Better Times Page 3

  Before the launch, Dr. Yazdovsky took Laika home to play with his children. “I wanted to do something nice for her,” he would later say. “She had so little time left to live.”

  Every once in a while, if it had been a long time since an incident, we were taken out into the world for a field trip. Madame Durance would rent a bus and those of us who were allowed to go piled in for the drive. Boys ran alongside, blowing kisses, leaving damp prints on the windows. This was the only touch of a boy I’d ever known: ghostly, quick to fade. I liked it that way.

  The year Babette was with us we went to the town’s art museum. It was a small, modest place whose walls were usually adorned with rolling hillsides and farmers forking hay. But that fall a painting was on loan from New York City, touring the country like a band or a play.

  It stood alone on a far wall, a rope mounted around it to prevent anyone from getting too close. Most of the girls studied it for a minute or two before moving on, darting about in the unfamiliar space as if the full force of their locomotion could slow down time, could keep them there. But I was transfixed by what I saw: in the foreground a woman in a pink dress, dark hair in a low bun. She was sprawled out on an open field, her fingers gripping the half-dead grass. Her face was turned away, looking toward a gray house on the horizon, a place that I would never see her reach. Her name was Christina, so the plaque said. Though suffering from polio, she refused the use of a wheelchair. The artist was inspired to paint her after watching her crawl across a field from a window in his house.

  It must have taken her hours. What sort of person could just stand by and observe something like that? But it was a hopelessness there’s no helping. Like Laika. Like all of us, I suppose. Perhaps capturing it was all that could be done; it was, in its way, the only chance of honoring it.

  The noise of the other girls brought me back, the tumble of their laughter, the scuff of their shoes on the floor. I blinked, glanced around, felt color creeping into my cheeks though nobody had taken any notice of my stupor. They burbled with hidden mirth, danced figure eights around one another. It dawned on me as I watched that Babette was not among them. She had disappeared.

  Fear like hunger pangs filled me, doubled me over. Everywhere I looked were faces I knew but couldn’t comprehend. My lungs twisted into strange balloon animal shapes. When Madame turned to reprimand a group of tittering girls, I slipped out the door and into the courtyard, gasping for new air.

  Only one of us had ever tried to run before and she had come back: Cordelia, the girl who wanted to hold onto holiness. A friend posing as a brother had come to visit and smuggled her away. She was gone five days before her mother returned her, dragging her in by her hair as she kicked up a feral dust. “Goddammit, Cordie,” her mother had cried, “why would you leave this?” She glanced at those of us who’d gathered, a wall of widening eyes. “This place is better than home.” The bewildered look on her face as she said this is one I’ve never forgotten. But I knew Madame’s response to my failure would be even more enduring.

  Once my breath caught up with me, another sound made itself known. It was Babette, her hands making tiny arcs across her stomach, sitting on a bench beneath the bosom of a wilting tree. From a distance she appeared to be shivering, but as I drew closer I heard the lamb bleats of her distress. “It hurt,” she said as I sat beside her.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, looking her over for cuts and bruises, thinking one of the girls had done something to her. “Do you want me to get Madame?”

  Her head gave a violent shake. “When it happened. It hurt. Why didn’t He tell me?” she said. “What if He made a mistake choosing me?”

  As startling as it can be to hear such doubt from an adult, I’ve come to believe over the years that it’s more frightening when it comes from a child. It seemed it was my duty to comfort her in that moment. Perhaps even my destiny.

  “No,” I said, less because I believed it than I wanted her to, “God doesn’t do that.”

  She took a deep breath, wiped at her tears, and when I looked at her again there was a calmness in her eyes that dwarfed her age.

  “You sure you’re okay?” I asked.

  Babette just smiled in that internal way she had. The way that said she trusted herself more than the world. Just like adults did.

  Laika died on the fourth day of the flight. Though she succeeded in her mission, her machine failed her. The Block A core of the satellite didn’t detach as planned. She overheated in orbit after the thermal insulation tore loose, raising the temperature in the cabin to over 100 degrees.

  The Soviets had always planned for her death. They had hoped to euthanize her; her seventh serving of food was poisoned. For forty-five years the scientists offered conflicting reports on the mission, a deception that allowed the Russian, and eventually the American, programs to continue their march toward successful human spaceflight. Laika’s true demise was not revealed until October 2002, when one of the scientists presented a paper at the World Space Congress in Houston, Texas. “It turned out that it was practically impossible to create a reliable temperature control system in such limited time constraints,” he said in the newsclip.

  About five months after the launch, on April 14, 1958, Sputnik 2 disintegrated upon reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere, carrying Laika’s remains with it. By then everyone else had moved on. Other, greater missions lay ahead.

  A few months passed. There was a cold spell and a new year. We grew older, grew bigger, some of us grew less bad and left.

  Then on a Tuesday in February Babette’s brother, Luther, came to visit her. She didn’t seem surprised to see him, but then again she hadn’t seemed surprised by anything as long as we’d known her. Though Madame Durance eyed him over suspiciously, his Beat poet hair and mud-lashed pants, she let him in. I was put in charge of watching them.

  Though Madame usually sat right at the table with visitors, I chose a seat a bit more removed. This was part politeness and part curiosity; I wanted to have a good view of any cracks in Babette’s manner. Though she did not meet the hand her brother offered her, she treated him with the same dreamy courtesy as anyone else I’d seen her with in the home. He seemed pained by this or perhaps by everything, wincing without warning, as if from countless invisible blows.

  “Nice place here,” he said. She nodded, waited, resting her arms on her belly like it was a windowsill. How strange to watch families interact this way, as if a new place also made them new to each other.

  “You’re big,” he said.

  “Yes,” she smiled. “The Lord has blessed me.”

  Sourness passed over his face. “Too late, then,” he said.

  “The Lord has blessed you too.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “You can’t talk like that.”

  “You don’t want it neither,” he said. “I know.”

  I didn’t feel so good then, like my whole body was caught in a shiver that wouldn’t stop. It was how he was looking at her. Like she was the bone his teeth kept gnawing.

  “All babies are blessings,” she said.

  “You got the devil in you.”

  She took his hand, pressed it first to her lips and then to her stomach. He jumped like lightning. When he pulled it back, held it up as if to hit her, she was never anything but calm. Graceful, even. “I forgive you,” she said.

  When I told Madame what I had heard, she looked at me with the narrowed eyes of a skeptic. “Her own brother?” she scoffed. “Why would you say something like that?” It seemed there were limits to the badness even Madame would believe.

  “Madame,” I said, panic and protest rising in me at once, clouding my eyes with tears. I let them spill over recklessly; she hated this sort of blubbering even more than lies.

  “You should know better,” she said. “Perhaps Durance Home has done what it can for you. There are other places girls like you can be.” Then she went back to the papers on her desk, not even bothering to dismiss me.

  Th
ese words came back to me later that night when I heard our bedroom door click open, the soft rustle of someone wanting not to be heard, and then a cry muffled by a swift clamping motion. I felt a curl of sickness in my stomach, sweat flocking in my pits, my heart slashing me like a razor. I stayed still, kept my breathing steady, even when she bit his hand and grunted out something. The start of my name soon snuffed. I knew the places Madame spoke of. My brother and I had been shuffled in and out of them for years before Durance Home, whenever another relative got tired of us. So I shrank from the sounds of their struggle, the violence I didn’t want turned on me, until the door shut behind them, leaving me alone in the smothering silence.

  As the terror of the moment began to subside, another stranger feeling began to build in me: relief. I would be blamed for it, I knew, but what I said would be believed. She was just another runaway now. I would be safe.

  Fifty years after her remains returned from space, Laika was memorialized in a statue and plaque, unveiled on April 11, 2008, in Star City, Russia, not far from the military facility where she was trained. It depicts a dog standing on top of a rocket. Though few in Russia spoke out about the controversy of the mission before the fall of the regime, Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists who worked with Laika, has since said, “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it . . . We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.”

  Over the years I have thought about Laika often, and Babette too, turning them over in my mind like a Rubik’s cube that never quite clicks into place. Laika’s story is known though not well recorded, which is its own kind of tragedy. I have wondered what became of Babette, if there was any joy in the life she was dragged back to. Even now some nights I dream her and Luther into the bed beside me, limbs writhing together like a den of snakes, my name like venom on her tongue. I wake up screaming loud enough to be heard, not just in other rooms but in other years.

  A girl appeared here, not too many months ago, with the same blonde hair, the same inward smile. A granddaughter perhaps? No. She was no child of God, that one.

  I’ve been at Durance Home for close to sixty years now, taking care of it myself for thirty, though I have never thought to change the name. The girls call me “Miss” anyway. I know what they think. Behind my back it’s “Sister.” In a way the slur makes sense; I’m performing a penance of sorts.

  I haven’t left the grounds since Madame died. Even before that I rarely wandered very far. It took time to rebuild Madame’s trust, but we both knew I didn’t belong anywhere else. I didn’t have the schooling for college or the manners for a husband. A shame it’s not like it used to be. I understand the cruelty of the young better than most. But there’s no respect, no fear, in these girls now. They tussle with one another, cuss and scream. They see nothing worth learning in my lessons. I’m ruining their lives keeping them here, not keeping them from ruining themselves. I want them safe; they wish me dead. The woods around us have grown scalp bald but sometimes they still disappear into them. And it just gets worse with time. There is no one to continue this work after me, but I’m getting on in years. That’s what makes me saddest of all. I’m not so eager to return to the world when this is all I see of it.

  Perhaps I have been wrong to think of Laika’s death as a tragedy. After all, if she had been able to return, what kind of life would she be coming back to? A hero’s welcome, surely, but then? A family to take her in? To eke out her remaining years manhandled by some ignorant child, dreaming of another orbit? There was no sorrow in being chosen in the first place, saved from a street-wandering squalor, to be fed and if not loved, then trusted. Some of us are meant to bear the glory that the rest of us merely share in. At least Laika was allowed that moment of awe, when the stars were surrounding her, and the moon, still so far from reach, was looking at her funny, wondering what she was doing there.

  Foreigners

  Rebecca noticed the lights first. A blue then a red pirouetting on the edge of her page as she turned it. She was reading in the front parlor after dinner, seated by the picture window that was designed to set scenes like this: her neighbor, Anya Demidov, being led by the police from the driveway she’d just pulled into, a bag of groceries still cradled in her arms.

  There was one cop on either side of her, each gripping an elbow, steering her to a silvered crosshatch of cars parked in front of her house. As she walked, her ponytail swung back and forth with the judgment of a wagging finger. She knew her audience, kept her neck straight, her head high as if she was in etiquette class instead of handcuffs. Later, Rebecca would remember that there were no sirens. In the moment, as she watched Anya’s face toughen and shrink, her features fired in a kiln of her own devising, she was just one part of a silence so full and complete it was as if it was waiting to be heard.

  The others watched from their windows or from behind their front doors, more felt than seen, the neighborhood holding its collective breath as the trio approached the squad car. When Anya was pivoted into position, the bag she’d been holding split in two. Tin cans and produce tumbled to the street.

  The three of them stood there, heads bowed in silent communion. When Anya bent to gather the twirling tops of her groceries, the officers yanked her back up in a motion of such efficient violence that it sucked the air right out of Rebecca’s rigid body. Anya’s head was lowered and her form was accepted into the groping darkness of the backseat. Then they pushed off into the night as if none of it had happened, leaving the porch lights on behind them. At some point, after everyone had exhausted themselves with speculation and laid down for a fitful sleep, a timer turned them off.

  “What’s so special about the Demidovs?” Colin asked. Rebecca looked across the dinner table at her son and resisted the urge to flick the hair that brazenly dangled in his eyes, the same hair she used to place a bowl on to cut and that she hadn’t touched without consequences in years. Yet again he had sculpted the components of his meal into artful piles rather than eating them. If his father had been there he’d have made him lick up every last lump. But his father wasn’t there, and besides, the counselor had told Rebecca to be more accommodating to her son’s needs. “Nothing,” she said. Then, “Why do you ask?”

  It had been a few days since the arrest but the novelty had kept it current and likely would remain so for months. Rebecca had been living in the town for longer than the marriage that first brought her there, though she felt, like everyone, as if she’d been there forever. When they’d first moved in, her husband spoke expansively of setting down their roots. But instead the neighborhood had hardened into a carapace around them, trapping her in a town where every teen pregnancy and illicit affair was more sport than secret.

  “I ask because they’re on fucking CNN.”

  Colin had long stopped responding when she objected to his language, though Rebecca half-heartedly continued with the charade. But the images flashing on the muted television caught her eye first: Anya accepting a plaque from the mayor, her hair done up in a challah braid, her smile a spray of teeth. The husband, who everyone called Mick. A professor of Eastern European studies with a bulldog’s body. Single women in the neighborhood were always sending him up ladders or under sinks. A portrait of their daughter, Zora, with her bottle-bottom glasses and visor of bangs, the stick of her body bent over the keys of a grand piano. A quiet, introspective child two grades behind Colin in school but enrolled in several of his classes. He complained of her often but what would become of her now?

  Rebecca plucked a few words from the sprinting ticker tape on the bottom of the screen: Infiltration, Allegation, Deportation. Spies. Such an old-fashioned word now. Quaint, even. Was she just imagining the sadness in their faces? Or had the possibility of this day always been upon them, pressing the ends of their mouths slightly downward?

  Then, with a shock, it was their house on display, at once alien and iconic, like seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time after years of travel shows.
A woman in a charcoal pantsuit was standing at the Demidovs’ front door, leading the camera around the perimeter, her hands making gestures of mysterious portent. The curtains were all drawn, though that had always been the case. When Colin was younger he used to call it the house that never woke up.

  They’d been neighbors for nine years but Rebecca had never stepped beyond their front door. When the Demidovs moved in, she brought over a casserole. A few days later Anya returned the dish, filled with a dinner of her own. Their relationship since, like many of imposed proximity, was one of clockwork politeness and veiled antagonism. They waved, honked their horns, admired one another’s landscaping. But the Demidovs didn’t live in the neighborhood so much as adorn it with their presence. They installed a pool in their backyard and regularly hosted outdoor parties in the summers. Rebecca and her husband were often invited but always declined, at his insistence. “Becky,” he’d complain, using the old nickname he knew irritated her, “I got married so I wouldn’t have to go to shit like that anymore.” Then they’d sit on the couch watching television and not speaking to one another. Peeking through her windows at the tiki torches, teased by the strums of a ukulele, Rebecca would feel like a loiterer in her own home.

  “You think they did it?” Colin asked.

  Anya had only come into her house once, not long after Rebecca’s husband moved out. In the days after the U-Haul truck pulled half her life away, she had been subjected to looks of withering pity and robotic condolences. So when Anya showed up at her door with a bottle of vodka, she let her in as much out of necessity as gratefulness, an urge to bludgeon her mind from her body.

  Though the bounce of Anya’s name belied a grave disposition, she made an amiable drinking companion, or at least one content to let Rebecca’s garbled monologues run their course. They sat at the kitchen table and traded shots that cauterized her gums and turned her tears septic. Late in the evening, when Rebecca’s peripheral vision had frayed and her tongue could no longer keep up with her thoughts, Anya confessed that she had thought more than once of leaving Mick. “But I cannot,” she said in a voice that sounded suspiciously unspoiled by drink. “We are too much tethered.” When Rebecca pressed her on the point, Anya quickly withdrew. In the five years since, neither had mentioned the night again. They were both better performers than that.