Second Fiddle (7 page)

I got up from the sofa. On the way back to my room, I stopped at the bookcase and ran my finger across the green-camouflage volumes of Dad’s army manuals.

“Can I take this one to school?” I asked, pulling out the
Army Field Guide to First Aid
.

“Are you planning on injuring someone?”

“Dad!”

“Is something going on?”

“Like what?” I said, praying Dad wasn’t a mind reader.

“Like somebody bullying you. Jo, self-defense is your right. If one of those boys at school gives you trouble, you can use those judo moves I showed you.”

“Nobody’s bothering me, Dad.” None of the boys even looked at me at school.

“Well, you should be prepared.”

“Can I practice on Ty and Kyle?”

“Those boys are going to be bigger than you someday.”

“Not if we stop feeding them now.”

Dad laughed, and I took the book back to my room and added it to my already full backpack. I fished my orange Tic Tacs out of the side pocket and dropped the pain pills inside. Then I turned on the Brandenburg Concertos for falling asleep. Now that was music: fifty strings, and woodwinds, too.

Usually I fell asleep trying to sort out the different violin parts. But I kept flashing back to the way my soldier was freezing cold and looked like a wax dummy when I first took him out of the river. I could still smell the sharp tang of sweat and oil on his skin and the bitter taste of river water on his face. When he could finally breathe all on his own, I remembered watching his chest go up and down like he hadn’t been almost dead just a few minutes before. I was exhausted, but I kept replaying the moment when I first saw his face. But the more often I remembered it, the less he looked like a grown man with a face full of bruises, and the more he looked like a boy my own age.

When I finally fell asleep, I had the same bad dream I’d been having since I was six. I was walking home from school and every house was exactly the same. The block was endless. I ran faster and faster, but I knew I’d never find my home. Only this time I heard a train and walked down to a river. There was a body in the water, and when I pulled the body out, it was nothing but a skull and bones in an army uniform. I woke up gasping for breath, and the sour smell of the river was in my sweat.

through the school day on Wednesday, I was hiding smiles, because there is something about having a secret with your friends that livens up even the dullest algebra class. We snuck our homework out of our backpacks so that no one could see they were full of men’s clothes and MREs and canteens of water. We shared two lunches among the three of us so that there would be an extra one for our soldier.

After school, Giselle and Vivian and I took the S-Bahn downtown. It was hot and crowded on the train. I thought it would be fun to have an adventure with Vivian and Giselle. We never got together except for music, and they knew lots more kids from the in-crowd than me, so I imagined they were out every weekend at the movies or going shopping or maybe going out for burgers with the basketball boys. But Vivian dove right into her geometry homework as soon as the train got going. Giselle made circle-and-stab moves with her hand against the seat in front of her, like she was fencing
a tiny invisible partner. So much for feeling part of the in-crowd.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” I said, because miniature fencing was what Giselle did when she was stuck on a test.

“They decided to leave a month early.” Giselle stabbed the seat back so hard, the man sitting there turned around and gave her a look. “We were going to spend all of July in Italy and Greece, but they bought a house and now they’re in a big hurry to move into it and spend the summer in boring Palo Alto.”

“But there are beaches there, right?”

Giselle stabbed at the seat in front of her again. “They have beaches in Italy and Greece. And ruins and sailing and the training camps for the Olympic fencing team.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t you get it, Jody? There’s going to be thousands of kids at my new high school. All those other girls will have their California clothes and California boyfriends. But I could have been the girl who spent her summer on the Italian Riviera. At least I’d get some respect for that.”

She stabbed the seat in front of her, and when the German turned around again, she gave him the look straight back. Actually, Giselle was pretty much gigantic enough for automatic respect. I’d tell her, but I respected her too much.

Who knew popular girls worried about being popular? I was pretty sure that wherever I got sent for high school, it
would be the kind of place where I would get beat up if I mentioned a summer on the Italian Riviera.

“You’re going to fit in just fine. You’re athletic and you have nice clothes and good jewelry, and your makeup looks perfect every single day. I don’t know how you do it. I don’t get makeup at all.”

“You don’t even need makeup,” Giselle said. “Look at you. Perfect skin. Not a zit in sight. How do you manage that, huh?”

“Umm … the zits take one look at all these freckles and figure they can’t compete?” I smiled and gave her a little nudge on the shoulder, because honestly, it’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my looks. Ever.

“You should try it sometime. A little peachy lipstick and something dramatic around your eyes, you could be a movie star. Don’t you think, Vivi?”

Vivian set her pencil down and looked at me over the tops of her glasses. “I can’t stand the competition already.”

“Not much danger of that,” I said. “Mom would give me the five-hour feminism lecture if I went out of the house in makeup. I’m not allowed until next year and then only on special occasions.”

“Image is power, honey. That’s what my mom taught me,” Giselle said.

“Potsdamer Platz,” Vivian called, and we all grabbed our stuff and piled off the train. It was just as warm outside, but at least there was a breeze.

We retraced our steps to the river. I started looking for our soldier as soon as we could see the bridge ahead, but he wasn’t where we’d left him yesterday. What if those officers had come back and killed him again? What if they’d killed him and left the body?

But he was there. He had pulled branches around him and was lying completely still, with the green army towels covering him up. If I hadn’t known where to look, he would have been invisible. He watched us as we walked up.

“Have returned,” he said. His voice was low and groaning. He rolled to his side to face us. Except for not being dead, he looked worse than yesterday. His black eyes were puffier. There was a purple bloom of bruises around his ribs peeking out from below Giselle’s PE shirt. His broken foot was back pointing in the right direction, but there was a bulge over the top of his boot that was almost twice the size of his other leg.

“Hey there,” Giselle said.

I could see she was going to say something else, but it just occurred to me that we didn’t even know his name. He could be anybody. The soldier pushed himself up on one elbow. He opened his mouth to say something, but then his face turned gray. He broke out into a sweat.

“He’s going to faint,” I said. “Look at him. It’s probably the pain.” I walked a little closer. He had spread his uniform pants and shirt on the ground to dry, and he had taken a branch and made a splint of it. He’d tied it over his boot
using the bootlace from his other foot. Thank God! I’d read up on broken legs in Dad’s FM 5-22 during math. The section about how to set broken bones had made my stomach go wobbly just looking at the pictures.

“How is it?” I pointed to his splinted leg.

“Is only pain. I breathe in. I breathe out.” He looked at me and then Vivian and Giselle and then he looked back at me again. “You are same angel from yesterday?”

“Communists don’t believe in angels.” I reached into my pocket for the Tic Tac box I’d used to hide the codeine. I emptied the whole thing into my palm and sorted out the bright orange candies from the dull orange pills. “I brought something for the pain, but you have to eat it with food, or it will hurt your stomach.”

He looked at me like I was the Second Coming of Jesus. Like my brothers looked at Dad when he said we could get a puppy when he retired. “You are angel of life,” he said to me solemnly.

“One,” I said in a serious voice. “You can only take one of these. It’s very strong. It’s four-thirty now, so you can have another when the sun comes up, and the last one when the sun goes down tomorrow. That will be about twelve hours apart.”

He reached out and took three pills from my hand like they were sacred things and swallowed one down dry. I unlatched my violin case and took out the canteen and the brown-foil-wrapped field MREs. The soldier reached for
the water and drained half the canteen in one long swallow. “There’s a whole meal in each one of these packages,” I said. “You don’t have to heat it up or anything. They don’t look nice but they taste okay, and they keep without a fridge.” I handed him a slightly squashed peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “But eat this now. It’s my lunch, and it will be gross if you don’t.”

He turned the package over three times and then handed it back to me. “Is opened?”

“Like this.” I showed him how to pull apart the Ziploc.

“Un. Believable!” Giselle whispered to Vivian. “They can build a nuclear missile system, but they can’t open a sandwich.”

The soldier took a deep smell of peanut butter plus strawberry jam. He ate my sandwich in two bites.

“Ugh! Chew with your mouth closed,” Vivian said.

The soldier went right on gulping down his food and sucking the last bits of Wonder Bread off his teeth. Vivian shuddered and said, “Were you cold last night?” She opened her violin case and took out a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a button-front shirt.

“For me?”

“For you.”

“Why so kind to a stranger?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” Giselle said firmly. “Because we are all Americans here. This is what we do—we help people.”

The soldier looked from the stack of clothes in Vivian’s hand to the pile of MREs on the ground.

“Go on,” Vivian said. “Get dressed.” She turned and walked down to the bank of the river, and Giselle followed her.

I was about to follow them, but then I turned back. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“I am called Arvo Kross.”

“Arvo? That doesn’t sound Russian.”

“Is Estonian name.”

“Estonia? Never heard of it. Is that a country, or is it a tribe of people, like Zulu or something?”

“It is my home and maybe soon it will be my country.”

“Isn’t the Soviet Union your country?” I pointed at his uniform still lying on the ground.

“Never!” He kicked dirt over his uniform jacket with his good leg like he was spitting on the flag. “They claim me, but I will never claim them.”

I couldn’t even imagine one of Dad’s soldiers talking like that, not even the ones who don’t like the army. “Okay, Arvo, from …”

“Estonia.”

“Right. I’ll just let you get dressed.” I went to sit with the girls. Giselle was throwing rocks into the water.

“His name is Arvo,” I said.

“Arvo, hmm,” Vivian said.

“Yeah, Arvo Kross from someplace called Estonia. Have you heard of it?”

“Yeah,” Vivi said. She drew a map in the air with her finger. “It’s in the top corner of Europe, next to Russia and under Finland.” Vivian had won the geography bee three years running and also the spelling bee. If there was an algebra bee, she’d be the international champ. The boys in our class called her Queen Bee except when Giselle was standing right there.

“Thank goodness he speaks English,” Giselle said. “Maybe he can explain why his officers are trying to kill him. I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about it. Officers just aren’t like that.”

Says the daughter of a general, I thought. Giselle looked at my look and added, “Because they need to have the trust of their enlisted men or they’d never follow orders. It’s stupid to abuse a soldier. Officers are always outnumbered.”

She did have a point. “I wonder if he’ll even tell us the truth,” I said. “Soviets aren’t exactly known for being straight up with each other, let alone us evil Westerners.”