Fourteen
FOURTEEN
WHEN SHE WAS a little girl, Amy used to dream about her father, a man she knew little about and rarely thought about during the daytime.
He’d been an orderly at the hospital where her mother was an aide; he and her mom were married for a total of three years.
He split when she and her brother were two.
“Just went out for cigarettes,” her mom liked to say, not explaining what she meant.
For a long time, Amy thought that was what had actually happened.
He’d gone out for cigarettes and vanished into thin air.
In her dreams, her father was not particularly attentive, and in fact was usually unwilling to even acknowledge her.
He would be a man on a sidewalk, two steps ahead.
Or at the same Burger King she was, but sitting at another table.
She’d seen a few pictures of him, had a general idea what he looked like (he’d given her and her brother their height, their lankiness, their whiteish-blond hair), but in her dreams he could and often did look like anything.
A postal worker delivering packages to their house.
A math teacher at her school, trying to teach her algebra in words she couldn’t understand.
Bill Clinton. The grocery clerk. But no matter what he looked like, she would know he was her father.
She just couldn’t get him to talk to her.
“Dad?”
In her dreams, following a tall bald man with a moustache across a busy downtown street, barely dodging cars, praying he would slow down to let her catch up but unwilling to ask him to.
“Dad?” Sitting a few seats back in a bus that was being driven by her father—she knew it was her father—but entirely unable to get him to turn around and look at her, even when he announced the next stops.
She was scared; she didn’t want to be on the bus without her mother, she wanted to ask her father to agree to take care of her until they reached her house, then he’d never have to talk to her again. But he refused to turn around.
She stopped having these dreams when she married Judd, which was one of the millions of reasons she was so glad she married Judd, but at the same time she worried that she had replaced her father with her husband, and if that were the case, how was she ever supposed to claim her own space in the world?
And sometimes she would dream of Judd sitting at the restaurant, and she would talk to him, but he wouldn’t respond; no matter how much she wanted him to see her, to talk to her, he wouldn’t. Was he refusing? Or was she invisible?
When she woke up from these dreams, she was disoriented, afraid.
She would reach out for Judd in their big bed and he would hold her close, murmur to her until finally her heart would slow and her breathing would slow until she could fall back asleep.
Amy, Amy, I’m here, it’s all right, go back to sleep.
More than one therapist had suggested that her father’s disappearance was her initial wound.
Of course that sounded right, but she wasn’t sure whether it mattered, particularly.
We all walked around with initial wounds.
Every human being on this earth. But didn’t most of us find a way to heal, to walk around the world without so much discontent, at least by forty-six years of age?
“You have no idea what other people feel inside,” said her second-to-last therapist, the nice one with the elaborate scarves.
She was a good therapist, let Amy ramble or just sit in silence, didn’t seem fed up with her or distracted.
She was the one who told her she didn’t have to write to her mother any more if her mother refused to respond.
She was the one who told her yes, of course, she deserved to marry Judd.
“Losing your father as a young child is no small thing,” her good therapist used to tell her.
“Half the people in the world don’t have fathers,” Amy said.
“That’s actually untrue,” said the good therapist. “And even if it were, that wouldn’t make it okay.
” (Her name was Clarice, like the heroine of The Silence of the Lambs , and she worked out of a gorgeous apartment on the Upper West Side and occasionally hawks perched on her windowsill.
And when she retired, she told Amy gently that no, retirement was what it sounded like; they couldn’t keep in touch.)
Somewhere in Moscow, Amy thought, there was a girl without a father.
She looked at Andrei, his ski cap, his stubble, his new parka that was probably used, and felt a great outpouring of feeling for him and, for some reason, herself.
She could not make sense of the feeling.
It wasn’t only lust, it wasn’t pity—it wasn’t sorrow or gratitude or hope.
Just a feeling that the two of them were connected somehow on this ground in this place where neither of them really belonged. They could matter to each other.
“Irine texted me,” he said.
“Where is she?”
“She went to the pharmacy to get some nitroglycerin. Her heart is—I do not know the word.” He patted his chest rapidly.
“Palpitating.”
“Palpitating,” he said. “She wants me to find Maia.”
In her mind, Amy started to frame a question: Do you want me to, should I , but then stopped herself. “I’ll come.”
He didn’t smile, but he said, “Good.”
Together, in silence, they left the house and walked down the hill, twisting and turning until the brightness of Rustaveli began to illuminate the trees around them.
Since Andrei walked a half step in front of her, she could see there was a tattoo on the back of his neck, Cyrillic letters.
She wondered if they spelled out the name of his daughter or his wife.
In the distance, they could hear a crowd, and a loud, thumping noise.
“Can we pause for a second?”
“Pause?”
“I need to catch my breath.” The cigarettes must have been taking their toll, plus the cold air. She took a yoga breath, trying not to look ridiculous.
Andrei shoved his hands in his pockets. His expression was neutral.
The wind was still, and the thumping sound from the bottom of the hill sounded expectant, even demanding.
Amy was not afraid of what they would find at the bottom of the hill, but she wanted to be ready for it.
The crowd earlier in the day—maybe that was why she was having a hard time catching her breath.
She still felt the pressure of all those people around her.
“You are all right?”
“I was at the protest earlier today,” she said. “By accident, I didn’t mean to be. I just found myself in front of the square when the crowd started assembling. There were police, water cannons.”
“You got hit by the water?” he said.
“No, I didn’t get sprayed, I wasn’t—I wasn’t in danger. But I’d never been in a crowd like that before, so many people pushing toward something. I’m sure you’ve done this sort of thing before, but to me it was kind of, I don’t know, a little frightening.”
“I’ve never done this,” he said.
“What?”
“I’ve never done a protest.”
“You haven’t?”
“What would I protest?”
“I guess—I just thought all Russians protested at some time or another.”
“Do all Americans?” Andrei said.
“No, of course not. But didn’t you protest Ukraine?”
He gave her a look. “I have never had any interest in going to jail, Amy.”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“I am not a hero today either,” Andrei said. “I am doing a favor for my landlady.”
She nodded, didn’t say anything else.
“We go?” Andrei said.
Amy pulled her scarf more tightly, continued following him down the steep road toward Rustaveli. The roar of the crowd pushed up toward them from the valley below. Lights beamed upward.
They turned one more corner and the entire boulevard came into view before them.
A crowd ten times the size of the crowd this morning—twenty times, thirty times the size—filled Rustaveli Avenue and Parliament Square.
People were holding up the flashlights on their phones and the entire street twinkled with tiny stars.
There were red-and-white Georgian flags and blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags and the blue flag of the European Union, twelve gold stars organized in a circle.
Large police vans were parked in the middle of the street, but the crowd flowed around them as though they were islands in a river.
The crowd shouted in indeterminable Georgian.
Their signs were in Georgian, English, Cyrillic.
They had flags wrapped around their shoulders, flags flowing behind them like capes.
The bright lights of the police vans beamed down on them, and riot police with plexiglas shields and invisible faces lined the sidewalks.
“We’ll never find her,” Amy said, watching the river of people slowly flow by.
But it was peaceful—enormous and loud but peaceful—or at least there didn’t seem to be any violence, the police watching, the crowd chanting, and Amy had half a mind to join them even though she knew this wasn’t her fight. And even though Andrei did not protest.
But maybe? She looked to him to see what they should do, but he was just gazing, impassively.
So they watched the people marching past them, and Amy saw that there were children in the crowd and old people and people who looked like mothers and fathers. One person—no, two, in wheelchairs. But the bulk of the crowd seemed to be people Ferry’s age, in their early twenties, unlined, beautiful.
And on the street where they were standing, ten yards away from the sea of people, two dogs lay on their sides, half asleep, unperturbed.
“Should we try to look for her?” Amy asked, but Andrei couldn’t hear.
She nudged him on the side, tried to mime looking for Maia.
He shook his head, Don’t bother, I can’t hear you, and turned his face back to the crowd, mesmerized.
What did he see there? Was this different for him?
“Fuck Putin, Fuck Putin!” the crowd screamed.