strawberry rice and the house of cards

The details of the moment play out in front of me. A smear on the mirror in the elevator. The smell of stale garbage in the hallway. The sound of a small dog barking furiously. Everything else disappears. A week of beauty and warmth evaporates in less than a minute. The messy pinata we made together, the chocolate cakes, the quiet birthday party on Thursday, the noisy birthday party on Friday, oceans of balloons, torn wrapping paper covering the living room floor, the laughter, the door buzzer and more friends bursting in as they struggle out of jackets, that perfect sleep afterwards - they are gone now, a house of cards that finally tumbled to the floor.

Walking across the frozen sidewalk, my hands cold in this air calling on the phone over and over all morning letting it ring and ring and ring but there is no answer. Trying all of the numbers, all disconnected. I replay the tone in E's voice from last night when I called her from the concert. Did she want to tell me something and I did not notice? 

The snow is falling hard, in angry flakes. A young woman passes, blows her nose with a finger pressed against one side of it. Her snot flies across my shoes. 

N calls, to see if I am there already. I turn that familiar corner, then onto that familiar back street. I look up at the windows and they are dark. Then I see the blue Ford. I don't remember her license plate number, and it could be anyone's. It is filthy, covered in mud and bird shit. 

I prepare myself for the worst, again. It is as familiar as the playground I stare at, taking a deep breath. This is the day she was taken, I prepare myself to remember. This is the day she was flown to Finland, or somewhere else. Yesterday was the last day we spent together. I made her chilaquiles for breakfast. We played checkers.

She made me a dessert from her new playdough set - strawberry rice with some pineapple on top.

I press the numbers on the outside door. It rings for some time.

There is a mumbled answer, then I am let in. My heart is beating in my throat. I cannot look at my reflection in the tiny mirror in the elevator. I know this moment. It does not mean I will get E back. It just means I have been allowed inside. I have made it this far before, and ended up in a police station an hour later. 

I press the button next to the door. More mumbling. 

I sit on the stairs and stare at the tiles. So many times I sat here. So many fights behind that brown panel, E half-naked in my arms, me running out of the house not coming back for hours but coming back because there was no place to go. 

I walk up the stairs, stretching my legs. Someone is smoking there, foul-smelling smoke drifting down from them. No one smokes inside their apartments here, or cracks a window open on the balcony. They are all taped shut. No, they smoke in airless hallways instead. There is a glass jar on every ledge, black from ash and filters smashed inside them.

E is shoved into the hallway, her face turned in on itself.
"Your phone has been off all day." I say fast and loud, before the door slams shut.
No response.
E looks up at me. She has been crying.
"You did not call." She whispers."And then Mom told me you were not coming."
I take her hand, and we move slowly down the stairs and then outside.

I buy clementines and avocados at the little stand downstairs. I ask E if she wants kiwis and she nods yes.

I call N, and tell her everything is ok now.

We pass a man playing a saxophone in the tunnel that runs under Kutuzovsky. Yesterday, is the song - slow and half out of tune. I stop, searching my left pocket and pull out some loose change - a dime, some kopeks, a new ten-ruble coin gold and heavy. I place them in E's hand.
"Put them in his case." I say. "Put this in his box."
She walks back to him like a stiff little mannequin. She waits for me.
We drop the coins there together. The man says nothing, does not even nod. He just keeps playing.

At the end of the cold, wet tunnel we stop. The light is banging into the darkness, the snow is still tumbling out of the white sky. I kneel down to her. Our faces are close.
"Pop, why did we do that?" She asks me.
"The whole morning I was really scared." I tell her. "And now I am holding your hand outside. And that man - he was playing a song and it made me feel something, so I wanted to say thank you to him. I want to say thank you to everybody."
She stares at me.
"When you want to change your luck you have to give something away." I say. "Now let's go home and make a movie with your clay rabbit and your clay fox."
She starts to cry, just for a second.
I put my finger to her chin.
I kiss her cheek.
"Ok, let's go." I say.

Later, she makes more playdough food.
Fortune cookies, with messages inside them.

hate/love

It is like driving in a snowstorm, at night. The headlights shining into that tumbling loop, showing no landmarks, no signs, just a few feet of the road ahead. My growing paranoia feels like that snow, growing, smashing into the wet pavement, then returning.

I am a passenger, and the doors are locked. We are just here for the ride, putting one foot in front of the next, manufacturing faith that things will turn out well. We have no idea what we are doing, or where we are going.

Outside the windows, the sun has suddenly disappeared.
A flock of black birds fly close together.
The sky is a giant washing machine flipping them around.

E is writing invitations for her birthday party. N has written the words out for her to copy.
We are sitting at the kitchen table. I am making gnocchi for dinner, with some roasted pumpkin.

E changes the words, instead of writing I like you, she writes I hate you. 

This is my nightmare, that there is something broken inside her I cannot fix, that life in this wilderness has twisted something deep inside her that cannot be unraveled.

I get her to take a bath.
She curls up next to me in her pyjamas afterwards and we have a quiet talk.
"I don't know." She tells me.
I tuck her into bed, surrounded by stuffed animals she has dressed in her own shirts. A rabbit. An elephant. A tiny white kitten with giant eyes. They all have names.
I kiss her goodnight.
"I love you, kiddo." I say.
"I love you too, Pop." She says.
She has never said this before.

The next day, she changes the word hate, blotting it out with flowers and hearts so now it says like.
We bring the invitation for one girl, leaving the second at home.

Things slump back to normal. We practice guitar. We do solfeggio homework.
E's mother does not call for days.

On Saturday, when she should take her there is a sudden cough in her voice. She says she is sick, but maybe will be better in a few hours. E sighs, looks up me, hanging up the phone.
"She's not gonna take me today." She says.
"I know." I say.
"She's not really sick." E says.
I nod once.

E spends the afternoon turning the living room into a version of her kindergarden.

Later, her mother calls saying maybe she will take her on Sunday. 

But Sunday comes and goes, and she never takes her. 

I walk quickly on the wet sidewalk, my hands deep in my pockets.

A man is playing his accordion in the underpass by E's school. He sits in a tiny folding chair that is about to break and fall sideways. The song is fast, but I would not say it is a happy. The accordion opens and closes with a sort of labored breathing.

He stares off at the empty wall across from him.
His eyes are too big for his face.

No one gives him any money, but he is here every day.

black and white (five years)

Faces, the same. The old woman in the underpass holding that yellowing and split piece of tupperware, eyes lowered. No one gives her loose change. 

There is new snow on the windowsill. I am waking up with a headache in the darkness, the black dot of Monday growing bigger. It is here now, with the stench of diesel and electricity. There are wet footsteps in the snow. E holds my hand tight, slipping on the ice as we turn corners. Walking in silence, the flakes still falling, this winter holding on and on. 

Faces are staring off at nothing with tired, pickled expressions. The wet, sour life repeats its song. 

The black dot grows and grows. Five years here now.

I was a guest in a man's house. He took us to an empty room - just a sofa at one end, and a massive stereo that sat on the floor. Drunk on good wine and limoncello, he put on Invitation to the Blues, by Tom Waits. The sound was magnificent, wrapping around us, bouncing off the hardwood floor. E was downstairs, playing with some kids. N was next to me.

I rested my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes.

a fever

She is weak, hardly strong enough to make it to the bathroom to pee. She looks so tiny now, a stray leaf than can be flipped around the apartment by the smallest draft. The fever does not pass quickly. I sleep in the big chair next to her bed, waking every two hours to check her temperature. It rises and falls, some sort of overheated ocean inside her.

E accepts spoonfuls of purple medicine, small glasses of cool water.
She is bored.

N is sick too, quarantined in her mother's apartment. We speak at random hours, her voice rough and quiet, barely more than a whisper at times. 

It will be a full week that I do not see her, falling asleep alone in bed, waking up to check on E, to place a cool wet towel on her forehead. 

The days merge into shifts of trying to stay awake and entertaining E.  The fever has a hold on her, deep in her veins. We watch a lot of films together, in the middle of the day. She falls asleep halfway through them, her face pressed against my arm. I leave her there to go wash dishes, maybe boil some potatoes. 

I don't know what to do besides that.

It is all lost time. A forced breath.