Winter Garden (30 page)

Meredith felt a kind of sadness. It wasn’t what she’d felt before: not disappointment that her kids didn’t call, or fear that Jeff didn’t love her, or even worry that she had lost too much of herself. This new feeling was the realization that she wasn’t young anymore. The days of frolicking with her little girls were gone. Her children were on their own now, and Meredith needed to accept that. They would always be a family, but if she’d learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn’t a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn’t control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.

As she stood there, staring at strangers, she saw her marriage in moments. She and Jeff at the prom, dancing under a mirrored ball to “Stairway to Heaven” and French-kissing . . . her in labor, screaming at him to stay the fuck away from her with those ice chips . . . him handing her the first pages of his first novel and asking her opinion . . . and him standing beside her when Dad was dying, saying, Who takes care of you, Mere? and trying to hold her.

“I’ve been an idiot,” she said to no one except herself, forgetting for a moment that she was standing in the middle of a busy sidewalk, flanked by eavesdroppers.

“It’s about time,” Nina said, smiling. “I’m tired of being the only screw-up in this family.”

“I love Jeff,” Meredith said, feeling both miserable and elated.

“Of course you do,” Mom said.

Meredith turned to them. “What if it’s too late?”

Mom smiled, and Meredith was struck by both the beauty and the newness of the face she’d studied for decades. “I am eighty-one years old, telling my life story to my daughters. Every year, I thought it was too late to start, that I’d waited too long. But Nina here won’t take no for an answer.”

“Finally. Being a selfish bitch pays off.” Nina reached into her camera bag and pulled out a clunky cell phone, flipping it open. “Call him.”

“Oh. We’re having fun. It can wait.”

“No,” Mom said sharply. “Never wait.”

“What if—”

Mom laid a hand on her forearm. “Look at me, Meredith. I am what fear makes of a woman. Do you want to end up like me?”

Meredith slowly reached out and removed her mother’s sunglasses. Staring into the aqua-blue eyes that had always mesmerized her, Meredith smiled. “You know what, Mom? I’d be proud to have your strength. What you’ve been through—and we don’t know the worst of it, I think—it would have killed an ordinary woman. Only someone extraordinary could have survived. So, yeah, I do want to end up like you.”

Mom swallowed hard.

“But I don’t want to be afraid. You’re right about that. So give me that damn cell phone, Neener Beaner. I’ve got an overdue call to make.”

“We’ll meet you on the boat,” Nina said.

“Where?”

Mom actually laughed. “The bar, of course. The one with the view.”

Meredith watched her sister and mother walk down the sidewalk, away from her. Although the wind was blowing slightly, tapping a seashell chime in the eaves beside her, and somewhere a boat honked its horn, she couldn’t hear anything except the lingering echo of her mother’s laughter. It was a sound she’d keep forever, and pull out whenever she stopped believing in miracles.

She crossed the street, stopping traffic with a smile and an outheld palm. Passing the family still taking pictures of each other, she went to a small wooden bench that read: IN MEMORY OF MYRNA, WHO LOVED THIS VIEW.

She sat down on Myrna’s bench and stared out at the gaggle of fishing and pleasure boats in the marina below. Masts cocked and swayed with every invisible movement of the water. Seabirds cawed out to tourists and dove for golden fries.

She glanced at her watch, calculated Jeff’s schedule, and dialed his number.

It rang so many times she almost gave up.

Then, finally, he answered, sounding out of breath. “Hello?”

“Jeff?” she said, feeling tears rise up. It was all she could do to hold them back. “It’s me.”

“Meredith . . .”

She couldn’t quite pinpoint the emotion in his voice, and that bothered her. Once, she’d known every nuance. “I’m in Sitka,” she said, stalling.

“Is it as beautiful as they say?”

“No,” she decided. She wasn’t going to be afraid and she wasn’t going to waste time on the kind of facile conversations that had gotten her into this mess. “I mean yes, it is beautiful here, but I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to talk about our daughters, either, or our jobs, or my mom. I want to say I’m sorry, Jeff. You asked me if I loved you, and I hit the brakes. I’m still not sure why. But I was wrong and stupid. I do love you. I love you and I miss you and I hope to hell I’m not too late because I want to grow old with the man I was young with. With you.” She drew in a sharp breath. It felt as if she’d been talking forever, spewing really, and now it was up to him. Had she hurt him too much? Waited too long? When the silence went on—she could hear a squeaky spring as he sat down on a bad sofa, and then his sigh—she said, “Say something.”

“December 1974.”

“What?”

“I was in line at the CUB. Karie Dovre elbowed me and when I looked over, I saw you standing by the tetherball. You’d been avoiding me, remember? After the Christmas play? You wouldn’t even look at me for two years. I tried lots of times to walk up to you, but I always lost my nerve at the last second. Until that day in December. It was snowing, and you were standing there, all by yourself, shivering. And before I could talk myself out of it, I walked over to you. Karie was yelling that I’d lose my place in the food line, but I didn’t care. When you looked up at me, I remember how hard it was to breathe. I thought you’d run away, but you didn’t, and I said, ‘Do you like banana splits?’ ” He laughed. “What an idiot. It was probably twenty-five degrees outside and I ask about ice cream. But you said yes.”

“I remember,” she said quietly.

“We have a thousand memories like that.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve tried to fall out of love with you, Mere. I couldn’t do it, but I thought sure as hell you had.”

“I didn’t fall out of love with you, either. I just . . . fell. Can we start over?”

“Hell, no. I don’t want to start over. I like the middle.”

Meredith laughed at that. She didn’t want to go back and be young again, either, not with all the uncertainties and angst. She just wanted to feel young again. And she wanted to change. “I’ll be naked more. I promise.”

“And I’ll make you laugh more. God, I’ve missed you, Mere. Can you come home right now? I’ll warm up the bed.”

“Almost.” She leaned back into the sun-baked wooden bench.

For the next half hour, they talked like they used to, about anything and everything. Jeff told her he’d almost finished his novel and Meredith told him part of her mother’s story. He listened in obvious awe, offering memories that suddenly made sense, times when Mom’s behavior had seemed inexplicable. All that food, he said, and the stuff she said . . .

They talked about the girls and how they were doing in school and what the summer would be like with the house full again.

“Have you figured out what you want?” Jeff finally said. “Besides me, that is?”

“I’m working on it. I think I want to expand the gift shop. Maybe let Daisy run Belye Nochi. Or even sell it.” She was surprised by her own words. She didn’t remember ever really thinking that before, but suddenly it made sense. “And I want to go to Russia. Leningrad.”

“You mean St. Petersburg, but—”

“It will always be Leningrad to me. I want to see the Summer Garden and the Neva River and the Fontanka Bridge. We never really went on a honeymoon. . . .”

He laughed. “Are you sure this is Meredith Cooper?”

“Meredith Ivanovna Cooper. That’s what my name would be in Russia. And yeah. It’s me. Can we go?”

She could hear the laughter in Jeff’s voice, and the love, when he said, “Baby, our kids are gone. We can go anywhere.”

Juneau was the epitome of the Alaskan spirit—a state capital built with no roads leading in or out. The only way to get there was by boat or air. Surrounded by towering, snow-clad mountains and tucked in between ice fields larger than some states, it was a rough-and-tumble city that clung tenaciously to its pioneer and Native roots.

If they hadn’t been on a quest—or it hadn’t been raining so hard—Nina felt sure they would have taken an excursion to see the Mendenhall Glacier. But as it was, the three of them were standing at the entrance to the Glacier View Nursing Home instead.

“Are you afraid, Mom?” Meredith asked.

“I wasn’t under the impression that he’d agreed to see me,” Mom said.

“Not precisely,” Nina said. “But sooner or later, everyone talks to me.”

Mom actually smiled. “God knows that is true.”

“So are you afraid?” Nina asked.

“No. I should have done this years ago. Perhaps if I had . . . No. I am not afraid of telling the story to this man who is collecting such memories.”

“Perhaps if you had, what?” Meredith asked.

Mom turned to look at them. Her face was shadowed by the black woolen hood she wore. “I want you both to know what this trip has meant to me.”

“Why do you sound like you’re saying good-bye?” Nina asked.

“Today you will hear the terrible things I did,” Mom said.

“We all do terrible things, Mom,” Meredith said. “You don’t have to worry.”

“Do we? Do we all do terrible things?” Mom made a sound of disgust. “This is the talk-show babble of your generation. Here is what I want to say now, before we go in. I love both of you.” Her voice cracked, turned harsh, but her gaze softened. “My Ninotchka . . . my Merushka.”

Before either could even respond to the sweetness of their Russian nicknames, Mom turned on her heel and walked into the nursing home.

Nina rushed to keep up with her eighty-one-year-old mother.

At the desk, she smiled at the receptionist, a round-faced, black-haired woman in a beaded red sweater.

“We are the Whitson family,” Nina said. “I wrote ahead to Dr. Adamovich and told him we’d be stopping by to see him today.”

The receptionist frowned, flipping through a calendar. “Oh. Yes. His son, Max, is going to be here at noon to meet you. Would you like to have some coffee while you wait?”

“Sure,” Nina said.

They followed the receptionist’s directions to a waiting room filled with black and white images of Juneau’s colorful past.

Nina took a place by the window in a surprisingly comfortable chair. Behind her, a large picture window looked out over a green forest threaded by falling rain.

The minutes ticked past. People came and went, some walking, others in wheelchairs, their voices floating in and out with their presence.

“I wonder what the belye nochi is like here,” Mom said quietly, gazing out the window.

“It’s better the farther north you go,” Nina said. “According to my research anyway. But if you’re lucky, sometimes you can see the northern lights from here.”

“The northern lights,” Mom said, leaning back in her orange chair. “My papa used to take me outside in the middle of the night sometimes, when everyone else was asleep. He’d whisper, ‘Verushka, my little writer,’ and take my hand and wrap me in a blanket and out we would go, into the streets of Leningrad, to stand and stare up at the sky. It was so beautiful. God’s light show, my papa said, although he said it softly. Everything he said was dangerous then. We just didn’t know it.” She sighed. “I think this is the first time I’ve ever just talked about him. Just remembered something ordinary.”

“Does it hurt?” Meredith asked.

Mom thought about that for a moment and then said, “In a good way. We were always so scared to mention him. This is what Stalin did to us. When I first came to the United States, I could not believe how free everyone was, how quick to say what was on their minds. And in the sixties and seventies . . .” She shook her head, smiling. “My father would have loved to see a sit-in or the college kids demonstrating. He was like them, like . . . Sasha and your father. Dreamers.”

“Vera was a dreamer,” Nina said gently.

Mom nodded. “For a time.”

A man dressed in a flannel shirt and faded jeans walked into the room. With a thick black beard that covered half of his angular face, it was hard to make out his age. “Mrs. Whitson?” he said.

Mom slowly stood.

The man moved forward, his hand outstretched. “I am Maksim. My father, Vasily Adamovich, is the man you have come so far to see.”

Nina and Meredith rose as one.

“It is many years since your father wrote to me,” Mom said.

Maksim nodded. “And I’m sorry to say that he has suffered a stroke in the years between. He can barely speak and can’t move his left side at all.”

“So we are wasting your time,” Mom said.

“No. Not at all. I have taken up a few of my father’s projects and the siege of Leningrad is one of them. It’s such important work, gathering these survivor stories. It’s only in the last twenty years or so that the truth is coming to light. The Soviets were good at keeping secrets.”

“Indeed,” Mom said.

“So if you’d like to come into my father’s room, I’ll record your account for his study. He may not appear to react, but I can assure you that he is happy to finally include your story. It will be the fifty-third first-person account he has collected. Later this year I am going to St. Petersburg to petition for more records. Your story will make a difference, Mrs. Whitson. I assure you.”

Mom simply nodded, and Nina couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking, now that they were coming to the time when the story would end.

“Follow me, please,” Maksim said. Turning, he led them down the brightly lit corridor, past hunched old women with walkers and tiny old men in wheelchairs, to a room at the very end of the hall.

There was a narrow hospital-style bed in the center of the room and a couple of chairs that had obviously been brought in for this meeting. In the bed lay a shrunken man with a bony face and toothpick arms. Tufts of white hair sprang from his bald, spotted head and his wrinkled pink ears. His nose was like a raptor’s beak and his lips all but invisible. At their entrance, his right hand began to tremble and the right side of his mouth tried to smile.

Maksim leaned down close to his father, whispered something into his ear.

The man in the bed said something, but Nina couldn’t understand a word.

“He says he is so glad to see you, Anya Whitson. He has waited a long time. My father is Vasily Adamovich and he welcomes you all.”

Mom nodded.

“Please, sit down,” Maksim said, indicating the chairs. On a table by the window were a copper samovar and several plates of pierogies and strudel and sliced cheese with crackers.

Vasily said something, his voice crackled like a dried leaf.

Maksim listened, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Papa. I cannot understand. He is saying something about the rain, I think. I am not sure. I am going to record your story, Mrs. Whitson. Anya—may I call you Anya? Is the recording okay?”

Mom was staring at the gleaming copper samovar and the row of silver-wrapped glass teacups. “Da,” she said softly, flicking a hand in dismissal.

Nina hadn’t realized that she was the only one still standing. She went to the chair next to Meredith’s and sat down.

For a moment, the room was utterly still. The only noise in it was the tapping of the rain on the roof.

Then Mom drew in a long, slow breath and released it. “I have told this story in a single way for so long, I hardly know how to start now. I hardly know how to start.”

Maksim hit the record button. It made a loud clicking sound and the tape started to roll.

“I am not Anya Petrovna Whitson. This is the name I took, the woman I became.” She took another deep breath. “I am Veronika Petrovna Marchenko Whitson, and Leningrad is my city. It is a part of me. Long ago, I knew those streets like I know the soles of my feet or the palms of my hands. But it is not my youth you are interested in. Not that I had much of one, when I look back on it. I started to grow up at fifteen when they took my father away, and by the end of the war, I was old. . . .

“That is the middle, though. The beginning, really, is June of 1941. I am coming home from the country, where I’d been gathering vegetables to can for the coming winter. . . .”

Nina closed her eyes and sat back, letting the words form pictures in her imagination. She heard things she’d heard before as a fairy tale; only this time they were real. There were no Black Knights or princes or goblins. There was only Vera, first as a young woman, falling in love and having her babies . . . and then as a woman afraid, digging on the Luga line and walking through bombed-out landscapes. Nina had to wipe her tears away when Olga died, and again when Vera’s mother died.

“She is gone,” Mom says with a terrible simplicity. “I hear my son say, ‘What’s wrong with Baba?’ and it takes all my strength

not to cry.

I pull the blanket up to Mama’s chest, trying not to notice how bony her face has become in the last month. Should I have forced her to eat? This is a question that will haunt me for the rest of my life. If I had, I would have been pulling the blanket up on one of my children, and how could I have done that?

“Mama,” Leo says again.

“Baba has gone to be with Olga,” I say, and as hard as I try to be strong, my voice cracks, and then my children are crying.

It is Sasha who comforts them. I have no comfort left inside of me. I am cold to the bone, afraid that if one of them touches me I will crack apart like an egg.

I sit next to my dead mother for a long time, in our shadowy, cold room, with my head bowed in a prayer that comes too late. Then I remember a thing she said to me long ago, when I was the child who needed comfort. We will not speak of him again.

At the time, I thought it was because of his danger to us, his crimes, but as I sit next to my mother, I feel her move beside me—I swear I do—she reaches over and touches my hand and I feel warm for the first time in months, and I understand what she was saying to me then.

Go on. Forget if you can. Live.

It is not so much about who my father was, this advice; it is what life is about. What death does to you. When I look down, of course she is not moving, her skin is cold, and I know she did not really speak to me. But she did. And so I do what I must. I stand up, feeling out my new role. I am a motherless daughter now, a sisterless woman. There is no one left of the family I was born into; there is only the family I have made.

My mother is in all of us, though especially in me. Anya has my mother’s solemn strength. Leo has Olga’s easy laughter. And I—I have the best of both of them in me, and the dreams of my father, too, so it is my job to be all of us now.

Sasha is beside me suddenly.

He folds me into a hug and I press my face into the cold curl of his neck.

“We will be away from here someday,” he promises. “We will go to Alaska, just like we talked about. It won’t always be like this.”

“Alaska,” I say, remembering this dream of his, of ours. “Land of the Midnight Sun. Yes. . . .”

But a dream like that—any dream—is far away now and it only makes my pain worse.

I look at him, and though he says something, I see his thoughts in his green eyes, or maybe it is my own thoughts reflected. Either way, we break apart and Sasha says to our slumped, red-eyed children, “Mama and I must go take care of Baba.”

Leo, sitting on the kitchen floor, starts to cry, but it is a pale imitation of my son’s sadness, of his tears. I know. I have seen him burst into tears when he is healthy. Now he just . . . leaks water from his eyes and sits there, too hungry and exhausted to do more.

“We’ll stay here, Papa,” Anya says solemnly. “I’ll take care of Leo.”

“My good children,” Sasha says. He keeps them busy while I wash Mama, and dress her in her best dress. I try not to notice how shrunken and thin she is . . . not really my mother at all, but . . .

It is true what they say. Children become adults who become children again. I cannot help thinking of this cycle as I gently wash my mother’s body and button her buttons and pin her hair. When I am done, she looks like she is sleeping and I bend down and kiss her cold, cold cheek and whisper my good-bye.

Then it is time.

Sasha and I dress for the cold. I put on everything I own—four pairs of socks, my mother’s oversized valenki, pants, dresses, sweaters. I can barely fit into my coat, and once I have wrapped a scarf around my head, my face looks like a child’s.

Out we go, into the cold, black day. Streetlamps are on in places, their light blurred by falling snow. We tie Mama to the little red sled that once was a family toy and now is perhaps our most important possession. Sasha is strong enough to drag it through the heavy snow, thank God.

I am weak. I try to hide it from my husband, but how can I? Every step through the knee-deep snow is a torture for me. My breath comes in great, burning gasps. I want to sit down but I know better.

In front of us, a man weaves drunkenly forward, clutches a streetlamp, and bends over, breathing hard.

We walk past him. This is what we do now, what we have become. When I look back, breathing hard myself, he has fallen in the snow. I know that when we go home we will see his blue, frozen body. . . .

“Don’t look,” Sasha says.

“I see anyway,” I say, and keep trudging forward. How can I not see? Rumors are that three thousand people a day are dying, mostly old men and young children. We women are stronger somehow.

Thankfully, Sasha is in the army, so we only have to stand in line a few hours for a death certificate. We will lose Mama’s food ration, but lying about her death is more dangerous than starving.

By the time we leave the warmth of standing in line, I am beyond exhausted. The hunger is gnawing at my belly and I feel so light-headed that sometimes I cry for no reason. The tears freeze on my cheeks instantly.

There are streetlamps on at the cemetery, although I wish it were dark. In the falling snow, the bodies are hidden, coated in white, but there is no mistaking them: corpses stacked like firewood at the cemetery gates.