“Talk to her, please,” Mama says.
If only I could, I want to say aloud, but don’t. “Where are you exactly?” I ask.
She clears her throat again. “I’m visiting Svetlana. I’ve been here for a little while. How long are you staying?”
I swallow. “Um. I’m not sure,” I say. “I’m kinda bummed. I mean, I know I’ve been hard to reach lately, but… Anyway, Papa didn’t tell me you were out of town.”
More silence. Something is wrong, I can feel it. She sounds… what, sad? Distant? I can’t quite put my finger on it. My mother is usually a very severe person. This woman seems emotional. How strange of her to travel to New Jersey in the middle of the week, too. Maybe Tristan was right after all, and the clue I needed has been under my nose this whole time. My dad is obviously keeping something from me. “Is Sveta okay?”
“Mashinka, I’m so sorry, but I have to go. Can I call you back later?” She pauses for a moment, then adds, “It’s so good to hear your voice, honey. I’ll call you back soon.”
And before I could finish saying “It’s Shabbat today,” my mom drops the call.
I call her back, but it goes straight to voicemail. So I leave one. “Mom, in case you forgot, it’s Friday, which means in three hours I’m turning off this phone and you won’t be able to get a hold of me. Please call me tomorrow night if that happens. Also, I hope everything is okay! I miss you. Bye.”
I hang up the phone, which blinks at me in orange, a sign of low battery. I don’t even bother getting my charger. I am all out of words. All I can think is:
What.
The.
Hell.
MASHA
________________
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When I get into my dad’s car an hour later, he looks peeved. My shoes are soaked, and my muscles are sore from spending the time between calling him and his arrival walking around the slushy streets of Riverwest. There’s a Parisian word for this sort of aimless ambling—flâner. It refers to the art of leisurely strolling the streets of Paris without any goal or destination simply for the pleasure of soaking up the city’s beauty. These aimless pedestrians are known as “flâneurs.” I’m not sure what you’d call a person who does this in Riverwest—besides, perhaps, careless—but it did not help. I’m still as in shock as I was before, only colder.
“I was in the middle of cooking,” my dad is saying in Russian. There’s more, but I’m too spacey to listen. “What was so urgent that you had to come home right this second? You find Anna?”
I put a hand on the gear shift and don’t let him move it out of park. “Why is Mama in New Jersey?” I ask in Russian.
My dad sucks in some air between his teeth. “Oh.” I think he is about to deny it, make up some excuse to appease me, but instead he digs into his pocket and lights a cigarette. Then he moves my hand away and begins driving, heading west down Center Street then turning right on Fratney. We pass an array of multi-colored Polish flats with wraparound porches and balconies. I’ve been inside at least seven of them, though I’m not sure any would still have the same residents. Although, I’d assumed that about Liam too, and had been wrong. Maybe Milwaukee really is quicksand, just like I’d always thought. “That’s, uh… long story.”
“Can someone please tell me this long story?”
“There are things… that have been going on here the last few months.”
“I can see that,” I tell him. “Don’t you think you might have mentioned that to me before I came here? Shto sloochelas?”
My dad turns his head toward the window, then itches his neck with his cigarette hand.
“Papa?” I start. “Does it have anything to do with the fact that you’re smoking again?”
For whatever reason, Papua New Guinea is full of languages with untranslatable words. My favorite one is Mokita, a Kivila word for the truth everyone knows but agrees not to talk about. It makes me wonder. What would Anastasia tell me if I found her? Here I’d thought this whole ordeal was about her disappearing, but it’s not, not really. There’s something else. Something that has to do with my parents, with my mom being in New Jersey. If that’s the case, perhaps I should let her be.
“Papa! Talk to me, or I’m getting on a plane home right now.”
Finally, Papa sinks into the seat, unstiffening. Then he takes a deep breath. “Well. Actually, your mom… uh, she needed break. She went to see your aunt,” he explains in English now.
“Yeah. I got that part. What did she need a break from?”
“From me.”
“Don’t you think that would have been important information to give me before I got here?” I ask. “No wonder Anna just up and disappeared.” No wonder she has resorted to stealing, I think. It could have been worse; when the world falls out from under you, it takes a lot of will power not to grab onto the first thing you catch on your way down—and she’s young and sensitive and newly involved with this blue-haired thief. I think of the French term, l’appel du vide: literally translated to “the call of the void”; contextually used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places. Or low places, depending on how you look at it. I know from experience that the call of the void comes easier than you might imagine. One little change can send anyone reeling, if they’re not standing on solid ground.
“Look. Masha. It doesn’t change facts. She gone and I’m not finding her.”
“It does, though. Obviously, something happened, and she decided to leave for a reason. It’s not just your general nineteen-year-old angst, which you have quite purposely lead me to believe,” I say. I pause, and inhale a deep smoky breath, before coughing. My dad opens the window, despite being on the highway, so that I almost have to scream my next question. “So what on earth did you do to make Mama leave?”
My dad licks his lips, which are chapped to the point of peeling, and glances over at me before his eyes turn back to the dashboard again. I can’t explain precisely what I catch there in his glance; it looks like guilt, but if it is, there are too many other things crowding it out. It must have been pretty bad if my dad feels guilty. He’s not someone who says sorry often, if ever. No matter the outcomes, he always thinks he’s right. Maybe I imagined it anyway; after that split second, it’s gone. He takes the next highway exit, and the car quiets a little.
“Did your sister ever mentioned woman named Zoya?” he finally asks me.
I think about this. The name sounds familiar, I’d met a few in Israel—one a Russian model, one an elderly widow—but I don’t recall hearing the name from Anna. We haven’t talked in weeks, months maybe, and when we did, it wasn’t about any specific person. I’m pretty sure I would remember that. “No? But we kept missing each other the last few months. The time difference… Well, it’s mostly my fault. I was so busy. I should have made it a priority to talk to her.”
Before I can ask what any of that has to do with my mom flying to New Jersey or Anna going who-knows-where, my dad turns into a cul-de-sac of identical condos and pulls into the driveway of a plain orange brick house with a simple gray roof. Once more I can’t help but wonder why on earth they chose to move here, of all places. It’s even worse than the house in Hartland. At least there, we had tons of neighbors, with big houses that all looked sort of different. And trees. Rosebushes. Dogs playing in yards. Here, it’s so… Quiet. Empty. The middle of nowhere, basically. It reminds me of a saying in Hebrew: B’sof Ha’olam Smolla. At the end of the world, turn left. It’s slang for the middle of nowhere, so it definitely applies to suburban Wisconsin, but I think there’s another level of looking at it that is less literal, a layer of unintended meaning. Metaphorically speaking, it could entail starting a new life; which, there’s no doubt about it, all the members of my family have done at least once, if not more. Even I’ve done it. Maybe Anna is just following in our footsteps.