She won’t let herself cry.
He wrestles free of her, goes to the barn door, leans over and vomits. Cold lake water comes out of him.
She brings him a paper towel for his mouth.
“I don’t understand half of what happened tonight,” he says. “But somebody’s coming for me. Somebody dangerous. And I think I know who’s sending her.”
“Who?”
“I don’t want to say her name. But I think it’s time I gave you a proper tour of my house. And I think it’s time I told you what happened to me in Russia.”
It stinks of lake now, worse than before.
“Is time you were telling me, too,” the naked woman with the dreadlocked auburn mane says. She walks dripping into the barn, eyeing Anneke territorially.
Anneke does some eyeing of her own.
“You have cigarette for me?”
“You know where they are.”
Nadia pads across the barn floor, reaches into the jacket pocket.
Anneke watches her, willing herself not to react to her smell.
Nadia pulls out a bright yellow cigarette pack, but the cigarette she pulls from it is broken in half.
“Shit,” she says, smelling the blond strands of tobacco.
Anneke offers her a Winston.
The rusalka takes it.
34
He tells them what happened to him in Russia.
PART TWO
35
The man who forgot his own name has been living on the street in Syracuse since March. March was a hard, miserable month to be outdoors, but, with the help of the blanket from the Salvation Army, the down vest from Goodwill, and the shoplifted sleeping bag, he made it.
He’s caveman strong.
A tribe of one.
He is proud of the sleeping bag. Not just for the tactical skill he showed in getting it past the sensors before the stock boy saw him or the sheer athletic prowess that left the pudgy employee huffing and puffing on the wrong side of a wall; he is proud he had the foresight to swipe it while he still looked okay. He knew it wouldn’t be long before he smelled like Dumpsters and had a beard, and that people like that get watched the minute they enter a place of business.
He is proud, too, of the fight with the shower-cap man. Shower-cap wanted that sleeping bag; it was a hunter’s bag, camouflaged, rated all the way down to ten below. You don’t need to tuck tail and run for the mission in a bag like that. Shower-cap pushed a shopping cart full of stuffed animals around, held the stuffies up and made them wave at cars before he showed his HUNGRY NEED A DOLLAR GOD LOVES U sign. Kids made their parents give him the dollar, and he smiled his gap-toothed smile at them. But not everybody who plays with teddy bears is nice. Shower-cap thought because he was big and had a pipe he was going to get that thermal sleeping bag and make the new guy push on to another on-ramp. Shower-cap was wrong. Shower-cap pushed on. Shower-cap’s smile has more gaps now.
The young man has always been a good fighter.
Going into the infantry seemed right, even though someone he cared about asked him not to. Begged him not to that day on the couch, lying on him and crying down into his eyes.
He had to go, and at the time he thought she didn’t understand, but he has come to believe that maybe she did.
He came back from Afghanistan after only a few weeks in country. He came back different. Not better different. Traumatic-brain-injury-and-severe-tinnitus different. The IED had spun the Humvee like a soda can, popped it in half, killed the lieutenant and the Mexican outright, blinded the guy who played hockey. He didn’t remember names so well anymore, but he knew that guy played hockey. He himself was the luckiest guy in the limo that day, but he wasn’t all that lucky. Kept all his outside parts, but now everything sounded like whining, and he got mad fast. Yelled when he argued, which didn’t play well at the smartphone sales kiosk in the Carousel mall. Or at the Catholic high school that took him on as a janitor. Or at the car wash, where he worked for six hours.
That he grabbed arms and squeezed to emphasize the yelling hadn’t played well with sparrow-tattoo girl. And it was sparrow-tattoo girl’s apartment.
Had been before he left for the army, when he had his own place, too. He had known her for years. Three? Four?
She had cried down into his eyes.
He used to have some letters she wrote.
She was right to kick him out.
He stole the sleeping bag the very same day.
Never went back for his stuff.
He is a caveman now.
It’s a warm day and he’s wearing the video game T-shirt, his favorite shirt. He has already gotten thirty-three dollars and fifty cents from the good motorists heading away from the airport onto Interstate 81. He has just lain down to nap when he sees a woman walking up to him, a pretty, older woman.
He sits up on one elbow and smiles at her.
He still has a good smile.
He watches her.
It isn’t every day that someone bothers to get out of the car and come over to him here, although it has happened.
She has a carload waiting for her, calling to her in another language. One of the men gets out, starts toward her protectively, which is completely unnecessary. He’s harmless to women unless they argue with him, and then he just squeezes their arms. He doesn’t even mean to do that.
She takes something from her purse; a vial of water? Three ounces, just how they like it at the TSA.
She unscrews the cap.
He just stares at her beauty mark, her pretty, fair skin.
She’s prettier than sparrow-tattoo girl, even though she’s old enough to be her mom.
A MILF.
He hates that word.
“Your name was Victor,” she tells him. She has an accent.
Her voice cuts through the whining in his head, and the whining stops.
Nobody ever did so much for him.
Tinnitus comes and goes as it pleases, doctors can’t help, the VA can’t help, but this woman made it stop.
He wants to cry.
“Victor,” he says, agreeing. “That’s right.”
He remembers it sometimes on his own, but it’s good to have it in his mouth again.
He hears the soft rush of cars, the delicious music of birds.
No whine.
“You are too young to live so hard. Are you thirsty, Victor?”
Come to think of it, he is thirsty.
He licks his lips and nods.
What is it? he thinks.
“Melted snow,” she says. “From home.”
She gives him the vial and he drinks it.
It’s cold, colder than he thought it would be, and clean.
“Don’t waste any,” she says, and he doesn’t, he even licks the back of his hand after he wipes his beard.
Now the foreign man is descending on them, speaking their language.
It’s Russian.
He understands them, though he doesn’t get how.
“This sort of thing is not done here, these people are dangerous. Please, Marina.”
“He’s not dangerous to me,” she says, still kneeling, and winks at him.
She hands him a twenty-dollar bill, but he understands that it isn’t really for him, that it’s just pokazukha, a show she’s putting on for the cousin.
He won’t need money anymore, and the thought makes him smile.
He smiles at this woman, whom he loves with all his heart, whose arms he will never grab and squeeze, and she smiles back.
She gave him his name back, but it was just to let him know how special she was, how right it was for him to trust her.