“Okay,” I say, five minutes in, watching her draw the same digit over and over without progressing. “New plan.”
She frowns.
“How many feathers does a sparrow have?”
She blinks. “What?”
“A sparrow. The one in your drawing. How many feathers do you think it has?”
“I — I don’t know.”
“Let’s find out.” I pull out a piece of paper and draw a terrible bird. It’s lumpy and lopsided, with legs that resemble a twig stuck in a potato more than a bird. The corner of Anya’s mouth moves.
“This is Bernard,” I say. “Bernard needs feathers. Let’s say he needs ten feathers on each wing. How many feathers is that in total?”
She shifts her gaze between Bernard and me. The gears behind her eyes turn as she brings the pencil to her lips.
“Twenty,” she says.
“Twenty. Perfect. Now, Bernard also needs five feathers on his tail. So, twenty plus five is…”
“Twenty-five.”
“You’re a genius.”
“I’m not a genius.”
“You’re a math genius who doesn’t know she’s a math genius yet. That’s the best kind.”
We spend the next hour building Bernard’s anatomy through arithmetic: feathers on wings (multiplication introduction), length of flight paths (addition), and the number of worms eaten per day versus number of worms Bernard wantsto eat (subtraction, and also a surprisingly engaging narrative about a very ambitious bird).
Anya redraws Bernard at the end. Her version is infinitely better than mine: a small, plump sparrow with personality in its eyes and twenty-five precisely rendered feathers.
The afternoon is devoted to science. We go into the garden, which is mostly dormant but still holds enough dead leaves, cold soil, and winter-bare branches to fill an hour of observation and questions. She touches everything, from picking up a leaf and studying its veins to finding a beetle and watching it with the focus of a surgeon.
By the time we come back inside, her cheeks are pink from the cold, and she’s holding four items she’s collected: the leaf, a small stone, a twig with a Y shape, and a berry she found on a bush that I had to quickly identify as non-poisonous before she put it in her mouth.
It’s a good day. A full, real, messy, productive day, and when I finally sit down in my room after dinner, I have a sense of satisfaction.
Rolan was nowhere to be seen.
All day, not a glimpse, not a footstep. The house is large enough that two people can exist in it without ever crossing paths, and today, that’s apparently what happened. Mr. Belov is either traveling again, locked in his office, or simply occupying a different dimension of this enormous, silent estate.
Which is fine with me.
Because every time my mind has wandered today — and it has wandered more often than I’d like to admit — it’s gone back to the same place.
I need to stop. He’s my employer. He’s the father of my student. He’s a man I’ve spoken close to fourteen words to, and twelve of them were variations on “yes” and “thank you.”
I do not need to think about him.
11
ROLAN
I can’t stop thinking about the fucking pajamas.
It’s been fourteen hours. I’ve conducted two conference calls, reviewed the Albanian counterintelligence report, authorized a shipment through the northern corridor, and signed off on three construction bids that will launder approximately four million dollars through the city’s permitting system.
