Sol typed away at his computer. Alexei could see that his word processor wasn’t open, so he wasn’t writing the story he kept saying he was going to work on. Probably he was chatting with some of the other soon-to-be freshmen to the College of Charlton, making plans for the fall. None of the others were gay—that they admitted—but they were impressed that Sol had been a baseball player, and mostly they all talked sports.
Meg, like Alexei, didn’t know what she was going to do this fall, but her plans depended on his situation. Alexei thought they could continue to rent this apartment by themselves, if he stayed in the country, but Meg hadn’t talked about the fall with him yet.
Sol’s typing stopped. Alexei glanced over and saw the black wolf gazing up at the painting. In the silence, the sound of Meg cleaning dishes clattered loudly, so the fox swept the letter and pens into his desk drawer, closed it, and went outside to talk to her.
Above the sink and stove, the two small kitchen cupboards were closed, their white paint chipped enough to show the brown wood below in a pattern like rot, though the wood smelled clean and fresh if Alexei put his nose next to it. If Meg had been cooking, the kitchen overflowed with the smells of oil and butter and (usually) fish, unless she opened one of the small windows; if she had not been cooking, the strongest smell was the grease that accumulated underneath the cupboards over the stove. Now the kitchen smelled of fish and salt and dish soap, and splashing sounds echoed from where Meg stood over the scuffed, dirty sink.
Alexei’s claws clicked on the cool tile floor as he walked up to the black-furred otter. “Hey, fox-boy,” she said, scrubbing at her plate with a sponge over soapy water. “I have a new drink recipe I want you to try.”
The fox stopped and sighed. “I would prefer—”
Meg held up a paw. “I know, I know. But I’m trying to make this drink that’s, like, special for you. It’s got local flavor and Siberian flavor and I just need someone to tell me if I’m making it right.”
“All right.” Alexei picked up a dishtowel and the clean, wet saucepan.
“You don’t have to dry,” Meg said. “That’s what a drying rack is for.”
“I don’t mind,” he said, wiping the water carefully away. “How was dinner?”
“Fish cakes and noodles and plenty of soy sauce,” she said. “I expect ‘Top Chef’ to call any day now.”
He grinned. “It smells good. Salty. What is ‘Top Chef’?”
“The salt is the soy. ‘Top Chef’ is a reality show…”
“Oh. Like ‘Survivor’.”
“Kind of. Except they have to cook. I have it on my computer if you want to watch sometime. It’s pretty good.”
“Sure,” he said to be nice, though he hadn’t really enjoyed “Survivor” when he’d watched it with his friends in Samorodka. He put the dry saucepan up in the cupboard and picked up the plastic spoon. A grain of rice was stuck in the gap in the handle; he poked at it with a claw.
“My vampire fox friend hasn’t seen it either. You can watch it with us when he comes to visit,” she said.
He nodded. “When is he coming?”
“In a couple weeks. I told Sol. He’ll sleep on my floor, don’t worry about it.”
Alexei smiled. “We can leave if you would like time alone.”
She turned, paws soapy, and scowled at him. “We don’t need time alone. He’s just coming to see the apartment.”
“Uh-huh.” Alexei grinned, and Meg splashed water at him. He jumped and wiped his fur with the towel. “Does this mean you are going to be a vampire too?”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t believe in that crap.”
He glanced toward Sol’s room, and Meg saw the look. “Even him,” she said, lowering her voice, because even though Sol had started playing music, he had good canid ears. “I don’t know what he thought he dreamed with that painting…”
“His eyes,” Alexei said softly.
She shook her head, and then held her fingers an inch apart. “Maybe I believe in it this much. But people just believe what they want to believe. Our minds are more powerful than we give them credit for. You have to remember what’s real and what’s not, or else you just lose yourself in the shit you want to be real and you can’t find your way back to be any use to the shit that actually is real.”
“How do we know what is real?” he said. “How can we know that there is not more to be seen? In Siberia, we believe that our ancestors watch over us.”
“I thought ancestor-worship was an Eastern thing.” She squinted at him.
“‘Worship’ is like in church?” She nodded, and Alexei shook his head. “It is not like that. Here…” He thought. “My host family, their grandparents had died years ago. They went to where they are buried and put flowers. Kyree—my host mother—she sometimes talked to her mother as if she were alive.”
“Not everyone does that.” Meg finished washing her plate and shook it, then slid it into the rack. “My grandparents died like ten years ago and I don’t even know where they’re buried.”
He nodded. “Yes. But in Siberia—in Samorodka, I know—it is much more common. We thought there was a house where an ancestor came back as a ghost, but also my sister and myself remember our great-grandmother and we think she would like to try to help us escape. She was born in Baranowicze, which was then Lechia, and she fled into Siberia when the war started.”
“Which war?” Meg asked. “They were having them every ten years for a while.”
“World War Two,” Alexei said. “Nineteen thirty-eight.”
“I thought they didn’t persecute foxes.”
Alexei lowered his ears. “Foxes with proper coloring. Great-grandmother was a cross fox.”
“Fucking hell.” Meg lifted a paw to her whiskers, the black dye in her fur. “So she went to Siberia?”
“She stopped in Samorodka because she…” He frowned. “She twisted her ankle so that she could not walk. Sprain, is this right?” Meg nodded, and he inclined his head, searching for words. It was harder to tell the story because he could hear Prababushka laughing in her cracked voice, the Siberian words so familiar that he had fight to speak in a language Meg could understand. “My great-grandfather was the son of the doctor. He helped take care of her and they stayed. She said that it was the happiest time she ever sprained an ankle.”
“She could have sprained her ankle in any town, though,” Meg pointed out. “She might still have met someone, and then someone else would be here telling me this story.”
Alexei shook his head, annoyed that he was telling the story badly. Prababushka would scold him, would tell him to start again. “She had a small doll from her grandmother, who had died the year before. When they were traveling through Samorodka, the doll slipped from her paws. She tried to catch it, and…” He mimed twisting his ankle. “So she always said that her grandmother’s spirit made her stop to meet Dmitri—my great-grandfather.”
Meg smiled. “It’s a nice story, but it’s still just putting meaning into randomness. What about you? You’re running away from a horrible place and you ended up here. What ghost did that?”
“Perhaps I am not meant to stay here,” Alexei said. “I have not met a…” The word ‘husband’ didn’t sound right. “Special person.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean,” he said quickly, “someone to build a life with. And anyway,” he added before Meg could argue more, “I may still have to return.”
“You can’t go back. They’ll fuck you up. It’s just getting worse back there for gay cubs, y’know?”
“Not only the gay ones.” Alexei thought of Cat. “But I will say prayers to Prababushka that I may remain. That is what I mean. We do not put our ancestors in churches, but we say prayers for them and thanks to them.”
“Whatever works.” Meg washed out her glass and one of Sol’s and put them in the drying rack. “I guess it’s no stranger than praying to a guy who died two thousand years ago and nobody knows what species he was and he wants you to eat part of him.”
“Does your vampire fox not want to eat people?” Alexei said, to tease her.
“He drinks fake blood,” Meg said. “It’s fruit punch.”
Alexei laughed. “So everyone believes in something strange. Who can say what is true?”
“I can,” Meg said. “It’s whatever I can touch, what stays the same from one day to the next. I never saw a ghost, I just saw Sol acting weird and then somehow screwing up his eyes. My vampire fox friend says there are chemicals on the Internet you can get that change your eye color.”
Alexei started to shake his head, then said, “Your vampire friend, does he have a name?”
Meg scowled. “I call him Athos, but that’s not his real name.”
“Are you going to learn his real name before he comes to visit?”
“You sound like Sol’s mother,” Meg said. “I trust him. I talk to him just about every day.”
“I only ask,” Alexei said, “because of what happened to Sol. Not the ghost, the real world.”
“Sol believes in a lot of things I don’t. Ghosts. Nice people. Love. I’ll be okay. He won’t try anything.”
“Okay.” Alexei smiled. “You will tell us if you need help?” He picked up the plate she’d put in the rack and wiped it dry.
“Of course,” Meg said, “but I won’t need help. What about you? Bringing anyone over we should know about?”
“You do not believe in love,” Alexei said, teasingly.
“I believe that you believe in it.” She shut the water off, but left her paws in the full sink, moving them back and forth, eyes half-closed as she turned to smile at him. “So I’m trying to respect your beliefs. Not be too biased, you know? So?”
Alexei shook his head. “No. I do not think so.”
“Oh well.” Meg looked in at Sol again. “He’s got someone. Did he tell you?”
The fox raised an eyebrow. “He said he didn’t want to tell you because you do not believe in love.”
“He didn’t tell me,” Meg said. “He’s just all distracted the way he used to be when he was texting that asshole rapist all the time. Did he really say he didn’t want to tell me?”
“They have not had a date yet,” Alexei said, turning the plate over. “I am sure he will tell you when he is more sure.”
“Hm.” Meg nodded. “Well, don’t tell him I know. But I wouldn’t make fun of him for it. I just want to make sure he’s okay. He’s… Well, even though you believe in ghosts, I think you’re more grounded than he is.” She peered at him. “You’ve been through more.”
Alexei put the plate down and dried his paws on the towel. “Should I say, ‘Thank you’?”
“Nah.” She sighed and lifted her paws from the sink. Alexei held the towel out to her as he heard the gurgle of the drain. The water level lowered slowly. “I need to get out to the pool,” she said.
“I will go with you if you like.”
“Okay.” She dabbed at her paws and then dropped the towel on the counter. “Tomorrow?”
Alexei shook his head. “Tomorrow is when Sol has his…” He smiled. “He asked me to be there to watch just to make him feel better.”
“Good. So he’s not entirely off in dreamland.” She looked past Alexei to Sol’s bedroom. “Day after tomorrow, then.”
Alexei nodded, and picked up the towel to hang it up as Meg went back to her room.
*
That night, he lay in bed wondering whether he would meet his special person in Vidalia, if there were a reason he’d ended up at high school with Sol and Meg. It could be Mike, but maybe someone else would join the Vidalia Lesbian and Gay Alliance, or maybe someone would notice him at his job, or maybe while he was sitting at the coffee house watching Sol and his date, someone would sit with him. But the more he thought about it, the more that mysterious person always became a white sheep with gold curving horns and wide brown eyes and a smile that made Alexei feel like a small sun was glowing in his chest.
And who liked Kendall, of all people. The pine marten smirked through Alexei’s half-dream, with his painted claws and his flouncing manner and his way of speaking that was so quick, so slick. Alexei had known someone like him back in Samorodka—not gay, of course, but that fast-talking manner. At home, he had enjoyed sparring with his classmate, because he was clever enough to match wits even if he wasn’t quick enough to match words, and also because there was much less depending on whether he could prove himself superior. He had played pranks on Tomas, and Tomas had played pranks on him, and sometime around their year 9 in school they had grown bored of it and stopped.
But Kendall, Kendall was like a Tomas who was living on the way to Alexei’s house, a malicious fairy living in the wood near his home. Alexei fell further into sleep, imagining the pine marten chasing him away from Mike over and over, until a high whine reached his ears and woke him.
He turned over in bed, facing Sol’s wall, where a light shone from outside. It fell on the portrait of Niki, on the fox’s one visible green eye, as though Niki were peering through a long, dark night directly at Alexei. The room rumbled as though something huge were approaching, though Alexei’s bed remained solid and still.
He got up slowly, and the light went out and Niki vanished back into darkness. A moment later, the whining and rumbling died away, and only the soft clanks of machinery and voices, the smell of dirt and oil, came through the warm air to him. He peered out the window. Two wolves and a raccoon at the construction site, doing something at—he checked his phone—midnight. Whatever it was, he didn’t know and couldn’t hear. He closed the window and lay back on his bed.
He’d never been woken up at night before, never seen a light come through the window so late. “Prababushka?” he whispered. “Niki?”
His ears stayed perked straight up, but only the murmurs of night outside broke the silence.
Chapter 3
In the morning, Alexei was no longer convinced that anything supernatural had happened. The painting looked the same as it had every morning, softly lit by the reflected glow of the sunlight from Alexei’s wall when Sol pulled the blinds up at six-thirty. He stared at the fox’s eye for a long moment and then, just as Sol looked about to ask him what he was doing, turned away and got dressed.
They ate breakfast bars on the way to the transit center, changed busses, and rode the ten minutes to Alexei’s stop together. Sol had to ride another ten minutes to downtown where his store was. “You’ll come down after?” he asked as Alexei got up to get off.
“Yes,” Alexei said with a smile. “Six o’clock, at the coffee shop at your bus stop.”
“Thanks.” Sol’s tail wagged against the seat.
Alexei’s work was dull, but he enjoyed the exercise of lifting boxes, and he felt safe and anonymous as one of a team of fifteen who sweated out the day shift in the warehouse. His supervisor Vlad, a second-generation Siberian tiger who smoked constantly, had told him that in a another month he would be eligible to move to the cooler evening shift, but this did not appeal to Alexei. For one thing, the heat of the day was no worse than the muggy Samorodka summers, and for another, he enjoyed spending his evenings with Sol and Meg, and the VLGA soccer games were also in the evening.
Alexei had not told Vlad about the VLGA, even though he had gotten the job through Vlad’s friendship with outspoken lesbian Liza. He did not think Vlad would mind having a gay worker, but there was no call for his relationships to be part of the job, so he talked to the tiger about his hometown when he had a chance, and sometimes about Sol and Meg, and little else.
The others on his shift barely even wanted to talk about that. They had families, most of them, but their conversations consisted of sports and their church activities, or about the nights they’d had at the topless club. Sometimes the same conversation would encompass all three topics, which had confused Alexei at first, but he just nodded and smiled, and over the first two weeks came to realize that though a fellow might be married with a lovely daughter and attend church on Sundays, still he liked to go out with the boys on Saturday and look at half-naked ladies.
They had invited him to the club with them this week, and he’d declined politely, saying he and Sol and Meg had plans—he always included Meg even if she weren’t coming, because then it was “three friends” and not “two boys.” Alexei, of course, had never had an interest in looking at half-naked ladies, so he had never really thought much of it other than that it was a thing that the boys in his class liked to do on the shared school computer when the teacher was out of the room. He had rather vaguely supposed that the urge would pass once you were married and had a wife to look at, but his co-workers acted as if their fondest dream would be to walk out of the warehouse into a world where it was illegal for female breasts or behinds to be covered.
His co-workers accepted him as a quiet fox, although if he chose to talk about his family, they listened well enough. Pierre, a hutia from an island to the south called Havane, had a younger sister who had remained behind as Cat had, and he constantly told Alexei he was lucky not to have to worry as much about his sister as Pierre worried about his, living under a dictatorial regime. It was worse, he said, because he had defected, and they would be watching her closely. Cat’s situation was not so different, Alexei thought, only the dictators were his parents.
This day, as Alexei retrieved boxes from storage and put them onto conveyor belts, or took boxes from conveyor belts to the appropriate storage area, he told his co-workers about the scout from the soccer team and his prospect of getting a visa. Vlad thought it was wonderful, but Pierre, also undocumented, was not so sure. “You know then Vlad has to sign you up regular, right? More paperwork, maybe the job here not so good for you.”
Vlad swatted at the hutia when he said that. “Always is job here for hard worker.”
“Siberian worker, you mean.” Pierre put on an accent. “If I talk like this, I can have more hours, da?”
“You talk like that, you may have claw where sun does not shine.” Vlad extended his middle finger and the claw at the end of it, and Pierre and the others laughed.
After work, Alexei took the bus to Sol’s stop and found the coffee shop easily. The black wolf must have just come from work; he was still in his red polo shirt, sitting across from a bear. Sol acknowledged him, but only briefly, and so Alexei sat in a corner with a latte and leaned back.
He knew he was supposed to be watching Sol, but his attention kept drifting. It was so strange to be sitting here watching his best friend have a date with a guy. This was why he had left Samorodka, and yet, it was frustrating to watch Sol smiling, engaged with the bear, while Alexei thought about Mike, and Kendall’s arm around his waist. At the barbecue, things would be better. Sol would keep Kendall away, and Alexei would ask Mike out. He
would
. He had not fled Siberia only to remain just as unhappy here.
Not
just
as unhappy; that was unfair. Here, he did not have to be afraid when he opened the door of his house; he knew that someday the life he wanted would be within reach. He just wished it would hurry and arrive.
And Vidalia was interesting in a way that Samorodka never could be, a profusion of people and worlds crammed between hot asphalt lines. Though it had been just a year since he’d left Samorodka, it was hard to remember the neat stone buildings, the decrepit abandoned houses, or anything outside his parents’ house or the schoolhouse. Only the path to the dam and the little shelter he’d so often sat in with Cat remained clear in his mind; he could see the flowers she talked about when she listed them, and he could smell the fresh water and the scent of grass crushed under their paws. Even his life in Midland, only a month removed, had receded into the fog of “things he didn’t need to think about anymore.” He could see the house where he’d lived and the painting on the wall he’d stared at every dinner, and he remembered the smell of the cheap disinfectant Richfield High had used in its corridors, but most of his other memories of Midland, like Samorodka, were of people: the nasty coyote who’d tormented Sol, a squirrel he’d studied with, the wolves on the baseball team.
And his host parents, of course. He had e-mailed them twice to let them know that he had an apartment, and then a job; his host mother had worried about him being paid unofficially, while his host father had congratulated him on doing “real work.” But neither of them had written since then to ask him how he was. He’d asked about their daughter, who had just returned from spending a year in Zhangou, and about the mother’s job—she had been up for a promotion. There’d been no e-mails since then, and Alexei realized that when he was no longer at their dinner table, his presence was no longer forced into their busy lives.
“Hey.”
He looked up into Sol’s bright green eyes. How long had he been thinking, off in his own world? He started to apologize, but the wolf was smiling. Alexei saw the bear waiting at the door. “Oh. Is it…?”
“He’s nice,” Sol said. “I think we’re going to get dinner. You’ll be okay?”
Alexei nodded. “Oh, yes. Good.” He smiled back up. “Have a good dinner.”
“Thanks for coming.” Sol lowered his voice, and his ears flicked back. “I feel silly.”
“No, no, I understand.” Alexei wagged his tail. “I am glad to help.”
He followed their progress down the sidewalk, watching them talk and gesture to each other. Sol looked completely absorbed in the bear, and Alexei was glad to see that the bear returned the interest. He didn’t know how good he was at telling character from appearances, but the bear looked like a nice fellow. What had Sol said his name was? Mike? No, not Mike, he would have remembered that. Mitch, that was it.
The two of them disappeared around the corner. So he would be on his own for dinner, or else he could go home and eat whatever Meg was cooking. He sighed, and then perked up his ears, looking out the window. The downtown bustled around him, full of buildings and scents, and sparking his spirit of adventure. Maybe he could find a place he hadn’t tried before, and tell Meg and Sol about it. If it were really good, he could write to Cat about it, too.
He finished his latte and left the coffee shop, walking down the street amidst all the other people. Even though the crowds were larger than in Samorodka, the mix of scents was similar. He supposed that beyond a certain number of people, scents just mingled into a haze. There was a muskrat in front of him, alone; a jaguar stalking the edge of the sidewalk. He followed the progress of another fox, a little chubby and older, checking his phone as he crossed the street. Any of these people might come up to him and be the right one for him, mightn’t they? Only they never would. Even here, where he did not know everyone he met, where there was a group of gay people who met and dated and (in private rooms) held paws, even here, he was walking to dinner alone.
The restaurants that looked interesting to him, the ones whose smells lured him to the door with fried onions and peach pies and roasted chicken, they all had tables where groups of two and three and four sat and laughed together. He wondered if Mike would want to go to any of these places with him. Sol was out with his date, and Alexei ached to share something like that with Mike, a dinner at an interesting restaurant or a movie they were both seeing for the first time.
He did not want to go sit alone by himself at a table, so he ended up at a takeout chicken place, with gleaming white tile and chrome and the smells of oil and ammonia mingling in the air. At least the oil in this place smelled good: chicken rather than burgers. Alexei had heard throughout his childhood the sour-grapes jokes that the delicious-looking burgers in the States included pieces of rats and vermin, and those jokes had worked their way so far into his consciousness that now he found it difficult to eat burgers, at least from fast food places.
This place at least looked clean, and the chicken smelled better when he stepped inside, so he walked up to the counter and ordered his chicken sandwich and Coke. And then he reached into his pocket and found it empty.
“Sorry,” he said, checking the other pocket even though he knew his wallet wasn’t there. He’d had it at the coffee shop, he’d been sitting next to the window, he’d gotten up…it must still be there.
His sandwich and fried potatoes plunked down on the counter, dropped by a breathless coyote who barely spared him a glance before running back to fill another order. The doe behind the register looked at him dully.
“I don’t,” he said, ears folding back. He panted as though the air conditioning in the restaurant had failed. If Sol were here, Sol could help him, either give him money or tell him how to react in this situation. Or if he’d been on a date, he could turn and see the sympathy in Mike’s eyes, and Mike would take care of things and together they would go look for his wallet. But there was nobody there to help. “I can’t find…”
Everyone simply stared at him. He turned and ran from the restaurant.
*
The kitchen smelled of salmon, butter, and a salty-sharp spice. “You were out late,” Meg called.
Alexei didn’t say anything, postponing the moment when he would have to say, “I lost my wallet.” He walked into his bedroom, directly to his dresser and the drawer where his shirts lay neatly folded. In the moment he reached his paw into the drawer, he half-expected his money to be gone, magically transported to wherever his wallet had disappeared to. But no, it was there, two hundred dollars saved over three weeks of work. Even without the…whatever twenty minus his latte came to, he was still doing rather well, he thought. Honest work.
The thought did nothing to improve his mood. Stupid fox, he thought, can’t ask Mike for just a cup of coffee, can’t keep track of his wallet, can’t speak English properly. How was it so easy, so natural, for Sol to go to coffee with Mitch the bear? He was an idiot to think things could be different even in a relaxed setting like the barbecue.
When Sol was frustrated, he’d told Alexei, he just looked at Niki, whether on the wall or on the background of his phone, and he remembered that Niki had believed in him. Alexei had Sol, but Sol was off with Mitch; he’d had Cat, but he couldn’t call her anymore or do anything but send increasingly worried letters out into the darkness.
He turned to the picture of Niki, facing the green-eyed fox behind his reflection in the glass. “
Where is my ghost?
” he said in Siberian. “
Why don’t you help me find someone?
”
“What are you going on about?” Meg appeared in the doorway and looked at Alexei, then at where he was staring. “Oh god. Don’t tell me you’ve started dreaming about him too. You know about collective hallucinations, right?”
“Collective?” He knew both the words, but they didn’t seem to go together. “No,” he went on before she could explain, “I am just…”
“Mind you, at least it would be familiar. Sol could help you handle it. So could I, for that matter.” Her grin faded. “You look like someone shaved your tail. Sol’s thing not go well?”
He shook his head. “It was fine. They went to dinner. They are still there, I suppose.” His muzzle dipped. He stared down at the carpet. “I lost my wallet. I had to walk home.”
“Oh, shit. Well, wait, you don’t have a driver’s license, and you didn’t have credit cards.” She sucked in a breath. “Your ID.”
“I can send for another one. It is not important. Nobody asks to see it. And it was not a lot of money. It was…” He held his paws in front of his muzzle, trying to work out how to convey the feeling of shame and loneliness and anger. “It made me feel stupid.”
“Well, asking that painting to find your wallet for you isn’t doing you any favors on that count. Maybe you should just get some candles and something that was in your wallet at one time.” She laughed. “But I think a drink might be more help. You game? I got the stuff for that one I was telling you about.”
“It is vodka?”