Raisa was right; the night proposed only loss-filled reflections, but what if, in fact, a loss had occurred? Wasn’t the night the ideal setting just then? As the bus touched off, Maya said temporary farewell to her son. She slept the entire way home.
4
At Acrewood, Maya felt a palm on her shoulder. The bus was idling, the door open to a better-lit night. “It’s Acrewood, isn’t it?” Frank said. Drowsily, she roused herself. Her breath was sour and something was aching after being suspended awkwardly for an hour.
“You owe me a return ticket,” Frank said. “And laundry services. And a new hip.”
She embraced him. He laughed, embarrassed, but then eased into it. “You go ahead now,” he said shyly from her collarbone.
“Stop smoking, Frank.” She released him and took the stairs down to the ground. It was a day of exiting buses with hands empty. She heard the doors close behind her and felt the smeared pockets of her capris. With great belatedness, she discovered that she had taken nothing — not her bag, nor wallet, nor cell phone. Frank was disengaging the brake, the bus about to roll forward, when she spun around and banged on the glass of the door. Wearily, Frank opened the door.
“Let no one say the bus line is not a full-service operation,” he sighed when she told him the reason. He extended a flip cell phone. As she dialed, he spoke an apology into the microphone.
Maya knew what would greet her on the other end of the line — she had sent no word for three hours, her cell phone ringing uselessly in her purse in the front hallway closet. She was rebuked like a schoolgirl, first by Alex, who threw down the phone, then by Eugene, whom she heard exclaiming in the background, and finally by Raisa, who picked up after Alex. Only then was she told that her son had been returned home just minutes after her bus had pulled away from the curb, whereupon Alex’s cell phone rang with the jubilant news; whereupon Alex began dialing his wife, only to speak to his mother again once she traced the tinkle of Maya’s cell phone to the front hallway closet.
“Raisa!” Maya broke in. “Is he all right?”
“In one piece, thank God,” Raisa said. When she was relaying the news of Max’s return, she was triumphant, but now a note of hesitation appeared in her voice.
“What is it? Maya said.
“Who does this, darling?” Raisa said. “Eugene said, ‘The grandson we found, now we lost the mother.’”
“Raisa—”
“We were mindless with worry.”
“You could have called the bus line,” Maya said sharply. “Asked them to dispatch it to the bus that I took. It only takes a little imagination. But you would rather sit there mindless with worry.”
Raisa, who had been starting to speak, fell silent. “I am not going to pay attention to what you just said because you are upset,” she said. “And God knows where you’ve been.”
“I’ve been looking for my son,” Maya said. “Now tell me where he was.”
“He was in a river!” Raisa said, as if Maya’s willfulness were responsible. “They brought him here like Moses in the basket. Families that have nothing to do with ours keep bringing our boy to us.”
“Watch your voice,” Maya said.
“He’s upstairs in the shower. Alex rushed him into a hot shower.” A hot shower — the Rubin remedy for the humiliations of fate.
“What do you mean he was in a river?” Maya said.
“In a river,” her mother-in-law repeated. “Facedown in a river. All right?”
“I don’t understand,” Maya said. “But he’s fine. He’s fine, isn’t he? You said he was fine.”
“They got him in time,” Raisa said. “I can’t make sense of it, honestly.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Maya started to say, but Raisa cut her off, her own voice quavering — she did not make a custom of interrupting her daughter-in-law. “Just come home.”
Maya saw Frank watching her. Meekly, he pointed at his watch. Maya hung up on Raisa and returned the phone.
“He’s at home, just like you said,” Maya said feebly.
Frank pressed the horn three times in celebration. Someone yelled up from the back. “I’m going to have a mutiny if I don’t get going,” Frank said. “You have a ride home?”
She did. Her husband was busy scrubbing down her son in the shower, and her mother-in-law refused to drive in the night, let alone after her daughter-in-law had been so rude. The chore was left to Eugene, and she and her father-in-law suffered a silent quarter-hour as he ferried her back to the house.
+
After an hour-long shower, Max stood downstairs and watched nervously as the adults shouted at each other. Finally he was remembered and stared at nervously in return. Then he was rushed up to bed. No one pressed him with new questions — the Rubins feared they would get answered. As Raisa hustled Max into pajamas upstairs, he stared at the spot outside his window where his tent had stood only that morning.
“Baba,” he said nervously. “Can I sleep on the floor?”
“No, little boy,” she said as she fought with a sleeve of his pajamas. Under her hands, Max felt as bony as a fish. She regarded him a little fearfully. “Good boys sleep in bed.”
Max was left to stand by the wall while Raisa reapplied to the mattress the bedding that had been rolled up on the floor. She did not request Max’s help, as if he could not be considered an ally, and he did not offer it. Occasionally, his grandmother looked up from the sheets to make sure her grandson was standing where she had left him. He looked the same: Floppy-haired and semitranslucent. As she worked, Raisa murmured optimistically at the sheets — now, Maksik would climb into a nice and clean bed, and he would dream of camels, and flying carpets, and tents, too, if he wanted, until he awoke the next morning and all the events of the previous day would dissipate like a dream, and probably his mother or father would make his favorite breakfast of farina with bits of turkey sausage, and if they didn’t because they were upset with him (he could understand that, couldn’t he), his grandmother would.
When Max was wedged into the billows of his blanket — his grandmother had folded its edge under his feet so that he was “in an envelope,” just as she had done with Alex when he was a boy — Raisa sat down on the bed and studied her grandson. All Raisa’s ministrations were powerless against his strange metabolism; the more she fed him, the skinnier he became. Even at home, Max looked as fragile and unprotected as a pencil, and he had decided to go wandering in the world and lie down in a river.
“Maksik, I am going to ask you a question,” Raisa said. “And your only job is to answer me honestly. That’s the only thing you have to do, because your grandmother loves you, and lies hurt your grandmother. Do you want to hurt your grandmother?”
Max shook his head.
“Exactly. People who love each other don’t hurt each other. It’s in the contract.” She guffawed sadly at her joke. “Maksik, why did you run away? It’s okay for you to tell me. If you don’t want to tell your mama or papa, it’s okay — as long as you tell me.”
Max shrugged.
“When did you think of it? You planned it a long time ago?”
Max shrugged again.
“Max, you’re not allowed to say ‘I don’t know.’ Because if you don’t know, who knows?”
Max’s face was as expressionless as his blanket, which swam with stone-faced seagulls. Raisa could tell she was frightening him.
“I’ll let you rest,” she said. “But right after you promise to tell me tomorrow. Will you promise me that?”
Max nodded. His grandmother laid her wrinkled lips on the straight straw of his hair and let him be.