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Authors: Tod Goldberg
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thinking about Russia—Tula, Russia, specifically—but telling Gordon that would mean she’d have to explain her situation, and she just isn’t emotionally prepared for that, at least not at work. Talking about Natalya here would make her trivial.
Even still, going back to Russia has been on her mind constantly these days. Maybe Natalya went back. Maybe there was an email from Natalya waiting for Tania right this instant telling her to come back to Tula, that she was sorry, too, and that she’d love to see her mother.
Before she picked up Natalya in Tula, Tania imagined Russia would be a perpetually gray country filled with scary Communists, like the ones they used to show marching in Red Square, back when Ronald Reagan used to scare her, too. Everyone told her to be careful, tell people she was Canadian so they wouldn’t kill her, to be as inconspicuous as possible.
But when she finally arrived—she remembered the date exactly: February 22, 1997—after flying into Moscow and then driving for two hours with an administrator from the orphanage, she couldn’t get over how beautiful the country was, how pleasant the people she met seemed to be, how substantial everything felt. The administrator kept pointing out interesting landmarks between Moscow and Tula, talked about Peter the Great, discussed the rich mining history of the city. And what a city: Citadels from the sixteenth century. Lush green forests surrounding the Upa River. Museums honoring famous writers and warriors. It was nothing like Las Vegas, nothing like Reno, nothing like any place she’d ever visited. She wondered even then what it might be like to settle in Russia, to raise her child in her home country, to
live in such a place! Yes, she’d come back here when Natalya was fully integrated as an American. Adopting a twelve-year-old would present problems, she knew that, but Tania thought that later in life they would travel back here together, maybe buy a little house. Tania was thirty-five then, just twenty-three years older than her new daughter. Young enough that they’d be like friends the older Natalya got, less like mother and daughter.
So foolish, Tania thinks, grabbing up her tray. All of it.
Adopting Natalya wasn’t something Tania planned. It was the money that did it. Well, the money and loneliness. A few weeks after she hit the royal, Tania’s fifteen-year-old dog, Lucy, woke up one morning and urinated blood; three hours later Tania watched while her vet quietly inserted a needle into her dog’s right front paw to put her to sleep (a term Tania has never liked, as the implication is that the dog will someday wake up and be just fine), and just like that, after fifteen years and three hours, she was completely alone.
Oh, she still had family and friends then; people she honestly loved at some point. But when it all boiled away, the fact was that she just didn’t keep people very well. Her parents and older sister, Justine, still sent her Christmas and birthday gifts, invited her to their homes for Thanksgiving (they even offered money if she couldn’t afford a plane ticket from Las Vegas, since her parents lived in Spokane and her sister in San Francisco), called once a week—and she enjoyed talking to them, but afterward couldn’t recount a single aspect of the conversation.
She’d had a series of boyfriends, too. Most of them long-term affairs, actually, and at the time had just broken up with a DJ at the Rio after he accepted a six-month gig on a
cruise ship, but their relationship hadn’t even been intimate. All things being equal, sitting on the sofa at home and talking to her dog was preferable most of the time anyway.
That night, though, her dog dead, her parents and sister filled with the kind of comfort people without pets usually provide—“What you should do tomorrow is go to a rescue and pick up an abused dog,” her father said—she sat alone on her sofa and watched a documentary on HBO about the plight of
Even still, going back to Russia has been on her mind constantly these days. Maybe Natalya went back. Maybe there was an email from Natalya waiting for Tania right this instant telling her to come back to Tula, that she was sorry, too, and that she’d love to see her mother.
Before she picked up Natalya in Tula, Tania imagined Russia would be a perpetually gray country filled with scary Communists, like the ones they used to show marching in Red Square, back when Ronald Reagan used to scare her, too. Everyone told her to be careful, tell people she was Canadian so they wouldn’t kill her, to be as inconspicuous as possible.
But when she finally arrived—she remembered the date exactly: February 22, 1997—after flying into Moscow and then driving for two hours with an administrator from the orphanage, she couldn’t get over how beautiful the country was, how pleasant the people she met seemed to be, how substantial everything felt. The administrator kept pointing out interesting landmarks between Moscow and Tula, talked about Peter the Great, discussed the rich mining history of the city. And what a city: Citadels from the sixteenth century. Lush green forests surrounding the Upa River. Museums honoring famous writers and warriors. It was nothing like Las Vegas, nothing like Reno, nothing like any place she’d ever visited. She wondered even then what it might be like to settle in Russia, to raise her child in her home country, to
live in such a place! Yes, she’d come back here when Natalya was fully integrated as an American. Adopting a twelve-year-old would present problems, she knew that, but Tania thought that later in life they would travel back here together, maybe buy a little house. Tania was thirty-five then, just twenty-three years older than her new daughter. Young enough that they’d be like friends the older Natalya got, less like mother and daughter.
So foolish, Tania thinks, grabbing up her tray. All of it.
Adopting Natalya wasn’t something Tania planned. It was the money that did it. Well, the money and loneliness. A few weeks after she hit the royal, Tania’s fifteen-year-old dog, Lucy, woke up one morning and urinated blood; three hours later Tania watched while her vet quietly inserted a needle into her dog’s right front paw to put her to sleep (a term Tania has never liked, as the implication is that the dog will someday wake up and be just fine), and just like that, after fifteen years and three hours, she was completely alone.
Oh, she still had family and friends then; people she honestly loved at some point. But when it all boiled away, the fact was that she just didn’t keep people very well. Her parents and older sister, Justine, still sent her Christmas and birthday gifts, invited her to their homes for Thanksgiving (they even offered money if she couldn’t afford a plane ticket from Las Vegas, since her parents lived in Spokane and her sister in San Francisco), called once a week—and she enjoyed talking to them, but afterward couldn’t recount a single aspect of the conversation.
She’d had a series of boyfriends, too. Most of them long-term affairs, actually, and at the time had just broken up with a DJ at the Rio after he accepted a six-month gig on a
cruise ship, but their relationship hadn’t even been intimate. All things being equal, sitting on the sofa at home and talking to her dog was preferable most of the time anyway.
That night, though, her dog dead, her parents and sister filled with the kind of comfort people without pets usually provide—“What you should do tomorrow is go to a rescue and pick up an abused dog,” her father said—she sat alone on her sofa and watched a documentary on HBO about the plight of
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