You Are One of Them (5 page)

If you come to Moscow, I can organize for you to visit churches, theatres, Kremlins. Is very interesting time here.

Sincerely,

Sveta

Of course Jenny was dead. Her demise was part of my curriculum vitae. Her name was chiseled into me, as if I were a memorial wall, so that even a blind person could feel the impression she’d made. Death had restored our friendship, like varnish on a weathered floor, and given me an easy explanation for my elegiac strains. I had a knack for grief.

Reading Svetlana’s e-mail made suspension of disbelief awfully tempting, though. I’d always loved magic shows as a kid: how wonderful to watch things disappear and then—presto!—reappear again, good as new. Jesus’s resurrection? Hocus-pocus, I thought, but what an irresistible story. Roll back the stone, Mary Magdalene, and tell us about the empty tomb.

Svetlana’s insult about Americans seemed especially stinging since she had used (incorrectly, and all the more pointedly) a definite article. There are no articles in Russian, so the difference between “a” and “the” can be perplexing.
“The kindergarten,”
Svetlana wrote, as if it were the only one, as if everyone in the United States were going down for an afternoon nap at the same time.

“Dear Svetlana,”
I wrote
. “American astronauts did walk on the moon. Perhaps you have not seen the footage of Neil Armstrong in 1969.”
I had been to the Air and Space Museum enough times to know the legend of the Apollo missions.
“And as for Jennifer Jones, I was at her funeral.”

It was at the National Cathedral to accommodate the hundreds of mourners and press. The service was for all three of them—Jenny and her parents, who died with her—but it was Jenny that the news crews were interested in. “Jennifer wanted peace,” the bishop of Washington said. “And now she has found it.” My mother rolled her eyes.

I still have copies of the obituaries that ran in all the papers.
“Jennifer Jones, 12; Peace Ambassador Killed in Plane Crash,”
said the
New York Times.
It was a charter flight, scheduled to fly from Boston Logan to Waterville, Maine, because Jenny had been invited to address students at Colby College. She made a lot of appearances at schools around the country in those days. She’d narrate a slide show of her trip to the USSR and then take questions.

“Your moon landing was Gollywood special effects,”
said Svetlana’s reply. (Because there is no equivalent of the letter
H,
Russians say “Gollywood,” not Hollywood.)
“Staged spectacle to win Space Race.”

I was angry now. This person was comparing one of my country’s greatest achievements to the likes of a Jerry Bruckheimer film. I was about to type a flip response—
“Did you read that in
Pravda
?”
—when the doubt crept in. Could I
prove
that we had actually landed on the moon? It was theoretically possible, I realized with a queasy feeling, that Neil Armstrong had taken those famous steps across a stage on a Hollywood back lot. It had never before occurred to me that we hadn’t actually walked on the moon. It was one giant step forward for mankind. Wasn’t it? Was the supposed moon rock embedded in one of the stained-glass windows of the National Cathedral just detritus from a local construction site? I felt like I did when I finally learned the truth about Santa Claus. It was humiliating to have been so naïve, so full of faith. My second-grade classmates scoffed at me.
Why was I the last to know?
I remember asking my mother.

The thing is, they never actually found Jenny’s remains. The plane that crashed was a twin-engine, unpressurized, fifteen-seater (though only four passengers—Jenny, her parents, and her manager—were on board that day), and it went down off the coast. When the plane disappeared from the radar screen, a search went out, and the wreckage was found the next day, but the bodies were never recovered. And the cause of the crash remains mysterious. The plane was a Beechcraft 99, a model that was not large enough for the FAA to require a black box. So in the aftermath the investigation was hindered by the absence of a cockpit voice recorder and flight data information. And the nearest airport—Portland, Maine—had no radar data to show exactly when and where the plane had disappeared. According to the airport, the flight had been chartered by Edmund Jones, but there was no forensic evidence that Jenny and her parents were on board. So technically Svetlana was right: it was possible that Jenny didn’t die.

Who did this Svetlana think she was? You can’t just write to someone out of the blue suggesting that her dead best friend is still alive. It was a cruel joke. I imagined my antagonist halfway around the world. She was almost certainly wearing too much makeup. The Russian girls I’d seen on TV looked like they were living in a funhouse mirror reflection of the 1980s: blue eye shadow applied with so little discretion that the effect was grotesque. Their garish, painted faces were a distorted and terrifying image of capitalism.

“Come to Moscow to see truth,”
Svetlana wrote.

What was the truth? Jenny’s death was front-page news in at least thirty countries. If she was alive, where was she? How could she disappear without a trace? And did Svetlana actually know something, or was she just trying to be provocative?

“Moscow?” said my friend Juliet when I told her my plans. “Don’t you want to go somewhere warmer? Somewhere with palm trees, maybe? Don’t you know that the Cold War is over?”

“Moscow’s the new Prague,” said my friend Sam.

The three of us were stretched out in the quad, plucking blades of grass as we spoke, vaguely aware that we would never again have so much time to kill. Our graduation was the next day. “A lot of expats are moving there,” I said. I didn’t tell them that I’d been waiting to go there since 1983.

“Russian girls are hot,” Sam said. “At least until the babushka drop-off.”

“What makes you such an expert on the life cycle of Russian women’s looks?” I said.

“The babushka drop-off is well documented. Russian women are insanely hot when they’re young, and then, at like twenty-six, they turn into these fat old women wearing head scarves. There’s no in-between phase.”

Sam’s opinions came courtesy of his cousin Corinne, who had recently moved to Moscow to launch the Russian edition of an American fashion magazine. When I e-mailed her, Corinne offered me her guest room until I could find housing of my own.

“I have a place to stay,” I told my mother. “With an American. I’ll be safe.”

1982

M
Y MOTHER SAYS
we’re going to have an adventure.

Where are we going?
I want to know.

It is a Saturday morning in the middle of March. The cherry blossoms have started to bloom, and I hope that we are going down to the Mall to see them. This is something we do every spring. The cherry blossoms are so beautiful that it surprises me every year. So delicate, so auspiciously pink.

No, not to the Mall,
my mother says.
We are going to be detectives.

Like Harriet the Spy?
I like Harriet the Spy so much that for two months when I was eight, I would eat nothing but tomato sandwiches.

Or Miss Marple
,
says my mother. She puts on her trench coat—in which she looks like a spy, or a glamorous Hollywood version of a spy—and fastens Pip’s leash. Her hair is tied up in a striped scarf. She hands me my yellow windbreaker—it is unseasonably chilly and damp—and we set out from the house.

What are we looking for?
I ask as my mother begins walking briskly down our street toward Connecticut Avenue. Pip can tell that my mother’s on a mission. He falls into step on her left, mirroring her determined gait.

I like playing detective. After I read
Harriet the Spy,
I wandered the neighborhood with a pocket notebook and wrote down the license plate of any car I didn’t recognize.

Fallout-shelter signs,
she says.
The shelters are closed now, but some of the signs are still on the outsides of the buildings. Let’s see how many we can find.

I am nine years old. At my school we do 1960s-style duck-and-cover exercises, as if a classroom desk could protect any of us from nuclear bombs. I ask my mother why they closed the fallout shelters. She says they were expensive to maintain. She says that disarmament treaties in the 1970s made people relax. I don’t remember détente; all I know is dread.

We find our first sign on the back wall of my old elementary school. The sign has three cautionary yellow triangles, turned upside down, their tips pointing toward the basement. I was corralled out this back door during fire drills for years and never noticed the sign before, but now that I see it (
This is the closest shelter to our house—this is where we would have gone if we’d lived here in the 1960s,
my mother says, her voice breathy with fear or excitement or both), it gives me the creeps. I can’t bear the idea of pressing into a dark basement with hundreds of neighbors. My mother says the shelters were stocked with supplies—food and water and medicine. You wouldn’t know how many days you’d have to stay down there, away from the radiation. The fallout could be deadlier than the explosion itself. But even if you survived the bomb, would you want to live in the wreckage left behind? To emerge from that dark space not into light but into a wasteland?

She snaps a picture of the sign. I stand beside her as she shakes the Polaroid, waiting for the image to emerge. It is, I think, the opposite of the overheated projector: instead of being melted away, the picture rises out of darkness like a figure out of the fog. There is something hopeful about watching the Polaroid develop.
Look,
she says, holding it out for me to see. Pip yaps. The fallout-shelter sign and the doorway it marks look faded and ineffectual. How could something so small save us?

Once we find our first sign, we start spotting them everywhere. In our neighborhood of Cleveland Park, we find ten signs that day. They are on the outsides of apartment buildings, mostly. There is one on a church. My mother notes their locations in a small blue book.
Civil defense,
she mumbles like a mantra. She says there are hundreds of deserted shelters all over the city, including one below Dupont Circle.
A few years ago,
she says,
they excavated all the food from that one and sent it to starving people in Pakistan.
Recently I went back to Washington and discovered that most of the signs—at least in neighborhoods like ours—are gone. Reminders of the nuclear threat were probably bad for real estate prices. I never asked my mother why she wanted to document the location of the shelters. I learned long ago not to ask
why.

•   •   •

D
URING THAT SPRING OF 1982,
Jenny and I spent a lot of time in the woods. Just a few blocks away from our street was a tributary of Rock Creek Park. Around the stream was a wooded haven with a trail through the middle of it. We weren’t supposed to go there alone, but we told her mother we were off to the playground on Macomb Street and then we kept going to Rodman Street, where the woods began. Sometimes I brought Pip with us. We’d go after school and stay until the light started to fade and shadows filled the hollows under the trees. We teetered across the fallen trunks that bridged the stream. We collected stones from the sandy creek bed and arranged them in sculptural mounds. Sometimes we just sat on a mossy stump and pretended we were camping. We could see the tops of the houses on Rodman Street through the trees—we felt safe because we were so close to home.

“What if we got lost in the woods?” Jenny said once. It was April. The trees were still half bare—their new leaves were coming in, shimmering in chartreuse, not yet thick enough to block out the sky—but the underbrush was vibrant and lush. There were little yellow flowers in bloom in the ivy along the creek. There was still a chill in the air, but the sky was the true blue of spring.

“We won’t,” I said. “We know the way.”

“We could leave a trail of bread crumbs,” Jenny said. “Like Hansel and Gretel.”

“Squirrels would eat the crumbs,” I said.

“Or Pip,” she said.

But Pip wasn’t with me that afternoon.

“Let’s play hide-and-seek,” Jenny said. “I’ll hide first.”

We were too old for hide-and-seek, but we often played it in the woods, where the stakes seemed higher. I counted to twenty, sent my voice far and wide. When I opened my eyes, there was no sign of Jenny. I listened for a rustle in the trees, trying to discern in which direction she’d gone. She had managed to slip away in silence. I looked behind the thick bushes near the stream’s head. I checked the cavities in rotting tree trunks. I walked all the way to the end of the trail—just half a mile, but at nine years old it seemed like a long way—to see if she was lurking there. I found stepping-stones to the other side of the creek. The underbrush was so dense on that side that I couldn’t see my feet. I was afraid I’d step on a snake. I knew they came out of hibernation in the spring.

“Jenny!” I called. I didn’t realize I was scared until I heard the plaintive wail in my voice. It was hard to believe she’d come to this side of the stream. We always stayed near the trail. I tiptoed along the creek bed, trying not to get my sneakers wet. “Jenny!” I shouted again. “Tell me if I’m hot or cold!” But my lonely voice boomeranged back to me.

I didn’t have a watch, but I could feel the heavy approach of dusk. I wondered if Jenny had been kidnapped. There were a lot of missing children in the news. The six-year-old boy in New York City, the one who disappeared on his way to school in 1979, still hadn’t been found. Jenny would be a face haunting me from lampposts. It would be my fault. “You told me you were going to the playground,” her mother would say.

As it grew darker, the trees lost their crisp outlines and blurred into menace. The woods seemed bigger, less familiar without light. I couldn’t see the houses on Rodman Street. The air turned cold, and I didn’t have a sweater. I found my way back to the path, gnarly with roots, and stumbled toward our entrance to the park. “Jenny!” I cried, but fear tamped my voice to a whisper. I dared not make noise in the dark. I crept through the encroaching black, brambles clawing at my arms. I knew I was almost home when I saw the streak of headlights on Reno Road. The cars rushed past, oblivious to my plight. As soon as I reached the sidewalk, I started running. My mother could come back and help me look for Jenny. I sprinted the rest of the way.

But when I finally made it back to our street, I heard Jenny’s voice call out to me. “Slowpoke!”

She was on her front-porch swing, a silhouette against the inviting yellow lights in the windows. “It’s seven-thirty,” she said. “We’ve already had dinner.” I had been gone for two hours.

“Where were you?” I said. “I looked everywhere.”

“I left the woods right away. I wanted to see how long it would take you to find me. I can’t believe you stayed there so long.” She seemed amused by my stupidity.

“I was afraid you were kidnapped.”

“Nope.”

I paused at the bottom of the steps to her house. She remained on the swing, moving back and forth, steady as a pendulum.

“Weren’t you worried about me?” I said.

“I knew you’d figure it out. I didn’t think you needed someone to hold your hand every second.”

“Weren’t your parents worried?”

“I told them you went home,” she said.

“My mom didn’t call looking for me?”

“No. Why are you so upset?” she said. “You know your mom is a total space cadet. She probably has no idea what time it is.”

“Something terrible could have happened.” We were so young. Even now I can’t believe she didn’t see the danger.

“Jeez, it was a test,” she said. “It was only a test. Don’t be so dramatic. You’re a nervous freak like your mom.”

“It’s not funny,” I said. “And she’s not a freak.” I knew I was starting to cry. It was humiliating. I was too sensitive. Why couldn’t I let things roll off my back?

The door opened, and Mrs. Jones leaned out. “Jennifer,” she said. “Time to come inside.” Then, sensing my presence, she looked down at me. “Sarah? What are you doing on the street in the dark? Did you have a good dinner?”

“Yes,” I said, choking back tears. “Thank you. We had chicken pot pie.”

“See you tomorrow!” Jenny said as she trotted after her mother into the house. After the door closed behind them, the porch swing continued to sway. I stood there frozen, watching it. When it finally came to a standstill, I went home.

•   •   •

O
NE NIGHT NOT LONG
AFTER THAT,
Jenny got her mother’s old Ouija board out of the wooden chest where the Joneses kept games. It was late; her parents had already retired to their bedroom. She took one of the candelabra from the dining room and a box of matches from over the living-room fireplace and told me to follow her. In her room she locked the door behind us and lit the candles. Then she turned out the light. She sat down cross-legged on the floor and opened the box.

“We’re going to contact Izzy,” she said.

“Izzy my sister?”

“Don’t you want to talk to her?” she said.

Of course I wanted to talk to her. I would have given anything to hear Izzy’s voice. My mother said it was sort of hoarse and made her sound older than she was. “It’s just a game,” I said. “You can’t actually talk to dead people.”

“Have you ever tried?” Jenny said. “Come on.”

I took my seat beside her. She guided my hands to their place on the pointer next to hers.

“We have to be quiet,” she said. “And we have to be patient. She will come to us when she’s ready. Focus.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. I watched the candlelight flicker on her face. The pointer moved a bit under my fingers. Startled, I looked down.

“Is there a spirit here?” Jenny said. She opened her eyes and addressed the empty room.

The pointer moved again. I wasn’t pushing it; Jenny seemed as surprised as I was. The pointer hovered over the letter
Y.
Then moved to
E.
Then
S.

“YES,” Jenny hissed. “There’s someone here. Tell us your name,” she said. And I swear the wind howled.

The pointer moved to
I
.
Then to
S.

“Stop!” I said, and jerked my hands away from the board.

“She wasn’t done spelling,” Jenny said. “You scared her off.” She looked around as if trying to locate the presence. “You wrote ‘IS,’” she said softly to the invisible ghost. “‘IS’ what? Can you give us the next word?”

“Isabel,” I said. “It’s Isabel. You moved the pointer. You’re spelling her name.”

“I did not,” Jenny said. “I am not a faker.”

“She’s my sister,” I said. “You don’t know anything about her.”

I blew out the candles in a huff. We sat fuming in the dark. I wanted to go home, but it was too late to leave the house without upsetting her parents. Mr. and Mrs. Jones always turned on the burglar alarm at ten o’clock, so there was no way to escape without deactivating the system. I knew the code, but the beeping keypad would disturb them. From their bedroom across the hall, I could hear the faint laughter of the studio audience on
Saturday Night Live.

Finally Jenny said, “I was just trying to help. I didn’t mean to upset you.” She stood up and switched on her desk lamp. She was wearing a lavender nightgown trimmed with white ribbon. “Want to sleep in my bed tonight?”

This was not the first time she’d let me squeeze into her bottom bunk. It was something I never asked for, but she seemed to know when I needed an extra degree of closeness. We had already brushed our teeth, so we scooted into bed. I took the inside, near the wall.

“Isn’t it funny that married people share the same bed every night?” she said.

“Until they get divorced,” I said.

“I’ll never get divorced,” she said.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get married,” I said.

“You’re so weird,” she said. Then, after a few minutes, she said, “Do you think your parents had sex before they were married?”

“I don’t know. Did yours?”

“Probably not,” she said. “But one time I heard them having sex.”

“Ew,” I said.

“My mom kept saying ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh’ really fast, like she was breathing really hard. My dad wasn’t saying anything, but the bed was squeaking.”

“Why were you listening?”

“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I had a bad dream and woke up. I went to their room, but then I heard all the noise before I knocked.”

“You’re sure they were having sex?”