Vaclav & Lena (20 page)

KNOCK KNOCK BYE BYE
…

L
ena did not wake up because there was a knock at the door, she woke up because the nice man got up from the couch.

The nice man stood up from the couch and walked to the door, and opened it, and Lena opened her eyes and wanted him to come back. She liked sleeping while the man sat next to her, awake. She liked this nap in the warm evening, curled on the couch with the television on, even when the man switched it to the news. When he switched the TV to the news it woke her, just a little bit, but she pretended to still be asleep so that their time together would never end.

The woman at the door spoke to the man for a few minutes, and then she came in and she sat down next to Lena on the couch. The nice man stood above them.

“Do you speak English?” The woman’s voice was as nice as the man’s. Lena did not understand, so she did not answer.

“Do you speak Russian?” the woman asked, in Russian. Lena understood.
“Da.”

“What is your name?”

“Yelena,” she said, giving her full name, as she always did with adults.

“Yelena, my name is Anna, and I’m going to ask you some questions, but there are no wrong answers.” The nice man was putting on his coat.

“Do you live here?” she asked. Lena did not understand why she asked this question. Where else would she live? Lena did not like that the man had his coat on. She watched him carefully, worrying. She wanted Anna to stop talking so that the man would stay.

“Where do you sleep?” Anna asked.

“Here,” said Lena, and she pointed to the couch. Anna nodded and then looked up at the nice man.

“Mark, thank you so much. I can take it from here.” Mark smiled and nodded, and then he leaned down and talked to Lena.

“You’re gonna be okay, kiddo. Okay?” He patted her on the head, and then he turned and walked to the door, and opened it, and left. Lena wondered when he was going to come back. She hoped it was soon.

Anna asked Lena a couple other questions, and then helped Lena pack her clothes into a bag, and then they held hands and walked out the door and into the empty hallway, to the elevator, and they took the elevator down to the garage, where her car was parked, and then she took Lena away from that place and brought her to a new place.

Lena didn’t want to leave, because she wasn’t sure that the nice man would be able to find her, and she began to worry that he would come back to watch
Sesame Street
and she wouldn’t be there.

GOOD MORNING, SUNSHINE
…

L
ena fell asleep in Anna’s car, and when she woke up, they were parked in front of a big house. Anna brought her inside, where it was dark and quiet, because it was the middle of the night, and put Lena to bed in her very own room, and Lena fell asleep right away.

Lena woke up early to the sounds of the house, busy morning sounds, sleepy children sounds, excited children sounds. There were children running up and down the hallway; there were children yelling. She had never been around so many other children before. In the room next to hers, someone was playing a radio and singing along to it, and then there was someone singing along to the singing along.

Lena had to pee, but she did not want to leave her room, and she could not imagine what, but she was sure that she was doing something dumb, that there was something she should have known to do or not do, and she was sure that the other kids would make fun of her, and she did not want to talk to them or see them.

Lena waited until the noises all went downstairs before she left her room, slowly, quietly, and ran to the bathroom to pee. The bathroom was closer to the staircase, and smells were coming up the stairs from the kitchen. The smell was familiar to Lena—it was toast—and Lena was hungry, but she was not brave enough to go downstairs.

She went back into her room and sat on the bed that she had slept in, the one with the blue flowers, and waited, quietly. She became afraid that when someone came in, they would wonder why she was waiting quietly, or they would know that she was too shy to come and talk to everyone and have everyone see her, and Lena did not want that, because she was ashamed of being shy, and she was ashamed of not understanding what everyone was saying and of not being able to talk.

Lena lay down again on the bed, and she pretended to be asleep. She heard footsteps in the hall and made sure that her eyes were closed and that she was very, very still.

The footsteps stopped outside her door, and the door creaked open.

“Here’s some toast in case you’re hungry.” Lena heard words but did not understand, and kept her eyes closed, thinking that maybe the person would think that they did not wake Lena up because Lena was so tired she was sleeping like a princess in a fairy tale, and this person would go away.

“Anna told me to bring you this toast in case you were hungry, so you should wake up and eat it,” the person said, louder. Lena was starting to hate the person.

The footsteps and the smell of the toast—it had butter on it!—entered the room and came closer and closer to Lena.

The plate of toast was set down on the wood floor, and it made a nice clunking sound, and then the hand of the person shook Lena by the shoulder. Now Lena could not pretend to be asleep anymore. Lena rolled over and looked at the person. The person was a girl, older than Lena, and much taller than Lena. She was black, and she had braids in her hair and clips at the ends of those braids. The clips were shaped like butterflies, all different colors.

“You wasn’t really asleep,” she said. “You don’t talk?” Lena was embarrassed that she did not understand, and she wished the girl would stop talking to her.

“¿Habla español?”
she said. Lena said nothing.

“Okay, fine, you don’t talk. Whatever. Eat the toast or not. You gonna come downstairs ever? Your lady is here.” Lena said nothing; she did not understand. This girl seemed not as happy as Anna or the nice man to talk to her without getting any answers, and this girl certainly was not as nice.

The girl left, and Lena ate the toast. Lena decided that the plate from the toast was a good reason to go downstairs. She couldn’t just keep the dirty plate in her room, and she knew that it was more polite, that it was the right thing to do, to return the plate and to bring it to the sink and to wash it. This she knew how to do.

Lena walked out of the room and into the long hallway. Some of the kids were back in their rooms, and all the doors were open. All the rooms had one or two beds. Some of the rooms had a lot of stuff in them, stuffed animals and posters, and some had nothing, like Lena’s room.

Inside the rooms, some of the kids were folding their clothes, or reading, or talking to one another, or playing a game.

Some of the kids were just lying on their beds, facing the wall, like Lena had been.

As Lena walked down the long staircase, she heard Anna’s voice. She was talking to another lady, and they were using the same serious voices that they had been using the day before, when Anna dropped Lena off. Lena followed their voices.

They were sitting at the kitchen table, and Anna was talking on her cellphone. There were papers in front of them, and Anna was writing a lot of things down on her piece of paper.

Anna saw Lena walk into the kitchen. She popped up out of her seat.

“Hey! Good morning!” She took the plate out of Lena’s hands and put it on a pile of dishes by the sink. Two kids were standing at the sink, washing dishes together, and they were talking and bumping each other with their butts, making each other splash water or soap on themselves. They were laughing. They weren’t laughing at each other, they were laughing at the fun they were making together.

Anna took Lena into a room off of the living room.

“This is the art room, craft room, general playroom,” she said in Russian. “You can do anything you like in here.” Lena looked around the room. There were shelves on every wall with toys and books, and there were tables in the room that had boxes of crayons on them, and big, huge pieces of white paper. There were clear plastic tubs everywhere with toys in them. There were kids Lena’s age on the floor, playing with cars on a rug that had streets and houses drawn right into it.

“Do you like to color?” said Anna. “Come on, we’ll color.” Anna pulled out a chair for Lena at a table where there was one other little girl coloring. This girl looked older to Lena, but not as old as Toast. The girl did not look up when Lena and Anna sat down. She was coloring an ocean of blue around a tiny pink fish, trying to make the ocean come closer and closer to the fish without going onto the fish.

“Janelle, this is Lena.” Janelle said nothing. Anna pulled a big piece of paper in front of Lena, and then she pulled a big piece of paper in front of herself. Then she put a big box of crayons between them. She took out a brown crayon, and she started to draw a big flower in the center of her paper. It had perfect tapered petals, and once they were outlined in brown, she began filling them in with orange.

Then Anna reached into the crayon box and took out a pink crayon, and handed it to Lena.

Lena slowly, carefully, introduced the tip of the crayon to the paper, as if to do so would spark a chemical reaction. Then, staring at the crayon, not at the paper, she pushed the crayon along, barely making a mark on the paper. She was focused on gliding the crayon across the paper. Then she laid the crayon on its side and glided it across the paper that way. She wiggled it back and forth and moved it along in her best approximation of an earthworm. She thought about how she had seen earthworms move, how they scrunched their bodies together and expanded, and she tried to capture this back-and-forth forward movement with her crayon. She thought about her fingers in the carpet, and she thought about the new carpet at this house, and how fantastic it would be to be alone with it, to walk her fingers along its roads, to drive her hands on its highways.

Lena liked this activity—it required no talking—and she liked sitting at the table and quietly concentrating while other people were quietly concentrating. She wanted to make marks on the paper like the other people—that seemed good—but she also liked the way that she was coloring. Lena’s way, she could color forever without using up any paper or any crayons.

HOW LENA BECAME A STAIN ON THE LIFE OF THE AUNT
…

T
he people who took care of Lena for those strange hours after Radoslava Dvorakovskaya died, with their caring faces and their protocol and paperwork and best intentions, these people examined the will that Radoslava Dvorakovskaya had left by her bedside table. Radoslava Dvorakovskaya had clearly wished that custody of Lena be granted to Lena’s aunt, Ekaterina. Radoslava, however, was not Lena’s legal guardian and had no authority to will Lena to Ekaterina or anyone else. To complicate matters, there was no paper trail suggesting who should have custody of Lena. Lena had been off the kid grid since her parents had disappeared. In fact, it was unclear whether Lena had ever been on the grid: Lack of an American birth certificate suggested she had been born in Russia; lack of immigration paperwork suggested that she had been born in America.

Radoslava Dvorakovskaya’s will, which identified Ekaterina as Lena’s aunt, was the only paperwork that even acknowledged the existence of Lena. After much searching and discussing, Ekaterina was determined to be the best legal guardian for Lena. The relation was close; Lena’s parents were nowhere, disappeared by all accounts; and Ekaterina was willing. Eventually.

“She is how old?” Ekaterina asked.

“That is old enough for free school?”

“My job is not making me wealthy; how am I to pay for all of the things? Schoolbooks and food and clothes and things?”

“Stipend? What is this?”

“How much is this?”

“When will the first check come?”

So Lena goes to live with the Aunt. This Lena remembers. Too clearly and not clearly enough, as that is how memory is.

It was several days of coloring with Anna before the Aunt came to take Lena home. Lena remembers these days as days of coloring, because they were filled with coloring, as much as she wanted, as much paper as she wanted, as many crayons as she wanted, and she fell into the hours of coloring, and meals came, and snacks came, and some of these she put into her mouth and some of these she did not, depending on who was looking at her and how brave she felt. Mostly she was allowed to go on coloring all day, and when it was time for bed on the second night, she knew the room she was going to, and she knew that no one would disturb her and that she could sleep under the covers, and go to use the bathroom whenever she wanted, and when she woke up, she could color again.

By the third day she was starting to feel really good, starting to look forward to the next day, to coloring, to getting lost in it so that her eyes hurt and her hands hurt. Everything about the house that had been frightening she now understood. She knew where the food was and where to put your cup when you were done with it. Also, someone new had come, a boy who was younger than her but taller, and who had a head that was very round, rounder than any other head she had seen, so that she was not the newest person anymore, she was a girl who knew things about the place and was comfortable and was there, and she was aware that when the new boy saw her, he would be feeling unsure and afraid, and he would be thinking that she must know everything, which she did.

Then the Aunt came. Lena had never seen her before, but she had heard of her, from Radoslava, and she thought, for the first time since she found Radoslava Dvorakovskaya dead in the shower, about Radoslava being gone and dead, and she thought about how nice the days had been since Radoslava Dvorakovskaya died, with the coloring and the food and everyone being nice and playing and leaving her alone, and she thought she was happy that her
babushka
was dead, and she thought that things were going to be even better with her aunt, who she had heard about.