Etched on Me Page 15

  Each morning at ten, I’d roll languidly out of bed (in Curran’s room, left empty while he was backpacking through Europe) to walk the dogs down Islington Green, then come home and watch Arsenal matches on the satellite sports channel with Vera. Despite all her tetchy tactlessness, she was actually super-grateful for a daytime companion, and sweet in her own way—bossing me around to eat more, calling me pet names like krasavitsa even though I knew that, in her eyes, my “beauty” was potential at best.

  In the afternoons, I’d go out on the patio and peel out of my long shirt, knotting it around my waist and stripping down to my camisole before perching on the chaise longue to strum my guitar. Eventually, I’d drift towards half-sleep again with it draped across my chest, my good arm steadying its neck, my bad arm turned up towards the healing heat of the sun.

  Round five-ish I’d startle awake to the growly rawr rawr rawr of Molly and Leopold rolling on their backs in the grass, and lean over to scritch at their soft-haired bellies and ruffly necks, talking to them in a mumsy chirp I’d never expected to fall from my own mouth: “Who’s a good girl? Who wants his dinner, hmm?”

  Once I’d got them settled with their food bowls (equally filled down to the morsel, so as to deter dissent), I’d give Vera her insulin (“How are you so good with those sharp needles, Leslyochka?” she’d always ask, to which I’d shrug and think, You don’t want to know) and then get to work on the evening’s two-legged supper in the Kremskys’ brilliant kitchen, which was fitted out with jewel-toned tiles and granite counters and a stainless steel hob, all those things Clare would have killed for.

  Still keen on honoring her, I worked my way through Nigella Lawson’s whole repertoire, even the “instant” chocolate mousse that was complete crap. Set the dining table with Provençal linens. Arranged flowers in vases. Watched as—amused, appreciative, even a little stunned—Gloria and Jascha arrived home together, their hands loosely laced, to find the elegant spread. Every time, they’d murmur that I didn’t have to; every time, I’d shake my head and protest that it was the least I could offer.

  Most evenings I hung out with them after dinner, not only for the company but also because I loved witnessing their dry banter and easy affection. Everything about how they related to each other was so natural and transparent: her feet draped in his lap as they read on the couch; his hand sneakily swatting her arse with a dish towel as they did the washing-up. Total opposite of my mum and dad. Even their arguments were refreshing—no heavy sighs or passive-aggressive glances, just a straight-up shower of f-bombs, followed by a sheepish, apologetic embrace.

  When the fights got really heated from the stress of their adoption’s red tape, or I sensed they needed some privacy, I’d head down the road to N1 Centre to mess around, either window shopping or seeing a film at the cinema. Sometimes, alone with my toffee popcorn, I’d get the ghost-urge to reach for Clare’s hand in the next theatre seat, and then I’d rush home to curl up on my boy-loaner bed, a sausage dog on either side of me, and have a good cry. Nothing too long or too intense, just enough to let the excess spill out the cup of my feelings.

  Once I’d pulled myself together and was lying there tired but calm, Gloria would come in (always after a polite knock, bless her, though I’m sure there were plenty of times she got worried enough to contemplate busting down the door) and sit on the edge of the mattress. Moonlight edged sideways through the thin curtains, turning her darkbright as her mum’s cello sonatas. She’d tuck the covers round my shoulders just a touch tighter, like Clare but not Clare. Brush a tilted hand against my temple, lightly, as if checking me for some fretful, brewing fever.

  “Everything all right?” she’d ask, her tone both casual and solemn, and I’d sleepily nod, because it was.

  • • •

  In July, the prodigal son arrived home from his backpacking adventure just as I was putting the finishing touches on a raspberry trifle for his mum’s birthday. As the devil dogs sprinted forward and the front door’s antique handle squeaked, I licked the cream-spattered edge of my thumb and braced myself for awkwardness.

  He came in the kitchen with his rucksack slung over one shoulder and his fair hair rumpled, his eyes weary but bright as he peered into the mixing bowl. “That looks ace.”

  Hadn’t expected to blush, but I did. Wasn’t like I actually fancied him, but I could certainly see why girls lost the plot.

  “Thanks,” I said, wiping my damp hands on the back pockets of my jeans. “You’re . . .” It took all my brainpower to remember his name. Blocked it out to save myself from endless self-comparisons, I guess. “Curran, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Whew. “I’m—”

  “Lesley,” he said straightaway, confident as if he’d known me forever. “I know.”

  My face flushed again. “Infamous around these parts, am I?”

  “Are you joking? You’re bloody revered.”

  “Really,” I said, giving the trifle a final stir.

  He nodded. “Every week I’ve rung home and heard a new report.” He put on Gloria’s accent, nailing the Anglo-American nuances dead perfect. “ ‘Lesley got Vera to keep her oxygen on for an entire afternoon! Lesley transposed “Human Behavior” for acoustic guitar! Lesley made us Toblerone fondue!’ ”

  “Oh, like that’s anywhere near an Oxford degree,” I said. “Double cream, double boiler, couple sticks, and Bob’s your uncle.”

  You’d expect us to have said all this cruelly, right, like we were jockeying for position in the maternal-regard league standings, hungry to one-up each other, but in reality the whole conversation was chill. No How many girls you get it on with from Amsterdam to Zurich, pretty boy? or Sure you’re not going to stab me with that berry-hulling knife, wackjob? digs, just sly grins and teasing laughter.

  I was just about to ask him whether he knew of any good clubs in town when, from upstairs, we heard a gleeful scream, followed by the jostle of descending footsteps. Quizzical, we glanced at each other, then turned towards the doorway just in time to see Gloria barreling at us, breathily crying out, “We got it! We got it!” as Jascha followed behind her, more sedate but still shining-faced, a sheet of paper in his quaking hands.

  “Got what, Mum?” Curran asked.

  “Your referral?” I said.

  She nodded. “Show them, honey.”

  As Jascha held out the paper, translating the details on their potential new daughter—Svetlana, aged 5, no known health issues—Gloria extended an arm to each of us, pulled both Curran and I close.

  “Best birthday present ever,” she sighed, with such rapturous relief neither one of us thought to mourn our trifle-making efforts or arduous pilgrimages home.

  “Look at her,” Jascha whispered.

  We looked. A little girl—and I do mean little, small enough for five that, even with an untrained eye, I could tell she’d need a whole lot of Nigella’s child-friendly pasta with peas to get back on the growth charts—peered into the camera with a gaze both wary and inquisitive, her dark, chin-length hair tucked rakishly behind her ears, her expression somewhere between a somber smile and a cheeky smirk.

  “Aww, bless,” Curran said. “Looks like trouble.”

  “Nah,” I said. “She looks like one of us.”

  • • •

  I’d figured they’d want Curran to accompany them on the big Russia trip, but a day later I was down at the passport office, getting ushered through the queue by Gloria so I could have my own picture taken.

  You’d think I’d have been a liability rather than an asset, but she and Jascha were keen on my going, and Curran wasn’t bothered in the least—said he was tired from all that Eurail-ing, and would be perfectly happy to house-sit and keep an eye on Vera.

  When I heard that, I felt a little less guilty about taking his rightful place, but I still had no idea why I’d been handed it. At least not until the night before we flew out, when I popped into his parents’ bedroom to ask if it’d be all right for me to take my guit
ar along, and found Gloria sitting slumped on the duvet, sorting through a pile of books with titles like Attachment After International Adoption and Post-Institutionalized Children and Trauma.

  She looked up, her expression startled at first, then growing more relaxed, as if she’d been calmed out of a dark reverie by my sudden appearance.

  “Les,” she said, “tell me honestly: How worried do you think I need to be about this stuff?” She gestured towards the fanned spread of paperbacks.

  I shrugged. “I’m not really the person to ask. I mean, it’s not like I’m an expert on—”

  Wait. Yes, I was. Maybe not in the same way as a child psychologist or an orphanage director, but still. Soon as I realized that, it was easy to guess the real reason I’d been bought a tourist visa and a plane ticket: not so I could take the photos and make the scrapbook, not in order to embark on a belated, much abbreviated version of a globe-trotting gap year, but because they wanted—no, needed—my support.

  But what exactly could I give? What could I say? I chewed my lip in inadvertent mimicry of Gloria, then slid the tomes aside so I could move closer to her.

  “You know,” I said, “I think it’s really smart of you to be doing your homework. Proper research and all, not just reading rubbish on the Internet.”

  Her mouth turned downwards in a rueful frown. “Well,” she said, “I’m guilty of that, too. Been scouring the adoption forums all week.”

  “Find any decent advice?”

  “Just stories about how bringing a child home from Eastern Europe is either a gift from heaven or an unending nightmare.”

  “Sounds like they could use some DBT,” I said.

  Gloria leaned back on the bed, rubbing her hands over the bridge of her nose. “Couldn’t we all, darlin’,” she said, sighing. “Couldn’t we all.”

  15

  Lesley Holloway, Livein Moscow It sounded like the name of a concert EP, too wild a fantasy to be true, but there I was, lugging my guitar and a brand-new suitcase (no more bin bags for me, baby; my arse was moving up) out of a taxi and into the August heat on Ulitsa Tverskaya.

  “God, I feel like such an ugly American,” Gloria muttered as we stepped into the (blessedly air-conditioned) Marriott’s wood-paneled lift.

  I expected Jascha to squeeze her hand and murmur back If by “ugly American” you mean “gorgeous-but-stubborn expatriate,” then yes, you are, or another of those dry, chiding-but-charming remarks he was always so good at breaking out with, but instead he stood wedged between us in the corner, his silent stillness so unnatural I knew it couldn’t be explained away by stoicism. Wonder at being back in his homeland for the first time since he was Svetlana’s age, perhaps?

  Nope. Poor thing spent the next hour kneeling before the toilet on the posh marble floor of our suite’s bathroom, sick from the combination of nerves and dodgy airline food service. I unpacked our luggage while Gloria tucked him in, and then we ordered up most-decidedly-undodgy room service and sat cross-legged with our Stroganoff and Siberian dumplings on my pulled-out sofa bed.

  “You know,” she said, twirling a forkful of egg noodles with one jittery hand, “I really ought to be studying my non-dirty-Russian-vocabulary flash cards right now. Or at least reviewing the warning signs of attachment disorder.”

  “Well, tough,” I said, reaching for the remote, “ ’cause what you’re gonna do is sit here and watch daft telly with me to keep your mind off tomorrow.”

  She responded with a grumbly sigh of “Goddamn Zen distress tolerance bullshit,” but I could tell she was relieved I’d cut her off at the pass.

  We’d just commenced watching a local quiz program hosted by a woman with blue eyeliner and so-enormous-as-to-be-freakishly-unhot silicone breasts when, from Gloria and Jascha’s king-sized bed, we heard a drowsy groan, followed by the shuffle of feet and the click of the loo door drawn closed. Even the hoots and cheers of the ebullient TV audience couldn’t drown out the sounds of him retching again.

  “Oh, love,” Gloria murmured, and got up to check on him.

  He came back out full of mumbled apologies, one hand pressed to his temple. I sat in the nearby desk’s big ergonomic chair, swiveling back and forth, feeling like a voyeur as she crawled beneath the plush duvet, propped up on pillows, and coaxed him down into her arms. Wasn’t a matter of minutes before he was passed out again, his own arm flung across her, his head slumped against her chest.

  I watched, fascinated, as she stroked his hair, her narrow fingers trailing down the back of his neck. A soft gesture, like a reassuring whisper, but also one, I realized, you could make with far different intent, dug-in nails scratching in anger or lust or even (most frighteningly) both.

  “Gloria,” I said, “can I ask you a weird question?”

  She glanced up at me over the top of his head. “Sure.”

  “What’s it like to, you know . . .” I gave a shy shrug. “Sleep with a guy. On purpose.”

  She tipped her head back against the topmost pillow on the pile. “What’s it like how, exactly?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. I guess I’m just . . . wondering whether, even if you really, really fancy him, and he’s really, really nice, it’s still . . .” My mouth puckered in distaste. “Just lying there and—”

  “Being a font of feminine receptivity while getting pounded at?”

  I looked down. “Yeah.”

  “Sweetie, if that were the only way intimacy worked,” she said, chuckling, “I’d have never gotten married once, much less twice.”

  “So you call all the shots?”

  “That’s not how it works, either.”

  My face scrunched up with confusion. “Then how does it?”

  “For me and him?” She glanced down at Jascha, then back up at me, blushing a little. “Umm, well . . .”

  “I don’t mean to be nosy,” I said. “Really. I’m just trying to sort out who I . . .” I swallowed. Looked away. “Who I am when I’m not the girl in the hall closet.”

  She let out a slow sigh. “Ahh.”

  “I mean, I know I’m not completely straight,” I said. “And as far as boys go, I can look at them and think, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s good-looking,’ in an abstract kinda way, but soon as I picture myself having sex with a guy, I start freaking out. Shit, most of the time I can’t even picture it, ’cause it’s all mixed up with . . .”

  “He who must not be mentioned?”

  I nodded. “I just wish I could push past the panic and test myself. See if I’m put off ’cause I’m full-on gay, or because my only reference point is fucking nasty.”

  She sat up and slowly extricated herself from Jascha, then scuffed barefoot across the carpet to perch on the edge of the desk next to me.

  “Be gentle with yourself, sweetheart,” she said, reaching over to brush my awkwardly-growing-out hair back from my forehead. “You’ve got plenty of time.”

  • • •

  The adoption facilitator who met us in the lobby the next morning was called Tatiana, and she was hot as the street’s swelter. Cheekbones higher than what I knew to be Gloria and Jascha’s hopes, hair an elegant upswept tangle highlighted gold and auburn. The guy driving us, Vitaly, wasn’t half-bad either, all smoke-tipped fingers and fitted T-shirt.

  My head swirled with a host of polymorphous backseat scenarios, my imaginings going places simultaneously dodgy and delicious. Never played them out with either party, but damn if it wasn’t brilliant to actually have imaginings for once.

  Meanwhile, Jascha and Gloria sat squashed next to me in said backseat, its space so cramped she had to crouch on his lap.

  “Goddamn it,” she sighed. “We forgot the camera.”

  “No, we didn’t,” I said, taking it out of my rucksack as, with a sputter of its muffler, the beat-up sedan lurched through the orphanage’s gates under Vitaly’s firm hand.

  • • •

  It was a good thing I did remember the camera, because Svetlana—whom her caretakers all called Sveta—charmed the bej
esus out of us on that first visit: bounding over in her sock feet, chattering in Russian so rapid-fire Jascha could barely keep up, leaning over my shoulder to poke inquisitively at the camera’s buttons while she sang along with the screechy, sugarcoated pop song playing on the radio in the next room.

  “Flipping whirlwind, you are,” I said, laughing, as I lifted the camera above my head so she couldn’t delete all the photos I’d just taken of her.

  “Wearing me out already,” Gloria said, but her face was so melty I could tell she’d fallen hard for the mad little moppet.

  And Jascha? He actually teared up when, at the end of our allotted hour, Sveta’s white-smocked minder returned to escort her off for her nap.

  I followed behind her parents-to-be as they shuffled reluctantly towards the front door, their arms slung round each other’s waists, as if their joy had bowled them over so much they had to hold each other up.

  Back in the car, Vitaly was reclining with a cigarette, while Tatiana sat primly filing her plum-colored nails. As the three of us slid into the back, she gave Gloria and Jascha a curious, appraising glance.

  “So,” she said, “now that you have met Svetlana, you are still wishing to continue?”

  “Boshe moi,” Jascha murmured. “How can you even ask such a—”

  “Yes,” Gloria said firmly. “Absolutely. Yes.”

  • • •

  That afternoon, while Jascha (who’d begun to flag after a malaise-free morning) took his own nap, Gloria persuaded me to go with her to a ginormous children’s department store fitted with soaring ceilings and chandeliers and a working carousel.

  “You’ve lost your flipping head,” I told her as she raced breathlessly from rack to rack and floor to floor, dragging me along while she loaded up on dresses and leggings and shoes and hairbands.

  “Oh, you say that now,” Gloria said, plucking a fuzzy cardigan appliquéd with dragonflies from a shelf, “but just wait till you’re in thrall to the nesting instinct.”