The Borrower (13 page)

In his Saturday litanies he billed the Hulkinovs as a line of adventurers charging bareheaded into battle, but I realized now that half of them were only runaways. And which was I, heading deeper into trouble with every mile I fled from home?

We stopped at a burger place for lunch, our third fast food meal in two days. Because we were sick of grease, we both ordered anemic little salads in clear boxes, and after Ian bowed his head and sat in silence for about ten seconds, he drowned his iceberg lettuce in ranch dressing. I picked at mine with the plastic fork, not eating much. My God, I was turning into Janet Drake. Ian started recounting for me every shocking injury received by everyone he’d ever known. A girl’s teeth that got stuck in another girl’s forehead, a woman whose nose was bloodied by flying Mardi Gras beads, a classmate who caught his own ear with a fishing hook.

“How did you get the scars above your eyebrow?” I asked.

“I went like this.” He stood his plastic fork on end on the table, and pretended to ram his head down onto the prongs. So at least I’d been partly right. “I was mad at myself, I think. I forget.”

It did sound like something he’d do, inflicting pain on himself for sheer dramatic impact. I believed him. But I realized now that the only vague evidence I’d had of any kind of physical abuse had just vanished. Ian popped a little tomato in his mouth and swallowed it whole.

Back in the car, I checked my messages. Still nothing from the library, which was starting to seem a little eerie, but one from Glenn saying “We need to talk about the weekend.” We had been planning on Mexican and Blockbuster that Friday. When Ian fell asleep, his forehead on the window and his glasses in his lap, I called Glenn back. “Hey, I’m calling from the road,” I said. There was no point pretending I was still in Hannibal—for one thing, he might show up again at the library. “I’m actually on my way to Chicago.”

“Chicago?”

“I didn’t tell you?” I said. “I was sure I told you. I have this old friend from high school who’s been sick, and I was planning to come up just for a couple days, but it looks like it might be longer.”

“Chicago,”
he said. “That’s so funny.” His tone was odd, as if he didn’t believe me. I wondered, briefly, if the police were listening in. He might be sitting in a detective’s office, sweating all over the table, trying to sound calm, hoping to keep me on the line as long as he could. But of course he wasn’t. This wasn’t a movie. Things didn’t work that fast in Hannibal.

“Yeah. I’m staying with my parents.”

We couldn’t stay any longer than the one night, though—even if Glenn wasn’t bugged now, the more time that passed the more likelihood there was of people reading the papers and pooling information. As soon as they suspected me, Glenn and Rocky would tell them where to look.

“Hey, is your friend okay?”

By friend, I thought he meant Ian. I recovered in time. “She will be, I’m sure. I’m just helping out a little.”

“Just don’t donate any major organs, okay? That’s not what you’re doing, is it?”

I laughed. “I’ll tell you all about it when we get back. When
I
get back.”

“Can’t wait.”

I was becoming a fabulous liar. I’d always excelled at embellishment, white lies, covers for unfinished homework, but I hadn’t had practice with something so serious, so consequential. And I wasn’t even sweating. I lifted my hands off the wheel to check. Not a drop of moisture. It was like I’d been born to the outlaw life. If I lost my library job, I could go pro.

Submitted for the record, the entire history of my criminal career, up to that point in time:

Age 4:
Standing in line at the post office with my mother, I have a lollipop from the bank drive-thru. The boy behind me is maybe three, and I see him staring at my lollipop, on the verge of tears. I turn so he can see it better, and I take a huge, purple-tongued lick. He begins to scream, and his mother can’t figure out why. I’m the only one who knows. It’s the first deliberately cruel thing I remember doing. It might also be the model for all my future relationships with men, but this is beside the point.

Age 5:
My father begins sending me into the halls of our apartment building to steal various things left by the doorman outside our neighbors’ doors. Dry cleaning,
UPS
boxes, even milk in glass bottles that a family downstairs has delivered from a farm in Wisconsin as late as 1986. Note that we are far from poor. My father later says that he simply couldn’t help himself: in Russia, if someone had been so foolish as to leave unguarded milk outside the door, you would take it and then brag about it all over town, letting everyone at the bar laugh at the people who thought they were so rich they could leave their milk on the stoop. At the time, he simply tells me these are things our neighbors don’t want anymore, so they’ve put them in the hall for someone to take. He tries on the freshly pressed oxford shirts and sends me back with the ones that don’t fit, to hang back over the doorknobs in their plastic shrouds.

Age 8:
My father fills my coat pockets with nine little jars of caviar at Dominick’s. This I know is stealing, but I am too busy pretending I am a mother fish to care. I am a fish, and these are the millions of tiny eggs I’m carrying upstream.

Age 15:
I cheat on my sophomore Advanced Algebra final. It’s surprisingly easy, and no one finds out. I expect to feel guilty but don’t.

Ages 17 through 20:
Significant but unextraordinary underage drinking, etc. Nothing a presidential candidate would even bother denying.

Ages 23-26:
Theft from Hannibal Public Library of over one hundred books I deemed inferior, one stapler, one ten-year-old child, and several reams of computer paper.

I reflected now that aside from the drinking, all these things involved stealing on some level—math answers, caviar, lightly starched shirts. Even the lollipop incident had felt like a kind of theft, like I was reaching out and grabbing that little boy right by his sucker-craving eyes. Perhaps we’re all hardwired for our crimes. Liars are always liars and thieves are always thieves, and killers are born violent. The form our sins take just depends on circumstance: how far we sink in the world, how badly we’re raised. Who walks into our little library and upsets the universe.

A
fter we fueled up and bought chocolate to stay awake, we were completely out of cash. “Count the change,” I said, and handed Ian my Tupperware of coins. He poured it all onto his lap and started building little stacks.

“Guess how many dollars we have,” he said finally.

“About two.”

“No, one. Plus twenty cents. But you could also say that we have one to the millionth power. Then you could say we’re millionaires.”

Time passed more quickly that afternoon with a specific destination in mind, and the scenery certainly improved as we passed through the Chicago suburbs. My parents live on Lake Shore Drive, in an apartment worth more than I’d make in fifty years. I don’t tend to tell people this. And I certainly don’t take my parents’ money, partly because I’m sure my father made most of it illegally, not on real estate. The Russian Mafia in Chicago is bigger than you’d think.

I doubt my father has ever hurt anyone, not physically, but he does some funny things with numbers. Zeros are conjured out of thin air, decimal points moved, entire bank accounts erased or invented. His friend the travel agent went to jail in the eighties for printing false ticket receipts for his friends. His friend the restaurant owner vanished forever a few years back.

“Wow, it’s all carved!” Ian said as we pulled up. He meant the building, with its elaborate scrollwork above the front door. I still had the sticker on my car, so we got waved right into the garage, and I parked in my parents’ empty space.

“Have you ever been to Chicago before?” I asked him. I’d been too lost in my own thoughts as we entered the city to ask. And he’d been busy sticking his head out the window into the freezing air so he could see the tops of buildings.

“No, but I’ve been to St. Louis a lot. But not even the fun parts.”

We rode the shiny new elevator up to the fourteenth floor, and I opened the door onto the living room—its white leather furniture and glass coffee table and the row of windows overlooking the half-frozen lake.

“Cool!” he said, and he leaned over the back of the couch to press his hands and face against the glass. “Can we eat on the balcony?” It was almost dinnertime.

“Too cold. Windy City.”

I showed Ian how to work the TV, regretted it for one horrible instant when it occurred to me that he might see himself on the news, then relaxed when he managed to find Nickelodeon. I left him there and took a shower and changed into my mother’s white blouse and blue wool cardigan and khakis. She was a couple of sizes bigger than me, but it was so nice to feel clean that I didn’t mind. I shoved my dirty clothes into the washer in the big bathroom closet. Ian wanted to do his laundry separately, and himself.

We found spinach ravioli in the freezer and an unopened jar of marinara in the pantry. For myself, I opened a bottle of what was probably a very expensive Syrah.

“Are you an alcoholic?” Ian asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

We sat at the long, glass dining table, and Ian was unduly excited to see his feet through it. He pretended to kick the plates from underneath.

“Did you grow up here?” he asked.

“Yep. Since I was two. Same apartment.”

“Where’s your bedroom?”

“They turned it into a library. Isn’t that funny? I’ll show you later.”

It was dark out now, and I loved how the night turned the windows to black mirrors. There were sirens every few minutes—a sound I’d always associated with home, rather than tragedy, even now when I kept thinking they were coming for me. On the highway that afternoon, an ambulance had passed us with sirens blaring, and I’d very nearly stopped breathing. From up here, though, the sounds of the distant emergency vehicles were just the constant and reassuring accents of the city noise below, the reminder that life was going on without us, and so was death, and most people in the world had other things to think about than a hapless librarian and the boy she had inadvertently kidnapped. I loved standing there, fourteen stories above the streets. I thought of Robert Frost: “I’d like to get away from earth awhile.” Skyscrapers, birch trees, a nice big glass of wine.

“I have a question,” Ian said. “If you grew up here, how did you ever play sports?”

“I played them at school,” I said. “And there’s a workout room on the top floor.”

“But what about on weekends?”

“Nope. Except sometimes my father and I would move the barstools to make goals, and we’d play soccer with a beach ball. Soccer is a very big deal in Russia.” I’d been telling him earlier about my father’s escape.

“Can we try it?” I was surprised this was so important to him. I remembered what Sophie Bennett had said about his lack of coordination in the cancan line. Then again, he was a ten-year-old boy who hadn’t run around much in the last two days, except up and down the sidewalks of highway rest areas.

“Sure,” I said. “But I don’t think they have beach balls here anymore.”

“We could definitely make a ball out of clothes.”

Once we’d cleared the dishes, I helped Ian find a drawer of my father’s white undershirts, and he worked to tie them into a ball with kitchen twine. We moved the four barstools to make goals at either end of the living room, and we each stood in one. We kicked the ball of shirts back and forth, one shot each, trying to block and score. He wasn’t that good, but neither was I. The ball started to unravel every fifth or sixth shot, and Ian would stop to fix it.

“Do you play soccer at home?” I asked.

“Well, I’m on a team, but it’s pretty stupid, and mostly I’m just in charge of handing out orange slices. At recess I usually play something called Ian Ball, but I can’t show you here because there’s no Dumpster.”

There was the sound of a key in the door, and Ian froze where he was bending over the ball to retie the string. “It’s the cleaning lady,” I said, but even before I heard my father’s loud voice I realized it was too late for Krystyna.

“Dad!” I said before he could find us and have a heart attack. “Dad, we’re in here.” My mother came around the corner first, her eyes big and white. She had her leather travel bag over her shoulder, and her hair looked slept on from the plane.

“Lucy!” she said, walking toward me with her arms open, the bag falling, “Sweetheart, what’s wrong? We saw your car. My God, you look terrible.”

“I’m fine, I’m okay,” I said.

“We came home early, your father’s stomach is a mess, don’t even ask.” As she was hugging me, my father came into the room, that big Russian grin, yellow and crooked, already spread across his face. “Great God,” he said, “and who is this new boyfriend?”

Before Ian could say something ridiculous, I said, “Oh, do you remember my friend Janna Glass, from high school?”

Janna Glass
was
someone who’d been at Chicago Latin with me, a girl who once stole French fries off my plate, a name I’d pulled at random, but no one my parents would know. They shook their heads.

“This is her son, Ian.” Why had I said Ian? Why not any other name in the world?

Ian held out his hand to my father. “Ian Glass,” he said. “Ian Bartholomew Glass.”

“She’s in the hospital, so I drove up to help out. We came over here for a change of pace.”

“Well what’s wrong with her?” said my tactful mother. She took off her heavy green coat, and I could feel the cold fly off it as she did.

“My mother tried to kill herself,” Ian said. He was a decent liar, I realized, a calm one. “My father ran off with a floozy, so she tried to kill herself with pills. But now she’s going to put her life back together.” He must have watched a hell of a lot of TV in addition to reading.