Bile rose up my throat.
He twisted his body to reach into the corner and opened the fridge. He didn’t raise his voice or bother to look at me. He spoke matter-of-factly. “You know why you’re here.”
“No I don’t. There must be some misunderstanding—”
“Don’t do that.” He stood up from the fridge, Perrier Jouët in hand, his knuckles white. “Don’t patronage me. My mother used to patronage me. My mother’s dead now.”
“Donnie, I’m not patronizing you.”
“You were asking questions you shouldn’t have been asking. At the panakhyda and the reception after the funeral.” The panakhyda was a Ukrainian Catholic memorial service held the night before the funeral. “You know better. We’re gonna have to… we’re gonna have to talk about that.”
“Talk about it?” I glanced at his cleats again.
He looked me over and licked his lips. It was the look of an addict delaying gratification for a few minutes, or kidding himself that this time it would be different. This time he wouldn’t smoke, drink, or do whatever it was he meant when he said he had to hurt me. He smiled quickly as though that would erase the gesture from my memory.
It didn’t.
“Let’s don’t worry about that now. Let’s have a drink and catch up. You work in New York, right? Investments or some shit, isn’t it? I bet all the Ukes are really proud of you. They should be. You were a classy girl. I always thought the world of you.” He glanced at the Champagne, turned back to me and raised his eyebrows. Tilted the bottle in my direction so I could see the label. “Money, right?”
I vaguely heard myself answering him because I was too busy searching for a means of escape. But there was none. A wall prevented access to the front of the van. The windows were blacked out and covered with shades. The only exit was through the rear door, and Donnie would have had his hands on me before I could raise the latch. The problem was that I was certain he was going to put his hands on me even if I didn’t try to escape. And he wasn’t going to use them to give me a warm embrace.
Despite the adrenaline, the all-consuming nature of my body’s fight-or-flight response, I was still lucid enough to reason. I understood that there was a decent probability he might do serious bodily harm to me, or even kill me. It was this ability to reason that gave me hope.
A crinkling sound snapped me from my stupor. Donnie peeled aluminum foil from around the cork.
“This is just like a date,” he said, cheerily. “Did you ever think you’d go on another date with me?”
“No, Donnie.” The operative word in his question was “another.” I’d done my best to forget the first one, and was hoping that after all his probable substance abuse, he might have forgotten about it, too.
Instead, he popped the cork. Champagne burst out of the bottle and poured down its sides, covering his hand and the carpet. He licked two fingers and gave me a rakish grin.
“You do remember our first date?” he said.
I looked away from him. Tried not to blush, urged the blood out of my face so as not to give him any satisfaction. It did the opposite of what I requested, of course, and flooded my cheeks so badly my entire face stung.
“Yeah, Donnie,” I said. “Of course I remember.”
Although I wished I could forget my date with Donnie, there were other childhood memories I’d worked even harder to forget.
CHAPTER 2
After studying his compass and map carefully, Nadia’s father hacked off a dead limb from one of the trees. The morning sun poured through the gaps between the branches and made a circle of light atop a bed of pine needles. He told Nadia to sit down precisely in that spot, and she obeyed. Nadia’s brother, Marko, stood off to the side sipping water from his canteen.
Beads of sweat covered her arms as though her skin was a pancake in the making. Her body pulsated from the two-mile hike. She was warmed up. Ready for the survival test. The details were a closely guarded secret, but she figured she’d have to build a camp and survive a night alone.
Nadia took three deep breaths. She could do it. Whatever it took, she could do it. She wouldn’t let her father and her brother down. Heck, the forest wasn’t the worst place in the world. Not even close. In a month, she’d turn twelve and school would start again. Sixth grade. The day before summer vacation, Rachel Backus and her friends had promised to flush her “disgusting Russian head down the toilet” in September. She’d told them her parents were Ukrainian, not Russian, and that there was a big difference. They’d disagreed, and promised her head was going down the toilet no matter where it came from.
Nadia looked around. Recognized the dip in the path ahead that lead down to the river. Diamondback Pass, they called it, because you could hear the rattlers hiss if you stepped in the wrong place. She spent her summers twenty miles away on a five-hundred-acre lot of land in northwestern Connecticut that Ukrainian immigrants had bought on the cheap in the 1950s. They used it as the setting for their PLAST scout camps. Plastun was the historical Ukrainian name for a Cossack scout or sentry. Sometimes the counselors bussed the plastuny and plastunky north to the Appalachian Trail to hike for the day. Nadia remembered the spot by its pine groves.
Her father walked up to her. He reminded her of an old lion, with sandy hair combed straight back and blown thick by the wind.
“Nadia, you live in America,” he said in Ukrainian. “The greatest country in the world. This makes you a lucky girl. You understand that, don’t you, my kitten?”
“Yes, father.”
“And you’re sitting at the exact point,” he said, tapping his right index finger on the map in his left hand, “where Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York meet. This makes you an even luckier girl. How many girls can say they’ve been in three states at the same time?”
Nadia glanced at the ground beside her. “Really?” A smile spread on her already-chapped lips. “That is so cool.”
“And now you’re going to become the youngest girl ever to pass the PLAST survival test. Are you ready?”
“Yes, father.”
“Good.
“Here is your knapsack. Inside you’ll find a compass and map, food and water for one day, three matches, a knife, a poncho, a plastic bag, some twine, a flashlight, and a mess kit. Attached to the bottom of the knapsack is your sleeping bag. You must survive three nights on your own with just these things. Do you understand?”
What? Three nights? Nadia nodded her head mechanically and managed a “Yes, father.” He couldn’t possibly mean it. He and Marko would probably be close by. Yeah, that was it. They’d be close by.
“Your brother and I will be far away,” he said. He glared at Marko the way he did when he was ready to ream one of them out, which was pretty much all the time. “Neither of us will be holding your hand.”
Marko gave their father a blank stare in return, but Nadia knew Marko was probably fantasizing about drop-kicking him from here to Niagara Falls.
Her father knelt before her so they were face-to-face. Nadia bit her tongue to try to look strong.