The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  I wondered if (when they started looking for me, plastering my face in the post office) I could really leave my country—send Ian home and flee to Canada with Anya’s coins and never come back. It would be nice, in a way. To look at America from the outside, to feel like the underdog instead of the overlord. Or I could move to Australia, land of criminals and exiles. I already knew the song.

  As we pulled into the next gas station, my cell started ringing. “Don’t,” I said, because Ian was reaching toward the dashboard, where the phone was balanced. I picked it up myself as I parked next to the pump.

  “It’s me,” Glenn said. I handed Ian a five-dollar bill and nodded toward the Speedee Mart. He skipped up to the doors.

  “So I had this crazy day,” I began. I got out of the car and started half-consciously pumping gas.

  “When are you going home?” His voice was too loud and too thick, and if I’d been the one to call I’d have thought I woke him up. I managed to remember that I was supposed to be in Cleveland, still.

  “Soon, I think. I mean, I can give you a lift back, I’m just not sure quite when.”

  “I found a bride.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I already found a ride.”

  “Great. I mean, that’s fine.”

  He let out a groan or a yawn, I couldn’t tell which. “I take it you’re not my date next weekend for the thing.” He had another concert, a second performance of the Mr. Clean Remix, which apparently was getting critical acclaim in whatever limited-circulation music news zines reviewed minor modern orchestra pieces premiering in St. Louis. “I mean, you said my piece sounded like a cartoon song, so . . .”

  “I’ll make it if I can,” I said. “I’m probably going back to Chicago for a while to help my friend. That’s the issue.”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “Speaking of which, that guy called.”

  I immediately thought police. “Guy?”

  “Your retarded friend. Rambo, whatever. He asked if I knew about a kid from the library.”

  It didn’t make sense, and I needed to know more—for instance, when exactly did this call take place?—but all I wanted to do was get off the phone, which was suddenly slipping out of my hand with sweat. Somehow, the only question that came out was “How did he get your number?”

  “Fuck do I know? Because he’s in love with you and he stalks you. Look, do I need to call the cops on you, Lucy?”

  “What in the hell for?”

  “You tell me.”

  “For not going to your stupid concert? For helping my sick friend? I know about the library kid. I talked to Rocky, and I’m incredibly upset.”

  “It just seems strange. I mean, that guy said you already gave the bone marrow.” So he’d called Glenn after our conversation just a few hours ago. A very bad sign.

  “He was wrong.” The gas pump clicked that it was done. Ian would be coming back out any second.

  “You’re not a very good liar.”

  “I’m an excellent liar. I told you I liked your orchestrated commercial jingle.”

  I said it on instinct, if only to get rid of him. It wouldn’t be a bad thing for him to be gone and silent and so angry that if Rocky called him back, all he could say was that he hadn’t heard from me in days and hoped I burned in hell.

  What he said to me was “Don’t ever call me again.”

  I pulled back up to the doors of the store and waited for Ian. Despite the vague and inexplicable urge to cry, it was all a relief. Because now that there was no more Glenn, and now that Rocky was probably realizing what an awful person I was, there was nothing really to go home to—except Ian, who wasn’t even there but here, coming out of the store with his coat on backward, arms and sleeves tucked up so it looked like his wrists were sprouting from his shoulders. It seemed strange now even to think of Hannibal as home. Chicago was home, the Labaznikov house was a sort of home, and certainly my car was home. Hannibal was a distant memory.

  We went a few more exits, Ian reading aloud to me from the magazine he’d bought with his five dollars—some sort of off-brand teen star-stalker with a photo of a shirtless movie star on the cover, one whose name I didn’t know, although I recognized his scruffy goatee and alarmingly pale eyes. (“What’s a fiancé?” Ian asked. “What’s a rehab?”) Every car had started to look like a police car, every noise sounded like a siren. I wondered if Rocky had taken his suspicions to the Hannibal PD, or if he was working freelance, sorting out the clues on his own. He would have been the one to find the lights on, the one to know how close I was with Ian.

  Ian had collected thirty points in our game for rhyming Lucy with “goosey,” and thirty more for insisting that “librarian” rhymed with “Ian,” when he fell asleep—his head tilted back and his glasses falling down his face. I leaned toward him every few minutes to hear if he was wheezing, but all I heard was the gurgle of someone sleeping with his mouth open.

  Not long after, I noticed a car behind us on the highway that was a copy of mine: powder blue, rusted, Japanese. I thought of waking Ian up to claim my forty-five points, but I was enjoying the quiet and he needed his rest. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman driving—the low sun reflecting off the windshield completely washed out the face—so I couldn’t help but imagine it was a woman who looked like me. My twin—only her greatest guilt wasn’t riding shotgun, her mind wasn’t playing a constant loop of grieving parents and vindictive ex-boyfriends, she wasn’t starring in the next act of her family saga of shame and flight and idiotic idealism.

  After the sun was down I looked for her again, but couldn’t tell if the bright little headlights behind us were hers or not. I didn’t wake Ian until we were pulling into a motel.

  28

  The Emerald State

  The next morning, Ian’s asthma was better. Before we got in the car, I listened with my ear pressed to his back. He couldn’t stop laughing, but what breathing I could make out sounded clear.

  We started toward the wrong car. There, again, with a better parking spot than mine, was a copy of my car, Japanese, powder blue. A man with dark hair and sunglasses reclining in the driver’s seat. When we got on the highway, he did, too. I gave myself a silent lecture about paranoia, and we headed east for a few hours until we finally passed a sign that said “Welcome to the Green Mountain State!” “So,” I said, “what town does your grandmother live in?” It was mean of me, and I don’t know why I did it, except that I was in a rotten mood, and I’d been up all night thinking about my father, alternately enraged at his betrayal and devastated for the guilt he must have carried his whole life, and confused about why Leo Labaznikov had taken it upon himself to fill me in.

  It had been a long time since we’d mentioned Ian’s grandmother outside the Janna Glass fiction, and it took him a second to remember what I was talking about.

  “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t understand at first, because I call her my nana. My grandmother would be my mother’s mother, and my nana is my father’s mother.”

  “Okay. Which town does your nana live in?”

  Suddenly he was screaming at me, his face red. “IF I TELL YOU, YOU’RE GOING TO TAKE ME THERE WITHOUT LETTING ME SEE THE TOURIST ATTRACTIONS!” It was a fake temper tantrum, the kind I’d seen in the library. Not half as scary or real as the one the day we left. He flung his face down onto his own lap, then looked up and whimpered, “I want to see about the Green Mountain Boys.”

  “All right,” I said. His screaming had at least brought me back to the present moment, to the problems at hand, the ones that weren’t forty-seven years in the past and out of my control. “Then where do the Green Mountain Boys live?”

  “Lived. They were in the 1700s. I don’t really know.”

  “Why do you like them so much?”

  “We had to do this report on something about the Revolutionary War. And I wanted to do Betsy Ross, but that was taken.” He was drinking a spinach and apple smoothie, and pretending to like it. We’d managed to find a
health food store out there in the middle of nowhere, a sort of gingko-and-mung-bean oasis. And it worked: I felt extremely healthy, for the first time in days.

  We drove through little towns composed of two or three stores and a handful of houses that had shed most of their paint and started to sag. There were homemade signs hanging on bedsheets from windows: “Take Back Vermont.” I’d heard an NPR story about it that winter, this ongoing grassroots movement against the recent civil union law. They’d played a phone interview with a Burlington resident who’d sounded young and energetic and pierced. He said, “This state is the most happily polarized place in the country. Half the people are way liberal, and the other half are so conservative, it’s like, ‘You can be gay if I can have my guns.’ It’s this sort of balance of extremes.” The angry clots of paint on these weathered sheets looked anything but happy, though. And I remembered that the man on the radio had said his own car bore a bumper sticker reading “Take Vermont from Behind.”

  Right then, Ian asked what the signs meant. I started to make something up, something about the fight against pollution, but I decided to be honest. I’d been looking for opportunities to bring up the subject, and it would be dumb to turn one down. I said, “Vermont is really a good place to live for people who are gay. Like men who are in love with other men. And they even sort of let them get married, in a way, but there are a few angry people who don’t like that. So they made these signs.”

  Ian said, “Those are probably the Christian houses.” I glanced over. He looked proud of the Christian houses, and he also looked like that was going to be the end of the conversation.

  I said, “Well, they might be Christians, but most of the Christians don’t have those signs out. Most of them think people should be happy the way they are. These are the hateful people. Like the Nazis. The Nazis didn’t like gay people, and they sent them to the concentration camps with the Jews.”

  On my mental instant replay, I realized that obliquely comparing his family to the Nazis was maybe not my finest moment.

  He was quiet a second, and then he said, “Did you know that Hitler wanted to be an artist, but since he couldn’t get into art school, he turned into a Nazi?”

  “Yes, I remember that.”

  “Just imagine if he got into art school, the whole world would be different.”

  I said, “It just shows that people should be allowed to be who they are. If they can’t, then they turn into nasty, sad people.”

  He started to laugh. “What if you went to the art gallery, and the guy was like, ‘Here you see a beautiful Monet, and here on your left is an early Hitler.’ Wouldn’t that be weird?”

  I couldn’t think of any subtle way to turn it back around again.

  He said, “You would go to the gift shop and buy Hitler postcards, and you’d go, ‘Oh, look at this beautiful Hitler. I’m going to hang it in my room!’ And people would wear Hitler T-shirts.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That would have been better.”

  Staring at the soft mountains in the distance, thinking about Leo’s “nation of runaways,” I was considering how running away was a childhood rite I’d missed out on—the angry flight to the tree house, the backpack full of candy bars—when I suddenly remembered that I had once run away, or something close to it. I hadn’t thought of it for years, but there I was at ten years old, crouched under my desk. All that morning I’d been down one floor playing with Tamara Finch, and when I came home there was such a silence in the hall, as if the entire building were in a trance, that I wanted to be a part of it. I let myself in as quietly as I could and curled under my desk, where I could look up and watch the snow falling outside in giant flakes. I held a book but didn’t read it. I imagined my grandfather vanishing into the Siberian wilderness. I wasn’t angry at my parents, wasn’t even sad—I just didn’t want to break the spell. Even when they started asking each other if I’d come home, even when they called Mr. Finch, I sat there paralyzed, refusing to exist. It was only when my mother picked up the phone to call the police that I came out of my room, yawning, and told them I’d been asleep under my desk. They couldn’t be mad at me for that, and they weren’t.

  Perhaps if I’d been caught then, if they’d sat me at the table with their hands in their laps and grounded me or cried or hit me with a stick, I might not have ended up in this mess. I’d have learned my lesson the easy way: you can’t disappear. Not in America, not at this late date. You could disappear into a snowy Russian field, I’d thought at one time. (And maybe this was why I’d agreed to drive Ian north, every twenty miles dropping us another degree, every new day bringing more ancient, packed heaps of roadside snow.) But no, even that was a lie. There was no more Siberia. There was no more dropping off the face of the earth.

  We stopped around dusk in Bennington because Ian remembered something from his report about a Battle of Bennington. Downtown was closed up already, and there was no one around to ask. A foldout flyer we picked up at a gas station said there was a Revolutionary War museum in town, but when I said we could wait until the next morning, he didn’t seem too excited. “I don’t really love museums, because I’m scared of setting off the alarm.” I wondered if he cared at all about the Green Mountain Boys, or if it was just the only thing he knew about Vermont. We took the flyer, bought some snacks, and Ian bought a pair of green-framed, green-lensed “I L♥VERMONT” sunglasses with what was left of his own money.

  We drove just a little more, up north, and stopped at a hotel on the block-long Main Street of a town we never learned the name of. The floors were slanted and hollow sounding, and Ian convinced himself the place was haunted. We were the only people staying there, but while we had dinner in the bar downstairs, the place started to fill up. They were all looking at us, but it was probably just because we weren’t local, or because Ian insisted on wearing the sunglasses over his regular glasses throughout the entire meal so his milk would look green.

  I found I was hungry, for the first time since we arrived at the Labaznikovs’. Hungry and tired and cold, despite all the junk I’d eaten since we set out, despite cranking the hotel thermostat up to eighty every night, despite the adrenaline and caffeine that had replaced my blood. I wanted to eat warm bread and wrap myself in blankets and go to sleep. I wanted to eat an entire blueberry pie. I suppose I felt homesick, but it was unclear what home I was sick for. One that didn’t exist.

  On Monday, the bewildered librarian and the very strange child had a 3 Musketeers bar, a Coke, some Pringles, a greasy pepperoni pizza, and two cheeseburgers. But they kept driving.

  On Tuesday, they had six powdered doughnuts, two pale fast food salads, some spinach ravioli with marinara, and a pilfered bottle of expensive Syrah. But they kept driving.

  On Wednesday, they had two plates of eggs, six glasses of orange juice, two large cherry-flavored Slushees, one BLT with frilly toothpicks, one quesadilla, several pocketed restaurant mints, and one cigarette. But they kept driving.

  On Thursday, they had two doughnuts, a cup of orange juice with two creamer packets added “for texture,” twelve Oreos, two turkey sandwiches, Marta Labaznikov’s spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread, and an inordinate amount of coffee. But they kept driving.

  On Friday, they had some Canadian bacon, eggs scrambled with vegetables, cheese, bread, jam, peanut butter, salami, milk, mustard and beer (which is how Russians, apparently, eat breakfast in America), two milkshakes, sandwiches, four Tylenols, and some M&M’s. That night, they felt like crap.

  The next day was Saturday. They drank two organic green smoothies and felt marginally healthier.

  And that was all. They did not construct an impenetrable chrysalis.

  They failed to metamorphose. They failed to fly away.

  We had agreed earlier to save money by sharing a room that night, as long as I promised never to tell Ian to turn off his reading light and go to sleep. I was willing to accept that if I were put on trial, the rooming arrangement really wasn’t going to make or break
me. And it had turned out to be a lot easier, checking into one room. We seemed more like mother and son to the very talkative woman at the desk, who asked Ian what grade he was in and what was the name of his school. (“Saint Mary’s School of the Church of God,” he answered. “Wasn’t that good?” he said later. “So she would think I’m Catholic.”)

  At eight thirty, after we’d eaten our dinners and two whole baskets of bread, I walked Ian up to the room and then decided I wanted nothing more than to go back downstairs and get drunk. Not so drunk that I would start telling everyone in the place what I was doing there, but drunk enough that for maybe a minute or two at a time, I could forget about what was happening back home, why Rocky had called Glenn, what Loraine had told the police, whether the Drakes were five miles behind us with a state trooper. I told Ian I was going to make phone calls.

  I sat at the end of the bar, and I took the small spiral notebook and pen out of my purse and put them in front of me on the counter, as if I were busy making a list—an old trick to keep friendly strangers away. I turned my stool so I could see the rest of the room. The men were all extremely skinny, and the women wore fleeces halfway to their knees. The bartender was the same woman who’d checked us in, with her big blue cardigan, a yellow bird stitched over the left breast. I ordered a vodka tonic, and then another. In the corner of the room, facing away from me, was a man who didn’t seem to fit the room. His black hair was slicked back, and he wore a dark blazer. I tried to angle myself to see his face, but all I could see was his plate of chicken fingers, sitting untouched on the table, and his very expensive new phone resting next to that. I turned as slowly as I could to the window that looked out over the lamp-lit gravel parking lot. There was my car, but not where I’d parked it. And not with my license plate. It was a Pennsylvania plate, with that keystone thing in the middle.