred is missing. In a way,

Mildred will always be missing because she doesn’t feel this way about him. Mildred will never lie to him or pretend he’s hilarious when he isn’t. She would never have to. But it feels good to have this pretty, kind girl hang on his every word, even when those words start to slur.

Hours later, when Boris’s mother probably assumes he is fast asleep in his room, he’s lying on a blanket under the stars with Amy Parsons, learning there are girls other 50 than Mildred who can make him feel this good, learning sex feels amazing, whether it’s with Mildred or Amy Parsons.

After that, Amy doesn’t call and neither does Boris. The day he leaves for

Moscow, he gets one text.

—Have fun in Moscow. Call when you get home and we’ll hook up.

When Boris gets home, Amy will probably be far away from Hawthorne, swimming on a college team, having late-night “study dates” under the stars with college boys. But it feels nice to pretend there might be a girl waiting for him, thinking about having sex with him again.

A week later, he unpacks his suitcase and duffel bag into the three drawers cleared for him in a small, one-bedroom family dormitory apartment. His bed is the pullout couch. He vows to never tell Mildred about Amy but she probably already knows.

It’s a small town, after all.

51

V.

Mildred had never imagined attending a fancy, private, arts-focused high school before Beverly made special arrangements to get her in and cover most of her tuition. San

Francisco is some real culture shock compared with Hawthorne, and coming in as senior is a challenge, but Mildred isn’t afraid. Maybe a tiny bit nervous, but certainly not afraid.

On the one hand, Mildred secretly enjoys knowing her mother has a certain amount of clout in the San Francisco arts’ community. On the other hand, she hates taking Beverly up on this offer as it feels like partial forgiveness, as if she is being bought back enough to give Beverly one more chance.

Gross. This makes her spine cringe. At least she lives on school campus, which is a few miles from her mother’s artist loft so she has a buffer to keep Beverly away.

Mildred enjoys her classes and spends most of her free time working in her studio, sometimes sleeping there instead of her dorm room, where a noisy roommate often sneaks her boyfriend in for a “sleepover,” sleep being code for not-so-quiet sex along with loud, annoying giggle-whispers. “Do you think she heard us?” “No, she’s asleep.” Then more loud, annoying giggles. Then, “oh Danny” and “oh Jess” and then more panting. Mildred is careful to keep her breathing even, steady, so as to never give them the satisfaction of thinking she’s awake.

Double gross.

She keeps a camping mat, sleeping bag, and extra pillow under her drafting table in her shared studio. Her studio partner never comes in because he’s too busy shagging her roommate most of the time. Mildred prefers sleeping in her studio, anyway. 52

Mildred also enjoys spending time trying international cuisines with a group of acquaintances from her ceramics class who let her tag along. She sometimes contemplates if her eating group mates might move up to actual friend status, but worries

Boris has set the bar way too high and no one else will ever seem like a good-enough friend in his wake. She enjoys these girls, most of the time, but is always glad to part ways with them as they head out to bars to test out new fake IDs or hit up the local bodega that doesn’t card. They never directly invite her to join, but there is an implied assumption that she will and they always act surprised when she excuses herself to walk towards the studios instead.

“Mil, don’t you want to come?”

It’s not an invitation, exactly, but it’s not a rejection either. It puts the ball solidly in Mildred’s court, where she likes it. She must like them enough to allow a new nickname, but only because she doesn’t hate it. It makes sense that here, in Beverly’s realm, new friends call her a shortened version of what Beverly used to call her, Millie, back when she still called Beverly “Mom.” Mil sounds grown-up enough to not be annoying so she lets it stand.

After trying a surprisingly delicious Korean fusion restaurant and devouring a peanut butter and kimchee sandwich, relishing the disgust with which the other girls stared at her order, she leaves early, excited for a night of FaceTiming Boris, watching

Bones on Netflix, and hiding in her studio-cocoon. She might even paint. The other girls feign gagging at her food choice and she knows they’ll never be really be friends. It reminds her of her first slumber party when, after much research and practice on Boris, she came prepared with the scariest ghost story she could find, “The Hookman.” She 53 checked out a book on urban legends from the library and tried three different stories on

Boris before he made the final vote of which was the scariest. Beverly had insisted that

Mildred hang out with other girls, got her invited to the slumber party, and then reeled in the aftermath. The gory details Mildred added to the story did not help Beverly’s cause, and Mildred was not invited to another slumber party, thankfully. Mildred claimed that was the whole point, but a small part of her hoped at least one of the girls would love her scary story and she would know she was not the only girl in the world who was so…Mildred. Instead, she slept alone in her sleeping bag, against a wall, while the rest of the girls whispered and giggled about Adam Levine. Colossal fail on their parts, as far as

Mildred was concerned.

Hitting ignore on a call from Beverly as Mildred slips quietly into her studio makes the night’s plan even more delicious than the bizarre sandwich she ate for dinner.

The administration has never explicitly told students what hours they can and cannot be in their studios, but since dorm curfew is nine on weeknights and ten on weekends unless they have a parentally-approved pass, it seems clear there are hours she should not be in her studio. She doesn’t want anyone noticing her going in but not coming out. She raises her phone up to her mouth to record a list of ideas for her current project.

Watching her back keeps her from realizing that the light in her studio is already on. Her heart drops when she turns and sees dumbass-loud-sex-giggle-face Danny on her side of their shared studio and another idiot she’s seen around campus with him, the sensitive poet type who sits around playing a guitar and expecting the girls to swoon. And they do—this is the most confusing part of all. Mildred admits to herself there is 54 something attractive about this guitar-playing poet, but she’ll never admit that to anyone else. He is way too big of a douche and it takes a lot to get out of that category.

“Hey Mil, feeling lucky?” Danny leans against her drafting table, chest puffed up in his too-tight tank top. “Because we were thinking of including you in a double date tonight. So head back to the room and get yourself ready. We’ll meet you out on the quad in thirty.”

Triple gross.

“Hmmm, wow, yes, I was feeling lucky—which is why I’m so confused to see you here. Oh well. I guess my feelings aren’t always correct after all.” As usual, she is both proud and ashamed of her biting tongue.

Danny looks taken aback and stands up straight, taking his elbow off her table.

The douchebag laughs. She resists the urge to find this hot.

“So if you don’t mind, I already have plans, only with a paintbrush, which is much more interesting than talking to you two.” She can feel her nasty snarls coming out but she can’t slow them down. Talking to her roomie’s b-f this way will create friction, but how dare they invade her art space? “Please remove your bodies from my area.” She pushes past douchebag and the brush of his shoulder on hers makes her tingly. Maybe just one romp with this guy, not tonight, but another time, when she is the one making the move, might be fun. After all, isn’t this what she and Boris trained for?

But instead of being pompous and rude, guitar-poet moves out of her way and apologizes to her. “I didn’t realize this was your area. I was just looking at this painting—

I really like it.” 55

Is this guy nervous to be around her? “I’m not done with that one, yet. But thanks.”

“It’s Brentley,” he says.

“Thanks, Brentley.” Mildred’s glad it’s a douchey name—it’ll be easier to stray irritated at this guy.

Danny fills the doorway, urging Brentley out of there. “Sorry, Brentley, I didn’t know she was such a prude. Let’s go—there are plenty of girls who’ll want to fuck you tonight.”

Brentley’s face turns bright red. He stammers out a few syllables but isn’t able to get any specific words out for a minute. Then he finally says, “I’m not like that. He’s messing with you.”

Mildred walks over to the open door and shoves Danny the rest of the way through it. He stumbles back, loses his footing, and falls to the ground. He must already be tipsy.

“Stay out of my fucking studio, asshole.”

Danny looks up at her. He doesn’t look afraid—just like more of a dick. “Don’t forget to listen to me and Jess tonight,” Danny says. “I’ll whisper your name. Shit, I can take care of you second, if you’re tired of just listening and ready to participate.”

“Okay, Danny,” Brentley says.

She spits on Danny’s face. He does nothing to wipe it away.

“And if you dare to tell your girlfriend about why you don’t use this studio anymore,” Mildred says, “I’ll tell her all about what you just said. Or maybe I’ll just let her listen to you saying it yourself.” She pushes play on the recorded note she’s still 56 making on her phone and hears his voice again. Then she snaps a picture of him on the ground, her spit on his face. “For posterity.” She smiles at Danny and then turns back to her studio.

Brentley walks past her and reaches to pull Danny up off the ground. Brentley turns and apologizes to her again and adds, “Tough as nails,” in reference to Mildred and in a way that sounds like a compliment. Mildred already knows everyone in school will hear some version of this before morning. Whatever. At least she’ll have her own studio now. And more people will leave her alone.

“Be careful who you hang out with,” she says to Brentley. “People might start to think you’re an asshole, too.”

“Come on, Brentley,” Danny says. Brentley and Danny turn and start walking away. Mildred hears Danny call her a tease and a bitch. Brentley turns back and waves at her with a half-smile of apology. She shuts the door and locks the deadbolt. Who cares if

Brentley’s hot and writes poetry? He apologizes too much for things he didn’t even do.

Also, the guitar is so cliché. Now he played the viola or maybe the stand-up, bass that would be different.

Mildred considers going straight to the administration with her recording and photo but then decides against it. It’s hard enough to make even acquaintances in this school where most of the students are rich and local and have known each other for years.

She’s already risked losing her dining “friends.” Plus, this information might prove useful in the future if her roommate starts harassing her or if Danny tries to get back into her studio. There is also a small part of that her wants to protect Brentley, who might be 57 considered guilty by association, and his lack of coming forward (assuming he won’t) would be considered by the school to be “dishonorable behavior.”

Instead, Mildred puts on her smock, sets up her paints, props her phone on her easel, and hits Boris’s number. She needs some sanity. She needs to tell someone her story, someone who will listen and understand.

58

VI.

Before Boris boards the commuter train home from high school in northern

Moscow to the one-bedroom apartment he lives in with his parents at the university, he takes off the front tire of his bike and folds his bike up so he can press the compact version between his knees and the seat in front of him. It’s a low traffic time so he isn’t worried about taking up too much space, just in the habit of making himself, his bike, and his backpack as small as possible. None of the other kids in his class take this train—they mostly live in and around Rublyovka with the few other remaining wealthy Muscovite families. When the other kids call him “American,” it rarely feels hateful or angry—more a way to tell him apart, as if his voice and clothing aren’t enough to mark him. Because of his name, students and teachers are often confused at first by his thick American accent and how he slowly picks Russian words out. They quickly switch to English, probably in the interest of time. At home in Hawthorne, he is Russian, no matter what his voice sounds like. He always laughs and denies when a Russian school friend references how rich his family must be. Boris promises if they saw his family’s dormitory apartment, they wouldn’t think so. This just happens to be one of the only schools with

Russian as a second language courses. No matter what he says, they call him rubli and rub their fingers together when they say it.

Boris exits the train at Leninskie Gory, reassembles his bike, hops on, and weaves his way through the university buildings to his home. The path outside his gray, snow- encrusted building with its tiny squinting windows runs alongside a pond, now frozen over, with a hardened snow jump on one side. The children of other teachers and students who live in his building scream and laugh as, one after the other, they glide down the 59 jump on their ice skates or boots, try to stick a landing on the ice, slide across, and lodge themselves in the snow bank on the other side. Boris looks down at the studded ice-and- snow bike tires Mildred gave him as a going away present and turns sharply. He pumps his pedals, trying to pick up as much speed as he can without sliding his wheels out from under him, slips alongside the line between jumpers, hits the frozen top of the compact snow jump, and his wheels release from gravity as his bike carries him up and over the ice rink. He flies, his sleek wings cutting through the troposphere, ice beards forming along his body as he shoots through the stratosphere, and then down, down, his front tire hits the snow bank, jolting him back into his human form. His human form then shoots off his bike like a rocket and he lands for a second time on another snow bank running along the opposite path. Worth it.

Boris wiggles each limb and joint to be certain only bruises will reveal his activities to his mother. As he starts to lift himself up, a pile of children tackle him, all with glistening icy eyes and bright red circles where skin has frosted over, laughter muffled by layers of scarves and down jackets.

Boris yells out “Pozhalujsta, ostanovites'!” from the bottom of the pile, reaching one arm up and through to the sky in a dramatic gesture, inciting delighted screams and another wave of laughter. They all start answering his pleas for them to stop at the same time, too fast for him to understand individual words.

“Boris, bring the neighbor-girls in when you come.” Boris’s mother yells to him from their small, first floor window. “And don’t break your leg, for Christ sakes. You don’t want to need serious medical care while we’re here.” 60

Boris doesn’t know if his mother likes being in Moscow. She often talks about their time here as limited, though no one’s mentioned an exit strategy—just that they moved to Moscow to be a family again. He often wonders if she chose this out of love for his father, out of obligation to his father, or out of the necessity to bring him closer to his father. He also often considers the possibility that she hated living in Hawthorne and wanted to get him away from there and get him away from Mildred, although if it were just about Mildred, his mother probably would have changed her mind when she found out Mildred was moving to San Francisco. Or maybe by then it was too late—the plan was set.

“Okay, Sofie and Greta, poydem, time to go in.” The girls each grab one of his thick, waterproof gloves with their soft, damp, mittens, and then they hang like sacks of potatoes for Boris to drag across the ice to his bike.

“Boris, we can sit on your bike and you push us?” These girls, like all of the children he knows on campus, have been studying English since before they were born, as his father claims, and love any opportunity to practice it. They are small and cute and cry when he says no, though what he always wants is to work on his Russian. But the people in his building prefer to use him to practice their English for when they get to

America.

“Push us, Boris! Pojalusta?”

Boris sets the girls one behind the other on his bike seat, one hand holding the back of the seat, the two girls cradled against his arm for balance, and then his other hand on the handle bars. By the time Boris drops the girls off at their apartment, wipes down and takes his bike apart to store it, and strips his outer layer off to drape over the 61 floorboard heaters, his mother is already curled up on their loveseat couch, a 5-gallon red tub of peanut butter brought from the States in her lap, and a spoon full in her mouth as she watches Love Actually on the large computer screen that doubles as their television.

The apartment smells of freshly burned sage, as usual, cleansed of negative energy. His mother wanted to pick the Russian blue sage herself and wrap her own smudge stick, but their timing and the season made that impossible. Luckily, Masha from downstairs had an extra she was willing to part with. His mother burns a little sage each day while Boris and his father are gone. The sage rests in a small, blue and white Gzhel dish, carefully chosen upon their arrival, the first of a collection. Behind the dish, rests a four-inch-tall Buddha and a gold carved Russian cross—a tiny altar for prayer and chanting and meditation.

Boris and his father are careful not to disrupt this space. They’ve learned better than to question its presence, especially since their arrival in Moscow. She’s always had a little area like this that was off-limits, but Boris didn’t pay much attention before since it was tucked away in her bedroom. Now, there is nowhere for it to hide.

“Hi, Mom. What’s for dinner?”

Without looking up, she pulls another spoon out of her lap and extends it out to him. He takes it and digs into the creamy peanut butter.

“Are we out of crunchy already?”

She shakes her head and motions over to the cupboard filled with 5-gallon drums, half empty, the other half full. It’s not worth the risk of losing any of the body heat he has already acquired from her and digs back into the creamy bucket.

“Dad?” 62

She waves her hand around in the air towards their small square of a window, through which Boris can see his father’s building. He wonders what he might find if he ever were to show up there unannounced late one night while his father is supposedly working late.

Once his mother begins snoring, peanut butter lining the edges of her lips, Boris puts away the peanut butter, washes the spoons, turns up the sound on the movie a few more notches, and takes his phone into the bathroom to FaceTime with Mildred. She doesn’t answer but texts will call later.

Later ends up being the next morning. Boris sleeps on his couch, the phone stuck with sweat to the side of his arm. He pulls it off and wipes the screen.

“Boris! What’s up, my comrade?”

5am. Boris pulls his parent’s room door closed as quietly as he can and tiptoes to the farthest spot in the apartment from their room. Mildred’s make-up is smeared across her face in a familiar way. She’s been crying.

“Enough with that comrade shit, Mildred. What’s up with you? Why are you crying?”

She takes a breath and makes a big smile as if she is about to deny it, but then sighs and drops her shoulders.

“What’s the point of trying to lie to you?”

“Exactly. Where are you?” She’s sitting in a big, orange, fuzzy chair in a corner where a giant mirror and wallpaper come together. 63

“A bathroom at some stupid art function. Beverly is parading me around like a prize pig—‘my daughter this’ and ‘my daughter that,’ as if I belong to her. As if she had anything to do with why I’m so awesome.” The last part gets a grin out of her.

“Sounds awful.”

“She keeps carries around an old-school soft leather portfolio covers filled with photos of my paintings and copies of my poetry. She dared to ask me to read one of my poems. I mean, come on! I’m not a trained monkey. I’m a girl who hasn’t even decided if she gets to act all mom with me. Do her friends know she abandoned me for my formative years? She probably tells them she hid me away from the public eye to protect me, or some other ridiculous lie.”

Boris let’s her ramble it all out until she’s done. Mildred is a like a balloon deflating when she gets like this—words come shooting out at first, and then, as she runs out of air, the words slow, and then silence. Boris responds then, not before.

When she finally stops, Boris waits a good thirty seconds before speaking, just to be certain.

“What do you want to do about it?” He asks.

“I want to finish this year at school but then I want to go home. Or to college far away from her. Or, I guess I just wish my dad would move here and I could be with him.

I don’t know. Or move to Paris with my dad, or trek to Machu Picchu, or take a fishing boat to Russia. I don’t know, but I have to get away from her.”

“Okay, okay, don’t do anything crazy.” There’s the Mildred that Boris knows, filled with big, dramatic plans. “Just tell her you’re tired and take the bus back to your dorm. Stay away from her for a few days to cool off. Maybe call your dad?” 64

“I hate complaining about it to him. I feel so guilty about leaving.”

“Telling him about being pissed at her will remind him he’s your real parent, the one you love. Plus, he knows how to deal with her better than anyone.”

“You’re so reasonable.” This doesn’t come out like a compliment. Mildred just stares at him for a minute, wiping smudged mascara and tears from under her eyes, and then she flashes her perfect smile, $3,000 worth of braces reflected in her straight, gleaming teeth. “But you’re still the best. I miss you. We should be finishing high school together, sitting at lunch, conspiring and looking weird to everyone.”

“I’d rather be where you are any day.” Will this ever not be true?

Mildred skips over his comment and turns the conversation to Boris. “Tell me all about Moscow. Met any lovely young Russian ladies lately? Any to take your mind off

Vlad?” Mildred had nicknamed his father Vlad—her favorite Russian name of all time.

Boris shakes his head and laughs. “Although maybe if I spent more time with

Vlad, I would meet them.”

“Any updates on his evening whereabouts?”

“None I want to discover.” They stare at each other for a moment and then

Mildred’s head jerks as if someone’s calling to her. She sighs.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Get home safe,” Boris says.

She kisses her phone screen and he winks back at her. His heart pinches and a swift wave of nausea passes as quickly as it arrives. These moments are pure friendship- love for Mildred. He forces himself to not think about it anymore. But every now and then he can’t control his body’s reaction. 65

Mildred has apologized for convincing him they should lose their virginities together, a sure sign she was not in love with him and never would be. But then a week later, they had sex again. It was never in a romantic moment, lips accidentally getting too close in an awkward pause turning into a passionate kiss. Instead, he just turned to her and said, “Want to try again? It’ll get better each time. We need more practice.” What he really wanted to make her feel as good as she had made him feel. She agreed, re-asserting her initial claim that it was their responsibility as best friends to help each other become adults. This went on for weeks—each weekend, try again, more research on how to make her orgasm, hoping to win her heart. He never did.

Sure, when Mildred found out he was moving to Moscow, she cried, threw herself on him, squeezed him, but then she wiped her own tears and reassured him these were great moves for their futures and, when they finally were neighbors again, they would have so many stories to share. The next day, she made her father call on their phone plan to include Russia, promising they would FaceTime every single day. They finally ended up on weekly meeting that was sometimes pushed to two weeks apart out of necessity— the time difference and tiny living accommodations for Boris complicated things immensely.

Boris wakes back up a few hours later, again to his phone. Hank. Mildred’s dad calling? He swipes the screen and clears the sleep from his voice.

“Hello?”

“Glad you answered. Beverly just called. Mildred disappeared from an art opening last night and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. Have you talked to her?” 66

Boris’s heart starts racing but then he remembers what Mildred said and thinks he knows where she is. His dilemma is what to say to her father. Beverly can worry but

Hank deserves to know.

“She called me pretty upset and said she wanted to go home. I told her to go back to her dorm and stay away from her mom while she cooled off but now I’m thinking she might be on a bus heading your way.”

“When did you speak? What exactly did she say? I need to know everything.”

As much as this feels like betrayal, he wants Mildred to be safe. He tries to give as little information as possible—only need-to-know. “Beverly was parading Mildred around, bragging ‘my daughter this’ and ‘my daughter that’ like she’s a great mom.”

Nothing shocking. “It’s been a few hours, since 4pm there, I think.”

“Thanks, buddy. I’ll keep you posted. Let me know if you hear from her.”

Boris clicks end call, pulls up Mildred’s number—straight to voicemail. He texts her,

—Call me ASAP.

Boris’s mother appears in the bedroom doorway. “Boris, run to your father’s office and wake him. I’m getting ready to start breakfast.”

The usual worry of what Boris might find his father doing in his office washes over him. So far, it is usually just a face pressed against a computer keyboard, each square its own impression on his father’s cheek, stubble blending the lines together. Boris pulls his boots and coat on and ties the ear flaps on his fur hat down to his chin snuggly.

It looks extra cold out today, the sun blocked from the path he needs to take. His father’s office curtains are closed. 67

Boris’s feet crunch through the ice layer sealing the snow pack underneath. Boris hopes his mother doesn’t sense his discomfort. He looks back and she is in the window, hot cup of Russian Caravan tea in-hand, fresh from the electric samavor. She watches him cross. He waves and smiles and tries, despite his brain telling his legs to drag, to pick up his pace.

The door to the building is locked so Boris removes one glove and swings his hand as if to rap forcefully against his father’s office window but slows just as his knuckles reach the glass and knocks as softly as possible, hoping from a distance they look like strong, loud knocks. Then he goes and stands by the door, pretending to wait for his father to open it, waving again at his mother across the frozen pond, the proud head of

Lomonosov’s monument peaking over their dormitory. To Boris’s surprise, the door swings open, but it isn’t his father who stands there. Instead, it’s a girl around his age, blonde hair poking out from under a black rabbit fur hat, ear flaps tied snuggly under her chin. She starts and jumps back a step, hooks the sleeve of her long, gray, wool coat on the door handle, slips, catches herself on the door’s edge, and bursts into laughter.

“Nedotepa, da?” She laughs so hard a fleck of snot shoots out her nose, which makes her laugh even harder, until she is doubled over, holding the door for support, tears filling the bottoms of her eyelids.

“Nyet spaseeba,” Boris says. “Mozhet byt', tol'ko nemnogo”

“Impressive for an American, although you don’t have to thank me when you disagree. And I am a klutz, more than the ‘maybe just a little’ you claim. It is okay to say so. Do American girls not like to hear the truth? Is this why you lie to me?”

“Impressive?” 68

“I said ‘for an American,’ didn’t I?” Then she starts laughing all over again. “I’m kid— you are fine, did well. I am Anastasiya.”

Boris reaches out his hand to shake hers, trying to think of how to respond in

Russian to impress her or make her laugh more. Either would be nice.

“Do you have no name? I may call you American?”

“It’s Boris.” He laughs, but it comes out a snort and his face flushes red. He presses his left earlobe between the thumb and pointer finger of his left hand, a nervous habit, but the lobe slips right out from between his fingertips and he realizes just how much his hand is sweating and it doesn’t even have a glove warming it. He takes a deep breath then realizes there will be no secret when he exhales and steams up the air between them. He tries to let it out just a little at a time, the way Mildred says she tries to pee in public when the bathroom is full—one little squirt at a time. But as he tries to let his large breath out subtly, his lungs burn to release the nerves building up inside him.

“Boris? Your name is Boris? Did your parents forget you are American, not

Russian?” She laughs again at her own joke. “I’m kid, Boris. It’s nice name for an

American. So what are you doing here at this door, frightening me, so early in the cold morning, Boris the American?”

“Looking for my dad. He slept in his office last night.”

“Your dad must be Dr. Orlov. He really likes pretend he is real Russian. You must get that from him.”

“That’s my dad. What are you doing here, Anastasiya? Why are you lurking around doorways in early hours?” 69

“What is lurking?”

Boris pauses for a moment, not even sure how to explain it. It sounded cool in his head but now he is certain she will think he is dumb—doesn’t even know the meaning of words he uses. Of course he knows, but where is it? “It’s like hiding in the shadows, watching and waiting.”

“Maybe I was watching you, Boris, just playing klutz.” She laughs again, her smile long and closed, ending in a dimple on one side, like a sideways semi-colon.

Mildred claims the semi-colon as the least sexy kind of punctuation, but on this girl, it seems poetic. “No, I look for my own mother. She has office upstairs. I saw your father inside. See you again soon, I think, we can practice some Russian?”

“Da,” Boris says and salutes her. He gets another punctuated smile. Then he remembers his mother in the widow, checks, and she is still there. “Wave at my mother,

Anastasiya.” Each time Boris says her name out loud, his stomach tightens and sends a heat shiver straight down through his center.

Anastasiya’s gaze follows Boris’s finger to the peering window and she waves and smiles towards his mother. Boris’s mother waves back at them and then pointedly turns her stare elsewhere to give the façade of privacy.

“She keeps her boys close, yes?” Anastasiya asks. There is only a hint of teasing in her question.

Boris’s face gets even hotter and reaches again for his earlobe. She sure does, well, at least she keeps Boris close.

She points to the monument. “Did you know Lomonosov discovered the atmosphere of Venus? Russian scientist, just like your father, I think.” She smirks. “Only, 70 real Russian, yes?” She laughs again and wraps her scarf around and around until all but her eyes disappeared. She raises one mittened hand in a wave, turns, and starts in the direction of the frozen botanical gardens. “Now I must move you out of my way.

Onward, to find my own missing parent.” Anastasiya smiles and pushes past him into the frozen crust of icy snow. “See you soon, Boris.”

Boris almost doesn’t catch the door before it closes, he is so busy watching

Anastasiya easily navigate ice and snow in her knee-high black boots. He glances over at his mother and she is in the window. He can’t quite see the details of her face but he knows she’s happy, probably thinking, finally, he’ll forget about that Mildred.

His mother doesn’t know about his and Mildred’s “experiment,” thank God. Not even Mildred knows the whole story, how Boris fell in love with her on accident. But

“the influence,” as his mother says, and “that artist mother of hers”—she never directly badmouths Mildred, but she makes a lot of exasperated noises and faces whenever

Mildred comes up, the reason why Boris tries to hide for their FaceTime dates.

Boris’s father comes out of the bathroom at the end of the hall, shirt untucked, hair mussed, maybe a bit more disheveled than usual, muttering to himself and scratching his head. He knocks his glasses off, bends down to pick them up, and sees Boris on the way up, drops his glasses again, and finally stands up straight. “Hello son. Sorry about missing dinner again.” He opens the door to his office and motions for Boris to go first.

Boris forces himself in.

“I met Anastasiya at the door.” Boris presses his toe against the crumbling crown molding smashed in by the door swinging open into the wall. He looks down at his feet to avoid seeing any evidence that may be difficult to keep from his mom. 71

“Oh yeah? Nice girl. Her mother works upstairs in biology. She’s a lovely one, tough as nails. She has to be, I guess. But quite nice as well. Works a lot of late nights to keep ahead.”

“Hmm.” Boris glances around at the stacks of books towering dangerously at the edges of tables, books shelves, and the desk. The couch cushions are hanging off the seat like his mother’s homemade bread dough spreading over the edges of the pan. “So, I’m going to head home. Mom says breakfast is almost ready.”

“Hold on a minute and we can walk together.” Boris’s dad starts collecting papers and books in his arms, cramming them into his satchel.

Outside, Boris searches for his mom in the window. She’s no longer there.

“I’m really happy you’re here with me now, kiddo. Sorry I get so busy.”

“It’s okay.”

“How’s school? Russian coming along?”

“It’s okay, but everyone wants to practice their English on me so I don’t get many chances to use it.”

“Want to work on it later?”

“Sure. Anastasiya offered to help me, too.”

“Who?”

“The girl I just met?”

His father stares across toward their dormitory door but seems to be looking through it.

“Her mom works upstairs in biology?” 72

“Mmm, yes, that’s an idea, sure.” He opens the door to the building, goes through first, and then holds it for Boris.

At the door of their apartment, Boris asks, “What was she doing there so early today?”

His dad walks through the door. Breakfast is ready on the table. To Boris’s mom, his dad says, “Sorry, dear, but today I’m staying with my family. Boris needs some help with his Russian and maybe we can take the train up to Velinky Novgorod and stay the night at the same little place we stayed in last time? The bed and breakfast? The room had a couch—Boris can sleep there for one night.”

“Sounds nice, dear.” She pulls out a chair for her husband to sit in.

They all sit down for hot tea with too much sugar, the smooth creamy porridge

Boris prefers, and thick slices of rye bread. Boris’s mother starts packing her overnight bag while taking turns carrying her bread and her tea with her free hand.

The train ride to Velinky Novgorod is long enough for them to chat about everything there is to say and then for the silence to stretch into awkwardness. Boris prepares by bringing homework, but mostly he stares out the window at the countryside imagining Anastasiya. It’s difficult for him to come up with a fantasy scenario explaining why she would be wearing only a Southern California-style string bikini, but she’s wearing one anyway. There have to be some beaches close enough to Moscow that allow for bathing suits at least a week or two out of the summer. Helsinki, maybe? The name

Helsinki is sexy enough for his dream in which they run into each other on the beach and then discover a hundred different ways to have sex. But is Helsinki far enough south for a beach scene? Maybe Amsterdam? The farther south he tries to imagine her, the less he 73 can hold the fantasy together. The sound of her name is enough to make him forget how much he misses home. Anastasiya in Helsinki, perfect to pass the hours of travel, trapped in a small space, his mother and father across from him. They sit next to each other but the space between them feels insurmountable. The snowy evergreens speed by, miles and miles of icy forest. Boris turns to his father.

“What work keeps you so busy all night long?”

“Oh, well, just the dissertation. I’m sorting out the details in my writing and my theory but each change I make changes fifty other spots so then I have to check back through and double-check. It’s quite boring but has to be done.”

“And Anastasiya’s mother, she’s in your same field?”

This when Boris’s mother seems to snap out of her own dazed staring out the window. “Is Anastasiya the girl you were chatting with this morning?”

“Her mother works in father’s building. Biology? Must be some crossover with chemistry.” Boris is intent on his father’s face, studying it for a hint of reaction.

“No, not really.” Something changes in his father’s eyes, a hardness settles in, as he stares at Boris after this response. He keeps shaking his head for a long time. Boris’s mother pulls herself back out of the conversation and Boris lets it go, for now. Maybe when he and his father are alone next, he’ll bring it up again.

The time does arise, later that night, after Boris’s mother has excused herself to go lie down, and Boris invites himself to go to the tavern with his father for a drink. Boris is rarely questioned when ordering alcohol in Russia as long as he is with his parents.

At the bar, Boris asks his father again about the woman in his building, presumably the only woman or one of very few in his close proximity. 74

“What is Anastasiya’s mother like?”

“You have a thing for this girl, Ana, don’t you?”

“Oh, her name is Ana? How familiar of you.” Boris doesn’t know what compels his to keep the attitude going, and even though it makes him uncomfortable, he begins to enjoy speaking so candidly with his father, as though they are peers and not father and son.

“I’m friends with her mother, Boris. Her mother calls her Ana so I call her Ana.

What are you trying to get at, son? Do you want to ask me something more directly?”

Boris sips his Baltika. It amazes him how such an icy cold drink warms him from the inside.

“Why are you never home at night?” His own directness makes Boris cringe—he hates being uncomfortable and this interaction will definitely add tension at home. Or even worse, his father will stay away even more, leaving Boris to tend to his mother’s loneliness all by himself. But Boris can’t stop. The nagging possibility it is not

Anastasiya’s mother but Anastasiya herself who was leaving his father’s office in the morning—he has to find out an answer to at least this part of the puzzle. And for this brief encounter, he feels powerful.

“You are way out of your element here.”

“If it’s true, it’s because you brought me here. Why did you bring us here if you don’t want us here?”

“I do want you here. I want you, Boris, I always want you. I didn’t mean that, I meant with your questions.” 75

“You just don’t want mom here?” Boris is filled with an odd sort of relief—the realization Boris does want his father to want him. He spends so much time worrying about his mother and what might hurt her, he’s forgotten to think about himself.

“Of course I want her.” There is long pause. “I’m doing my best, Boris. Your mother’s just so…so…hard to explain.”

“So what about Ana?” Boris keeps emphasizing this shortened version of her name. “What was she doing there on your floor, one of the only two people in the building, at such an early hour?”

“How should I know? She’s practically a grown woman, after all, in college. I’m not in charge of her. Probably looking for her own mother just like you were looking for me.”

And Boris knew. It wasn’t Anastasiya. It was her mother. Leonid was too certain of what Ana was doing in the building that morning, as if he knew where Ana’s mother had been—with Leonid. Leonid must have been hiding from Anastasiya when he unexpectedly ran into Boris instead.

“Did Ana find her mother this morning?” Boris pushes but his resolve diffuses, his rush of confidence to confront his father falters. He has the answer he really wants.

“I honestly don’t know, Boris. Can we talk about something else?”

They sit and drink for another hour, watching a television on in their corner, his father occasionally translating something funny or interesting. Boris understands most of it but doesn’t stop his father. Each time, even when Boris already gets it, he responds with surprise or a laugh or whatever emotion his father seems to be looking for. He will 76 give his father this. And Boris tries, fairly unsuccessfully, to keep his mind off

Anastasiya.

As they walk back to their room and Boris’s mother, he says to his father, “We should do more stuff together like this.”

His father nods his short nod, lips in a straight line across his face, but Boris knows he’s pleased. His father, now barely taller than Boris, drapes his arm over Boris’s shoulder. Then, in an unusual moment of joking, his father says, “Why? So you can spend more time at the bar?” He shakes Boris a bit and they walk like this to their door.

“I think I’ll keep walking awhile,” Boris says. The moment feels right to get a bit more freedom. He’s heard fathers will do this for their sons when mothers will not.

After a long pause and a thoughtful, not critical but careful, look-over from his father, he answers. “I suppose seventeen is plenty old enough. If we were in the States you’d be running the streets at all hours, going to high school parties. Be safe, son, try not to get in any trouble.” He squeezes his shoulders one last time, then opens the door and hands Boris the keys. “Oh, and when you get home in no longer than a few hours, don’t wake your mother or we’ll both have to answer questions.” His dad pulls out a wad of crumpled rubles and hands those to Boris as well. “Have fun.”

Boris fills with his new freedom. He knows people thinks he’s odd for only having old ladies and small children as friends, but that’s entirely circumstance. He takes friendship seriously, because of Mildred, which creates another obstacle, on top of being foreign, on top of coming to the school as a senior, and on top of living across town from everyone else at his school. He walks the small, quiet streets, leaving prints in the snow, 77 crisscrossing over the earlier marks he and his father made. He heads back to the bar, where a crowd of young men was gathering just before Boris and his father left.

Boris’s new friends end up being college students. Boris allows them to believe he is also old enough to be in college. They sit at the bar practicing their passable English on Boris, translations getting worse and worse with each round of drinks.

“What slang you say for drunk in English?”

If Mildred were here, she would be bursting with the irony of Boris becoming the expert on American slang.

“Tanked, plowed, hammered, wasted,” Boris says.

The group howls with laughter at this first round. They take turns practicing their favorites. “I am plowed,” says one and the others laugh and shove him around.

“Like a field of rye,” one says. This gets a laugh out of Boris. He’s never really thought about how odd these words are or where they came from.

“You would say ‘I’m plowed,’” he corrects.

“Tell us more,” they plead. A small crowd of young men forms around Boris, all listening for the news on how to talk like a “real American.”

“Shit-faced,”

“Yes, yes, we have that one too.”

“Trashed, sloshed, blitzed,” this one gets another interruption.

This goes on for ten minutes, the guys laughing harder, failing more hilariously to use English words correctly, and then they finally slipped back into Russian, which is fine with Boris—he’s starting to worry he won’t even be able to make it back to the room if he has any more beers. He sits quietly listening for a few minutes as the men’s words 78 sounds more and more like the sloshing of liquid in a glass. Maybe that’s where sloshed came from. Then for a moment, their conversation becomes completely clear to Boris, not as if they are speaking English, and not as a translation, but he just knows what they are talking about. Him. The guys look at him and realize he knows what they are saying.

Boris responds in English.

“It’s okay, fellas, you don’t need to worry about speaking English with me—I’ve got to get home anyway.”

They answer, in Russian, to thank him for the words he shared. A conversation in two different languages at the same time feels normal. A few shake his hand and he turns to head out.

“Take it easy, guys.” Boris waves and heads towards the door. When he opens it, his new friends toast him and the crowd who learned new English slang from him hold their glasses up in cheers.

“Za fstryé-tchoo!”

Boris waves again and begins the slippery, wobbly, drunken trek back to his parents.

The next day, after a breakfast of sausage, rye bread, and sweet hot tea, Boris and his parents wander through a few churches and shops they missed the day before. Boris’s mother gingerly handles icon after icon, tracing her fingers along edges of Gzhel dishes and candle holders, deciding which to add to her collection, opening and shutting matryoshkas as she explores what each smaller doll looks like, how it changes from the one it nests within. Instead of staying right next to her, Boris falls back, standing with his father in doorways of gift shops, chatting about the guys he met at the bar, about how his 79 mother hadn’t noticed he’d stayed out, about how his father is going to talk to his mother about giving him more freedom on Moscow. When she finally settles on a purchase, she comes over and finds a safe spot for it in the basket Boris holds. A few of the people

Boris met at the bar the night before walk by and see him, wave, and he looks at his dad.

His dad nods, takes the basket. “Be at the train in two hours. Don’t be late. I’ll handle your mother.”

Later, after they are home, back in their tiny, squinting apartment, his parents asleep in their room, Boris discovers a message on his phone from a 510 area code but not a number he recognizes. That’s right—Mildred is missing. Boris waits for a wave of guilt about forgetting about her but none comes so he checks the message.

“Hi Boris, this is Mildred’s mother, Beverly?” Why does Beverly say her name as a question, as if she doesn’t really know who she is? Her voice sounds far away and like a stranger’s. “I’m wondering if you’ve heard from Mildred. Her father said she talked with you after I last saw her so I was hoping maybe you know something. She’s a smart girl so I’m sure she’s fine, but a mother worries.”

Boris deletes the message. Beverly’s voice sounds too casual for his liking. He will not be calling her back. On the other hand, the call did come in the middle of the night, her time.

Boris lays awake listening to his father snore, a sound to which he’s still not completely accustomed. He thinks about Anastasiya, her blonde hair, her comment about the monument, her knowledge of his father, her own missing mother. He drifts into a fitful sleep. When he awakens hours later, deep in the frozen Russian midnight, he sits awake on his couch-bed, phone on vibrate in his hand, eyes fixed on the pond, a light 80 across it in his father’s building burning. This time, it is not his father’s, as he can hear the uneven humming of his father’s snore. The cold freezes the landscape into a painting, sparkling in the Moscow winter’s night. His vision blurs as he zones out on the stillness until a movement pulls him out of it—a mitten presses on the glass, then a face comes clear, and a semi-colon of a smile.

Boris shakes his head slightly, uncertain if he is dreaming or if Anastasiya has materialized in his frosted window, silently, breaking the dream-spell. She waves again, this time a motion for him to open the window. The change in temperature will awaken his mother so he holds up a finger to her and struggles to pull on as many layers as he can quickly wrap himself in.

When he gets to the outside door, she’s standing just on the other side of it. “I think this time I startle you, Boris the American.” The steam coming out of her mouth brings Boris to life. He blinks fast and hard to clear his eyes, to allow his head to believe she is really standing in front of him. For a moment, he imagines the children finding his body on the frozen pond in the morning, as if he’s followed Vasilisa’s ghost candle into the night. Boris steps through the doorway and Anastasiya hooks her arm through his.

“Want to go for a walk? I have keys to the gardens.”

“Anastasiya, did you come just for me?” Saying the name gets him.

“Call me Ana. Yes, the gardens for a walk?”

“Is anything alive in there to see?”

“Oh Boris, even in Moscow winter, nature shows us the beauty. If we cannot find it in the cold, some years we may never find it at all until we one day forget it—what my grandmother says to me. Come, I will show you.” 81

She pulls him tight next to her, probably for body heat, but maybe for something more, too. Maybe Mildred is right about his American-ness attracting Russian girls. He feels his phone vibrate in his hand—he has a message.

“Sorry, just one sec, I need to check this message.” He checks the screen—one missed call from Hank. He puts the phone to his face, already chilled.

“Boris, my boy, I was worried it was too late to call—didn’t want to bother your parents, whom I assume you have told none of this to—but I need to update you on the situation.” Hank knows Boris better than Boris’s own father does. “I’ve been doing a little research on my recent credit card transactions and discovered a sizable charge to

Delta Airlines, close to $2,000. Maybe the cost of a ticket to Moscow? I also found out that she told her teachers there was a family emergency out of town. There was a very convincing letter from me, apparently. I think she’s on her way to you, bud. Please, I need to know. Take care of my girl.”

As if Boris knows any other way. He closes the phone and turns the ringer all the way off.

“Everything okay? We can go for walk?” Now Ana’s face is close enough to

Boris’s cheeks for him to smell the scent of lavender on her lips. She slips off one glove and presses her hand into his pocket, tugging off his glove as well, then threads her fingers through the spaces between his. “In Moscow winter, we must find ways to be touching but with no freezing.”

Boris closes his hand around hers, squeezes her arm tighter in his own, and says,

“Lead the way.” Lomonosov grows larger and larger in front of them as they make their way, balancing on each other over the slick spots, towards the entrance to the gardens. 82

Boris wonders if Mildred worries what she might find if she arrives.

At the gates to the gardens, Ana slips a key into the lock and pushes it open with some resistance, the metal bottom scraping along the freshly built-up ice. She pulls Boris through and whispers in his ear, “Be wary Baba Yaga. She loves the taste of Americans.”

A string a laughter follows, filtered through Ana’s mittened hand. The garden path is lined with lamps, dimly lit, casting shadows along the edges of branches and stems encased in ice and snow as glass sculptures. At the end of the path, there is a small doorway, and Ana slips a key into this door as well. “But wait, Boris, there is heat.” She laughs again. Boris already feels comfortable with her way, always laughing, teasing, pushing him, holding his hand. He ducks down to follow her. He wants to follow her through any door she opens. 83

VII. Boris startled awake in his bedroom in Hawthorne to the cackling of his favorite chicken, Pingu. His mother must still be asleep in her room which meant Boris needed to investigate. Why had his mother allowed him to name the chicken Pingu? He blamed it on being six years old at the time. At that age, he would not accept the fact that chickens and penguins were altogether different kinds of birds with little in common. Wings.

Feathers. Beaks. That was all that mattered. Six-year-olds should not be allowed to name animals. Ten might only be four years older but it felt like a hundred miles away. At six, he had been a little kid. Now, he was practically a tween. Pingu squawked again and he rolled out of bed, wondering where his mother was and why she wasn’t looking into this disturbance. If Pingu woke Mildred up, next door, he was sure to hear about it later.

Usually, when Pingu got loud, there was something she needed help with, either a predator threatening her chicken-sisters or perhaps the food dish was unacceptably low.

Either way, she thought she was a rooster and wouldn’t be quiet until her alarm was recognized and addressed.

Boris came through the garage side-door to the chicken coop. Mildred’s dog Neko must be asleep on Mildred’s bed—otherwise she would be out here wagging her tail at the chicken coop door. The latch was still done so his mother had not been out doing one of her dawn meditations in the backyard. He peeked over to Mildred’s house but no lights were on yet. The chickens were tightly locked in their roost, Pingu shouting louder as

Boris approached. The sky starting to light up with reds and grays, Boris only had to squint a little to see the coop, but when he turned to check out the rest of the area, his eyes needed to adjust. He grabbed the flashlight out of his pocket and flipped it on. In the 84 corner, where the fence leaned out and needed replacing, he saw red eyes. Coyotes. His mother had said they’d had more than usual in Hawthorne this year. He felt the rush of fear, even though he knew coyotes were scaredy-cats and would scatter at any loud noise he made. But they would tear Pingu to pieces if given the chance. He had to protect the chickens. He grabbed the rake that was propped against the coop.

Boris and the coyote locked eyes for a few moments as Boris tried to breathe his heart into slowing down a little. It wouldn’t agree. He took a few steps forward, shook the flashlight, and belted out, “Get! Get! Get!” With each “get,” he took another step forward, trying to look bigger than his small frame allowed and thrusting the rake forward. He knew not to corner it—the coyote needed an exit strategy. In his head, he could hear the wolf’s theme music from Peter and the Wolf, his favorite Russian fairytale. This coyote appeared to be a loner. And less than half the size of a wolf. But still, he allowed himself to feel brave in rescuing his chickens.

The coyote crouched along the fence line and Boris stood still, keeping his body between the coyote and the chickens. It was limping. The familiar ache started in his chest. This animal needed help, was probably hungry and thirsty. It was hardly stalking him, let alone to be feared. But he couldn’t leave it alone with the chickens. What to do?

It appeared to be missing clumps of fur, maybe mange. He’d heard about it going around the coyotes—they looked like wild zombie dogs, giving Mildred and him endless ideas for horror stories about the attack of a variety of zombified desert creatures. Hank said it looked much worse than it was. His mother said the only good coyote was a dead coyote.

“Boris, it’s time to call your father.” His mother’s voice came through the kitchen window, opened just a sliver to call out to him and then promptly shut. 85

“Mom,” he called back. “Mom!”

“What, honey?”

“I need the leftover chicken breast from last night and a bowl filled with water.”

“Oh, Lord. What animal are you rescuing now?” The question was rhetorical as she slid the window back to shut and shuffled around the kitchen collecting the requested items.

The garage door creaked open but she didn’t come out. Instead, she pushed the water and the chicken breast through and the door and then closed it again. It was chilly out and she was probably still in her pajamas. “What would your father say?” Boris heard the familiar words through the security door. What would his father say? Was he a man who supported the love of animals or the kind who would trap and kill them as pests?

Boris set down the rake, tucked the Ziploc bag of cooked chicken under his arm, picked up the water, still holding the flashlight on the coyote, and walked away from the coop, holding the water out in front of him, hoping to lead the coyote a safe distance away. It continued to limp along the fence line, keeping its eyes on Boris as well.

“Hey, buddy. Hungry?”

It froze for a moment, then its eyes darted around, looking for an escape. Boris walked all the way to the end of the fence and pushed on a loose board leading out to the sage brush field where the coyotes often collected on their way down from the hills. He showed the coyote the water and pushed it through, showed it the cooked chicken and pushed that through, then used a rock to prop the board open. He’d nail it back in later.

Boris backed his way towards the coop to check the chicken feed and give the coyote 86 some alone-time to get away. The day was now filled with light so he slipped the flashlight back in his pocket.

In the coop, he left the door closed but checked the food and water—plenty. Pingu squatted and spreads her wings for a back-scratch. He popped the coop door open enough for his hand to reach through and rubbed up under her wings—her favorite. Then closed and latched it.

“Good girl, Pingu. Nothing gets past you, little guard chicken.”

He went back inside. He’d let the chickens out later. Pingu was quiet and they’d be fine in there for a little bit longer today.

“It’s time to call your father.” The house filled with the smell of coffee and fresh eggs frying.

Boris sat on their faded green couch waiting for his mother to connect the call and wondered for the millionth time, what would his father say if he were here? His mother always said, “If your father was here…” but then never finished the sentence, as if that was supposed to mean something to Boris. As if Boris was supposed to know his father well enough to know what he would say about Mildred spending the night or when

Boris’s struggles with Russian or choosing swim team over baseball or assisting an injured coyote. He knows what his father would say about the Russian, but the rest of it?

He’d never told his father and his father had never asked.

Twice a week, they spent twenty minutes on the phone, mostly discussing what they would do when his father got back from Moscow for summer break. For the last part of each conversation, his father wanted to speak only in Russian, a constant reminder to

Boris of his failure. Russian was so hard and it meant so much to his father—to have a 87

Russian son. But how could one be Russian in a small town in Nevada? He heard his father lecturing his mother on only speaking Russian at home and she claimed they would, but they never do, mostly because she barely spoke Russian herself. How had she even end up married to a Russian? Leonid had come to the United States as soon as the

Soviet Union dissolved and met the once beautiful and young Gertrude—as much of the story as Boris ever had gotten.

Boris didn’t wish his dad were home. Boris and his mother had a system and things worked out when it was just the two of them. Dinner was easy, homework was quiet, she let him take in most of the animals he wanted and he came and went as he pleased after letting his mother know where he was going and why. The only thing that rolled his mother’s eyes was Mildred, but even that he just ignored and she didn’t do much of anything to keep them apart.

When his dad was home, there was tension. His dad wanted things his way. His dad was a disruption to their quiet momentum. He always needed explanations and rationalizations—why this route? Why this milk? Why this movie? His dad questioned every method they had for moving through the days. Even their special time in the tiny

Grassroots bookstore would come up for questioning once his father returned, where once a month Boris searched for everything from Harry Potter to Madeline L’Engle while his mother stacked up weathered copies of books on religion and spirituality. They would each fill an entire paper grocery bag for five dollars. Each visit, they brought backs the books they were done with to donate and picked out more to read. He knew his father wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t just the books—it was the doughnut he picked out at the coffee shop next door. It was the moments where his mom dropped her guard and 88 revealed tidbits from her life before Leonid. It was during one of these coffee-talks when she told Boris she’d started her first semester of religious studies at UC Berkeley before meeting Leonid. Boris never asked, but often wonder if Leonid talked her out of going back, or maybe Boris’s arrival was a part of her not finishing.

It also isn’t as if Boris didn’t want his dad to come home. He didn’t mind much the disruption that much and enjoyed the occasional fishing or camping trip, drives to museums, and visits to the ichthyosaur fossil site in Berlin, Nevada. He sometimes struggled with the Russian conversations, but his mother was blamed more than he for his lack of skills. She also had to take most of the heat regarding their daily comings and goings.

While Boris waited his turn to talk, he considered the possibility that his parents were actually separated, his mother left with the task of raising him to be a “good Russian son” when she doesn’t even know what makes a “good Russian son.”

“Boris, come talk to your father.”

“Hey, Dad.”

“Boris, my boy, good to hear you! Tell me all about your week.” His dad’s

English was so clear, so carefully practiced, especially over the phone, Boris almost couldn’t hear the Russian accent underneath it.

Boris’s mother picked up her newest book, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, and went into the next room, probably just pretending not to listen to Boris’s conversation.

“Fine.” He never knew what to say to this question.

“Do anything fun or exciting?” 89

“Mildred and I went to the pool almost every day.”

“Yes, Mildred. What about any other boys? Playing any baseball this spring with the neighborhood boys?”

“No. I like swimming.”

“How was Russian tutoring this week? What have you learned new?”

Boris’s stomach started to get tight as he ran through his mind for any new words or phrases he’d learned this week. His mind was blank so he turned to the back-up plan—

Russian history and stories.

“I learned about Lenin and the changing of the name of St. Petersburg yesterday.

Did you know Lenin’s body is still on display in Red Square? Have you seen it?”

“It’s there, all right. I’ll take you to visit it sometime.”

This gave him pause but he decided not to mention it. Were they going to

Moscow soon?

“Your mother wants me to talk to you about Mildred. What are you two doing locked in the closet all the time?”

This was unexpected. His father rarely acknowledged knowing anything personal about Boris aside from what Boris directly told him.

“We like to tell ghost stories.”

“Nothing else? No ‘playing doctor,’ as Americans say?”

“What does it mean?” Boris’s voice dropped a few notches in volume, in case his mother was still listening.

“You know, taking your clothes off and checking each other out so see how you are different?” 90

Boris turned bright red and was grateful his dad couldn’t see him. “Why would we do that?”

“Curious, I suppose?”

“No.” As much as Boris was curious, but more about what his dad might say if they were taking their clothes off in the closet, he didn’t ask. If he said they were taking their clothes off, just to see his father’s response, it would only result in the end of closet time. “Can we talk about something else?”

“Okay, back to Russian, then.”

Boris sighed loud enough for it to travel through the phone cord 10,000 miles away to Russia. What could he say? Maybe a talk about sex would be better than this.

After ten more excruciating minutes of trying to force the correct words out for small talk, Boris’s father asked to talk to his mother again.

“I love you, Dad.”

“I love you, too, my son.”

Boris handed the phone back to his mother and as she disappeared into the bedroom, he heard her giggling into the phone. Maybe they do still love each other after all, if his father could still make her giggle.

Boris headed back out to the fence. The water dish was low and the cooked chicken breast was gone. Neko came running through the open part of the fence, barking and wagging her long, white, spindle-haired tail. Boris pulled a tuft of brown fur off the fence board, moved the rock, and wedged the board back in place, pushing Neko’s face back far enough so he could see without her licking his eyeball. “Okay, girl, hold on.” He laughed and held her back with his shoulder while he used the rock to hold the loose 91 board closed for now. That coyote wouldn’t come back with Neko around. On his way back in the house, he opened the chicken coop and all six chickens rushed him in a flurry to freedom.

92

VIII.

As the plane’s wheels hit the tarmac, Mildred’s stomach drops all over again, more out of anxiety and excitement over her caper than the thrill of landing. She plans to pay her father back for the ticket to Moscow and figures he knows that. He won’t stay mad even if, technically, what she’s done could be considered stealing and running away.

Boris probably already knows she’s on her way—her dad and Boris always keep each other apprised of her “adventures,” as Beverly would say with air quotes. Beverly is the one Mildred hopes is flipping out right about now. She deserves it after the shit she pulled at her art opening, parading Mildred around like a prize cow Beverly had raised, nurtured, loved, showed off as she secretly led the cow to slaughter. It feels like little pieces of her die every time Beverly takes credit for Mildred and her “artistic sensibilities,” as Beverly calls it. Hank just says, “That girl’s got talent.” He never gloats or takes credit for any part of her—just beams with pride as he says small but sincere little tidbits here and there to friends and family. He is genuinely proud of her, not just showing her off so others will think better of him. That’s what Beverly does.

Now that she’s here, ready to bombard Boris, she’s nervous. She hasn’t been able to eat this whole trip, at first out of excitement and the thrill of breaking Beverly’s rules, but now she is definitely nervous—what will Boris’s parents say? They live in a tiny one- bedroom apartment. It’s hardly as if they have all the extra space for her to crash for a few weeks. Plus, Boris’s mom still doesn’t like her—still makes Mildred call her Mrs.

Orlov. Boris will get his mom to cave but she won’t be happy about it. This surprise visit isn’t going to help her relationship with Mrs. Orlov. It’s too late to change her mind. 93

Mildred should know better by now, but she’s surprised to see Boris waiting for her just past the security checkpoint. His dark hair falls across his face as he balances his bike against his hip. He’s got the special winter tires she bought him on it.

“Boris!” Mildred yells out, waving her arms frantically, more wildly than she normally would except she worries Boris will be annoyed with her. Instead, a wide grin spreads across his face, he loses his grip on the handlebars, and his bike slides down his leg to rest on the ground. Instead of picking it up, he leaves it there and rushes towards her, picking her up in a hug.

“Sorry to just pop in like this,” she smiles at him.

“This is hardly ‘popping in!’ ‘Popping in’ is a random afternoon visit, not flying halfway around the world without even checking in first.” But he’s laughing and has an arm around her—she’s already forgiven.

“Did you tell your parents I might be showing up?”

He pushes her back so he can look straight into her eyes, one eyebrows raised, lips pursed. “I mentioned it to the professor but not Mrs. Orlov.” He also calls her Mrs.

Orlov when in Mildred’s company, one of the many ways he will always be on Mildred’s team first. “He’ll work on her for us, but not sure how far he’ll get since he spends most nights ‘asleep’ in his office.”

Mildred laughs at the air quotes and protests in her Beverly voice. “Don’t use air quotes, Boris. It’s so passé.” Mildred uses air quotes around the words air quotes, Boris, and passé. Boris gets her in a way no one else can. Hank stands up for Beverly, probably mostly out of pity. Mildred needs to be able to shit-talk her disappointment of a mother to someone. Boris. 94

“No matter what, she’ll cave in the end because she isn’t going to put you out in the freezing cold to fend for yourself.”

Back at the apartment, Boris’s mother stares disapprovingly from the kitchen nook, where she prepares lunch for Mildred. She acts irritated but jumps to feed Mildred after commenting how thin Mildred has become.

“Doesn’t that mother of yours ever feed you?” Gertie even stops next to Mildred and squeezes her shoulder, the most intimate moment they’ve ever shared. “We’ll always make room for you,” Gertie says. Then, to Mildred’s surprise, Gertie sits down next to

Mildred at the table and asks about her flight, about her school, and about Hank. Mildred finds herself telling Gertie the story of how Beverly parades her around to all of her art friends. Gertie shakes her head and makes all the right noises to demonstrate empathy.

She shakes her head, mumbling things like, “That mother of yours, I swear.” Mildred sees why Boris is close with his mother. She also suspects that Boris’s mother dislikes

Beverly more than she dislikes Mildred and perhaps this act of defiance against Beverly has gotten Mildred some good grace.

After lunch, Mildred sits next to Boris in the window, watching the bustling quad, listening as Boris explains and names everything they see—the ice skating children, what is normal about the scene in front of them, what is odd, which window of the building is his father’s office, and on and on, Mildred’s only half-listening, not because she’s bored, but because the comfort of Boris’s voice in her ear combined with the real-life version of what she has been trying to imagine for the past months plus the jet lag and lack of sleep are all lulling her into a trance. Her eyes are open but she is walking the line of sleep, where her mind starts to wonder what is and isn’t real. 95

A beautiful young woman wrapped in a burnt orange scarf and a gray wool coat with oversized buttons, blonde bangs peeking out from under a black and yellow rabbit fur cap, pushes the door of Boris’s dad’s building open with such force that it smacks against the outside wall and then immediately retreats back towards her face. She barely catches it in time on the rebound and laughs.

The woman, herself, isn’t what brings Mildred pause, but the reaction from Boris does it. It is slight, so slight that Mildred wonders if she imagines it in her dream-like state. It snaps her awake and, as she wonders, she notices Boris’s breath coming out a bit louder than usual, as if he held it for a few extra beats. She did not imagine it. Nor does she imagine the twinge of jealousy—she’s no longer the only woman in Boris’s life, not counting Gertie, of course. She knows it’s silly and pushes it away, knowing they tried and it wasn’t there for her. Perhaps, if they’d never slept together, she would see it as regular friend-jealousy, but the not-so-small complication of sex always leaves her wondering if it is a different sort of jealousy all together. Since she knows nothing will come of it, she refuses to get between Boris and a love interest. It will be hard enough for

Boris’s girlfriends to accept Mildred without her ever admitting even the tiniest bit of romantic envy. They are meant to be besties forever and nothing can ever get in the way.

“Who’s that?” Mildred nods towards the building where the woman is navigating her way across a patch of snow, her thigh-high boots protecting her legs but the depth of the snow impeding progress.

“Who?” Boris asks but doesn’t look at Mildred. His tell.

“You know exactly who. Don’t be coy, Boris. You like her. Who is she? Have you met? Do you need me to make friends with her and get you in? What’s the deal?” 96

Boris blushes and nods towards his mom, code for, I’ll tell you in private. “We’re going for a walk, Mom.”

“Okay—be back in fifteen minutes for lunch. I need to get some meat back on

Mildred’s bones.” The closest thing to love Gertie will ever offer Mildred, and it is enough for Mildred to be tolerated by her. Or perhaps Gertie just wants Boris to be happy and he seems happy when his best friend is around. Either way is fine with Mildred.

Mildred gets excited that they might run into this girl outside and Mildred can meet her. But instead, Boris turns them towards the street-side of the building.

“Let’s get tea. You’ll love it—it’s about half the cup filled with sugar and the other with Russian tea.”

Just before the exit to the street, Boris turns towards a tiny café inside his building. It houses eight or nine tables, all round, plastic, cafeteria-style, each with the exact amount of chairs to fill every single inch of each table’s circumference. One things she notes about Russians—they economize. Not an inch is wasted.

“Boris, my zajcik, who is this friend you bring for afternoon tea?”

“Babushka, this is my best friend, Mildred. Mildred, this is my adopted grandmother, Masha.”

“It’s lovely to meet you, Masha.”

Masha comes out from behind the counter, holds Mildred’s shoulders in her hands, and looks her over with kindness, not judgement. “Best friend? Or ‘special’ friend?” She winks at Boris.

“Best friend,” Boris and Mildred answer at the same time. Masha smiles that knowing smile adults often use when they think they know something about Mildred that 97 she herself doesn’t yet know. This time, Masha will be wrong but Mildred will humor her—she is sweet and Boris clearly loves her.

“Does Mildred like as much sugar as Boris?” Masha asks the teapot.

“More.” Again, Mildred and Boris answer at the same time.

Masha turns and smiles. “Maybe it is best friends.” She turns back to measure the sugar.

Mildred needs this tea and sugar. She is wiped out. She feels a surge of relief to see that Boris has people here who love him and get him, maybe not as much as she does, but enough. Leave it to Boris to make best friends with an old lady and a bunch of small children.

“Back to this young lady who makes you hold your breath,” Mildred brings them back on topic. “What’s her name and are you going to blush every time I bring her up? You’re all googly-eyed. It’s gross.”

Masha pipes in. “So Boris does have a special lady friend. Tell Masha all about her. What is her name?”

Boris blushes harder. “Her name is Ana.”

“And? What else, zajcik? How did you meet her?”

“Her mom works in my dad’s building.”

“Oh, little Ana Medvedeva? Yes.” Masha’s tone changes just enough to be noticeable. Mildred gives Boris the eyebrow.

“Dish the dirt, right now,” Mildred says to Boris. “Right now.”

“There is so much to tell. Where do I start?”

“Start anywhere. You know I’ll get it all out of you eventually.” 98

So Boris starts. He begins with meeting Ana at the doorway while on the errand to fetch his father and winds his way to the trip where he stayed out late with new friends.

Mildred, for once, sits awe-struck, not interrupting or making jokes or asking questions or guessing the next piece in her normal way. She just sits and listens, thinking about how exciting and dramatic and entertaining Boris’s new life is. And when Boris talks about

Ana, he reveals his secret—he really likes a girl other than Mildred for the first time in his life. Mildred is surprised to feel joy at this revelation. She is happy to relinquish

Boris’s heart so long as Ana is worthy. Or at least worthy enough. No one will be truly worthy, not even Mildred. Her Boris deserves better.

When Mildred finally meets Ana, she’s ready for a battle of sorts, a proving-of- self. She verifies with Boris that Ana knows about her, has been informed of the importance of Mildred’s relationship with Boris, and at least has a sense that Mildred’s approval matters. Boris reminds Mildred repeatedly that it has only been a few days since he met Ana, but yes, Ana knows of Mildred’s arrival and best-friend-status. Boris promises Mildred that Ana is smart and probably understands the importance of getting along with Mildred. He even tells Mildred that she and Ana are alike in certain ways, for example, with confidence and silliness and wildness. Mildred decides this is a good thing, that hopefully this means Ana will understand how special Boris is and respect and protect that part of him while also pushing him to stop acting like such an old man. He can’t be responsible all the time and sometimes has to let loose. She knows he has let loose a little based on the story about going out late with new friends in a strange city—

Boris always needs reminding about this. 99

The first meeting is less dramatic than Mildred hopes. She imagines a black and white film where two beautiful women meet, both in love with the same man, one knowing she is too “bad” for true love, the other pure and blonde and sweet but wild, perhaps secretly a Russian spy, but really truly in love with the man. It isn’t that

Mildred’s in love with Boris. It just makes the imaginary meeting more interesting and theatrical. Art school has taken its toll on Mildred’s imagination, even for a girl who was already in love with building stories and crafting moments. Now that she’s an “artist,” officially, she finds her imagination framing scenes from the kinds of movies that made her stomach jump as a pre-teen, the scenes she would watch over and over to get that rollercoaster drop. Once a scene couldn’t create this sensation in her, she moved on to the next.

Instead, Mildred and Boris find Ana sitting in the window of a nearby café, gazing at the sky. Mildred stares, hoping to catch Ana’s eye before they enter, but Ana does not seem aware of her surroundings at all. She appears much the same as the day before, except her gray coat is draped over the chair behind her, revealing a lighter gray t- shirt with a scoop neck-line and the Sex Pistols sprawled across the front. This is a step in the right direction.

Boris is pulling out the chair before Ana snaps out of her daze. Her head jerks, she blinks, and then goes from blank to a huge welcoming smile, as if she turns on. She pushes back from the table, stands, and wraps her arms around Mildred in a warm hug— not at all what Mildred expects from Russians, based on the one full and one half

Russians she knows. Five minutes into the conversation, Mildred loves Ana, couldn’t have chosen better for Boris if she had handpicked the girl for him. 100

“So, Mildred, do you like punk rock music? I know it’s not so popular in

America anymore but is still very much so here. I hear of a secret punk show tonight. I will take you and Boris, if you want.”

“That would be just fine.”

The two lock eyes and smile—two of kind. Boris rolls his eyes but he’s smiling too. “Don’t run off together and leave me behind. I need two of you to keep me fun.”

“Don’t be silly. We need you to keep us sane,” Mildred says.

“And help us find our way home,” adds Ana.

Mildred laughs. Boris is doing great in Moscow, which is more than she can say for herself in San Francisco.

Mildred knows her anger with Beverly is keeping her from being herself anymore, When she opens her mouth towards her mother, she cannot control the vinegar that spews forth. Her bitterness is spilling over into her art, into her studies, and into her new friendships at school. Most of her peers steer clear of her, worried they will end up on the receiving-end of her sharp tongue. She was right in guessing that everyone would hear the story of her pushing her studio-mate down after he propositioned her. She tells herself it was the other boy, Brentley, who told—this is how she keeps herself from wanting to see Brentley again. In the traditional high school telephone-game way, the story grew and her spite blossomed in the new versions. Her roommate barely speaks to her so she must have gotten the made-up version where her boyfriend was being so nice to try to include Mildred and Mildred physically assaulted him as a “thank you.”

Mildred’s roommate probably has to believe that to rationalize staying with the guy.

Mildred sleeps in the studio almost every night and hasn’t seen him there again. His 101 belongings did disappear the day after the incident. A couple of the other girls in her class told her in private they loved that she cut that jerk down to size, about how he has also propositioned them but they could never tell anyone. Mildred even got her first kiss from a girl over the scandal. Her eating buddies have also changed their attitudes towards

Mildred. They still take her along for dinner but then clearly say goodnight to her when they leave the restaurant. There is no longer the implied potential invitation to join them for their next stop. Between that situation and the Beverly situation, Mildred needs a break. Her plan is to return to San Francisco after a few weeks of adventure with Boris, renewed, with a clearer perspective on Beverly, and Boris back in her head, talking her through it all. There is always more time for art and math and other friends. She can easily make up her required coursework in summer school at home in Hawthorne with her dad. Her art teachers are all hippies who will be happy to give extensions and still accept her work. Plus, the principal may have, or want to have, some sort of romantic tryst with her mother. She cringes at the thought of allowing Beverly to clean this mess up, but also, it feels like necessary punishment for Beverly to do so. So what if the only people her age she enjoys live halfway around the world from her?

At the show, Ana and Mildred have a blast, moshing, crowd surfing, and dragging Boris into the ladies’ room to guard the door and smoke the little bit of weed

Ana scored. Mildred is impressed at how Ana can hold her own in the mosh pit—she doesn’t try to hurt people with elbows but she certainly marks her space and blocks any appendages that might be coming at her. Boris hangs just out of the pit, bobbing his head, and Mildred is grateful for Ana. Without Ana, Mildred might be too intimidated to really get into this scene. The music blares and Mildred assesses the crowd as just wild enough 102 to feel edgy but not too edgy to be frightening. The perfect balance. It feels like 1983, or what she imagines 1983 felt like. Boris whispers in Ana’s ear as often as he whispers in

Mildred’s, probably the same comments. Leave it to Boris to be so worried about anyone feeling left out that he repeats every single word for each of them. Mildred meets a couple of Russian high schoolers wearing Siousxie and the Banshee shirts with skinny jeans and she lets them flirt with her. They love speaking English and their accents and mistakes are endearing in ways that make American boys sound like assholes. Ana and

Boris lean against the wall, their faces touching, talking into each other’s’ ears. Ana laughs at seemingly appropriate times and Boris is mesmerized.

“You come to Moscow to see punk music?”

“I come to Moscow to see Boris,” Mildred points to Boris, “and get away from obnoxious American guys.”

Her new friends seem to really enjoy this answer.

“But I love punk rock,” she adds. “Nice shirts.”

“They are vintage from London thrift shop.”

Bragging is somehow less annoying in this accent.

“Cool,” she says. They compare notes on favorite 80’s punk bands and songs.

Their choices are all textbook, Wikipedia lists of what songs and bands count as being a punk lover: Sex Pistols, Siousxie, Bad Religion, Ramones, and the Dead Kennedys all top the list. They impress her by naming Bikini Kill and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The conversation stretches on, Mildred often checking in with Boris via eye contact and facial expressions.

“Want to smoke some weed?” One of the boys nods towards the alley door. 103

Mildred takes one step towards the door, has a flash of Boris, scouring the streets of Moscow, searching for her body. She has another flash of Hank getting the call after they dredge her body out of the Moscow River.

“No thanks,” she says. The boys shrug and say they’ll be back. She’s losing interest anyway so takes the opportunity to scoot back over to Ana and Boris. Trying to hold a conversation with music blaring exhausts her. Ana grabs Mildred’s hand and charges an open route through the crowd all the way to the stage. She hops up onto the stage, grabbed halfway into her leap by a guitarist who pulls her in. She reaches back for

Mildred, who grabs her hand and jumps too.

“Ever done this?” Ana yells into her ear. Mildred shakes her head. Ana continues, “The best way is to turn around, jump backwards as if you’re backward diving into a pool, and then relax muscles and fall. They will catch.” Ana turns around, swings her arms from her waist to up over her head, and leaps backwards into the crowd. They do catch her and she floats away on a sea of hands and tangled hair. Mildred watches for another moment, then turns, the guitarist leans forward, pushes his guitar to the side, grabs her waist to pull her closer, and she leans forward and kisses him, then shoves him away and dives backwards. There are hands everywhere—under her thighs, touching her feet, in her hair, in her armpits, and she takes a deep breath and holds it, feeling the movement in the crowd pause as she passes over and then return to thrashing, jumping up and down, swinging hair around, and shoving each other. When she finally gets to the outskirts, she looks forward and someone is stage diving, a front dive directly through a crowd of elbows and head swinging, and the entire group lands in a mess of arms and 104 legs, rolling over each other and scrambling to get footing. She finds herself standing with Ana, who grabs her hand and pulls her back into the pit for more.

Mildred, Ana, and Boris have an exciting week together, Mildred sleeping on the couch, at Boris’s insistence, with Boris on the floor next to her, both sneaking in as quietly as possible in the early hours after following Ana to underground parties and shows, and then sleeping through Boris’s mother’s disapproving stares as she tip toes around the small apartment, making breakfast, then lunch, both meals waiting for

Mildred and Boris when they wake up in the afternoon to an empty apartment. On school days, Boris rides the train to school after very few hours of sleep, and Mildred sleeps in.

When she awakens, Gertie is waiting for her, a cup of coffee for Mildred on small kitchen table. There are no disapproving looks on these days. They chat in a way they have never chatted before, in over seventeen years of knowing each other, and Mildred finds herself looking forward to these chats. She wonders if she and Beverly might chat like this, had

Beverly not abandoned her.

Boris claims that Mildred’s arrival has pushed his mother to leave the apartment more often, even if it’s mostly to visit churches. They agree Gertie needs her own life, maybe a friend or two. Mildred doesn’t give any details about her coffees with Gertie.

She finds pleasure is having a mother-aged woman to talk to and wants to keep it to herself. Mildred notices a glint in Boris’s father’s eyes that Boris is finally having fun, running around at all hours with girls. Now she knows what kind of father he is—the kind who doesn’t interfere much but wants freedom for his son. Mildred wonders if

Boris’s father would be so approving of this behavior if Boris were a girl. 105

After two weeks, Mildred’s already talked to her dad multiple times and heard the forgiveness though her phone. She continues to ignore Beverly’s calls and Beverly hasn’t left a message. Mildred hopes this means Beverly knows what she did. Mildred pushes all thoughts of school and Beverly’s face out of her mind. This time belongs to her.

106

IX.

Mildred sees Boris standing behind her in the doorway and gets that familiar feeling. Something off.

“What is it? Tell me right now.”

Boris says nothing, just takes a deep breath. It’s bad.

“Spit it out, Boris. You’re making me crazy right now.”

He takes another breath in through his nose and opens his mouth but no words come out and he closes it. He hands the phone to her—it’s Hank.

“We need to book that ticket home,” Boris says.

Her dad’s face is off, a different kind of worry.

“It’s your mom, sweetheart. She’s really sick.”

Another of Beverly’s attempts at getting Mildred’s attention? But Hank would never participate in a game like that.

“Advanced breast cancer.” Hank’s crying. “Apparently she’s known for some time, since before she even got back in touch with us. She’d already done chemo and radiation before she even came back to Hawthorne.”

Mildred’s vision goes blurry.

“How advanced?” She knows to ask this even though the voice coming out of her mouth sounds foreign.

“Stage five. You should come home right away. I’ll meet you in San Francisco.”

Mildred struggles to breathe and keep her eyes open but they close and she can’t stop them. It feels like the dream where a monster is chasing her but she can’t hold her eyes open so she has no idea where that monster is or how close. Then, in the dream, her 107 legs stop working, no matter how hard she tries, and she ends up crawling, blind and cornered. That’s when she usually realizes that there’s a tiger nearby. In Boris’s living room, her legs give out but she doesn’t fall—Boris’s arms are holding her up. Her mind goes empty. In the distance, she hears Boris speaking. Her dad must still be on the phone.

“We’ll call you back, Hank.”

It takes Hank and Boris three days to convince Mildred to go home and be with

Beverly. It’s Boris who makes the argument that tips the scales.

“No regrets. Is it worth risking being sorry for the rest of your life? Set the differences aside—you have a lifetime to work through it all with your private therapist but only so many days left with your mom.”

Mildred can’t help but wonder if this is why Beverly wanted to be her mother again, why she reached out to Mildred over a year ago now. It’s an unpleasant feeling, wondering if Beverly, once again, wasn’t even thinking of Mildred but of herself, her own need to make peace before dying.

Boris helps her book the open-ended part of her ticket for the soonest flight they can find—she’ll be back in San Francisco by Saturday. Hank has already rented a one- bedroom motel room near the hospital with special rates for people with family members in long-term medical residence. Everything is set. She won’t be alone when she gets home.

108

X.

Boris and Ana are on one of their “human-subject experiments,” as Ana calls them. Ana and Boris are the humans being experimented on. They get on a train in a general direction and then exit at a random stop and explore. If they were in the U.S. or even Russia, okay. But Greece is unfamiliar, even if Ana does speak a little of the language. On this day, they end up in Perama when Ana hops off the train, and Boris, as usual, follows her. “We’re scientists, Boris, both the examiner and the subject being tested.”

As the train pulls away, she picks a direction and starts walking. “I smell the ocean—that seems a good choice.”

Within blocks, they are surrounded by the sort of extreme poverty Boris has only seen in National Geographic and the BBC. Certainly no American news station he’s ever watched reveals these images: buildings with no walls, filled with camp fires, stacks of rusty pots and pans, and piles of blankets and clothes; packs of dogs with ribs showing through missing hunks of fur; dirty children in rags sitting on piles of trash playing cards, gaunt cheeks like the ones from pictures of holocaust survivors, spitting and laughing.

Two men speak loudly in Greek, arms flying around. One man leans forward and the other pulls him into a hug. A chicken falls over a broken wooden door and a woman grabs it from the splinters to carry under her arm. Boris pulls Ana’s hand but she resists.

He follows her gaze to a small child with dirty locks of hair on the curb, basket in hand.

No nearby adult seems to be connected to this child and she looks back at Boris while walking towards the child, a sort of question. He backs away, holding Ana’s hand, trying 109 to be the one to direct her, for once, to get her out of this place she’s tricked them into landing. The child’s basket is empty and the tips of her fingers tap the center of it.

“Boris, give me the apricots from your backpack.” They picked them from a small, roadside tree the day before. He drops three apricots into the child’s basket—all he has—and a crisp, red, ten Euro note. The child grabs the note and crumples it in her palm.

At first Boris thinks maybe she doesn’t understand but then he realizes it’s probably not safe for her to have money out in the open.

“Poú eínai i mitéra sou?” Ana asks her.

Boris winces. How many languages can she keep in her head? Boris struggles with his supposed “Mother tongue,” and on some days feels like he can barely speak

English, let alone Russian, French, Greek, Spanish, Italian, and German.

The child stands, slips the apricots into a pocket, hand clenching her cash, sets her basket upside-down on her head for easy travel, and starts walking.

“Come,” Ana says to Boris. Boris wants to run the other way, not even wait for the train, and keep running. He definitely doesn’t want to follow a strange child into a rundown neighborhood with little understanding of the language. Of course, he follows

Ana.

“What are we doing?” He asks her.

She gives him a sideways glance like the one that had first hooked him to her in the botanical gardens of Moscow University on that first night together. This look is different, though—pained, not the usual sly, half-teasing, half-sincere look to which he’s become accustomed.

“I asked her where her mother is. We can’t leave her alone here.” 110

“What the hell else can we do? Kidnap a Greek homeless kid, smuggle her back to Russia, and start a family? Let’s go.”

But Ana keeps following the child and Boris keeps following Ana.

After a few turns on narrow streets lined with crumbling buildings and ragged, sideways hanging business signs, the child steps through an opening where a door should be but isn’t. In the back of a dark room stands an elderly man.

“Pappoús,” the child points. She removes the three apricots from her pocket, takes a large slurping bite out of one, and hands the other two to the man. She unstraps a satchel from under her shirt and sets it down, pulling out a bag of walnuts. That must be where the wadded up money went.

The man grabs the child, scolding in Greek, his hand gently patting her hair, his other arm clasped tightly around her shoulders, pulling her to his side. In a voice, loud and harsh, he asks Boris, “What you want from my granddaughter?”

“We just wanted to make sure she’s okay, sir.” Boris struggles to find the words to for this surreal situation.

The man speaks quietly to the child and again turns to Boris and Ana, staring suspiciously and holding the child close.

“Okay, thanks to you.” He waves his hand and they’re dismissed. Boris turns toward the opening they came through and sees Ana already standing at it, paler than usual, one hand on the doorjamb to steady herself.

Outside, Ana turns to Boris. “The man said to girl, ‘They take their pictures and then go back to eyes closed.’” 111

They backtrack to the train station, Boris’s heart racing. Did they turn right on this street? Or left? Did he step over this pile of rubble on the way in? But Ana’s nose catches the scent of the falafel stand they passed earlier and suddenly, they’re back in their own world, the one of safety and food and beaches and trains taking them away. Boris tries to tell her how scared, how angry, how helpless he feels, but he can’t find the words or the courage so he stays silent.

The next day, they stand hand-in-hand at the edge of a cliff.

Boris pulls Ana by the hand, the rock disappears from under their feet, and they fall, fall, fall, until long after the rollercoaster sensation ends.

“Point your toes,” Ana yells, her voice left behind in the air.

Just as Boris wonders when the falling will end, his toes part the water and it swallows him. Water shoots up his nose and through his sinus passages, force presses on his eardrums, and gravity slows, and then Ana’s hand pulls him up, he frog-kicks his legs, and his head shoots up out of the water in gasps for air. Water drains out of every orifice in his head except one ear, where he feels the headache of waterlogging beginning. He shakes that ear towards his shoulder in several rapid jerks.

“Again!” The turquoise of Ana’s hair, chopped short to her head, almost blends with the water behind her, making her face look like a buoy floating on the water’s surface. “Come on.” She puts her hands on Boris’s shoulders and pushes down, her own body coming up out of the water for a moment while Boris’s submerges. When he comes up for air, he refuses another jump and Ana goes alone.

Back at the hostel, Ana teases Boris. “I thought Americans are so brave, like

Rambo. Would Rambo be worried about a little water in his ears?” 112

“Holy shit, Ana, that is so 1985. I wasn’t even born yet.”

She laughs, her blue hair sticking out in every directions from the ocean salt and sand crusted on it. “Okay, Deadpool? He would jump, no?”

“Okay, that’s no fair—he can’t even die in that movie. Plus, you know I get ear aches.” He teases her in return but real irritation festers under the surface. With Ana, it’s always how Americans are supposed to be so brave. His head aches from water exploding through it and his nose leaks when he turns his head in certain directions.

Maybe he’s not meant for this kind of living—the kind Ana loves of cliff diving and taking trains to random European towns with no plans. Now and then it crosses his mind that he would rather be traveling with Mildred, who would definitely be making fun of him, but not risking his safety so often, and she would listen to his plans and ideas. On the downside, no sex. Often during their travels, Ana challenges Boris to turn his phone off and resist his urge to plan ahead, book a hostel online, double check the safety of neighborhoods, and use navigation. At times, plunging forward without knowing at all what will happen is thrilling. Other times, like yesterday, it’s terrifying.

“Ground control to Major Boris,” Ana’s face is inches from his. “Are you in there? Hello?”

Boris sighs. Can he say what he wanted to say on the train but couldn’t? What does he have to say?

“Oh,” Ana says. “So a talk is in order? I push you too far this time?” The tease is gone from her voice and Boris’s anger, his frustration with how she loves to corner him, dissipates.

“How do you always know what I need to say before I know?” 113

“It’s on your face. You Americans have no secrets with your emotions. In Russia we are more careful with our hearts.” She smiles, slides her hand into his pocket, and intertwines her fingers with his—the Russian way, always hidden in a pocket. “I also have logical thinking, as you say. I know you are mad about yesterday. Today I can’t help but tease you, so I should be able to figure out you are mad with me.”

“I guess I am. Why did you take me there? Why do you insist on danger?”

“Oh, Boris. You make so much of so little.”

He steps back, pulling her hand out of his pocket. “It’s not ‘so little.’ It’s big. Not everything is ‘so little’.”

“Okay, fine. We discuss now?”

“Yes.” Pressure to talk may push her to stalk off and disappear for the night, but he has to follow through on his promise to himself. Unlike all the other dangers, this one ended up closer to his fears. “What’s your deal? Why do you get so mad when I try to plan anything, or be safe?”

“My therapist tells me my parents’ divorce ‘did a number on me,’ as you say in

English. So what? Like all kids of divorce, I end up with little impulse control and a need for risk-taking.”

Boris contemplates this, thinks of Mildred and how she also takes big risks, is wild, and makes crazy choices. This feels like something else, though. Mildred never really risks Boris’s safety. She respects his fears. She might tease, but she never makes him feel bad for being, well, for being himself. Safe, careful, thoughtful—things Mildred turns to him for help with. Ana sometimes fails to appreciate what makes him who he is. 114

“Okay, but I know a lot of people with divorced parents and they’re all different and all divorce is different. That’s a cop-out. Tell me the story, not your summary of why

‘it’s okay.’”

“Okay, fine. Let’s go outside to the patio for a smoke and I will tell you a story about Ana.”

Sometime it’s cute when Ana refers to her child-self in the third person, but this time Boris’s skin prickles. He’s about to get another taste of Ana’s secrets, things she rarely divulges.

The brick steps are long and wide, edged with a steel hand railing, one post set on each step, so Ana and Boris can sit off to the side and not block foot-traffic. They sit sideways, their legs dangling off the end of the stairs into the bushes. Ana rests her cheek against one of the metal posts and swings her legs, kicking her heel against the side of the stairwell.

“I was little, like seven. My mom was so poor and in school when he left her. She was too busy and couldn’t pay for nanny so my dad took me with him. We traveled a lot, to many countries for his work, and I learn bits of many languages. He gave me books and more books to read, in different languages, and I spend a lot of time with adults, other ambassadors. He tells me he wants me to be cultured, not trashy, like my mother.

Then one day, he disappears at a party and I can’t find him. I’m almost nine and barely see my mom anymore. I don’t speak the right language so I wander around looking and looking and then I hide and cry. A maid finds me but I can’t tell her my problem because we don’t speak the same languages so she calls police. Just as police arrive, a car pulls up and my dad gets out. He is stumbling, laughing, doesn’t seem to realize he’s forgotten 115 me. The police talk to him for a long time. After that, he disappears a lot, stumbles a lot, until finally my mom finishes school and gets good university job and takes me back. By the time I went to her, he was too drunk to really notice. I haven’t really seen him much since, just get cards and money and expensive presents. Because that’s what a girl needs from her father. So he drinks and she sleeps around with married men and I jump from cliffs.”

Boris holds her hand, afraid to say the wrong thing, and then she won’t tell her secrets anymore. He wipes a few tears from her cheeks and she leans her head on his shoulder.

“Okay, then, now you know my secret. Let’s hear one of yours.”

“I was attacked by a wolf last summer,” he knows joking is the way encourage her confiding in him, “and now I’m a werewolf.” He howls at the moon and then paws at her face, pretending to take a bite out of her neck, sticking his nose in her ear and breathing in and out quickly, like a curious dog.

“More like puppy dog, I think.” She laughs and runs into the hostel towards their room. He chases her, barking and howling, all the way to their twenty-bed room, where she dives onto the mattress, rolls over, and unsnaps her bikini top. For once, he doesn’t try to stop her or check to see if anyone might be in the hallway or lobby, coming their way. He pulls her shorts off. His hips fit perfectly between her legs and she whispers in his ear.

“I’m sorry about yesterday. I make it up to you. Our next adventure you pick, you plan the whole thing, make reservations ahead, and we do it all your way. Okay?”

She sits up on her elbows and pulls him into her. 116

“Okay.”

He breathes in her salty, sweaty hair, and all he sees is blue.

When they wake up, tangled in gray sheets, sweat sticking them together, a group of Germans chats in the doorway. Boris and Ana are on the bottom bunk on the far side of the room so they have a minute to find clothes, struggle back into them, and act natural. Boris pulls his swim shorts back up over his hips and lays next to Ana, hands behind his head. The Germans haven’t noticed them as they talk loudly, laugh, jostle each other, and rustle around with their packs, taking things out, folding, and stuffing items back in.

“Drunkards. Fucking Germans, right?” Ana, of course, knows what they are talking about. “They did tour at Noctua Brewing Company. We should go there—you liked that beer the other day.” She pauses. “I mean, if that’s what you want to do. We are on Boris-time now.” She teases a little but seems to mean it this time. “What will be the first thing we do with Boris’s time?”

“Let’s go to the brewery first.” He feels satisfied—at least he was asked. He did like that beer a lot. And it is time to get drunk. It’s well after noon. In Athens, they’re way behind already. He likes the way it sounds: Boris-time.

Ana chats away in German with the guys, getting directions, Boris assumes, and finding out any other pertinent details. The Germans laugh much harder than seems necessary for directions to a brewery, even for drunk guys. It’s impossible to know if she is flirting or just being her gorgeous self. Boris can barely tell in English. In Russian, she seems much less adorable, much more serious. He wonders if she ever thinks about how 117 little respect she gets in the many other languages she knows. She walks back over and grabs her money belt.

“What’s happening?” He winces as he says it. Why can’t he learn a fucking language already? He’s picked up a bit of Greek but guaranteed it’ll be gone ten minutes into the next country.

“I’m buying mushrooms for after the brewery. There are cool ruins nearby.”

Is that supposed to make sense? What happened to Boris-time?

“You want to buy drugs from total strangers and then feed them to me?”

“They’re hardly strangers. Remember Natasha? These are the guys she met in

Amsterdam. She was telling us about them.”

“Okay, so someone you know from home hung out with these complete strangers in the drug capital of the world and now they’re our best friends and we trust them with our lives?”

“Oh, Boris. You’re worse than old man, sometimes. I will buy. We can decide later.”

She takes the Euros over and tucks a hard white plastic tube in her pocket. They go back and forth in German for a few more minutes, she laughs and waves. “Auf wiedersehen meine freundes.”

The guys laugh. “Ciao,” one responds. Maybe she’s not as perfect in every language as Boris imagines. Italian, though, she speaks that as well.

“Those guys are douches,” Boris says when she returns to him.

“They’re fine, but sometimes is better for them to see you as more innocent, or, that is not the quite right word, but you know what I mean. Not so savvy.” 118

Once again, Boris is surprised by her. So she does put on a show, is less than sincere with these guys. Maybe when he thinks she’s flirting she’s really acting out a role, to get what she wants. Is this also what she does with him?

“I got us a quarter of Amsterdam ‘shrooms for less than half the Euros it should cost. Sweet, innocent, friend-of-a-friend, not sure where to go for these things—boom.

They laugh a little at me for my difficult German and later I laugh at them for being blinded by boobs and giggles.”

While they’re at the brewery, Boris appreciates that Ana hasn’t mention the mushrooms since he saw her stash them deep in her in her travel pack. Maybe it will be at least a little Boris-time after all.

At the end of the brewery tour, they have thirty minutes to drink as much as they can until the next tour group comes in. The bar is large and round and the walls have the facade of rocks stacked together just right. The tables circle around the bar, which sits in the center of the room. A seemingly endless number of waitresses line up at the bar, filling trays, spiraling out from the bar in various directions to distribute drinks, then back in line. Of course, Ana and Boris see this thirty minutes as a challenge. They end up in a drinking race with a couple of Aussies from their hostel.

“I start drinking vodka at age twelve, my friends,” Ana tells them.

“We aren’t falling for that Russian stereotype. It’s a big talk for a little lady,” says an Aussie.

“I’m no lady.” Ana laughs that long, slow laugh that rumbles through her chest and shakes her shoulders. 119

Boris knows—they are in for it now. He’s tried to keep up with her and he’s no beginner. He and Mildred started sneaking beers out in the bushes when they were eleven.

“What’s the drinking age in Australia, twenty-one? In Russia is thirteen.” She could shit-talk with hardened gangsters, if necessary.

“No way,” an Aussie says, then tilts his head back and empties an entire pint down his throat in two gulps.

After that, it’s beer after beer, tray after tray, slipping the waitress ten Euros to come back faster than she’s supposed to, and by the time the bell rings and the doors open, there are no fewer than fifteen empty pint glasses on the table, despite the waitress having already cleared their table once. Their waitress is petite but strong, her arms defined by curves of muscles as she fills her tray with empty glasses and swings it up over her shoulder in one, graceful move. Boris pulls another twenty out of his pocket and leaves it on the table. Ana pulls a sharpie pen out of her bag and hands it to him.

“Leave a little love note on it. An extra tip. She’s been eyeing you since we got here.”

“What? No she hasn’t.” He noticed but would never want Ana to know. He’s not a flirter and never has been, always careful to hide it when he finds another woman sexy or beautiful. Ana’s already too much for him. What would he need with attention from anyone else?

“Just do it. I won’t be mad. She deserves it, anyway. She is good to us. Give her this present.” 120

Boris takes the pen and chews on the cap, thinking. He’s lucky to be just drunk enough—the last few beers haven’t kicked in yet. Thanks for a great thirty minutes.

That’s all he can think of. Ana picks it up and reads it.

“You are such a dork!” She takes the pen and adds, I’ll be dreaming of you tonight and a heart.

“Like that’s any sexier.”

Ana drops the twenty on the table, grabs Boris’s hand, pulls him out the door, and doesn’t slow her gait for the five blocks to the ruins. She’s on a mission. Boris stumbles, those last couple of beers kicking in, and worries he may have difficulty getting back to the hostel if they wait too long.

“Wait, Ana, wait. What about Boris-time? Isn’t it up to me?”

Ana does not look back, holding his hand tightly, moving too fast for his mind to keep up with what is going on. “What are we doing?” He asks.

No response, just a tighter grip on his hand. She slows a little, finding each footing, possibly also feeling those last few beers make their way to her head. They approach what seems like a cubby hole in the side of a crumbling wall, a slanted opening that reminds Boris of the door in the wall in Beetlejuice. He laughs out loud.

“Let’s go in here,” she finally speaks, grinning over her shoulder. There she is.

She’s back. “Come, follow me through another doorway.”

He ducks to miss hitting his head, less worried now that Ana is Ana, again, and not a crazed, silent drunk who hits on waitresses for him. Inside the doorway, the space opens up into a full room that Boris can stand up within. The walls are covered in parts of paintings and etchings in the stone. He runs his fingers over the edges of their creases— 121 he can feel a meaning in them, an age, a texture that has no translation into words. There is depth in their crevices. The dust collects on Boris’s sweaty hands and he rubs his palms together, the grit scratches, older than he can comprehend, yet here it is, in his hands.

How much longer will all of these Greek ruins they’ve been visiting last? Perhaps not even his lifetime. Ana pulls the small, white, hard plastic tube from her pocket. It’s not in her travel pack back at the hostel after all. She pops the top, taps some of the mushrooms into her mouth, and then hands the rest to Boris.

“This is ancient grieving room,” she says, glancing around the walls.

Boris holds his fingers on the wall and dumps the rest of the mushrooms into his mouth with his other hand. Why resist? There’s no point in arguing when he already knows he’ll cave because the mushrooms sound like fun, now.

“After the funeral, the family sits here and grieves. The walls tell their stories and have the passport of the dead—like instructions for travel after death. They say good-bye to the old life and hello to the new one.”

“How do you always know this stuff?” Boris asks, picking remnants of hardened stems and caps from between his teeth, his tongue raw from the bitterness.

“I read it in the travel guide I brought that was my father’s.” She pats her backpack. “And part of making it here was just determination and luck.” She winks.

When Boris says nothing, fighting off gagging, she says, “You want me to say ‘I feel it?’ I’m psychic? The ghosts tell me? Americans always want romantic. I just read a book, okay? I’m a nerd and I read books. Now let’s have fun.” She turns to the wall, pressing her forehead against it. 122

Boris sees a glimpse of the real Ana in her as she examines the ancient stone—the girl who clings to the books she has from her father, what she has kept of him, how she secretly expresses her love for him, even when she is mad.

She says, “In translation, it is literally ‘the transition room.’ In Greek, it is domátio metávasi.”

Together, they transition into night, pupils wide with psychedelics, running, tripping, laughing, hiding, all over the ruins. They lie across the edge of an open window made of rock and stare straight up at the stars, no roof above, only the past below, talking about their lives before they met, talking about their families. Boris admits to Ana that he lost his virginity to Mildred and she doesn’t seem surprised or jealous. She tells him about her first, the son of a man her mother was having an affair with, whose house they would stay over at while the wife was working abroad. She tells how, years later, her mother admitted that she chose that man because she knew his wife had slept with Ana’s father. Ana never told her mother, but she tells Boris, how she slept with that man’s son to punish her father, too.

When they finally make their way back to the hostile in the early hours of the morning, arm in arm, Boris finally feels safe.

Although they only have a few weeks left to travel and play before returning to their parents and then on to college, Boris finally chooses Ana. And believes she chooses him.

123

XI.

Mildred wonders what Boris would think of her situation now. Him, happily running all over Europe with Russian Barbie. Her, naked, uncertain of the details from the previous night, searching for her underwear beneath the covers with her foot. She removed the underwear without a second’s thought the previous night, after stripping her clothes off, bending at her hips to snort a line off the glass coffee table, and climbing into bed with a near-stranger. Her clothes are across the room in a pile, but her underwear are tangled up in the sheets.

How did she even end up in Reno? As a kid, she thought of Reno as “The City,” at least until she found out about her mother in San Francisco. That’s where she should be now, getting ready for college, but in the months since her mother died, San Francisco feels like a magnet with a like-pole, pushing her away. So instead of going back to catch up on her missed work, she left high school to follow a cute, skinny, damaged, sexy boy all the way to Reno. And here she is.

Nick’s blond dreadlocks pile around his head onto the pillow. Who is the man- boy behind this beautifully sculpted face? Does he know dreadlocks are a political statement? Probably not. He clearly wants to look like the musician who will “make it” one day, at least small-time, but hopefully big-time. If Boris were here, they’d be making so much fun of Nick’s hair. Boris would tease her endlessly, knowing that even as she mocked Nick, she wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to touch Nick’s body. With permission, of course. But boys rarely say no. 124

Nick’s eyes open, laced with sleep and wild strands of hair. His brown eyes mismatch with his blond locks and fine, delicate features. Boris would be laughing now for sure, mostly at her, but a little bit with her.

“Hi,” Nick says.

Mildred’s squirms on the inside—now they are awkward. Shy, even. What happened to last-night-Mildred: naked, drunk, and confident? What happened to last- night-Nick: strong, sexy, and wild with desire for meth and Mildred’s floating body as the air swirled through her like a storm of ecstasy and adrenaline? The meth burned her nostrils and set her head on fire, her lungs, her heart, her arms, her legs, her brain churning then racing with synaptic overload. Her skin tingled as the drug drained down the back of her throat, both choking her and fueling her need to act. To. Do. Something.

Anything that felt meaningful in that moment, no matter what the consequences. Nick.

Now he seems timid. Drugs will do that.

“Hi.” Mildred wills her eyes to stay locked on his until he is the one who blushes.

He struggles under the covers for a few minutes. “Are you hungry?” He slides out from under the covers, somehow already in his boxers, and without displacing any blanket from Mildred’s suddenly large-feeling body. She wills herself to shrink.

“Sure,” she says, trying to track the last time she ate. Was it breakfast yesterday?

Dinner the night before that?

“I’ll go pick up some food from Denny’s, if you want.”

No way is she staying in this creepy house without Nick. The thought of the walk down the narrow hallway to the long, steep staircase makes her hold her pee. The dark, empty, open-doored room just before the stairs? No thanks. She hasn’t met any of the 125 other roommates, so there are strangers in the house, and some of them are moving in today—awkward. “I’ll go with.”

Nick hops off the edge of the bed and across the floor like a kitchen mouse running from an unexpected light flipped on. He loads weed in a bowl, takes a hit, and offers it to Mildred. It feels like communion. She asks herself for forgiveness. Weed is a great relief from last night’s white meth smoke, sweet and sharp with chemicals, like sugar and Clorox. She takes it from his hand, using the other hand to clutch the covers up to her chin. He turns for the door and doesn’t see her close her eyes for a moment in prayer—please get me out of here safely.

“Bathroom,” he nods towards the door and walks out of the room.

Mildred is relieved for a moment of privacy. Is he purposely giving her a quiet space to relocate her underwear and her confidence? She takes a hit and asks herself the most obvious question: What the fuck was she doing smoking meth last night? There was a time where she believed in “above the influence.” When she first dropped acid, she carefully reorganized her drug-related beliefs from “all bad” into a “some good/some bad” category system: Acid and weed? Yes. Powdered drugs? No way. After her first line, another reorganization: Snorting lines? Okay— not great, but occasionally fun.

Smoking powders? No way. Shooting up—a boundary she vows never to cross. Or will she? Meth doesn’t seem so bad now, after all. Not good, but not only reserved for street junkies, as she had once believed with the force of a nun believing in God.

She hears her mother’s voice and the conversation they had after Mildred smoked weed for the first time. “You have to find your muse, Millie. Creative people have all sorts of methods—don’t judge your own.” 126

At the time Mildred responded with, “Wait, Beverly, are you suggesting I try more illegal drugs? Also, don’t call me Millie.”

To which her mother replied, “Geez, Mildred, don’t you tell Henry that interpretation.”

That was a year ago and now Beverly is dead. It’s just like Beverly to make

Mildred feel emotionally messy even when she’s dead.

“Get out of my head, Beverly,” Mildred says to the pipe. Sometimes she has to tell herself this out loud—it’s the only way to stop the thoughts of her mom’s skeleton hands after she had lost so much weight in that last month, cancer withering her into bones into dust. It happened so fast. Mildred was mad, then she was out of the country, then suddenly her asshole mother dared to go and get deathly ill. Sometimes it feels plain rude. Other times, it feels stickier. Every now and then, there’s a glimpse of guilt about her initial reactions to Beverly’s illness— Beverly is faking to get her home. Beverly is manipulating her. At least she only told her dad that feeling. And Boris, of course. One good thing about meth—it presses the more complicated feelings out with a rush of adrenaline. Some days, she can’t decide if it is lucky or unlucky that she went back to

San Francisco before her mother’s death. On other days, she wouldn’t be surprised if

Beverly just reappeared one day, that this is just another one of her disappearing acts. Her dad calls that denial. Mildred calls it relief.

As she dresses, the sun comes out from behind a cloud, shines through the glass table, and the white residue on the table grows more dramatic, like a chalk outline of her murdered night. She has to go to the bathroom. Can she make it to Denny’s? The bathroom door in Nick’s house has no lock, a barrier for a young woman in a house filled 127 with twenty-year-old men. It isn’t that they can’t be trusted because she is afraid of them, but that they just can’t be trusted, in general, for the same reasons she no longer trusts herself: Meth. Alcohol. Self-induced sleeplessness. Lack of nutrition. General fuckedupedness. Also, five dudes share one tiny bathroom. It’s not pleasant. She remembers from the night before that there’s no toilet paper, which creates a fresh inner- wince about her previous night’s sexual escapade. Chances someone ran to the store to grab some? Zero. No fucking toilet paper. Men are disgusting. But super fucking hot, so what’s a girl to do? Also, good drugs.

Nick comes back in the room. He rolls an elastic off his wrist and pulls his thin white-boy dreadlocks back into a messy man-bun at the nape of his neck. He rolls one of the loose hairs around a finger and then tugs, pulling it out of his head. Between his pointer and thumb, he rolls that single hair into a ball and drops it into the garbage. It’s going to have to be the Denny’s bathroom.

“Ready?” Nick asks. His voice is so tentative that Mildred questions her own voice’s ability to respond in the form of a statement. She pretends to look for something in her pockets but then Nick reaches back one hand for her and she steps forward.

Apparently this is happening.

Six months later, here she still is. She sometimes lets herself believe she’s a part of this drugged-up, motley crew of throwaways-turned-family, but really, the guys are family to each other, not her. Mildred stands alone. Drugs can make things funny, that’s for sure, and also really fucking sad. She helps pay the rent with part of her inheritance from Beverly, and they give her drugs. Every single day, a never-ending line of meth 128 addicts and homeless twenty-somethings rotate through the house, its saggy front door swallowing people up. There is no relief here, not for Mildred.

Even the front of the house looks depressed, hopeless, stuck in the charred middle of former bonfires and dirt, wishing for the family it once hoped to house. Now it’s given up and become a serious fire hazard. Beverly’s light blue ’67 Volkswagen bug sits out front, waiting for Mildred to drive it back to SF to finish her last high school credits that she ditched by running off to Moscow—a constant light blue reminder of the life she’s supposed to be living.

When she talks to Boris, she lets him believe she’s living with a bunch of

Burners—artists and musicians who spend the year planning their next festival “on the playa,” making jewelry, and experimenting with drugs. Boris makes fun of her, as she thinks he should. The story that she’s taking a year off to be wild, but in an artistic, socially acceptable way, is so much more palatable than reality. She laughs at Boris’s repeated question, “But why is it called playa? There’s no beach there.” Seriously. He must see her getting thinner, but he doesn’t push it. Since Beverly’s death, Boris and

Hank treat her as fragile thing that very well might break if the wrong words touch it. If

Mildred called her father, he would be here yesterday, collecting her things, politely thanking Nick, and dragging her out of here. But thinking about her father makes her eye twitch with guilt.

Mildred sits on the porch, smoking cigarettes, drinking from her flask, blocking out the guitar and drums she can hear upstairs and is already tired of, staring at her inherited blue reminder, running her fingers over the ribs she can easily count, strumming them the way she used to strum the ichthyosaurus bones on her trips to Berlin. 129

A noise startles her, metal scraping metal, and she looks over to the side yard to see the lid to the underground shelter opening. She’s never seen the guy who lives down there, only heard stories about him and his odd bomb-shelter of an apartment. He’s the dealer. The door slides open but, instead of a man’s head, a small blond one emerges. It’s wide across the top and pointy at the chin, the shape of a guitar pick, like an alien. The forehead goes high before the blonde hair tuft spills over the top. The thin torso and arms of a woman rise up behind the boy, lifting him all the way out.

Mildred recognizes the half-a-stick-figure as the wife of the cook. Not even Nick has met the cook, only his wife, who makes the weekly deliveries to their compound. If the tweaker folklore that touching meth can erase your fingerprints is true, this woman must have none left. The woman doesn’t seem to notice Mildred as she sets the little boy on the dirt and retreats back into the ground.

The boy stands still, looking stunned, his eyes squinting at the bright sunlight.

Mildred can’t look away. Should a child this small be standing alone by the street? He can’t be more than three. He spots her and gives a sideways smile, questioning and timid.

He stumbles over, tripping on twigs and trash in his path.

“Hey there, buddy,” Mildred says.

He gasps and his face lights up with a huge grin. He points to her hand and leans forward and she reaches her arm out to him. He grabs her middle and pointer fingers and pulls until she takes a step forward.

“What’s your name?”

He pulls harder. 130

“Can’t you talk?” Mildred feels a jolt in her chest—a pain that threatens to fill her eyes.

He pulls Mildred to a rock he tripped over on his way. It’s about the circumference of a quarter. He points to it and stares intently, his forehead wrinkled, brows trying to come together between his eyes. She looks closer and sees a sparkling white stripe through the center: quartz. It’s a wishing stone. Where did it come from?

Mildred’s never found one in Nevada before, only once at Flathead Lake in Montana, and then again at a beach trips to the Oregon coast, where she saw huge rocks as big as cars with thick strips of quartz splitting them into disproportionate halves. She loved them, crawled all over the m, always searching for stones small enough to sneak home and carry around in her pockets, making wishes. She thinks of the palm-sized, oval wishing stone in the glovebox of her car and fights back tears.

The boy looks up at her.

“Wow, neat! It’s a wishing stone. Can you say that?” What would this boy wish for?

He picks up the stone and slips it into Mildred’s pocket. She wants to slip the boy into her other pocket. She imagines grabbing him, taking him in Beverly’s car, and driving home to Hawthorne, to her dad. The boy’s face turns into a smile and his forehead tips slightly towards the ground but his eyes look right up at her.

“Are you flirting with me?” Mildred asks.

His smooth hand wraps around her fingers tightly. He stares into her eyes, his set far apart below his wide forehead. He doesn’t even blink, just stares and points, breathing deeply and loudly. 131

Mildred would never be able to explain how she came across this boy, why she had him in her possession. Even if she did, how could she prove he needed help?

Kidnapping isn’t a charge she is interested in dealing with.

She pulls her hand from his, removes the stone from her own pocket and places it in his hand, wrapping his fingers tightly around it.

“Wish for fingerprints,” she says.

The spider lady reemerges from the hole in the ground, gives Mildred a suspicious look, and grabs the boy, swinging him up on her bony hip. “Don’t I tell you not to talk to strangers?” The woman stares at Mildred for an awkwardly long few seconds, one eyebrow up—Mildred feels herself being assessed. She pulls her hands into the ends of the long sleeves of Nick’s sweatshirt, sees herself, and realizes for the first time that she looks like a drug addict, hair long and stringy, dark circles under her eyes, clothes dirty and ill-fitting—she is the thing she’s looking at in this other woman. She tucks her lips into her mouth, wishing she had sunglasses to hide at least a few of her secrets. The woman shakes her head, turns one side of her lip up, and turns, carrying the boy to the faded yellow mustang. She thrusts him in the front seat, shoves him over to fit herself behind the wheel, revs the engine, and they speed away.

132

XII. “I’m so glad you came, honey.” Beverly’s voice was soft. It cracked over the word honey.

Mildred’s skin prickled. She took a deep breath and said nothing. She was still a bit jetlagged from travelling from Moscow back to San Francisco, although Hank had insisted she rest one night before seeing her mother so that she would be more emotionally prepared. Beverly could have what she needed—that word, honey. That’s what Boris said and that’s what Mildred was going to do. Give Beverly what she wants.

No regrets from these last days, no matter how they twisted Mildred up inside.

“Me, too.” Mildred said. She didn’t mention Hank and Boris’s struggle to get her to agree to this visit. They were right, though. Millie was inside her somewhere, a voice telling her the right thing to do—Mildred just needed to listen to it over the voice of her anger. She slipped her hand into Beverly’s and practiced the words Boris made her say over and over. Mom, I need to ask you a question.

Deep breath.

“Mom, I need to ask you a question.” Before you’re gone. But she doesn’t say that last part out loud.

“Before I drop dead?” Beverly laughed but there was a sorrow in her voice similar to the first time they had talked on the phone after her disappearing act.

Mildred took another deep breath and counted as she slowly let it out through her nose. She bit her tongue again, letting her teeth drag across a bump she’d bitten into it earlier. 133

“You’re finally going to let me to explain why I left?” Beverly looked into

Mildred’s eyes and Mildred’s heart sank the way it had every morning in the months after

Beverly disappeared, as Mildred had come to realize Beverly didn’t want her anymore.

Beverly wasn’t coming back. One question to get through. Her mother wouldn’t even let her choose the moment or the words.

“Geez, Beverly, yes, but why can’t you just let me ask the question?” Mildred felt the old frustration, the resentment, filling her up. And then, a sharp pang of guilt. She’s dying and I’m still throwing a teenage fit.

“Fine, Millie. What do you want to ask me?” Beverly stared past Mildred to the window.

Mildred stood up and walked out. Count to ten, go for a walk, whatever it takes to be nice. Whatever it takes to not act like a petulant child, even if she believed her mother still deserved some of that. Now there was no time for it.

Five minutes later, Mildred walked back into Beverly’s hospital room and sat back down on the edge of the bed.

“Why did you leave us?” This would have to count as Mildred asking in her own time.

Beverly’s corked smile tilted the edges of her eyes down, making them droop even more. “I’m so glad you finally want to hear the answer. I’ve been trying to tell you, for so long, wanted to tell you.”

Her answers were mostly expected—she had felt like an outsider in the family, had been jealous that Mildred was so much closer to Hank than herself, felt like a failure as a mother, sometimes felt like they didn’t want her, felt alone in Hawthorne, had no 134 outlet for her creativity. Mildred understood that she couldn’t have heard this explanation before because it was so many explanations, because the reasons were complicated, and she wanted one answer that made sense.

One of the reasons did surprise her.

“I need to tell you about my own mother. She always punished me for loving my dad so much. She would yell at me and ground me and withhold affection from me. I didn’t want to do that to you. She was so cold. Cold is worse that angry or mean. It’s emptiness. I felt like I could easily become her when I felt jealous or sad, when I wanted your love so badly. Once I realized that I had the capacity to hurt you in that way, I began to come up with my plan to leave. I wanted to protect you from me but, instead, I hurt you more than I even could have imagined.”

Mildred started to cry.

“Oh, stop it,” Beverly said. “You’re stronger than that.”

There was the tone that hinted to Mildred that Beverly might have been right about her fears about mothering. She might have had the capacity for that emotional cruelty. Instead of letting it set her off, Mildred got out of her chair and climbed into the hospital bed next to her, pressing her belly into Beverly’s side, one arm over her. Beverly wrapped her arms around Mildred and they stayed like this.

“I’m sorry I had secrets with dad.” It was all Mildred could bring herself to say, but she had to say it.

Beverly squeezed her harder. “You don’t need to be sorry. Who else were you supposed to be close to? It was my fault. You needed a mom and I was sure I didn’t know how to be one so I ran away. I ruined everything.” 135

Mildred couldn’t say It’s okay but they fell asleep laying together. When Mildred woke up, the grief rushed in like salty ice water.

Beverly died the day hospice took over.

The morning started hectic. Mildred woke up at 2am to Beverly moaning in pain.

The nurse came in with liquid morphine and anxiety meds and Mildred lay awake, repeating the mantra Beverly taught her as a girl when she felt anxious and couldn’t sleep: Everything is right in the universe. Things are as they are meant to be. It kept her from hyperventilating.

The nurse came in to clean Beverly. Beverly couldn’t speak. She pulled her gown open and her hand groped at her breast, where a greenish, white puss came out of her nipple. The nurse pulled on purple latex gloves that pulled all the way up to her elbows, pulling a packet of wipes in her pocket.

“That’s okay, honey, it’s normal.” The nurse said this, but the look she gave

Mildred said more. The nurse pulled a wipe from the package and gently wiped the puss away as if it were nothing more dramatic than a child’s snotty nose. She put her hand on

Beverly’s shoulder and turned to Mildred. “I’m going to wash her, now. Do you want to step out?”

“I can help,” Mildred said.

The nurse turned to Beverly. “Get yourself ready and we’ll be right back. Can I see you in the hallway for a minute?” she asked Mildred. Mildred nodded and they walked out of the room.

“You can’t touch these wipes. I have to wash off the chemotherapy residue and disinfect her skin, but they’re radioactive. Technically, you shouldn’t touch her, but at 136 this point, even being near her at all will radiate you at least a little bit so do what you need to do.”

“But aren’t those wipes bad for her cancer, too?”

The nurse smiled an understanding smile and put her hand back on Mildred’s shoulder. These two acts were surprisingly comforting, unlike the awkward hug the nurse from the day before had leaned in for.

“For your mother, the risk of using these wipes doesn’t compared with the risk of not using them. We have to prevent infection—it’s a quality of life issue, honey.”

Mildred waited in the hallway.

By the time the nurse was finishing up, Beverly had deteriorated. She placed her hand lightly on Mildred’s back. “It’s going to be soon.” Mildred nodded her head once and the nurse pushed her station to the next room. Twenty minutes later, a hospice nurse showed up.

Mildred began whispering to Beverly that it was time to let go.

As Beverly’s eyes rolled around and Mildred climbed into the bed and whispered to her mom. “I love you.”

Mildred watched Beverly’s chest rise and fall, and then waited for it to rise again.

It did not.

A few hours later, when Mildred was finally ready to leave with Hank, the nurse handed her a bag of the belongings that Beverly brought with her to the hospital.

Sparkling, right on the top of Beverly’s folded leggings, was a small oval stone the size of her palm, a sliver of quartz shot through the center.

137

XIII. After twenty straight hours of sleep, Mildred can’t eat. She can’t even get out of bed. It feels like an extension of her body. When Nick mentions her face has taken on a greenish hue, she rolls over, wondering if she should call Hank and ask for help. Then more sleep arrives.

“Mildred, Dred, talk to me, baby.”

Hank’s voice fades in and out. Is she dreaming? Did she call him?

“How long has she been like this?”

Arms gather her up, separating her from the bed. What’s that smell?

“She hasn’t gotten out of bed in a few days except to go to the bathroom.” Nick is here too. Did he call?

“When was the last time she ate anything?”

“I tried to give her chicken noodle soup last night but she wouldn’t sit up to eat any.”

Mildred feels the jostling of the stairs, her bare feet tracing a line along the stairwell wall. “Dad? Daddy? I need my shoes.”

“Mill? What is it? What are you trying to say?”

Why he can’t understand her? “Shoes, Daddy, my shoes.”

“When was the last time she talked clearly, words you could understand?” Her father’s voice is quiet but sharp.

“Maybe yesterday morning? I don’t know—I was gone for a while yesterday.”

“Fuck, kid, when did she turn green? Get that door for me.” Mildred hears the panic rising in her dad’s voice. Who is he talking about? 138

Her thigh skims the door frame and fresh air rushes against her face, cooling the layers of sweat. Her body starts shaking. The little boy—they need to get him.

“Don’t forget the boy, Dad, in the bunker. He wished for you.”

“I’m sorry, baby, I don’t know what you’re saying. I’m getting you to help.” Her dad’s voice calms her shakes. He will have to come back for the boy.

“I’m taking this blanket. Get the car door for me.” Mildred feels the pressure of her dad’s chest against her as he slides her into the backseat. “No, you stay here.” The door slams, the engines turns over, and the potholes shake her back and forth across the seat. She slips back into sleep.

139

XIV.

When Boris’s phone rings at four a.m. Moscow time, he assumes it must be

Mildred. No one else calls at this hour. He hasn’t heard from her in a while and it makes sense for her to call at a time that will wake up his parents and cause as much accidental disruption as possible. She never considers time change. Boris reaches over for his phone and is surprised not to feel Ana next to him. Then he remembers—she is with her mother in Latvia, he with his parents in Moscow, both spending time with their own families between traveling Europe and when he and Ana will move to the States together for college. It could be Ana calling, but that would be really odd. Fumbling, he recovers the phone from under the couch, where it slid while trying to grab it with too much haste. It’s

Hank. This cannot be good.

“Hey buddy, it’s Hank.”

As if small talk were even necessary at this point. “Hey, Hank. What’s up?”

“Did I wake you up? I forgot to check the time change.”

“That’s okay. Tell me what’s going on with Mildred, the sooner the better.”

Boris’s pulse pounds in his forehead. Mildred hasn’t been right since her mother died but

Boris has been so busy. He feels guilty for hardly calling Mildred at all while he traipsed all over Europe with Ana. She was doing her own thing and he was doing his—it was good for them, they had agreed on that. He isn’t even sure if Mildred is still in Reno or back in SF. “Hank, please, say it.”

“She’s in the hospital. Kidney failure, they say, maybe lupus.”

Boris breathes out slow and steady, but that doesn’t stop the tears. “Is she all right? Where are you? Is she conscious? Can they fix it?” 140

“Okay, okay, there. She’s okay—docs say we caught it just in time. She should be able to mostly recover, but it’ll be a lifestyle change for sure. She’s conscious and irritated and lippy and all the things you miss. It might be awhile before she gets out. She didn’t want me to tell you and mess up your plans…” Hank trails off and Boris hears him cover the phone. Is Hank crying? “It’s been hard. Can you come for a little while? I’ll pay.”

Boris does a lot of research during his thirteen hours of flights from Moscow to

San Francisco to get to Mildred. Hank invited Ana and Boris to stay in his rental. Boris can’t imagine what Hank’s been going through. Stubborn Mildred, not wanting Hank to call him. But Hank should know better by now than to listen to his daughter when she’s being ridiculous. Hank didn’t have many answers the last time they talked but, since

Boris has been out of phone service, a number of tests have now been completed. During a two-hour layover, he called Mildred and she told a very different version of what she’s been up to for the past few months than the one she’d been telling him. He didn’t have to ask her why she’d kept the truth from him. He already knew—she was lost.

Boris hopes there are more answers now. He doesn’t bother stopping at the apartment to say hello to Hank and drop of his luggage. He Ubers straight from the airport to the UCSF Medical Center. He already knows the tentative diagnosis—lupus.

What the hell does that even mean? It’s hardly a disease that gets public service announcements or 60 Minutes exposés.

For the first five minutes of their reunion, Boris and Mildred hug. No words are spoken. Mildred is her feisty self and starts by cracking jokes. She’s easing the tension on 141 purpose and he’s relieved to be with her—it’s so easy, so comfortable. There is not much guessing left between them.

“If one more person sticks their finger up my ass, I’m going to lose my shit,”

Mildred says.

“Literally or figuratively?” asks Boris. “Or loose your shit?”

Their burst of laughter cuts through the smells of cleaning disinfectant, antibacterial gel, and residual vomit and urine. She grabs her side.

“At this rate, it’s already falling out of me anyway,” Mildred says. “The point is,

I’ve spent my whole life keeping things from going in that way and now it’s like every ten minutes.”

A nurse pokes her head in. “What’s your pain level?” The slanted handwriting on the chalk board names her Rosa.

“Around a four point five or a five,” Mildred says, sounding like a professional at answering these kinds of questions, as if she’s been sick for a long time. Boris makes a mental note to double check dates. Was she keeping this from him for longer than Hank said?

“Once this one accidentally broke her finger trying to prove she didn’t feel pain,”

Boris tells the nurse.

“We’re used to that around here.” She rolls her mobile nurse’s station over to the monitors and types updates for the next medical professional.

“Does every single doctor who comes in here have to stick a finger up my butt?

The problem is my kidneys. Kidneys are a different body part than butthole. Don’t they have to take anatomy anymore at med school?” 142

Rosa smiles, seemingly already used to Mildred’s sense of humor. “I know it’s no fun but it’s necessary, I promise, until they can figure out exactly what’s going on. Your kidneys affect everything. Now we have to figure out what’s happening with your blood.

Be patient and eat another pudding cup.” She smiles.

These two already have quite a rapport.

“No, thanks.” Mildred laughs and pretends to gag. “When can I eat real food again?”

“Hopefully tomorrow after the spinal tap. Need anything else?”

“New kidneys? And a functioning immune system would be nice.”

“We’ll keep working on that.” Rosa laughs and busies herself at the computer.

Then she drops her rubber gloves in the trash and squirts a few pumps of anti-bacterial gel in her hands. “Press the button if you need anything. Your next pain meds are in about an hour so I’ll be back then, if not sooner.”

“Thanks.”

The nurse leaves the room and Mildred turns back to Boris. “It never ends around here, all day long, all night long, over and over, ‘what’s your pain level?’ and ‘want a mostly liquid food-like-product for a snack?’ and ‘roll over for another finger-in-the-ass exam.’ How do people ever get healthy here? No one lets you sleep.”

Boris listens. He learned how to handle Mildred’s rants a long time ago, but this feels different, like listening can’t really do anything, but it’s all he has prepared. That and spreadsheets and distractions. “Seems like you and that nurse are pretty good friends.

How long have you really been here? The real amount of time, not the amount you told

Hank to tell me.” 143

“You’re paranoid. Why would I lie?”

“Maybe you didn’t mean to lie. Maybe you’re just enjoying those pain meds a little too much?”

“Pain meds are only to be enjoyed recreationally. When I have to take them for pain, it takes all the fun out of it.”

They laugh again but then stillness sets into the room.

“How is the pain, honestly? More like a six?”

“Besides feeling like there’s a tiny person inside my abdomen stabbing me in the back and stomach over and over and over? It’s not that bad. I was on morphine at first—it didn’t help to stop much pain but, boy, did it distract me! I barely even remember. The pills don’t do much.”

She doesn’t directly answer this question either—that might mean more like a seven or eight.

“Well that sure sucks.” They sit in silence for a few minutes, watching RuPaul strut her stuff across the stage on the T.V. Boris wants to ask about Nick but doesn’t want to upset Mildred. He isn’t used to being so worried about her feelings, as if she’s sensitive, but he’ll need to ask eventually so may as well get it over with.

“Where’s albino dreadlock Rasta? At the awards ceremony for his platinum record? Hall-of-faming it with Queen Beyoncé?”

Mildred shoves him and laughs. “Shut up, Boris. It hurts to laugh.” She holds her side until she doesn’t have to fight the giggles anymore. “He was all right, just a hot fucking mess. One hot mess was what I thought I wanted. But he doesn’t fit into this world.” She motions around the hospital room. “He came when I was first moved from 144

Reno to UCSF but now I’m not even sure if he is still in town. He has some friends around here so he might be. Who knows? He can’t handle it, anyway. Hank’s ready to murder him in the kindest, most respectful, but deadliest way possible. We were pretty much done with each other anyway so whatever.”

They sit quietly listening to the beep beep beeps of machines.

“I guess I’m relieved I don’t have to meet him and pretend like I don’t want to punch him in the face, so that’s a thing.

Mildred laughs. “Boris, seriously. Punch someone in the face? Now I want Nick back so I can witness this first ever potential act of violence.”

“I think it’s better if he never comes back.”

Mildred nods and slips her hand into Boris’s. “Probably would have been better if

I’d never met him, right?” They watch RuPaul’s Drag Race for a while. Mildred breaks the silence. “Do you think I did this to myself?” She stares at the T.V. so Boris knows she really means this question. He tightens his grip on her hand and shrugs.

“I doubt it.” He’s been expecting this question and thinks of his massive, completely terrifying, Google search. He learned more about what might be wrong with

Mildred, possible treatments, and possible causes, than he ever wanted to know. He charted out the possibilities in his pocket notebook on the flight—rows and columns that calmed his nerves. This is how he handles these things, not by winging it, unprepared for devastating news. Something about the ruler-straight lines and cross-referenced symptoms helped him stay calm. “I mean probably not. Everybody does crazy shit. It’s not like you’ve been a crackhead for years. It’s just one little rough patch.” 145

Mildred purses her lips and nods but doesn’t look at him. “Not a crackhead, Boris.

A meth-head—there’s a difference.” They laugh again. It’s all that feels good in this sterile, uncomfortable place.

If Boris knows her as well as he thinks, she’s more interested about blaming herself than about finding out what is really wrong.

Mildred wipes tears off her face. “There was this boy, Boris. A boy with an upside-down triangle-shaped head and giant eyes and no words and I left him behind.”

“This is what you’re crying about? Not your own sick body but some random boy?” Boris thinks of his own little Greek homeless child and his stomach tightens.

“No, Boris, not ‘some random boy,’ a specific little boy, one who needs my help.

I had to leave him, don’t even know where he lives, just that his parents cook meth and he can’t speak.” She tells him the whole story. Boris doesn’t speak, just holds her hand and nods at the right times. They spend another long while, between speaking and nurse intrusions, holding hands and watching T.V. Boris has so many questions but Mildred is barely awake at this point and looks wrecked. He finally nudges her arm and her eyes widen, blinking away sleep.

“This totally sucks, Mildred, but I have to pick up Ana at the airport and get her settled. We’ll be back in the morning. What do you want me to bring?”

“I’ll text you if I think of anything.” Mildred squeezes Boris’s hand. “Can’t wait to see Ana again and hear all about you two slutting around Europe.”

Boris kisses Mildred’s forehead, collects his things, and heads for the door. He turns back to try for one more laugh but Mildred already has her headphones on. The nurse nods at him as she walks past with a small paper cup filled with meds. 146

At the elevator, Boris realizes that he left his notebook in Mildred’s room and turns to get it. He pushes the door of her room open while announcing his purpose for return but is cut off mid-sentence. Mildred’s face is buried in her nurse’s scrubs and her shoulders shake with sobs. Boris catches his breath—Ana will have to wait. He sits on the other side of the bed and pulls Mildred towards him. “Me, too,” he says.

Rosa stands up. “I’ll leave you two alone. She wouldn’t say it, but she really needs you.” She nods and leaves the room.

“Ahh! I just need to know what the fuck is going on,” Mildred says into Boris’s shirt.

So she is worried about herself after all. For one of the first times since they were kids, Boris has no answers for her.

Ana’s plane lands late so by the time Boris and Ana eat and get back to the apartment Hank rented near the hospital, it’s already ten. They stay up until after midnight catching up after those few weeks apart since they both went home to their parents.

When Boris and Ana arrive at the hospital campus the next morning, Mildred has already left for her procedure in the Hematology Center. Nurse Rosa calls over to check on Mildred’s appointment and tells Boris and Ana that Mildred shouldn’t be gone much longer—she’s waiting for transport.

“She’ll be able to have a solid meal when she returns. Maybe you guys can pick her up a few of her favorite snacks?” Rosa suggests. “She was really happy to see you yesterday, Boris. She needs good friends right now.” She looks at Ana in an assessment of sorts, and then pushes her cart on to the next room. 147

“Okay,” Ana says. “I guess we should do that. What will she want?”

“Um, let’s see…cigarettes, a chocolate milkshake, raspberry flavored vodka, and baked brie with baguette.” Boris touches a finger for each item he rattles off.

“I think that angry nurse is right—you guys are very close. You didn’t even have to think about that.” There’s a sharpness to her voice.

Boris is in no mood for this so he starts walking towards the elevator.

“Okay, so I’m thinking maybe the milkshake and baguette without making trouble?” Ana’s voice softens a little.

“Yeah, maybe. But brie baguettes are hardly a common food-stand item in the

States.” He doesn’t look at her. The attitude he usually loves grates his nerves here.

Maybe bringing Ana was a mistake. Boris always thought Ana was secure enough to handle his relationship with Mildred, but he’s been second guessing this since he found out about Mildred’s illness. He’s never admitted to anyone that he was in love with

Mildred once upon a time. He wouldn’t have even brought Ana here but it felt wrong to tell her to go on to New York without him while he flew to California with no specific plans for return. She didn’t have anywhere else to go or anything else to do but he’d hoped she would decide on an individual States adventure to fill her time while he went to Mildred. Instead, she surprised him by insisting on being supportive. Now, he’s learning what Ana means by “support.”

Ana grabs his hand. “I’ll get us Uber and we can go to a Whole Foods or something. Transport takes a long time at the hospital so we’re in no rush. Let’s get her what she wants.”

This feels more like it. 148

After trekking around to find everything on the list minus the cigarettes and vodka, Ana and Boris return to Mildred’s room. They can hear her from three rooms away.

“Oh my God, just give me food that’s edible, please!” Boris hears the louder- than-necessary, dramatic, but also sincerely exasperated voice he’s used to.

They enter the room and Mildred goes silent, Hank sitting by her bedside, and wipes some partially dried tears from her cheeks, and puts on a big smile. “Ana! Good to see you! Sorry you have to postpone your exciting new life in N-Y-C for my stupid health.”

Ana sets her grocery bag on the ground and goes straight to Mildred. She doesn’t seem squeamish around the tubes and beeps and attached machines. She tucks her arm right under the IV line and gives Mildred a big hug, avoiding the catheter tube coming out of her neck. Smooth. This is not her first time visiting someone she loves in the hospital— a story to ask about later.

“Oh, Mildred, of course I want to come here. Plus New York is boring without

Boris. Nothing to do but museums and theatres and national monuments and night clubs.”

Mildred laughs. They do share a sense of humor. Boris has always suspected that this commonality has the potential to either bring them together or tear them apart.

Hank extends his hand to Ana. “Mildred’s dad, Hank. A pleasure to meet you finally, Ana. Thanks for protecting Boris from getting kidnapped in Europe and sold for parts.”

Ana pulls Hank in for a full hug as well. “Sorry we missed you last night—my flight was late. But it’s wonderful to meet you now.” Boris wonders if this is truly how 149 she feels or if she is being careful to get in good with the people he refers to as his “real family.” It can’t all be fake but she might be laying it on a bit strong. Or maybe not.

Hank grabs Boris by the shoulder. “Walk with me to grab a coffee.”

“Good,” says Ana. “We can have girl talk.” She winks at Mildred and rummages around in her purse.

Hank walks Boris to the waiting room at the end of the hallway. What appears to be an extended family fills most of the small room: A woman wearing a baby in a sling is pacing, two young men are talking quietly by the doorway, two elderly woman sit elbow to elbow, one reading on her tablet and the other chewing on her fingernails. Two seats sit open by a window—Hank and Boris take them.

“She’s getting transfusions every day but nothing is working to get her blood count up. They think it’s more than just lupus. Doc says these autoimmune disorders like to travel in pairs. Plasmapheresis. It’s what the neck tube is for. They have to clean her blood so it doesn’t attack her organs.” Hank stops and presses the palms of his hands against his eyes.

“Jesus Christ. Her own body’s trying to kill her. They had to transfer here from

Renown in Reno because they couldn’t figure out what else to do for her.”

For the first time in a lifetime of knowing Hank, Boris doesn’t know how to respond. Hank’s eyes are dark, swollen, the creases around his eyes deeper, almost as if

Hank is aging right before Boris’s eyes. For once, instead of turning to Hank for comfort, he realizes that this rock in their lives is crumbling.

“I found her in that dump with that meth-head. She was greenish-gray, Boris. She couldn’t sit up or even speak, eyes rolling around like she was dying. I asked that idiot 150 what was happening and he mumbled something about thinking she had the flu. Kidney failure, she’s dying, and he’s trying to feed her chicken soup.” He pauses for a few moments. “At least that dipshit figured out to call me.”

Boris pictures Mildred surrounded by people who could let her die right there. His eyes well with tears he’s been holding back since Moscow. In this situation, he can only cry with Hank.

“They said if I had waited one more day she’d be dead. Dead in a meth house in the hood.” Hank’s openly crying now and Boris knows what to do for this man he realizes is his other best friend. He wraps his arms around Hank.

“It’ll be okay, Hank. We’re here now. We’re all together.”

“Thanks, son. Thanks for coming.”

When they go back into the room, Ana is lying back next to Mildred in the hospital bed and they are holding hands, each with a cardboard cup in the other hand.

“ Vashee zda-ró-vye,” Ana says.

A Russian toast to good health. Boris should have known Ana would sneak in a bit of vodka. Mildred has tears on her face and is laughing.

151

XV.

The first time Rosa sat at Mildred’s bedside after her shift ended at UCSF

Hospital was the same day Nick texted Mildred saying he would not be back to see her again and it was over between them. Rosa happened to be finishing up Mildred’s chart when the text came in and, despite herself, Mildred began to cry. She knew it was coming—he had only stopped by a few times even though he’d been staying in San

Francisco with friends, supposedly to be near Mildred. Her illness was more than he could handle, more than anyone could handle, but especially someone who could barely deal with his own life choices. Dreadlock Rock-n-Roll Ken Doll was what Boris had taken to calling him, a person who wants all of the fun accessories but none of the work.

The hospital was no Barbie Dreamhouse.

Mildred’s unexpected emotional release did not seem to take Rosa by surprise, though. She told Mildred she is used to this part for her patients. Many partners can’t deal with long-term illness. “True colors,” is what Rosa called it. She stayed with Mildred for more than an hour after she should have been home and eating dinner. Mildred wondered how Rosa ever left the hospital, if she invested this much in every patient.

The second time Rosa stayed afterhours was a two days later when Mildred’s father had to leave town for a few days. Mildred had pushed him to move forward with his life. “You can’t just sit around watching me feel a tiny bit better at time for the rest of your life. I’m getting there, Dad.” It had been almost a month since Mildred’s arrival to the hospital and the doctors assured her that things were improving, slowly, but still improving, and she was stabilizing. As soon as Mildred had timed how long it would take

Hank to leave the hospital and start driving, she broke down. Again, Rosa appeared, this 152 time with fresh turkey and Swiss sandwiches from the deli around the corner. “Is now a good time?” Rosa asked, as if it were perfectly normal that she brought dinner.

By the third time, Mildred knew for sure this was more than dedication to patients. Rosa was kind and thoughtful and said all the right things about Nick being awful, about lupus being awful, about missing Boris being awful. She gave just a little encouragement to Mildred’s emotions, even when they were irrational, even when she was cursing Nick for being a terrible human being, and then she would carefully steer

Mildred back to seeing the good in what seemed terrible. There was no specific reason for the third visit yet Mildred found herself talking about Beverly. She didn’t cry. She didn’t want Rosa to get the wrong idea–that she was the kind of girl who cried all the time.

When Rosa transferred from working on the ward to working in the infusion center, Mildred hoped it was so they could spend more time together, even though Rosa’s explanation was about better hours with holidays and weekends off. It had been three days since the transfer and Mildred tried to let herself hope, each time the door to her room opened after five in the evening, that it was Rosa.

Mildred had dated other women before, towards the end of high school. Well, dating was a strong word. Hooking up with was more like it. It was popular at her private arts school to “experiment,” as the adults liked to call it, with sexuality. She had kissed girls in dark corners of dances and in alleys next to warehouses during underground parties, but nothing much ever came of any of it. She’d never really wanted to date those girls but then she’d never really wanted to date anyone. She didn’t ever even date Boris, 153 the only supposed “long-term boyfriend” she’d ever had, according to old acquaintances from Hawthorne. She even questioned her feelings for Nick, if any of them were genuine.

Rosa was different. At first, Mildred was so sick that she didn’t care about anything but clearing her head, being near her dad and Boris, and making as many jokes as it took to crush down the fear. But now that she was feeling better, bit by bit, day by day, she found two sets of strong feelings bubbling to the surface on a regular basis. The first was an extraordinary sadness about her mother’s death, but she was nowhere near ready to let herself think about those final days so, instead, she would cry in the middle of the night in intense bursts of hidden grief. The other was Rosa—she couldn’t get Rosa out of her mind.

Mildred had been up and about, bathing, walking, and feeling like she was recovering from the flu and nothing much worse. There was talk of her discharge on the horizon, once all of her numbers were stable. The doctors said it was too soon to call it

“remission,” but her treatments seemed to be working, her numbers were stabilizing, and at this point, the doctors said that was the best they could hope for—to be released within the next few weeks and have a slew of out-patient treatments and appointments to stay carefully monitored. Mildred had a fleeting moment of regret that she might be released and not see Rosa again before she was gone.

That was why, when Rosa did show up with sandwiches and cold pasta salad at six o’clock on the fourth day after changing jobs, Mildred’s stomach turned into butterflies. She let herself feel the attraction that had been cooking inside her. It was okay because Rosa was definitely there just for her and for no other reason. 154

When Rosa sat down this time, she sat on the edge of the bed, not in the chair. “I missed you,” were the first words out of her mouth.

Boris isn’t surprised to hear that Mildred’s fallen for her nurse, Rosa. It’s so

Mildred to do the absolute most random, unexpected thing. Convince her best friend to have sex for the first time? No problem. Out of nowhere, after hating her missing mom for six years, decide to leave Hawthorne and go to school in her mom’s hood? Why not?

Seems reasonable. Hop on a plane from San Fran to Moscow? Not a big deal. Run off to

Reno and become a meth-head? Sure thing. Still, when Mildred breaks the news to Boris in her usual, dramatic, “big-reveal” kind of way, with Ana sitting right next to him, he hides his split-second reaction—Mildred’s in love for the first time, really in love, and it’s with someone else. Boris swallows his burst of flush from Ana, although Mildred probably notices but is kind enough to ignore it. It isn’t that Boris wants Mildred—he’s way beyond that, at this point. It’s the jealousy of knowing it wasn’t him. Jealousy isn’t even the right word. It feels unfair in its unbalance. Boris thinks about his comment to

Mildred, asking her how long she’d really been in the hospital, assuming the closeness

Mildred and Rosa shared as one built over time. But now, he realizes it’s just their chemistry, an immediate closeness. He understands. If Rosa were any less great, Boris might hold on to this feeling, allowing it to roll around in his head on nights when he can’t sleep and spends hours wallowing in all the things he can’t let go of. But because it is Rosa, their Rosa, the nurse who took such great care of Mildred when she was most vulnerable, he lets the feeling wash through him and move on. This is why Boris isn’t surprised at all. 155

XVI.

“It’s Nick. I’m pretty sure.” Mildred squeezes Rosa’s arm, pulling her back into the canned soup aisle. They stopped at a different Safeway than usual because it was on their way home from the movies and they were missing ingredients for dinner. One more reason to only go to their Safeway. Wandering the aisles searching for items is bad enough. Now Mildred has to run into the man she did meth with who then abandoned her at the hospital when she almost died? With each passing year, she thinks about that part of her life less and less often, but even thinking about Nick still makes her stomach turn.

Now here he is, in the next aisle of the grocery store, of all places, looking haggard. Still in the Bay Area all this time.

“Pretend we are looking for soup,” Rosa jokes.

“We are looking for soup.” Mildred laughs but her insides knot up. Nick. She counts back in her mind—two and a half years? The pain meds she took at the end of the movie are kicking in so the math is tricky.

Up until this moment, it wasn’t really Nick that bothered her but what he represented—the part of her life she’s least proud of, the time she almost didn’t make it.

Rosa knows all about the meth year, the so-called “friends” from back then, and how they almost let Mildred die. Mildred doesn’t blame them—when you’re always on, or at least carrying, illegal drugs, calling 9-1-1 is a threat in and of itself. She never thought Nick meant to let her die, just that he was too fucked up to help her. Nick is the one who called

Mildred’s dad.

But now that he’s around the corner, it is Nick that makes her feel uncomfortable.

He’s a person, again, standing within twenty feet of her. 156

Mildred’s told Rosa as many stories from this part of her life as Mildred can think of during their late nights sitting in the cool air of Rosa’s front porch, swinging in the hammock, high on edibles. Mildred takes handfuls of medications every day, which they now refer to as “pill salad,” that serve the purpose of holding stage three kidney failure at bay. The medication, the kidney disease, the combination—it’s difficult to tell what makes it difficult for Mildred to keep her appetite up, but she struggles to eat every day.

Rosa feeds her just enough edible THC to get her appetite going and then cooks

Mildred’s favorites from scratch: Homemade tamales and hot tortillas filled with scoops of chicken and rice and mounds of mild guacamole and Pico de Gallo. This also happens to be Rosa’s favorite—food Rosa’s mother made for her when she was a girl.

Mildred leans against the row of Campbell’s’ soup dispensers. Rosa peaks around the corner of the aisle to the cereal row and snaps a picture with her phone.

“Is this him?” She opens the picture and uses her fingers to zoom in on the face.

It’s him, minus a lot of his hair and at least a few front teeth. He holds the hand of a girl who can’t possibly be his—this child is at least five, maybe older. Or could he have had a secret child the entire time he was with Mildred? It’s his face for sure, but too many years older than it should be. Hers has prematurely aged too, the medications and kidney problems wreaking havoc on her once near-flawless skin. But she has an excuse, one that makes people uncomfortable, but is acceptable to say out loud. She suspects Nick can’t speak his reason too loudly, at least not in public.

“I want to meet him,” Rosa hooks arms with Mildred and starts pulling, gently but persistently, as is her way. “You have to introduce me. I deserve a voice to go with the stories I’ve heard.” 157

“No. It’s too awkward. I can’t handle it.”

“It’ll be weird right now but later you’ll be relieved. I promise. Trust me. This will be good for you. ”

Rosa has never steered Mildred wrong so Mildred allows herself to be tugged.

“Be normal,” Mildred says. They both burst out laughing to this. They are rarely called normal. “I mean, get the cart and act like we’re shopping.”

“We are shopping. Relax.” Rosa grabs the cart and they come around the corner, arm-in-arm, pushing the cart together. “We’re going to act like we’re just walking by and then see if you can catch his eye.”

Mildred wants to throw up a little but the thought of laughing about this later in the hammock helps her swallow down the bile rising in her throat. He’s not in the cereal aisle anymore so they move on to produce. There he is, staring at the bagged salads. As they pass the broccoli, she glances over at the salads and Nick is looking right at her.

“Oh, wow! Hey, Nick. What a surprise,” she says, doing her best to get her face to match the words coming out of her mouth.

“Yeah, wow! Hi, Mildred.” He stands there, as confused by social cues and behavior as ever. The little girl hides behind him.

There’s that awkward pause she knew was coming and then she concedes to fill it with a half, sideways hug. Nick reciprocates. Mildred starts to let go but can feel Nick’s grip tight on her shoulder. A thought occurs to her: while she almost didn’t make it, Nick actually didn’t make it. She swallows that hard lump in her throat that helps her stop the tears from coming.

“I’m glad to see you’re doing better,” he says. “I’ve been wondering.” 158

What Mildred wants to say is, Why didn’t you just call, like a decent human being, and stay in touch with your sick ex-girlfriend who you almost left for dead and then dumped? But she’s glad getting rid of him was that easy so it’s hard to stay mad.

Instead, she says, “Yes, much.” He doesn’t deserve any details or to know how much her health wavers. “You?” She glances down at the little girl.

“Oh, this is my friend’s daughter, Lexie.” Lexie doesn’t come out from behind

Nick. He glances at Rosa, who is leaning forward, ready to be pulled into the conversation.

“This is my girlfriend, Rosa,” Mildred says.

Rosa steps up, eye-to-eye with Nick, and shakes his hand with confidence. “Nice to meet you, Nick.”

“You look familiar. Have we met before?” Nick asks.

“Yes—once, at the hospital. I was Mildred’s nurse.”

His face shows that he wants to ask more questions and he takes a breath to speak, but Rosa just stares right into his eyes, like a challenge, and he exhales. Then he takes another big breath and seems to be choosing his words carefully. “Oh, that’s right.”

The rest is left unsaid. Everyone knows what happened, how he ghosted Mildred.

Mildred flushes with relief. This was the right thing to do. One more reason to love Rosa.

“What have you been up to?” Mildred asks. “Stayed in the Bay Area this whole time?

“Yeah, staying with some friends over in the Tenderloin, working here and there.”

His face reveals his story in broad strokes, creased with smoke and meth, his skin the wrong color, almost green but not quite, also not quite yellow—maybe a liver 159 malfunction in the works, possibly pancreas. Kidney failure would be a sad irony.

Mildred doesn’t feel any of the satisfaction she’s occasionally imagined feeling at seeing

Nick in this state. She hopes that this child really is just some friend’s and not a child who is living through this life with Nick. She sees a thin, meth-ed out girlfriend, thrusting her helpless child onto Nick so she can go hooking. She winces and wipes this thought from her mind. Maybe the girlfriend’s a social worker or a lawyer. Anyone can find themselves in this situation, after all. But it’s probably the worst.

“Okay, nice to see you. Take care.” Mildred can tell that Rosa wants more but

Mildred wants less. It’s time to walk away before she starts to feel trapped in “catching up.” Just this small interaction is going to takes days to process, processing she’ll do with

Rosa.

Rosa doesn’t press Mildred to talk about it. Mildred wants to, but where to even begin? How can she even sort out the complicated feelings churning inside her? A swirling mess of emotions fills her up.

Later, while rocking in the porch hammock, Mildred reaches up and grabs one of those complex feelings from the mess—guilt for leaving Nick behind. This one is fresh, she hasn’t felt it much before, but it’s easy to release into the air.

He put himself there and chose to stay, chose to leave her. She grasps another— guilt for leaving the little boy with the triangle face. This one fuses back into the tangle.

The boy needed her, but there was nothing she was capable of doing at that time.

The next slips from the jumble into her consciousness—Beverly. She deserves more of Mildred’s grief. It exists and it has to come out, sometime. This one Mildred more carefully tucks back into her mind. It needs its own time, just not this minute. 160

One more, this one whipping out and pricking her eyes with tears she struggles to hold back—her own body. How much of this did she do to herself? Nick’s body has become the outward image of the damage that lifestyle ravages on the body. While

Mildred’s outsides may not be so haggard from her year there, her insides probably are.

Or was it always the disease, lurking just off-stage?

She can never know.

Maybe the story she tells herself, that experimentation is normal, that it doesn’t destroy health so quickly, that she recovered in time, holds some truth. Sometimes she believes it and sometime she does not. This is the one she needs to tell Rosa first.

But Rosa doesn’t come out and Mildred falls asleep swaying in the breeze.

In the morning, Rosa comes out with a mug of hot coffee spiked with Mildred’s favorite cocoa mix. Mildred takes the mug, grateful, but also confused. Why didn’t she come? Mildred doesn’t look at her.

Rosa speaks first. “You know the story about my father dying when I was twelve?

What I never say is my earliest memories. Him sitting at the table, always with a drink, passing out, crusted lips, all of it. I blamed him. I was a kid—I didn’t understand how complicated addiction is. Or life

Mildred feels a kick in her gut. Maybe Rosa does blame Mildred for her own illness.

“He’d tell me how I ruined his life. Then hold me in his arms later and cry, begging me for forgiveness. Promising it wasn’t true or sometimes not even remembering saying it.” Rosa stops for a few minutes. “And then my mom would come home from her graveyard shift and fall asleep on the couch with me, never knowing why I cried, never 161 knowing all the things he would say to me. When he couldn’t hide how drunk he was anymore and started to get belligerent in front of her, she would shuffle me away, offering a walk to the store or a story. Like I couldn’t see him. She never admitted it, but

I’m pretty sure he drank himself to death.”

The knot in Mildred’s throat feels like choking, feels worse than the breathing tube she woke up with in the hospital. Rosa hates her, she is sure of it. Then, like one, strong, gust of wind to a deep cavity, it occurs to Mildred that Beverly did still blame

Mildred some for her leaving the family, even in the very end. Beverly never fully took responsibility, even in her attempt to reassure Mildred that it was Beverly and Beverly alone, who made that mistake. Mildred has to be okay with it, to know it wasn’t her fault, no matter what her mother might have felt. How could Beverly say it wasn’t Mildred’s fault while still implicating her? She didn’t even know she was doing it—thought she was taking responsibility and was still holding Mildred accountable. It’s not your fault,

Mildred. You were just a kid.

But instead of keeping her distance, Rosa pulls Mildred in close. “My point isn’t that I was right. I was wrong but I believed for a long time that it was all his fault, that he killed himself, that his disease was his own fault. It ate me up, kept me up all night, made me angry—it fueled my resentment. Sometimes, it made me physically sick. Once, during a psychology exam in my undergrad, a question made me think of my father and I got so upset that I had to leave class and never went back. I failed, obviously, and had to petition for financial aid the following semester to stay in college. This belief I held about blame was a sickness.”

Mildred doesn’t know what to feel. Rosa didn’t come out. 162

“You have to understand, all of these thoughts came back to me last night. I know you were out here struggling with your memories, but so was I. I just needed to sort out my own head. My father died and I also feel conflicted about it.”

Mildred never really considered this possibility. Rosa’s always calm, collected, and reasonable about the past. Her father died so long ago, Mildred never once thought

Rosa could be so upset about it—how selfish. Of course Rosa was torn up about her own father’s death. Everyone always is. Whether they were close or distant, loving or conflicted, losing a parent is the worst, even for Rosa. Especially for Rosa, who’s filled with such generosity and love. Mildred flushes with the heat of realizing Rosa doesn’t blame her. Understanding the breadth of the grief about Beverly that she’s been keeping at bay is too much to face alone.

Rosa climbs into the hammock and says nothing.

Mildred says, “I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.”

“For what?” asks Rosa.

“All of it,” she says. “Everything I should be sorry for. I’m not sure exactly what, so all of it. It all feels wrong.”

Rosa wraps her arms around Mildred and they sway.

163

XVII.

Boris and Ana’s tiny one-bedroom, one-bath apartment in Green Point, Brooklyn, is packed with books and books and clothes and books. In the two years they’ve lived in

New York City since spending those weeks in San Francisco while Mildred was in the hospital, they have arranged and rearranged and rearranged, fitting each piece of their material lives together into a tiny, comfortable, puzzle of a home. A year into their cohabitation, they decided to splurge on a couch that functions comfortably both as couch and pull-out bed in order to save space but also accommodate visiting family, the occasional night of separation over a fight, and when one stays out late and the other wants to go to sleep early. In cramped New York City-living, everything must have two jobs, “Like most Russian women,” Ana loves to joke, “to support husbands who are drinking vodka and writing poetry.” When they are alone, Boris no longer reminds her that most Americans don’t know this is a joke about stereotypes—they really believe

Russians are that way. Ana’s response was always, “Isn’t that a sad American problem?”

On this spring day, the sun breaks through the clouds after many days of rain. The streets sparkle a little, a slight-of-hand trick when the weather can’t decide if it’s gloomy or bright, in a way that makes them appear small-town clean. If it weren’t for the kabab shop across the street, Boris can almost imagine he’s home.

Ana lounges in the window seat, one bare foot pressed against the glass and the other flat on the cushion. She laughs and chats loudly in Russian with her mother. Boris makes out bits and pieces but the conversation moves from point to point so quickly that, as soon as he figures out the topic, it changes and he has to start all over again. Pointless.

He goes into the tiny bedroom that only fits their mattress in order to read in silence. 164

Ana’s voice drop low. They are talking about him, and Ana, once again, is defending her choices. She always falls back on her work at the Columbia University International

Studies Program, a plan her mother approves of wholeheartedly. On this day, Boris prefers not to try to fill in Ana’s mother’s part with his imagination. He does enjoy listening to his own strengths being discussed in Russian—it is like prepping for a job interview. On his application for good Russian boyfriend, he might list podderzhku, svoyego roda, and khorosho rabotayet s drugimi. Unfortunately, “supportive,” “kind,” and “works well with others” are more qualities that American jobs might look for, so what’s the point of knowing how to say them in Russian? Once he made the mistake of suggesting that Ana may also not be the beginning and end of deciding who is and isn’t

Russian.

“You aren’t Russia, Ana. You are just one small piece. Just like I’m not

America, or is that what I am to you?”

“And you are in no position to determine who is and isn’t ‘real’ Russian,

Boris.”

“Maybe not. But maybe neither are you.”

He received the gift of silent treatment the rest of that day and for weeks she didn’t call him “American” or tease him. The withholding of this kind of teasing as punishment was curious, but also, extremely effective. He was practically begging her to verbally assault him by the end of it.

It isn’t Ana’s mastery over so many languages that Boris resents, exactly, but something along those lines. It also isn’t that he doesn’t know what she is saying to other guys, although that is part of it, too, he supposes. It’s that he can’t always understand 165 what she says between the lines. In English, as she gets better and better, he hears what’s implied as much as what’s said. In Russian, he struggles so much to figure out the words she’s saying that, unless she repeats herself, he can’t translate what’s implied fast enough.

It doesn’t help that they mostly speak English. And why not? It is the one language in which they are both fluent.

When he listens to her talk to her family or to her peers at school, she’s poised and intelligent, and her beauty becomes secondary to her intellect. People respond with respect. They listen. There is a lot less giggling on her part. She’s taken seriously. When she speaks to him in Russian, she acts like his kindergarten teacher, the expert that he’ll never be. But then she gets so frustrated with repeating herself and explaining what she means that she quickly switches back to English, usually with a joke about “Americans.

Everybody better speak English, or too bad for them, right?” She even sometimes says,

“Why do even need Russian? Besides your father wants you to know your mother tongue. You are not even Russian. You are American. So why bother?” This comment stings coming from a woman who speaks seven languages and could speak at least a little of the language in every single country they visited while traveling through Europe.

Every. Single. Language. While she chatted with strangers in various languages, Boris stood awkwardly by, picking up bits and pieces, wondering if the looks he was getting from could be translated to, Why does she pick this guy? What makes him so special?

“Boris, hello? Are you in there?” Ana leans into his face, pressing her nose against his, eyes wide and bright. He was so deep in thought that he didn’t even notice her come into the room. Today, Ana’s eyes are the color of the sagebrush he and Mildred used to burn in the fire pit when Hawthorne was their home. 166

“What are your thinking about, Boris? Worried my mother has finally convinced me to rethink life choices?” She laughs but hugs him tight. “I never would.”

They sit quietly for a few minutes. He is really lucky. It’s been on his mind since finding out Mildred’s back in the hospital. While he appreciates a few minutes of self- deprecating doubt, he immediately feels guilty that he gets this: a wonderful girlfriend, a school he mostly enjoys, and a future career that, so-far, feels right. And Mildred gets doctor appointments, trips to the hospital, and handfuls of medications. At least she has

Rosa. Boris hopes she knows that she still has him, too. It’s difficult to fully express that from across the continent. Of course, she knows. How could she not?

Mildred swears this current hospital visit is no big deal and Hank verifies that he has no secret information he’s not supposed to share, but Boris doesn’t trust Mildred to correctly judge it or to be fully honest with him about the situation. She’s back just for observation—she swears. “They need to sort out some meds. That’s all.” Rosa walks a tricky line of revealing the secrets when it’s really necessary but mostly needing to respect Mildred’s privacy and wishes in order to keep the peace. Rosa tries to explain to

Boris the importance of allowing Mildred to be in charge of her own life and not have the freedom taken away by everyone always trying to figure things out for her. Many patients’ families, with the best of intentions, end up making the patient feel helpless.

Boris has a beautiful woman in his lap and Mildred sits in the hospital. Waves of guilt set back in.

“Okay, Boris, just call her already. We will FaceTime her now so you can enjoy this day. I want to practice my Spanish.”

Another conversation I won’t understand. 167

Boris checks his email while Ana and Mildred chat loudly in Spanish, laughing, correcting each other, stumbling over words. Ana decided to freshen up her Spanish because Mildred is learning it too—to use her as a cohort. This is what Ana had originally promised to Boris, only she’s doing it with Mildred. He knows it’s not really the same—Ana and Mildred are learning at the same time, practicing together, and Ana would be teaching Boris, not just trying to chat with him. He still can’t control how frustrating he finds it. Ana told him, “This will make Mildred and I good friends, give us something to talk about. She can feel she has upper hand with me, is my teacher. It will be easier for her to accept me.” At the time, Boris loved that this is Ana’s version of being supportive. She will learn more of a language just to be close with the people he considers family—what an amazing woman. Why does he feel more and more bitter, as his Russian withers away and Ana strengthens another language in her repertoire?

When Boris gets his turn with Mildred, Ana goes for a walk—her way of making it more than obvious she’s not threatened. He has fleeting moment of wonder. Does her blatant lack of protest seems like its own sort of protest? It passes quickly. She’s being herself.

“Hola, mi amigo. Como esta?” Mildred grins from a hospital bed. He knows she’s poking fun at him. She always knows. “If you are wondering if I’m purposely teasing you about Ana and my new bond over Spanish, you know I am.” She looks thinner since a few days ago and there is a new PIC line coming out of her neck. Boris purposefully doesn’t mention it. She can have a normal conversation this time—not one overrun with medical questions and borderline panic on his part.

“Why are you two so good at this?” He flips Mildred off. “You suck.” 168

“Um, excuse you, Boris. You saw me struggle in high school. My basic, elementary version of Spanish has taken two years of middle school classes, four years of high school classes, and I’m in an online college class right now. I also live with my private tutor. So, don’t even lump me with Ana. ‘Oh, Mildred, it is so much like Italian.’”

Mildred’s perfected Ana’s accent. “Yeah, awesome. Maybe in ten years when I master

Spanish, I’ll spend another fifteen learning Italian.”

Boris laughs. They’re back on the same team.

“If it bothers you so much, learn Spanish with us.”

“No way. I’ve already tried to learn a language with her. She just gets irritated with me and then switches back to English. With you, she thinks it’s so cute when you misplace your modifiers or confuse tenses. With me, it gets eye rolls.”

“Then I’ll learn Russian with you. Next, though, after I master Spanish, of course, and the ridiculous language required for this stupid illness—medical-ese.”

“Since you brought it up, what’s the deal with that tube coming out of your neck?”

“Oh, no big deal. It’s more plasmapheresis.”

“See? You’re good at learning new words.” Boris vaguely remembers this word from the original hospital stay but there were so many words he didn’t understand then that he can no longer place what it is. He’ll look it up later when she can’t see him. This time is her turn to just chat. She doesn’t always need someone charting on her. He knows all these things but he can’t help himself. “I thought you were done with that.”

“Me, too.” 169

Mildred doesn’t offer more information and Boris doesn’t ask. He’s determined to give her the break she deserves. He’ll call Rosa during work hours if he can’t figure out on Google.

Boris feels freshly frustrated all over again about Ana and learning Russian. He decides to bring it up again. It’s better than brooding. She always figures out something’s wrong and then he’s automatically in trouble for not telling her of his own accord. He’s not much of liar. He waits until they are nestled into their couch eating Chinese take-out.

When he flips through every television channel and can’t find a thing to watch, it feels like a sign.

“Why don’t you speak Russian with me anymore?”

“This again?” She sighs with frustration but doesn’t untangle her legs from his.

She takes a giant bite of Szechuan chicken, chews, swallows, gulps down some water, and then finally answers him. “I just feel weird correcting you, like your teacher, when

I’m your girlfriend. Is weird, yes? Like having sex with your professor.” She laughs her icy Russian laugh that tends to freeze conversations. Not this time.

Boris cringes, thinking of his initial fears about Ana and his father. He will not go there. He’s never told her those fears. “So it’s cool to speak Spanish with Mildred but not

Russian with me?”

Her sly, sideways signature grin falls flat. “Fine. We have this conversation. Yes, we are learning together. It helps her like me and we have little to say to each other, otherwise. I do it for us, you and me, so Mildred can be friend to both of us. Why you can’t understand this? I never think American men are so stubborn—maybe you are at least part Russian after all.” 170

The teasing that always changes the subject. Boris resists it by taking his own too- large bite of noodles, leaving some hanging out of his mouth on purpose. Ana laughs.

“Fine, Boris, vy mozhete imet' svoy put'.”

Boris slows down each word in his head, blocking out the implications in her tone. Is she frustrated? Maybe, but that is between her lines. Teasing? No. Conceding, finally? Leave it to Ana to give him his way but make him work sp hard to figure it out.

“Spasibo, moya lyubov,” he says.

“I love you, too,” she answers, with an eye roll but a smile. “We can do this together. I will make you Russian after all.”

“Good luck with that. If you can make me Russian, my dad will love you forever. Did I ever tell you why he picked the name Boris?”

“I assume because your father wants you to be Russian boy, no?”

“Sort of, I guess. He told me once that he wanted me to be born in Moscow but my mom wouldn’t agree to it so he planned a ‘work trip.’ He convinced her to join him, claiming there was plenty of time before I was due, even though he secretly planned on just not coming back to the United States until after I was born. But then I went ahead and came six weeks early, a week before they were supposed to head to Moscow, and fucked his plan all up. He says the whole world gets Americanized. He wanted to make sure I also had his home country in me before Hawthorne made me an American cowboy.

Fat chance of that, right? And I can’t learn his language or ride a bull.”

Ana elbows him, nods, and swallows her bite.

“When I was a girl, even though this was some years after fall of USSR, we still struggled to get food. My mother would push me into the crowd, as her mother did to her, 171 to retrieve a head of cabbage or a bag of potatoes, only people were no longer so kind to let a little girl push through the crowd to pick first. They were tired of this trick from over seventy years of spreading themselves too thin. Sometimes I come back with nothing but bruises on my face from accidental elbows. She say to me, ‘Ana, what happened? Where is our cabbage?’ I always felt badly, like I could have tried harder. Ten years later, she was saying, ‘Now there is an abundance of food. But how can people pay for it?’ We went from everybody having same access to very little food to lots of food but no money to buy it. I still feel like I should have gotten her that cabbage. I don’t even like cabbage.”

“I can see why. Why was it your responsibility to feed your family? You were just a little girl.”

“That’s right, but I feel it. And why is it your responsibility to be this Russian boy your father wants? If he wants Russian boy, he should go make a baby with Russian.

It’s his own fault, not yours. There is word for deep existential pain—a Russian word with no true English translation. I guess Russians think they have deeper pain than other people. The word is toska. We feel the weight of the suffering our parents have placed on our shoulders. It is not small, this weight of history, the weight of what the parents want but cannot have. It becomes what we don’t want but still do want but cannot have.”

“Toska.” Boris feels the weight of this word in his mouth. “Toska.”

“Lay down.” Ana pushes him back on the couch, then pulls him back up. “No, lay on the floor.” Boris gets down on the narrow stretch between the coffee table and television stand. Ana straddles him and sits on his stomach, pressing the palms of her hands down on the center of his chest. “Take a deep breath and then let it out as slowly as you can.” Boris breathes in, and as he breathes out, she firmly presses down. When he is 172 done, she keeps the pressure on. “Now try to breathe in.” Boris tries to fill his lungs but the pressure of her hands feels so much more powerful than his chest that he can only get a small gasp of air in. That small gasp burns. He tries to breathe into his stomach but can’t because of the weight of her body sitting there so he starts taking small, quick breaths that feel like hyperventilating. “Now think about a moment you really felt his disappointment.” Boris remembers a day in Moscow when he was in high school. His father asked him to come speak to his class at the university. Boris’s father wanted Boris to talk about what it was like to be an American immersed in a Russian school. When a student asked a question in Russian and Boris couldn’t find the right words to answer, he saw the look on his father’s face, as if he were failing the big test on being Russian enough.

“This feeling is toska. Say it now.”

“Toska,” Boris feels the vibration of the word in his ribs, pushing back against the pressure of Ana’s body, and at the same time he feels the pinch in his heart and in his brain.

“Now a word that is only Russian belongs to you.”

“Learning Russian is painful.”

“You just wait, Boris. Tomorrow, we learn ‘the cat pooped in my mouth.’ To learn this one, we need to drink heavily. Then you can feel ‘soosh-nyak.”

173

XVIII. Mildred recognizes the back pain almost immediately, this time. It’s familiar searing that begins in one spot just off center of her spine and radiates out through her lower back and hips. Kidneys love to be sneaky and pretend their pain is caused by something else, perhaps a slipped disk or a pulled muscle. Rosa is also there this time, recognizing the symptoms. It doesn’t take either of them much time to figure out something’s wrong with Mildred’s body. That first bout of lupus knocked Mildred’s kidneys into stage three failure but, since then, she’s maintained functional health. She isn’t out running marathons or even working a regular job, and the pill salad has remained hearty, but most of the maintenance is managing the side effects of the medications that regulate her kidneys and blood, not with the actual disease, which her doctors have referred to as “in remission” for over a year now. But that declaration came with a clear warning—the next time this happens, Mildred must seek medical help swiftly. Period.

And Mildred does.

She begs Rosa to tell no one what is going on until they have answers as she dreads the constant slew of texts asking for updates, plans, and mental and physical status. She doesn’t want to answer those until she knows what to say. One message to her kidney specialist with a quick referral to the ER leaves Mildred and Rosa sitting in the waiting room for hours upon hours as more “severe” emergencies slide by them, one after the other.

“Mildred Stanton,” a nurse says from behind a plastic clipboard. 174

Mildred and Rosa stand up together.

“Want me to come or wait here?” Rosa asks.

“Why don’t you go get something to eat and I’ll text you when I’m settled since.

We both know they’re checking me in. No need for you to starve while we wait.”

Mildred needs to be alone for this. She can already barely hold her tears back and she needs just a little bit of privacy while she waits for the terrible news.

“Okay. Want something?”

Mildred shakes her head. It’s been days since she wanted to eat, longer than she’s let on to Rosa, and the food she can eat is coming out in whole pieces on the other end, mostly undigested. It can’t be good but she doesn’t want Rosa to freak out prematurely.

There have been so many scares over the past couple of years, panics that turn into nothings. This time she wants to be sure before sounding any alarms. Besides, she feels as if she deserves to own just one small piece of privacy again before she loses it all.

“I can’t even tell Boris?”

Mildred shakes her head. “Especially not Boris.”

“Hank?”

Again, Mildred shakes her head. “Please, I just need some answers, first.”

“Okay.” Rosa kisses Mildred’s cheek, squeezes her shoulder, and watches as

Mildred walks through the doors to her room to wait.

175

XIX.

As Boris stands just past security at John F. Kennedy International Airport waiting for his parents to arrive for an unexpected visit, he’s both excited to see their faces and anxious of the usual evaluation Leonid puts him through. Boris hates dreading the arrival of his father but he’s used to it by now. He mostly enjoys it after the initial greetings, but it always begins with the interrogation and evaluation of how Boris is developing as a Russian. Too Russian? Fake Russian? Not Russian enough? Usually determined by Leonid to be the latter.

Boris resists this judgement with small gestures, calling his father Leonid instead of Papa or the preferred Papachka. His father notices and grimaces but seems to respect the resistance more now that they aren’t all living together. Boris still refers to his mother as Mama. It would break her heart if he didn’t call her that, and she doesn’t judge him in the same ways—just wants her boy. His father needs to slowly begin to respect that Boris is who he is. This comes from a substantial amount of prodding on the part of Ana, who claims to be sick of Boris’s stress over the situation.

“You just aren’t Russian. Nothing short of moving there for twenty years will make you more Russian. And I am staying here in New York, so you’ll be on your own.

I’m tired of Russian.”

Boris’s first glimpse of Leonid coming down the tarmac reveals a larger bald patch in the circle on his crown coupled with an obvious attempt to comb the remaining hairs over. He doesn’t seem to be trying to hide the baldness, just make it gentler. This softens Boris’s resolve. Who cares if his father evaluates Boris’s success as a Russian? 176

What does it matter, anyway? Perhaps it’s easier and more loving to just stop caring so much and wait for it to be over.

His mother’s arm links tightly to his father’s, as if gravity has less of an impact on her in New York City than in Moscow. Were she to let go, a magnet would pull her over the ocean and back to the home away from home she tired of before even moving there.

Boris knows in this one glance that she isn’t going back to Moscow after this visit. The question is, is Leonid?

After a group hug in which his father begins a visual evaluation and his mother clings to him with a tightness that suggests there is dramatic news, Boris rushes with unexpected relief at having his parents within his physical reach. It’s nice to be in the same space again.

“Where is Ana?” Leonid scans the space around Boris.

“She working on a project in the library,” Boris lies. He’s buying a little time alone with his parents before his father starts speaking to Ana in Russian and Boris can’t follow fast enough to stay in the conversation. Ana’s idea, of course.

“If you ever want to break down the wall between you two, you must spend uninterrupted time with him.” Ana also planned to take Boris’s mother a wine tasting one evening so that Boris and his father would be alone. “I don’t care what you do with the time—I’m not planning that. You’re on your own. Just know it exists.” This felt like part kindness and pure honest concern, well mostly those two intentions, and then a smaller part “selfishness,” Ana’s word, “at being exhausted by the brief but intense rollercoaster of self-doubt you ride after every phone conversation with Leonid.” 177

“Ah, well, I’m sure we’ll catch up at dinner, then,” Leonid tries to hide his disappointment at not getting to see Ana yet and Boris appreciates the effort. At least he’s trying. “Tell me about your final project. Any interesting developments?”

Again, Boris is grateful for his father’s effort and pretends not to notice the harsh glance from his mother that stifles the usual follow-up comment about how unfortunate it is that Boris did not pursue international relations, Russian studies, or a possible career that might lead Boris to the former Eastern Bloc. Not a word this time. Also, not a word in Russian.

Boris’s mother doesn’t let go of his arm, reinforcing his instinct that something is changing, and he feels himself sincerely wanting to prolong this final calm before whatever storm approaches. It’s a peace in his family that he doesn’t remember happening very often in his life.

“I’m working towards my thesis practicum credits, mostly doing outreach directly to homeless teenagers, some are pregnant teens, some refugee teens who have parents out of the country. I’m working under my professor, for now. I haven’t yet taken any clients on my own, yet, but starting in the spring, it’ll switch into an internship and I’ll have my own small client load.”

“Hmm. And what is it that you will do with these pregnant teens? Some sort of counseling help?”

Boris resists sighing and rolling his eyes. It has to be okay that Leonid will never really understand what Boris does or why.

“Something like that. We help people find the different resources they need—it’s called ‘coordinating services.’ I spend a lot of time learning about kinds of support 178 services, like how they can get shelter, how they can get clothes and diapers, things like that.”

Leonid’s silence borders on the sort of partial approval that Boris has learned to appreciate.

“How about lunch, son? I could use a kind of food I’ve never had before. Maybe

Ethiopian? You once mentioned a café near your house.”

Ethiopian food? This news is going to be even worse than Boris suspects.

“Sure thing, Papa.” He gives this father this small kindness in exchange for

Leonid trying so hard this time. “Should we drop off the bags first?”

With a parent at each arm, the cart filled with bags in front of him, and a rush of people shooting in every direction, trying to navigate the airport maze, standing lost and confused, studying the flipping names of foreign places on the board, it is impossible not to notice that Boris’s mother’s pile of luggage towers over his father’s, the imbalance pulling the cart to the left. At least the thrill of eating spicy foods with their fingers will soften this blow.

After they drop the luggage off to the tiny space in the apartment that Ana has designated and cleared out for his parents to stay, they walk the few blocks to the restaurant.

“Order for us?” Leonid asks.

Boris pretends not to be surprised by this extraordinarily irregular request. The three seem to have entered a silent contract to pretend that things are as normal as possible in order to fully enjoy the moments leading up to this split. 179

Boris orders a few different items to share family-style, a thing they don’t even do as a family while at Chinese restaurants: Plenty of injera to move the food from the trays into their mouths and cushion the olfactory oddness, atkilt wot, some shiro, azifa. Boris puts together a bayenetu plate, just to test his father, to see if he will notice that the entire meal is vegan. If he doesn’t mention it, it either indicates things are so serious that Leonid didn’t even notice, or that Leonid is working really hard to be agreeable in order to help

Boris handle the news.

As they lick their fingers clean, Boris decides the charade must end, as fun as it’s been to be together as a family, pretending nothing will ever change. “So what’s up guys?

Where is Mom going, if not back to Moscow?”

There is a briefer than expected moment of silence.

“San Diego. There is a spiritual training program I’ve applied to and I’m waiting to hear about financial support through the program. They like some of my spiritual writings and have published a few in their newsletter. They reached out to me. It may be what I’m meant to do.”

Both parents stare at Boris.

“You mean become a nun?”

“It’s more what your father might call ‘new age spirituality.’ It’s an intensive one- year program and there are spiritual centers all over the world that counsel in spiritual growth and transformation.”

“Like a guru?” Boris thinks to altars, secret ceremonies, and the constant smell of burning sage from his youth. His mother never pressed it on him or explained much to him, but he occasionally opened a book in her stack from the used bookstore. He 180 remembers that partial year she mentioned once that she’d spent starting her religious studies before meeting his father. It’s been a while since he thought of this part of his mother at all, the part he and Mildred always found secretive and therefore fascinating.

Why had he never really asked his mother more about it?

“There is a six month post-course pilgrimage in the Nepalese hills with a bodhisattva. I will apply for my own kind of internship.”

Boris looks at Leonid, waiting for a word, a look, something to interpret into a position on this topic. Nothing. Boris and Leonid used to tease behind his mother’s back that there wasn’t a church in all of western Russia that they hadn’t been dragged to, no religious relic unseen by their eyes.

“Where are you going?” Boris addresses Leonid.

“After our week here, I will travel to San Diego to help your mother get settled and then back to Moscow and to teaching.”

It was obviously already settled, long before they arrived to New York to break the news to their son.

“Then I guess all there is to do is have a great week together,” Boris isn’t ready to give his own perspective on this situation yet—he doesn’t want to add his thoughts out loud until he’s sure what they are. He decides to smile and act as if this is perfectly normal and expected, even though he’s unnerved by how surprised he is. His mother deserves his support, whether it’s real yet, or not. He’s happy to realize that his mother maintained her secret life all this while. For how long? Thinking back, he decides all that’s shocking is that she’s willing to stand up for herself in this way. Good for her. Now that the secret is out, his mother is beaming with excitement. His father seems 181 begrudgingly supportive, perhaps a bit distressed, but he’s holding it in. And Boris has never seen his mother look so happy. 182

XX. Sitting in her art room alone, holding her phone in her hand, Mildred calls Boris.

She doesn’t want him to see her face so she doesn’t FaceTime, as they normally do. She just wants, no, needs, to hear his voice. She plans for a light conversation where she doesn’t say anything that’s on her mind, hears Boris talk about his normal, hopefully boring, life, and then makes up an excuse to get off the phone quickly when the discussion turns to how she’s doing. She needs a little normal in her life right now. This time, she was discharged from the hospital before anyone even knew she was in. But this time, her trip home is temporary. She isn’t ready to tell Boris about that, yet.

Rosa’s pretending to prepare breakfast—Mildred can hear pots shuffling around.

But really, Rosa is giving her privacy to break the news to Boris, news she doesn’t plan to break and also doesn’t plan to think about for at least a few more days.

“Mildred! What’s wrong? Why don’t you want me to see your face?” Boris’s voice sounds teasing but the question is real. “Have you been hideously disfigured? Are you wearing half a mask and lurking in some attic?”

Mildred laughs—this is why she needs her some Boris. The less he knows about what’s going on in her head and her body, the more she’ll get of the jokes and teasing, the better she’ll feel. She’s exhausted of always being the sob story. What does Mildred need? How can we help her? Who’s going to set up the visiting schedule for the hospital?

Who’s going to spend the night? She feels like a downer, as if she can’t go anywhere without the conversation revolving around her, her stupid kidneys, her emotional state, and what doctor appointments she has scheduled. Then she has to feel awkward as people tiptoe around the big life questions. She wants to make a shirt that reads: No, I can’t have 183 children. No, I can’t have a career. No, I can’t be normal, so don’t ask. She doesn’t care about having children or a career—she sometimes feels lucky enough to have gotten sick at a time in her life when she didn’t care about any of that yet. She never expected to be a professional artist and art is something she turns to in her free time, especially when she's down. She works on training her thoughts to believe she never would have wanted children or a real job. The only thing she wants to talk about in her own life is her Rosa, her painting, and her Boris. But even Rosa can’t help her now. She sees how frustrated

Rosa is—there is no right thing to say, no way to fix it, and no secrets. Mildred needs it to be light and Rosa can’t do that—she knows too much about the medical side of things.

Only Boris can help her out of this funk.

“My stupid screen is cracked and I can’t bear to stare at only half a Boris.” Thank

God Boris can’t see her face now—she’s a terrible liar.

“Huh.”

It’s obvious that he’s deciding whether to call her on it or let this one slide.

“Okay. What’s up with Mildred?”

“More like, what’s up with Boris? How are Leonid and Gertie?”

“I’ll have to check with Mrs. Orlov to clear this usage of her first name.”

“Okay, Leonid and Mrs. Orlov. How was the visit?” This banter calms Mildred’s stomach more than any medicine created in a lab. She loves Boris’s mother for loving

Boris and for taking her in while she ran away to Moscow. When Mildred discovered grownups have first names, she asked Boris’s mother what her first name was. Boris’s mother replied, “Mrs.” She may always be Mrs. but there’s something a little more caring between them ever since Moscow. 184

“Actually, she seems happy. Weird, right? I mean, great, but so unlike her. You can start practicing calling her Sister Orlov because she decided to leave her failed home- making business behind and study to be a spiritual leader.”

“What?” Mildred gets exactly what she’s looking for—she can’t stop laughing.

“Is there acceptance and forgiveness involved? And do they have advanced and graduate courses for people who require extra training in those areas?”

Boris laughs as well but also gets a little defensive. “She’s not all that bad. It was always just you, the main threat to her sweet, innocent, perfect son. Why give up her entire career and life to raise a perfect child just to have a demon-seed come along and work relentlessly to ruin him? Anyway, she even asked about you, so she might be softening up.”

“True. Plus she had to deal with Leonid all of these years. Who could ever tell what was worse—having him around as a husband or being a single parent and not having him around? You know I only tease her. I know things were hard for her. So are they divorcing? What’s Leonid’s take on all this?”

“They are not divorcing and he is offering his full support.”

“Who are these people?”

“After they broke the news to me, in private, my mom confided that she finally caught him red-handed with his hand in the cookie jar. And by cookie jar, I mean the pants of a fresh young Russian graduate student. I didn’t ask for the details, but, from what she described, based on how they both had to turn their heads to see my mom standing there, he had her bent right over his desk.” 185

“Oh, Leonid. Why am I not surprised?” Mildred feels a moment of guilt at being relieved that other people have drama in their lives and it doesn’t always have to be about her fucked up situation. “And she’s not divorcing him?”

“Later, when my dad and I were alone at the bar participating in Ana-enforced bonding rituals, he told me she basically threatened him that he either support her life choices or she divorce him and spread the word around campus that he ‘diddles’ his students.”

“Good for her!” Mildred smiles at the thought of Gertie finally standing up for herself. “Please tell me that you just used finger-quotes when you said the word diddled.”

“Of course I did.” They don’t tease about what Beverly would say, anymore. Not since she died. “One of those required ‘supports’ is marriage counseling and their therapist is encouraging them to work out their frustrations with each other in many different ways, not just talking. Apparently, this shift in power has spiced up their marriage because Ana and I got home early the other day and almost walked in on them

‘working out their frustrations.’ Luckily, they were really loud and we figured it out in time.”

“That’s super gross.” Mildred has a flash of naked Gertie and naked Leonid trying to figure out how sex works again after all these years and winces, but also can’t resist laughing. “I will never get this image out of my head, dude. Why?”

“Because it’s trapped in my head, that’s why.”

“Now you know why she was tortured all those years imagining that we might be trying to have sex in the closet. This is what we get!”

“Well, trying and also succeeding, right?” 186

“Succeeding as much as is possible for sixteen year olds, I guess.” It’s been a long time since they rehashed their teenage sexcapades.

“It was alright, wasn’t it? Maybe even pretty good?”

“I’ll give you ‘pretty good.’ I’ll even give you way better than the other boys.”

“Thanks—you’re so generous.”

Mildred can hear a tiny but real hurt feeling in there.

“You’ll always be best of the guys, so that counts. And you weren’t the one who turned me to the other side.” Mildred laughs.

“All right, I’ll take it. That really does count.”

Mildred takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, covering the mouthpiece so

Boris can’t hear. There aren’t words for how much she loves and appreciates Boris. That they can even have this conversation puts their friendship above any others she’s ever even heard people talk about.

“So now that we’ve critiqued both my parents’ and my own teenage sex-abilities, why don’t you tell me what’s really going on with you?”

This whole time he’s known and has been playing her. Well, really, giving her exactly what she wants and needs but not letting her off the hook.

“Rosa called?” Mildred asks.

“She texted me last night. Said I needed to call you first thing today but you beat me to it.”

“Why didn’t you just say so?”

“When you made up that tired lie about your screen, I figured you needed to hear about my parents’ sex life to put your own problems into perspective.” 187

“Well played, sir.”

“So what is going on with Mildred?” Boris’s tone shifts from silly and mocking to serious in how the word Mildred soothes off his tongue.

This is exactly what Mildred wanted to avoid, and yet, here she is and there is no escape. He already knows a least a little of what’s up. “What else did Rosa say?”

“I’m not saying so just give it up. Why did I need to call you first thing this morning and why did you beat me to it?”

There is a long pause, a stand-off of sorts, in which Mildred refuses to speak, hoping Boris will keep talking. When he also refuses to speak and a good few minutes pass in silence, Mildred knows Boris is taking this seriously. He will not speak until she answers his question.

“I’m just tired of talking about myself and about my stupid life-threatening problems. No one knows what to say. I’m a total downer. People who love me usually cry while I’m talking. Nobody cracks any jokes about lupus. It’s like off-limits or some shit. Whoever decided that liver jokes were cool but kidneys were off limits? When I joke about dying, everyone gets all weird. How am supposed to fucking cope with this shit when everyone is so goddamn serious about it all of the time?” Finally saying it out loud feels heavier at first. Mildred begins to sob into the back of her hand. She puts Boris on speaker phone. “When people joke and laugh, you know they aren’t over it. You know there’s space left to connect with you. But when it is all serious faces and knowing nods and hands on the shoulder, you realize that you’ve exhausted them. Your fucked-up health is exhausting for others. They’re already grieving the loss of you and soon they’ll tire of it and move on. Why wait for me to actually drop dead? I’m a burden, Boris. A lot 188 of Rosa’s supposed friends are distancing themselves from us. She isn’t invited to gatherings as often. No one wants to come over. It’s fucking depressing and I’m taking her down with me.”

Boris doesn’t say anything. Mildred can imagine his face right now, thoughtful, sad for her, defensive of her worth in the world, angry at Rosa’s friends. He is making all the right faces right now, oozing empathy and kindness and love.

“I’m tired and I want to give up. I’m sick of feeling like a burden, I’m sick of feeling sick, and I’m sick of having no future that I can fathom. I want to be done.”

Boris says nothing and Mildred cries.

“Boris? Are you there?” It’s hard to hear any of his noises over her own sniffles and coughs.

“Sorry, I’m listening but I’m also busy booking a flight out west to see you.

Leonid feels guilty about being a homewrecker so before he left he gave me his credit card to ‘help with my studies.’ How can I study if you’re feeling this shitty? It seems a reasonable use of the money. And as for your ‘I want to be done’ crap, I’m going to sound like an asshole, but you need to hear this: When you’ve fought with every ounce of your body and soul and you are sincerely done with this world and ready to move on, I will be devastated but I will respect your choice. But this whole, ‘I’m a burden, I’m taking Rosa down with me’ shit is no fucking reason to give up. You’ve been through some shit—you’ve trained for this and you know how to get through it. Yes, it sucks, probably more than anything you’ve ever been through. Yes, it’s hard and sometimes you’ll want to give up, but it’s way too soon for this kind of talk. So get your shit together, do the things you need to do to get your head straight, and quit feeling sorry for 189 other people. If Rosa didn’t want to be there, she wouldn’t be. If I didn’t want to be there,

I wouldn’t have just spent $350 of my father’s money on a red-eye flight to come and see you. Don’t assume what other people think or feel and just focus on getting through this.”

Mildred can’t even speak. Rosa peaks her head around the door of the room to check on Mildred’s loud sobs, sees she is still on the phone, and mouths the words did you tell him? Mildred shakes her head. She can’t tell him. He can’t understand. He’ll never understand. No one can. But at least he’s coming.

As if Boris can see them through an imaginary broken cell phone screen, he says,

“I already know you need a kidney, so you don’t have to try to figure out how to tell me.

I called the transplant clinic at UCSF and have an appointment to be checked out—I could be a match. I’ll get the bloodwork and some other screening done here this week and bring it with me. I’ll be there in ten days.”

Mildred’s desperation turns to fury. “Absolutely not.” She glares at Rosa, still in the doorway, and mouths back to her you already told him? Then uncovers the phone and returns to Boris. “I won’t allow it. You can’t give me your kidney. Period. I’m putting my foot down.” She’s yelling now. Rosa disappears but this is for her too.

“As if it’s up to you,” Boris says. “Besides, it’s not like I just pulled a kidney out of my body and am standing here trying to hand it to you. It’s a consultation. And it’s settled.”

“No Boris. I’ll go on the transplant list. I can’t take a kidney from you.”

“That would be a great plan in an alternate universe, like Spain, where everyone’s an organ donor and the wait isn’t years, but we live here. So yell, stomp around, put your fist through another wall, turn your phone off while I’m there—whatever you need to do 190 to deal with it. But deal with it. Ever since we discovered we share a blood-type, we’ve been training for this challenge.” He’s clearly trying to lighten the mood but Mildred is having none of it.

Mildred throws her phone across the room. It hits the wall at just the right angle so that the battery flies in one direction, the back falls straight down, and the face splinters into a spider’s web. Mildred cannot take this from Boris. It’s too much.

On the flight to San Francisco, Boris plans his argument against Mildred. It’s so

Mildred for him to have to fight with her over whether or not he can help to save her life.

If it were he who needed a kidney, the matter wouldn’t even be open for discussion. She would be offended at the idea that a discussion were even warranted. “Of course I am giving you a kidney, Boris. Don’t be ridiculous.” Her response is so obvious that he can hear her saying it as if it’s already happened. But because it is him giving to her, this is hard for her to accept. She hasn’t answered his calls in the days since their phone conversation and has even refused to answer Hank’s calls after he brought it up to her.

She threatened Rosa and refused to speak to her for almost a week. Stubborn, even when death is threatening.

He’s already been cleared as in good enough health to be a living donor and has passed some of the screenings but is not yet cleared as a match for Mildred. He has never quite been a full match for her over the decades, but always enough of a match to bond them together.

191

XXI. Mildred’s and Boris’s hospital beds stand side-by-side, facing a large window that overlooks a courtyard of the UCSF hospitals complex, their hands joined in the middle.

Transplant day has finally arrived. In the courtyard, a white-haired woman in a wheelchair holds a Jack Russell terrier in her lap, stroking its head with a marionette hand attached to a mobile IV stand. A younger, dark-haired woman sits on a bench next to her, intently tapping on her phone.

Rosa sits on the outside of Mildred’s bed, poring over the hospital chart. On the outside of Boris’s bed sits Ana, staring out the window, chewing on a rogue cuticle as the first stream of blood trickles down the side of her finger.

Across the room, in the corner to the left of the window, Hank watches Mildred, her eyes closed, lids flickering as if she is watching a movie on the inside of them.

No one speaks.

Boris counts each breath he hears from Mildred. They feel measured, contemplated, as if each breath is a deliberate decision. His heart pounds hard enough that he is certain Mildred can hear it, can feel it in his hand, and it must be upsetting her.

But in this uncertain moment, Mildred can only see Beverly, her orange hair sticking in every possible direction, face to the wind, eyes squinting, as she picks little girl-Mildred up into her arms. Mildred feels the sharp gusts trying to halt her chest, filling her face with such intensity that she can’t seem to inhale. “Put your face in my shirt so you can breathe, baby,” Beverly whispers in her ear, and Mildred presses her small 192 cheeks firmly into Beverly’s cleavage, the opening between her breasts allowing Mildred to breathe in a protected way. Beverly’s fingers split Mildred’s hair into sections, gently rubbing up and down in a tangle of curls. “It’s okay—we’re almost there now.” Mildred feels the bumps of her mother’s gait.

The door to the hospital room opens and Mildred’s eyes open, her memory relegated to the back of her mind, once more.

“Are we ready?” The doctors come to settle everyone’s nerves and say their final words before the anesthesiologists arrive and the nurses escort the loved ones out.

“I am,” Mildred says, squeezing Boris’s hand tighter. Hank stands and moves between Mildred and Boris, careful to not disrupt their connection, ready for the doctors’ words.

Dr. Svenka begins. “Mildred, Boris,” he nods at each of them. “Let’s run through the plan. You’ll be side-by-side in the operating room, me with Boris, and Dr. Siddiqui with Mildred. My team and I will begin the removal of Boris’s kidney. When we are about ten minutes from done with the extraction, Dr. Siddiqui and her team will begin preparation for Mildred to receive the organ. It should be easy for her to find room for it, based on the CT scan we got back last night, as the left kidney has shrunk to the size of an infant’s fist. As soon as Boris’s procedure is complete, he’ll be taken to recovery, and the rest of the time will be spent integrating Mildred’s new kidney into her body. Once

Mildred’s integration is complete, she’ll go to ICU recovery. The entire procedure can take anywhere from four to six hours. Once both of are you are cleared from post-op recovery, pending any complications, you will be put together in your general recovery room, per your request, and monitored overnight by a team of transplant nurses. Miguel 193 is your family liaison.” Dr. Svenka turns to a nurse standing near the door. “Miguel, this is Hank, Ana, and Rosa. They will be anxiously awaiting any news during and after surgery.”

Miguel turns to Hank. “I have your phone number and will be texting you any updates if you are not in your waiting room when I come to check in. If you need to wander off, get a drink, go for a run, eat, don’t worry—we’ll keep you updated.”

Dr. Svenka continues to go through details for another ten minutes as more nurses and doctor in scrubs fill the room, most wearing disposable booties, face masks down around their chins, smiling as if this were just another day. After work, they might play a game of basketball at the hoops in the south parking lot or shower to meet their partner for drinks or pick their children up from afterschool care or go on a blind date. After, they might visit an ailing parent in a nursing home or ride the cable cars home to watch

Chicago Fire reruns on their DVR. They might add to their tally on Twitter,

#onemoretransplantdown, #jobsecurity, and virtual friends might “like” their heroic and humanistic life choices. They might go home and cry over the illness of a dear friend or the recent failure of a ten year old girl’s transplant, the one who didn’t make it to the six- month milestone. Maybe her name was Lilly. Maybe her mother stroked her hand, wishing, bargaining, promising anything, if only her girl would pull through.

But Mildred can’t think this way. It is just another day. Another day to fight, another day to love, another day for these people to do their jobs well.

“We’ve done many of these procedures successfully, more than I can even count,” says Dr. Siddiqui.

“More than three hundred just last year,” adds Dr. Svenka. 194

***

Boris thinks about the slight mismatch. Ever since childhood, when they discovered they shared a blood type, they’ve solemnly sworn to give blood to each other if ever necessary, developing elaborate scenarios in which one might need to give to the other, and then pressing each other, “Even if this happened? Even then? You would give me blood?” These answers came with their signature blood-spit-pinky swear oath, “No matter what.” But they’re not a perfect transplant match because they aren’t siblings by blood. The doctor says they are as close as they could be without being related. There is a slight margin, a sliver of difference between them. How much will that sliver count? “It’s the difference of only a few percentage points, in terms of probability of success.” They couldn’t ask for better odds. On the general transplant list, it could be years before

Mildred is offered a donor kidney.

“Let’s get it over with. The anticipation is literally killing me.” Mildred feels as ready as she’s ever going to be and, with each passing moment, more doubts, more questions, more fears inch their way in. It has to be now.

The family is led out of the room and the anesthesiologists each attend to their respective patients.

For the first hour in the waiting room, Hank reads the same four pages over and over until he finally gives up. He’s tired of trying to comprehend the words. All he can think about is his girl. Losing Beverly the first time was painful but they survived. Losing her the second time was somehow easier because he had already grieved her so deeply.

Losing Mildred is unfathomable. The image of her, green, sallow, speaking gibberish, 195 when he carried her out of that house in Reno…he can barely allow it to cross his mind.

Driving her to the hospital that day was the scariest ten minutes of his life, at least until now. And Boris. What luck, to have chosen that house right next-door to Boris and his mother, all those years ago. Hank needs a distraction to keep from breaking down—he takes out his phone to text Leonid and Gertie. They arrive tomorrow.

Ana sits on the waiting room floor and sips Pinot Noir from a pink water bottle stashed in her purse, a gift from Mildred for this specific wait. When Boris first told Ana of his plan to give Mildred a kidney, she asked, “What if our own child needs a kidney one day and you only have one left?” He answered, “Lucky you’ll have two, then.” She knew before she asked. He never mentioned that moment again and she was grateful. She feels guilty enough for the flashes of resentment she’s felt, not towards Mildred, but towards the whole situation. Why does it have to be Boris? She knows—Hank has a different blood type and Beverly is dead. The moments of frustration pass quickly and are replaced with gratitude. Boris is such a good man, if only her mother could see this act of bravery for what it is and learn to appreciate him. It’s a good thing she’s halfway around the world. And Ana loves Mildred. Perhaps not as much as Boris loves Mildred, but still.

Mildred is a part of this family she’s pieced together, one she never felt she had growing up.

Rosa walks up and down the halls, stopping periodically to check her phone for nothing in particular. Two twenty-somethings come in and sit under a fake fern hanging from the ceiling, talking quietly and holding hands. At first, Rosa’s angry that these 196 strangers have invaded her space. She takes a breath and knows this is irrational. They’re also worried for a loved-one, perhaps even grieving. This loved-one’s chances for recovery may be much less than Mildred’s. In moments such as this one, Rosa wishes she knew less about illness. She’s never assisted in this sort of surgery but still has enough knowledge to imagine a hundred different complications. She can see Mildred and Boris, mostly naked, vulnerable, cut open, tubes everywhere, and she knows she needs to get out of the hospital. She gathers Hank and Ana and insists they try to eat something, even though she knows she won’t be able to. Anything to avoid another lap around the room.

They pass a couple of hours at a sports bar a block away, unable to hear each other easily, and so they settle into an uncomfortable silence. Eventually, they give up on trying to be distracted and head back to the waiting room, which is now completely deserted. Rosa rolls her coat up like a pillow and lays on the floor, laying her arm over her face. Ana lays next to her. Hank changes the television to a Psych rerun marathon and all three focus on it, laughing at some of the right times, and missing many more.

When Boris first opens his eyes, he’s confused by what he sees—his shoes are on the floor in front of an unfamiliar white cabinet. His own sweatshirt is folded on a strange table. White walls surround him. Then he hears the beep beep beep of his monitors, turns to look at them, and sees Rosa and Ana sitting side-by-side in blue padded chairs, the kind that fold out into “beds,” leaning into one another, whispering. It all comes back.

Where’s Mildred? What day is it?

Boris checks his voice. “Hey.” It’s scratchy, foreign, as if he’s been smoking a pack a day since he was fifteen. Both women look up and stand. 197

“Boris,” Ana says, her voice comforting, maybe too comforting. What does she know? She stands and comes closer, taking his hand. “How do you feel?”

“I’m not sure. Where’s Mildred?”

“She’s in recovery—her surgery went much longer than yours. They say it went fine, as well.” The look of concern on Ana’s face is difficult to read with so much pain medication in his body.

“We’re both fine?”

Ana smiles. “Yes, for the third time, everything is fine. I’m not hiding anything, I promise. Both surgeries went as well as could be expected, you’re doing well, Mildred’s surgery went well as far as anyone has told me, and everything is so-far, so-good.”

“What do you mean, third time?” Boris reaches into his mind for memory of anything beyond counting back from ten. Did he get to five? Yes. Three is fuzzy, then the blur of the anesthesiologist, the mask on his face, a glimpse of his doctor entering the room, hands in the air after scrubbing in, and then this moment.

“You keep waking up and I have to answer the same question,” Ana says. “I keep promising you that I’m not keeping any secrets. I promise, just as I promised before you went under—no secrets about what is going on. Whether or not you can remember our discussion from one minute to the next is another thing.” She is smiling so she must just be playing. Now that she has clarified, Boris reads her face as relieved, tender. Nervous, yes, but that’s natural. No hidden agenda. No secret tragedy no one wants to tell him.

The door cracks open and the nurse in charge of coordinating their transplant pokes her head in, surgical mask around her chin. “

You can see her now,” she says to Rosa. 198

Ana squeezes Rosa’s shoulders and they embrace.

Rosa turns to Boris. “I’ll bring back a full report.” Her voice is a little shaky, her smile a bit forced. He knows the feeling of just needing to lay eyes on a person to believe everything is okay.

“Alone, at last,” Ana says and slips herself onto the edge of the bed. Boris tries to scoot over but a surge of abdominal pain stops him in his tracks. “Yeah, don’t try moving. I will fit myself around you.” And she does, curving her body to lie in the small space next to him in the hospital bed, on her side, her hand holding his.

Boris remembers a question he wanted to ask Ana when Ana first met Mildred.

“Why are you so good at being in the hospital?”

Ana laughs. “What do you mean by ‘good at?’?”

Boris struggles to figure out what he is trying to say, his eyelids heavy with anesthesia. “I mean comfortable, I guess. You know how to hug someone or lie in their bed. Most people get awkward in the hospital. You just jump into the bed.”

Ana laughs again. She can see his’s barely with her, still so groggy from surgery.

“You are tired so I will give you a short version for now. You might not remember it the next time you wake up anyway so I’ll save the extended version for another time. Before my parents split and my father ran off to be a diplomat and alcoholic and forget about me, his mother lived with us, my babushka. She was good to me—we spent a lot of times telling stories to each other and wandering off on adventures, until she had the stroke.

Then she went down the hill and never really came back. I slept in her hospital bed with her at first but then my parents wouldn’t let me anymore, said it was no place for a child 199 to be. She was in and out of hospital for about six months, the last time for three weeks and my parents refuse for me to stay there with her. And then I would not let go of her even when they tried to pull me out.”

Ana watches Boris’s eyes droop, but his hand still firmly holds hers. She’ll finish the story but have to repeat it again, when he’s more awake. It’s good for her to talk about this story and her beautiful babushka. She feels too far away when Ana doesn’t talk about her for a while.

“All the times my parents would come, they acted as if she were some leper or something like that, like they didn’t know how to talk to her or even who she was. My dad would barely touch her, and the times they did take me to visit, when I would try to touch her, to get in the bed, my dad would pull me away.”

Normally, Ana cries when she thinks of this, but she’s so emotionally exhausted from this day, this week, this month, than she finds she can speak of her babushka with a new ease.

“The last time I saw her, she couldn’t talk. I held her hand and wouldn’t let go even when my dad tried to take me. She looked so sad, I just wanted to lie in her lap and cry. I promised to myself that I would never do that to anyone ever again in my life, pretend a person who is sick or dying is not a person anymore.”

Ana pauses again and Boris’s eyes pop back open. “Don’t stop,” he says, squeezing her hand in reassurance.

“I think my father could never forgive himself for his inability to talk to her or touch her when she was dying. They were always close but she was feisty and they argued a lot, mostly in teasing, but not always. He never cried in front of me but was also 200 never the same. It wasn’t long before the drinking and cheating started. He became like a distant acquaintance after that, not my father.” Ana lays her head on the pillow next to

Boris’s and doesn’t feel out of place. She is good at this.

Boris relaxes his face against Ana’s, grateful that she’s not afraid to get so close to him and grateful that she doesn’t jostle anything that might cause him more pain. He’s heard of this grandmother many times but never this whole story, just that she died in the hospital. Boris tells himself to remember this story but can already feel the details slipping away. He can’t hold his eyes open for another second.

“So now I make it my place to touch the sick people I love so they know I am not already moving on from them,” Ana whispers.

“Promise to tell me the story again tomorrow,” he says.

“Of course.”

Boris hears the door open but can’t open his eyes, can’t fight the sleep anymore.

The last things he hears is Ana’s voice.

“Mildred!”

And the wheels of a hospital bed rolling through the door and into their shared room. They are back together. 201

Epilogue When Mildred was a little girl, barely two, Beverly had loved taking her to the grocery store. In fact, she’d hated shopping without her little Millie. It was so boring without Mildred grabbing unwanted items from shelves, giggling at zerbies on her neck and tickles to her ear, and making friends with strangers who passed by them. It would take twice as long as if Beverly were shopping alone, but it was worth it. Shopping was not the worst thing on the planet when Beverly had Mildred.

The first time Beverly tried to grocery shop after leaving for San Francisco, she ended up crying on a zucchini for twenty minutes until a bagger came over to ask if he could assist her in some way. She told him, “make me a better mother,” and then left her cart behind and walked the ten blocks to her artist loft in a daze.

For weeks, every girl looked like Mildred. Beverly would tell herself that Mildred and Hank would find her and bring her home. She told herself Hank would be around the next corner to rescue her from this life she wasn’t sure she wanted. Sometimes Beverly’s story would be that she would come home to her studio loft and Mildred and Hank would somehow already be inside, their belongings squeezed into her tiny living quarters. They would hug her, crying, “We need you. We can’t make it without you.”

But she had to push these thoughts away. No one was looking for her. There was no way to undo this horrible mistake, no way to turn off Mildred’s anger towards her. She knew her Millie too well to think this could just be swept away. It was done and she had to make the most of it.

At night, she imagined moments, not full stories, not entire memories, but moments, as paintings, frozen: Mildred with a plastic frog in her pink raincoat pocket, the 202 coat she insisted on wearing every single day for six months even though it rarely rained in Hawthorne; Mildred doing a handstand against the walls of their new house, rubbing her muddy heels against the red paint that Beverly couldn’t wait to paint over; Mildred slipping small, quartz-stripped stones into Beverly’s pocket; Mildred climbing on a chair to peak over the fence at Boris; Hank sneaking them all into a second movie at the theatre, Mildred asleep in his arms and his pockets filled with candy from the 7-11.

On that final day together, as the hospice nurse bathes Beverly while Mildred sits in the chair beside her, all Beverly can think of is Mildred’s tiny face, pressed into her chest, shielded from the wind, as they ran to shelter.