Anyway, when I thought of Richard, I thought of how he was so worried I was cold that night when I was sitting on the bed. How he wouldn’t fuck me because he was married. How he had bought his daughter so many Barbies. He was a man—and here was a word I did not normally think of when I thought of men—that a person could trust. It had been a long time since I had thought of a man that way. Mostly men were just animals who had needs. Even the TV Bachelor. Even all of the TV Bachelors. I wanted romance, I wanted a man to kneel and give me a rose, but girls like me do not meet men like that. We just don’t. It’s movie fantasy that we do, even when we are pretty.
And I was never gaga for any guy. I was never in love. I had regulars at the cottage and in Moscow, but I was never going to be so stupid as to think they could love me. Maybe if Richard had fucked me like all the others, I wouldn’t have continued to think about him. Maybe if my father hadn’t died when I was so young, I would have looked at Richard the way I looked at most of the johns. (People say girls like me have daddy issues. Maybe. But it’s not a universal thing. Not all sex slaves are orphans. Not all whores wish their fathers—living or dead—had paid them even teeny tiny teaspoonful of attention.) But, for whatever the reason, I found myself wondering if Richard could help me. Would help me. Not healthy. Not normal. Not smart. I let the idea go.
When this father I saw on the Tenth Avenue and his little girl with the ball gown Barbie passed me, he was listening carefully to something she was saying. She was talking about a kitten. I guess it was their kitten. The girl’s hair was as dark as mine, willowy and long. A fairy tale girl. Her peacoat was red. I wondered if maybe she was Armenian. I had not met any Armenians in America, but before Inga had returned to Moscow, she’d told me there were lots here. Most were descendants of the survivors of the Genocide. There had even been two Armenian churches I had walked right past those first days: Saint Illuminator’s on Twenty-seventh Street and the Saint Vartan Cathedral on the Second Avenue. Saint Vartan looked just like the Armenian churches I had seen growing up. It had a round dome, but otherwise it was all vertical lines. It was beautiful. I had stood outside there on the street with Inga and Sonja and Pavel and Crystal, looking up at it. It would have fit in perfectly in Yerevan.
“Want to go in?” Inga had asked Sonja and me, but Pavel said we didn’t have time. Besides, I would have been too ashamed. I was who I was. Whores don’t belong inside churches like that.
At some point—I don’t know when—the Tenth Avenue became the Amsterdam Avenue. And still I kept walking. It had been dark since I left, but the side streets seemed even darker now. I stayed on the avenue. I considered trying to find a subway entrance, but I didn’t know where I would go. I wondered what would happen if I just rode the subways all night long.
I would probably fall asleep and be robbed, that’s what would happen. Or a police guy or subway driver would figure out who I was.
So I kept walking, sometimes stopping to get juice from a little store or—one time—a slice of pizza. But mostly I just smoked and walked, smoked and walked. I might have walked until I collapsed, but at 103rd Street I saw something: a youth hostel. It was a handsome brick building that looked like it should have been a government office. They had beds for less than fifty dollars a night. I would not have a room of my own, but that almost made me feel safer.
It certainly made me feel less alone.
I decided I would stop there and sleep, at least for the night.
Chapter Twelve
Richard wished he had thought to ask the color of the girl’s hair. The dead girl’s hair. The one in the morgue. He was driving now to Brooklyn, using his Garmin to guide him to King’s County Hospital, heading south on the Major Deegan. He was being led, he saw, to the FDR Drive and then the Brooklyn Bridge, which made him wonder if he should detour into the Heights and insist that his younger brother join him on this cataclysmically awful errand. Make him experience a little more of the lash and woe. Feel a little bit more of the pain. But he wasn’t going to do that. His younger brother could drive him crazy—find new ways to infuriate him—but birth order was always going to rule. His younger brother was always going to be that: younger. Which meant there was no reason to subject him to this. Besides, he really didn’t want Philip with him if the girl on the slab was Alexandra. He honestly wasn’t sure what he would do if it were—but he knew that his brother would find his grief incomprehensible. Philip would have guessed mistakenly that his anguish stemmed from a crush. A lingering infatuation. But the despair wouldn’t have been lodged in that section of his soul; it would instead be taking up room in the part of his heart that he reserved for children. For his daughter. The girl was young and beautiful and did what she did because she hadn’t a choice. She deserved so much better than the ontological hole through which she had fallen.
As he drove, he considered praying silently that the corpse would be the chemical blonde, but he feared there was something a little despicable about praying for one of the two girls to be alive at the expense of the other. Also, he didn’t really pray. He was a Christmas and Easter Christian only. It seemed disingenuous to start praying now, especially about something like this. But he knew what he wanted; he knew what he hoped. That was, alas, undeniable.
He was grateful for yesterday and tried to focus on that. Never in his life had he been so relieved as when his head had hit the pillow beside Kristin yesterday afternoon during lunch. He had her back. It might take years to fully regain her trust, but no longer did he fear for the future of his marriage. Now if he could make the right choices, do the right things, he might be able to win back his daughter. Melissa, he could tell, was somewhere between embarrassed by him and mad at him. As she should be. There was a bridge he had yet to rebuild, he thought with a pang. But how was he to replace the fallen span? How do you explain what he did, what he had desired, to a nine-year-old girl? To his nine-year-old girl? Clearly, it was going to take time to regain her trust, too. But maybe eventually she would figure out how to forgive him—and the simple joy that is normalcy might return.
A yellow cab honked as it passed him on the right, the driver giving him the finger for being distracted and driving too slowly, but when Richard glanced down at the speedometer he saw that he was motoring along at fifty-five. Not awful. Not geriatric. Still, he tried to focus more on the crowded, tortuous highway. But it was difficult. He kept seeing the faces of people he loathed: Spencer. Hugh Kirn. A couple of Russians who called themselves Pavel and Kirill, though none of the detectives he had met believed for one second that those were their real names.
But the person whose face infuriated him the most was Spencer.
And so he made a decision. He was not going to pay the bastard a penny. Paying a bribe only suggested that he had something to hide—and, the fact was, he didn’t. He was already a public spectacle. He was going to tell Kristin that there was a video and it might be painful for her to see it—that is, if she chose to watch it. But she already knew the tawdry outlines; the video was mere lineament. He would devote his life to making amends for that one moment, if he had to.
The same went for his daughter. Someday he would tell her about the video, too. He didn’t know how, but he would.
And as for those bastards at Franklin McCoy, well, they could go fuck themselves. They were self-righteous and smug, and they were far from the only game in town. They weren’t even the only game on Water Street. He knew how good he was at what he did. And if he did leave, he had a feeling that Dina Renzi would make sure that his exit package was substantial.
The traffic slowed, and abruptly he came up behind the cabbie who had given him the finger a few minutes ago. Briefly he considered slamming his car into the back of the bastard’s taxi. He knew he wouldn’t really do such a thing; his life was enough of a mess as it was. And while he would readily admit that he had issues, road rage wasn’t among them. But the idea of rear-ending the cabbie had indeed crossed his mind. How dare that moron give him the finger? How da
re he? Was he on his way to the Brooklyn morgue? Nope. Was he on a forced leave of absence from a job he really liked and desperately missed? Nope. Did he have a couch in his living room that looked like a prop from The Walking Dead? Nope.
He braked and inched forward along with the rest of the traffic. He turned on the radio, steering clear of News Radio 88 and 1010 Wins. The last thing he wanted was a reminder of what a disaster the rest of the world was. He found a station with sports talk, and tried to lose himself in the debate about how to rebuild the Giants’ offensive line. But he failed. Try as he might to think of anything else, his mind would always roam back to the mess he had made of his life and, saddest of all, to the corpse at the hospital where he was headed. And so he finally allowed himself a small prayer. He succumbed. He prayed that the girl with the coal-colored hair was alive.
…
“It was called Mountain Day when I was at Smith,” Kristin was explaining to Melissa and Melissa’s friend Claudia as the three of them stood with the very last of the commuters on the platform of the Bronxville train station. Kristin was doing something now that she wished she had done four days ago, back on Monday morning: she was taking a personal day. She was taking a personal day with her daughter and one of her daughter’s friends. Something about Richard having to drive to Brooklyn to ID a body had pushed her over the edge and given her the idea. She and her daughter simply weren’t going to go to school today. That’s all there was to it. And they were going to bring Claudia with them when they played hooky. As Kristin had anticipated, Jesse was all in: she didn’t mind her daughter joining them for a day off in the slightest.
“One weekday in the autumn, we’d all wake up and hear bells,” Kristin went on. “The bells in College Hall and the quadrangle and the chapel would all ring like it was, I don’t know, 1918 and the end of a war, and that meant that all classes were canceled. We—the students and faculty—had the day off and we could do whatever we wanted. The college has been doing it for forever. And this, girls, is our own personal Mountain Day.”
“Why did they ring bells at the end of a war?” Claudia asked her.
“To let people know it was all over,” she answered.
“Why not just tell them on TV?”
“There was no TV in 1918.”
“But there were newspapers,” Claudia argued. “I think a newspaper would be a better way to tell people a war is over than ringing a bell. I mean, when the students at Smith College heard the bells, did they think it was the end of the war or they just had no school?”
“Claudia, don’t take everything literally,” Melissa said to her friend, rolling her eyes.
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” Melissa began, but then the thought stalled. She didn’t know quite what it meant. What she meant. She just knew that Claudia took everything…literally. It drove Melissa crazy sometimes. It drove everyone crazy sometimes.
“You’re right, Claudia—about the bells and the newspapers,” Kristin told her. “People knew the war was over because of the newspapers. And the newspapers had informed them that the bells would ring when there was an armistice. When there was peace. I just meant that we heard a lot of bells on Mountain Day at Smith.”
The three of them stared for a long moment in silence at the train tracks. It was chilly this morning, and the temperature wasn’t supposed to climb above forty-five degrees that day. When Kristin exhaled, she saw her breath. But it was sunny and the sky was cerulean. Her plan was to take the girls to the Museum of Natural History and then the Museum of Modern Art. She was going to see if her own mother would like to join the three of them for lunch, though she guessed this was a long shot: her mother’s social calendar filled up far in advance. Given how much the two girls enjoyed clothes shopping, she assumed they might also wander into some of the stores on Fifth Avenue or Rockefeller Center. They might visit Capezio for new leotards and dance tights.
She wished the girls were still in third grade. A year ago, she could have taken them to the American Girl store, and they would have been in heaven for hours. Now Melissa hardly ever played with her American Girl dolls. Kristin wasn’t sure she had picked up any of them since school had started in September. Soon they would be as much a memory as her plush pals from Sesame Street—Zoe and Abby and Elmo—or her Barbies.
She shuddered ever so slightly when her mind roamed to the Barbies, because that meant she saw once more the used condom on her daughter’s Tucker Tote. She wondered which of the two prostitutes had been in Melissa’s bedroom. Was it the one who later would bring her husband to the guest room? Or was it the one who would steal one of her kitchen knives and—according to the media, not her husband—nearly decapitate a Russian with a sequoia for a neck? (Richard had been more circumspect: he had said only that the girl had stabbed the fellow in the throat.) She had never liked emotional chaos, but she was feeling this morning that her composure—so frail since the bachelor party—was under siege. Hence the need for this Mountain Day. When she thought of the dead body in the morgue, she felt bad that she had any preference at all when she contemplated whether it was the one who had been with Richard or the one who had rained hellfire down on her bodyguard. Her captor. Whatever. But—and she could admit this only to herself—she did have a preference. Of course, she did. The truth was, she did not wish that either girl was dead. Had been murdered. But the inalterable (and unutterable) fact was this: Richard was now on his way to ID one of them, and somewhere deep inside her she hoped that the victim was the girl before whom her husband had stood naked. The girl who had led her husband upstairs, where the two of them…
Where the two of them either did nothing or something. Probably she’d never know for sure.
“Train’s coming,” Claudia was saying. “There’s a movie about a lady who throws herself under a train when it’s coming.”
“It was a book first,” Melissa corrected her.
“Doesn’t matter. Is that the worst way to kill yourself or what? What a total mess! You’re like…you’re like hamburger meat.”
“You should see our couch,” said Melissa, and she shook her head.
“Wait, what? Your couch?”
Wait, what. The train began to slow, and Kristin heard those two syllables echoing in her head. Melissa looked up at her, clearly wondering if it was okay to tell her friend about the couch. She shrugged. It was fine. The doors opened, and she herded the children into the car, the last of the commuters—the women as well as the men—making way for her and the two girls. She half listened as Melissa told her friend about the blood on the sofa, and then the blood on the walls and how there was a blank spot where once there had been a famous painting.
“It wasn’t that famous,” she corrected her daughter.
“No?”
“Nope.”
Wait, what? The words continued to reverberate inside her. A Ramones song? No. Something else. Someone else. It didn’t matter. This morning it simply felt like the story of her life—at least her recent history.
…
“Yes, that’s her,” Richard murmured, his voice wan. “She said her name was Sonja.” The pathologist was a muscular guy perhaps five or six years his junior, with hipster eyeglasses—thick black frames that made him look like he should be an Apollo 11 engineer—unruly black hair, and a nose that clearly had been broken at least once. Maybe twice. He had introduced himself as Harry Something. Richard had already lost the fellow’s last name, but he thought it might have been Greek. He’d pulled the sheet down only as far as the bottom of the girl’s chin.
Beside him was a New York detective, a fellow who reminded Richard a little bit of his father: they had the same dark bags under their eyes and the same ring of short white hair running along the back of their heads from ear to ear. Richard’s father had retired a couple of years ago; he guessed this detective would soon. He was wearing a tweed jacket and a white oxford shirt without a necktie. He looked more like an English professor than a cop.
/> “You’re absolutely sure?” the detective asked him.
“I am.”
“I mean, given the decomposition—”
“It’s her. I’m sure.” He was relieved it wasn’t Alexandra, and that made him feel both a little guilty and a little unclean. The sensations were related in a way he couldn’t quite parse here among the morgue’s cold lines and antiseptic counters. Its balneal tiles and polished chrome. Its Proustian-like aroma of biology lab. Harry, the pathologist, had warned him that the odor from the cadaver would dwarf that smell, but still the stench from the body had caught him off guard. He’d nearly gagged. The girl, now a mephitic shell, reeked of decay and dirty water, and he’d taken a step back—away—so the principal smell was the combination of disinfectant and bleach that had greeted him the moment he’d walked in the door. The stench of formaldehyde. But he had recovered. Breathing only through his mouth, he leaned in again. He had, to use an expression his brother sometimes used—and always in the context of endeavors that in point of fact demanded neither heroism nor spine, such as downing a shot of particularly wretched tequila or agreeing to bowl one more game at some trendy bowling alley in the small hours of the morning in Soho—manned up. The corpse had been found in the water beside an old dock in what had once been the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was bobbing like a buoy against one of the pilings, trying to wend its way to the shore.
“Now that you have her—her body—will you be able to figure out who she really is?” he asked the detective.
“Maybe. But not likely. Not from this,” he said, waving his hand over the sheet. “Those guys we busted earlier this week? They’re the clues to who she really is. Where she’s from. They know where their friends got her.”
The Guest Room Page 24