Learning to Swear in America (9 page)

“And yourself?”

“Sixteen, high school student. Not a science guy.” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s nine days till summer break. I was going to apply for a job at the video store, but if California’s going splat by the time school starts up again, I should probably spend the summer doing something else. So.” She looked at him. “What do you think?”

They rocked up and slammed down from the curb. The crystals hanging from her key ring clinked softly.

“Pardon?”

“Should I get a summer job?”

He looked at her for a moment. She was what they were working to save. This girl, with flecks of paint on her knuckles and the troughs around her fingernails, and all the Dovie Collums in California. While he was printing flight schedules and scheming to get home, while he was sitting on a bridge, thinking about jumping. He felt a stab of shame. She had no chance to help shape the work that would guide the rockets. How helpless did she feel? How out of control?

“Yes,” he said. “Get summer job.”

Dovie smiled widely. It was a great smile, and he stopped feeling the scrapes. She nodded, and her bangs waved to him. She drove on for another ten minutes, careening around corners,
testing the limits of modern metallurgy as the car groaned and clicked in unsettling ways. It made him think of submarine movies, with all their menacing creaks.

“Do you have papers to drive?”

“A license? I’m sixteen,” she said, and had nosed the car into a residential neighborhood of small postwar houses by the time he realized she hadn’t actually said she had a license.

Dovie turned into the driveway of a small purple house with a wheelchair ramp, and the car rocked to a stop.

“Home again, home again, jiggity jig.”

She pulled her key ring from the ignition and got out of the car. The door clattered as it shut. Yuri sat alone for a moment, bewildered.

“This isn’t my hotel.”

She pointed to her ear.

He got out and pushed the door shut, afraid the impact would make the car collapse.

“This isn’t my hotel.”

It sounded stupid. Of course it wasn’t. How would this girl know where he was staying? Maybe he
was
too accustomed to limo services.

“Yeah, but it is my house.”

She waved her hand and, without waiting to see if he would follow, walked up the ramp. Yuri hesitated for a moment, swiveling to look at the row of small dwellings, identical in size and orientation to lot, and at this one, the only purple house on the street. The only purple house he’d ever seen. Attached to the
siding was a metal rivet for a flagpole, which held a rainbow-hued peace-symbol flag. Only one of those on the block, too.

Dovie opened the front door and motioned to him. He hesitated a moment, absolutely sure that he was dangling as loose as he had been at the bridge, and then he followed Dovie Collum up the ramp and into her house.

“I’m home, and I brought a science guy,” Dovie called.

Yuri stopped just inside the door, awkward and bleeding from the face. Not the way to make an impression. A young man, maybe eighteen, sat in a wheelchair to the left, watching TV. He glanced up briefly and turned back to his show. A woman stood in the kitchen just beyond the living room, dropping batter into muffin cups. She was lightly dusted with flour.

“Good lord, you’re bleeding!” the woman called. “Dovie, sit him down before he dies.”

Dovie pulled a chair out from the kitchen table, situated between the kitchen and living room. She raised an eyebrow at him and her glittered shadow caught the light. He slipped out of his shoes, though she’d left hers on, and walked across the living room, leaving depressions in the green carpet. The woman disappeared down a hall and came back with a first aid kit and a wet washcloth.

“These the only boo-boos?”

He looked at her, uncomprehending.

“Yuri’s Russian,” Dovie said, then explained, “she wants to know where you’re hurt.”

“Oh. I have multiple superficial abrasions and small laceration to forehead and left lateral mouth, with localized swelling. So, compromised skin integrity and risk for infection, but no skeletal issues.”

“I see,” Mrs. Collum said, smiling. She dabbed at his forehead with the damp washcloth, then taped a generous amount of gauze over his face. She stood back, looking at her work with approval.

Dovie sat down opposite him.

“This is my mother, Delinda Collum, and my brother, Lennon.”

“Lenin? Like revolutionary?”

“No, Lennon with an
o
, like John Lennon.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said, swiveling back and forth to look at them both.

“I used to go by Walter,” Lennon said. “To rebel.” He raised a hand in greeting but kept watching his show.

Mrs. Collum filled the rest of the muffin cups. Dovie pulled two cans of organic unsweetened orange soda with natural flavors out of the refrigerator and plunked one down in front of Yuri. She opened hers and sniffed the fizz with a rapturous look, then continued the introductions.

“This is Yuri Strelnikov. He’s one of the meteor scientists down at the Jet Propulsion Lab.”

“Why was he bloody?” Mrs. Collum said.

“He …”

“He’s too young to be one of those guys,” Lennon said. “He’s feeding you a line, Dovie.” Lennon hooked his index finger in the side of his mouth, then pulled it out and narrowed his eyes. “You hitting on my sister?”

Yuri flushed, unsure of the idiom. He opened his soda can to stall for time.

“Say something smart,” Dovie whispered.

“I wouldn’t hit your sister,” Yuri said to Lennon.

“That didn’t sound smart,” Lennon said, “but the accent did sound Russian.”

Mrs. Collum jerked the oven door. It resisted for a moment, then clattered down. She put the muffin pan in. From a corner of the living room a voice shouted, “Give peace a chance! Give peace a chance!”

“We cover his cage in the evening, but sometimes he still gets worked up,” Mrs. Collum said. “Lennon, show him the bird.”

Lennon thrust his middle fingers up over his head. Dovie laughed.

“Lennon! He’s a guest,” Mrs. Collum said.

Lennon sighed exaggeratedly and wheeled to a cage in the corner. He pulled off a hand-painted cloth depicting Gandhi and Maya Angelou holding hands, and the motion made his straight, shoulder-length hair swing. A blue-and-yellow parakeet cocked its head and screamed, “Give peace a chance!” Lennon flipped the cloth back over the cage.

Yuri stole a quick glance around. Ivy and a Boston fern drooped
from macramé hangers knotted through hooks in the ceiling. The walls were covered in green paint until, halfway up, it changed to blue, which continued across the ceiling. The kitchen counter was littered with brown paper bags labeled “Organic oats,” “Organic dried berries,” and “Brewer’s yeast.” Framed photos of Nelson Mandela and Jimi Hendrix hung on either side of the kitchen clock, above the cabinets.

“Give peace a chance!” the parakeet screamed from under its cloth.

“We went through a hippie stage,” Mrs. Collum said, by way of explanation.

“Oh. Is it over?” Yuri said.

Dovie snorted orange soda out her nose.

“Sorry,” she said, laughing, and grabbed a paper towel. She smeared the puddles around on the table.

A man with Dovie’s dark eyes wandered in from the hallway, a paperback folded around his thumb.

“What’s going on out here?”

“Dovie brought home a Russian boy from NASA,” Mrs. Collum said.

“He was bloody,” Lennon added helpfully.

Yuri stood, trying to be polite, painfully aware that gauze almost entirely covered his face. Mr. Collum looked him over, then spoke to Dovie.

“You shouldn’t let strange boys in your car.”

“We’d already met,” Dovie said. “He’s the one who sent you the cruller that day.”

“The one who made you stand in the street? Huh.” He was silent for a moment. “This isn’t the start of a collection, is it? Like your rings, or those snails?”

“No. I promise this is the only bloody Russian I’ll bring home.” She turned to Yuri. “The snails were like two years ago.”

Mr. Collum stared at Yuri for a moment. “All right, then. Carry on.”

He turned back down the hall. Yuri sat.

“He tried to kill himself,” Dovie told her mother. “He jumped off the Hernandez Park bridge and I pulled him back up.”

Yuri stared at her. “I didn’t try to kill myself. I fell when I turned to see who was there, because you stopped.”

“You were on the outside of the railing, looking at the gorge. Then you let go and went down. That counts as jumping.”

“She’s right,” Mrs. Collum said, giving him a sober look. “That’s a suicide attempt.” She squeezed his shoulders.

“Why’d you do it?” Lennon asked, suddenly interested. He wheeled his chair around with one hand and muted the television.

“I didn’t. I fell.” Yuri felt his face burn under the gauze.

“So why were you outside the railing?”

Yuri stared at his soda can. Why had he climbed over the railing? He wasn’t really going to jump. Was he?

He glanced up. All three of them were looking at him. This would never have happened at home. If something awkward came up, something
emotional
, his mother would have pretended it didn’t exist. She wouldn’t have asked him about it. She would never, never have mentioned it.

“I … was just thinking. About asteroid. Is stressful, you know.” He clicked his thumbnail on the soda can. “And my mouse died.”

They let that hang for a moment.

“I’m so sorry about your pet,” Dovie said, squeezing his forearm.

“So you really are with NASA? Seriously?” Lennon asked.

“I’m with Moscow State University. Russian government lent me to America. I’m physicist.”

“Wow. So your head’s important, and you got in a car with Dovie?” Lennon said. “You are suicidal.”

“She doesn’t drive car so much as … herd it, I think.” Yuri smiled to take any sting out of his words. Lennon and Mrs. Collum laughed, but Dovie looked serious, and for a moment he thought he had offended her.

“You’re some kind of freaky genius, then, right? So you shouldn’t have been on the outside of that bridge,” Dovie said, leaning forward. “Aren’t you supposed to be saving us?”

“Not just me.”

They were silent for a moment. He shifted under the gauze. Dovie leaned in closer, the light shooting green sparks off her eye shadow.

“How do you go from being like the world’s smartest guy, from being
that smart
, to making a decision that bad?”

“Lightning-fast reaction times?”

Nobody laughed. The oven timer dinged and Mrs. Collum ignored it, leaning against the counter, observing him.

He looked from face to face, from Dovie, to Mrs. Collum’s nearly identical older version, to Lennon, who had a weariness hiding in the corners of his eyes. Yuri picked at the edge of the table, where the top joined a metal rim. And for the second time that night, he climbed over a restraint without knowing why. He looked in Dovie’s dark eyes and told her the truth.

“I heard NEO director say they’re not going to let me go home to Moscow. I saw American military information, because of work we’re doing. I wasn’t supposed to. But after asteroid, then I have to stay here. In America.”

Lennon gave a low whistle.

“I don’t know anyone in this hemisphere.” Yuri shrugged.

“You do now,” Mrs. Collum said, giving him a quick shoulder hug. She picked up some potholders off the counter, pulled the muffins out of the oven, and set them on the stovetop to cool.

“Not to be selfish,” Lennon said, “but you are going to deal with the asteroid, right?”

“Yeah. We have enough time. Should be okay.” He thought about the disagreement with Simons and Pirkola on their approach to destroying the asteroid. It was annoying. Stressful. But he’d convince them. They’d come up with their different answers, and then he’d show them his approach, explain, and persuade.

“So maybe they ought to keep you,” Lennon said. “Maybe you’re a security threat.”

Yuri stared at him.

“Um, no. Is because I saw weapons list one time. It isn’t relevant to my research, I don’t remember any of it, and I wouldn’t
tell my government if I did. Russian government is not so free right now. I don’t like it so much. Besides, this stuff changes—will be outdated in few months. And I’d guess Moscow already knows most of it, anyway.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Dovie said.

No one spoke for a moment. Yuri drank his organic unsweetened soda until Lennon motioned him over toward the television. He popped a disc in a console and handed a video game controller to Yuri. A picture came up on the TV—outer space.

“You ever play?”

“Um, no.”

“You should be a natural. Sit.”

Yuri sat on the sofa and Lennon rolled his chair alongside and took the other controller.

“You’re in the blue starship, see? I’m in the red one. We’re hurtling through space, and we have to avoid hitting stars and space junk. Alien warships will pop up unexpectedly …”

“There aren’t alien warships.”

“You don’t know that. Not for the whole universe.”