“I don’t know,” Anton said. He had good grace not to add, You wanted this. “Maybe she needs to see a doctor.”
Claudia’s fingers ran through the girl’s hair absently. “Maybe.”
Tina did not like the idea of leaving the house—she kicked when they loaded her into the car and strapped her down in a plastic safety seat. She bit Anton’s arm as he buckled the seatbelt over her. Two crescent wounds swelled with blood. He frowned and got into the driver’s seat.
Claudia looked out of the window at the fluffy clouds littering the sky and kept quiet. She did not want to admit that Anton was right, and stubbornly hoped that things would work out. They just had to.
They had to wait in the reception area, and Claudia blushed and lowered her head under the disapproving eyes of the receptionist and a few parents. Tina twisted and hissed, slid off her chair as if she had no bones, and tried to bang her head on the coffee table, littered with colorful fans of magazines.
“Shh,” Claudia whispered, and held Tina’s head. “It’s all right, it’s all right.”
Anton stared at the wall opposite him, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He wanted nothing to do with either of them, and didn’t even try to hide it.
When they were finally called in, Claudia had to resist an urge to jerk Tina by her arm, just drag her along like a floppy doll. Instead, she carried her. The girl tried to slide through her arms like soap.
The doctor, a nice young woman just a little older than Claudia, listened to her sympathetically, every now and again giving Tina a penetrating look. Tina still hissed, but remained still in the cocoon formed by Claudia’s arms and lap, squirming only occasionally.
The doctor told them that Tina had an autism spectrum disorder—they were not sure exactly which one. “But they are pretty similar,” the doctor said.
Anton spoke for the first time since they got there. “Can you fix it?”
“Unfortunately, no,” the young doctor said. “There are therapies that can help her adjust. We can teach her to relate to other people.”
“But she’s not going to get better,” Anton said, standing up. He turned to Claudia. “Let’s go.”
The doctor gave him a card. “This is our behavioral therapy center,” she said. “You may want to check it out.”
As they were leaving, the doctor caught Claudia’s sleeve. “She’s in your foster care, correct?”
Claudia nodded. “What does it have to do with anything?”
“There are institutions for autistic children,” the doctor said. “The state will take care of it if you need it.”
“Thanks,” Anton said, and left.
“The book said she would become human.” Anton paced across the kitchen floor, and when he turned his shoes squeaked on the polished tiles.
“She did,” Claudia said, in a whisper, afraid to wake up Tina, who napped on the floor by the kitchen table. “It’s not her fault that she’s ill.” She sat down next to the child, running her fingers through the wisps of her light hair, all signs of the cross shorn into it obliterated by the new willful growth. It’s my fault, Claudia thought. I wanted to make her human, and I broke her.
Tina shifted in her sleep, and uttered a wordless whimper. “Don’t worry,” Claudia said to her, even though the girl could neither hear nor understand her. “We’re not giving you away. You’re ours now.”
Anton sat on the floor next to them, watching Tina as if she were an exotic animal, impossible to comprehend. Claudia supposed she was, just like everyone else. She was grateful that her husband put in an effort, at least. Most didn’t bother at all.
“Her hair is growing back,” Claudia said. “Do you think it’ll make a difference?”
Anton shrugged and yawned. “Let’s go to bed.”
She tucked the blanket around Tina and followed him to the bedroom. Both of them lay sleepless, listening to the small tired noises houses make at night. They heard Tina waking up and whimpering, then her shuffling footsteps across the kitchen floor, the clicking of the screen door latch.
The screen door banged in the wind. Anton shifted but didn’t get up. Claudia balled the sheet in her fist as she heard the angry clucking of chickens and a small, halting voice. “One, two, three,” Tina counted and laughed. “One, two, three.” Then the clicking of the bobbins started, portending a disaster.
YOU DREAM
This is a recurring dream, the kind that lingers, and lately it has become more frequent. And it takes a while to realize that you are not, in fact, standing in front of the brick apartment building, its doorway cavernous and warm, your hands in your pockets, cigarette smoke leaking slowly between your lips and into the frozen air. It takes you a while to even remember that you’ve quit smoking years ago. And yet, here it is, clinging to the collar of your winter coat in a persistent, suffocating cloud, and you can taste it still.
It takes you even longer to remember why you dreamt about this building on the outskirts of Moscow—that you used to live there, but this is not why; you’re there because of the boy who used to live in the same building but the other entrance. You cannot remember his name or whether you were really friends or just nodded at each other, passing by like boats in the lonely concrete sea of the yard, a fringe of consumptive poplars looking nothing like the palms of the tropical isles neither of you were ever likely to see. You know, though, that there was never any unpleasant physicality between the two of you, even after you learned to throw your body between yourself and whomever was trying to get too close.
You sit up in your bed and want a smoke, and whisper to yourself, It was never sex. Never. It was a defensive reflex, the same as a lizard that aborts its tail and escapes while some predator dumbly noses around the mysteriously wriggling appendage. You’d learned to do it with your entire body, and only the spirit escaped, not watching from the distance, running instead for the hills and the razor slash of the distant horizon. It was always about escaping.
Anyway, the boy: as far as you can recall, he had an average and pale face, he was short and slouched, his hands always in the pockets of his ratty hand-me-down winter coat, too short for him. His straight dark hair was always falling ungracefully across his forehead, and the only thing even remotely remarkable about him was the fact that even in the deadest winter cold his eyes remained warm and soft and brown, and he looked at everything with the same subdued delight. Finding oneself in the diffuse cone of his nearsighted gaze was both disconcerting and comforting, since he seemed to be the only person in the entire universe who honestly didn’t want anything from you.
You try to remember what happened to him—you think vaguely that he died as a teen after being drafted, died somewhere in Chechnya; or maybe it was his older brother, and the boy just disappeared one day. Maybe he is still there, at his old apartment, and the memory of his death is a confabulated excuse for not having kept in touch. That seems likely.
It’s time to get up anyway, and you stare out the window; you’ve moved from the grey suburbs to the sort-of center, near the Moscow River’s bend, where it is somewhat less grey and the lights of opulence are visible across the river. You try to be satisfied with your lot in life, but discontent lingers, so you eye your pantyhose, tangled and twisted into a noose, and your short skirt, the one you’re getting too old for, and you keep getting a sneaking suspicion that your immediate boss feels the same way and soon enough he’ll trade you for a newer model, like he does with his BMWs.
So you call in sick. No one minds since there’s yet another economic crisis in progress, and chances are no one will be paid until right before the New Year. And they can type their own damn reports, those twelve managers and only two of you to do the actual work. It doesn’t matter. You dig through your wardrobe and find half-forgotten woolly tights, scratchy and severe and thick, and a long gabardine skirt with a broken zipper, which you fix with a safety pin. You wrap your head in the flowery kerchief every Russian woman owns—even if she never bought one, it was given as a gift, or, barring all normal means of acquisition, spontaneously generated in her apartment. You suspect that yours is one of those, an immaculately gotten kerchief with fat cabbage roses on a velvet-black background with tangled fringe.
It is warmer outside than you expected, what with the dreams of winter and whatnot, but the wind is still
