“I used to think your accent was so sweet when you spoke in English,” he said. “Just because you came at a later age. I wanted to guide you. I wanted to help you adapt.”
“Keep talking in the past tense,” she said. “Who can blame you given the way our future looks.”
“Shifting the blame,” he said, “how au courant.”
“And now you’re talking to me like you’re on social media,” she said. “Oh, Sashen’ka. Don’t stop being clever and pithy. It turns me on so much.” She shut off the light and he could hear her turning away from him, the bed grunting in its own practiced language.
* * *
—
When the sound of his cough woke him up, the wind was ripping through the trees, hungry for leaves but settling for the branches, which it cracked with a horrific groan, one by one, like a torturer in the Lubyanka.
Goddamnit, the wind does sound like a freight train, Senderovsky thought. He was the sworn enemy of clichés; the one time he had raised his voice at Dee in class was when she used “robin’s-egg blue” to describe the shade of a nursery that had never existed in her particular reality. He got up and slid open one of the blinds. The moon was absent, but two ghostly beams ran down half the length of the driveway, attached, most likely, to a black pickup truck with SLEGS BLANKES on its rear bumper. He had had enough of this. He would call the police. No, he would go down himself, come what may. He put on his athletic pants and dressing gown, converting their ridiculousness to armor, and grabbed a woolen hat off a peg in the mudroom.
Outside, the wind threatened to lift him off his feet and carry him, gown flapping, to a graveyard of English nannies and broken umbrellas. But Senderovsky persisted. He sloshed through the mist coating the special glasses he wore at night. （His night vision was also fading with age.） As he entered the high beams’ long field of vision, he saw what the wind had already wrought no more than halfway through the night, the lawn now covered by an even-grander assortment of blanched tree branches, the embodiment of a universe without thought or care, rife with heartbreak, sprinkled liberally with disease, its inhabitants walking lamb steaks.
“Fuck!” he shouted, uncharacteristically.
Even as he strode toward the beamed interloper at the end of his driveway, Senderovsky took the wind personally. He had just given the tree guy eight hundred dollars in cash he did not have. And for what? Nothing changed. The dead trees kept falling. He could not win.
“Who are you?” he shouted toward the solitary figure behind the wheel of the pickup. He could not see a gloved hand tapping upon it, the call letters of a terrestrial pop music station coming in green over the dashboard. He tried a kinder tack as he approached. “Are you lost?” he shouted. And then in his best American, “Mister, are you lost?”
A crack popped past him. A gunshot? And then another crack. He covered his face with his opened gown and fell to the ground, gravel against his stomach. The cracking sound returned, but this time it wouldn’t stop; an object was groaning under the wind’s unremitting torture, its pleas ignored, until a chunk of elm, an antler of wood, began to separate from the tall bare yellow trunk right above Senderovsky.
Ny vsyo, he thought in Russian. Well, I’m done for. But as he closed his eyes, he found himself being rolled off the driveway and into the soft ditch of the lawn, the beneficiary of an unseen providence. A terrible crash curled him fetally. Moments later, when he opened his eyes, the utmost extremity of the immense sundered branch was tapping him on the forehead with an insistent finger, the way Nat sometimes did to wake him up at an early hour. The wind kept at it, but now country rain that put his wife to sleep without fail had started sluicing against the Rushmore of his forehead. The freshly sundered tree limb gave off the gamy odor of young summer skin. It was dead black now. The power had failed all across town, much as it was failing across the country. The truck down the driveway was gone.
Act Three
Out Like a Lamb
1
“There are beautiful cattails on the side of the road,” Nat informed Senderovsky over breakfast two weeks after we had last seen them. Per her therapists, her eye-contact skills were poor, but now she was looking into his eyes directly, as if trying to befriend him with her innocence. How did Karen merge with her so well? How could he not acknowledge that he was the father of a remarkable child, who noticed everything, processed it differently than those with fewer anxieties, those with quieter minds, and spoke with utmost honesty? It was still not too late to be a complete parent to her if he could find the solvent that might decalcify his love. His beloved espresso trembled in his hand and he crunched at the high-fiber cereal in his mouth. “Look at them if you go for a walk today, okay, Daddy?” Nat said.