The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

that’s it.
    “You’re right,” Dad says. “How did I not think of that?” And he instantly moves to the next level, like in a computer game, “In Temirtau, when she was pregnant, she kept saying to me, you’ll have a little brother, Adrian. She was so certain it would be a boy. And she was right, as it turned out.”
    She wanted to have this name in the family, I think to myself. She wanted the name to belong to our family—as the man who had borne that name was supposed to belong to her.
    “And when you came,” Dad unspools his tale, “as soon as we got word we had a boy, she greeted you: Adrian! I can hear her the way she said it, now—it was like she...exhaled it. Sealed it.”
    “Uhu.” What else can I say? That to name both her son and grandson after some unrelated guy, a woman must have once really wanted to have that guy be their father and grandfather? I don’t see any other reason—but maybe I don’t really know women?
    She must have loved that man very much, my Granny Lina. Only he loved another—Aunt Gela, her precious sister.
    “Now, Stefania, she wanted our boy to be Ostap,” Dad mumbles on like a somnambulist. “And if we had a girl, she wanted to name her Lesya. And I thought to name the kid after Grandfather—Ivas, or Ivanka.... But Stefania agreed with Grandma right away: Let it be Adrian! We could see it really mattered to her.”
    Of course it did. Both in 1950, and then in 1970, when I was born, it mattered just the same. Twenty years changed nothing. In her own way, however she could, Granny Lina also spent her life trying to set right something that had not come to be. Something that was meant to happen—but did not.
    “Do you have any idea who it might have been?” Dad asks. A touch fearfully, as it feels to me. Now he is the boy who is afraid of losing his mom: the image he’d had since he was little has suddenly come alive, like a statue that’s drawn a breath and is ready to leave its pedestal and set out in an unknown direction—and I bite my tongue before I let my ready answer roll off of it: I’ve seen him.
    For a split second, the unspoken words billow out from my lips like bubblegum—and then burst inaudibly: poof, and they’regone. And it’s not true, anyway, because
I
haven’t seen him—I’ve only seen pieces of footage from inside his head. (His later-to-be-exploded head.) My beloved has seen him. No, my wife—from the night the two of us dreamed the same dream, something has changed between us: she is now inside my life, like a part of me. Apparently, this is exactly how married people experience themselves. And this is the change Dad meant when he said I’ve matured.
    “He died, Dad,” I say out loud. “In battle.” And because this sounds suddenly curt, as if I were suggesting that this dead man be buried and forgotten posthaste, I add, “At the same time as Aunt Gela. With her.”
    “Oh, I see,” Dad sighs—relieved, it sounds to me. “Then it all makes sense,” and catches himself, “but how do you know?”
    “From Daryna,” I say. Since that’s basically how it, in fact, is.
    “She’s a trooper.” Dad reaches for the highest praise it was ever acceptable for a man in our family to give.
    “Yep. Something like that.”
    “Alright then...you go now, go to bed, son.”
    He is letting me go—and I understand: he wants to be alone now with his newly gained knowledge, to roll it over in his hands, hold it up against the light, work it into his previously undisturbed picture of the past until he can’t see the seams. He might have to move some things around in that picture in order to do this; that’s not out of the question, things have to be cleaned up as always happens when one brings a new piece of furniture into a well-lived-in room. This is indeed work that takes time, and I understand him perfectly.
    “You oughtta turn in too, Dad. The notebook can wait till tomorrow.”
    “Uhu.”
    But of course he won’t; he couldn’t possibly—he’ll go sit right back down and read it all over, picking out, with his new eyes, the A.O. and Ad. Or. from the web of Grandma’s acronyms, like oneglowing light in a dead string. Who knows, he might get at something else this way, light by light...Lolly’s method.
    “Thank you for calling.”
    Wow, it really got to the old man.
    “Don’t mention it. I’m sorry I don’t call as often as I’d like...been totally buried at work.”
    If only you knew, Dad!
    “Of course, of