by Zhanna Slor
“That’s not true. The only real indicator of a lie is a microexpression. You’re better off looking at eyebrows than eye direction.” Tristan takes a long drag from the cigarette, then looks down at the floor. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. If you don’t want to do this, fine...”
“I’m not the police,” I say. I point down at myself, my dirty black skinny jeans and David’s extra IDF shirt I always sleep in, my unwashed hair. “If that’s not obvious.”
Tristan takes another long drag from the cigarette, watching me. He seems nervous now, and begins slowly backing away towards the kitchen door. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I watch his eyebrows, but they don’t move. Still, I know he’s lying.
“Wait here for one second,” I tell him. I cross the checkered laminate floor to the kitchen drawers, looking through them until I find a marker and an old Center St. Daze flyer with a white back. I write down my temporary number along with the message, in Russian, “Call me ASAP. - M.” “Give this to Anastasia. Okay? No harm in that.”
He looks down at it, then at me, his eyebrows furrowing, for a brief second, then straightening again. Is this the micro-expression he mentioned? Because what I saw there was confusion, for sure. Then something clicks in his head, and his shoulders relax for the first time. He puts the note in his back pocket.
“You should really talk to a therapist, lady,” he says. He turns back for a moment, and I’m pretty sure he winks at me. “Or your dad,” he adds, quietly. Then Tristan opens the door and disappears speedily down the hallway.
MASHA
________________
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I take another one of the cigarettes and head out to the porch to smoke it. The interaction with Tristan has frazzled me to the core. I feel lost and triumphant at the same time, somehow. Was he trying to tell me to talk to my dad about Anna? Or did he think I was crazy and that I needed to talk to someone related to me? I’d spoken to my dad plenty. It’s my mom that I need to reach. But every time I call, her cell goes straight to voicemail, because this not answering the phone thing is some kind of genetic plague. Why did any of us even bother to get phones in the first place? I cannot help but wonder. We either hate them or cannot live without them or both.
Emily was probably right. I shouldn’t have stayed in an apartment with so many ghosts. Everywhere I look, I see June’s face, her giant eyelashes, the little mole on her cheek. I knew she was depressed. But I had no idea how much. I thought she was like everyone else in Riverwest, a standard mixture of high school angst with a dash of rebellion more superficial than not. She was a poet, so it wasn’t exactly unusual. She was a great poet actually. I still remember some of her poems, but especially the one that she wrote and printed on our tack board right before she died:
Love is a siren song.
Chasing a shadow in dim
alleyways
for every night to lose its
darkness.
“You’re beautiful,” they say
and tomorrow
push another tiny brunette against a
pale wall.
At the time, I thought she had written it about Liam, who I’d been dating for several months. He was a common topic of conversation in our house then. It was a wild animal, what we had; one day it was eating you alive, the next licking your wounds. It took me a while to learn that wasn’t what a relationship was supposed to be. I think June would have learned that too, had she stuck around. She had a thing for lost causes. I guess I did too, as we did briefly end up dating the same guy. Antonio. The beginning of the end. In a way it was my fault, for bringing him in the house. Of course I didn’t know at the time what would happen, that after he was done confusing me for two months, he would meet his match in emotional imprisonment.
Later, after the funeral and the wake and weeks of confusion, I looked at that poem again and I wondered: am I the other tiny brunette? Was the poem a message to me? Right before June died, after some fight with Liam, I’d hooked up with Antonio again; some silly drunken thing that meant nothing, I’d been over the guy for months. It’s easy to get over someone when you let them live with you for free and then they start dating your roommate. Especially when they’re bipolar and spend much of their time yelling at you. The problem was that Antonio was hot. And I was drinking too much at the time. No one went the committed route in Riverwest, so I didn’t have a clue that Antonio was cheating on her.
Sometimes I wonder if Antonio felt at all responsible—at times I definitely felt responsible, how could I not, when all my friends saw it that way? But I was pretty sure he wasn’t capable of taking responsibility for anything, let alone a person’s need to harm herself. I don’t really blame him, personally. Only a romance novel is about a romance, and our lives are not romance novels. In fact, they aren’t like novels at all. If anything, a life is a room filled with scattered pages. Sure, you could try to deconstruct and organize, but what’s the point? Discovering something isn’t the same as changing it. A feeling can be written about, can be painted, can be sung. The question is what to do about that feeling before it consumes you. How to stop having such feelings in the first place. This was never something June could figure out; any tiny little thing that went wrong would consume her for weeks on end. It wasn’t our fault, what happened, logically I know this. She was a troubled person from the start. She always said writing poetry was her therapy. I’d believed her because it was this way for me too. But she should probably have actually gone to treatment as well, instead of spending weeks on end re-watching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the computer and drinking by herself when she got depressed.
You can’t get out of that deep a hole alone; that was one of the main metaphorical points I’d retrieved from watching season six with her. Buffy, I had to admit, was not only a great distraction but a pretty good motivation tool. Buffy was why I’d had the idea to try martial arts in the first place. Kickboxing, originally. Then Krav Maga once I got to Israel and learned enough Hebrew to follow directions. Somehow all the show did to June was make her more lethargic. It was like she didn’t want to get better. The only reason I could come up with when I occasionally tried to come up with a reason beyond laziness, was that part of her must have craved the sorrow, so ubiquitous it came to feel like a friend. To her, sadness was like a drug. And for whatever reason, June didn’t want to stop being sad. I never did find out why. As much time as she’d spent writing her feelings into words, she did not leave a suicide note. Just that poem.
I wipe my eyes, realizing they’re wet. As I said, I never think about June. There’s a reason for that. Weirdly, this is followed by an unquenchable need to talk to my mom, so I take out my phone and try calling her again for the third or fourth time since my arrival. In a few hours, the sun would fall, and it would be Shabbat, which meant I could no longer use my phone. If we are ever going to talk it has to be now.
A throat clearing, then a fuzzy “Hello?”
“Mama?”
“Masha? Is that you?”
I let out a sigh of relief. “Finally. I was starting to get worried,” I breathe. “I tried calling you a few times.”
“About what?” my mom asks, in Russian. Her voice sounds distant, muffled even. Like after she’s had too much wine, or woken up from a late nap. “Is everything OK? Whose phone number is this?”
“Yeah, it’s fine, I just... I haven’t talked to you since I got here and it feels weird—”
“Got here? Where?”
“Milwaukee,” I say, slowly. “Are you telling me that you didn’t know that?”
A pause from the other end of the phone. “I’m in New Jersey.”
A long breath of air escapes my mouth unexpectedly, and I have to close it before it turns into a cry. How extremely strange. My dad had definitely left that out when summoning me here. I had been so looking forward to seeing her. “What are you doing
in New Jersey?”
“Oh...it’s a long story.”
“Can I hear this story?”
“Have you talked to your sister?”
“No, that’s kind of—” I pause, suddenly unsure if my mom even knows Anastasia is missing. There seems to be a lot of miscommunication going on here, and I don’t want to make things worse. And why hadn’t my dad mentioned to me that she was out of town?
“Talk to her, please,” Mama says.
If only I could, I want to say aloud, but don’t. “Where are you exactly?” I ask.
She clears her throat again. “I’m visiting Svetlana. I’ve been here for a little while. How long are you staying?”
I swallow. “Um. I’m not sure,” I say. “I’m kinda bummed. I mean, I know I’ve been hard to reach lately, but...Anyway, Papa didn’t tell me you were out of town.”
More silence. Something is wrong, I can feel it. She sounds…what, sad? Distant? I can’t quite put my finger on it. My mother is usually a very severe person. This woman seems emotional. How strange of her to travel to New Jersey in the middle of the week, too. Maybe Tristan was right after all, and the clue I needed has been under my nose this whole time. My dad is obviously keeping something from me. “Is Sveta okay?”
“Mashinka, I’m so sorry, but I have to go. Can I call you back later?” She pauses for a moment, then adds, “It’s so good to hear your voice, honey. I’ll call you back soon.”
And before I could finish saying “It’s Shabbat today,” my mom drops the call.
I call her back, but it goes straight to voicemail. So I leave one. “Mom, in case you forgot, it’s Friday, which means in three hours I’m turning off this phone and you won’t be able to get a hold of me. Please call me tomorrow night if that happens. Also, I hope everything is okay! I miss you. Bye.”
I hang up the phone, which blinks at me in orange, a sign of low battery. I don’t even bother getting my charger. I am all out of words. All I can think is:
What.
The.
Hell.
MASHA
________________
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When I get into my dad’s car an hour later, he looks peeved. My shoes are soaked, and my muscles are sore from spending the time between calling him and his arrival walking around the slushy streets of Riverwest. There’s a Parisian word for this sort of aimless ambling—flâner. It refers to the art of leisurely strolling the streets of Paris without any goal or destination simply for the pleasure of soaking up the city’s beauty. These aimless pedestrians are known as “flâneurs.” I’m not sure what you’d call a person who does this in Riverwest—besides, perhaps, careless—but it did not help. I’m still as in shock as I was before, only colder.
“I was in the middle of cooking,” my dad is saying in Russian. There’s more, but I’m too spacey to listen. “What was so urgent that you had to come home right this second? You find Anna?”
I put a hand on the gear shift and don’t let him move it out of park. “Why is Mama in New Jersey?” I ask in Russian.
My dad sucks in some air between his teeth. “Oh.” I think he is about to deny it, make up some excuse to appease me, but instead he digs into his pocket and lights a cigarette. Then he moves my hand away and begins driving, heading west down Center Street then turning right on Fratney. We pass an array of multi-colored Polish flats with wraparound porches and balconies. I’ve been inside at least seven of them, though I’m not sure any would still have the same residents. Although, I’d assumed that about Liam too, and had been wrong. Maybe Milwaukee really is quicksand, just like I’d always thought. “That’s, uh...long story.”
“Can someone please tell me this long story?”
“There are things... that have been going on here the last few months.”
“I can see that,” I tell him. “Don’t you think you might have mentioned that to me before I came here? Shto sloochelas?”
My dad turns his head toward the window, then itches his neck with his cigarette hand.
“Papa?” I start. “Does it have anything to do with the fact that you’re smoking again?”
For whatever reason, Papua New Guinea is full of languages with untranslatable words. My favorite one is Mokita, a Kivila word for the truth everyone knows but agrees not to talk about. It makes me wonder. What would Anastasia tell me if I found her? Here I’d thought this whole ordeal was about her disappearing, but it’s not, not really. There’s something else. Something that has to do with my parents, with my mom being in New Jersey. If that’s the case, perhaps I should let her be.
“Papa! Talk to me, or I’m getting on a plane home right now.”
Finally, Papa sinks into the seat, unstiffening. Then he takes a deep breath. “Well. Actually, your mom…uh, she needed break. She went to see your aunt,” he explains in English now.
“Yeah. I got that part. What did she need a break from?”
“From me.”
“Don’t you think that would have been important information to give me before I got here?” I ask. “No wonder Anna just up and disappeared.” No wonder she has resorted to stealing, I think. It could have been worse; when the world falls out from under you, it takes a lot of will power not to grab onto the first thing you catch on your way down—and she’s young and sensitive and newly involved with this blue-haired thief. I think of the French term, l’appel du vide: literally translated to “the call of the void”; contextually used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places. Or low places, depending on how you look at it. I know from experience that the call of the void comes easier than you might imagine. One little change can send anyone reeling, if they’re not standing on solid ground.
“Look. Masha. It doesn’t change facts. She gone and I’m not finding her.”
“It does, though. Obviously, something happened, and she decided to leave for a reason. It’s not just your general nineteen-year-old angst, which you have quite purposely lead me to believe,” I say. I pause, and inhale a deep smoky breath, before coughing. My dad opens the window, despite being on the highway, so that I almost have to scream my next question. “So what on earth did you do to make Mama leave?”
My dad licks his lips, which are chapped to the point of peeling, and glances over at me before his eyes turn back to the dashboard again. I can’t explain precisely what I catch there in his glance; it looks like guilt, but if it is, there are too many other things crowding it out. It must have been pretty bad if my dad feels guilty. He’s not someone who says sorry often, if ever. No matter the outcomes, he always thinks he’s right. Maybe I imagined it anyway; after that split second, it’s gone. He takes the next highway exit, and the car quiets a little.
“Did your sister ever mentioned woman named Zoya?” he finally asks me.
I think about this. The name sounds familiar, I’d met a few in Israel—one a Russian model, one an elderly widow—but I don’t recall hearing the name from Anna. We haven’t talked in weeks, months maybe, and when we did, it wasn’t about any specific person. I’m pretty sure I would remember that. “No? But we kept missing each other the last few months. The time difference…Well, it’s mostly my fault. I was so busy. I should have made it a priority to talk to her.”
Before I can ask what any of that has to do with my mom flying to New Jersey or Anna going who-knows-where, my dad turns into a cul-de-sac of identical condos and pulls into the driveway of a plain orange brick house with a simple gray roof. Once more I can’t help but wonder why on earth they chose to move here, of all places. It’s even worse than the house in Hartland. At least there, we had tons of neighbors, with big houses that all looked sort of different. And trees. Rosebushes. Dogs playing in yards. Here, it’s so…. Quiet. Empty. The middle of nowhere, basically. It reminds me of a saying in Hebrew: B’sof Ha’olam Smolla. At the end of the world, turn left. It’s slang for the middle of nowhere, so it definitely applies to suburban Wisconsin, but I th
ink there’s another level of looking at it that is less literal, a layer of unintended meaning. Metaphorically speaking, it could entail starting a new life; which, there’s no doubt about it, all the members of my family have done at least once, if not more. Even I’ve done it. Maybe Anna is just following in our footsteps.
“Did you find out if Anna is dating guy?” my dad says, finally, in lieu of an explanation. “You know how young girls are. Remember Nick? He made you…what is word? Goth.”
“He did not make me goth,” I say, stifling a laugh. “First of all, it was punk, and secondly, no one made me do anything. I liked it and Nick just happened to be around.” I pivot toward the real issue. “So…who is Zoya?”
My dad ignores me and continues along. “She’s very impressionable. If she’s gone, she’s with the guy.” He turns off the car but continues to sit there, silently, while AM 620 plays around us, staring ahead into the garage; several large packages of bottled water, shovels hanging from hooks, bikes and toolboxes that haven’t been used in years.
“But why did you mention—” I start, but am interrupted by my phone ringing. Hoping it’s my mom, or David—or maybe even Anna—I don’t hesitate in answering.
“Hello? David?”
Usually, an unknown number means David. But if it is David, he would be saying something. I think I can hear breathing on the other end of the line, but no words. In that case, it’s probably not David. I open the passenger-side door and cover my mouth with a hand when I get out. I whisper, “Anna?”
But I never learn who it is that’s calling. Whoever it is drops the receiver, and when I try calling back I only get an error, like the number doesn’t really exist. The only time that ever happens is when David calls me from internet cafés in Europe. The program he uses automatically creates a fake number in order to connect via phone line and not Wi-Fi. If it was David on the other end, and he had encountered technical difficulties, then he would call back. There’s no reason to worry, or panic. And yet, my stomach begins turning in knots. Maybe my dad is right and Anna is with Tristan, like I originally thought. But maybe there’s something else going on altogether. What if she’s in trouble? Or worse?
