Sixteen #2
Bachana shook her head. “She went to work. We let dogs out together this morning, maybe five? I don’t think she slept at all.”
“God, that’s the worst.”
“Maia is making her very crazy. I say to her I’m glad I had son. I don’t think I could manage daughter.”
“I know what you mean.”
“We do this quick, okay?” Bachana said, opening the door to Irine’s room, and Amy suddenly felt like she was trespassing, like Irine would not want her in this room, which was messy, unmade bed, clothes on the floor, smelling faintly like smoke and some kind of strong perfume.
A formal portrait of a family hung on the wall over a bureau: Irine, a small Maia, a handsome, dark-eyed man. Nobody in the portrait was smiling.
“Is that Maia’s father?”
“Yes,” Bachana said. “But he left a long time ago. I don’t know why she keeps picture.”
“He left?”
“Another woman,” Bachana said. “Remember how I told you? All men the same.”
She put a vase on the bureau, which made a strange tableau, the wine bottle of flowers underneath the family portrait.
“How long ago did that happen?”
“Oh, many years. Maia was two.”
“That’s when my father left,” Amy said. “I mean, that’s how old I was.”
“Your father left?”
Amy nodded. “We never saw him again.”
“He is alive?” Bachana said.
“I really don’t know,” Amy said, surprised by a passing breeze of sadness. But why? It was fine, it had been fine, it was how it always had been.
“Maia’s father died in car accident after he left. With other woman in car. Terrible accident. Car fell down the hills, a big explosion.”
“How awful!”
“No, we were happy. He was a bastard.” Bachana adjusted the vase on Irine’s bureau. “We go?”
“Um, sure.”
They had three vases left; Amy followed Bachana up another short set of stairs. She walked more quickly than Amy would have expected—“We go in here?” “No, that’s closet”—and then down another hallway.
“My grandfather build this house, did you know?” Bachana said. “Three houses next to each other, he combine them. But he did not know anything about architecture, as you can see.”
“When was this?”
“Maybe 1900, maybe a few years before? It was before Soviets, I know that. You could still purchase property. My grandfather had money, then lost money, then had money again. You know? Always doing different jobs.”
“I know people like that.”
“He bought these houses when he had money,” Bachana said. “Then he lost it all again doing—what do you call it? With horse races?”
“Gambling?”
“Gambling, yes. But then, when Soviets came, he got job with city gas company, was able to keep the house. He had to bribe someone lot of money for the job. So we had big house but no money. Sometimes Soviets put other people in house with us but sometimes they didn’t. People coming and going.”
“Was it like this your whole childhood?”
“Oh yes,” Bachana said. “It was how I meet my husband! That room was his and his mother’s when he was a boy. His father died in the war.” She pointed at a doorway.
Amy tried to imagine if she would have married Judd if she’d known him since he was a child. Would she have loved him more then, or less?
Bachana shrugged. “It was how things used to be. Not like where you are from, where everyone has own house,” she said.
“Not everyone,” Amy said, then considered. “But, I suppose, most people.”
“You know,” Bachana said, holding her flowers against her bosom, “I always feel sorry for Americans. Having to always to think about money. Having to buy so many things all the time.” She knocked on the door they were standing by and pushed it open.
“Maia.”
“I’m not sure—”
“Go on,” Bachana said, ushering her in. “It is disaster but we don’t stay very long.”
Maia’s room, once Bachana’s husband’s boyhood room, was larger than most of the others and a total mess, but Amy understood it immediately as a walk-through history of the person Maia had been and who she had become.
She had seen rooms like this before, had even had one, sort of, when she was a teenager.
The walls were still the baby pink of a little girl, but they were covered in adolescent posters: Che Guevara and the Ukrainian flag and Keith Haring and “Fuck Putin” and the European Union flag and Barack Obama and Rihanna, which was frankly a bit surprising.
And posters of bands she’d never heard of.
Amy had the same sense of trespass that she’d had in Irine’s room, but for some reason that sense of trespass was not matched by an equal urge to get out.
She was too curious. Lacy black underwear strewn across the floor.
A silver bra. Black combat boots with yellow laces.
Ripped jeans, a ripped jean skirt, a backpack, phone chargers, paperback novels, socks.
Taped to the wall by Maia’s bed, a small photograph of the same image that was on Irine’s wall: mother, father, child.
“Do you think Maia remembers her father?”
“I don’t think so,” Bachana said. “She was too young.”
Amy wondered if that was something she could talk about with Maia, that she too was fatherless and always had been.
Or would Maia care? Something about this room made Amy feel in touch with her own impoverished younger self, the person she had been before she knew she’d escape Minnesota.
A person who thought her ambitions would only ever be realized in her head.
She had been a mess, too. She had liked to draw and liked to read.
Of course Maia was much more driven than she had been, was much more willing to fight.
“It is such garbage pit in here,” Bachana said. She stooped to pick up some T-shirts, dropped them in a bin in the corner. “She does not take care of anything.”
Amy put the vase of flowers down on Maia’s desk, next to journals, books, papers covered in flowery Georgian script.
A large pile of Polaroids and a kitschy miniature Polaroid camera.
Lipsticks, eyeliners. Pencil drawings of cats with wings, cats holding swords, dragons.
They weren’t bad, actually. Drawings of beautiful women, some of them naked. A chemistry textbook. A math textbook.
Amy couldn’t stop herself—she rifled through the Polaroids.
Maia and her friends at a nightclub. At a restaurant. Maia in this very bedroom, smiling coyly. Her shirt and silver bra straps hanging off her shoulders.
And then photos of another girl, naked from the waist up, on Maia’s bed.
And then several close ups. The girl smiling. A come-hither smile. A selfie of the two of them kissing, topless.
Well, of course.
Did Irine know? She must. If Maia was trying to keep a secret, why would she keep these Polaroids out?
Or was it a dare? To see if her mother would see what was hiding in her own house?
The other girl was beautiful, long brown hair, clear brown eyes. No tattoos. Amy thought back to the last time she saw pictures she wasn’t supposed to see and felt a tingle crawl up her neck. This was no business of hers.
Bachana was still tossing clothing into the bin. Amy slid the racier Polaroids back in the middle of the stack and tried to make the stack look disheveled in exactly the same way it had been before she’d gone snooping.
“Come on,” Amy said. “We shouldn’t go through her things.”
“Such a messy girl,” Bachana said. “I do her laundry but last time I try she yell at me to leave her things alone.”
“Kids like to be private.”
“You be glad someone do your laundry!” Bachana said. “We have two more flowers. One for you, one for me?”
“That sounds right.”
She and Bachana parted ways in the kitchen, and Amy brought her vase up her own winding passageway. At Andrei’s door, she paused for just a moment, then knocked. “I have a present.”
He was sitting at his computer like usual, spartan room, neatly made bed, no photographs on the walls or in frames, no disorder of any kind. A duffel bag in the corner. His winter coat on a hook.
She wondered what he would say if he knew what she’d just seen. She couldn’t tell him. In his part of the world this sort of behavior could cost you your family or your job (sometimes in her part of the world, too).
So instead, she said: “I brought you these.”
“Flowers?” He looked at her, a crinkly half-smile.
“It’s a long story,” she said. She put them down next to his computer and then took a step away.
He picked up the vase and held the flowers to his nose. “They don’t smell.”
“Hydrangeas don’t really have a strong scent.”
“This is what they are called?”
“Hydrangeas,” she said. “Those puffy blue ones.” She approached his desk again, fluffed the flowers in the vase, aware that she was performing for him and intruding on him at the same time.
“Ah,” he said. Then: “You are looking for the dog today?”
She sighed. What else did she have to do here? What else was there to do? She wanted to find Maia, to see if she was all right, to say I know who you are, I know about your father, I know about your girlfriend, I know why you are fighting. I can be a friend to you. But she didn’t have the courage.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m going to leave in a few minutes.”
He nodded at her. It was a beautiful day out, or rather afternoon, the sun streaming in, the birds twittering outside.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“I will.”
“You will?”
“Where are you going to look?” he asked. “Have you been to Mtatsminda Church? Are you still having a hard time with your breath?”
She was offended. “I’m not having a hard time with my breath. I just didn’t want to walk so fast last night.”
He gave her another half-smile, those perfectly shaped lips. “Meet me in the kitchen in ten minutes. I show you where you should look for this dog.”