“Are the boys stealing?”
Her face was so dusty that her tears left gray marks on Misha’s white dinner shirt. Fifteen years later, she would look into the mirror after an argument with Alex, her tears streaking her mascara, and think back to crying through dirt onto Misha’s shoulder. Maya forced herself to pull away — she hadn’t come this far for Misha to see her crying. “It’s nothing, Uncle Misha,” she said. “I’ll prune tomorrow.”
He took her shoulders and they watched the violet light, now with pink threads. “It’s different every time,” he said. “One season, half the seeds don’t make it, and it’s three feet between every plant. Another summer, every goddamn seed sprouts and it’s like a train terminal in there, everyone pushing and shoving. You’re good luck, dochen’ka: everything you sowed came up. Come, let’s look.”
She hesitated for a moment but followed him. He held her hand as they walked back into the garden. She flushed with embarrassment — it was the same old garden. But she became frightened again when Misha led her to the spot where the squash leaves clumped the hardest; inside his, her hand became clammy.
“You made this garden, little one,” he said, letting go of her hand. “Every single thing here was grown by your hand. It won’t hurt you.” With that Misha lowered himself in his dinner shirt to the dusty topsoil, turned gray by the daily violence of the sun, and marveled again because the tomato vines ran so thick there really was no place for a man to lie down in his own garden. Maya had to lie down in the next row, though Misha said twice, “I’m right here, I’m right here.” And they lay like that, the fear receding from her chest, until Misha said he wished he could remember if he had turned off the gas, and she giggled. But he had remembered his horilka—the flask was always in his back pocket, dinner wear or not — and he let Maya have a sip, which melted the sky into a star-spangled fleece, and at first blunted but then sharpened her hunger.
“Here,” Marion said, stopping.
“Here but not there?” she smirked nervously, trying to lighten the quivering darkness. Now the leaden smear of the bathroom light seemed very desirable. The range of audible calls by unknown creatures was vaster and clearer here, and she practiced her vocabulary: yowls, hoots, shrieks, howls, and yelps. She thought she heard the earth tamped by hooves and nearly bit her tongue before clutching Marion’s sleeve. “They really want nothing to do with you,” he promised her. “You’re too big for them.” “Except rattlesnakes,” she reminded him. She could feel her heart aiming out from her chest. “Not at night, right, right,” she reminded herself. She hung off him like a branch.
“You are standing on the Pierre Hostetler and Marion Hostetler Time Capsule,” Marion said. “Which this year turns. .” He thought about it. “Thirty-five years old. It’s a grown-up.”
Maya stamped her feet in the cold. “Your daughter said Spanish and German. Pierre sounds French.”
“The Hostetlers are fond of sticks in the eye. German villagers circa 1930 were not overly fond of children born out of wedlock. So my grandmother gave my father a French name. They got out before Hitler took over. That’s what they said, but if you ask me, they left because she was alone and he was a bastard.
“My dad was off-season. I don’t think he’d ever gone east, so he didn’t know what it was to be crowded. You swim in the tank you were given — even Rapid City was like one giant hive of insanity as far as he was concerned. He’d scoop me up and we’d come here. It was always me he took, not the other boys, which made me feel pretty good, as you can imagine. I didn’t understand it then, but he needed to be quit of my mother for three days. Even my mother was one person too many. Why’d he have four sons then? But he couldn’t very well take off by himself — what decent man is allowed to do that? I was the cover. Don’t take it the wrong way: he loved me. Once you figure out what’s happening, you think, Did he take me not because he loved me but because out of the four boys, I was the easiest dupe? But he loved spending time with me. He just needed to be quit of my mother.
“It got so that I knew most of this around here with my eyes closed. But we never camped. We always stayed in a motel. He always got two rooms, always at opposite ends of the motel. Didn’t understand that either until many years later — or I understood it the way a child understands, which is to say that part of you that Freud knows all about. And I guess it’s because I understood it that one time that I said, ‘Dad, I want to camp this time.’ And he said yes, of course we would. And we got out here and he said we have to do this time capsule. It was about this time of year, cold getting on colder like now, not many people to get in the way — would you believe fat Willy was already here then, skulking around? — and my dad dug this damn hole like he had a body to bury. Here, he said. ‘You put in here what you want to get rid of. You want to be quit of it, you put it in here. You got a bad habit, you put it in here. And you don’t have to tell your dad about it either. Just put it in here. Like a birthday wish.’ Except with a birthday wish, you wish to get something, and this was all about getting rid.
“He made a show of putting his cigarettes in there. But they were a stand-in for: did he put my mother in there, or did he put all those other women in there? No answer to that, but I bet on the latter. He hated himself for these trips. On the way back it would always be, Well, son, don’t be mad, but we may not go again for a while.
“I smoked too, only he didn’t know it. He would hang me by the collar if he knew, even if he did it himself. But I wanted so bad to be with him in that moment, to say I got faults too, look at me—and so I took out my pack and threw it in there, too. He looked up at me, but didn’t say a word. And then pushed all that hard federally managed ground we had violated back into place. Two packs of cigarettes and a whole bunch of other invisible God knows what.
“So that’s the deal here. I’m going to leave you here for a minute. I don’t have a shovel but just picture it, it’s right under you. Something you want to get rid of. That’s my happy birthday to you.” He searched out her eyes. “You think it’s hokey?” he said.
“You’re still smoking.”
“Be the better version of me I never managed.”
“That’s for your daughters. It’s too late for me.” She wrapped herself more tightly. “What if it isn’t something I want to get rid of? What if it’s something I want? Will it still work then?”
“It takes all comers.”
“Don’t walk away, please,” she said. “I’m too scared to stand here by myself.”
“I won’t step away if you say so.”
“Just another minute, stay. It gets colder and colder?”
“People camp here through the winter. Some people seek out wildness at all costs. And God blessed you with your own supply.”
“Did your mother know?”
“I loved my mother. She never asked me, never put me on the spot like that. I don’t know what all they discussed with each other. But there was one time when she came out of the kitchen as my father was packing the car, and said, ‘Marion ain’t going with you this time.’ Said she needed help in the basement and whatnot. She didn’t ask — she said. He looked up at her for a while — I remember that look. And then he nodded just the tiniest bit and went back to packing, not a word. I stayed back.”
“Okay, don’t go far.”
“Ten steps.”
“I won’t see you.”
“But you’ll know I’m here. In a minute I’ll come back to get you.”
Marion was eaten up by the darkness with his first step. Maya breathed a long, settling breath, in and out. Then another. At some point, the ache in her rib cage had gone. If she breathed in and out thirty times, each breath a little acquittal, Marion would return. She only had to hold out thirty times.