“My stay continues to be wonderful,” Doran said without turning around.
“You beat me to it,” said Emily, looking out at the dark lake, the deck, the forest.
“You’re a good girl.”
A breeze swept through the grass, and Emily shivered. She settled on the cold stair. “Do you remember meeting Harpo Marx?”
“I haven’t seen his films in quite some time. I do remember seeing my first one. It was A Night at the Opera. I laughed so hard I had to hold my stomach, to keep everything in. I was unspooling, I thought.”
“But you met him here,” said Emily. “That’s what everyone said.”
“I don’t remember that,” said Doran. “Was he a guest?”
“Apparently.” Maybe they hadn’t met. Maybe their stays hadn’t coincided after all. Emily let out a long breath.
“What are you working on all the time?”
“My research is in graph theory,” said Emily. “I study social networks. But I’ve been doing a lot of work on family trees as well, family connectedness. I’m using that as an illustration. I’ve made a graph for my family and one for Jonah’s. I might use Harpo Marx.” Emily saw her opening. “I even thought I could include your family too.”
“I would like that very much,” Doran said slowly. “I was hoping that you were going to be the one to help me. That’s what Blima seemed to think. She certainly has that hope as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve only traced my adoptive family.”
“Oh,” said Emily. “All I can really do is the math. I don’t know how good I am at finding people.”
“I don’t have much to go on.”
“Did you remember anything?”
“Images. Sounds. A cupboard I crawled inside. I’m caught one time. I know this because I’m pulled out, and I see the whole office whirling past me. And then a pain. I’ve been spanked. Blima saw that cupboard too. That’s the other reason I came. Verification. I wanted to know that they weren’t all dreams.”
Emily watched him carefully. Why would he think he remembered Blima’s Russian room? “Do you remember where you’re from?”
“That’s a complicated question.” Doran turned, and a spot of wet white tooth shone in the moonlight. He might have been grinning or grimacing, Emily had no way to tell. She tried to picture him as a kid inside a cupboard, saw him as long-limbed and strange, curled up like a bug and freakishly tall even then. That probably wasn’t accurate though.
“You probably can’t imagine me as a child,” said Doran.
“No,” Emily said, shaking her head fervently, hoping he couldn’t see the flush of her cheeks in the dark under the veranda. “I mean yes. Of course—”
“But I was,” said Doran. “I was a child then.”
A breeze rifled thought the long grasses. Emily watched them shush each other and bow. For a moment, they just watched the grasses dance.
“Ayala came to our apartment,” Doran said finally.
“What?”
“I remember. I’m sure of it now.”
Emily shifted, looked at the doorway, at the light that was warm-looking and orange that shone out of the room of windows. She could hear a tinny sort of music too. Had they known each other in Russia after all?
“I have a father and a mother,” he said. “For as long as I remember, when I’m upset or alone, I say their names to myself. Simon and Ekaterina. In the worst times, I’ve whispered their names out loud. But never when anyone else was present.”
“Do you remember a last name?”
“They’re saying those names to each other, giants standing in a hallway. They’re angry. I’m afraid.”
“You have first names,” said Emily. “That might help.” But how could it?
“I didn’t take my adoptive parents’ last name.”
“Oh!” said Emily. “Right. Simon Baruch. Ekaterina Baruch. Okay. I’ll look. I’ll see what I can do. But I should warn you that I haven’t found anything at all yet.” And she’d already looked for Doran Baruch and hadn’t found him, so what were the odds of finding Simon or Ekaterina? “What do you remember from the lodge?”
“Sonja,” Doran said simply.
“That’s so lovely.” And it was. It was romantic. But he was having trouble connecting with her now. He slipped out of rooms right as soon as she walked in them. “Why did she mean so much to you?”
“Whenever I was with her, I felt like family.”
“Do you still feel that way?”
“Maybe I should just talk to her?”
Emily nodded. He made it sound so simple. Maybe it was that easy to reconnect.
“You and I,” said Doran. “We overthink.”
“Yes,” whispered Emily. “And you can’t turn that stuff off.”
“That’s right.”
They sat in silence, Emily shivering, Doran thinking, about what Emily couldn’t fathom. She pictured monsters made of food, terrifying shadows, ghosts. Then Doran stood. He walked into the house, and she heard the low sounds of voices, Doran’s and Sonja’s. He was doing it. So she stood too.
Emily wandered around the side of the house. If Doran could do it, then she could do it. Friendship was easy. And she loved Jonah. That’s all that mattered. Plus, they’d been getting so much closer in the last couple of days. She saw Jonah crouched in the shadows by the side of the lodgehouse, moving around, working on something, she couldn’t see what. “Hey,” she called out. “What are you always up to out here?”
“Nothing,” said Jonah. He stood. “Don’t go for a walk tonight.”
“Why?”
“Tell me about the mystery,” he said, grunting, from what possible exertions, Emily didn’t know.
“Okay,” she said, holding onto the banister, and trying to see him, to catch even just a glimpse in the dark. “We have three family trees: mine, yours and Doran’s. They’re not connected biologically, but apparently they met all at roughly the same time. And it was one person who introduced them, our families at least.”
“Was it the same person who introduced all three?”
“That I don’t know,” said Emily.
Then there were just snapping branches in the dark of the forest. And then, “You’ve been researching Harpo Marx too,” Jonah said softly.
“He was here in 1933,” said Emily. “I wanted to see whether the lodge is mentioned in any of the books.”
“Is it?”
“I haven’t found it so far.”
“The lodge would have had to have been influenced by him.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Emily, but it was true. There would be echoes of his presence here.
“What was Harpo up to, in that time?”
“Oh, that’s smart,” said Emily. “Let’s make him a timeline.”
“Maybe you should work on that by yourself.”
And then Emily heard something, a splash by Jonah. “What are you doing over there?”
“Nothing,” Jonah said quickly.
Emily waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t. Maybe he didn’t want to spend time with her after all. She turned and went inside.
Then Emily was in the room of windows, searching, pulling books off of bookshelves and flipping through the pages, and then, just as suddenly, she was caught. Blima took her arm. “I helped Harpo write letters,” she said, steering her into the kitchen. “You wanted to hear things about the family. This is something I remember. I helped Harpo with his romance. He was sitting by the waterfall. No. He was sitting by the dock.”
“Who was he writing to?”
“Susan Fleming.”
“His wife!”
“Not yet she wasn’t. But do you know what else I just remembered? His name. In Cyrillic, Harpo’s name looks like it spells Exapno Mapcase.” She wrote the word on a napkin.
“Could you tell me a lodge love story now?”
“You should go to bed.”
“Sonja used to date a different boy every night,” said Emily. “But then she fell in love with Daniel. Sonja started standing up all her other dates to see him. Then he stopped showing up, and Sonja stopped going out altogether, because she was waiting for him. She cried all the time, had red eyes and a runny nose and pretended to be sick with the flu. Finally, my great-uncle knocked on the door, except, instead of roses, he brought a box of tissues. Then he gave her another box. He’d only left so that he could buy her a ring.”
“It is a good story, isn’t it?” and Blima said nothing else. And Emily realized that she wasn’t going to.