The Borrower (12 page)

At 7:00 I sat cross-legged on the bed and called the main library number. After that first pit stop, Ian had stopped demanding I surrender my phone—either because he trusted me now, or because he knew I was too deep in this mess to get out with a single phone call. I got Loraine’s voice mail, which I hoped she remembered how to check. She asked Rocky at least once a week to help her “get the messages out from in there.” “Loraine!” I said. “It’s Lucy, just checking in. Sorry we didn’t talk before I left, but thank you so much for taking care of everything. I assume Sarah-Ann is the one covering my hours this week, and of course she knows exactly what to do, but you could remind her that read-aloud is Friday at 4:30, and we’re on
The Borrowers
, which I think is in my desk. If she can’t find it, it’s by Mary Norton,
N-O-R
. And then the craft lady comes Wednesday, but I think that’s it. So . . . as I said when we talked, I’ll be back by Monday morning. I have my phone with me, and thanks for taking care of all this! Bye!”

If Loraine stayed true to form, in an hour or two she’d be yelling at Sarah-Ann for not remembering my vacation, which had clearly been scheduled weeks ago. “Even Rocky knew about this,” she’d say, “and he doesn’t even work under her!”

As I hung up, I looked at my phone and saw I had no messages at all. Four recent calls, though, all from the library yesterday morning, all before I called Rocky’s cell. They would have been worried, of course, especially if someone noticed all the lights I’d left on. But they hadn’t been worried enough to leave panicked messages, and that was a good sign. I imagined a couple of calm ones sitting on my home phone: “Lucy, we’re just wondering where you are,” et cetera.

Ian knocked on my door (fast and loud, a lot of knocks) and I opened it. He stood there fully dressed, hair combed, holding out his tube of toothpaste. His eyes looked red, but he was grinning and bouncing on his toes.

“I thought you could use some fresh breath,” he said.

T
hat day I let him sit in the passenger seat. He was probably tall enough, and I felt I’d be a safer driver without someone shouting things from behind me.

I’d bought him a packet of six little powdered donuts from the hotel vending machine, and now he was wearing them like rings, taking tiny bites from the outside edges. He had on a Cardinals cap, but it was big and boxy, like he’d never worn it before. I wondered if he’d dug it out from under his bed just because it seemed like something good to run away in.

I got back on the interstate. “So, where are we going, buddy?”

He looked surprised, like he’d forgotten he was the navigator. “Oh, you stay on this road quite a while, still.”

“We’re going toward Chicago,” I said. “Does your grandmother happen to live in Chicago? Because I know a place we could stay that’s a lot nicer than a hotel. It would take us a pretty long time to get there, but there’s lots of food, and books.”

“WE
DEF-IN-ITE-LY
HAVE
TO
PASS
THROUGH
CHI-CA-GO
.” He was a robot now, apparently. “
BUT
SHE
DOES
NOT
LIVE
THERE
.”

“Great.”

For one last time, I considered turning around and driving back to Hannibal without telling him. I could have distracted him from the road signs if I really wanted, and we’d be back by nightfall and I could drop him on a street corner and head out of town. But I could picture him so clearly dry-sobbing into his arm, saying “She came in on Sunday when the library was closing, and she made me get in her car, and she said she was taking me to get some candy! And I love candy, and I didn’t know better, because she wasn’t a stranger! And she started asking all about how much money my dad makes!” There would be a national search, and the newscasters would give the story its own theme music. I wouldn’t stand a chance, even in Mexico. And come to think of it, I didn’t even have my passport with me. No, he really had to want to go home. And judging from the blissful expression on his face as he stuck his head out the passenger window like a golden retriever, that wasn’t quite yet.

Thirty miles later, thirty miles farther away from yesterday morning, when I hadn’t yet thrown my life away and ruined his parents’: “Miss Hull, do you have any CDs?”

“My car only plays tapes. But I don’t have either.”

Ian stuck his finger in the tape flap, then pulled it out and pressed eject. A tape popped out, one I’d never seen before.

“It’s not mine,” I said.

I realized that I actually hadn’t used the tape deck since I’d bought the car two years before. I listened to
NPR
on my way to work and needed silence to navigate traffic on the way home. I’d bought the car from a guy in Kenton who handed it over caked in McDonald’s wrappers and golf tees and cigarette butts.

“Maybe it’s karaoke!” He pushed the tape back in and pressed Rewind. The player churned backward, and I was momentarily surprised that it was capable of this.

“
AND
NOW!” screamed the tape. Ian lunged and turned down the volume. “Our national anthem, as sung by. . . . Miss Gina Arena!” A stadium-sized crowd made happy noises, like they knew who she was. Ian suddenly popped upright in the seat, pulled off his baseball cap, and slapped it over his heart.

“Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free
,” sang a woman’s voice, ringing and angelic. Behind her, the crowd sang along.

“What
is
this?” Ian kept his hat hovering above his breastbone, unsure of the protocol.

“We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil, our home is girt by sea!”

“That would be the national anthem of
Australia
.” I hadn’t even noticed the announcer’s accent, I was so focused on the road, on the million images of doom flashing across the windshield.
“Our land abounds in nature’s gifts of beauty rich and rare! In history’s page let every stage advance Australia fair
!
”
We both laughed through the rest of the song, but Ian never put his hat down. When the song finished and some ancient World Cup game started, he rewound it.

“Let’s learn it!” he said, and so we spent the next hour singing along and trying to understand all the words. We got pretty good, and when we tried without the tape we weren’t perfect, but “we had gusto!” as Ian put it.

Watching him with his hat on his heart, singing the anthem of another country, I imagined an Ian born somewhere else, Finland or San Francisco or one hundred years in the future, in a world without Pastor Bobs. Most of America was like Hannibal, Missouri, no matter what was in the news about East Coast cities, no matter what was in the movies, no matter how many prime-time sitcoms featured spunky gay sidekicks. To be fair, maybe most of the planet was like Hannibal, Missouri.

To get “Advance Australia Fair” out of our heads, I turned on the radio and flipped around. Ian wasn’t interested in anything until we got to what must have been a Christian station.

“Turn this up! I love this song!” he said, and started singing along:

When Jesus walked oh-oh!

On the mountain tops oh-oh!

He didn’t stop no-oh!

No He didn’t stop!

It sounded almost like a Seattle band from the nineties, but with Jesus lyrics. “Where did you learn that?” I asked.

“Oh, I go to this thing. This class, with these kids. It’s okay. And we listen to music, and sometimes this one leader guy brings his guitar.”

I didn’t want to push the subject, but I thought it would be good for him to talk about it. “What else do you do?”

“Some stuff. We do, like, workbooks and we read stuff. And then we always play sports. We mostly play football, but it’s not tackle.”

I looked out my left window so he wouldn’t see me biting my laugh. It was partly the image of Ian playing football. I remembered one Family Fun Day when I tried to toss him a balloon, and he ducked. And it was partly the fact that they wouldn’t let them tackle.

“Do they teach you things?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of like Sunday school. Only it’s probably more fun, because you can wear jeans.”

“Is it all good stuff? Do you believe everything they tell you?”

He pulled down the passenger-side sunshield, and looked in the mirror while he stretched his cheeks back in a fish face. “Well, it’s all from the Bible, so it’s definitely true.”

Hard to argue with, since I wasn’t about to assail his entire religion. Sadly, my primary motivation for silence was not empathy but strategy—the second he got mad at me, he might decide to use the next phone he saw to turn me in.

So instead, in my most neutral voice, I said, “I know about that kind of class.” It was an invitation to skip the awkward part of the conversation and tell me more.

But he didn’t say anything, just sat there looking out the window.

W
hen Ian did talk again, it was to ask about the Russian flag sticker on my rear window. My father had stuck it there the previous summer, in a sudden fit of national pride. It was around the same time he started asking if I wouldn’t like to change my name back to Hulkinov. He never volunteered to do it himself—too many business contacts would be confused—but for me, he said, it wouldn’t matter.

My father had a complete narrative for every link in the Hulkinov ancestry, from the scholar-warrior of the notoriously impaled head on down. He wore the family crest on a gold ring, on the pointer finger of his right hand, as only someone European with a portfolio of shady business dealings can.

“This young fellow,” he would say over the long Saturday breakfasts of my childhood, loosening the ring so it slid down his bent finger like a single brass knuckle, “was a swashbuckler. He took the bulls by their horns. Next Hulkinov is his son, who hides in the wheat fields when the enemy comes for revenge, trying to kill the only son of the great warrior. They think they will find him home, but off he goes to make his fortune, does not come home to roost for twenty-three years. Next Hulkinov, he charges to the battle on his horse, kills forty men in one day. Becomes a favorite of the czar.”

By the time he got to the Bolshevik revolution I was usually catatonic, but next came the best parts—his father and himself. His father, a man who peered half-starved out of photographs, his face stretched between giant round ears, had weaseled his way into the good graces of Stalin, only to perpetrate against Uncle Joe some unforgivable offense about which my father was always exasperatingly vague. I entertained various theories for years—Had he filched a left-behind Romanov Fabergé egg? Stolen Stalin’s mistress?—before I realized that if it were anything half that interesting, my father the fabulist would long ago have woven it into a cloth of finest hyperbole. It probably had to do with taxation laws or Party infighting. My grandfather, in any event, left his wife and eight-year-old son, took a box of cigars, a bottle of vodka, and a change of clothes, and told them he was off to Siberia before Stalin had the chance to ship him there. That was it, and all through my childhood I fantasized he’d come knocking on the door of our Chicago apartment, snow still crusted to his coat, beard thick with icicles. My father insisted he died only a few years later in Novosibirsk, but I knew better.

My father’s older brother, Ilya, died trying to cross the border into Romania, but that was all I knew. There was one photograph of my father and his brother, and every time it was shown, my father would say, “This is my brother Ilya, who died crossing the border to Romania.” Period.

And my father himself, the summer he turned twenty, a week after his underground chocolate company had been discovered by his neighbor, looked out the window of his mother’s house one night to see two men in thin brown coats bent over the back of his car. Ilya had built the car himself from scraps, and he and my father shared it. When my father dared to go outside an hour later, he found a fat potato crammed tight into the tailpipe. Who these men had been, and why they’d tried killing him with vegetables rather than just hauling him away at daybreak like everyone else, I could never quite get straight. In any event, my father removed the potato with kitchen tongs, packed a bag of clothes, kissed his mother’s cigarette-wrinkled mouth, and drove to the Volga, where he jumped from the dock to a shipping boat, clung for two minutes to a rope on the boat’s outer wall, and then plunged into the river, breaking his leg on the way. He lost his bag swimming, then filled his belly with air and lay flat like a floating log, letting the current carry him downstream. “I did the dead man’s float to stay alive,” he’d say, relishing the irony. For two hours he floated in the cold August water until two brothers in a little fishing boat pulled him up, waterlogged and half drowned, and laid him to dry on the boat floor like a prize catch. By the time he made it over the border, through Romania and Yugoslavia and into the Italian refugee camp, he’d lost twenty pounds and grown a beard.

In third grade, when we studied Ellis Island, I imagined him sailing on a steamer past Lady Liberty with a blanket over his shoulders, getting chalked and checked for lice, sleeping in quarantine. I even raised my hand and said it, until Mrs. Herman’s puzzled look cut me short. Really, my father flew into Idlewild in mismatched refugee clothes. It was 1959 and he had yellow pants and a chest-length Rasputin beard and bulging eyes. The way he told it later was that as he gripped the cold railing and stumbled down the airplane steps to the tarmac, the Pan Am ground crew turned from their luggage carts to stare and laugh. Sometimes I wonder if he took that as permission to rip off every American he met, to cast himself as the scholar-warrior and everyone else as the head on the pike. He had very little with him—the clothes from the Italian camp, one hundred American dollars, and his papers—but he did have that ring and its four hundred years of warrior lore.