Karen Cleveland: Need to Know

We sat in the back corner of the coffee shop until dusk descended on the city. The conversation flowed so easily, never a lull. We had so much in common: We were our parents’ only children, nonpracticing Catholics, apoliticals in a political city. We’d each traveled around Europe on our own, on a shoestring budget. Our mothers were teachers, we’d each had a golden retriever as a kid. The similarities were almost eerie. It seemed like fate that we’d met. He was funny and charming and smart and polite—and drop-dead gorgeous.

Then, with our coffee cups long since drained and an employee wiping down the tables around us, he looked at me, unbridled nervousness on his face, and asked if he could take me to dinner.

We went to a little Italian place around the corner, had heaping portions of house-made pasta and a carafe of wine and a dessert that neither of us had room for but ordered anyway, as an excuse to linger. We never ran out of things to say.

We talked until the restaurant closed, then he walked me home, taking my hand, and I’d never felt so warm, so light, so happy. He kissed me good night on the sidewalk outside my building, the same spot where I’d bumped into him that very day. And by the time I drifted off to sleep that night, I knew I’d met the man I was going to marry.

“VIV.”

I blink and the memory is gone, like that. I hear strains of the monster truck theme song from the family room. Babbling. One toy banging another, plastic on plastic.

“Viv, look at me.”

Now I see the fear. His face isn’t blank anymore. His forehead’s creased, those wavy lines he gets when he’s worried, deeper now than I’ve ever seen.

He leans forward across the table, places a hand over mine. I pull away, clench my hands in my lap. He looks genuinely scared. “I love you.”

I can’t look at him right now, can’t bear seeing the intensity in his eyes. I look down at the table. There’s a smear of red marker, a small one. I stare at it. It’s seeped into the grain of the wood, a scar from some art project, long ago. Why have I never noticed it?

“This doesn’t change how I feel about you. I swear to God, Viv. You and the kids are everything to me.”

The kids. Oh God, the kids. What will I tell them? I look up, over to the family room, even though I can’t see them from here. I hear the twins playing. The older two are quiet, no doubt engrossed in the show.

“Who are you?” I whisper. I don’t mean to whisper, but it’s what comes out. Like I can’t get my voice to work.

“It’s me, Viv. I swear to God. You know me.”

“Who are you?” I say again, my voice cracking this time.

He looks at me, eyes like saucers, forehead creased. I stare at him, try to read the expression in his eyes, but I’m not sure that I can. Could I ever?

“I was born in Volgograd.” He speaks quietly, evenly. “My name was Alexander Lenkov.”

Alexander Lenkov. This isn’t real. This must be some sort of dream. This is a movie, a novel. Not my life. I focus on the table again. There’s a constellation of little indentations where one of the kids banged a fork.

“My parents were Mikhail and Natalia.”

Mikhail and Natalia . Not Gary and Barb. My in-laws, the people my kids call Granny and Gramps. I stare at the grooves in the table, these tiny craters.

“They died in a car crash when I was thirteen. I didn’t have any other family. I was placed into state care, moved a few months later to Moscow. I didn’t realize what was happening at the time, but I was placed into an SVR program.”

I feel a pang of sympathy, thinking of Matt as a scared orphaned boy, and then it’s quickly blunted by an overwhelming sense of betrayal. I clasp my hands even tighter.

“It was English-language immersion for two years. When I was fifteen I was officially recruited. Given a new identity.”

“As Matthew Miller.” Again, a whisper.

He nods, then leans forward, his eyes intense. “I didn’t have a choice, Viv.”

I look down at the rings on my left hand. I think back to those first conversations. Finding out we had so much in common. It seemed so real. But it was all made up. He’d created a childhood that never existed.

Suddenly everything is a lie. My life is a lie.

“My identity wasn’t real, but everything else was,” he says, almost as if he can read my thoughts. “My feelings are real. I swear they are.”

The diamond on my left hand catches the light; I look at the facets, one by one. I’m vaguely aware of sounds from the family room. New sounds, louder sounds. Luke and Ella are arguing. I look up, away from my ring, and Matt’s watching me, but his head is craned just enough that I know he’s listening to the kids.

“Work it out, you two,” he calls without taking his eyes off me.

We stare at each other, both listening to the kids. The argument intensifies, and Matt pushes back from the table, goes in to referee. I hear snippets, the kids each trying to argue their side to Matt, his admonishments to compromise. There’s a fuzzy feeling in my head. The wine, maybe.

Matt comes back holding Caleb and sits down. Caleb grins at me, sticks a drooly fist in his mouth. I can’t force my face into a smile, so I just look back at Matt.

“Who’s the real Matt Miller?” I ask. I think of the birth certificate buried deep in our fireproof safe. The Social Security card, the passport.

“I don’t know.”

“What about Barb and Gary?” I say. I picture the two of them. The matronly woman, the pastel-colored tops that always remind me of something my grandmother would have worn. The man with the belly that protrudes over his belt, his shirt always tucked in, his socks always white.

“Others like me,” he says.

Chase starts crying, a distraction that’s strangely welcome. I stand up from the table and walk to the family room. He’s on the floor near the couch where Luke and Ella sit, and I can see the outline of a little blue ball wedged underneath. I reach for it, then pick him up, shift him onto my hip. He’s quieter now, just little whimpers, the ball tight in his grasp.

My thoughts are a jumbled mess. How could I have been so easily duped? Especially when it comes to Barb and Gary. There were red flags, certainly. I didn’t meet them until the wedding. We’ve only been out to Seattle once, and they haven’t visited us. There were reasons, of course. Ones that made sense at the time, that seem so flimsy now. Barb’s afraid to fly. We didn’t have enough vacation days. We’ve had one infant after another, and who wants to risk a screaming baby on a cross-country flight?

I felt guilty about it. Seeing my parents so often, his barely at all. I even apologized. “Life has a habit of getting in the way,” he said with a smile. A somewhat sad smile, sure, but he never seemed all that bothered by it. I suggested video chats, but they weren’t comfortable with the technology, were happy just talking on the phone every couple of weeks. Matt seemed fine with it, too.

And I never pushed it. Did I not push it because secretly I was glad? Glad that we didn’t have to alternate Christmases, that we didn’t have to bust our budget to fly the family across the country on a regular basis, that I didn’t have overbearing in-laws. Maybe even glad that Matt’s affections weren’t split. That his entire focus could be on the kids and me.

I walk back into the kitchen and sit down at the table with Chase on my lap. “What about all those people at our wedding?” There were at least a couple dozen other relatives there. Aunts, uncles, cousins.

“Same.”

Impossible. I shake my head, like it could put all these random facts into some semblance of order. Something that makes sense. I’ve met upwards of twenty-five sleepers. How many do the Russians have here? Far more than we thought.