Nine
NINE
BY THE TIME she got home she was very cold.
She had purchased a cheese pastry from a vendor on her way back to the house: she had no interest in going to a restaurant or taking more of Irine’s food, and remembered, again, why some people found travel so enervating: so much thinking about where the next meal was coming from.
The pastry was greasy and sat badly in her stomach, but she thought she’d tell Judd about it anyway.
Maybe at home she could recreate it with all-butter puff and maybe halloumi, or something softer. It wasn’t a bad idea.
She texted him: “something like a boureka, only puffier, maybe a little saltier.” She knew he would know what she was talking about. He didn’t text back right away, but that was fine. It didn’t necessarily mean he was with Meret.
In her small, quiet room, the wind rattling against the wooden window frames, she changed into sweatpants and an old CUNY sweatshirt.
She knew this meant defeat, no more searching for Angel today, but it was dark outside and so cold, and anyway randomly wandering Tbilisi was about as stupid a way of looking for a dog as she could think of.
Tomorrow she would walk around the school’s neighborhood and ask some of the students what they knew. Play detective. Discover more about the fired teacher. Maybe there was a lead in there somewhere? It was better than nothing.
She flipped open her laptop to look at an old video of Angel, to refresh her memory about who (or what), specifically, she was looking for.
And there she was, proudly marching across the street with her small charges behind her.
The children holding hands, the traffic slowing.
Angel waited until everyone was across the street, accepting her pats, her farewells, her thank yous, who’s a good girl, such a good girl.
She stood erect, her tail wagging, a service animal showing the satisfaction of having fulfilled her service.
Why were dogs this way, so eager and easy to please?
Studies had shown that dogs liked to earn their treats rather than just receive them, that the pleasure centers in their brains went off when they solved a puzzle, say, or retrieved a caregiver’s shoes.
Some quirk in their evolution told them they were best beloved when they were most of use; some quirk in her own evolution, she knew, told her the same.
Amy stretched out on the bed, set her laptop on her hips.
Another video of Angel, this time shot in disconcerting, jerky angles, narrated in Georgian, in a child’s voice: the work of one of the school’s students.
She had no idea what the girl was saying until the very end, when she shouted, in English, “I love you Angelozi! I love you I love you!”
The closing shot was a still of Angel happy in her little wooden house on the corner near her school.
Amy was surprised to find tears filling her eyes.
Various legends spoke of where the Pied Piper had led the children when he guided them out of Hamelin.
Some said he drowned them all in the river and others said he took them to the end of the earth, playing his flute until they slowly went mad.
But the nicer version, the one that Amy liked, was the one where the Pied Piper took them to the top of a magical mountain, the one where they played games and sang songs and learned how to speak different languages and how to tend their farm animals until their parents finally came to fetch them.
A school, in other words. A particular school that was magic.
As she clicked onto a new video of Angel, a text bubble appeared on her screen.
“You there?” Judd.
“I’m here,” she said. She assumed he wanted to talk about pastry.
“Uno’s in the hospital.”
“Oh god,” she typed. “Again?”
“Some kind of fungal infection. Asper—aspergers or something.”
“Aspergers is autism.”
“Something like that.”
“Do you need me to come home?” God, it galled her how quickly she typed that. And there was no delete function.
“No, no. Maybe just check in on Ferry.”
“Does he know?”
This had always been her job at home, managing Ferry’s emotions, making sure he felt safe and loved.
She didn’t know why Judd was so keen to outsource this work to her, although she had a natural aptitude for it and obviously she did love the kid like he was her own.
But he was Judd’s own. And Judd always shied away from the difficult work of it.
He liked his relationship with his son to be easy, football games and restaurant meals.
“Yeah, he knows. I texted him this morning.”
“You texted him????”
“He might have been sleeping!” Judd, defensive.
“Well, how bad is it?”
“Unclear.”
“Okay,” Amy typed, trying to calibrate what to do with this information. “I’ll call him.”
“Thanks. I love you.”
“Me too.”
Nine p.m. in Tbilisi meant it was one in Ithaca, a reasonable time to call.
Still, Amy paused before picking up her phone.
She had done this so many times before. She had said all the things she was supposed to say so many times.
It will be all right. It will be okay. She had never known whether she was telling the truth, only that she had to try with all she had to will it to be so.
But if she said it when it wasn’t true, she would lose all credibility.
She googled “asperger’s fungal disease.” Up came aspergillosis , a fungal infection liver transplant patients were particularly vulnerable to, even years after a successful transplant.
Something about the suppressed immune systems. Something about the omnipresence of mold in our ecosystems. It was treatable if caught early enough. It wasn’t always caught that early.
The prescription: IV antifungals. Survival rate of almost 60 percent once treatment started. So, okay. She could tell Ferry it would be all right with a certain amount of honesty.
She dialed and it went straight to voicemail. “Ferris, Dad told me your mom was in the hospital. Let me know what I can do.”
What on earth could she possibly do? But she had always done something before. She had pulled miracles out of her handbag. Taken Ferry to the magical mountain.
She hung up. In the absence of being able to do anything from Tbilisi, she watched more Angel videos, then followed the trail of YouTube from dog to dog, animal rescue to animal rescue.
Usually this sort of thing calmed her heart, but after an hour she still found herself agitated.
After all this, a fungal infection! So incredibly stupid.
Uno had been born into such privilege and such misery, a childhood of wealth and emotional torment, a sexually abusive stepfather (vile), drug addiction by the time she was fifteen.
Her own mother a drunk. Her father never around.
She and Judd had met at Andover, where she’d lasted about a year and a half before getting expelled.
Judd liked her, at first, because she could get him coke, and then because she’d have sex with him.
And then it became something more, something like obsession with each other for many years.
They circled each other around New York for more than a decade, getting back together, breaking up.
His parents never approved, threatened to cut him off if he didn’t stop seeing her.
Which he never did, which they never did.
When she called him and told him she was pregnant, he assumed she’d have an abortion.
Instead, she said she wanted the baby, that the baby would help her turn her life around.
A lot of pressure, Judd said later, to put on a baby, but neither of them knew that at the time.
They managed to stay married for eight months after Ferry was born.
Ferry had no recollection of his parents ever sharing the same house.
He told her he couldn’t imagine the two of them together, how it had ever worked, how they had ever even managed to have a conversation, much less a child.
How the only person he could ever imagine his father loving in his entire life was her.
Amy found herself looking at pictures of Ferry as a baby, short videos, which she didn’t always indulge in but often tried to savor like chocolate.
A video of him in the bath, singing the theme song from Phineas and Ferb .
“There’s a hundred and four days of summer vacation, and school comes along just to end it—”
And Amy, fifteen years ago, her thin voice joining in: “So the annual problem, in our generation—”
And Ferry’s little voice: “No, Mom! No! It’s of our generation! You got the words wrong!” (She loved this video because she could hear his little voice, because he called her Mom.)
She needed water.
IN THE SILENT kitchen (silent except for the drip-drip-drip), Amy was surprised to find the blue-eyed man at the table with his laptop and a beer. She startled. She’d thought for some reason he wasn’t allowed out of his room.
“I’m sorry,” she said, moving quickly past him.
“Why are you sorry?”
She poured herself a mug of water at the sink. “I interrupted you.”
“You did not.”
“Aren’t you working?”
“If it was important,” he murmured, still looking at his screen, “I wouldn’t be doing it in public.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. She drank from her mug, refilled it, turned to head back upstairs, but found that her feet wouldn’t move. In the hallway behind her, she heard quiet shuffling. Downstairs, dogs were rolling over, snuffling, sleeping in heaps.
She rinsed out her mug, placed it on the drying rack.
“The water here is terrible,” he said. “You shouldn’t drink it.”
“It tastes like regular water to me,” she said.
“It comes through Soviet pipes,” he said. “Lead.”
“I grew up with lead,” she said.
“In America?”
“Minnesota.”
The man nodded. She wondered if he had ever heard of Minnesota.
“I am Andrei,” he said.
“I’m Amy.”
“I know,” he said. “You’re famous.” His voice had a gravelly quality that made it unclear if he was being serious or not.