“Would Max like it if we looked in his room without him there?” she tried.
“I don’t think he minds when you go in there with a vacuum cleaner, am I wrong?” Eugene said.
“Don’t say that, Eugene,” Raisa said. “Maxie is so neat.”
Maya couldn’t think how else to distract them and gave up. To remain alone downstairs after having been doubted would have expressed a greater objection than Maya felt up to. She followed. They took the stairs in a line, like a team of emergency workers. The four of them stood at the furry threshold of Max’s room, hesitant to find the clues they wanted to find.
“I’d run away, too, if my parents painted the walls of my room the color of hand cream,” Eugene said, but the joke didn’t take. He persevered defensively: “I didn’t have these concerns as a child — my brother and I slept in the same bed.”
One wall of Max’s room was covered with a map of America Alex and Max had hand-drawn across a quilt of printer sheets; shelves ran the height of the next: Max’s books; two menorahs and a stuffed doll in a Purim costume, halfhearted Jewish gestures whose makers hoped their ancestral religion would take better root with Max than with themselves, even though he was the only non-Jew among them; and the Indian masks Max always wanted when they went to the Riviera Maya on vacation. Just now, the one with two red lightning bolts in place of eyebrows and a snake coiling out of its mouth communicated all their unease.
Eugene stepped inside and nodded toward the bedding, in a neat pile on the floor. “This was you, Alex,” he said. “You never had to be disciplined or told to clean up.” Maya swallowed, eager for him to misunderstand why it was all on the carpet. With satisfaction, Eugene ran a finger across the top of the dresser: no dust. He went over to the window and forced it up, sighing with the pleasure of his muscles at work, and stuck his nose into the evening air. The humidity was on its way back. The other three stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, looking around. What were they looking for? Everything seemed in place; there were no empty hangers in the closet. That could be good news because Max meant to return, or bad because Max had meant to return and had not.
Eugene turned back to them from the window. “To voluntarily sleep on the ground.” He shook his head. “Even on the night of a Cossack pogrom a hundred fifty years ago, a Rubin slept off the ground. Maybe on a haystack, but not on the ground.” He meant the pup tent in the backyard, where Max was allowed to sleep on weekends when the weather was warm. Alex and Max spent afternoons there. Home from work, Alex changed into lawn-mowing clothes, and father and son journeyed outside. Maya did not resent losing her sous chef to her husband, as if, eight years later, she was still checking the glue between them. By the time she saw, through the kitchen window, her men reaching the tent, gold on the inside and forest-green on the out, like a leaf in two seasons at once, they were stumbling back to base camp after losing their men to hostile Siberians who rode wolves. Or they were on a new planet and Alex had to leave outside the flap the crystal lowball with two fingers of cognac that he sometimes brought with him because liquids turned to gas on Planet Chung. (“Why Chung, Maxie?” “I can’t tell you.”) Surgical masks Maya had been made to bring home from the hospital enabled father and son to survive the bad gas. Then — a star popping softly in the black ether — the faint call for dinner would come.
Eugene slid his head back inside and stared at the bedding on the floor. “That’s not for laundry, is it,” he said ruefully, understanding. “It’s folded too neatly. Your son sleeps on the floor. And you know.” He stared at his son and daughter-in-law. Betrayal appeared on his face. “What else have you concealed about my grandson?” He looked at his wife. “Did you know?”
“No,” Raisa said without joy. Alex and Maya did not answer, but Maya sought support from the wall.
Eugene sat down on Max’s bare mattress and stared at the bedroll. “Maybe our boy is off on some adventure,” he said without believing it. “Maybe he’ll be home before long for a nice scolding.”
“Why don’t we return downstairs,” Raisa said.
“Genes are not water,” Eugene said. “Biologically, he is and always will be the child of those people. And the people who made them. It’s a miracle you’re seeing this only now. He came to us with programming; you can spend your whole lives changing the code, and still you are going to rewrite only fragments. I knew my great-grandparents. And who am I if not their great-grandson, buying for ten cents and selling for twenty? Faxes, e-mail, zip drives, okay. But it’s the same game.”
His audience stood silently. Maya felt the wall with her hand. It was cool to the touch. She tried to fit all of herself into the feeling. She was a palm against the cold wall.
“I ship everywhere,” Eugene said. “Denver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle. I like cities that end in consonants, strong names. Denver. Boston. Washington. New York — the “k” is like a nice flick in the eye. Miami, Philadelphia — feminine names. Montana.
“They don’t have philharmonics out there. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ballet, buildings taller than a barn. They don’t have that.”
“And, what, you go to the ballet?” Raisa said.
“No, but I can go whenever I want,” Eugene said. “I can go this very evening.”
“Come on, Zhenya,” she said. “Don’t get upset. Let’s go downstairs. I’ll make a cup of tea.”
“They have horses, and rivers, and grass, and then nothing,” Eugene said. “I know because that was my village — why did I run away to the city before I finished ten grades? The countryside is for poor people. Drunk people. They subsist on drink instead of turning ten into twenty.”
They observed one another gloomily. Outside, the light was letting go of the day.
“You’ve called the school,” Raisa said finally, redundant in a wish to turn back the conversation.
“Mama,” Alex said wearily.
“The school is responsible for him until two forty-five,” Maya said. “He went outside with the rest of his bus, and then he must have walked off.”
“The school is responsible for him until two forty-five!” Eugene exclaimed. “And if a murderer shows up at two forty-six, they’ll just fold their hands and watch with regret? No, this is a lawsuit. The school is guilty of negligence.”
“When I was little and playing in the sandbox with Sasha, and those men stopped to ask directions to school?” Alex said. “I knew you weren’t supposed to talk to strangers, but I not only talked to them, I walked them to the school. Children do mysterious things.”
“This is supposed to make me feel better?” Maya said. “Your father had to rescue you at the last moment.”
“I don’t think it’s the best example, son,” Raisa said.
Eugene rose heavily, and his ankle nicked a board peeking out from under the bed. His knees cracking, he leaned down and pulled it out, a bulletin board, its symmetrical rows of tacked plastic pouches pleasing to the eye. Each pouch had a labeclass="underline" Fescue. Timothy. Zoysia. They were grasses. The fescue was tufted, like the back of a porcupine, the timothy like grass everywhere. He looked up at Alex and Maya. They stared at him woefully.
Until now, Eugene had not known that there was more than one type of grass in the world: grass. It looked like a science project. As his family watched him, Eugene fished out a faded clump from the pouch labeled “timothy” and sniffed it. He didn’t get anything except the smell of old sun. He looked again: The tawny grass looked chewed. Eugene noticed tooth marks on the other grasses. Not all; some. They had been chewed and placed back in the pouches. Some of the pouches held more grass than others, as if some of the grass had been not only tasted but eaten. Feeling foolish, Eugene looked around, as if to confirm that he was where he thought he was — a suburban bedroom where the carpet had been vacuumed recently enough that the lines remained visible. No animal had climbed to the second story and delicately pawed its way inside the pouches of grass without shredding the plastic. No, his grandson had eaten the grass. He dropped the board like a cursed object.