The Sunlit Night (7 page)

“What’s in the envelope?” said Yasha.

“Tickets,” said Vassily. “Happy birthday,” he added hastily.

Yasha’s birthday presents had generally come out of the oven, and were then treated with a double coat of frosting and sprinkled with M&M’s to distinguish them from the everyday cakes. His father wasn’t good at remembering dates, and the birthday cakes had often been a few days late. No gift had ever arrived early. Third warning.

“Are we going to a show?”

“You could put it that way,” said Vassily.

Yasha took the envelope from his father’s hands and studied the tickets. They were one-way flights, New York to Moscow, departing the following Thursday. There were only two.

“I have been thinking,” Vassily said.

“Graduation,” Yasha said, the first excuse that came to him. “On the twenty-ninth.”

“It was a bad mistake,” said Vassily, sitting on Yasha’s bed. “I was thinking of the last day of school. I thought, Let’s go fast. Wednesday school is out, Thursday we are out. What did I know about a graduation?” he said with some light in his eyes. “I never did one of those.” He patted his thighs, and small clouds of flour erupted. “When school was out, I figured, it was out.”

Yasha loved his father. When his father spoke, Yasha understood what he said. His father was sometimes eccentric, but never insane; not terribly attractive, but adorable, easy to adore. He smiled when he had amused himself and shouted when he was mad. His pants were yellow from dozens of broken eggs. His hair was gray and long around his ears. His core, Yasha suspected, was made of peace.

Out, I figured, was out,
Yasha repeated to himself, hoping his mother would never show up again. “Let’s go,” Yasha said, “I don’t need to go to graduation.” If she did come again, they would be gone. Let her miss me, Yasha thought. “Saves a hundred dollars, no cap and gown,” he said.

“So what, you can have ten caps,” Vassily said, “with fur, even with earflaps.” The wind made Yasha’s blinds rattle against the window. Vassily said he would find Olyana, kiss her bare hands, show her his gray hair and their good-looking son. Vassily touched his own lips. He said he imagined his body growing thinner and his heart growing thicker until it all ended, at which point he wanted his wife at his side. He said they were low on juice and milk, and he would not go about replenishing. “Think of it as a vacation,” Vassily said. “And when we come back,” he said, grinning, “the doctors will cut my chest open.”

•    •    •

At lunch hour on Monday, Olyana was standing at the school door. It was sunny, and she leaned against a pillar, fanning herself with one hand. Yasha had come outside for some air and a turkey sandwich. He was about to have a precalculus exam. He couldn’t remember telling her where he went to school.

There were so many questions he would have to ask to begin understanding anything, questions of such different magnitudes: How did you know where I go to school? and Why didn’t you want to raise me? and Do you know what we’re about to do? She was wearing an orange dress today. When she saw him, she started waving jubilantly with her whole arm. He didn’t want to go over there and be happy with her. He wanted a turkey sandwich, and to use the bathroom, and to study the law of cosines.

“Yakov!” she shouted, making a few kids on the street look at him.

He hurried over to keep her from shouting more. “Be quiet,” he said.

“Heavens, why? Look, I’ve gotten us a few apples.”

“I told you to come this weekend, and you didn’t, but you’re here forty minutes before my final exam, for lunch?”

His mother handed him a yellow apple. “Where can we find a good sandwich?” she asked.

Yasha closed his mouth and twisted it up. He felt tall again, and over-aware of his own arms, and hungry, and at war.

“You can find a good sandwich at the Gregoriov Bakery,” Yasha said, “where your husband and son work.” She was already eating her apple.

“Yakov,” she said, “if I storm right in and talk to your father, with his sick little heart, after all these years, nothing will go right for any of us,” she said, twirling her empty hand in the shape of an infinity sign, first out toward Yasha, then back to her.

“If you don’t talk to my father before Thursday, you will have missed your chance.”

“Thursday?” She laughed, and in doing so choked on a piece of apple. Her laughter flared up into coughing and then resolved into laughter again. “See what you’ve done? You’ve made me choke, with all your threatening. All right, little man, perhaps you can help me on Thursday. Perhaps Thursday will be fine.”

Ten years ago, Yasha had needed his mother’s “help” to pick out his school clothes, scramble his eggs, comb his hair. She denied him nothing in those days, no service, no affection, straight up until she decided to deny him a decade. Now he stood inches from her generous hands, feeling capable and cold.

“How could I possibly help you?” Yasha said.

“You and I will make a plan for your father tomorrow. You take your exam now like a good little man,” she said, “and be sure to ravage it.
Ravage
it.”

As Yasha marched up the stairs to Mr. Usoroh’s classroom, her voice said,
little man, little man
, around his head in a loop. She cared less about everything than anyone he’d ever met. All the kids at his school, he himself, his father—they all seemed, in retrospect, to be bombarded by worries, to be hopelessly depressed, compared with his red-haired mother. She was one big victory. She made him feel so powerless, so without a body, he walked straight down the hall, looking for something to punch, turned into an alcove of senior lockers, pushed Alexa against her own locker, and kissed her.

They kept their mouths closed and touching for long enough to make Yasha feel certain it was a
kiss
, and then he stepped back and walked into the math room. From inside, he could hear ferocious squealing, not just from Alexa but from all the girls nearby. He looked back out the classroom door’s window. Alexa was on the floor, trying to breathe through her giggling. The other girls had gathered around her, flipping their hair around and touching Alexa’s knees. Yasha rubbed his lips together. The kiss had left no trace, hadn’t even tasted like anything, and now it was over. Yasha still needed to use the bathroom. Mr. Usoroh was passing out the exam papers.

“Did you study?” a boy named Stephen whispered from his desk, next to Yasha’s.

Mr. Usoroh asked the class to begin.

•    •    •

When Yasha came down to lunch on Tuesday, he needed his mother to be there. She wasn’t. When he left school for the day two hours later, she was there, at the school entrance, wanting to go to Lincoln Center.

“Take me to the fountain,” she said.

It was the second-to-last day of school, and it had been eventful—the school’s heating system had malfunctioned and started pumping hot air into the classrooms, making everyone sweat and some freshmen cry; Alexa had followed him down every hallway, leaning against lockers, asking if he wanted to “do it again,” and he did kind of want to do it again, but he walked right past her every time, leading her eventually to shout that she hoped he’d go back to Russia and stay there.

Was that what would happen? If they moved back to Russia, would his mother follow them back? Could they lure her there, trap her, and undo this enormous American detour? She was ahead of him now, skipping down a flight of stairs into the subway.

Yasha watched one serpentine trail of white bricks crawl across the tunnel wall as the train sped uptown. It was comforting to sit beside his mother,
any
mother, he thought, when the train rattled. The doors chimed, and opened, and closed. Everybody riding seemed half asleep. He closed his eyes and let the thick vibrations bounce him, babylike, on the lap of the seat.

They got off at 66th Street. The asphalt in the street was shining. On the east side of Broadway, a man was selling framed photograph prints. They were spread out on a folding table, the unframed prints collected in alphabetized bins. Olyana walked over and ran her finger across the surface of the table. She looked at a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge with a moon, then Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon. Behind those, in black-and-white, a little girl was kissing a little boy. Yasha looked at them—it only confirmed his feeling that he had come late to the whole kissing game. He could never have asked his father about such things, but his mother, who seemed be in a constant state of kissing—her whole body seemed to be tonguing the wind that blew around it—she had, without a doubt, much to say on the subject, and Yasha wanted, despite himself, to consult her.

Beside the kissing children lay a color photograph of Lincoln Center, the fountain centered and at full blast. The man selling the photographs smiled at Olyana—Russian nose, yellow dress. After looking at her, he looked up above her head at the scrolling text of the AMC Loews movie theater. She took the five-by-seven print of Lincoln Center and dropped it into her large shoulder bag. By the time the man looked back down at his table, she had closed the gap, rearranging the rectangles into an evenly spaced grid. She picked up the photograph of John Lennon and looked at it intently.

Yasha’s hands started sweating. He looked at the man behind the table, half hoping for confirmation that he hadn’t seen, half hoping for him to call the police. If they took her away now, he would have some time to think. They’d have her cornered, he and Papa, if she were in jail.

“Poor man,” she said. “Simply too tragic.” She put the Lennon portrait back on the table and thanked the seller.

Yasha thanked him profusely and wished him a great summer. The man told him to take care of his lovely mother.

“Take a walk through Central Park!” the man shouted after them.

“Yes, how would you like to spend a little time in the park,” his mother said, “not just today, I mean every day, if you liked?”

“You just stole a—” They were still within earshot of the man. “There is something in your bag,” Yasha said. He didn’t know how to make his face look appalled enough.

“There are many things in my bag, Yakov,” Olyana said. “What about yours?” she asked. “Where are your books? Have you left them at school? At the bakery? Tell me,” she said, turning east onto 67th Street, the trees of the park coming into view, “how do you like working in the bakery? Truly, how do you like it? Are you tired of all the bread?”

To Yasha, bread was clean and homogeneous. Bread had no veins and no gristly parts. It broke down into sugars, and filled one’s stomach. It soaked up everything else. It won.

“Tired of Brooklyn, maybe?” his mother continued. “Perhaps you would like to live in Manhattan? You could live with me, in Manhattan.”

The traffic light changed, and they crossed Central Park West. Eastward-driving cars came rushing up from behind them and drove straight into the park, each car making its own whoosh.

“You live in Manhattan?” Yasha said.

“I have been here for three months. At Ian’s apartment in Tribeca. I will need your help to stay longer.” She looked at Yasha intently.

Yasha didn’t want to look at his mother. Hearing her was enough. A man was riding a unicycle up the park’s western bike path, and Yasha watched the rider’s knees moving in nearly hypnotic circles.

“Who is Ian?”

“We are going to be married,” his mother said.

At that moment, as if to distract Yasha from his rage, the unicyclist lifted his cap to Yasha and rode faster to pass a horse carriage. They all seemed to be circus attractions, hired by his mother, the ringleader.

“You are married,” Yasha said. “To Papa.”

“If I ever bring myself to see your father,” she said, “I will ask him to be free.”

To be free, Yasha thought. To be free to be free to be free.

Who had been free, all these years? Yasha watched four more cars whoosh under the footbridge. Hadn’t everybody? She had stayed in Russia, to be free. They had come to Brooklyn, to be free. They had opened a business, made some money, been free. She had met another man, in her freedom—“Who is he?” Yasha asked.

“An American, Yakov, just like you. Good lord, I could call you Jacob!” She laughed, and he could see her ribs stretch out her dress. “He has an awful lot of money and could have done whatever he wanted, and what he wanted, bless him, was Russia!” The yellow material of her dress was elastic and became paler when it stretched. “He came to me asking for lessons. What could I teach him? He plays like a dream, my student.”

“Papa was your student,” Yasha said. This fact had always started the story, the story of how his mother and father met, which Yasha had sometimes asked his father to tell him at bedtime, before he stopped asking about his mother altogether.

“Teachers, and students—” she said, resting her hand across her collarbone.

Yasha took a step into the park, turned around, and looked back at her, carrying her large bag, carrying the hideous photograph, which lay illuminated in Yasha’s vision as if by an X-ray. He looked at her hands, the nails cut short, the fingers long, and could not remember how her skin felt—could not remember if she had often held him. He could only recall her hands touching her piano; her playing on certain weekends four-hand duets with his father, who had never been a fine pianist. His father, her first student, replaced by a second student, a finer pianist, a wealthier man, no doubt a childless man, no doubt a man who asked nothing of her, no doubt a man who bought her all these colorful dresses, no doubt a paradise.