“We were supposed to observe Max,” Maya said.
“He’s not a pelican, Maya, to be studied in his native habitat,” Alex said. “Fall is coming. Do you know what happens when fall comes to these places? It doesn’t. There’s a fart of summer and then it’s winter for nine months. Our winters back home look like a sprinkle of snow next to it. So let’s get there.”
“But I wanted you to ask me before you did it,” Maya said.
“Where exactly do you plan to deposit him while we go meet these people? You’re going to find a babysitter in that town?”
“I don’t know, Alex. We’ll figure it out.”
He shrugged and flicked the cigarette into the grass. It was a reckless trip — three voyagers into the gloom, on the doorstep of winter.
“Why are you smoking?” she said.
“Why are you smoking?” he said, and nodded at the car where, indeed, the glove compartment held a pack of Parliament 100’s that Maya had impulsively bought along with the other things.
She tightened her shawl. She craved coffee. Hot, lip-scalding coffee. Terrible coffee, weak and plain, a pale perimeter rimming the blackness. Maya had glimpsed enough movies to know this was the kind of coffee they drank out here. She wanted some.
She stared at the humpbacked brown bestiary in the distance. The earth looked tired. Someone had spent it. Little tufts of green shrub rose here and there, like the indecisive patches on Alex’s chest. Like Rubins — erstwhile of the same square mile in Minsk — dispersed across the broad back of America: Eugene’s brother in Chicago; Eugene’s second cousin in Omaha; Raisa’s second cousin in Denver; someone, Maya could never remember who, in San Francisco. It turned out, given the chance, they all preferred to live far away from one another.
However, the land spread voluptuously, disdainful of restrictions, and this lifted her. The openness was heedless, spoiled, uneconomizing. It sprang something in her chest, got out of her a clutching deep exhalation, transmitted a clarifying signal to the haze in her head. The white oblong birds watched the cows, the cows watched her, she watched the brown ridgeline, and the brown ridgeline watched everything. She liked being in the relay.
“Don’t you want to know where we are?” Alex said.
“No,” she said. It came out resentfully, a petty revenge — she was not asked where to go, and so she would not ask where they’d gone — but she didn’t mean it that way. On the cusp of inquiring, she decided not to inquire. She enjoyed not knowing. She even enjoyed not knowing why she enjoyed not knowing. There was a weightlessness to it — her husband had unwittingly kidnapped her from the designated and mapped. How could anyone try to reach her if she didn’t know where she could be reached? She watched his face struggle with the senselessness of her answer.
“Maya, what is all this for?” he said. “It’s a fool’s errand.”
She shrugged and pulled again on the shawl, setting off a shudder of pain from her neck to her fingertips. “I thought. .” she started, but trailed off.
“Let’s just hope nothing bad happens,” Alex said.
She needed a cup of coffee, an ibuprofen for her neck, a cigarette. “We need to find a campground,” she said.
“A campground?”
“I want to camp with my son. You said cold is coming: Better to do it sooner.”
“I don’t understand,” Alex said, spreading his arms.
“Your preference is to spend the night in a vehicle,” she said. “I also would like to not sleep in a bed.”
“Maya, I don’t want to sleep in a tent.”
“I didn’t want to sleep in a car, but you didn’t ask. You can rent a hotel room. Max and I will sleep in a tent.”
“What is it you expect to find out?” Alex raised his voice. “You think he’ll sit up in the middle of the night and confess to you the secret of his being? We had a tent in the backyard.”
She looked past Alex’s shoulder. If she spoke, she would say something that would scatter the last of the goodwill stored up in Chicago. The morning fog was dissipating, setting loose a golden light streaked with pink. The brown humps had turned blue. If she kinked her head — fresh stab of pain — they looked like the shoulders of a beheaded colossus, buried below the rib cage, and the stony wrinkles that ran up and down the rock were his strain at trying to lift himself from the earth. Dumpy clouds hopped above the shoulders like little white horses.
Why did the hills in the distance becalm her with their mute, maintaining consistency, but the same quality in her husband made her unhappy? Was the vision in the distance especially majestic, or was she especially impatient?
“Maya,” he called to her, a peacemaking note in his voice.
Her head was sideways in an inspection of hills. Once upon a time there was a woman who left her husband and married a mountain. The blue giant’s headless torso, inspired by her love, wrenched its fingers from the ground and pulled at a wick in her belly until it had unfurled her like a scarf and the ground was covered with the eiderdown of an unraveled Maya. Nine months later, the woman gave birth to a tree. There it grows in the shade of the blue giant’s shoulders, watered by snowmelt and the brine of her tears. What the freshwater enlivens, her saltwater destroys.
There. Not only her mother could tell stories. Her mother found fairy tales annoying, however: the ticking grandfather clock, the house on stilts, the talking wolf. Her stories of their Kiev neighbors were about real people suffering real lives. Why the gloom of a fairy tale when you could have the desperation next door? That was fine, Maya thought: Fairy tales would be the daughter’s department. She touched her temples. Being out of New Jersey was having a strange effect on her. Her imagination was working, but not the remainder of her. Belatedly, she looked up at her husband. She said she was fine.
They heard Max climbing out of the car. He stood shading his eyes against the light, which, having vanquished the fog, had turned severe. Alex walked to his wife and placed a hand on her shoulder to reassure his son that mama and papa were not fighting, but it looked as if he was either leaning on Maya or keeping her in place.
“Max, honey, we’re going to camp tonight,” Maya said excitedly and walked toward her son, letting Alex’s hand drop from her shoulder.
“I need to go number one,” Max said unhappily.
“Max, what do those hills look like? Sleeping rhinos or a brown headless giant?”
“I need to go number one,” Max insisted, knocking his knees. He was blinking furiously. She walked over and embraced him, inhaling the sleep in his hair. He stomped his feet impatiently. She took his hand and pulled him toward a stand of trees by the fence. “There isn’t a bathroom?” Max said, pulling away.
“Maya,” Alex called out in reproof.
“Honey, you’ll be fine,” Maya implored Max. “Don’t be fussy. There’s nowhere else to go. Just quick in the bushes.”
The pair of them took the decline down to the trees. What kind of trees? Trees. Maya pointed Max toward a thick trunk good for concealment and faced back toward the road. They all heard the burp and whoop of a police cruiser at the same time. As it pulled up behind the Escape, the siren went off but the lights continued to rotate and flash, menacing in their silence. Max turned back to his mother and now she shook her head. Maya felt Alex’s furious gaze and avoided it. She felt a sweat on her spine. She remained in place, as if any movement could be misinterpreted, and took Max’s hand.
The policeman took time climbing out. They watched him through the windshield of the cruiser, recording their license plate and murmuring into his radio as if they were fugitives. Maya had a panicked urge to laugh. Their first morning! She imagined the incredulous silence on the other end of the line when she called Eugene and Raisa from the local jail. Her neck ached incredibly. She remembered Max and rustled his hair. He stared at the police car inscrutably.