3. Long Time Passing

3

LONG TIME PASSING

TIME PASSED, MORE HOURS slipping down the river, and Nadya adjusted, bit by bit, to her new reality. First the language classes, which were a punishment and a glory at the same time: the grammatical structure of English made no sense at all, and there was little poetry to the way words fit together. Still, being able to communicate her needs and desires to the people around her was worth any number of dull, leaden sentences sitting like ashes in her mouth; being able to understand and be understood was a gift so far beyond price that she didn’t realize how much she had desired it until it was given to her.

The first day Nadya sat in her class and listened to her teacher speaking in slow, careful English and didn’t need to request any direct translations, she cried. She sat at her desk and wept, and her instructor, a very nice woman who had become an ESL teacher out of a genuine desire to help people communicate, smiled in understanding and let her cry until the tears dried on their own.

Once the language classes were more about polish and refinement than actual base construction, it was time for speech classes, hour upon hour with a private tutor whose entire focus was the elimination of Nadya’s accent. It was important, apparently, that she not be too foreign when she was meeting new people: they needed to look at her and understand that she had been plucked from another country, washed and pressed and molded into the perfect model of American childhood. Her teachers didn’t have strong opinions about what kind of child she was going to be, as long as she was normal.

Six months after her arrival in Denver, Nadya was deemed ready to stand before a jury of her peers and be judged on her performance of American normalcy, and Carl and Pansy enrolled her in the local elementary school. The matrons at the orphanage had always put as much of a focus on education as they could, but they were understaffed and overstretched, and it hadn’t been sufficient to keep the children where they needed to be. Nadya was reasonably up to where she was meant to be with math, but reading was essentially a matter of starting over from scratch, while history and geography both required forgetting most of what she already knew.

Relearning the history of the world from an Americentric perspective was technically no more difficult than any other part, but it was the most frustrating by far. Seeing achievements she had been taught mattered hugely reduced to a line in a textbook, if that, made her head ache, even as she buckled down and soldiered through as best as she could.

Life in the orphanage had taught her the value of obedience and grace, of listening to the people who swore they had her best interests at heart. By the time she finished with her language classes, she knew full well that Russia was farther away than she could ever hope to walk; this was her home now, if only because she had no place else that she could possibly go. And if she was going to live here, she needed to understand what that meant. She needed to belong. So she studied like she thought there was nothing in the world more important than the acquisition of knowledge, and when she got home at the end of her school days she would make her polite greetings to Carl and Pansy. They preferred to be called “Mom” and “Dad,” and she was willing enough to go along with that, since respecting adults was always important. Once they were done asking her about her day, she would go to her room and do her homework as carefully and quickly as she could, because if she finished in time, she could go down to the pond and watch the turtles.

She was happy when she watched the turtles. They didn’t look anything like her beloved Maksim—they were turtles, for one thing, and Carl had taken her to the pond on a translation error; Maksim was a tortoise. Although she supposed there wasn’t a good place to go and watch tortoises all day, outside of a zoo. Turtles would suffice.

So they didn’t look anything like home, but they were still turtles, slow until they needed to be fast, flat and long-necked and serene, completely adapted to their watery home. It was a simple thing, to be a turtle, and they were happy.

As long as she had the turtles, this could be home.

A year after she first came to America, Nadya had her first reason to question whether that was true. Pansy had picked her up from school, as was normal, and driven her to the doctor’s office, which was slightly less normal, but was understandable, at least. It was within the realm of things that had been known to happen.

Carl was already there, waiting. That was strange. Nadya frowned, hanging back. Carl worked during the day, and was rarely home before dinner. For him to be there, at her doctor, hours before he should have been released… it was unusual at the very least. She had been in America by this point for long enough to understand more things than she had the year before. She knew how important work was to a man like Carl, and what an act of love and faith it had been to travel halfway around the world for the sake of bringing home a Russian orphan to be a part of his family. She knew doctors sometimes discussed things with parents that they wouldn’t say to children, things that were thought to be too big for children to understand or accept. Maybe something was wrong. Maybe something inside her was sick or… or broken, and they were going to send her back to Russia, and…

And when did that become a bad thing? Nadya froze inside, allowing herself to be led into the office and seated on an exam table while she tried to think her way through the contradiction between desperately wanting to go home and loving her life here, with her private bedroom and her pond of turtles and her friends at school, who could be loud and wild and played with her at recess whenever she was brave enough.

Very few of them would have survived the orphanage, which made their childish, halting attempts at bullying easy to endure and dance around. They didn’t know how to join forces against the bigger bullies, or how to coordinate a story to convince the teachers that they’d been doing something entirely and utterly innocent. They weren’t her brothers and sisters like the children at the orphanage, but she would mold them soon enough, teaching them how to form a united front, teaching them their natural rage was better aimed outward, at teachers and authority figures, than inward at the weakest among them.

She was, in her own sideways, unintentional way, cultivating kindness, and she was doing it one day at a time, never quite seeming to understand what she was doing, focused only on her small student army and their need to control something, anything, about their surroundings.

She loved Russia. Russia was her mother, the first one she ever knew. But when strangers had come from across an ocean, Russia had failed to protect her. Russia had looked at her and seen nothing of value, and allowed her to be taken by her new parents, her new family, to a new world and a new life, and much as she missed the orphanage, she knew many of the children she remembered would be gone by now, off to new families of their own, and the matrons would not be happy to see her returned. This life was all they had ever wanted for her.

She sat on the table and stared blankly straight ahead as the adults spoke, voices low and quick, making their still-unfamiliar words blend together into an undifferentiated stew of sounds. It’s wasn’t until the doctor lifted her right arm, turning it gently from side to side as he inspected her stump, that she came back into the present and tried to pull away.

The doctor’s grip was tight enough that she couldn’t break free without hurting herself. She turned a silent, pleading look on Carl and Pansy, hoping they would help her.

“Be a good girl, Nadya,” said Pansy. “This is going to make you feel better.”

Nadya stopped fighting the doctor and turned her eyes on him, gaze gone hard and unforgiving. He continued to turn her arm between his fingers, studying the structure of the stump.

When he let go, it was only to step back, adjust his glasses, and say, “Yes, this should be an easy procedure.”

Nadya blinked at him. “What will be?”

“It’s a fairly standard model, no truly fine motor dexterity, but the technology is advancing every day. We’ll be able to do bone implants in a few years, give her something that provides the illusion of feeling. Since she’s not in any active distress, this will be primarily cosmetic. It should be ready in a week.”

“Wonderful, thank you so much,” said Pansy, beaming. She turned to Nadya. “Thank the nice doctor, Nadya.”

“Thank you, doctor,” said Nadya obediently. She didn’t know what she was thanking him for, but adults who were demanding politeness rarely wanted to discuss their reasons why. Besides, this was apparently all they’d come to the doctor’s office to do; Carl was offering her coat, a twinkle in his eye.

“We’ll stop for ice cream on the way home,” he said, conspiratorially.

Nadya giggled. She liked ice cream. She liked ice cream a lot. They had ice cream in Russia, of course, but not often; there were always better things to spend the orphanage budget on than sweet treats for the children. She let her coat be slipped over her shoulders, let Carl take her hand and lead her to the door while Pansy finished talking to the doctor, both of them once again speaking too fast and too low for Nadya to understand.

Then Pansy joined them, and together the three of them left the office, heading for the elevators. Pansy managed to keep her quiet until they were almost to the ground floor. Then she looked at Nadya, frowning, and said, “Well, say something.”

“Um, hello?” said Nadya.

“She means about your arm,” said Carl.

Nadya blinked. “What about my arm?”

The elevator stopped. Pansy stepped out and did the same, standing in the middle of the elevator lobby as she turned on her daughter and asked, “Did you understand anything that just happened? Were you paying any attention at all?”

“Yes, I was paying attention, no, I did not understand why we had to come and see a new doctor,” said Nadya. “I like the woman who gives me the shots. She always lets me have a sweet when she’s done. A suck-pop. I enjoy the suck-pops.”

“I don’t even know where to begin with that,” said Pansy, and turned to Carl. “You handle her. I’ll be in the car.”

Then she stomped away, and Carl was alone with his daughter, who looked up at him with despairing confusion in her eyes. He knelt down, to be more on a level.

“All right, pumpkin, you know how most little girls your age have two arms?”

“Yes,” said Nadya, surprised. Of course she knew that. She paid attention to people, she owned several dolls, and she would have noticed long since if one and a half had somehow become the standard number of arms. “I don’t because the doctor says my mother was probably exposed to something teratogenic while she was pregnant with me, and it’s a miracle that everything else about me is as perfect as it is.”

“Can’t remember ‘lollipop,’ but can say ‘teratogenic,’” murmured Carl, who did that fairly frequently, making comments like she couldn’t understand him if he kept his voice low. Nadya didn’t mind, though. It was better than Pansy, who rolled her eyes and stomped away, not explaining herself at all.

It was as if she thought that teaching a child English and eliminating as much of her accent as possible was like pressing the reset button on their upbringing and culture, and could transform Nadya into an American child overnight.

“Yes,” said Nadya, uncertainly.

Carl seemed to remember that she was there. He smiled encouragingly and said, “Well, we know the other children can be cruel.”

How could they know that? They had never been to her school during classes, never seen the way the children interact. Unless the assumption was that all American children will be cruel, that they somehow can’t help themselves, which seemed unfair. Some of the children she went to school with had to be taught not to abuse those smaller than themselves, but they were all quick studies, and she had seen little cruelty from the children themselves. She blinked at him in slow bewilderment, waiting for him to start making sense.

“We wanted to make sure you’d be comfortable, and we wanted it to be as much of a surprise as possible, so you wouldn’t have to wait too long.” He paused, apparently waiting for her to catch on and get excited, then sighed a little and said, “We’ve bought you a new arm.”

Nadya blinked again, slow and deliberate. “But I have an arm,” she said, and raised her left hand toward him, palm outward and fingers spread, so he could see the whole thing.

“This is what’s called a prosthetic arm,” he said. “It goes over your right arm, so it will be the same length as your left. You’ll have a hand, too, although you won’t be able to use it.”

“Protez?” asked Nadya, and was suddenly glad that Pansy had already stalked away. Her accent might have been wiped into obscurity when she spoke English, but when she spoke Russian, even short words, it came rushing right back like the tide. She swallowed, forcing her tongue back to American patterns, and said, “I am fine. I do not need a protez—a, ah, prosthetic—arm. I am happy as I am.”

“But you can’t be,” Carl insisted. “You must want to be a whole little girl.”

Nadya paused. Why did she have to want that? She did perfectly well with one hand and one stump that she could use for gripping things when necessary; the world rarely demanded more of her than that. The things she couldn’t do for herself were few and far between, and most of them were things she could live without. She didn’t need to polish her own nails when it was easy enough to convince the other girls to do it for her, and the hand she had was more than steady enough to let her reciprocate. She could play tetherball and kickball, and she got to sit out dodgeball, which didn’t look like it would be all that much fun anyway. So there was nothing she could think of, really, that would be easier or better with two hands, especially when one of them wouldn’t even work.

“I do not,” she said, politely. “Thank you, though. I’m happy precisely as I am.”

Carl looked at her sadly.

ONE WEEK LATER, they were back in the doctor’s office, Pansy and Carl watching as the doctor strapped Nadya’s new prosthetic onto her right arm. He talked very slowly and carefully as he did, explaining how she could put it on and take it off by herself, how it would probably be easier, at first, if she slid it through her sleeves before putting her shirts on in the morning, and that she shouldn’t get it wet, but that she’d get used to it soon enough.

“After a little while, you’ll wonder how you could ever have gotten along without it,” he said jovially, and Nadya offered him a polite smile and didn’t contradict him. Contradicting adults so often ended badly. She hadn’t gotten her ice cream after their last visit to his office, and if the prosthetic arm was an inescapable future, she at least wanted it to be an inescapable future with ice cream.

She couldn’t feel the arm, of course, and she couldn’t move the hand, but there was a simple lever of sorts inside the attachment point, which she could control by flexing her stump. So she raised her arm and flexed her stump, and watched with wide eyes as the unfamiliar arm swung forward, bending at the elbow to form a perfect angle. She unflexed and the arm straightened again.

“As you get older, we’ll be able to fit you with more advanced models,” said the doctor. “You’ll also develop the muscles that allow you to manipulate the arm by doing it, and that will make those advanced models easier for you to use. Everything feeds into everything else, after all.”

Nadya lowered her new arm and nodded at him gravely.

Then, again, it was time for Carl and Pansy to talk about her like she wasn’t there, voices bright and rapid, the doctor answering technical questions she couldn’t even begin to understand. Normally, when the three of them walked together, they walked with her in the middle, where passersby couldn’t see and possibly comment on her missing arm. Today, as they walked to the elevators, Pansy made sure she was at the outside, her new right arm facing toward the world.

Nadya had never felt so much like a trinket or a prize. She ducked her head and did her best to keep up, almost walking into the elevator door.

“Honestly, Nadya, watch where you’re going!” said Pansy. “If you give yourself a bloody nose, we won’t be able to go for ice cream before dinner.”

“Yes, Mom,” said Nadya softly.

“And keep your head up. People will think we beat you.”

“Yes, Mom,” said Nadya, and adjusted her posture, head up, shoulders down, trying to look like she liked this, like she was completely confident and comfortable and content. The new prosthetic itched and chafed where it rubbed against her skin; even all the talcum and lotion in the world couldn’t change the fact that she had never intentionally strapped anything to her arm before, never seen herself as lesser because she only had one hand, never seen the need to transform into something more. This was not her choice. This was her body, but it was not her decision, and that alone made it very heavy, and difficult to carry.

They went out to the car as a family, Nadya buckling herself into the back seat after bending her new arm carefully up, out of the way. She supposed she could see why many people would think of this as a good thing, especially people who had misplaced the arms they started out with: it was somewhat nice to have an even weight on both sides of her body, keeping her right shoulder from drifting upward as she walked (a habit which had caused more than one matron to comment on how she would develop a hunch if she wasn’t careful). And having a second hand to lay across the strap did make it easier to click the buckle home.

Still, it wasn’t something she’d ever wanted, and it itched and pulled and ached as she sat in the back and fought the urge to fidget. Carl didn’t care when she fidgeted, said she was the one in back and he was the one in front, so whatever she wanted to do with her own space was fine by him, but Pansy took it remarkably personally when Nadya seemed to be anything less than perfectly content.

Privately, Nadya thought Pansy was less than perfectly content, and maybe shouldn’t have been allowed to have authority over another human being until she figured out how to be kinder to herself. But that was a large, complicated thought that would have needed some large, complicated words to articulate, and all the large, complicated words she had were in Russian, making them difficult to use with her new parents. Both of them had dutifully attended their Russian language classes for the first six months Nadya was with them, and could now carry on a simple conversation in her mother tongue. That didn’t mean they were willing to actually do it. Neither of them had spoken a word of Russian outside of family court since the day she was judged fluent enough to communicate in English.

They were doing their best to erase her roots. Nadya considered that with more gravity than most would expect from a ten-year-old girl as they drove to the ice cream parlor, as she selected her cone—cookies and cream, with sprinkles—and as they sat at the tables outside, a perfect little family in a perfect little display. They wanted her to be their all-American girl, and to replace her missing parts with pieces of their own design.

It would be easy enough to let them do it, to sit back and allow Nadezhda Sokolov to be replaced by Nadya Sanders. It wouldn’t hurt. If she didn’t resist, she probably wouldn’t even notice it happening, and it would make Carl so happy. It would please Pansy, too, but she cared less about pleasing Pansy: Pansy knew the little girl she had wanted better than the little girl she had, and never took Nadya to see the turtles either at home or on their family outings to the zoo. When Carl had raised the idea that Nadya might benefit from a pet in the home, and suggested a tortoise, Pansy had been the one to say that she would never have a filthy reptile in her house, and that a cat would be much better for a growing girl.

Nadya didn’t understand quite how an animal that pooped in a box of sand would be less dirty than a tortoise, which was quiet and didn’t jump or scratch the furniture, even though it would occasionally defecate in its own water dish, but she had already learned that it was better not to argue. They were going to get a cat at Christmas, according to Pansy’s careful schedule, something soft and fluffy and beautiful.

Nadya was less excited about this than she knew she was expected to be. So no, pleasing Pansy wasn’t her first priority. But pleasing Carl could be a good thing, and could make her life, which was already easier and more luxurious than she had ever dreamt it could be, easier still. All she had to do was give in.

Nadezhda Sokolov had not survived nine years as a one-armed girl in a state-run orphanage by being timid or easy to push around. She ate her ice cream and privately pledged resistance. She rode home with her new parents, still pledging resistance, and went to her room with her new prosthetic arm hanging heavy by her side.

When she removed it for bed, the skin where it had been rubbing was red and angry. She touched it gently with her fingertips before getting the lotion the doctor had recommended, and knew that resistance was only the beginning.