Free You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt Page B

she was photogenic and charismatic and named Jennifer Jones. I didn’t want her to feel guilty. My mother and I went to Dulles Airport with the Joneses to send them off. I gave Jenny three granola bars for the flight.
    “I’ve never been to another country before,” she said to the flock of reporters. She held up her newly minted passport. I was right there beside her, but I was cropped out of all the published photos.
    We watched their plane take off. My mother stood next to me, breathing deeply in an attempt to ward off a panic attack—the mere sight of planes was enough to make her nervous. If we had been invited to visit the USSR, I would have had to explain that my mother didn’t fly.
    For the next two weeks, my mother and I watched the coverage of Jenny’s trip on the news. Orchestrated footage of her being greeted at Sheremetyevo Airport by the Soviet Friendship Committee—they gave her so many bouquets of flowers that she could hardly walk—of Jenny posing outside Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square, singing folk songs with other girls at Artek, and strolling through the cavernous galleries of the Hermitage in Leningrad.
    While she was away, I had agreed to feed Jenny’s cat. Every afternoon I let myself into their house to fulfill my duty. I stacked their mail—mostly letters addressed to Jenny from her adoring fans—on the sideboard in the dining room. Hexa’s bowls were in the kitchen, and while I served her Meow Mix and refilled her water dish, she studied me from her perch on the windowsill. Hexa was a fat gray cat with amber eyes so penetrating they freaked me out. Her default expression was a scowl, and she had the annoying habit of using the bathtub as her litter box. I was never much of a cat person, but I made an effort. I tried to stroke her under the chin the way Jenny did, but the cat just switched her tail and stared me down.
    After I watered the plants, I often climbed the stairs to the second floor. I told myself I wasn’t snooping—even as a child I had a profound respect for privacy—when I wandered into the master bedroom. I just wanted to examine the evidence of fatherhood: the cuff links in a silver box on the dresser; the wooden shoe trees on the floor of the closet, awaiting their next assignment; the Speed Stick deodorant next to the toenail clippers in the medicine cabinet. I am embarrassed to admit that I even pressed my nose into Mr. Jones’s ties, hoping to inhale some paternal comfort. He had dozens of ties, hung in neat silk stripes from a rack, and his shirts were arranged by color: Oxford blue, white, a few pale pinks. His loafers had dimes in them, not pennies.
Everyone wears a uniform,
I thought.
    In Jenny’s room I’d put on one of her LPs and let the needle find the deepest groove, to see which songs she listened to most. Above her desk was a bulletin board on which she stuck various mementos and talismans: a picture of her old yellow house in Dayton, a ribbon from a swim meet, a black-and-white photo strip of the two of us. In the months since the Andropov letter, newspaper clippings had crowded out the photos I knew so well. One day I lifted up one of the articles (“Jennifer Jones is just a normal American girl”) to see if our photo strip was still there, and I must have bumped the board, because it slid off its hooks and fell onto the desk. I checked to be sure the articles were still securely tacked, and then when I lifted the board to rehang it, I felt a wad of paper taped to the back. I turned the board over, and there it was, lodged in the lower left corner: the envelope addressed to Mr. Yuri Andropov in my handwriting. Inside was the letter I’d written in Jenny’s room the previous November, the letter Mr. Jones had promised to post. There was no stamp in the upper right corner. It had obviously never left the Joneses’ house.
    “I’m sure Andropov will write to you,” Jenny had said to me again and again, but she must have known that wasn’t