Page 6 of Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

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 thoughtPansywas 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. Bothof 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 actuallydoit. 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 weregoing 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.

PART IIINTO THE DEEP DEPTHS

4ONE-ARMED GIRLS NEED SWIMMING LESSONS TOO

NADYA WAS REQUIREDto wear her arm to school, the way a child who had recently been fitted with their first pair of glasses might be required to wear their glasses. She had tried objecting, only to be informed that a properly grateful little girl would understand and appreciate what was being done for her, not make her parents’ lives more difficult by complaining when she had nothing to complain about.

As always, Pansy had played the bad cop while Carl looked placidly on, not supporting his wife but not objecting, either. Nadya had pled and tried her very best to explain her objections, all for naught, because she was small and they were large and they werehelping.How could she be so ungrateful as to refuse to let themhelp?

So she was whisked away to school with the unfamiliar weight of the new arm hanging heavy from her shoulder and pinching her skin, and that day the other students looked at her like she was somehow broken for the very first time. They had grown accustomed to overlooking Nadya’s missing arm, seeing absence as a part of her body; having an arm suddenly appear was worth staring at. What’s more, the arm was visibly artificial, and Nadya was visibly uncomfortable.

She wasn’t the only child in school with a prosthetic; one of the boys in fifth grade had a prosthetic leg, and they were all used to Michael. He didn’t even walk with a limp most ofthe time, save for right before he was fitted for an improvement. And one of the teachers had a prosthetic eye, which one student or another would periodically claim they had seen her remove and drop into a glass of water. So while a few of the other students might have been staring with intent to mock, the majority were simply fascinated by the appearance of something new in their environment.

Nadya loved going to the zoo with Carl and Pansy, even if Pansy found most of the animals loud and unattractive, and just wanted to look at birds and tigers all the time. And one of the concepts she liked best was the idea that every animal, from the biggest or the smallest, had zookeepers assigned to something called an “enrichment team.” Those were the people whose job it was to find them new toys, new things to taste and smell, new ways to keep their enclosures interesting and engaging, so they wouldn’t get bored and start breaking things for fun.

She thought, sometimes, that she and all the other students were part of a massive mutual enrichment team. They gave each other something new to look at every single day, keeping them from succumbing to boredom and destroying their enclosure.

And today, thanks to her new arm, she was the something new. She’d been the something new once before, when she first arrived at the school. She hadn’t liked it then, and she didn’t like it now.

She squirmed through her morning classes, fidgeted through recess, and, when lunch arrived, rushed to the cafeteria to be at the front of the lunch line, grabbing her tray as she always did, only to discover that her new arm interfered with the way she would normally brace it against her body. She staggered, unable to use the arm to support the tray evenwithout the weight of her lunch, unable to get the tray between her arm and her body. It was only when one of the other students stepped in and helped her that she was able to get to her lunch and head for the table where she usually sat. Her cheeks burned the whole way. It was rare for her to need help with basic tasks, and while she had been warned that there would be a period of adjustment, she wasn’t used to feeling helpless.

Nadya sat at the table, picking at her macaroni and cheese, and hated her new arm a little bit more than she had before the bell rang. One of the boys prodded her in the shoulder and asked a question about her prosthetic. She answered softly, barely aware of her own words, and bent her arm at his request, demonstrating the way the elbow bent when she flexed her stump. The other kids began talking enthusiastically about the arm, how cool it was, how lucky she was to have it, and didn’t seem to notice that they weren’t talking aboutheranymore at all. They weren’t talkingtoher, either; like a room full of kindergarteners with a fun new toy, they were talking about the toy.

It washerassistance device,hermechanism for better interacting with the world, not a replacement for who she was as a person. She’d never really considered her missing arm a disability—it was just the way she was made, and always had been, and it didn’t stop her from doing anything she wanted to do—and now it was all the other children could see.

She didn’t like it. It burned.

They finished lunch and rose, an amorphous group of second-graders on their way to the playground. Nadya moved within the pack, as she so often did, neither hanging back nor pushing her way to the front. Her stump ached. She wanted to remove the arm and rub more lotion into her skin, but she didn’t dare attract attention to the arm again: it wouldonly cause the other kids to focus on it, when she desperately didn’t want them to.

“Dodgeball,” said one of the boys. “Since Nadya can finally play!”

Nadya blinked and protested. She couldn’t “play,” as they said, couldn’t hold or catch or throw the ball any better than she’d been able to the day before. But she could be pulled to the dodgeball court, and she could use her hands—both the one she was born with and the one she was wearing—to bat the balls out of the way as they came rocketing toward her. The other kids laughed and laughed, and if most of them liked her and didn’t understand how they were making her unhappy in fundamental, unkind ways, they were still young enough not to understand all the possible forms of cruelty. Nadya dodged and twisted as well as she could, but was still hit by several red rubber balls before the bell rang again to end lunch and they all went trooping back to the classroom, where she hunched in her seat and stared at her paper, and hated.

Oh, how she hated. She hated being forced to conform to other people’s idea of normal, whether they be cultural or physical. She hated how easy it was for the adults in her world to pass her around like a doll, moving her from Russia to America, from house to doctor’s office, from her bedroom to wherever they wanted her to be. She hated that her agency had been taken away from her in ways she couldn’t fully articulate, and she sat at her desk, and she seethed.

Until the bell ran for the end of the day, and she rose, gathered her things, and scooted for the door as fast as her legs would take her, not pausing until she was at the bus-stop line. Once there, she waited anxiously, jiggling her weight from foot to foot, counting the seconds until the big yellowbus pulled up and she could climb aboard, ready to head for home. They had to wait while the children who were in less of a hurry came out of the school and got onto the bus. Nadya squirmed deeper and deeper into her seat, self-conscious in a way she couldn’t remember ever having been before, right arm pressed up against the bus wall where no one would poke at it, or stare, or ask questions she didn’t want to answer yet. How was she supposed to tell people how she felt when she didn’t know yet how she felt?

The bus pulled away from the stop with a lurch. Nadya closed her eyes. They were on the way home. She was safe.

When they reached her stop, she got off the bus without saying anything, staring down the block at the square, comfortable shape of the house she shared with her adoptive parents. If she squinted, eyelashes laced together like the fingers on folded hands, she could blur the outline enough to make it resemble the orphanage, which might not be well-beloved but was certainly familiar. She knew who she was at the orphanage. She knew who she was expected to be. She looked down at the artificial palm of her right hand, eyes still half-closed, and through the blur, it looked almost real.

But she wasn’t a girl with a right hand. She was a girl without one. It had never defined her, but it had always been a true part of who she was, as true as her dark brown hair and lighter eyes, as true as her slightly snaggled left incisor. All the little pieces of a person. She didn’t know how to be this new version of herself.

It was a transition many had weathered before her, and many would weather after, and had her new parents ever considered that perhaps a girl who’d neverhada hand might notmisshaving a hand and taken steps to help her through the process, she might have taken it as smoothly as some ofthem. But Carl and Pansy had been looking for a child, partially because their pastor said it was their proper Christian duty and partially because they thought they ought to want one, and now here she was, lost, with two adults who barely understood what it was to be responsible for another living being.

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