Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

“But I couldn’t bring myself to make that stroke, and I left the brush hanging there and it dripped. A big fat smudge of blue in the middle of the grass. I looked at Danya in horror.

“ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll make a hedgehog out of it. This is just what my letter D was missing—a blue hedgehog.’

“ ‘I like hedgehogs,’ I said.

“ ‘Are you going to the dance on Friday?’ Danya asked.

“I nodded.

“ ‘I’ll see you there,’ he said.

“I nodded again. It was then that he smiled for the first time.

“Nap time was over. I picked up the straps and ran to our unit. There I laid them on the table in the lobby and went upstairs. My heart was beating like crazy. I could still feel the weight of the brush in my hand, my shock when the paint dripped onto the painting, the smell of paint.

“The straps were the first thing that I saw when I went downstairs the next morning. All sixty of them were laid out in neat rows. All done perfectly. Golden stars shining brightly against the blue. It could only be Danya. He saw how upset I was over the stars. He wanted to help me. He was my knight in shining armor. He must have sneaked into the building after everybody was asleep. He must have worked for hours. I couldn’t believe Danya did that for me! He must have really, really liked me. I kept stroking them with my fingers with a big silly smile on my face.”

Lena stopped and looked at Ben. She’d been so engrossed in her story that she had momentarily forgotten about her audience.

“You know what,” he said. “It might sound idiotic, but you made me jealous.”

Lena touched his arm and smiled. And just then his phone started to ring. The vibration was so strong that Lena could almost feel it on her body. She could also feel how Ben stiffened. She moved away from him and straightened up in her seat.

Ben made his call from a visitor center a few miles away from Augusta. Lena went to the restroom, and when she came out—wiping her hands on her raincoat, because hand dryers never managed to do their job—Ben was still talking. He was half-hidden behind a column. He kept his hand raised at chest level and he moved it up and down, as if reasoning or listing points. Sometimes he would shake it as if disagreeing, and sometimes he would squeeze it into a fist.

He was lying. Another detail added to her rapidly growing version of him. Lena didn’t hear him lie, but she saw him lie. “I missed you, baby. Of course, I miss you. Of course, I love you. Of course.”

That was what he must be saying to Leslie. Right now, right this minute. When Lena was on the phone with Vadim, she said these things too. But when she said these things, it was as if she switched to some kind of automatic mode. The words poured out with ease, familiar affectionate words that didn’t seem to require her presence. It was as if the words had been prerecorded.

She started to walk away, along the edge of the woods, separated from her by the chain-link fence. The sign on the fence said KEEP THE WILDLIFE WILD! Her first thought was that they meant keeping wildlife agitated, that it was somehow important to keep the animals angry, because otherwise they would grow too lifeless and depressed. It reminded her of when her mother said, “You know what? I’m not even angry at your dad anymore,” and how scared her words made Lena. She died a few months after that.

Lena dialed her kids’ number. Misha answered. “Mom?” Then she heard both her children fighting over the phone. She told them about the wild wildlife sign. Misha laughed. He said: “No, Mom! It means ‘Do not feed the wildlife.’ ” Borya laughed too. They didn’t ask where she saw the sign. Then she felt the urge to tell them about the hedgehog farm in Gerry Baumann’s basement, and she did: “This fat man, Gerry Baumann, a famous artist, used to have a hedgehog farm in his basement.” Borya was especially impressed. “You know what, Mom,” he said, “I think those male hedgehogs could breed after all, if they both turned gay, for example.” Lena laughed and shook her head. “No, I don’t think that would have worked,” she said. She asked the boys to call their dad to the phone. She heard Misha yelling, and then some voices in the background, Borya yelling, then puffing into the phone, after which Misha said that Dad would call her back.

There was no way to get into the woods. Lena kept peeking over, hoping to see some of those angry animals. She wondered what kind of wildlife there was. Moose? Bears? Hedgehogs? No, no hedgehogs, they were not native to these parts, she reminded herself. And even in Russia, she had only seen a hedgehog once, a few days after meeting Danya. She had thought this was some kind of a happy sign, an omen. It happened when she and Inka took the campers on a scheduled walk in the woods called an “exploring expedition.” She remembered that hike as if it happened yesterday.

The idea was to “get to the end of the woods.” They carried biscuits, cold drinking water in aluminum teakettles, and a couple of blankets to sit on. Alesha Pevtcov also carried a large jar, because he hoped to catch a frog.

After some time, they could feel that the woods were about to end. They glimpsed uncertain patches of light ahead, and the usual forest sounds changed, they seemed louder and more intense, and there were barely noticeable wafts of wind, and this strange anticipation of something impossible, something unreal, something magical. The kids got very quiet and slowed their pace. Usually, they would be trying to run ahead, and push each other and fight for the first place in line. But not now. Nobody wanted to be the first to get to the end of the woods.

Except for Lena. She wanted to reach that magical place because she thought it would match the state of mind she had entered after that evening with Danya. She was there with Inka and the kids, but she wasn’t really there. She didn’t know where she was. Nowhere and everywhere. She could feel herself diffusing into molecules and permeating everything they passed. She had never felt like that before. She was in love.

“What’s wrong with you?” Inka kept asking her, but Lena couldn’t answer. For as much as she longed to tell her about Danya, she couldn’t possibly share it.

She remembered how she took one of the kids’ hands and said: “We’re almost there. Let’s run!” And they ran until the last trees on the path opened onto a field. She yelled: “Aaa!”

And soon all the kids were running around and yelling.

“Idiots,” Inka said, stretching on the grass with an issue of Art of Cinema .

Lena stretched next to her, facing the sky. Now she knew exactly how the girl from the Song of Songs felt.

Then she closed her eyes and imagined how it would happen with Danya. This was the simplest and purest fantasy she would ever have.

She imagined herself lying on her back—very straight—with her legs open. Danya lay down on top of her. They reached the point of contact. And they both exploded. That was it. She wanted it so much, but at the same time she was so absolutely sure that she’d get it eventually, that it would happen, and that it would happen exactly like that, that she felt perfectly content.

The sound of a commotion in the bushes brought her back. The kids crowded by the blackberry bush, fighting each other to take a look at something.