The Summer Garden (95 page)

“Oh, we certainly all know,” said Tatiana. “Aren’t we so smart. Now look at us. We should’ve seen this coming: the future. We should’ve seen the whole thing.”

“And prevented it?”

“Yes!” she cried. “You knew what he was risking! You knew!”

“Come on, now you’re just being…unreasonable,” Alexander said. “And that’s the
kindest
thing I can think of.”

Tatiana was shaking her head. “I don’t think I’m unreasonable. Not at all. You should have stopped it.”

“How?” he yelled.

“Maybe if you hadn’t come back from Berlin in your military dress greens, he wouldn’t have become so enamored of them. Maybe if you stopped wearing your battle fatigues every chance you got, but no! Maybe if you stopped handing him your officer’s cap in Deer Isle, like I asked!”

“Well, maybe
you
should have stopped telling him I had been a soldier every chance you got, but no!” said Alexander. “Maybe you should have paraded my wounds to him less. I wasn’t the one flaunting my stupid
Hero of the Soviet Union
medal in front of him!”

“Oh? And teaching him how to load your weapon when he was five?” Tatiana yelled right back. “Teaching him how to shoot when he was twelve? What, you think I couldn’t smell sulfur, potassium nitrate on your clothes when I’d come back from work? When you teach your twelve-year-old how to fire your weapons, when you take your sixteen-year-old to Yuma to test new missile launchers with you, what do you think he’s going to do with his life?”

“I don’t know, Tania,” Alexander said, rubbing his face, closing his eyes. “You mean, maybe if you and I had been two completely different people, this wouldn’t be happening?”

“Oh, so clever. Well, look at him now, wearing his dress whites, Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, carrying all his Claymore mines and M-16 rifles, and missing. What good are those medals to him, your cap to him, your rifle to him?” Tatiana cried. “He’s missing!”

“I know he’s missing!”

“Where is he? You’ve been in MI for twenty years—has that been good for nothing?”

“I know very well what weapons the Soviets are developing. But no, they don’t seem to be sending me dossiers with Anthony’s location on them.”

“That’s great, Alexander, charming,” Tatiana said, crossing her arms. “Despite your sarcasm, you still don’t know anything. We should have known better and been smarter. Made better decisions.”

“Holy Mother of God!” Alexander ran his hands through his hair. “Are we analyzing
all
our decisions? How far back are we going? Every minuscule decision we had made over the years that might have led to Anthony’s frame of mind at the moment of his choosing West Point among six universities, at the moment of his choosing to extend his tour for the fourth time? Do you really want to do this?”

“He did not become what he became in a vacuum,” Tatiana said. “And, as you well know, those decisions were not so minuscule.” She stared at him pointedly. “And yes, they
all
affected him.”

“Yes!” Alexander yelled. “Starting with the very first one.”

They fell silent. Tatiana held her breath. Alexander held his breath.

“I’m not talking about the decision to have him,” he said, not even trying to keep his voice down. “He didn’t begin with himself. He began with us. And believe it or not, we began
before
the moment you went crawling in the snow and bleeding in a truck across Finland and Sweden with him in your womb.”

“Yes,” she snapped. “We certainly did begin before that, didn’t we? But how far back do you want to go, to change
your
fate, Alexander Belov?”

“All the way, Tatiana Metanova,” Alexander said, his fists on the granite, swiping their china cups of tea across the island onto the limestone floor and storming out of the kitchen. “All the way to crossing that fucking street.”

There was nothing to say after that. There was just nothing to say. Anthony was gone. Alexander
had
crossed the street, and now his son was lost, and there was nothing to do but run to the ringing phone, play with three babies, work, go to Yuma. Look at each other. Go to sleep with each other, back against back staring into walls, trying to find the answers there, or belly to belly, trying to find the answers there, too.

They walked around with gritted teeth, they slammed doors against their life.

The weeks became months, and like days they passed, the long gray line becoming longer and grayer with each passing day.

Add another lash onto Alexander’s back. Add another lowering of Tatiana’s head as she took care of her children and her house and ran the Phoenix Red Cross Chapter, barely raising her eyes to Alexander. The Sonoran Desert with lowered eyes, with fears so deep, each thought just another hammer upon the heart, each memory another sickle on the back, until there was almost nothing left under the scar tissue, neither Alexander nor Tatiana.

Just the boy climbing into the bed with them at three in the morning, crushed by his nightmares, in which his mother left him to go find his father, knowing she might never come back, and in his dreams never did.

Just the boy’s mother, sixteen years old with her family in the small Fifth Soviet room, her feet up on the wall, on the morning war started for Soviet Russia, on June 22, 1941, hearing the voice of her beloved Deda saying to her,
“What are you thinking Tania? The life you know is over. From this day forward nothing will be as you imagined.”

How right he was. Not two hours later, Tatiana was sitting eating ice cream in her white dress and red sandals, her hair blowing all around her face.

Leningrad is still with them, everywhere they turn. Anthony missing is their continuing eternal struggle against their fate.

Their sweet boy, his brown body in Coconut Grove, walking the line, behind his mother, his hands apart, laughing, trying to keep his balance, imitating her. Swinging upside down like a monkey on the bars, like her. Sitting on top of his father’s shoulders, tapping him on his scarred and sheared head, saying, faster, faster, and Alexander, not knowing babies, or children, or boys, running faster, faster, trying to forget he was Harold Barrington’s son as he tried to become Anthony Barrington’s father.

And Harold Barrington saying to a young Alexander, “
We’re going to the Soviet Union because I want it to make you into the man you are meant to be.”

And it did.

And Alexander Barrington saying to a young Anthony, “
You decid
e
what kind of man you want to grow up to be
.”

And he did.

The sins, the scars, the wishes, the desires, the dreams of the fathers, all in that one small boy on Bethel Island learning how to fish, sitting patiently waiting for the prehistoric sturgeon that wasn’t coming, now lost. Now gone.

Oh my God, Tatiana thought, is this what my father and mother went through when our Pasha went missing? How little I understood.

Tatiana and Alexander lost their way. After Anthony went missing, they all went missing, all went lost in the woods of the wretched imaginings of the things that could have befallen him.

One evening Alexander came home late from work to find Tatiana lying fetal in the bedroom on top of the bed while the small ones were by themselves in the playroom.

“Come on, Tania,” he said quietly, giving her his hand. “We still have three other children. They can’t find their way either. You have to help them. Without you, they’ve got nothing.”

“I keep waiting for the next stage,” Tatiana whispered, struggling up. “What is it? When will it come?”

“Don’t wish for it, babe,” said Alexander. “It’ll be here soon enough.”

It came with a visit from Vikki.

Many people called with sympathy, with misgiving. Many people called with advice, with consolation. Francesca cooked dinner for Alexander and the children for weeks. Shannon, Phil, Skip, Linda all took care of Alexander’s business. After Amanda had left him, Shannon thought he would never rebuild his life, but soon he had found a woman named Sheila with two kids of her own, who’d been left by her husband. She moved in, they combined their families, were given a wholehearted seal of approval by Tatiana, who thought Sheila was almost the woman Francesca was, and now Sheila helped Tatiana by picking her kids up from school, driving them to dance, to baseball, taking them to her house to play. Everyone was solicitous; they all helped out.

Vikki didn’t do any of that.

Ordo Amoris

Vikki had been out of touch for months
, traveling in Europe. She flew in from Leonardo DaVinci in Rome to Sky Harbor in Phoenix by way of JFK in New York. Vikki rented a car, and drove north on Pima and made a right on Jomax. Vikki stormed through the faux-gilded gates, through the large square stone courtyard with the paths and the trees and the fountains, sank down at their white kitchen table, threw her arms down, threw her head down, and wept.

Alexander, in his suit, having just come home from work, and Tatiana, in a short fashionable checkered silk dress—the modern fad having finally caught up with her clean look and long, unsprayed hair—both stood and watched Vikki’s inexplicable sorrow, staring first at her and then at each other in such troubled apprehension that Tatiana could not even go and put her arm around her closest friend. It was Alexander who patted Vikki’s back and got Vikki a cup of coffee and a smoke, and stood by her until the slow motion deafening moment ended. Vikki calmed down enough to speak. She said she had called Tom to wish him a happy birthday, and heard what happened. In a strident voice, over and over, she kept repeating that her husband would help Anthony, would find Anthony…

“He’s trying, Vikki,” said Alexander pacifically. “He’s doing all he can.”

“Tom is CCC, Alexander, he knows everything.”

“He doesn’t know
this
.”

“They have men crawling through that jungle. If anyone can find him, Tom can.”

“I suppose. He’s had men looking for him for four months.”

Four months!

It was dinner time. The children ran in, climbed all over Aunt Vikki, who calmed down, even smiled. Tatiana fed everyone, Alexander liberally poured the wine. After the children went to play, the adults discussed the possibilities.

A bald fact remained: Anthony wasn’t on assignment when he vanished. He was on leave. Unless foul play or AWOL was involved, men didn’t vanish while signed out on leave thirty miles away down a straight road in a safe town filled with U.S. servicemen.

Vikki looked like she had something to say about that.

She looked like she had something to say about a whole manner of things. But not looking at Tatiana, she said nothing, and they, not looking at her, asked her nothing.

They didn’t speak to each other as they got ready for bed. Tatiana read, Alexander went outside their patio for his last smoke of the night. In bed they stayed quiet. Her tight mouth told him more than he wanted to know. Sidling toward her, Alexander bumped his head against her arm.

“Shh. I’m trying to read.” She leaned over and kissed his hair. Didn’t look at him, though. Alexander thoughtfully rubbed his face, remaining at her shoulder. Vikki’s reaction to Anthony’s disappearance was not Francesca’s reaction to Anthony’s disappearance, and Francesca had spent fifteen years feeding Anthony and driving Anthony and watching Anthony play with Sergio—who had enlisted to fight in Southeast Asia himself, until he found out he was sick with lymphoma and couldn’t go. (Now he was in remission—and
home
.)

Alexander bumped his head against Tatiana’s arm again.

“I’m. Trying. To. Read.”

Pulling down the sheet covering her, Alexander gathered her nipple into his fingers, nuzzling his face against her breast.

Tatiana put down her book.

After he made love to her, after her last
oh Shura
, after turning off the lights, Tatiana said quietly into the hollow of his throat, “It’s because Vikki doesn’t have a child of her own. That’s why she’s so overwrought. Think how far back she and Ant go. She’s known him his whole life, from the moment he was born at Ellis.”

“I know that,” said Alexander, rubbing her back. He could not have this conversation with Tania. He didn’t know if he could have it with Vikki.

Alexander waited until he was sure Tatiana was asleep; she still fell asleep in the crook of his arm—either facing him like now as a vestige of their long-ago Luga tent, or spooned by him as a vestige of their long-ago Deer Isle twin bed—and then quietly disengaged, threw on his long johns and went outside.

Alexander found Vikki on the covered patio in the back, smoking.

Vikki Sabatella Richter, at nearly forty-seven, remained what she had always been—a remarkable, striking woman. Dark, tanned, lean, with long hair, long neck, long arms,
long
graceful coltish legs that tonight were crossed and bare. Her ankles were tapered, her toe-nails painted red like her fingernails. She wore lots of makeup, lots of jewelry, she smelled of heady perfume and operas and late nights out. She was the dramatic, full-breasted, dark-haired, dark-eyed friend that was too attractive for most girls to be friends with. Most girls were always in Vikki’s tall shadow.

Alexander had known Vikki for nearly a quarter-century. They were old friends. But now for the first time Alexander looked at Vikki as he had not looked at her before. He looked at her as a man might look at a woman. And this woman was sitting on his porch, sunken and shrunk into her drink and her cigarette, and her hair was unbrushed and her makeup smeared around her eyes. To the man in him this arresting woman looked as if she were fracturing from her broken heart.

“It’s so nice, here, Alexander,” she said in her smoky voice. Even the mournful voice was redolent of drink and too many late cigarettes. “I’ve always loved it here. It really is like magic.”

“Yes, it’s good.” He lit his own late cigarette. They smoked and listened to the wind. The lights were always on in the twinkling valley, as if it were Christmas every night. There was great comfort in the big house, in the taupe and azure desert, in the silence of the mystic mountains.