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Zenya was two-and-a-half when two very strange people came to visit her orphanage. They talked funny, as if almost able to speak properly, but with such horrible accents it was difficult to understand them. She assumed they were stupid. Gloopy, in Russian. They were there to see her, though – just her! – so she let it go.
She was devastated when they stopped coming after just one week. It was not fair! They had been coming every day, and she had bows in her hair and wore a pretty dress every time! She thought they were The Ones! Guess not.
After a couple months – forever at that age – the memory of her visitors faded as that infamous Russian winter approached and she blended back into daily life at Dome Rebyenka (Baby Home) No. 1 on the outskirts of town. Someday, she knew, she would have her very own grown-ups to take care of her. She just knew it! They needed to hurry up, though.
Sure enough, one day as she and a dozen other children sat in kid-sized chairs along the back wall, those same two wonderful strangers reappeared.
Smiles all around lit up the playroom. Zenya’s exuberance then collapsed into a withering pout as she remembered the abandonment last time. They better not do that again!
She waited to see their reaction to this pout. And, satisfied that her point had been made, she allowed one of the caregivers to walk her across the room to her visitors.
Her gray eyes looked deep into those of her visitors, and she allowed herself a controlled smile. She was still unsure about them. Spying a stuffed toy on a shelf to her right, she tried to reach it. The strange man smiled as he grabbed it for her. She had already lost interest, but found a colorful book behind him on another shelf and tried to reach that. This time, it was the woman who got it for her.
Zenya took the book, turned a couple of pages as if studying its contents, then dropped it on the floor for the woman to pick up. It was the grown-ups’ job to put things back on the shelves.
Her eyes twinkled with delight upon realizing all she had to do was point at various items beyond her reach – even the ones she didn't care for – and her visitors would dutifully give them to her.
The power she had over these people was intoxicating! She would remember this. Always. Especially the part about letting them clean up after her.
When the man asked in that strange accent, "Tee hoachesh eegrut?" (You want to play?), she of course said, "Da!" (Yes!) And that was when she knew she had found her forever parents.
Her world – the world – was once again as it should be!
Halfway into the long drive back from Louisville to Saint Louis, Clay Desno is looking forward to a hot shower and cold beer. He has just bought a brand new Chevy Silverado pickup, fully loaded, and is following the dealer's advice to keep his speed down until the odometer reaches at least 500 miles.
He's never had a brand new car before. Always used. Then again, he's never done so well playing the ponies before.
On a whim Friday afternoon, he drove the four hours it takes to get to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby. Saturdays are usually game days for the minor league soccer team he coaches, but his team had a bye/day off, so he took the opportunity, after all these years as a fan, to attend the Derby in person.
It was all too last-minute to get a seat in the grandstands, and he resigned himself to suffering through the drunken buffoonery of the infield crowd. There was a time when he would have fit right in with these folks but, after meeting and marrying Pamela, he cleaned up his act.
The crowd was not so bad once he got into the swing of things. His winnings for the day – thanks to a tip from a racing stable employee – were so good he splurged on a new pickup truck on his way back to the hotel. As he told the happy salesman, "You only live once, right?!"
Worried about parking his new toy overnight in the hotel lot, exposed, Clay considered driving all night to get home, but decided against it. He would just have to risk it, and get a fresh start in the morning.
He is feeling pretty good about life now. Playing the ponies. Buying a new truck. Singing along to Tom Petty's American Girl as he heads home. Basically, doing whatever he wants because Pamela is no longer there to say otherwise.
When his phone rings, he sees that it’s Pamela. He is tempted to let it go to voicemail, but finally turns the radio down and answers.
"Hello?"
"Have you seen Jenna?!" Pamela shrieks on the other end, not bothering to say hello.
"I've been out of town," he exhales. He wants to ask what sort of knock-down, drag-out fight she and their daughter have gotten into now. They have been at each other's throats almost constantly the past few years. Instead, he says, "She's probably just out with friends. Want me to try calling her?"
"Could you? I thought she might have gone to the Derby with you, but... she's not with you, is she?"
"Wait, let me check under the seat," he rolls his eyes. "No, Pam, she's not here with me."
"Okay, well, I haven't seen or heard from her…" she hesitates, "since yesterday."
"Yesterday?!" Clay grips the steering wheel tighter. "And you're only now calling?! She could be…!"
"I know, I know. Please just come home, Mud Man?"
After hanging up, he shakes his head. He should have known it would come to this. His two favorite people on the planet have been fighting like cats since Jenna hit her teens, and he has been playing referee. Almost to the day since she hit thirteen it was like a switch had flipped and she became the hellion that she is today.
Mud Man was a play on the name Clay that Pamela came up with early in their relationship. More recently it's used only when she needs to soften him up.
His own relationship with their daughter has not been much better than Pamela’s, but at least there's less drama. When those two go at it, household items tend to get airborne.
Before he knows it, Clay has his new Silverado doing 90 miles an hour, headed west.
As he pulls into the driveway of Pamela's house in the Glendale suburb of Saint Louis – his old house – Clay doesn't notice the unmarked, unoccupied Crown Victoria on the street. He pulls in behind Pamela’s car, gets out, and takes his usual shortcut to the porch, the space between the driveway and first of three rose bushes. Everyone else uses the paved walkway to the door. It is only a few extra feet, but Clay likes to cut through the bushes. The first time Pamela saw him do it, she let it go. After the third or fourth time, she made him put down octagonal pea-gravel steps in that space so he would at least not track dirt into the house.
Without knocking, he bursts through the door, only to be confronted by Police Detectives Wilson and Cheval. The latter pulls his gun.
Standing behind Cheval, Pamela shouts, "Don't shoot him! Not fatally, anyway." She moves to place a hand on the detective's shoulder, then stops for fear that he might pull the trigger. "This," she explains, "is the ex-husband I've been talking about."
"Not officially exes yet, Pam," Clay smiles and raises his hands in the air. "And don't believe whatever she says about me, officers."
"Detectives," Cheval corrects him and slides his gun back into its holster.
"Any word yet on Jenna?" Clay asks. “She hasn't returned my calls or texts." He almost adds "I'm getting worried" but doesn't come right out and say that. There is this thing that comes over a man when dealing with other men, especially strangers, in front of his wife or girlfriend. He feels the need to be strong, unwavering, impervious, and not look weak.
In answer to his question, Pam shakes her head. She has not heard anything further.
"Anyone check her bedroom?" he continues. "Recently? She might've snuck back in. It's what I used to do at that age." Pamela raises an eyebrow at this tidbit from Clay's past. When both detectives stare blankly at him, he shakes his head and says, "I'll go look."
Detective Wilson – the taller, thinner, blonde and slightly older of the two – puts up a hand and says with a friendly smile, "We only just got here ourselves, Mr. Denso…"
"Desno," Clay corrects him automatically, used to the mispronunciation.
"I'll go check," Wilson continues. “You stay here."
Watching the man climb the stairs, Clay feels useless. I need to be doing something! his mind screams. He and Pamela never installed tracking software on Jenna’s phone. They thought they could trust her. Big mistake. Since she went missing, they have been calling everyone they can think of. No luck.
Clay flops onto the couch. Pamela gives an exasperated look. She always hated that, complaining more than once over the years, "Can't you be more civilized? You're like a teenager."
To this, he would usually shrug, which infuriated her even more. She is holding her tongue now, choosing to glare at him as she and Detective Cheval stand together at the dining room table.
"What?" Clay asks under the weight of her stare. She shakes her head and looks for something else to glare at.
Detective Cheval picks up where she left off, and a staring contest ensues between him and Clay. The latter is the first to look away.
As he turns away and rolls his eyes, he realizes the couch is new. All the furniture is. Tufted upholstery, it's called, though to him it simply looks old-fashioned. There is a new coat of paint on the walls, too. A soft yellow has replaced the light brown.
Returning his attention to his estranged wife, Clay decides that it’s nice to see her again, despite the circumstances. It’s been months since they were in the same room together. He almost forgot how much he loved those intelligent blue eyes (in happier times), that smiling face, and her long mane of wavy auburn hair now pulled back in a ponytail. He cannot help but smile, if fleetingly, forgetting for a moment all the reasons they are no longer together.
It is Pamela's turn to snap in response to being stared at. "What?!"
Clay recoils.
She hadn't meant to snap at him, but Detective Cheval's hand had brushed up against her butt cheek just prior and she was trying to decide if it was an accident and whether or not she should allow herself to enjoy it.
Clay focuses on the décor. There is a black and white family portrait on the wall, featuring a smiling Pamela and Jenna… but no Clay. He turns back toward her just as Cheval is pulling out a chair for her to sit at the dining room table.
Pamela smiles warmly before casting a smirk and an arched eyebrow at Clay.
At some point while racing over here, Clay found himself looking forward to saving the day. Finding Jenna. Being the hero. Pamela's hero… somehow, only to be beaten to the punch by this Cheval dude.
Even Clay can see that she is moving on with her life. Too many angry words had passed between them. She is now buying new furniture, posing for family portraits without him, flirting with other knights in shinier armor.
"Why call me," he asks as Cheval takes a seat next to her, "if you're just gonna call the cops, anyway?"
"I'm sorry," Pamela is sarcastic, "should I not have called you?! When I searched the entire house, looking for her, thinking she'd been… kidnapped," she barely gets that word out without crying, "I called everyone!"
"Come on, you two," Cheval plays mediator with a friendly pat on her hand. "This is not helping. Your daughter is missing. We need to work together."
Pamela nods and takes a firm grasp of the detective's hand. Clay studies them. They are awfully chummy, making him wonder what transpired between them before he arrived. The man is younger and better-looking than Clay, but he would be the first to admit that's a low bar these days.
Clean-shaven with short dark-brown hair and eyes, Cheval has squeezed his athletic frame into a dark gray suit, lavender shirt, top button undone, no tie, and – as Clay can see under the table – matching lavender socks. Like Crockett or Tubbs from Miami Vice twenty years ago, Clay thinks. That look might still work in south Florida but this is suburban Saint Louis. Maybe he's gay!
Clay decides the partner, Detective Wilson – dark blue slacks, plaid tie, white short-sleeved shirt and no jacket – looks like a Mormon missionary or someone from 1960s corporate America.
As Wilson descends the stairs, Cheval asks, "Anything?"
Wilson shakes his head, "no."
"Would you care to join us at the table?" Cheval asks Clay politely, despite the palpable tension between them. "We have a few questions."
"No, I'm good here," Clay says from the couch, just to be difficult. He knows they are only doing their jobs, but this whole thing has him on edge.
Wilson slides into a chair at the foot of the stairs, strategically positioning himself between Clay and the front door.
Clay keeps an eye on Cheval's hands under the table. He guesses he'll be the one to play "bad cop" but is disappointed when there is no such charade. Both detectives are irritatingly polite and professional throughout the questioning.
"When did you leave town?" one of them asks Clay.
"Where have you been?" asks the other.
"Why Louisville?"
"Seems like a long way to go to buy a new car."
"What do you do for a living?"
"Didn't know there was a local minor league soccer team to be head coach of," Cheval says with a smirk.
Detective Wilson ends with, "Please don't leave town again until Jenna is found."
With all questions more or less answered, the detectives fold up their notepads and prepare to leave.
Clay finds it odd that Cheval, a detective, would be unaware of his soccer team, or any semi-pro sports team in town. He lets it go and disappears into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. “These guys need to be out looking for Jenna," he mutters aloud to no one, “not asking stupid questions and implying that I'm a suspect!"
The detectives assure Pamela they will be "looking into the matter" as she walks them to the door. Cheval leans in conspiratorially and hands Pamela his business card.
"Call me any time," he says with a smile.
Wilson cringes at his partner's incessant womanizing. Pamela is flattered, but in no mood to be womanized.
Wilson picks up the soda can Clay was drinking from and seals it in a baggie to test later for fingerprints and DNA.
Pamela hears the back screen door slap up against its frame. Did Clay just escape out the back?
The detectives had been treating him like a suspect, but she never considered him one until just this moment. Clay loved their little girl more than anything on Earth, but he also had a temper. It never got to the point of violence but could be pretty scary, nonetheless.
She now wonders if he had anything to do with Jenna's disappearance. It is suspicious how he just happened to be out of town when she went missing.
She is about to express her concerns to the detectives when the front door bursts open. Jenna has returned. Laughing and stumbling over each other as they enter, blonde-haired Jenna and her mostly-brunette posse pull up short upon seeing the somber adults in front of them in the foyer.
Pamela closes her eyes briefly in relief and exclaims, "Jenna!" Toward the heavens, she mouths, Thank you! She would hug and kiss her wayward daughter but knows she would be mortified by such overt affection in front of her friends. Pamela is left standing there bursting at the seams with joy.
The still-giggling Jenna points at the detectives and asks, "So, what's with the 5-O?"
Pamela despises this thug-speak that Jenna uses when hanging out with friends, but says nothing.
"You must be Jenna," Detective Cheval oozes what he thinks is charm. "And I see you're wearing a green silky top, and white Capri pants."
Jenna gives him a dirty look and steps away from him.
"Your mother," Detective Wilson explains with a laugh, "couldn't remember exactly what you were wearing. My partner here is not as creepy as he sounds. Not this time." He winks at the now-cringing Cheval.
Jenna nods absently. With her pretty face, blonde hair, and now-green eyes – they had changed over the years from gray – she is used to men giving her lascivious looks.
Noticing the body language and look on her mother's face, Jenna asks, "Whoa, who died?"
"No one, honey," Pamela says with a laugh, unable to keep from hugging her. "And no one has ever been happier to have their little girl back home!"
"Geez, mom," Jenna is thoroughly embarrassed, as expected.
"Jenna!" Clay rushes into the living room with a shout.
"Dad!" she is surprised. "I didn't know you were home! I saw your truck but thought it was Barry's." The name Barry drips with derision. "I usually try to sneak in when he's around. Talk about creepy."
Pamela wonders what Barry has ever done to creep Jenna out, but says nothing. There is no hesitation from Jenna as she and her father rush into each other's arms and hug tightly.
Clay lifts her off her feet and spins her around like a child.
Pamela knows Jenna has always preferred Clay over her from the moment they met at the orphanage, but in all these years – with people saying "She's just a daddy's girl! It's normal!" – it has never gotten any easier to accept. After failing to conceive their own child, it was Pamela's idea to adopt a child, after all, not Clay's. If either of them should be second fiddle, it should be Clay.
"Who's Barry?" Clay asks Pamela, mimicking Jenna's inflection as he sets her back down. Jenna throws her father's hands out to his sides and pirouettes away like a ballerina like when she was small. Suddenly remembering her audience, she self-consciously glances out the corner of her eye to her friends smirking.
"Just someone I've been spending time with," Pamela says. She is in no mood for a public discussion of her love life.
"A lot of time," Jenna adds with a smile.
"Anyway," Clay changes the subject. He doesn't want to hear about Pamela's love life, either. "Where have you been this whole time, Jenna? We've been worried sick!"
"Good to see you, too, Dad!"
"You know I love you, honey," Clay continues, "but you've done this, what, three times now? Do we have to send you to a boarding school where there's no chance of escape?"
"How about prison?!" she counters, sneaking a smile at her friends. "The cops are already here. I'll just go with them!"
"Works for me!" Clay says. He is angry but does not mean a word of it. He is looking for a reaction from Pamela when he realizes her hair is not pulled into a ponytail. It's twelve inches shorter. "Your hair! You chopped it completely off!"
"Not completely," Pamela replies with a smile. "You like it?" She knew he wouldn't.
"I told her not to do it," Jenna adds, happy to deflect attention away from herself.
Detective Wilson shakes his head and interjects. "If there's nothing else, Ms. McGill…?"
"'McGill?!'"Clay scoffs. "You've gone back to your maiden name already?!"
Pamela shrugs, hoping it irritates Clay as much as his own irritate her.
With the detectives and Jenna's friends gone, Clay and Pamela are sitting on opposite ends of the same couch. Jenna is draped sideways across one of the chairs, with her legs dangling over the side. Normally, Pamela would complain about this abuse of her new furniture, but she is too drained to argue.
"We're still going to Russia, right?" Jenna sits up to broach the subject of their impending "homeland tour." They are due to leave next week, and she cannot hide her excitement.
"Ah, geez," says Clay. "Let us recover from this latest drama before we have to think about that?"
He is not looking forward to returning to a country he never enjoyed in the first place. He was beginning to hope this little episode would be an excuse to call the whole thing off.
To be fair to Russia, Clay knows he must never forget that their visits were not vacations. Not even business trips. They were for the purpose of adopting a child – a beautiful little girl – and came with an inordinate amount of stress, uncertainty, and time spent dealing with Russia's infamous bureaucracy. He and Pamela were too focused on the adoption process to properly appreciate their host country as tourists.
They both laughed, though, at how well their experience summed up Russia itself: You never know what you'll get. Or, as Winston Churchill said, "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
They had gone over there expecting to meet and adopt a brown-haired four-year-old boy, only to end up with a two-year-old blonde girl. And, while Clay was pleasantly surprised at the time, Pamela was ecstatic. Beyond ecstatic.
During that final visit – after the court appearance in which the adoption was approved – they had to endure two weeks of limbo holed up in their hotel waiting for the official paperwork to be finalized. They convinced themselves that those two weeks were a ploy by the government to keep adoptive parents "in country" and spending as much money as possible.
On the flight home and still recovering from the ordeal, Pamela suggested they convince their daughter she was born in The Bahamas so they could "return" there when the time came for this homeland tour. She was joking. Clay thought it was a great idea.
Years later during Jenna's rebellious teen phase before they separated, Clay said to Pamela, "Maybe we should've lied to her from the start."
"To who? About what?"
"To Jenna about being her adoptive parents. Not just your joke about saying she was born in The Bahamas, but we should have made up an elaborate story and told her we are her birth parents but had to leave her behind while on a secret mission somewhere. We're spies, you see," he continued the fantasy while Pamela listened, politely incredulous, "and we had dangerous work to do but didn't want her to get hurt. We just happened to be in Russia when she was born, so that's where we placed her."
Pamela thought this was stupid. "Well, for one, she would have asked years later why we didn't at least drop her in the south of France or somewhere nicer than Russia. She would have hated us for dropping her anywhere! Either way, what good would it do to make up a story like that?"
"A lot of our problems with her, mainly the defiance, might stem from a certain lack of respect. Remember I told you about one of the Russian hotel maids having a conversation with Jenna? I didn't understand most of it, but after one question, Jenna looked at me and said ‘gloopy,’ which means "stupid" in Russian. I could tell by the woman's reaction she was embarrassed for me. ‘Gloopy’ was definitely directed at us, or at least me."
"I'd forgotten about that," Pamela nodded.
"It's like we're not entirely legitimate in her eyes because we're 'only' her adoptive parents. Like students with a substitute teacher, or players with an interim coach. Know what I mean? If we had her believing from the start that we were her birth parents, it might've helped. That's all I'm saying."
"So, you're a psychologist now?" she teased.
"Actually, as a head coach, I have to be part psychotherapist."
"I think you're reading too much into that 'gloopy' thing, but it's a moot point. And, from everything I've read about adoption, honesty is the best policy. You just tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may."
In Pamela's living room now, Clay shakes his head and says to Jenna, "Think about it, honey. The three of us… together in Russia… after all this?"
"I'm with your father on this," Pamela says. "I don't even want to think about that right now."
"You see there?!" Jenna laughs. "I've already got you two agreeing on something! I should be a marriage counselor! But, seriously, it's all arranged and paid for. We can't back out now!"
Clay knows she's right. He had concerns about the trip before any of this latest drama, but there is no point worrying aloud and putting such thoughts out there. It’s like one of his soccer matches. As coach, he makes a plan and sets goals. Once the game starts, though, you just deal with whatever comes up, make adjustments and hope for the best. That's all he can do here.
Clay is back at the soccer fields the next day. As his players perform drills nearby, he and the other coaches shout corrections and encouragement at them, interspersed between Clay telling his coaches every possible thing they might need to know in his absence. When one of the players misses a wide-open header into the net, Clay shouts "You can do better, Justin! See the ball, be the ball!"
He is still shaking his head when another unwelcome call from Pamela comes in. She again forgoes the customary hello and announces, "I won't be making the trip. Sorry, but you and Jenna will be on your own in Russia. I feel terrible, but there's no way around it."
"What?!" Clay snaps before lowering his voice and walking away, out of earshot. "How convenient. Now you, Barry, and Miami Vice can have quality time together while your daughter and I try to survive on the other side of the world."
Clay always regrets such outbursts, but she caught him at work in "coach" mode. If a key player had come to him just prior to a match with such an excuse, the words out of his mouth would have been a lot worse.
"A little melodramatic, aren't we?" Pamela says with a smirk. "It's not a war zone over there in Russia. And what does Miami Vice have to do with anything?"
He ignores this, now thinking how, as a head coach, he is good at dealing with young men, not women, especially his head-strong drama queen young daughter. He is more upset at the thought of being alone with Jenna, having to handle her all by himself, so far from home. If there was one thing he and Pamela always agreed on, it was that it was best to have their little darling outnumbered. Double-teamed, as he put it. That concept alone might have been what kept the unhappy couple together longer than they might have otherwise.
More than anything else, he wanted this homeland tour to double as a marriage reconciliation tour. As he hangs up, Clay makes a mental note to stop saying things he later regrets. He thought he overcame this failing years ago. Apparently not, but he does give himself credit for recognizing the problem. And that, as they say, is the first step toward recovery.
Until his daughter came into his life, he almost never acknowledged having any character flaws. But, like a walking, talking, full-length mirror, Jenna made him painfully aware over the years – through words and actions coming from her but recognized as originating from himself – of a wide variety of unsightly personality blemishes.
He knew he had to do better.
On departure day, Jenna is in the shower when Clay comes to pick her up. That girl lives in the shower, he thinks. He once looked forward to a much lower water bill after she moved out, but now that is Pamela's problem.
He kills time snooping around her bedroom; nothing too intrusive, just your normal parental snooping. She has left a Russian genealogy web page up on her computer screen. It is written in Cyrillic, which might as well be hieroglyphics to Clay. On a scratch pad to the right of the keyboard Jenna has scrawled several names, also in Cyrillic; some scratched out, some circled.
She always had a knack for languages. She was speaking fluent Russian when they met her, after all, then switched to English impressively fast during her first year in the States. Clay thought she had lost her Russian language skills, but she has done well relearning it.
She comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel just as Clay is trying to get a closer look at her Cyrillic scribbling. "A little privacy, please!" she snaps and quickly turns off the monitor and flips the notepad face-down with one hand while keeping her towel up with the other.
"OK," he puts his hands up in surrender. "But, is there anything you need to tell me? You know I hate surprises, especially in foreign countries."
"Nothing at all!" she says a little too forcefully. "Why do you ask?"
"Who's Maksim?" he asks. He had deciphered that much from her scribbling. The fact that it was underlined several times brought it to his attention.
"Just this guy," she says unconvincingly, with a guilty look. "A pen pal helping me to learn Russian."
It is obvious she is not being completely forthcoming, but Clay lets it go. Girls like to have their little secrets. Let her have this one. It can't be anything too terrible.
Hey, just trying to make a living.
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