He was still looking out the window, and not a single muscle in his face moved. From the kitchen came the smell of coffee and the sound of Mike’s footsteps. Her husband asked from the doorway if she was ready and started zipping up his jacket.
His eyes moved from their son to the bowl in Alena’s hands. When he asked what happened, she said nothing, really, and set the bowl back on the sill. Mike crouched down and kissed Arsen on the top of the head.
The boy turned his head a little—or maybe Alena only imagined it. Mike told her not to work herself up, saying all kids were different and their son was just calm. Alena said nothing and watched the front door close behind him.
She had heard the word “calm” so many times by then it had practically worn smooth. “Calm, easy, quiet”—that was how Ludmila had described Arsen when he was tiny, and at the time it had sounded like praise. Alena had nodded and even felt a little proud that her baby didn’t scream through the night, didn’t need constant attention, and could fall asleep on his own.
The neighbors said she was lucky, and she had agreed. Now the word “quiet” sat inside her like a stone: smooth, cold, and heavy. She took Arsen outside, set him down on the ground, and he immediately dropped into a squat by the porch and began studying a crack in the step.
Alena headed toward the gate when voices drifted over from the other side of the fence. Aunt Raya, who was a little hard of hearing in one ear, loudly asked the neighbor if she had seen little Arsen Vorobyev yesterday. Nina said she had, then added that the boy was already a year and a half old and still spent most of his time standing there staring into space.
Then the women lowered their voices to a whisper that was somehow just as easy to hear. Alena turned around and hurried back toward the porch. Ludmila arrived at three in the afternoon, without calling first, as usual.
Alena heard her SUV before it turned onto their street; the old engine had a sound all its own. Her mother-in-law appeared in the doorway holding a jar of strawberry preserves and wearing that particular look she had—the one that could scan an entire room in a second. It was a look that immediately found everything that could have been done better.
She asked how Arsen was doing and walked right past Alena toward her grandson, who was sitting in the middle of the kitchen holding a wooden spoon. Alena said he was fine. Ludmila crouched in front of the boy, picked him up, and tried to get his attention, asking him to look who had come to visit.
The boy kept staring somewhere over her shoulder. Ludmila called his name again, then again, but he didn’t turn his head or smile. Arsen didn’t reach for her. He just sat in her lap as if she weren’t there at all.
Something in Ludmila’s face shifted, just slightly, and Alena caught it right away. In two years she had learned to read her mother-in-law’s moods the way a weather forecaster reads the sky. Without taking her eyes off the boy, Ludmila asked in a firm voice whether she had taken him to a doctor….
