As Emily crept out of her bedroom, she heard a sound, an angry kind of humming, but it was early, and what could account for that kind of noise? So she galloped up the stairs, taking two at a time, her heart beating to the rhythm of her footsteps. When she got to the landing, she saw Blima standing in the hallway with the vacuum cleaner. The noise was the vacuum.
Emily shrank into the doorway. She’d wanted to find Blima. She’d woken up with questions, wanted to know about Doran’s story, the package she kept hearing about. But Blima was busy. This was a private moment. She shouldn’t intrude.
Emily found herself looking around the wall. Blima was swinging that vacuum cleaner right in front of the students’ room, Ryan and Amy’s, closer and closer to their door each time. When Blima saw Emily, she waved. Her face was open and shining, and she was smiling wider than Emily had ever seen. Her expression was joyous.
Emily ran down the stairs, to where Jonah was fiddling with something behind the desk.
“Blima’s vacuuming,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Jonah. “She does that.”
“Upstairs.”
“She likes to pretend that she’s saving them from sin.”
Emily craned her neck, to see the stairway again. “Because I didn’t vacuum well enough?”
“Premarital sex.” Jonah held up a lamp. “Do you like it?”
“Pardon me?” she said, feeling herself blush hotly.
“I tied a bow.” Jonah fidgeted with the pink ribbon, and Emily saw that it was the same lamp from the day before.
“Oh,” said Emily. “That lamp. Ryan’s lamp.”
“Yeah.”
“But it isn’t working, is it?”
Jonah thrust it into her arms. “She’s been asking about you. She likes you.”
“Jazzy.” Emily stroked the glass cover. It was a cute little thing, if you forgot its practical uses. It looked kind of like an alien, like it had a lopsided little eye. “She misses me,” she said, “clearly.”
“Yes,” said Jonah. “Clearly.”
Emily hugged little Jazzy close to her. She tried to imagine that it was Jonah, but it was hard, because Jazzy was incredible bumpy. He’d tied a bow around her though. He’d remembered stuff from when they were young. That had to mean something.
Emily propped up her graphs and got to work like an adult. Well, she squinted at what she’d already written. It was a start anyway. And it was remarkable how little information family trees really captured. They didn’t tell the reader who’d been involved in whose lives, for a start, who’d influenced whom. For example, she was connected only to her mother and father on the diagram, but really, she was pairwise connected to her grandmother as well, and that relationship was a significant one. It was Blima who’d explained her mother’s moodiness, told her about sex and reproduction, and given Emily her first cup of coffee. She’d spent more time here than with her parents, growing up. And she was pairwise connected to Great-grandma Ayala as well, and they used to hide together, like under tables and in sofa forts—Ayala’s idea, not hers. They’d watched Marx Brothers movies and giggled.
That was weird in retrospect. Ayala had told her everything about Harpo—everything but the most important thing: that she’d known him. Something was missing.
Emily made a new graph, and this one had Harpo at the centre. Then she drew more vertices, everyone who had known him at the lodge—Blima, Ayala, Sam, Moshe. Now Doran. That connection was a maybe. These people weren’t biologically related, but related by influence, so she connected them all with dotted lines, from Harpo to all of them. Then Emily filled in all the other graphs with dotted lines too, from Blima, Sonja, Ayala, and Moshe too, all to her. They were edges of influence, though, so they should really be directional. So she drew in arrows. They terminated at her, the one who’d been changed. Because people changed.
In fact, everything should change, including, say, search patterns. This was stupid. The Mormons couldn’t be the only ones interested in genealogy. Emily turned on her computer, opened a search page and looked for everything having to do with births and deaths in Russia, searched for anything having to do with genealogy there at all.
Jonah looked over her shoulder. “Find anything?”
“I’m making progress now,” said Emily. “I’ve moved on from the Mormons. There are loads of message boards around. Here’s one where they call themselves the cemetery men. They’ve photographed a bunch of cemeteries in the town where my family came from, every tombstone.”
“Are the pictures posted?”
“Just a couple. They say that they’ll send the rest if you ask. I’m asking. We’ll see if they respond.”
“This is fun.” Jonah sat down beside her. He smelled like oranges.
“We can look at other message boards too,” said Emily as a feeling swelled in her stomach, the feeling of a tree growing roots, a cup overflowing, what Blima called awash with happiness.
Jonah pulled her chair closer, and they were on the trail, together, just like when they’d been little.