A thought occurred to him: Would Steve eat literature? Weren’t pages made of the same stuff as trees? This would have to be a temporary solution. As he stuffed Vinod’s novel into the marmot’s subterranean townhouse, Senderovsky saw a black pickup truck pass on the road, beams lit against the incomplete dawn. A corner of the Teva box still stuck out. Senderovsky scooped out a large mound of hard dirt with his genteel city hands and tried to mold it around the box like an impromptu sandcastle.
Once again, he heard the rumble of a motor. The black pickup had apparently circled around and was passing in the opposite direction. Now it had stopped completely by the edge of the driveway, flush with the main house. A window rolled down and a hand with a phone emerged. Sasha watched it snap a picture of his bungalow colony. The window rolled up. Sasha strained his eyes after the passing truck. Was there a sticker on the back? The deconstructed remains of a swastika? Slegs blankes?
Up in her room, Nat greeted the new day. She rubbed her eyes in the way we think little children do, even if her mind was racing at an adult speed. The green front lawn scattered before her, begging her to come out and stomp all over it. Her mental picture of the terrain was interrupted by an unexpected interloper. Her daddy was on his knees in his dress burying something in Steve’s winter palace. As if he were Steve himself.
Life with Daddy was a perpetual encounter with a daisy. He loved her, he loved her not. But he was, and Mommy always agreed, very funny. The Sasha Senderovsky Show, as the nice new woman Dee had called it at dinner last night. Nat’s mommy loved her all the time, but Nat could never be good enough for her. There was a Nat whose body she inhabited, but also another Nat （Natasha was her name）， who lived in another country （Rossiya was its name）， in another city （Sankt-Peterburg, they now called it）， who probably looked like a young version of her mommy or Aunt Inna, who had gone to heaven （which, as a classmate whose family owned horses had informed them, did not exist）。
But something had happened last night that made an impression on Nat, perhaps the greatest of her short life. Her mother was right in that Nat missed many social cues, but some facts were incontrovertible. Namely, the Actor was important. Jin-or J-Hope-level important. One of her classmates had an actor for a father, and the school turned into an entirely different institution when he deigned to appear during Family Sing-Along to perform a Calypso-inspired version of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” And last night the Actor had hinted what she had always known. That her parents weren’t really her parents. Or they weren’t entirely her parents. Just as she wasn’t entirely the person her “mother” thought she was. And if she didn’t belong to them, then maybe she belonged to no one.
Also, he had called her “lovely.”
Nat went to the bathroom to brush her teeth with her imported BTS toothbrush （Jin’s pouty smile a great way to start the day） and then to wake up her mother and tell her about the new funny thing Daddy was doing in the front yard. As she spit out the saccharine swirl of children’s toothpaste, the very thought of her daddy on his knees in front of Steve’s lair made her laugh. She looked at her reflection, multicolored toothpaste on her upper lip, surprised as always by the fact that the night had passed, but the Nat in the mirror remained.
Act Two
Entanglements
1
The property had not slept well. Tissues and other sundries now coursed through the channels of the septic system, despite the signs Masha had placed in the bathrooms of the bungalows asking guests to PARDON OUR COUNTRY PLUMBING. After two showers （Dee’s and Ed’s）， the water supply was about to run dry for the day, with at least one disastrous consequence, as we will soon see. Various birds gathered in the thick forestscape behind the covered porch to hold a public conference on a great windstorm that was now approaching from Newfoundland. A groundhog peeking out from behind a dogwood watched his benefactor and enemy the landowner use his winter hole as a personal storage space and was unprepared for such a change in their relationship.
Meanwhile, the bungalow residents, minus sleeping Vinod, gathered on the slope of the hill to observe a rural ritual: a man with a buzz saw wearing safety goggles and a large cowhide strap around his waist was transforming the Jurassic bleached tree limbs covering the front lawn into mere logs, which would then be placed in a Pascal’s triangle by the porch, ready for the stove’s devouring.
“Now the fun really begins!” Senderovsky declared. “Now I can have the lawn properly mowed. And then you know what we’ll do? We’ll set up a badminton net! There are deadly ticks in the grass, but we can still play if we wear long socks. Has anyone ever heard of lawn hockey?” （No sport by that name existed.）