Part 28

Quinn took Zander down in the elevator to walk around the main lounge on the first floor, on condition he stick with the walker. After the relapse, he had bounced back. She thought he was doing pretty well, but thought he should stick to the level he was at for a day or two.

He admitted to being tired. She told him to sit down. "I'll get a chair for you," she said.

"I could try to walk back after a little while, instead."

She thought for a moment. "Sure. I can always get a chair for you if you want."

"I'm not used to this."

"What's that?"

"Not being able to move without hurting."

"You're in good basic health, so you'll heal up in time. But it must be tough to be so stuck."

"It's tough, alright. And I can't do anything! While Alexis is out there shaking things up."

"I'm glad she is. She cares more about you than anybody from the point of view of this hospital, I think."

"You're so kind, worrying about things like that. I wouldn't have expected Alexis to do all that. I'm grateful to Alexis. She's buying trouble, though. I don't know what I would do without her. Dumb Emily writing me her crummy letter - I don't think I would care what happened to me. But I'm grateful to Alexis. If she has to take all the trouble, I hate to let her down, after all she's done. And I really hate the thought of my parents seeing her as somebody to use."

"It's been awhile. Maybe your mother changed some since you've seen her. Before she didn't know she would lose you over her behavior."

"Just like Alexis. You speculate about some other person as if they were like you."

"We'll see. You've got to deal with your mother one way or another anyway. Emily, Cheryl, anybody at all, it's always going to be shallow if they can't know anything. That's just how people are. You can't be a mystery guy and get any further with any girl than a certain point."

"I never thought of it that way. Anyway, she said she loved me and we were supposed to be together, you know, like she meant it. I'm always falling for words like that. I guess it was just words. Or I didn't listen to all of them. I remember her telling her boyfriend, the one she had before, how everything changes. Then I should have realized how everything could change again. Yeah, I think she meant it, but for that time when she said. You know."

"Maybe it can be saved. I think she'll send another letter regretting the first one. It's just a disagreement. You can work out a disagreement. Anyone who thinks a relationship is over because of a disagreement will never stay in one anyway. Her letter doesn't make sense. She's mad at you about locking her brother up when your boss wants you to. Leaving aside that it's a strange thing for the boss to ask, let's say first, why doesn't she respect that? Then to add to that, she's not on her brother's side of this custody dispute? I don't understand that part, but leaving that aside - She's on the side your boss is on, and therefore, on the same side you're said to be on. Leaving even all that aside, none of it has anything to do with the two of you. It's her brother and his ex, and the custody of his kid! I've had countless friends and they've had countless relationship problems they told me about. I've had dozens myself. But this is the most confusing thing I've ever heard."

"Joe said it would be funny, and it already is starting to be. Maybe it's 'I can be against my brother, but you can't.'"

"Yeah, but then, what are you supposed to do then? Just stay out of it, ok, but what about this boss?"

"She doesn't want me to work there, anyway. I need the money, to put her through school. That was the whole idea. Get away from her parents, and put her through school, and just be free of them. They talked her into one year, and she went for it. But you can bet it's not really that, with her brother. It is a cover for something else. Somebody in her family told her something else. She's done that before."

"Done what before?"

"Her grandfather said I attacked him. She said she'd help me prove I did not attack him. Then he says something to her and the next day, suddenly does a 180, and she believes him. She never wants to see me again. Then later her father and brother have some problem with grandfather, so they end up digging up his medical file and exposing he had no injury. He was even going to pay somebody to witness this so-called attack! Then she comes back, and claims she never believed it anyway. Which makes no sense, but she must have been embarrassed to have her grandfather fool her."

"What a grandfather!"

"Yeah, not having one at all isn't necessarily the worst thing, you see."

"Yours raised your parents, so maybe they are like that. The culture was different, though."

"Maybe. They could be like that because of what they had to do. Or thought they did. They separated themselves, voluntarily, from their whole family, and their whole life. For all they knew, when they did it, they would never see their parents again."

"Maybe that's why they didn't see the upheaval for you by moving you from one place to another."

"I guess. Through their eyes, it might not have been much, I guess."

"Still, it was tough on you. Maybe they should have tried to see it from your point of view."

"They had to become citizens, and I remember when they got their citizenship; they had a big party. He even said we were born here and didn't appreciate it. They thought it was so cool when they had their US passports; they took us on a trip to Italy, just so they could use them! Then, later, at least as I thought then, he had caused Pete and I to lose our nationality!"

"How?"

"Well, she found us finally, and stopped us leaving school. We naturally knew not to tell him. She'd meet us places. It was fun, sort of, you know cloak and dagger stuff. You'd have liked it. She wanted us to come back with her. I told her I had to stay one more year to finish school. I only had one more year and was not about to try to switch to such a different system at that point. She said ok, just come for the summer and you can come back and finish school. That would have worked fine. I knew people who had started college in the US after they graduated from that system."

"So you went?"

"First we had to get a US passport. I looked all around, and realized then I only had this Russian one. The guy in the U.S. State Department, which we sneaked off to see one day, her and me, said I needed a visa. She said, no, he was born in the US, give him a U.S. Passport. The guy said no way, I had no proof of anything, but that I was a Russian citizen. He told her that since she was a citizen, she could file for a green card for me and Pete, and that would take a year. "

Quinn laughed.

"That's what I did. Even she knew better. Said no way, he was born there, he can't need one of those just because he left. They guy said it was illegal for a citizen of the US to leave the US without a US passport, and he suspected she and I were trying to get around the law and not wait my turn for a green card like everybody else."

"Oh, boy."

"She told the guy what our father had done with us, and showed him her custody order, and blamed it on my father. She said, 'they're kids, how can they be guilty of that kind of a crime?' Anyway, this bureaucrat said she would have to prove we were born here. She went all the way back to Florida, got our birth certificates, came all the way back to Moscow, and gave it to the guy, and he said it wasn't stamped by proper authority in Tallahassee. She went back again, got a stamp from Tallahassee, and brought other stuff he told her she had to have. Since we had no photo ID other than the damned Russian passports, she had to get our school records and our class picture and notarized and certified affidavits sworn on pain of death from our teachers. She even found the doctor who delivered us, finally, so he could swear and certify and notarize that he delivered us in a hospital on US soil!"

"Couldn't this guy see you acted and spoke like an American?"

"The pieces of paper were more important to him than anything. Documentation. My case was not properly documented, he kept saying. So naive. Probably there were 20 Russians a day who couldn't speak good English going right by him with faked 'documentation.'"

"That must have been frustrating."

"I know it's funny now. But you can't think how mad you would get to have some bureaucrat telling you that you are an alien and you need a visa to get into the United States. And after all that trouble, it turns out it was the dumbest thing I ever did."

"Why?"

"I felt guilty because I had not seen her and I preferred it that way - the thing with what he did was, though we never saw her, we also never had to fight about it - no judges, no cops - I felt worse for Peter, but I was getting old enough - I thought; I'll be 18, and then he can't stop me from just going to live with her to make up for it. And I should have waited until then, too, instead of letting her convince me to go with her for the summer."

"Well, you'd have had the passport problem anyway."

"True. That was when I realized, or so I had thought, that he had stuck me in Russia for life. It was maddening. He had gone there on his US passport. Therefore, think of it, he had one! And so did she! I had to get a student visa, just like kids in my class there who had never been to the US in their lives. I had no advantage at all from having been born here and lived here 13 years. You can't imagine how infuriating it was. Those two were citizens and Pete and I were not!"

"I'm sorry," Quinn said, "I know I shouldn't be laughing. It is funny now, isn't it?"

"Sort of." He smiled a little, as if trying to maintain his fury and not being able to.

"I'm infuriated," Quinn said, soothingly. "Just thinking of them keeping two fine young Americans from coming back to the U.S., while those two could come back at any time!"

Zander laughed.

"But couldn't she go live there?" Quinn asked.

"We never even discussed that. I would have just thought that they would fight, anyway - they'd be in the same place again. I knew there were no KGB any more, but the idea of their police has always really freaked me out - growing up I only heard about how awful they were. No way did I want to be in school and have the cops show up. I just didn't understand the system. Now, I don't think they would have any cops to spare for stuff like that. You could go to the police station if you lost something on the other hand. They were the lost and found. Strange. I mean imagine going there if you lost your umbrella, but being scared to death if they approached you."

"This is what comes of taking on too much yourself too soon. Getting in over your head. But your parents seem to put you in that position."

"They just messed me all up. I don't know how to get into college. Some kid from a foreign country can just come. But when I finally got here, I realized she had no intent of sending me back. And her custody order - how could I get around that? It was ok for Pete, because he could just pick up again, but I had two more years if I stayed here, plus it was all mixed up. They were talking about putting me back as a sophomore - 3 more years."

"No way!"

"Yes. And if I had him send me the money to go back, I was still a minor. They wouldn't let me on the plane. I called him up and asked him to send me the Russian passport, which of course I stupidly left behind. By then I was at least smart enough to dial an international call. I knew they would let an alien go, no matter how old they were!"

"So did that work?"

"It could have. But, instead, like a total idiot, he comes over here to get us! Well, the federal marshals met him at the airport."

"How come?"

"He was charged with interfering with custody. She had custody, he had weekends, see, so by taking us over there he violated the orders of the courts. I never saw that. But it was all set up before she even found us."

"Oh, no! So there went your chance to graduate after the one year."

"Exactly. And he was sentenced to go to prison! She was going to take us to prison to see him every week - well, that didn't last long. Then they moved him to some prison further away. But he would be getting out just in time to take Pete somewhere else and they'd wreck up Pete's education, too. I didn't think too well, I admit, at the time it seemed like the only thing to do. Get away from them, get a job, because I was going to put myself through college - if it was them, I'd be in 10 colleges before I could graduate. Then I could help Pete get through whatever he had left."

"You take too much on."

"Why?"

"You're 20 years of age, have a sort of 11th grade education, you're going to support your little brother and send him to college while working in a place where you're liable to get shot."

Quinn started to giggle at the picture she was painting. "I can picture a nice little house," she added. "Your brother going off to school everyday."

Zander started giggling a little, too. His eyes stared off, as if he were imagining a similar picture.

"And don't forget," Quinn giggled harder, trying to talk at the same time, "your girlfriend Emily is there, too. You're supporting her and sending her to college also. Both sets of rich parents don't have to spend a dime."

Zander giggled harder too, and started holding onto his stomach.

"Watch it," Quinn said.

"It's ok," he said. "I can see them going off to school, with their backpacks, down the street, together."

They were both laughing, but she started to worry about his stitches. "It was kind of dumb of me, I guess," he said.

"Good intentions count. But you don't have to be the one to take on the whole world. Let me wheel you back."

"No, no. I can walk."