Other Resort Cities

Three days after she gets back from Russia with Natalya, her adopted daughter, Tania knows that she’s made a mistake. It’s ten in the morning and they’re walking through the new New York, New York Casino, Tania pointing out how the faux Statue of Liberty out front is actually half the scale of the real statue, how when Tania’s ancestral family first came to America, they actually came right past the Statue of Liberty, too. How the casino floor is actually a replica of Central Park, right down to the trees and the piped-in bird noises.

Seventy-two hours into their new life together and Tania has already run out of conversation topics, is now making things up as she goes along, this word “actually” creeping back into her vocabulary for the first time since the year she spent lying to everyone. How old was she then? Sixteen or seventeen, though she could have been fifteen or eighteen. It may have been longer than a year. It may have actually been a period. Back then, she lied because she had nothing else to say, nothing interesting whatsoever, and frequently told stories to her friends about actually spending a year in England when she was ten, or how her real father was actually Walter Cronkite, because it was better than simply being someone’s second daughter.

But now here it is, the last Saturday in March 1997, and she is thirty-five years old and telling lies to her own child only to avoid the realization that this whole adoption, the entire process of bringing Natalya to the States, must have been folly on her part.

“Some,” Natalya says. It’s one of about fifty English words Tania has grown tired of hearing since first meeting Natalya in Russia last month. Before actually adopting Natalya, after having only seen her photo and reading her letters (which, she knows now, Natalya never actually wrote, but were likely form letters with blanks for specific U.S. cities and American names), Tania envisioned that Natalya, though already twelve, would have an infantlike personality filled with abject need and wonder, such that every moment would be like a revelation to the girl. Tania would keep a scrapbook with pictures of “Natalya’s first Big Mac” and “Natalya’s bicycle,” and eventually it would just say “Nat’s” this and “ Nat ’s” that as things got more personal.

Instead she discovered this . . . girl, this half-woman, who wanted nothing but to be left alone, who had spent most every night on the Internet chatting with friends in Russia or crying, and who never directly addressed Tania at all. But Tania isn’t even sure what she’d like Natalya to call her. The word “mom” has so many connotations she’s simply not comfortable with, plus there’s the issue that Natalya still remembers her own mother, who, if the people at the orphanage in Russia are to be believed, was a scientist. The orphanage told Tania that both of Natalya’s parents were scientists who died in a car accident en route to a very prestigious conference. At the time, this fact gave Tania a sense of true ebullience: My daughter might be a scientist, too!

Now, though, she doubts any of it might be true. Scientists, particularly ones who attended prestigious conferences, probably had extended families, probably wouldn’t have left Natalya in an orphanage in Tula for nine years while she waited to be adopted by an American.

“I didn’t know there were Mexicans in Russia,” Tania says, but Natalya doesn’t respond. She’s learned already that Natalya has no ear for sarcasm yet, that her limited sum of English is based mostly on basic human services like eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom, her most complex sentence to date being the one she uttered as their plane circled Las Vegas three nights ago: Why so many lights? she asked. “It’s so people can see that they’re having a good time,” Tania told her, but that didn’t seem to satisfy Natalya. She spread her fingers out across the window, blocking out entire swatches of the city, so that all that was visible were the Red Rock Mountains and the muted lights of the city’s suburban sprawl. “Better,” she said.

Every ten minutes, another plane swoops over the Taco Bell on Maryland Parkway either en route to or just taking off from McCarron Airport. Outside, where Tania and Natalya are sitting eating their tacos in silence, Tania watches how Natalya follows the path of each plane with her eyes. Her expression remains fairly placid, but Tania thinks the girl shows a bit more sadness for each plane that lands, though she recognizes immediately how stupid that is. The girl is sad about everything. It’s impossible she’s now assigned metaphors for her sadness, at least not ones as absurd as Southwest planes, particularly since one of those planes will deliver Tania’s own parents within the hour. “We can’t wait to meet our granddaughter,” Joan, Tania’s mother, said on the phone the day previous. “We’re bringing all the old scrapbooks so she can see pictures of you when you were a little girl. Won’t she get a kick out of that?”

“They’re just pictures,” Joan said. “Don’t you think she’ll want to see what her mother was like when she was twelve? I remember when you came home from spending the summer with your Nana and couldn’t wait to tell me about seeing pictures of me in bobby socks and a poodle skirt.”

The problem for Tania is not the concept that she’s now Natalya’s mother, but rather the execution. Natalya is nothing like her, there’s no seed of similarity to grasp yet that binds her to Natalya apart from the curve of the girl’s upper lip. It was the first thing Tania noticed when the orphanage in Russia sent her those first photos a year ago. The photos were several years old and showed Natalya posed around a metal jungle gym. In each, Natalya had either a piece of candy or an ice cream cone in her hand and was dressed in an adorable red velvet outfit. Her face was so alive in those photos, her smile nothing short of infectious, and her lip, the way it moved into a soft point when she was particularly happy in those shots. How many people had Tania ever made that happy, ever? To be able to give this child the chance to make that face . . . it overwhelmed Tania, to the point that she printed out those photos and showed them to the other cocktail girls at the Mirage, told them, “This is my daughter,” and when they asked if she lived with an ex or something, Tania just nodded. Something. Certainly something.

But the face in those early pictures is lost now beneath too much makeup—she’d have to make Natalya wash her face before the parents landed—and a scowl so persistent that Tania has begun to think that perhaps there was a clerical mistake somewhere in the process and that she was allowed to adopt the wrong child. Somewhere in Tula, Russia, is a happy girl with the same cute little lip Natalya has, and she’s waiting patiently for Tania to return and rectify the situation.

Tania had failed to consider that the years between when those first photos were taken and now would have aged Natalya. She knew it rationally, of course; knew that adopting a twelve-year-old girl came with its own specific set of problems. But Tania couldn’t stand the idea of being one of those forty-year-old women still toting around an infant like an accessory. She imagined Natalya as an instant friend, as well as someone she could actually talk to, but also as a child who would need her. The first time she actually saw Natalya in Tula, however, she realized how juvenile her thinking had been: Natalya was sitting at a picnic table not far from the jungle gym in the old photos, reading aloud from a picture book to three small boys, and even from her vantage point fifty yards away, Tania could tell that Natalya had presence, personality, a life.

Natalya cocks her head, as if to make sure she’s heard correctly, but doesn’t answer right away. Tania isn’t sure how much English Natalya actually knows. The people at the orphanage said she was “75 percent fluent,” which Tania thought was fairly remarkable in light of how many people she knew in Las Vegas who were probably closer to 50 percent and held management positions at the hotel. What she’s learned in the month they’ve spent together—first during the bureaucratic morass of court hearings and meetings in Russia, where legally she was only allowed to spend fifteen unsupervised minutes each day with Natalya, and now as they’ve walked this odd alien tightrope in Tania’s Summerlin townhouse—is that Natalya can read well enough but that she’s selective in what she can say or understand of spoken English. Tania’s sister tells her that’s normal for a twelve-year-old born in America, too, which would be funny to Tania if it was her own flesh that ignored her. But this child, this child who cost her nearly all of the $50,000 she won on a single hand of Caribbean Stud on the same night they closed the Sands, wasn’t really hers at all.

Natalya fingers her cup of Sprite and looks away from Tania, out toward the street, which has suddenly filled with college students exiting UNLV. It’s noon, though with the persistent case of jet lag she has, it feels much later, but also somehow slower to Tania. She imagines Natalya must feel something entirely different, though, and for the first time since they arrived back in Las Vegas, Tania begins to feel sorry for Natalya. For her dead parents, for this woman who has shown up in her life and brought her to America, forced her to eat tacos, made her answer questions about how she feels, when the woman herself has only the vaguest sense of her own emotions.

“I’m going to work on that,” Tania says, though the truth is that she has no idea how she’ll change anything. She’s been in school for the last six months trying to become a dental hygienist, to give herself—and her daughter—a chance at a life outside Las Vegas, but has failed chemistry twice in that span. If she couldn’t master an even rudimentary understanding of the composition, structure, and properties of matter, how could she claim to know anything? “I want to be a good parent to you, Natalya. I’ve never been one before, so this is going to take some doing.” Another plane roars overhead and Tania checks her watch. Her parents are due to land in another thirty minutes. “You don’t have to answer this, and maybe you don’t know, but I wonder what really happened to your parents?”

Of course she’ll go back. Tania had already entertained the idea of one day having a home in Tula, too, so that Natalya wouldn’t grow up thinking she was some kind of refugee, so that she knew she hadn’t escaped, that she was still tethered to her past, even if her future, if the people who really loved her (and this was when Tania was sure she already loved Natalya, before this sense of emotional burden began its slow descent), now lived in America.

On her third day in Tula, she’d rented a car and just drove, not bothering to consult the map of tourist locales—she’d never read any Tolstoy, so visiting his home didn’t seem necessary, and she wasn’t very excited about the prospect of visiting the Museum of Russian Weapons, either—hoping instead to stumble into neighborhoods, the kind perhaps Natalya had lived in as a toddler and where they might live together, or at least visit.

She discovered a neighborhood just adjacent to the local university, only a few miles west of the twisting Upa River. It was the mid-morning—a time she rarely saw in Las Vegas, since her shift at the Mirage typically ran 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, which meant she usually was heading to bed just as normal people were waking up—so the streets were alive with college students, but also with people who just looked like regular humans, people like her who served the people who bothered to go to school. There was a main drag of coffee shops and stores interspersed with one-story houses with flat roofs, but on large slats of green land. She was surprised by the lack of fences surrounding the homes here, but also by the lack of trash on the street. Yes, she thought, we could live in this place. I could learn the language. I could go to school. We could drink coffee on the street and read Tolstoy together.

When she returned to the orphanage and told Leda, the administrator she dealt with most closely, that she’d found the most perfect neighborhood for them to one day return to, Leda brushed her off quickly. “Very polluted there from Chernobyl,” she said. “Most of Tula is.”

That was true enough, Tania knew. She’d lived in Spokane, Reno, and Las Vegas in her life, each place as unremarkable as the previous, but the thing that always amazed her, even when she simply went out of town for a few days, like when she went on a cruise to Mexico with a few girlfriends back when she worked at the Cal-Neva, was how much she missed her spaces, how comforting it was to know she could never get lost in these resort cities other people visited.

“Do you remember your parents?” Tania asks. All Tania knows for sure about Natalya’s parents is their medical history, which includes a history of cancer and heart disease on both sides of the family. “Nobody dies from being healthy,” Leda, the administrator, told her. “Everybody dies from something awful.”

No one chooses to cocktail, Tania thinks. She and her family—her parents, Stu and Joan, and Natalya—are waiting for a table at Odessa, the one Russian restaurant in all of Las Vegas. It’s in a strip mall off of Paradise, a few blocks south of Flamingo. Tania has strenuously avoided the place over the years, since it was one of those restaurants in town everyone said was mob owned, like the Venetian on Sahara and Piero’s over by the convention center. But now she sees that it’s filled with families, that the waiters are all older men with mustaches wearing black pants and spotless white shirts. The cocktail girls hovering around the people playing video poker in the bar, however, look the same as everywhere: low-cut tops, hair sprayed and teased, shoes no woman would ever consent to walk in on her own. One of the girls looks familiar, though Tania can’t quite place her, thinks maybe she worked at the Excalibur with her when she first got to town, or maybe she picked up a few shifts at the Mirage, or . . . well, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to say hello anyway. Wherever they knew each other from, that time was over, and now the girl was working in a strip mall.

Since landing three hours ago, Tania’s mother has been lecturing Natalya on American history, telling her interesting tidbits about the League of Nations and Woodrow Wilson, and now, in the restaurant, has worked all the way up to the Hoover Dam, but Tania’s not taking part, instead she’s watching the restaurant, watching the people serving, thinking about how difficult it is to know who you’re going to be when you’re just a kid. What did she want to do with her life? She never decided, though she knows now it wasn’t cocktailing. That’s the job you end up with when you’ve made no decisions at all; or at least none that matter. And then one day that’s just who you are.

“Isn’t this place great?” Joan asks. She’s sitting between Tania and Natalya and keeps grabbing at both of their wrists. It’s something Tania remembers she used to do in church whenever there was something interesting happening and Joan wanted to get Tania and her sister Justine’s attention. It was Joan’s idea to come here in the first place—she read about it in a tourist guide to Las Vegas—and they weren’t five minutes out of the airport before she was telling Tania how great it would be to have authentic Russian food for dinner, as if she’d ever had inauthentic Russian food in the past. Now, no one knows what to talk about, and the wrist-grabbing feels like a nervous tic. “ Is this what home is like?” Joan says to Natalya.

“Some,” Natalya says and then forces out a smile. It’s the first time Tania has seen the girl smile in days, and she can’t help but feel jealous that her own mother can get Natalya to show something, anything, and here she can’t even get the girl to look her in the eye most of the time.

Stu, Tania’s father, paces in front of them. For forty years he sold restaurant equipment and now, two years into his retirement, Tania can’t imagine how he ever closed any deals. He always looks vaguely displeased in restaurants, as if he can’t quite figure out how, after all the time he spent working in restaurants, he’s still expected to eat in them, too.

“No,” he says. “No. I’m trying to see what they’re cleaning with back there. From the sound of it, I’d bet they’ve got a Hobart, and not one that is functioning properly. Wash cycle sounds corrupted. We’re about fifteen minutes from food poisoning, if you want my opinion.”

When Tania graduated high school and moved first to Reno, the idea was that she’d go to community college there for two years, establish residency, and then try to get into the hotel management program at UNLV in Las Vegas, all of which was her father’s idea. He told her there would always be hotels, that people always needed to stay somewhere. Restaurants, he told her, were a luxury people could do without, but everyone needed to sleep. But then she started cocktailing at the Cal-Neva, started making what to her was real money, and eventually just stopped attending class at all. It felt, at the time, like there was plenty more to do in life than get an education, more to life than thinking about where people stayed, but now, watching her father pace, his life boiled down to his ability to parse the sounds of dishwashers, watching the cocktail girl as she casually flirts with the locals around the bar, she thinks that her own hubris has brought her to this point in life. Opting to do nothing. She’d failed to recognize how the weight of finally making a decision could be so paralyzing.

She used to tell people she was saving money to open a dog grooming business—she even had a name picked out: Groomingdales—though the fact was that she didn’t have any idea how to accomplish that, didn’t even know if she’d need a license or if she could just get a pair of clippers and a storefront or what. And really, since her dog died last year, just a day before she started looking into adoption options in Russia, the desire to be around animals of any kind was just too depressing to consider.

“Honey,” Tania’s mother says to her, “you should ask the manager if they have any job openings here for hostesses. Wouldn’t that be perfect for Natalya?” She turns to Natalya and takes her wrist again. “ Wouldn’t that be nice, sweetheart? Earn a little pocket money?” When Natalya doesn’t answer, Joan looks back at Tania expectantly, as if this is the solution to a great many unknown problems. “ Wouldn’t it?”

“ I want to show you something,” Tania says and pulls out a little change purse filled with business cards from her wallet and dumps the contents on her mother’s lap. There are at least a hundred cards, engraved, embossed, phone numbers and room numbers and email addresses scratched onto the back of each. Tania picks a few up and waves them in front of her mother’s face. “Every night, I get maybe five or six of these. You know what they want, Mom? They aren’t looking to make business deals, okay? They aren’t looking to make friends, okay? My daughter is not going to work in a place like this. Ever.”

Tania feels as if she might cry, as if she might just let it all go right here in the middle of pleasant Russian families having dinner, as if she might stand up and start screaming, but then Natalya reaches over and takes all of the spilled business cards from Joan’s lap and hands them to a passing busboy, who is actually a middle-aged Mexican, and says, “Please. To garbage.”

Later that evening, after Natalya goes to sleep, Tania sits up with her parents in her small living room. Her parents have a room down the street at Arizona Charlie’s, a local’s casino Tania’s father likes because of the pancake buffet breakfast and because he once won a satin jacket there during a blackjack tournament, but neither of them seems to be in a hurry to leave.

There are photo albums scattered across the floor, a half eaten bowl of microwave popcorn in her mother’s lap. A series of photos from the night of her senior prom are still stacked on the coffee table. What does she remember about that night? Getting high, mostly. Having sex with her date—a boy named Devin—in the bathroom of the Ramada Inn, the music from the dance throbbing through the wall, Devin’s breath hot on her face, her hair catching in his watchband. But mostly, mostly, she remembers wondering when it would end. When she could go home, forget these people, get on with her life. Even then, at eighteen, things seemed unsatisfying to her, as if the next day would always be the best one.

“She seems very intelligent,” Stu says. At sixty-seven, and two years removed from his own real life, Tania’s father now has a doughy quality to his skin and has become obsessive about odd things: the price of gas, the amount of advertising in baseball stadiums, other peoples’ teeth. As a child, Tania was afraid of her father. That’s not to say she felt threatened by him, only that there was a feature to his existence in her life that boiled her stomach. So maybe it wasn’t fear. Maybe it was just anxiety. And then it occurs to her that it was his anxiety she was feeling, that she was afraid of him because he was afraid of . . . something.

Tania’s father nods his head at this, and she can see his mind filling with questions, new obsessions forming. She knows her father still considers Russia the enemy, even though the Cold War has been over for nearly a decade, and even he must know that Natalya is just a child and not some kind of sleeper agent, but she’s sure he still has real concerns. Maybe that’s why she’s so vibrantly recalling this now. It wasn’t that he brought fear into the house with him, but that he was always so circumspect, that whenever he’d watch the news or read the Spokesman-Review he’d start to mutter about how the whole world was made up of charlatans, that you couldn’t trust anything you saw. Everything deserved investigation.

This is a period of her life that Tania associates with her mother’s odd descent into religion, a time her father feels largely absent from in her memory, since he didn’t actually attend church with them. Not the Wednesday night Bible study and coffee klatch the church called Supreme Bean (which, upon retrospect, strikes Tania as surprisingly clever), nor the regular Sunday service. Though since they only had one car, a blue Ford Fairmont, he’d drive them to the church both days and then he’d just sit outside smoking. Sometimes he’d bring one of those dime-store men’s adventure novels with him—The Exterminator or The Destroyer or, occasionally, a thick Robert Ludlum novel that he never seemed to finish—but usually he just sat and waited.

Once back at home, Tania’s mother sat at the kitchen table and drank Sanka while she read the Bible, her lips moving over every word. She’d periodically jot a note down onto a steno pad, though Tania can’t remember ever seeing her mother read back over those notes. Tania usually sat on the front lawn and watched Justine practice twirling the baton, though she doesn’t know what Justine was practicing for, since she never competed, never became a member of the cheer or dance squads, while her father raked leaves, even if there weren’t any leaves on the ground. On rainy days, her father would rake the avocado-colored shag carpet in their living room. She can see him standing there in the living room, a cigarette in his teeth, pulling the rake from one corner of the room to the other, making sure not to cross the lines he’d already put into the carpet.

She can’t imagine how she’d forgotten this image of her father for so long, but now it’s all she can envision when she looks at him sitting on her sofa, his purple-veined hands reaching into the bowl of popcorn. How old is he in this memory? Maybe forty, forty-five. Not much older than she is now, but living an entirely different life. He had two children, a wife, a job selling restaurant supplies that he’d have until the day he stopped working, a Craftsman in a decent neighborhood in Spokane, a fishing trip every June to Loon Lake. He must have wanted something more, though Tania can’t imagine what. Tania doesn’t know her father, really (and can’t say she knows her mother, either), but she wonders if he misses the fear, the rage, the longing, or if somehow a satin jacket and a pancake buffet are enough to satiate him.

Tania wakes up to the sound of Natalya blow-drying her hair. It is nine in the morning on Sunday, and Tania promised Natalya that they could go to the Stratosphere today to ride the rollercoaster atop the casino’s hundred-story tower. Tomorrow, she’ll be back at work and Natalya will start her first day of school, so this is their last free day before real life starts, or at least that’s how Tania thinks of it. She’s not sure what to make of real life anymore, not sure she knows how to conduct herself, except that she realizes she needs to change her shift at the hotel, or else Natalya will be home all night by herself. Last night her mother offered to move in for a couple of weeks if Tania thought it would help ease Natalya into her routine, but Tania told her no, that she’d be fine, but the reality was that she didn’t want her mother to see how unprepared she really was, that she hadn’t even thought about such a simple task as getting her shift moved.

She pulls herself out of bed and looks outside, makes sure her car is still parked under the metal awning across the way. She lives in a townhouse in Summerlin, which is just a fancy way of saying that she lives in an apartment that happens to have a connected one-car garage beneath it, one she’s filled with so much of her crap that she doesn’t have room to park her Explorer. Her neighbors are mostly working girls—strippers, other cocktail waitresses like herself, blackjack and roulette dealers—and young families. It’s a safe neighborhood and the complex is gated, but even still, she’s aware of how vulnerable she is living alone, and now, living with Natalya. Her ex-boyfriend, Clive, who worked the door at a strip club called Little Darlings, used to tell her stories about girls who got followed home after work and were robbed and then either raped or killed or both, but because they were just dancers, and usually didn’t even really live in Las Vegas, just kept a place for the weekends they danced in town, no one bothered to check on them for days or weeks and then, well, then it didn’t matter who they were anymore. They were just dead strippers from that point forward.

Long ago she’d convinced herself that Clive’s stories were just myths, though of course anything was possible in Las Vegas. Things would be different now, anyway. She wouldn’t date guys like Clive, people who were all about bringing negativity in the absence of anything valuable. Her sister, Justine, was always saying how great it was that Tania had such a wide market of available men to date in Las Vegas, particularly single guys with money, but the truth was that no one who spent much time visiting Las Vegas was the kind of guy who would be right to help her raise Natalya. Circumstances had changed, and now here she was not even sure a person like herself was capable of the job.

She hadn’t even really been with a guy since hitting the royal. She’d done a stupid thing that night and left her job at the Mirage with a customer, a Persian guy named Pejman who said he was a doctor from Seattle, but was probably just another dumb ass from LA with a little money in his pocket for the weekend, which, honestly, didn’t bother her, really. He had some coke, a gold Amex, and wanted to party. He tipped her over a grand that night, slipping her bills every ten minutes while he rolled craps, convinced she was his luck. And maybe she was, because she put $500 of his tips on that Stud game, flopped a royal, and found herself $50,000 richer.

The thing was, she ended up fucking that guy in his room at the Frontier (which should have been her first clue he wasn’t a doctor), and now, a year later, all she can remember about him is that he wore these absurd black and white saddle shoes, like he was ten and on his way to the sandbox. Would that be the story she eventually told Natalya about how she came to have enough money to afford her adoption? That she fucked a guy in saddle shoes who tipped her a grand that she turned around on a fucking table game?

Tania hears the blow-dryer click off, and the townhouse fills with the sound of Natalya singing to herself in Russian. The melody sounds familiar, though Tania can’t quite place it—she thinks it might be an old Michael Jackson song, maybe Prince, something she hears over the Muzak piped into the Mirage—but the words she’s saying in Russian make the song sound exquisite and nuanced. Something more than just a pop song about love or dancing or partying the millennium away. Tania knows intellectually that she should learn Russian, but she hasn’t done it, thinks that not knowing how to speak Russian will give Natalya a better sense of privacy, a way to escape. And anyway, if she knew the language, she’d lose the ability to appreciate the sound of Natalya singing in it.

Down on the street a Yellow Cab pulls up in front of her townhouse, and Chelsea, Tania’s next-door neighbor, steps out into the sunlight. She dances over at the Olympic Gardens, which means she’s just getting home from her shift. Tania watches as Chelsea fumbles through her purse looking for cab fare. Tania can tell from one story up that Chelsea is trashed, thinks that maybe she should run downstairs to make sure Chelsea doesn’t give the cabbie a stack of hundreds accidentally, see that she gets into her place okay, doesn’t end up passed out on her front porch (which has happened before).

Tania considers Chelsea a good friend, though the truth is that she doesn’t even know if Chelsea is her real name or just her stage name and has never bothered to ask, figuring that if she knows, she’ll have to start volunteering information about herself, too. Sometimes, they go to the pool together in the afternoon before their respective shifts, and Chelsea regales her with stories from the strip club, all of which strike Tania as being tragic, in or out of context. There’s the girl who sells her used underwear online, the girl whose brother is her pimp, the girl who left the club one night as a blonde with brown eyes and then came back the next day with brown hair and blue colored contacts and pretended she was a different girl entirely, even when everyone clearly recognized her, and demanded people call her by her new name.

What did Chelsea really know about Tania? Nothing, really. Tania hadn’t even told her she was adopting Natalya, only that she was going to be out of town for about a month, and if she could keep an eye on her Explorer and water her plants, she’d be ever grateful. When she got home, all of her plants were dead but her car was still there, covered in bird shit, and with a thousand more miles on it than when she left. What did it mean that she wasn’t surprised (or angered) in the least by this?

Tania turns and sees that Natalya has come into her bedroom and is watching the scene over her shoulder. Her long black hair is pulled away from her face and into a ponytail, her makeup, so severe yesterday, is almost nonexistent today. Tania thinks she sees the child from the photos, thinks she sees a young woman, thinks she sees someone that could have grown up to be her daughter.

Tania has never liked heights and yet here she is on the observation deck of the Stratosphere, nearly one hundred stories above the Las Vegas Strip, her twelve-year-old adopted daughter beside her, staring out through the bowed Plexiglas window at the street below. The day has turned overcast and muggy, and from her vantage point in the sky, Tania can see heat lightning snapping between the clouds clustering to the west over Interstate 15, though the sun still cuts through the clouds intermittently. From up here the world is so tiny and unmovable to Tania; like it is under water. Everything looks wet and gray and yellow as if the clouds are bleeding the fluorescent lights off the Strip, floating between what is real and what is imaginary. Even the air seems distant and colored. Tania thinks she could jump and just float and float.

An announcement rings out over the loudspeaker that the next batch of riders for the rollercoaster should make their way to the elevator to shoot up the remaining five stories to the very top of the tower, where they will spin upside down, where they will corkscrew through the air, where no one will pay any attention that there’s a woman coming to realize that the only mistake she has made was waiting so long to start this phase of her life, was being so selfish, so stupid to think that she could just pick up in the middle, that she could replace her own empty life with this other person.

Natalya is already walking toward the elevator when a strange sense of vertigo strikes Tania and she grabs at the metal railing in front of her, as if it can stop the sudden perception that she is seeing too much, that somehow the world has flipped over and she’s no longer someone’s daughter at all; that she’s a woman, that she’s responsible, that life is starting now, that everything else has been mere prelude.

“Natalya,” she says, and the girl stops, turns around, looks at her. Tania would like to believe that there is some recognition in her daughter’s eyes, that the girl sees in Tania the same thing that Tania feels. That she does love her. That she will never love her. That she thinks she already knows Natalya completely, because that poor girl is her, was her, could be her, wishes she was her. That she doesn’t know her in the least. That she will spend her lifetime looking for Natalya’s parents, dead or alive, if that’s what the girl wants. Or she will never mention them again. She will never mention them again, because Natalya will not need them.

Tania could let Natalya go up that elevator to the top of the Stratosphere by herself, and by the time the rollercoaster ride was up, she could be back in her Explorer and heading out of town for good, could disappear into another life. It’s a thought she has had over and over again since they arrived back in Las Vegas. It’s a thought she knows makes her unstable, unfit to be a parent, unlikely to give Natalya any kind of life at all.

Natalya walks back and takes Tania by the hand and pulls her along toward the elevator, pulling her past the couple in the matching Circus Circus T-shirts, past the men in tight pants with shiny silver rodeo buckles on their belts, past the teenagers with pierced eyebrows, past the old man and old woman with fanny packs and into the elevator where they stand pressed against the back wall of the car. As a child, Tania’s father used to take her and her sister to Riverfront Park in downtown Spokane to ride the attractions left over from the 1974 World’s Fair, but what she recalls now is that he never went on any of the rides. He’d stand outside the Tilt-a-Whirl, or the Spider, or the Bumper Cars and he’d just watch, so that whenever Tania got scared (which was often), she always knew she could find him standing there, already looking directly at her, always ready to meet her gaze. Perhaps it was out of fear. Perhaps it was out of love, even a love born out of simple duty. But it was perpetual.

The elevator doors close and Tania becomes aware of how close she is to Natalya, how she can feel her daughter’s pulse through the grasp of her fingers, can smell her perfume and her shampoo and something indistinct that reminds her of being seven. And in that brief moment when the car shoots upward and the world turns buoyant, all that Tania finally perceives is the weight of her daughter’s hand in her own, and she decides she will force herself to remember this moment, that she will hold it as precious, even if she’s not sure now if it means anything at all.