Home Leave: A Novel (22 page)

Matthias lets out a critical sigh, one that Leah knows means
You’re not taking this nearly as seriously as you should be.

“I’m serious,” Chris says. He’s sitting in a sauna, naked, sweating with men from the Russian joint venture, at the CEO’s dacha outside Moscow. They’ve just beaten each other with birch branches, and in this open atmosphere, Chris is hoping he can sell them on the benefits of extending the joint venture to Siberia. But the Russians look like they aren’t into discussing anything at this point. Borgev, the CEO, who kept walloping Chris’s back at dinner after making crude jokes, is leaning back with his eyes closed, looking embalmed. Andrej, his son, who is poised to step up as the CEO, the one Chris really needs to convince, lifts a finger to his lips. “We talk later,” he says. “Now, relax. Sauna.”

But it’s hard for Chris to relax in a sauna, where his body urges him to get out: it’s just counterintuitive to sit stewing in these temperatures. Saunas seem to Chris the perfect symbol of Russian and Northern European masochism: why choose to relax in an environment that is, by definition, deeply uncomfortable? It’s too hot in the sauna, too cold when you jump in an icy lake, and too weird when your foreign business partners are swatting you with branches. Chris prefers the American form of chilling out: taking a John Grisham book and a dog down to the dock on the lake, sitting in the sun with a cold beer. Chris says a silent prayer of gratitude to his ancestors, for getting the hell out of Europe. Mechthild sends him a silent
Bitte schön
back.

Later that night, after several more rounds of vodka, the businessmen get confessional. Borgev begins. “And to think, five years ago, Dmitry would have been here with us,” he says, heaving a huge sigh, like a wooden ship sinking.

Through his vodka-sharpened senses, Chris notices that Borgev’s son, Andrej, looks distinctly uncomfortable.

“Borgev oldest son is killed by Russian thugs,” says the man next to Chris, a fat, wheezing sales manager whose name Chris immediately forgot as soon as they were introduced. “He was going to be the CEO. Now Andrej must do it.”

Chris thinks Andrej has the potential to become a skilled CEO. He’s sharp, perceptive, and has a good handle on the market. But he doesn’t have the bluster of his father, or of most Russian businessmen. Though he drank rounds of vodka with everyone, he got quieter, not louder. He would make a great business leader outside of Russia, Chris thinks, but he won’t last a day here. Chris wonders, briefly, if he should act on this insight soon, sell off Logan’s shares in the joint venture before Borgev retires. But this call to action recedes just as quickly as it came, and Chris relaxes back into the circle of men. They are sitting around a candlelit table, with tiny vodka glasses in front of them, the table laden with Russian dishes: pickled tomatoes; cold herring; beet salad; thick, dark bread; slices of nearly translucent green melon.

“You have how many children, Chris?” Borgev asks, looking up blearily from his reverie.

“One,” says Chris. “But two before. I also lost a child. A daughter.”

“It is terrible,” says Borgev. “And this daughter, the one still alive. She work in your company?”

“No,” says Chris. “She is a newspaper reporter.” Technically, this isn’t true, but it’s the career that Chris had always wished for Leah, and hopes might still happen, once she gets out of this silly voice-a
cting
business.

This produces a wave of hilarity among the crowd. “A reporter!”

Borgev shoves his son. “Like this one! He also want to be a journalist!” Andrej smiles, embarrassed. Borgev slaps his thigh. “In Russia! What a joke. I take him out of literature study and put him into business. Because I need someone I can trust.”

This, of course, prompts a toast to trust, and more vodka.

“My younger daughter, Sophie, wanted to be an engineer,” Chris says, surprising himself. He never permits himself to think about this, let alone mention it in front of wasted Russian colleagues. “I think she would have done very well in this business.”

Borgev shakes his head. “What is it Tolstoy says? About death?”

Andrej shrugs, annoyed, a look that Chris has caught from Leah before.

Borgev takes it down a notch. “God gives, and God takes away.” He lifts his glass. The others follow suit.

By now, Chris’s head is swimming.

“This daughter of yours, Chris. Is she married?”

“Engaged,” says Chris.

“Too bad,” Borgev says, already laughing at his own joke, before he’s said the punch line. “Otherwise I would offer her Andrej.”

For a second, in his vodka-addled state, Chris considers it. Most likely they would be a good pair. Andrej seems serious, well intentioned, a reader. Who is this Matthias, anyway? Chris has met him a few times: he is nice enough, smart, but Chris is still uneasy. Watching Leah and Matthias, he remembers his engagement with Elise. They wrote each other a letter every day while he was studying in Stuttgart and she was teaching in Atlanta. Sometimes he thinks that was their happiest period: the anticipation of being together, before it actually happened. How does he warn Leah about the bitterness that comes, the disappointments, the personal failures? Maybe she already knows.

Chris is dreading the wedding. He tries hard to hide it, but he wishes it weren’t happening at all. It means he has grown old, that Leah is staying in Germany. It is another step away from their time as a family, with Sophie. I’ve stayed the same, Chris thinks. Traveling, working, meeting with customers. But Leah and Elise are barely recognizable as the daughter and the wife he knew. Elise, with her expanding interior design business, her feminist friends, her guarded nonchalance. He watched Leah closely in Berlin, the last time they visited her. Her face and body changed when she spoke German; she looked like a stranger to him. I’ve stayed the same, he thinks, stubbornly, and feels suddenly betrayed.

I should get some sleep, he thinks. What time is it in Madison? Five in the morning.

“Wake up, Chris!” Borgev is yelling. “We take car to Moscow, go to fun bar downtown. Only forty minutes to city center. Still early!”

Andrej helps Chris up apologetically. “I can take you back to your hotel if you want,” he says quietly, in the corridor. “We’ll just tell my father that we’ll meet him there; he’ll forget all about it in an hour.”

Andrej and Chris settle into the back of Andrej’s black Lexus. Andrej murmurs something to the driver and they head down the gravel driveway back to the main road.

“You must miss your brother,” Chris says, to break the silence.

“Yes,” Andrej says, and then, after a pause, “Well, we were very different. He thrived in this life. He loved the energy, the money, even the danger.” Andrej is quiet until they turn on the highway. “I think it’s bullshit. It’s ugly. I wanted to study abroad, get a journalism degree at NYU, come back here and make a difference. Oh well.” He laughs, joylessly. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”

“I’m glad you’re telling me,” Chris says. “You know, business was my ticket out of a life I didn’t want, on my parents’ farm. So for me it was a chance to escape. But I see how it is the opposite of that for you.”

“Very much so,” says Andrej heavily. “Well, we’ll see. How long I last.”

They have entered Moscow’s suburbs now, tall Soviet apartment blocks sliding by. “How is your daughter now? After her sister’s death?”

“It was hard for her,” Chris says. “But I think she’s doing okay now.” He doesn’t say that he is worried she will never recover, that none of them will. Who would they be if they did? He doesn’t want that, either.

“The place they are going tonight, it is where Dmitry got shot. Whenever my father gets drunk, he goes there.” Andrej shakes his head. “Sometime I think, he hopes they kill him there, too. Or he will kill them. It is good your family is better,” he says. “Dmitry’s death really fucked our family up.”

Chris doesn’t know what to say to this, so he simply says, “Your English is incredible.”

“Hollywood,” Andrej says. “The cheapest American education.”

They do not speak for the rest of the ride, and Chris drifts off.

After he has been dropped off at the hotel, back in his slick suite, he feels irritatingly awake. He opens his laptop, glances swiftly through emails. On an impulse, he opens a picture he has saved on the desktop: one of the four of them, Chris, Elise, Matthias, and Leah, at the lake house last summer. He tries, in the smiles of Leah and Matthias, to judge whether they are happy, whether they will be enough for each other. Then he looks at himself and Elise, trying to remember what he felt that day. All he can see is that the sun is in everyone’s eyes, they are squinting, laughing at Zack, who has wandered into the bottom of the picture. Then Chris pulls a photo from his briefcase, the one he always carries when he travels: the four of them, Sophie, Leah, Chris, and Elise, on the Great Wall of China. He looks at his two daughters smiling, holding each other tightly. Leah has told Chris and Elise, in the last two years, along with other sundry revelations, that she was rabidly jealous of Sophie, miserable in China; but she looks happy here. Everyone looks happy. They must have been happy. If they weren’t happy back then, then when?

Of the four of us, I’m the only one who can go back, whenever I want, to wherever we were. I can touch down in Singapore without landing at Changi Airport (although I sometimes stop by, to sample the hard candies they give out at passport control, which Leah and I always loved: the ones with the penguins on the plastic wrapping, a weird polar welcome from a tropical island). I wind through Little India, which we seldom visited when we lived there, but which I love now: the loud voices, the iced tea and the lime juice in small plastic bags, the patterns of saris, like looking up at the stars.

I wander over to the harbor, stare at the boats and the cranes. One good thing about dying young is that you don’t lose your curiosity, the excitement that made me ask Dad, over and over when I was alive: How does that work? What makes that move? The same impulse that made me take apart Leah’s Discman when I was ten, and she freaked out, but I put it back together, didn’t I? People think the dead are all knowing, but it’s not true, at least not for me, not yet: information is revealed in agonizingly slow stages, as far as I can tell. I sit in on physics classes at Singapore American School, at an empty desk in the back row, and make mental notes about quarks and black holes and Schrödinger’s cat.

When we were little, Leah and I used to hold our breaths passing the cemetery, exhaling and giggling when we couldn’t hold it in any longer. I avoid cemeteries now, too: they’re comfort for the grown-up living, not for the young, and not for the dead. I do go back to the soccer field where I collapsed, sometimes, for sentimental reasons. It’s not a space of horror for me, like it is for Leah. It’s like going to visit an old house, or the place where you had your first kiss. If anything, I feel a quiet pride, and I guess that’s what keeps me going there: there’s less and less these days from my time alive that conjures any emotion in me. Grand Ada says that’s a good sign; it means I’m ready for the next level, which makes me excited and a little nervous, the way I used to feel before any of our big moves as a kid.

“Next level?” I asked her once. “Like a video game?”

“How should I know?” she said, kind of condescendingly. “I never fooled around with that trash.” Then she was gone. I can’t wait until I can learn that disappearing trick. She says it’s not so hard.

I go back to our old houses too, of course, especially the one at Cairnhill Road, where it rained in the kitchen, where Robo was a little puppy. Another benefit of leaving the quick behind: I can find out things I always wanted to know before, like where the heck the name Robo came from. I look in Mom’s files (they’re not files, of course, but that’s the best way I can think to describe them to you) and sure enough, there’s the story of Robo Cop, lost in the woods, cuddling up next to Mom on the mountain summit. It’s satisfying to piece it all together.

And upsetting, to learn the bad stuff: about Paps, about Grand Ada, about Mom. The next time Grand Ada showed up, I yelled at her until I had no more “breath.” She just kept mumbling, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” until we were both as empty of emotion as winter trees of leaves. And that was that—for Mom’s sake, I tried to stay angry at Grand Ada, but after that confrontation, the fury was gone. The dead can’t stay mad, contrary to what stupid ghost stories will try to tell you. To the dead, revenge is as laughable as sleep. Both irrelevant to us now.

I read Leah’s files first, of course, desperate to know everything about my mysterious teenagey sister, and missing her like crazy. Seeing the files wasn’t as good as being back with her, alive, but it was the closest I could get, and it shed light on a lot I didn’t grasp back then. Some of it I knew, of course, like how she was kissing Ana’s brother, Lane, the summer before I died. Ana and I had a special club devoted to encouraging their budding relationship, FSLA, the Future Sisters-in-Law Association. But I hadn’t gotten the chance to read Leah’s and Lane’s breakup faxes, which I did with bated breath. In some ways, it was beautiful to be able to be closer to Leah in this new way, flipping through the pages (still speaking in metaphor, you understand), pretending, sometimes, that she was whispering it to me in the dark, in the twin bed over.

I was shocked that she had been, or still was, so jealous of
me
. I mean, what with the weird mature hindsight you get as soon as you kick the bucket, I
got it
, I understood the whole sibling rivalry business and Leah being older, and shyer, and not having curly hair, or whatever, but I hadn’t known what a big deal it was for her. Reading it I had a strong flash of human emotion, something I haven’t had for years now, which you experience often in the few short years after you die, the same way the ones you leave behind have flashes of death in the first years of mourning. I felt sad at being resented, even as I blushed with a feeling of triumph.