You Know When the Men Are Gone Read Online Free PDF

especially in Natalya’s bedroom. The bed was perfectly made, the walls a somber green, the bedspread a shocking white. There were no family photos on the walls or bureaus, none of Natalya holding twin infants at a hospital, no wedding photos, and no scenes of Serbia. A luminous icon of Jesus, His beard as black as His wet eyes, hung directly over the bed. Meg thought of Natalya in this dark-walled room and understood why she would resist bringing her nightly visitor here. But he had been here the night before, hadn’t he? He had finally wormed his way into Natalya’s bed. Meg peered at the pale comforter, looking for something sordid, the lacy edge of see-through panties perhaps, and she wondered why Natalya could not have waited just a little bit longer for her husband to come home. Then Meg went out to the living room, turned on the TV, and thought of Natalya’s husband, how, like all the others, he was sitting on a plane right now, so excited to return to the States, to his home, to his family. The wives had ensured that his dog and his children had not been taken from him, but Meg knew that his wife had. She knew he would not be returning to a happy home.
    Leaning back into the pillows, Meg kicked off her shoes. Soon she wouldn’t need to worry about Natalya. Tomorrow Jeremy would be home. That interminable waiting, waiting, waiting for her life to continue—such a long, gray nothingness between departure and return, huge chunks of existence she filled up and pushed through as if it were a task rather than a stretch of her young life—would be over. There was such unreality to the waiting, such limbo; sometimes she didn’t even know what she was waiting for. So much wasted time. Time was the enemy, waking her up alone at night and ticking so slowly, each minute mocking her. But now it was over. Jeremy would be back tomorrow and her life would resume and she would no longer care what Natalya did within these walls.

    Boris woke her as usual. But this time it was his snout pressing up against her shoulder rather than his bark. It took Meg a moment to realize where she was, that she was stretched out uncomfortably on Natalya’s couch. She sat up so quickly that she nearly fell off the cushions, her elbow knocking over the foreign fashion magazines on the table, splaying bare arms, thighs, and lipsticked mouths across the carpet.
    Daylight filtered in through the shaded window, Boris was trying to lick her face, and Natalya had never come home.
    Meg rose, pushing the dog away, feeling her stomach shift with uneasiness. It was seven in the morning; she told herself that there was still time for Natalya to walk in, for the day to right itself. She creaked open the door to the twins’ room. Peter had crawled out of his bed and into his sister’s, their small bodies pressed together as if still curved in a womb. Meg closed the door, got Boris’s leash from the hook by the door, and took him outside.
    He pulled her up and down Battalion Avenue, trying to run into traffic, looking back at her as if he were having an amazing amount of fun. Then he squatted on the perfectly manicured lawn of the Relocation Center and would not move no matter how much she tugged his leash or begged. She hadn’t brought a plastic bag to pick up after him, so she covered his mess with leaves, not making eye contact with an old woman who watched from a park bench.
    She returned to the apartment, quickly slipping inside. The twins were both sitting up, blinking. They didn’t seem surprised to see Meg rather than their mother, and they didn’t cry.
    Meg changed Peter’s diaper, his green eyes watching her stoically as she covered him with baby powder from his thighs to his ribs. Then Lara led Meg by the hand to the bathroom and pointed at the toilet, and did not let go until Meg clapped her hands in praise at the contents. It was eight o’clock in the morning and Natalya had not returned.

    Meg held a child on each hip as she made her way