Сигрид Нуньес - Salvation City

My sister and I were never into dressing alike. Actually, we thought that was kind of tacky. If anything, we wanted people to forget we were twins.”

“Oh, isn’t that interesting? And here I always thought it’d be double the fun to be a twin. Didn’t you, Wyatt?”

“Never really thought about it. More coffee, ladies?”

“None for me, thanks. Look, I don’t mean to be impatient, but do you think Cole will be up soon? I’m pretty worried about him after last night, and we need to move along.”

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

Everyone stared at Cole as he entered the kitchen. Tracy started to get up but he gestured her down, saying, “All I want’s orange juice, and I can get it myself.” He poured himself a glass from the container on the table, but instead of sitting down with the three of them, he crossed the room and leaned against the counter. He wished they would all stop looking at him. As they did not, he faked a yawn.

“How’d you sleep, son?” asked PW. Cole saw Addy wince at the word son.

“Fine. I’m telling you, really, I’m fine.” Not even trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.

There was more than irritation in Addy’s voice. “Would it be too much to ask if I could speak with my nephew alone now?”

“‘Course not,” said PW. “Why don’t you two use the den?” Cordial words but the same cold-metal tone he’d used to wish the Three Stooges a blessed day. The hostility in the room was unmistakable. But at least this morning everyone was being civil.

“You sure you don’t want some breakfast first?” asked Tracy. Cole studied the birdfeeder hanging outside the window above the sink and shook his head. He drained his glass and placed it in the dishwasher. When he turned around again, he saw that Tracy was crying. PW had put his arm around her, but his eyes were fixed on Cole as he followed Addy out of the room.

In the den, Addy recoiled at the sight of the rifles and Cole smiled in spite of himself.

“I guess this is gun country, isn’t it. You have no idea how insane Europeans think the whole American gun culture is.”

She sounded like his mother—they had the same voice—and the way she sat with her arms crossed and her hands resting on opposite shoulders recalled his mother as well. (For a while, when he was younger, he’d thought his mother did that so he wouldn’t stare at her breasts.) But it was almost inconceivable to him now that he could ever mistake his aunt for his mother. Even looking at old photographs, he’d always been able to tell them apart.

The instant he sat down he wanted to bolt. He wasn’t ready to talk to Addy. He hadn’t even washed his face or brushed his teeth yet. And he never skipped breakfast. He needed to eat something. He needed to eat breakfast and then he needed to go back up to his room and do some thinking. He could feel himself getting queasy at the memory of last night. How everyone had fussed over him, insisting he lie down on the couch with a pillow under his head and another one under his feet, and how he had lain there for the next hour, like a rictus, listening to the two sides shout at each other.

Addy had accused PW and Tracy of kidnapping. She would not listen when they tried to explain how they thought she had passed. “It’s true that I was very sick. But the only way you could have thought I was dead was if you made it up.”

“Let’s call it a mix-up,” PW said evenly. “It’s not like there weren’t plenty of them. I don’t know how bad it was where you were, but here it was total chaos. At the orphanage they couldn’t tell us hardly anything about Cole. They said he’d been so sick he’d developed some kind of amnesia. They told us filling in the gaps could take months, maybe even years. There were way too many cases like his and not enough people for the job. They even managed to lose—”

“You must think I’m a complete idiot,” Addy said. “As you can see, hard as you made it for me, I did manage to find you . I don’t care what kind of story you told Cole. The fact is, you had an obligation to do everything possible to track down his family. Instead—admit it—you took advantage of the chaos to do whatever the hell you wanted. You had no right—”

“You act like we tried to hide the boy!” said Tracy. “It’s not like we changed our identities or fled the country with him, for goodness’ sake. We’ve always been right here. How can you call it kidnapping when the state placed him with us?”

“Oh please. Don’t tell me you didn’t do everything you could to cut him off from his past. Including pretending I was fucking dead!”

“This is a Christian household,” Tracy said, enunciating each syllable. “I will thank you not to use Satan’s language under our roof.”

Addy started to laugh. She laughed merrily, as if genuinely amused by Tracy’s words. Tracy looked ready to burst into tears.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” said PW. “But there’s something you’re not getting here. First of all, from what we could tell, you’ve always been more of a stranger than any kind of family to Cole. But in any case, my wife and I had no obligation to go looking for you, none at all. That was for the government to do. And you’re right, they don’t seem to have done a very good job. Can’t say as I’m much surprised, though. But it wasn’t our responsibility. Our responsibility was to give Cole a good Christian home, and now that you’re here you can see for yourself that is exactly what we’ve done. Did I try hard to find you? No, ma’am, I did not. What I did was pray hard. I prayed to the Lord and asked for his guidance. And I want you to know, I am right with the Lord on this. My wife and I are both right with the Lord.”

Addy looked at him as if he’d just admitted he and his wife were cannibals. “You people are un-fucking-believable.”

“You sure got a mouth on you, don’t you, lady.”

Cole held his breath. He had never seen PW look at anyone with hatred before. For a moment, he was afraid PW might slap Addy. If he did, Addy would go for his eyes. If she did, Tracy would rip Addy’s throat out.

Cole sat up. “I have to go to bed now.”

In the silence that followed, shame condensed in the room like a fog. Then PW said, “I think we could all use some time to chill. Why don’t we call it a night. We can talk again in the morning.”

Addy was whipping her head this way and that with an expression of mixed outrage and helplessness. PW and Tracy exchanged a look. Then Tracy cleared her throat and said, “Miss Abrams, at this late hour it only makes sense you spend the night. Please say you’ll be our guest. Spare room’s all made up.” In spite of everything, her voice was sincerely hospitable. And though Addy looked as if she’d been offered a straw pallet with bedbugs, she gave a weary nod. She had been traveling for days, flying from Berlin to New York and then to Chicago, where, after spending the night with a friend, she had borrowed the friend’s car and driven to Salvation City, beating Cole and PW by about two hours.

“I didn’t give any warning because I was afraid to,” she told Cole. “How could I be sure they wouldn’t run off with you or send you away somewhere? Once I found out they were fundamentalists, I knew I had to be extra careful. To people like them I’m the enemy. An atheist expatriate Jew—what rights do I have? These fanatics will use religion to justify anything—especially the ones who believe in the imminent rapture. You do understand, don’t you? That’s what these monsters were counting on? The Messiah was supposed to show up before I did.”

Addy told the story of her own bout with the flu. It had struck while she was away from home on a business trip. She had ended up in a hospital in Geneva. Almost the last thing she remembered before getting sick was that Cole’s father had died. “It was one of the last things your mother and I ever talked about. I knew that you were getting sick, too, and that she was going between your bedside and the clinic at the college where she was helping out. But she never said anything about being sick herself.”