1. Not Everything Is Made the Same

1

NOT EVERYTHING IS MADE THE SAME

NADYA SOKOLOV, AS SHE grew older, would come to say that she had three mothers: the one who bore her, the country that poisoned her, and the one who adopted her. But when her story began, she knew no mother at all. She was born to an unmarried teenager in a state-run hospital, a girl whose own story has as yet gone unwritten, who pushed her firstborn daughter screaming and bloody into the world, already half-determined to run and leave the child behind, even before she got her first look at the baby.

As red and angry as any newborn, the not-yet-named Nadya shook her tiny fist in the air, and waved the unfinished stump of her right arm at the same time, making her fury and frustration clear. The girl who had never quite managed to think of herself as a mother, who never managed to imagine any involvement with her own child past this moment, looked at her and recoiled.

“Where is the rest of her?” she demanded of the nurse. “Is it still— Oh, God, is it still inside me?” Images of a baby’s arm permanently wedged in her womb danced through her pain-mazed mind, more horrifying than even the baby’s existence, which was horrific enough.

She had never asked for this. Not the pregnancy, not the prettiness which had made the pregnancy all but inevitable, not the boys who had danced attendance on her until the wages of their communal sins had begun to show—and hadn’t the boys disappeared quickly after that? As if a girl could get herself pregnant without assistance, as if the boy who had been so quick to call himself a man while seeking her favor had no part in it at all! And most of all, she never asked for the child. God above, not the child.

And now the child is flawed, incomplete, and she can’t do this. She was never meant to be a mother, or at least not yet, not now, not until she’s more than a child herself. Not until she’s had time to play.

The nurse, either unaware of or ignoring her patient’s growing distress, shook her head and laughed, the deep, hearty laugh of a woman who’d seen more new mothers than she cared to remember. All of them were the same in this moment, sweaty and exhausted and worn thin, but aching for their babes. “No, no, her arm isn’t inside you. Her arm never grew at all. See how smooth and rounded the skin is? That means there was nothing there to be torn away. This is how she was made. She’s perfect as she is.” She scooped the baby out of the warmer where she had been placed for cleaning and offered her to the frightened teen whose heartbeat the baby’s body knew better than its own. “You can hold her if you’d like.”

“No!” blurted the girl. Still torn open, bloody and bleeding and in an immeasurable amount of pain, she rolled away from the nurse and infant, almost toppling off the narrow birthing bed. At the last second she caught herself and wobbled in place, not falling to the floor. Pushing herself into a sitting position, she swung her legs around and stood, lurching for the door.

The nurses who had overseen the birth watched this with silent interest and, in some cases, amusement. This wasn’t the first time many of them had seen an unmarried girl flee rather than face the consequences of her actions, even when those consequences had healthy lungs and all the parts that truly mattered. An arm? A hand? Pah! What was a hand? One was enough to let the girl bathe and dress herself, and work when the time came. Two hands were a luxury, and not necessary for a child who had no reason to aspire to great things.

The girl reached the door and staggered out of the room, leaving a trail of blood behind, never once looking back. The head nurse sighed and looked down at the child.

“She’ll have the paperwork completed to leave you here and be gone before we finish cleaning you, if I read her right, little songbird,” she said, a hint of regret in her voice. “And I do read her right, I’ve been doing this for thirty years and I’ve never guessed wrong.”

“Do you want me to go after her, ma’am?” asked one of the junior nurses anxiously.

“And do what? Turn her into a different person altogether? Not enough magic left in all of Russia for that. The law says she can surrender her baby, and if that’s what she desires to do, that’s what will be done. As for this little songbird, we’ll get her cleaned up, wait to see if the mother returns, and surrender her to the home if not.”

“I see,” said the junior nurse, somewhat disapproving.

The head nurse made silent note of her tone. They’d be discussing that later. For the moment, she had to focus on the baby, and so she carried her back to the warming box, humming an old song her grandmother used to sing to her, about the river that ran from one end of the world to the other, never stopping, never slowing.

By the time she put the baby down, the girl was staring at her with wide, fascinated blue eyes. The head nurse smiled. “You understand nothing, little songbird, but even a stone can comprehend kindness. You’ll have time enough to learn, I promise you.”

THE GIRL, WHO HAD NEVER given her name or named her daughter, did not return, and so the baby was surrendered to the nearest orphanage, a state-run institution for wards of Mother Russia. She was not the only infant with a visible deformity, nor the worst-off of the new arrivals; having never possessed a right hand, she didn’t miss it, and did perfectly well with her left, navigating and manipulating her world as adroitly as any other child. If certain tasks would always be more difficult for her, well, wasn’t that true of everyone? No single person could do absolutely everything without aid, and so her own limitations weren’t limitations at all, merely different standards.

They named her Nadezhda, a good, traditional name with plenty of room for her to grow into it, and they called her Nadya, and she was a good, sweet child who grew swift and straight as a reed, strong of back and swift of eye and quick to help the other children with their tasks, seeming to see without being informed how they could turn their collective weaknesses into strengths, all by combining them into a united front.

On the rare occasions when prospective parents came sniffing around the home for adorable new additions to their family, it was Nadya who organized the swarm into orderly ranks, highlighting whichever of her many brothers and sisters she had decided would most benefit from a home of their own, someplace less regimented and institutional. She had such a gift for it that the orphanage staff mostly just stood back in polite bemusement and allowed Nadya to work, not sure whether their presence would help or hinder her machinations.

“It’s as if she has no interest in a family of her own,” said one of the matrons, on the occasion of one such presentation to potential parents. “See how she never puts herself where they can properly see her? She’ll age out if she’s not careful.”

“She’s six, she’s in no danger of aging out,” said another of the matrons, taking pity. “And we’ve filled her head with stories of Mother Russia. She believes she already has a family. Her country is mother enough, and all the other orphans are her brothers and sisters. She wants what’s best for her family, and that’s why the children who want to leave us are always front and center when she arranges these little displays.” Her tone turned fond. “Again, she’s only six. She’s going to be a terror when she’s grown.”

Nadya smiled and dimpled at the prospective parents, gesturing as much as possible with the stump of her right arm, making sure none of them could miss the fact that she was missing what too many of them would see as something crucial, rather than something she had never truly missed. The other children were styled to minimize any attributes that might have made it harder for them to find homes, while she was styled to accentuate hers.

That would, three years later, prove to be her downfall, but she was very far, as yet, from knowing that. She was young and sweet and innocent and hard, in the way of children raised in job lots rather than individually; she was doing her best to be a good person, and to figure out what that meant in the context of the world she knew and had and understood.

She liked the matrons, or most of them, at least; the younger ones were kinder, more inclined to play, more willing to answer her endless stream of questions. The older matrons had been worn down more by the system they belonged to, and found Nadya’s endless optimism frustrating. Almost as frustrating as her tendency to wallow in the shallow river behind the orphanage, which was filthy and polluted but called to her in some way they couldn’t understand or stop.

She had come in one day from the field between the orphanage and the river, holding a sickly tortoise under her arm, declaring loudly that his name was Maksim and she was going to make him healthy again. The orphanage didn’t allow pets, of course, but a tortoise was quiet and made no unpleasant smells or messes; the matrons agreed, collectively, to turn the other way and pretend they didn’t see the reptile, who was sure to die soon anyway.

But he didn’t. Nadya brought him greens from the yard and cabbage and salad from her own plate; she cajoled the other children into letting her raid their leftovers, sparse as they were, for tidbits her tortoise might enjoy; and she guided him, one awkward, almost-accidental step at a time, back toward a healthy tortoise life. His scales brightened. His movements became quicker. His shell, which had been flaky and dull when she brought him inside, gleamed. He began to rove the orphanage halls with greater and greater frequency, until the matrons became hard-pressed to keep up the pretense that they didn’t know he was there.

The next time potential parents came to visit, Nadya found a way to turn the conversation, even as she was introducing her available brothers and sisters, toward the brilliance of tortoises as beloved household companions. By late afternoon, as two of the younger children were on their way to a new life and new adventures, with the new parents to match, the newly minted father was cradling a tortoise under his arm, trying bemusedly to understand what had just happened.

But that was what it was like to run afoul of Nadya when she wanted something to happen. As for Nadya herself, she went back to the room she shared with almost a dozen other girls, and looked at the empty bowl next to her bed where she had always placed Maksim’s ration of salad. She had done a good thing, the right thing, she knew she had. She always did the good thing, the right thing, and if she kept doing the good and right thing, maybe one day the mother who had fled from her would realize she had made a mistake and come back to claim her. She would hear it in the river, or carried on the wind; Russia herself would see what a good, biddable, obedient girl Nadya was, and tell her mother to come collect her.

Someday.

Nadya lay down on her bed, and pressed her face into her thin pillow, and cried.

Years slipped by, one after another, like leaves floating down the river, until Nadya was nine years old. She was quick and articulate, frequently bored in her classes, always willing to assist with chores, even beyond the ones she was assigned, and still she presented the other children and still she downplayed herself, until the day the missionary trip arrived in the office.

They were healthy and bright-eyed, these Americans, with sleek, shining hair and clear skin, dressed plainly in black and white, each with a name tag written in incomprehensible English lettering. Their paperwork was impeccable. They had managed, through bribery, careful applications, and understanding of the administrative systems they were dealing with, to circumvent the laws forbidding adoption of Russian children by foreign nationals. It was a mission of mercy, they said; they were there to help the most underprivileged children they could find, the ones with nowhere else to go.

The matrons bristled at this description of their charges, which dismissed all the work they’d done and all the care they’d given, but they wanted these children to have homes before they got too old and were pushed out the door to make room for the bodies who were always crowding behind them, hungry and in need of a place to call their own. They smiled stiffly and agreed to arrange for a viewing.

It began like any other. The matrons prepared the children according to the proper standards, while Nadya came through with standards of her own, tweaking and adjusting and preparing her brothers and sisters to put their best feet forward. When she moved to hang back as she always did, the matrons swept in and forced her into her own nicest dress, the one with the sleeve that hung down to what should have been wrist-length on her right side, making it harder to see her arm. She fussed and whined, but they pinned her in place and combed her hair.

“You can’t stay here forever, Nadya,” they scolded. “The years go by, and you remain. It’s not right! A girl like you should have a home of her own, a family to prepare you to become a woman! You will be presented to them like a proper child, not as if you were a mascot meant to make the other children look more pleasant to potential parents. You are not a wild thing. Be a credit to those who have raised you.”

At that, Nadya settled and allowed herself to be prepared. She was not a wild thing, but there was no way these parents from a foreign land would look at her and see their heart’s desire. She had been marked by Mother Russia before she was born. It was there she would remain.

The children were ushered into the greeting room and pinned down by the bright eyes of the American missionaries, who seemed to home in on every tiny flaw. They dismissed perfect child after perfect child, spending their focus like precious coin on the ones who had been left there by parents afraid to love a baby with pieces missing, as if blindness or deafness or a foreshortened limb could somehow become contagious. Nadya almost managed to avoid their attention, thanks to the dress she had been given, until one of the matrons realized what was happening and called, in a trilling tone quite unlike her usual harsh orders:

“Oh, Nadezhda, darling, you forgot to pin up your sleeve!” She rushed in with a safety pin, folding up the tangling tube of fabric and pinning it securely in place while Nadya glared at her. She met the girl’s glare with a smile, which only grew as the missionaries swarmed around her, this polite, well-mannered little girl who they had previously dismissed as not what they were looking for.

Three children left the orphanage that day. Gregor, who could not hear; Maria, with her seizures and sloping spine; and Nadya, whom they had taken for polite, biddable, and tame. She looked back over her shoulder as she was led away, carried into a new life she had never asked for or expected.

Her third mother had arrived at last, and Nadya was finally gone.