Page 7 of Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

Nadya blinked away the beginning of tears and trudged toward the house, right arm dangling by her side and left hand clutching the strap of her backpack, keeping it from slipping down her shoulder. Pansy’s car was in the driveway as Nadya let herself in, stepping out of her shoes before heading down the hall toward her room.

“How was your first day?” asked Pansy, appearing in the kitchen doorway.

Nadya stopped and looked at her in confusion. She had been at this school since September, and they wouldn’t change classes untilnextSeptember. “It was… fine,” she said, having learned that positive but noncommittal answers would usually free her from the burden of parental expectation, confusing or not, more quickly. Pansy was still looking at her expectantly. “We’re doing multiplication in math. After I finish my homework, may I go to the turtle pond?”

“I don’t want to hear about your homework, I want to hear about how the other kids reacted to yourarm,” said Pansy, now sounding annoyed.

Ah. So this was another scripted conversation, then, and as usual, Nadya was on the wrong foot because she hadn’t learned her lines. She never did. She still forced a smile, and said, “They found it very interesting. Michael, who’s three years ahead of me, has a prosthetic leg, and he plays kickball all the time. I played dodgeball for the first time today.” The bruises were already forming.

Still, she kept smiling and waiting to hear that she had finally managed to say enough, to satisfy Pansy’s insatiable desire to be the one who did things correctly, the one everyone looked at and said “There, that woman, she’s a good woman, a pious woman, devoted to her family, she’s the one I want to be like.” And to her great relief, Pansy relaxed and nodded, saying, “Your homework comes first, but after that, yes you can go to the turtle pond, as long as you finish at least an hour before dinner. Come and give me a hug.”

“Yes, Mom,” said Nadya, and trotted obediently over to hug Pansy with her left arm, resolutely ignoring the disappointment on the other woman’s face at her failure to use both. Pulling away, she walked down the hall to her room, leaving Pansy watching after her.

Pansy sighed and shook her head as Nadya vanished into her room. She was trying so hard to understand the girl, but nothing they ever did seemed to be good enough for her. She was serious all the time, seeming to look toward a future that she had yet to share with either of the adults who cared for her. She’d expected an orphan overflowing with gratitude over being offered a better life, and had thought Nadya would absolutely embody that spirit when she’d first seen her among the other children, a bright-eyed little director gleefully organizing them according to her own design. How had that child become the one they had? It didn’t make any sense.

In her room, Nadya pulled books out of the backpack and dropped them onto the small desk provided for her use. She couldn’t think of any of the furnishings as “hers”: they had all been selectedforher, notbyher, and while she liked them well enough, they were much more suited to Pansy’s tastes than her own. That was all right: she’d never been able to pick her own things at the orphanage, either. But it just fedinto the feeling that she was there to be a prop, not to be a person, and one day she’d be replaced by a little girl who did a better, faster job of conforming to Pansy and Carl’s unspoken, sometimes nebulous expectations.

That little girl would probably think this room was perfect exactly as it was. She wouldn’t dream of changing a thing. And if they boughthera prosthetic arm, she would be grateful to have it, not dubiously unsure that she wanted anything of the sort, not squirming when it rubbed against her skin. She would be a grateful, dutiful daughter, and they would forget Nadya entirely.

Nadya wished her well, even as she hurried through her homework and put it carefully back in her backpack, ready to be turned in the next day. She lived here now; even if this wasn’t going to be her home forever, it was still hers, and she would live with all its sharp edges and strangeness. She would be strong. That was what the matrons would have wanted her to be, what the other children would have expected from her, what Russia would have demanded of her, if Russia had been in a position to demand anything.

Russia had, after all, repeated the one crime for which Nadya had never been able to fully forgive her first mother. Russia had given her away when she was too much to care for.

Leaving her room, Nadya padded back down the hall to her shoes, relieved when Pansy didn’t appear again. Sometimes, permission to go out would be rescinded in favor of chores, especially when Nadya was going to see the turtles, which was unladylike and, in Pansy’s eyes, unnecessary. But her day had been long and unpleasant in strange new ways—ways she couldn’t help remembering as the unfamiliar weight of her new arm bumped against her side—and she needed the turtles.

Stepping back into her shoes, Nadya took her coat from the hook and stepped out into the crisp afternoon air, beginning what had long since become a familiar walk through their small housing development to the turtle pond. It had been a warm enough day that several of the turtles were basking when she arrived, and she paused, squinting at their round, familiar bodies, a flame of rage kindling in her soul.

Someone had taken a knife or a rock—something sharp, anyway—and scratched two words into the shell of the largest turtle currently basking on the log. But a shell wasn’t just a piece of clothing or a pack the turtle carried! It was the turtle’sbody,naked to the world!

It took a moment for her rage to clear enough for the words to actually register:byt’ uveren.A beat later, she realized why that looked so strange, apart from words having no business on the back of a turtle.

They were written in Russian.Be sure.Be sure of what? Be sure it was a crime to scratch words into a turtle? Because she was absolutely sure ofthat.Still candle-bright with rage, Nadya ducked under the top bar of the fence and stepped onto the narrow strip of bare earth between it and the pond itself. The turtles were used to her by now, and watched her with slow, wise eyes, not abandoning their perch. What could one child do to them from a distance? She wasn’t one of the children who liked to throw rocks or poke with sticks. She was safe.

Nadya began inching her way around the pond, trying to watch her footing and the turtles at the same time. Had someone asked in that moment what she was intending to do, she wouldn’t have been able to give them a good answer. But she couldn’t just walk away, not when the turtle was so clearly injured. She had tohelp.

On the log, the turtles looked at each other, nodding in slow symphony, like they had reached a reptilian consensus. One by one, they dropped into the water.

The turtle with the words etched into its shell was the last to move, shifting position so that it was closer to Nadya as she moved along the bank. It watched her progress, watched as her eyes fell on the cattails and rushes that grew dense in the clear water, reaching for the sky, watched as those same eyes went terribly wide. Nadya stared.

She was used to seeing patterns in things where adults would insist there were no patterns, rabbits in the clouds and dancing bears in the shapes of leaves. But she had never seen a half-open door etched in waterweeds before. It looked oddly inviting, like it wanted her to step through it. But she couldn’t do that, because it wasn’t a door; it was just… a shape in the water, just an outline of something that wasn’t real.

She was so busy staring at the door that wasn’t that she didn’t notice how close she was to the edge, or how the ground under her foot had started to crumble, until she lost her balance and fell forward with a yelp, crashing into the water at the direct center point of the door that wasn’t there. The splash was surprisingly soft.

She didn’t resurface.

After a few seconds had passed, the turtle with the scratched-up shell dropped into the water, following her lead, and swam away.

5ON THE BANKS OF THE WINSOME RIVER

NADYA WOKE WET AND ACHING,clothes plastered to her body by drying pondwater and sticky silt. She pulled her face away from the muddy bank where she was resting, coughing and spitting out a bit of grit, and rolled onto her back, staring up at the sky.

It was gray and heavy with pendulous clouds, their bellies swollen with rain yet to fall. She blinked, frowning at that sky. It didn’t look right. She hadn’t seen clouds like that since arriving in Denver. Even on the rare occasions when it rained, the clouds weren’t the deep, lowland clouds of her early childhood, the clouds she remembered from the orphanage. These clouds looked pregnant with storm, ripe and ready to begin throwing lightning from one to the next, to roll with thunder as they sheeted rain down on the land beneath them.

These weren’t Russian clouds, either, not quite, but they were closer than she’d seen in a long time, and they filled her heart with lightness, even as her hair was filled with muck. Her hair…

Pansy was going to kill her.

She sat up abruptly, the fingers of her hand digging into the mud, eyes so wide it hurt, looking frantically around in a vague attempt to figure out how long she’d been floating in the pond. Her panic didn’t recede as she realized she didn’t recognize anything around her. Instead, it built and pooled behind her breastbone, becoming something dark and terriblethat threatened to break loose and sweep her away. It was a raging flood, and the dam holding it at bay was very thin indeed, barely worthy of the name.

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