Rose Sees Red (13 page)

“Free,” Yrena said. “I have something to tell you. I will be back in Moscow on Friday.”

“What?” he said.

“I am moving back home to Moscow,” Yrena said.

“This is her only day out,” I said, trying to come to Yrena’s rescue. She smiled at me, and I could tell she appreciated it.

“Really?” Free said. “You’re going back to the USSR?”

“Da,”
she said. “Friday.”

“So, like, you’re not someone who defected? You’re, like, really Russian?” Free said.

“I am not a defector. I’m a Soviet citizen,” Yrena said.

“Wow. I thought you were just an immigrant or something,” he said.

“No. I am a Soviet citizen.”

Caleb came back out and came straight up to me.

“That was lame,” he said. “I was lame. No one even cared about our piece.”

“I cared,” I said.

“I know,” he said. And then he smiled at me. “Friends?”

I nodded.

“Let’s go see some of the bands,” I said. Then I turned to
Free, who had just come up for air after kissing Yrena some more. “I thought you had a whole big group coming from Science.”

“Nope,” Free said. “I’m the only one who showed up. I have a social conscience.”

“I can’t believe you actually found us,” I said.

“I talked to a cop and he said there are at least five hundred thousand people here,” Free said.

“That is a lot of people,” I said.

“Yes, but we found you,” Yrena said. “We were looking for you!”

“Do you think this is what Woodstock was like?” Callisto asked. We started walking toward the Great Lawn.

“My parents took me to Woodstock,” Free said.

“Really?” Caleb said. “That’s kind of cool.”

“What is Woodstock?” Yrena asked Free.

“It was a three-day rock concert,” Free explained.

“A big love-in,” Callisto said.

“Love-in. I like that,” Yrena said.

“At least your parents went to Woodstock. My dad’s a jazz musician; he doesn’t know anything about rock and roll,” Caleb said.

“Yeah, my parents are a mess, but they love rock and roll. They’re both here at this protest. Just not together.”

I realized that I liked my parents and my family. They were not extreme. They were not clueless. They were not
cool, but they were not uncool. They were normal. In the middle. Just fine. That made me kind of happy. Like, at least I didn’t have to worry about having crappy parents.

James Taylor started to sing, and I leaned back into Caleb’s chest. I don’t know why I did it, but I did, and then he had his arms around my waist. Maurice and Callisto were dancing in time to the music. Callisto knew the words to the song and so she was singing along, but she was doing it low and in Maurice’s ear. I noticed that Yrena and Free were hovering near each other, and then I watched as Free did the pin on Yrena as she leaned up against a tree that we were next to.

I was with a group of people who I thought could be my real friends.

A man got onstage and said, “Three thousand of you have silver ballons. On those balloons it says G
OOD
-
BYE
, N
UCLEAR
W
EAPONS
.”

Everyone cheered.

“All together now, starting on ten,” he said.

After the crowd counted down, we let go of the two balloons we had, and they joined the thousands of other balloons that rose and floated into the air like a reverse snow. They floated up into the gray day.

We all breathed in and out as one as we watched them become smaller and smaller until they were impossible to see in the sky. We hoped with all our might that we really were
saying good-bye to nuclear bombs. Because that would have been the best news.

More people got on the stage and gave speeches. One of them told us exactly what would happen if a nuclear bomb hit Central Park right that minute. It would vaporize everyone within six miles.

It was terrible.

Why did we have weapons that could do that? It was inhuman.

We were trembling.

We wanted to do something that would make us feel better.

And just in the moment when I felt surrounded by friends, the music started again. There I was in the arms of a cute boy, happier than I’d ever been. You had to embrace life in order to fight death. You had to grab hold of joy in order to fend off destruction. You had dance wildly instead of standing still.

At the moment when I felt right with everything, when the music in my heart was just right, I knew what I had to do.

“Yrena, I have to tell you something,” I said.

And then I told her about the news report. And about talking to my brother on the phone. And about the clicks.

She stood there and she stared at me. Her eyes got a faraway look in them.

Yrena nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I suspected that would happen.”

“We should go home soon,” I said.

Yrena nodded, and I didn’t feel anxious anymore.

Rita Marley took the stage and began to sing. Her voice slipped around us with love and peace.

The last song that was sung as they closed the protest was “Give Peace a Chance.” We sang and swayed, everyone’s voices lifting to the sky like wishes. My friends and I were all arms and limbs and togetherness as we sung. I stood closest to Caleb and Yrena. I couldn’t tell where my body started and where theirs ended.

And then it was done.

“Time to go home,” I said.

We left the park with all the others, and there was such a sense of camaraderie between us all. Not just me and my new friends, but between me and the whole world.

As Yrena and I climbed on to the 1 train heading back to the Bronx, it was almost as though we had forgotten that it was forever good-bye.

The thing was, saying good-bye is actually too hard. So sometimes you just don’t. You just keep listening to the music. You just keep swaying side to side. You just keep going until the day is over. I couldn’t see how a person said good-bye when it was forever good-bye. It would be slow and sad. It would be painful and foggy. It made no sense. Like being underwater. Or seeing things flicker and extinguish.

We were tired. We wanted to go home. We talked all the way about everything that had happened that night. About what we could do to top it. About how we would hang out every single day before she left. About Free’s kisses and about Caleb’s holding my hand on the way through the crowd.

When we got to the bottom of our street, humming one of the Pete Seeger songs, trying to remember the words, and looking for a stick of gum in our purses because we realized we hadn’t brushed our teeth in over a day, we learned that going home wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought.

They were waiting to grab us as soon as we came in sight of them.

Men in suits.

We didn’t see them at first. All I heard was a word: “You!” Then a snap as one of these men, CIA by his eyebrows, unhooked something from his belt. At first I thought it was his gun, but then I saw that he was speaking into his walkie-talkie.

“I’ve got them,” he said.

There was then some Russian spoken by one of the other men, softly, like the lullaby that Yrena had sung to us. It was Yrena. She was talking to me, telegraphing a message.

“But I don’t understand,” I said.

“Da,”
she said, and turned. “Take off your shoes.”

She was taking off her shoes, stepping out of them. I did the same because she had asked me to.

“We’re just going home,” I said as the next pair of suits
approached us. They were not smiling. They were angry and yelling in Russian. They seemed to be in disagreement with the first pair of suits about who had authority.

“We live just up the street,” I said. I was trying to be helpful. But the suits closest to me put their fingers in my face, shushing me.

The man closest to me nodded to the other men—KGB, if I went by his eyebrows—who were escorting Yrena away from me.

No one noticed about our shoes. Yrena was walking barefoot up the hill. She looked back over her shoulder to me and smiled.

“Come with me, please,” the man who stayed with me said. His arm was holding my shoulder so tightly, I couldn’t go in any other direction than where he led me.

I had to Nancy Drew what she was trying to tell me with that look. I wanted to tell her that she was leaving her shoes behind, but something stopped me when I stared at the shoes. In hers I could see the piece of paper with the address the waiter had given her, folded up and springing out from under the tongue like a small ladder stopped by the laces.

“Can I get my shoes?” I asked.

The man nodded and we went to retrieve my shoes. I slipped Yrena’s on my feet. They were too big and I had to clench my toes to keep them on as I walked.

Isn’t it funny how you could know a person for fewer than twenty-four hours and know everything about them? Know someone better than you’ve ever known anyone? Know when they are being themselves or not? Know someone better than you even know yourself?

They came and took us away from each other and interviewed us separately.

They asked me so many questions.

“How long have you known her?”

“Who instigated the incident?”

“Did she force you to go along with her?”

“Would you say that you were under duress?”

“Would you say that you felt your life was in danger?”

“So you don’t really know her at all?”

I wanted to say:

“I’ve known her for forever.”

“We both decided to have an adventure together!”

“We are not our countries!”

But the lawyer said I should keep my mouth shut. He said that it would be better for me to emphasize that I had only met her on Friday.

So that’s what I did.

And that’s what made me a traitor.

After it was all over, the CIA let my parents and my brother into the interrogation room.

“Why didn’t you girls just come home right away?” Now it was my dad who was interrogating me. The lines in his forehead when he furrowed his brow were so deep, they looked like canals.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The truth was that we were never
not
going to go home. We kept meaning to go home, and then it just got later and later. And then it got harder and harder. And at some point during all that, we started to have fun. But how do you say that? How do you say that staying out had suddenly become more important than the consequences? Because it was the only time. It was the only night.

Nobody understood that.

I wanted to tell them that I would never give that night up because even though I was going to be in more trouble than I had ever known, I had made friends for life.

But my mom must have known that, because she sat next to me and smoothed my hair and smiled at me.

“What did you girls do?” she asked.

“We went to a party,” I said. “We went to a party and we had fun.”

“That’s what you keep saying,” my dad intoned.

It didn’t matter if I said it a million times. It didn’t matter if it was true. I felt like he was never going to believe me. He was never going to let me forget the fact that the authorities were in his house, questioning him and his politics that morning. That he was just a guy who didn’t vote for Reagan, who fell asleep during the eleven o’clock news, and who didn’t ever think about or want to think about the Cold War as being something that affected him in any way.

“Dan, relax,” my mom said. “Rose is okay.”

I laid my head on the table.

“I’m done talking,” I said.

“Rose,” she said, “you girls did the right thing by coming home.”

“I really never meant to be any trouble,” I said.

“I know, baby,” my mom said, and hugged me again. She put her arms around me and held me tight, like she loved me something fierce.

I looked up at my dad and it looked like he wanted to say something to me. It looked like he wanted to say
I’m sorry.

I took my sweater off the back of the chair and lost my balance a little as I stood up.

My brother caught my elbow and helped me keep steady.

Just like he was at the bus stop, he was there to walk me out of the federal building.

I was free to go. I was on my way home.

The CIA drove me and my family back to my house in Riverdale.

I couldn’t bear to look at my parents, and even Todd knew to let me be, so I looked outside the window and stared out across the river at New Jersey. The George Washington Bridge flew by. Cars were going places. A Circle Line boat was sailing on the Hudson River, full of tourists. People were just doing their thing.

One day you could be a normal girl. In America. Free. Your blood ran red, white, and blue. And then Monday morning, you were alluded to in the
New York Times
as an “unspecified international incident.”

My parents were deathly quiet next to me and I knew I would never be the same.

I was still a ballerina. That would never change. And somehow I was surer of it than before. I was a ballerina.

But I was also a girl who was under suspicion of consorting with an enemy of the state.

I looked out my window across the driveway at Yrena’s house. I thought it was going to be dark and empty, like they’d been removed in the middle of the night, but the light was on in Yrena’s room.

I could see that it was full of boxes and everything looked bare.

I thought maybe she wasn’t there. I thought maybe she was already gone halfway across the world. I decided that I wouldn’t draw my curtains closed. I just kept looking over at her window, wondering what she was doing. If she was okay. If she was in a lot of trouble. If she was thinking about me. And then suddenly she walked into her room. I was just standing there, surprised to see her. I wondered if she would look up. There was no way to yell over at her without getting us both into trouble. There were suits stationed in front of both of our houses.

Finally she did it. She looked up.

I waved. So did she. We smiled. But it broke my heart. We couldn’t even say anything to each other. This was terrible. Then I got an idea. I motioned for her to wait a second. She nodded that she would. I got a marker and a stack of paper.

ARE YOU OK
? I wrote it down and pressed the note up against the glass, hoping that she could read it. Hoping that she could see it. Hoping that she could read English as well as she spoke it.

She smiled and nodded.

DO YOU GO HOME TOMORROW
?

She nodded.

I copied down the Cyrillic from the paper in the shoe, hoping that she could read it.

She gave me a thumbs-up.

I wrote again.

I’M SO GLAD THAT WE BECAME FRIENDS
.

She bobbed her head up and down furiously. I could see that she was crying. She blew me some kisses. I blew her some, too. I saw her turn her head and say something. Then I saw her mom walk into the room. Her mom looked out the window and saw me. I saw her face soften, like she felt bad, but she had to do what she had to do.

I waved. I waved to make sure my good-bye was seen. Yrena lifted her hand up, too. She waved good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye.

Yrena’s mom went to the window and pulled down the shade.

That was it.

Good-bye.