And, Grant, if you ever decide to go back to Russia and look for your mother: this journal is why you cannot. You must not. Ever.

63

Grant

No sign of a journal, but the file with his adoption paperwork is right where it’s always been. There have been times in the past when Grant has gotten it out and paged through it, thinking, This was my start. Once he had to look at it all for a school project on family background. He had wanted to write about where his four grandparents’ families came from—Dad was English and Czech, Pollitt a name originally from Lancashire, and Mom was Scottish, Irish, and Swedish. But his teacher had said, “Well, but it’s just so interesting that you are from Russia originally”—(he later figured out that someone had told her about all the international adoptions at that school)—“you should write about that.” Like he’d had some golden childhood in Saint Petersburg full of Russian traditions and charming customs before he accidentally wandered into the loving arms of his American family. So instead he said he’d been born in Saint Petersburg, shared a bunch of pictures that showed off the city in a charming way, then said he’d been adopted from an orphanage and the only thing he remembered was a Russian lullaby, “Tilly Tilly Bom,” a horrifying song about a mysterious man in the house who would kidnap you if you didn’t fall asleep soon. He said nothing showed the contrast in culture between home and Russia more than a threatening lullaby, and he played a bone-chilling rendition of it he’d found on YouTube and left the class sitting in shocked silence. Then he said, in defiance, “I’m an American boy now.” He got an A and didn’t have the nerve to tell the teacher (who never, ever asked him about Russia again) that the rendition he played came from a Russian horror movie made a couple of years before and wasn’t exactly a traditional lullaby as presented.

But, on the legal form from the Volkov Infants Home, he had looked at the name of his birth mother, Anna Alexandrovna Averina. His birth father, Boris Vladimirovich Stepurin.

He had never googled them. But he must now: the strange emails, the pictures, the accusations, the knowledge of his personal history, the use of the tree—now to leave him both enticing objects and a murder weapon. Why was anyone bothering to send him pictures of a stock photo of a woman dancing and a cat in the snow and a cozy house?