Текст книги "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena"

Автор книги: Anthony Marra

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

CHAPTER 14

THE WINTER BRENDAN and Sonja fell in love, all of Volchansk became homeless; even those like Natasha, whose homes hadn’t been hit, found the cold easier to sleep through than the fear of falling rubble. She spent the winter in City Park, a twelve-square-block refuge of brown grass and barren trees, designed, it was said, by the dimwitted fourth cousin of Boris Iofan, where the tallest man-made edifice was a corroded jungle gym. The homeless, insane, and alcoholic reigned in this world. Trained and experienced in the art of surviving a winter outdoors, the city pariahs were inundated by professors and lawyers and accountants whose degrees were worth the five seconds of warmth they could fuel. Natasha and her cohort took direction from the City Park Prophet. The great bib of gnarled hair, now reaching mid-thigh, shook indignantly when he reminded them of his prophecy. No one had listened when he predicted the fast-coming day when the sky would split open and God would fall upon the indecencies of man. Natasha remembered passing the madman each evening as she returned from the oil ministry, and he remembered the coins she had given him. “I told you I would remember you,” he said when she first moved into the park; soon she realized that all of the City Park Prophet’s flock had been daily alms-givers the Prophet now felt obligated to protect. He taught them to camouflage their tents and to scavenge for pinecones buried in the frost; to hunt feral dogs with cudgels and bait pigeon traps with the viscera; to pray five times a day and perform the proper ablutions, and Natasha, who had never stepped in a church, let alone a mosque, praised Allah because she knew better than to challenge a man who spent his life preparing for the apocalypse. In fourteen years those accountants and lawyers would collectively purchase for the City Park Prophet a studio apartment in a newly rebuilt apartment block. They would search for Natasha, hoping she would contribute to the considerable down payment, or at least be there when they led the Prophet into his new home, but the combined brainpower of six lawyers, three accountants, and eight PhDs couldn’t solve the mystery of the former secretary’s whereabouts.

By spring, when the Feds took the city, the bombing ceased and the siege settled into occupation. The City Park refugees dispersed to ancestral villages and aulsscattered throughout the highlands, where they could count on the hospitality of distant family and clan. But Natasha had no family left. Her apartment block still stood, now the tallest building on the street. The windows had blown out but the bathroom mirror was still intact. She hadn’t seen herself in months. Her options dwindled to subsistence and scavenging. Her reflection said she wouldn’t last long in a city of drunken, vengeful, sex-starved soldiers. But avenues of escape still existed for women who could make themselves attractive without the benefit of running water.

Against the ringing of her last two kopeks of common sense, she found Sulim. He lived in the open now, in business with both Feds and rebels, and occasionally with the smuggler Sonja would later know as Alu’s brother. They met in a bar that served nothing. No door, no liquor, no employees, no windows, but the regulars still returned each afternoon. Their lips were blue from drinking windshield wiper fluid.

In comparison to them, Sulim looked well. His eyes, unclouded by exhaustion, scanned her approvingly. The Parkinson’s that would turn him into a quivering jelly mold in eleven years was already fermenting in his midbrain, but his hands didn’t shake when he went to light his cigarette. War served him well. From mountain hideaways Dudayev’s economic and police chiefs issued statements praising an economy and a police force that no longer existed, and in the vacuum of legitimate authority, organized crime provided the only meaningful order. He offered her a cigarette.

“You want to get out,” he said. “Who doesn’t?”

“I can do well in the West.”

“Anyone can do well when they aren’t dodging bullets.” He scanned the ghost drinkers; those with the bluest lips had gone blind, and they reached out, touching the faces of their drinking partners. Sulim reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a vodka bottle. “I don’t know how they got it in their heads that we smuggle it in barrels of windshield wiper fluid.”

“I’ll work off the debt.”

“Will you?” he asked.

“You know how hard I worked at Grozneft. I’m productive.”

“Are you?” he asked.

“Please.” He took a small sip from the bottle, savoring it as he watched her. He hadn’t forgotten how she had denied him at her door, his skin sallow in the daylight. He crossed his legs, leaned back, waiting for her to beg. “I know there are trafficking routes,” she said. “I know you can get me out. Please, Sulim.”

“Under the Soviets, women who disappeared had to reappear on the other side of the world to make money. Now women can turn a profit simply by vanishing. Reappearance has too high an overhead. Chechen families will pay a higher ransom for the body of their daughter than they will for her alive. I’ve looked at the numbers.”

She stood to leave.

“But you aren’t Chechen,” he continued. “You have no family to pay for your corpse. You have no afterlife for which your body must be prepared. You can have another cigarette.”

He lit it for her with a bent match. She had kissed those knuckles. She had loved them.

“Will you help me or not?”

He was holding her index finger and he nodded it up and down. Crippled by tremors, unable to control his limbs, an embarrassment to his family, he would spend his final years in a windowless room with a television set for companionship. “You didn’t really think I would deny you? Where do you want to go?”

“London.”

“Then in London you will be an au pair. Do you know what that is? It’s a French word. It means you will watch the children while the parents are at work.”

“So I will be a grandmother?”

“Yes, something like that.”

“I’m not my sister but I’m not a fool.”

“There may be other things. Dancing, entertaining. Being, what’s the word, enticing.”

It meant prostitution. Waitressing, nannying, those were for pretty girls from poor countries, not pretty girls from war countries. Some repatriated women called it slavery, but even if it was true, so what? Paid sex with London civilians couldn’t be worse than forced sex with Russian soldiers. And in London, Sonja would find her other work. Sulim watched her from across the table. His lips twisted into a slight smile, a challenge. Did he think she was afraid of him? Did he think he could possibly scare her?

“London,” she said. “Make me an au pair. Make me reappear.”

A young man with a soft, round face transported Natasha and five other women to the Dagestan border. They sat on crates in the near-darkness of a Federal supply van. The wind pulled against the olive canvas awning, and occasionally, a sliver of sunlight slipped through and was gone. She wanted to ask their names, where they were from, if they, too, were au pairs. Conversation seemed possible a moment after the round-faced man, looking like their younger brother, hoisted them into the truck bed. But the air clotted with doubt too thick for any words to pass.

Some hours later the van shuddered to a standstill and the round-faced man unlatched the back. Natasha shielded her eyes against the bright burn of noon and the light warmed her hands. A smock of dark evergreens wrapped around the nearest mountain. The round-faced man led them a hundred meters down a gravel path to a jeep flying the flag of national independence. Wooden benches replaced the backseats. They crowded in.

The jeep carried them up ravines of dried creek beds, along an unending jawline of pale stone. Conifer cones hung from drooped branches. The landscape appeared on the precipice of collapse. In the glens below, trickles of silvery light wound through empty pastures, glittering ribbons tied off at the horizon. It wasn’t fair. She hated the outdoors. A sex worker was one thing, but a weekend hiker? The sun silhouetted wide circling wings. A pigeon, she first thought, grown to fit the monstrous proportions of this habitat.

The round-faced man parked the jeep when the incline became too steep. When she stood straight her hair hung off her shoulders, held back by the invisible hands of gravity. Sick, dizzied, she wanted a patch of asphalt she might sit on and feel whole. Pretty Womanwasn’t anything like this. The round-faced man began climbing the rock-ridden slope and called for them. No, no, no, she wanted to say, the carabiner in my purse is only a keychain. But what could she do? The top was closer than the bottom. No threat or command, just his finger beckoning, and following it, she left Chechnya.

Dagestan was three unbearable hours of hiking, then another hour by jeep. The nod of the border guard’s chin stubble was the only official record of their crossing into Georgia. Time was measured by bathroom breaks until they reached the water. The Black Sea was blue. They boarded a fishing trawler and the wind swept the scent of salt through her hair. Condominiums stood like dominoes on the coast, the white dots of lit windows numbering into the hundreds. When the sun fell below the water line the sea at last went black. She lay on the driest bit of deck she could find, used her duffel bag as a pillow, and fell asleep as the boat rocked on the water.

In Odessa they were divided. Three went with the round-faced man and as they disappeared into a Yugo something small and sharp panged through her; she didn’t know their names. She and two others followed the man who had purchased their passports into the back of a delivery van. The door slammed shut. When it opened they were in Serbia. They stayed with eleven other women in a stone cellar. Manacles looted from the Sarajevo archaeology museum lay coiled on the floor, the implicit threat more constricting than the rusted cuffs. A tin pail tilted in the far corner; when one approached it, the rest turned away. Slurred voices seeped through the damp wooden ceiling. An argument over whether fire hydrants were a good idea. She touched the cheeks, forehead, and lips she had once gazed at in the mirror, proudly. Now she wanted scar tissue, missing limbs, cheeks buckshot with acne, teeth pointing every which way.

“What is this?” she asked.

No one spoke.

“Does anyone know where we are?” she asked again.

The girl sitting next to her, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, was the only one who answered. “The Breaking Grounds.”

CHAPTER 15

“SHE NEVER TALKED about how it happened,” Sonja said, thirty minutes outside Grozny’s outer suburbs, ten since she had begun telling him. “How she got to Italy. If they took her on a plane or in a car or what. She never even told me who took her there, when she left, how she survived the first war. Nothing. She probably just didn’t want to think about it, but I always thought it was her way of punishing me for leaving her.” Akhmed had set the radio to 102.9. She barely knew him and that was the only reason she told him; he was, himself, static. She couldn’t explain her confession any more than the calm that followed.

“War is unnatural,” Akhmed said. “It causes people to act unnaturally.”

“Even you?”

“Of course,” he said. “I was never this charming.” He stretched his hands in front of him; brown fields wedged between his fingers. “In the first war Dokka began classifying everything. He was an arborist by training, so he was used to dividing plants into species and genera and family, and one day he began doing that with everything else. With people. Everyone was a pacifist or an imperialist or a fascist or a classicist or any other number of – ists, and anyone who criticized his system was an anarchist.”

“Havaa speaks in more – isms than a philosophy PhD.”

“Yes, she really does take after him. She began making up her own and I remember hearing them discuss mustachism and shearistry and they were so excited. I had no idea what any of it meant. It was like a language they created to speak to each other more fully.” He paused. He was breathing heavily. The flush of his cheeks had seeped to his neck. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“She plans to be a sea anemonist.”

He laughed. “I bet. We were friends for years, Dokka and I and Ramzan. Every other Sunday we played chess, Havaa watching. Ramzan was the one who was waiting for me yesterday. The informer. We played chess every other Sunday for over a decade.”

“What happened?”

“Ramzan began running guns for the rebels. He would invite Dokka on his expeditions, pay him well. I never understood why. He didn’t need Dokka’s help to drive a jeep into the mountains. The same way you thought Natasha was punishing you by her silence, I always thought Ramzan was punishing me with those trips. He never invited me along even though I needed the money as much as Dokka. We were friends, Ramzan and I, but I always felt Ramzan resented me for something I had done. Now I think it’s more complicated than that. He was detained in the Landfill in ninety-five, and I think he resents me because I know what happened to him there.

“I was jealous of Dokka. Of his trips to the mountains with Ramzan. Of the money he made. Of his wife. Mine has been bed-bound and senile for nearly three years while his had more vitality, more urgency in her little finger than most men have between their legs. I was jealous of his daughter. We tried for years but …” His voice trailed away. Beyond him a single smokestack rose a hundred meters into the sky, no building in sight. “Dokka was my closest friend and yet I wanted his family, his opportunities, his life. He and Ramzan would go to the mountains for a week or two and I would eat dinner with Esiila and Havaa. I would spend the whole day and night there. On his final trip, in January 2003, I slept in his bed for three nights. Of course I couldn’t have known that he and Ramzan had been detained and sent to the Landfill. I couldn’t have known that his fingers were snipped off with wire cutters while I was at his house, sleeping with his wife, eating with his daughter, because I thought his life was perfect. Whatever we were to each other was lost then. I’m not sure if Esiila told him or not, but he knew. Never said anything but he knew. I would go over and talk to the refugees staying at his house when I wanted to talk to him. He didn’t say a word to me last year when I spoke to the woman who told me your name. If I saw Dokka again, I wouldn’t apologize or try to make it right. That isn’t what I would say.”

“What would you say?”

Akhmed smiled, shook his head. “I don’t know.”

The shadow of a fresh crater darkened the road. At the bottom an arm reached upward. The rest of the body lay there and there and there. Lavender tatters, caught in an updraft, twisted in a wide ocean of sky. “We offered her a ride,” Sonja said, meaning I told her so, meaning this isn’t my fault.

Snow sprayed from the tires, cresting in the rearview. What would she do if the war ended? Of all the possibilities and permutations she had played out in her mind, peace was never among them. What would she do? The war that turned lieutenants into colonels, and unemployed men into jihadists, also turned residents into chief surgeons.

“Tolstoy was here two hundred years ago,” Akhmed said. “There was a war then. He wrote a novel about it.”

“I don’t care for fiction.”

“ Hadji Murádit’s called,” he said. “I’ll bring it for you tomorrow.”

“Why aren’t you angry at me?” she asked. The question had been burning in her all afternoon.

Akhmed folded his hands, but said nothing.

“I had you interrogated at gunpoint. If you were deceiving me I would have had you shot.”

“If I were deceiving you, I would have been another man.”

“You’re a decent man,” she said, and smiled. “A terrible physician, but a decent man.”

“I know. I shouldn’t spend so much time with you. You’ll turn me into a first-rate surgeon and boor.”

“I think it’s the other way around,” she said. A gauze of afternoon cloud cover had wrapped around the sky and she looked up and into it. “I’m overcome by the inexplicable desire to speak to you with common courtesy.”

“I doubt that very much.”

“I’m sorry I called you an idiot.”

“You only implied it. Do you want to make it up to me?”

“Not really,” she said.

“Then tell me who Ronald McDonald is.”

“Very soon I’ll have to apologize for calling you an idiot again.”

“Imply,” he reminded.

“No, this time I’ll likely come out and say it.”

“I already know he isn’t the American president.”

“I think you’ll be disappointed.”

“I almost always am.”

“He’s a clown.”

“A clown?”

“A clown who sells hamburgers.”

“Does he cook the hamburgers?”

“Does it matter?”

“I may be an idiot,” he said gravely, “but I would never eat a hamburger cooked by a clown. Anyway, you were telling me about your sister. When she returned from Italy.”

CHAPTER 16

IN THE WEEKS after she returned, Natasha traveled no farther than the three meters of gray carpet to Laina’s flat. She drank weak tea, interpreted hallucinations, and returned, that fourth meter sealed behind an invisible wall of terror. Sonja watched distantly, wanting to take Natasha’s hand and pull her down the hallway like a petulant child. Laina’s flat – where, three weeks earlier, she had crouched at the door, a glass of ice melting in her grip, and heard Natasha’s voice inside – seemed like the first step on recovery’s staircase. But that step had stretched into a landing, then a floor, and Natasha couldn’t have disappeared, not then.

Sonja, more talented as physician than as sister, withheld her diagnosis as long as she could. Then one Tuesday, Sonja returned from the hospital with feet swollen and shoulders heavy, too tired, really, to begin tending to her most difficult patient of the day. Natasha sat on the divan, a stack of books propped on the cushion beside her. Origins of Chechen Civilization, The Third Soviet Guide to Ornithology, Life and Fate. A yellowed tome covered her lap. The Medical Dictionary of the Union of Soviet Physicians.

“I can define any words you don’t understand,” Sonja offered, and immediately regretted it. Not the right tone to take. “Looking up anything particular?”

Natasha shrugged, of course.

“I hope you didn’t read that all day.” She turned to the bare wall. Her open mouth, pointed at Natasha, invariably projected condescension. “Surely there are more exciting books on the shelves.”

“I don’t want to be excited,” Natasha said flatly. “I want boredom. I want to be lobotomized by boredom.”

“Listen, Natashechka, something is wrong,” she said, and hated her lack of specificity. Something? Wrong? How could a surgeon diagnose with such imprecision? “Have you heard of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?”

Natasha nodded without looking up from the page.

“What is it, then?”

Golden lamplight outlined the text as she flipped the pages. “It is a psychological reaction that occurs after experiencing a highly stressing event outside the range of normal human experience, which is usually characterized by depression, anxiety, flashbacks, recurrent nightmares, and avoidance of reminders of the event.”

Natasha hadn’t spoken a complex sentence in months, and even recited, the clause-heavy bluster made her sound alive again. “Sound familiar?” Sonja asked.

“The Italian head doctors went through this already. I don’t want your help.”

Help was the last thing Sonja knew how to give her sister. “Can you remember the last time you went outside?” she asked. Natasha could have lit a cigarette off the end of that glare. “I’ll tell you when. When you were repatriated. You haven’t set a toe outside this apartment block since you returned to it.”

“You weren’t there,” Natasha said, shrugging. “So you don’t get to tell me what to do.”

For months she’d withheld, stopped herself, thought better, bitten her tongue to shreds. “I’m right here. Now. Here I am.” She spread her arms, not to embrace her sister, but to show how wide she was, how much of her was here. “Do you know why? Do you have any idea?”

Natasha didn’t move. She couldn’t unlock the cellar door, not for Sonja, not for anyone. What had happened down there was still happening inside her, and she wouldn’t let anyone, least of all her sister, into what she was still trying, still failing to escape from.

“Because of you. Because I was afraid you were here alone. Everything was so good in London. I was happy there. But I came back for you and that entitles me to your respect. You can hate me and think I’m a self-righteous bitch, but you will treat me with respect, because I came back here for you.”

Again, that fucking shrug! Sonja couldn’t imagine, then, with exasperation surging inside her, that one calm morning, eight and a half years away, after her sister had disappeared for a second time, she would wake on a hospital bed with her shoulders as stiff as her collarbones, and shrugging once, twice, failing to relax them, she would remember Natasha’s shrugs, how fluid, how easy, and that would be the first definitive, the first known, that wherever Natasha was she would be shrugging.

“Do you want me to feel sorry that you left your nice life in London? Are you the victim here, is that what you’re saying? Maybe you should talk with a psychiatrist about it, Sonechka. No, you made a mistake returning here for me,” Natasha stated, as simply as if still reading from the dictionary. “Just as I made a mistake leaving here for you.”

A window might have opened; a breeze might have slid across the walls, clearing the air, because Sonja smiled, and said, “We’re sisters. In that way, at least, we’re sisters.” She took a clean breath, now that they had each said what they had to say. “I bought you a souvenir,” she said, surprising even herself. “In London.”

Exhibiting great restraint, Natasha didn’t shrug. “What sort of souvenir?”

“I’m not telling you. I’m keeping it for myself.”

“It’s not a souvenir if you keep it.”

“Of course it is. It’s a gift to myself. I deserve it.”

“Why didn’t you give it to me?” Natasha had sat up and cocked her head to Sonja.

“Because,” Sonja said, picking up the dictionary and fanning the pages with her thumb, “you’re always on my nerves.”

“All the time?”

“Stampeding on my nerves.”

“I wouldn’t want it even if you were giving it to me,” Natasha said.

“Good, because I’m not.”

“I bet it’s a book about intestines.”

“You know I’d keep that for myself,” Sonja said. “I’ll give it to you right now.”

“Why?”

“How many intestines books does a woman need? I’ll trade it to you for a promise,” Sonja said. Natasha had taken up the clarinet when she was twelve, and Sonja, sixteen at the time, already sitting in on university classes, had heard every squeak, every warble, every pinched sharp through their shared, shadow-thin wall. She had paid Natasha, by the hour, not to practice. That same glint of easy opportunity returned to Natasha’s eyes.

“What promise?” she asked.

“Promise that you’ll come to the hospital with me tomorrow.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Just that. If you think you’re well enough.”

“What, you think I’m not?”

“No, no. I’m not saying that.”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Natasha said. “Fine. I promise.”

Sonja went to her room and returned a minute later. “Close your eyes,” she said, and handed her a sturdy oblong object wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.

“What is this? A doll?” Natasha asked, pulling it from the bag. “I’m a grown woman.”

“It’s not a doll. It’s a nutcracker of a Buckingham Palace guard.”

“Who are they?”

“They stand outside the queen’s palace. They’re not allowed to laugh. They just stand there. They’re not very good at guarding, when you think about it. They just stand there. You could dress up a lamppost and get as good a guard.”

“Yes,” Natasha agreed, cranking the nutcracker’s mouth up and down. “A bad guard and worse souvenir. What should I call him?”

Sonja bit her lip. “What about Alu?”

“Alu the lousy, boring, worthless souvenir.”

“Yes,” Sonja said. “That is the perfect name for him.”

“I’m a little disappointed. You spent five years in London and all I get is a doll?”

“The real gift was my absence.”

Finally, a smile.

The next morning the hospital was quiet. The few patients Maali couldn’t scare off with promises of an amputation cure-all waited for her: a sprained ankle, a case of the common cold, nothing urgent. She took Natasha through the ghost wards of deserted laboratories and examination rooms. Pigeons roosted in split IV bags. A manhole cover, leading nowhere, lay in radiology. The rooms would look unchanged eight and three-quarter years later when Sonja led Akhmed through. The powdered heroin, provided by Alu’s brother, would still slouch against the canteen cupboard wall, but when she led him past she would do so without worry, without wondering if his veins, like her sister’s, might tingle from proximity.

“This was once among the foremost oncology departments in the U.S.S.R.,” she said, as they shuffled into a room relieved of its doorknobs and light fixtures. “Party officials came from as far as Vladivostok for treatment.”

They paused at a hulking MRI machine which the former hospital director had sacrificed his pension, his marriage, and all the black in his hair to procure. “It’s a shame we can’t use this, but a single scan would kill the generator.” A meter from her foot the bronze rim of a shell casing was silhouetted in dust. “Besides,” she added, “there’s so much embedded metal in here the magnetic field would turn the room into a shooting gallery.”

The tour ended on the fourth-floor maternity ward, where a woman who had given birth the previous night smiled at everyone in placid exhaustion. Her child had emerged with a collapsed lung but the doctor on call had acted quickly and the child had lived. The mother held the infant to her breast. Its little lips bent the nipple. She beamed as they approached.

“God is great. She will live,” the mother said in a slow cadence to make it clear that the two statements were logically dependent. She glanced up at Natasha, mistaking her white sweatshirt for scrubs. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I’m no one,” Natasha said.

“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You save lives.”

Natasha crossed her arms, and Sonja couldn’t see it, couldn’t know it, but right then, when Natasha dipped her head, looked to her palm, to the floor, to Sonja and back, she believed that their body temperatures rose by some fractional degree, that this they shared. The baby finished suckling and tilted its square little face upward.

“Do you want to hold her?” the mother asked.

“No,” Natasha said, ratcheting her frown.

“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You want to hold her.”

“I need to go, but you stay here. There is a case of the common cold in need of my attention,” Sonja whispered as Natasha took the infant in her arms.

That morning, in the cavernous wards, Natasha’s brain finally hushed. When the newborn sniffed strangely at her chest, she stared into its eyes and saw a world only two days old. Those two and a half kilograms righted her, turned her vantage to a future kinder than experience had taught her to expect. The next morning she woke when Sonja woke, left when Sonja left, and the next morning and the next.

Deshi and Maali, her superiors, were nurses and twins. Deshi, on the eleventh of her twelve loves, reminded her of Sonja, and she preferred Maali, the younger by eighteen minutes, who treated illness and injury as the practical jokes of a God wheezing with laughter, and suggested amputation for every cough, chest cold, ulcer, and eye infection that had the misfortune of seeking her counsel. In the maternity ward, Natasha cleaned towels, bedsheets, the linoleum floor, plastic tubes and hoses, bottles, baby bottoms, and bedpans. Her fingertips reddened in the bleach, and in this good hurt and those clean bottles, she found herself warmed by the small suggestions of her agency. In her day’s rare pauses, she restored the view to the boarded windows. It began with a few right angles penciled on the plywood. She hadn’t known what she was drawing until it took shape. Two squares, one atop the other. In the pencil’s descent a stray line became a downspout, the pulsing overhead fluorescence became a blue afternoon sun, and a small curl of wood grain became a secretary’s brown hair blown back by a desk fan. Drawing by division on the plywood, she parceled the building into floors, floors into windows, windows into panes. Familiar, but it still floated a centimeter off her memory; she placed a Soviet flag over the arched entrance, placed pigeons on the flagpole, placed a strong westerly breeze so the flag caught every squirt of pigeon shit. Pencil lead smudged on the thick of her palm as she dredged the building from its ruins. When finished she wrote its name in block Cyrillic above the awning. The Volchansk State Bureau of Vehicular Licensing and Registration. Of course it looked familiar; it had once stood on the other side of the window.

Over weeks and months, as spare minutes became hours and the hours days, she added linden and poplar trees, rusted streetlamps, drooping electrical lines, shingled roofs, a skyline of television antennae, clotheslines curved by wet laundry, smoke ribbons unwinding from tailpipes, the sidewalks and cigarette kiosks and everything she could remember. She added no fire hydrants.

Behind her back, and later to her face, Deshi and Maali opined.

“A dreadful thing,” Deshi said when she thought Natasha had gone to the parking lot for a cigarette.

“Completely inaccurate,” Maali concurred. The nurse understood what it was like to be the younger sister, if only by eighteen minutes, and her criticism hurt Natasha the most. “The perspective is skewed. It isn’t possible to see so much of City Park from this window.”

“Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard,” Deshi said. “She’s never actually seen the view from this room.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? She’s drawing something she’s never seen.”