He underestimated her, he thought. Her ideas were nowhere near as simple, knee-jerk, and one-dimensional as he sometimes believed them to be, and he should know by now that despite the strict doctrine and rigid culture, most Molokans were at heart good, decent, moral people. They were also intelligent spiritually minded individuals who gave a hell of a lot more thought to metaphysical and philosophical matters than he ever did. Despite his college education.
He might not believe the same things as the churchgoers, but it was wrong of him to dismiss their beliefs as somehow intellectually inferior to his own.
His mother looked around the room, as if to make sure Julia and the kids were not nearby, then got out of her chair and came over to the couch, sitting next to him. “I’ve been having dreams,” she said.
Gregory said nothing. He knew where this was leading. Throughout his childhood, his mother had foisted her supposedly prophetic dreams upon them, always insisting on the inevitability of their outcomes. She wasn’t revered like Vera Afonin, but her dreams were still accorded respect in the church, and that had given her far too much confidence at home. His father, he knew, had invented scenarios similar to her dreams in order to get her off his back, and Gregory had long since learned to do the same. There was no statute of limitation on prophecy—it was what kept fortune-tellers and psychics in business—and he knew that if his mother predicted some sort of disaster for him, she would be on pins and needles until something bad actually occurred. It could be a year later and completely dissimilar to the event in her dream, but if something happened to him, she would claim credit for it. She could dream about him cracking his head open, and if he injured his toe playing football six months later, she would pull an I-told-you-so and rest secure in the knowledge that she had successfully predicted it.
This time, she told of dreaming about the Molokan cemetery and seeing him crawling up the ridge from the mine below, dreaming about him being trapped in the banya and unable to escape, dreaming about him being attacked by the shadow of a dwarf.
It was slightly unnerving, the sheer number of nightmares she’d had recently that involved him, but he still didn’t put any stock in their veracity, and he tried to think of some way to put her mind at ease.
“I don’t think any of those things are going to happen,” he said in Russian.
“No,” she admitted. “But they mean that something bad will happen to you. I worry.”
He looked into her eyes. She’d grown so old, he thought. She had not regained her former sprightliness after the minister’s death, and she looked weak to him, frail. He found himself wondering how much time she had left.
He tried to push the thought out of his mind.
She met his gaze. “Just be careful,” she told him.
He smiled, patted her hand. “Don’t worry, Mother. I will.”
3
Saturday morning, they let Gregory’s mother take care of the kids and met Paul and Deanna at the Country Kitchen for breakfast. They could have gone to the café, but both Gregory and Paul said they’d been spending far too much time in that place and were getting sick of it, so they took a break and went out for a real meal instead of Mocha Joe’s bagels and coffee.
Paul and Deanna were already at the restaurant, and they waved the two of them over as soon as she and Gregory stepped through the door. The Country Kitchen smelled richly of bacon and sausage and buttermilk waffles, and to Julia there seemed something good and wholesome about that. Eateries in California were so trendy and health-conscious these days that far too many of them had the bland scent of a refrigerator filled with fresh fruit. It was heartening somehow to smell these old-fashioned breakfasts, and in a weird way she suddenly understood why Gregory had wanted to move back here.
They greeted their friends, sat down, ordered.
Gregory and Deanna were still a little wary of each other, both of them acting more polite than either of them did normally, and Julia had to smile at that. All these years later, those teenage dynamics were still in place, and the patterns of behavior that had been laid down in childhood had not changed one whit.
Julia wondered if she would act the same way if she encountered some old acquaintance from her high school days. She had not attended her ten-year reunion, but her twentieth was coming up and she was halfway considering going to it. There weren’t a whole lot of people she was interested in seeing, but there were a few, and she figured she was successful enough and had kept herself up well enough that she could lord it over a few former rivals.
But would she still feel intimidated by the girls who had intimidated her back then? Would she still feel close to the girls who had been close to her?
She looked at Gregory and Deanna and wondered.
After breakfast the four of them walked off their calories. They paired off oddly—she and Paul were in the front, Gregory and Deanna behind them. Paul seemed to know quite a lot about the town’s history and heritage, as well as its architecture, and he pointed out the boardinghouse that had once been a house of prostitution and the bookstore and thrift shop that shared what had been a Masonic temple. He knew who used to live where, and he told stories of land grabs and claim jumpers, cuckolds and adulterers as they walked up and down the winding, narrow streets.
Julia was curious about the Molokans, wanted to hear about them from an outsider’s perspective, but Paul and Deanna both said that since they’d grown up with a lot of Molokans around, they hadn’t paid much attention. Molokans had been an accepted part of everyday life. There’d been problems in the past, though, Paul admitted. Like the Mormons before them, Molokans had been relegated to a certain section of town at the outset, and he led them through the narrow drive lined with abandoned shacks that had once been Russiantown, recounting stories of several anti-Molokan attacks and beatings.
“Do you remember this?” Julia asked Gregory.
He shook his head. “Before my time.”
Back in the Country Kitchen parking lot twenty minutes later, Gregory stopped in front of their van, taking out his keys.
“It’s been fun,” he said. “Thanks for the invite.”
Paul grinned, nodded toward Julia. “You got yourself a good one, bud.”
Gregory looked over at Deanna, then offered a half-hearted grin of his own. “I guess you did too.”
“Tough admission,” Deanna teased.
“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
Julia hit him.
They all laughed.
4
He didn’t tell anyone about it at first. It was embarrassing, for one thing. And it was weird, for another.
His belly button was growing.
If he’d been married, he could’ve talked about it with his wife. If he’d been a kid, he could’ve talked about it with his mom. But he was a grown single man, living alone, and this wasn’t really something that he could bring up with his buddies down at the bar.
Chilton Bodean turned off the shower and rubbed his washcloth gingerly over the not-so-small nub protruding from the bulging mound that was his belly. He’d always had an “outie,” but in the past week it had seemed to become more prominent. At first he’d thought it was just his imagination, but overnight he’d had to throw that theory out the window.
It was now more than an inch long.
He got out of the shower, used a towel to rub the steam off the mirror, and looked at his body in the glass. The pinkish belly button was now hanging down, like a small second penis, and the thought occurred to him that maybe his umbilical cord was growing back.