Swallow Fifty Five

The laptop was hers, an old Lenovo with a cracked corner and a sticky spacebar, and she'd left it open on the kitchen table like she always did, like it was a magazine she'd finished reading. I wasn't snooping. I was looking for the insurance papers. That's what I told myself, standing there in the dark of the kitchen at two in the morning, the refrigerator humming its one long note. The insurance papers were in the drawer by the stove, where they'd always been.

But the laptop was open.

And the browser was open.

And there it was, right there in the blue glow: Ласточка55. Profile photo, a picture from Sochi, 2019. She's wearing that yellow blouse with the little pearl buttons, the one she wears to funerals and weddings, the one she wore to Papa's funeral. She's smiling in the photo. Not a real smile. The kind you practice in the mirror before you take a picture you're going to send to a stranger.

I closed the laptop. I opened the drawer by the stove and found the insurance papers in four seconds. I went back to my room. I lay down on the bed with my shoes still on and stared at the ceiling, at the water stain shaped like a map of a country that doesn't exist.

I didn't sleep.

The next night I did it again.

This is the part I don't like to think about. Not the snooping, although that's bad enough. It's the speed of it. How fast I went from I am not the kind of son who reads his mother's messages to scrolling through her inbox with my heart going like a bird in a shoebox. Twenty minutes. Maybe less. The first message was from a man who called himself Сергей_1968. He wrote: *Вы очень красивая женщина. Давайте встретимся.* She hadn't answered him. The message was four days old. Read, but unanswered.

There were eleven others. A widower from Tula who wrote in paragraphs, long ones, about his dacha and his late wife's roses. A man who sent a photo of himself holding a fish and nothing else, no words at all. A retired military man, forty-seven, who said he was looking for a woman who understood silence. A poet. An actual poet, or a man who thought he was one, writing her lines about the Black Sea and the smell of apricots. She'd answered that one. Two words: *Спасибо, милый.* Thank you, darling.

Darling.

My mother, who has not left this apartment for anything except work and church and the market in three years, who irons my shirts on Sunday nights while the television plays some quiz show she doesn't watch, who keeps Papa's slippers by the door even though it's been four years, my mother had written the word darling to a stranger on the internet.

I felt something I couldn't name. Not anger. Not exactly. It was closer to the feeling you get when you come home and the furniture has been moved. Everything is still there. But you don't know where to sit.

---

In the morning she made kasha and I watched her from the doorway before she knew I was there. She was humming. That's the thing I noticed. She was standing at the stove in her robe, stirring the pot, humming something with no melody, and the morning light was coming through the window and hitting the salt shaker and she was humming.

"Ты чего встал так рано?" she said without turning around. How did she know I was there. Mothers know.

"Couldn't sleep."

"Тебе надо к врачу."

"Мам."

"Что."

I didn't say anything. I sat down and she put the bowl in front of me and I ate the kasha and she drank her tea standing up by the sink, the way she always does, one hand on the counter, looking out the window at the courtyard where the same three pigeons do the same three things every morning. And I thought: who are you. I thought it with my mouth full of kasha and I thought it without any cruelty, which surprised me. I really wanted to know.

She's fifty-five. The username said so. Ласточка55. The swallow, fifty-five. A bird that flies south every winter and comes back every spring and never once, in all the poems and songs, gets asked why it left.

---

I found her again that night. I told myself it was the last time. I told myself I was just going to check if the poet had written back.

He had. He'd written: *Я думаю о вас каждое утро, когда пью кофе.* I think about you every morning when I drink my coffee.

And she'd written back: *А я о вас, когда завариваю чай.*

And I about you, when I make my tea.

I sat there in the dark and felt the floor move, just slightly, the way it does on a boat before you notice you're on a boat. My mother makes tea every morning. I've watched her do it a thousand times. The same blue kettle, the same two spoons of leaves, the same ritual of pouring the boiling water over them and waiting. She's been making tea every morning for as long as I can remember, and for some portion of that time, some portion I can't measure, she's been making it for a man who isn't here.

Not for Papa. For a poet on the internet.

I should have closed the laptop. I know that. But I kept reading. I read about the poet's apartment in Anapa, his bad knee, his daughter in Novosibirsk who doesn't call. I read about his view of the sea, which he described as "серое, но доброе," gray but kind. I read her reply, three lines, in which she told him about the courtyard pigeons. She gave him the pigeons. She gave a stranger the pigeons she's never once mentioned to me.

---

The thing is, I know why I was really looking. It wasn't the insurance papers. The insurance papers were an excuse I made up before I even opened the drawer. I was looking because two weeks ago I came home early and she was crying at the kitchen table with the laptop in front of her, and when she heard the door she shut it so fast the screen went black, and she wiped her face with the back of her hand and said, "Лук режу." Cutting onions. There were no onions. There wasn't even a knife on the board.

I didn't ask. I made a sandwich and went to my room and turned on the television and pretended I hadn't seen anything, because that's what we do in this family. We pretend. We pretend the slippers by the door aren't there. We pretend the fourth chair at the table isn't empty. We pretend Mama wasn't crying over a laptop with no onions on the board.

But I kept thinking about it. For two weeks I kept thinking about it, at work, on the metro, in the shower, and the thinking turned into a question and the question turned into a search and the search turned into this: me, at two in the morning, reading my mother's love letters to a man who lives by a gray but kind sea.

---

Last night she came into the kitchen while I was sitting there.

I hadn't heard her. She moves quietly, always has. I was reading a message from Сергей_1968, who had tried again, more desperate this time, *Ну почему вы молчите?* Why won't you answer me? and I didn't hear her until she was standing right behind me, and then I heard her breathe.

I closed the laptop. Too slow. We both knew.

She didn't shout. She didn't cry. She stood there in the dark in her old robe with her hair loose and she looked at me for a long time, and I looked at the table, and the refrigerator hummed its one long note, and somewhere in the courtyard a car alarm went off and died.

"Ты искал бумаги," she said finally. Not a question.

"Да."

"Нашёл?"

I shook my head.

She sat down across from me. She folded her hands on the table, the way she does at church, and she looked at me with an expression I had never seen on her face before, not once in twenty-eight years. It wasn't shame. It wasn't anger. It was something closer to exhaustion, the kind you only see in people who have been carrying something up a long hill and have finally, without meaning to, set it down.

"Ну и как тебе?" she said. Well? How is it?

I didn't know what to say. So I said the true thing. The thing I hadn't even admitted to myself until it came out of my mouth.

"Я не знал, что ты умеешь так писать."

I didn't know you could write like that.

She looked at me. Then she did something I will never forget for as long as I live. She smiled. Not the practiced smile from the Sochi photo. The real one, crooked on one side, the one I remembered from when I was a kid and she'd catch me doing something wrong and decide, for reasons of her own, not to punish me.

"И я не знала," she said.

Neither did I.