Valentina, however, seems positive there is something else we should be doing, parent-wise, that we have shamefully neglected. Tears run down her flushed face as she pushes the rest of the mashed sweet potato away. She looks so miserable that it’s impossible to feel angry or annoyed. Instead guilt bears down on me. This little girl needs her mommy. Maybe she senses that’s not really me.
Paul must be thinking the exact same thing. As I brush orange mush off the loose white nightgown I tugged on this morning, he writes, I shouldn’t have taken the Nightthief. Then her father could care for her most of the time.
I shake my head no and take the pen. We need to get the stabilizer built as fast as possible. The sooner we do that, the sooner she gets her parents back. Which is all true, and I know it, but I still feel so ashamed as I look at Valentina—
—who says “Milk?”
With her hand, in sign.
“Milk?” I sign back. Valentina brightens, going from looking miserable to hopeful. I open the one small cabinet for dishes and see, on the highest shelf, a collection of bottles and nipples. By the time I turn back around with the fixed bottle of milk, Valentina is already holding out her chubby little hands. When I give it to her, I’m rewarded with the briefest of smiles before she pops it in her mouth.
Of course this Marguerite is teaching her daughter sign language, just like Paul must be teaching her how to speak. The baby is too young to talk, but apparently kids can start signing a little earlier. Paul sags against the small fridge in relief, and I can’t help laughing.
An instant later one of the small lights blinks in the corner. Frowning, Paul goes to open the door, but he smiles when he sees who’s come to visit.
“Good morning!” my mother signs to me, then stops as she takes in my nightgown, Paul’s T-shirt and boxers, and Valentina’s flushed face. Behind her is Dad, who only has eyes for his granddaughter. My parents look basically the same as if they’d come in from our living room back home, if Dad stopped to pick up a really unattractive pair of plastic-rimmed glasses along the way. Mom’s idea of dressing up is using bobby pins to hold her bun back instead of pencils. Dad’s scarf is a bold shade of blue that probably stood out like a beacon on the streets of Moscow.
I’d be touched by the way my father brushes his hand over Valentina’s head if it weren’t for what he signs next, which is approximately, “Baby pretty very. Josie said sick you?”
Mom asks, “Sick you also Paul?”
I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Grammar, in sign language, turns out to be three-dimensional; the meaning and sentence functions of the individual gestures are determined not only by the shape of the fingers or the order they come in, but the positions and movements of the hands, too. Facial expressions matter, as do the sharpness and clarity of finger movement. My parents, the mega-geniuses, have no clue about these parts of signing. Obviously they didn’t learn until they were already adults, so they never got very good at it—and as a result, now they talk to me like cavemen.
Well, I got the gist of what they were asking. “I’m fine. Lots better.” They don’t seem to have come over to check on me, though. Apparently we invited them over for breakfast, or maybe this is just something we do as a family on our days off. “But it took Valentina a long time to decide what she wanted this morning.”
Obviously my mom and dad understand sign language better than they can use it themselves. Mom smiles and leans over to kiss the top of her granddaughter’s head as Dad tells us, “You clothing we baby storage. Happy to storage.”
Storage is as close as they can come to saying keep. I beam at Paul, who is staring blankly at the people using sign. “Thanks for keeping Valentina for a little while, Mom and Dad. We’ll be right back.” With that I take Paul’s arm and pull him into the back of our apartment.
We dress in a hurry, making a mess as we go through closets and drawers to figure out where all our stuff is. As I roll thick socks up my legs, Paul pauses buttoning his shirt long enough to write, We shouldn’t tell them about the Firebirds right away.
I shake my head. No. I’m done lying to the other universes. In this one, they might even be able to help us!
This is the USSR, Paul writes. It’s a police state. Friends report on friends, and paranoia reigns. If I come across as an intruder instead of someone offering knowledge, your parents could report me.
I want to tell him they’d never do that—but Mom and Dad are profoundly shaped by their own worlds. While I think they would never betray me, I can’t be sure they’d do the same for Paul.
I could wind up in a gulag, Paul insists. I need to introduce the topic slowly. So, for a while, they need to think I’m this world’s Paul. I can talk to them in Russian—that’s the language they said hello to me in—but what if they notice I’m not signing with you?
Oh, good catch. Let’s say you hurt your hand yesterday. Nothing serious, but you need to give it a rest. That ought to work.
Neither of us acknowledges the bed filling our room, its cover and sheets still crumpled, the pillows still softly sloping in where our heads lay. What we did last night, what I said—it almost feels like a dream I had, one I wished into being. Does Paul believe me about our infinite chances, our one world? Or do the scars of his splintering, and his own terrible past, run too deep?
When we emerge, Mom and Dad are standing in the middle of the room, the weirdest expressions on their faces—somewhere between shock, fear, and amusement. Mom is holding Valentina, but at arm’s length, like she’s something they found unexpectedly. They both startle to see Paul and me, and Mom says something out loud. I don’t have any idea what. Lip reading is especially hard when you don’t know which language someone is speaking in.
Paul takes a step back, jaw dropping in surprise, which is when I see the glints of metal at my parents’ necks. Those are Firebirds. Which means the Mom and Dad from this universe just became my mom and dad, who have traveled through the dimensions at last.
Quickly I grab the pen and paper from last night, flipping over the private things I said to Paul, and write, This is Moscow. Paul and I live here and that’s Valentina. I’m deaf.
Mom and Dad look stricken, and Mom’s hand reaches toward me. Why are they so upset? They recover quickly, though. After a second my father takes the pen and writes, Is this your baby or ours? I’m not sure which possibility is more terrifying.