Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

But instead he looked at her and chuckled.

“Okay. Let’s see if there are cops around.”

“Why?”

“See, no U-turn here.”

Lena could barely hold back a squeal of delight.

“No cops. Make a U-turn!” she cried.

The car made a sharp U and sped back to the crossing.

“Now we’re officially outlaws,” Ben said.

They went through the toll booth and onto 95 North. They were going to Maine.

Lena couldn’t believe how relieved she felt, despite her uncertainty just minutes before. She stretched in her seat and bumped her leg against the juicer again. This time she picked it up and put it on the back seat.

They were about to pass the WELCOME TO MAINE sign when Ben’s phone rang. He kept it on vibrate. She heard a barely audible buzz and saw how Ben paled and stiffened as if there was a nagging pain in his left thigh. He pulled his phone out of the pocket of his pants, looked at the number, and put it back.

His phone was elegant and thin.

Lena’s phone, buried deep in her backpack, was sturdy and plump, metallic, no extra features, an older model. It rang a few minutes later. She always kept it at the top volume, and she jumped when it rang. She turned the music off and rushed to get the phone out of her bag, but she couldn’t find it right away. She rummaged in her bag with her hands shaking, dropping her other things on her lap or to the floor, her lipstick, or her sunglasses, or her tiny French dictionary, while the phone rang and rang. When she finally took it out, there was a dollar bill and an old receipt caught in it. She paled and stiffened just like Ben a few minutes before. She didn’t pick up.

A long and awkward stretch of silence followed.

“Why don’t you tell me your mystery story?” Ben asked.

“My mystery story?”

“Yes, you said there was a long mystery story about those guys that disappeared after a date with you. It’s about five hours from here to the cabin. We have all the time in the world.”

“Okay, sure. There’s time. It’s a little confusing, though. I’m not even sure where to begin.”

“How about the first guy who disappeared?”

“Yeah, you’re right. Seems logical.”

Lena stretched in her seat and wrinkled her nose in concentration.

“Kostik was the first,” she said. “He disappeared on June twelfth. I remember the date because it was my grandfather’s birthday.

“It happened after a double date with Inka and Andrey, which had been Inka’s idea. She had just met this soldier, Andrey, at the first dance. He asked her on a date, and she asked him to bring a friend for me. I had never had a double date before and I didn’t know that they were supposed to be awful by definition. One couple is always better, hotter, more at ease, happier than the other, which inevitably makes the other couple find a million things that are wrong with them and their relationship.

“In our case there was no doubt which couple was the happy one.”

Lena stopped talking and cleared her throat. She couldn’t believe she was actually telling the story out loud. Over the years she had spent so much time telling it in her head that now every word she used felt awkward and wrong. The main problem was not even the content: what to tell, which scenes to choose, which characters or events to bring forward, which to omit altogether, but how to transform images into words. Because in her head, the story ran like a movie. A movie that would randomly jump from one image to another, depending on how she felt or what was on her mind. Sometimes she would even see the same image over and over again, a little differently each time. And since she had been thinking about this story for years, she could no longer tell which of the images came from memory, which from her interpretation of the memory, and which purely from her imagination.

She closed her eyes and tried to evoke the exact image of how they’d sat at the picnic table.

“We sat at the picnic table outside our unit,” she said. “The four of us. Inka and Andrey sat on one side, snuggled against one another, staring into each other’s eyes, engaged in happy banter, laughing at each other’s jokes or sometimes for no reason at all; and Kostik and I sat opposite them, about two feet apart, silent, dumbly smiling as Andrey and Inka joked. I didn’t know why Inka wanted me there at all. By then, I began to doubt that I understood Inka at all. Ever since she had hooked up with Andrey (which was only three days before, I wanted to remind her), she’d behaved as if she had always been popular, as if the whole lifetime of her loneliness and insecurity had never happened. I noticed that she’d become drawn to Dena, the slutty, pretty, popular counselor. Suddenly, it seemed like Inka’d rather spend time with her than with me, and she even subconsciously mimicked Dena’s words and expressions. Which didn’t suit a fat pig like Inka at all, I would think, and then become surprised at the nastiness of my thoughts.”

Ben chuckled, and Lena became momentarily embarrassed, but she continued the story anyway.

“Well, okay, Inka’s reasons for inviting me on this date weren’t clear, but my reasons for accepting were even foggier. Could it be that I thought that even this humiliation was better than staying in the room alone while Inka was on a date?

“Kostik had brought a bag with sunflower seeds, and Inka brought out a jar with sour cherry jam that she had confiscated from Sasha Simonov. They were all eating the jam, taking turns sticking their spoons right into the jar. I hated jam, so I concentrated on the seeds.”

Lena paused and looked at Ben. He was looking at the road ahead, but his expression was pensive. Did he even know what sunflower seeds were? Lena wasn’t sure if she was telling the story right. It still ran in her head like a movie, brighter and louder than ever, and now in first person, like a movie addressed to Ben. But the movie was happening in her head, her words were a pale voiceover, they couldn’t possibly convey everything that was there to convey. She wondered how much he saw or understood.

“ ‘Hey,’ Inka said, ‘you’re shelling the seeds the wrong way!’

“I knew I was shelling them the wrong way. I could never shell them the right way. You’re supposed to put a seed in your mouth and bite on it, and then it’ll somehow get out of the shell and you’ll spit the shell out. I couldn’t do it the right way, because when I bit on the seed, the seed just turned to mush and didn’t come out of the shell. So I shelled them one by one with my hands.

“ ‘You look cute like that, Lena,’ Andrey said. ‘With a seed in your fingers, you look like a little squirrel.’

“ ‘Yeah, you do look like a squirrel like that!’ said Kostik.

“Furious, I wanted to grab a handful of seeds, throw them at Inka, and leave. But then Andrey took out his new watch, and everybody forgot about squirrels. It was a beautiful imported watch that showed the date and the year as well as the time. ‘It’s June twelfth today,’ Andrey announced. June twelfth! It was my grandfather’s birthday, and I hadn’t called him yet.

“I stood up and said that I had to go to the phone booth. Kostik stood up too and said that he would go with me.

“It was a long walk from our unit to the booth, which stood on the edge of the woods by the headquarters. Away from Inka, and her happiness, I immediately felt better. Kostik put his arm around my shoulder. It was heavy and warm and felt good.

“There was this amazing sexual tension in the air. I thought I could actually smell couples. You would walk across the camp territory in the dark, and the smells would reach you before you heard the sounds. Sharp, distinct smells: sweat, lip gloss, perfume, hairspray. And sounds, barely audible, almost drowned out by cicadas and bullfrogs, but still perceptible—panting, whispering, giggles, moans, and gasps.