Trafficked

by Kim Purcell

  Maggie cleared her throat primly and began to read in her perfect American voice, occasionally making her voice deep, when she remembered she was Mr. Barnes.

  “Okay, your turn.” Maggie handed Hannah the book.

  Hannah read the first line of the next page, speaking slowly.

  “No, silly, you don’t say it like that,” Maggie said in English, laughing. “Say, ‘vampire,’ not ‘wampire.’”

  Michael repeated, “Vampire.”

  “See, he can say it. Good boy, Michael.” Maggie readjusted herself and smoothed her long brown hair back. “Try the sentence again.”

  “The vampire svaggered toward the girl,” Hannah said.

  “Svaggered?” Maggie flopped backward on the bed and threw her head onto her pillow, laughing.

  The door to her room opened. “What is going on here?” Lillian asked, speaking Russian as she always did, even though she must have heard them speaking English. Hannah leaped off the bed, pressing the book to her side, both for Maggie’s sake and for her own.

  “Nothing,” Hannah said, answering in Russian.

  “What are you reading?” Lillian demanded.

  Neither Maggie nor Hannah answered.

  “Vampire,” Michael said in English with a big grin.

  Lillian marched around the bed and snatched the book from Hannah. She lifted it up in the air. Hannah flinched, sure Lillian was going to hit her with it, but Lillian just shook it in her face. “How dare you? You are not going to use my children to teach you English. I told you no English books. They need to speak Russian, not bad English.”

  Hannah knew it was best to be quiet when Lillian got angry. She pressed her lips together even as her mind rushed with things to say, ways to fight, arguments to make.

  “But Mommy, I’m teaching her good English,” Maggie said from the bed, looking up at her mother with those sweet, innocent eyes.

  Lillian read the cover of the book. “What is this? You are not allowed to read vampire books.” Lillian turned back to Hannah. “Do you realize that I’m going to have to wake up every night for the next week because Maggie will have nightmares from this book?”

  “No, I won’t,” Maggie said in English. “I haven’t for a long time.”

  “Be quiet, Maggie.”

  Hannah saw the flush in Lillian’s cheeks and prayed that Maggie would stop, but Maggie was just getting started. “I’m not a baby. God. You can’t make me speak Russian. You’re just jealous ’cause you can’t speak English.”

  Lillian’s mouth dropped open and then she marched to Maggie’s shelf where Maggie kept all her dolls. She tucked the book under her arm and reached up for Rebecca, Maggie’s favorite doll.

  “No mamulya, please,” Maggie said, switching back to Russian. “Not Rebecca!”

  “I’m taking five dolls today,” Lillian said, grabbing four more dolls by their hair. “If I hear any more English, Maggie, I’m taking away all of them.”

  This was a terrible punishment, Hannah thought, and not fair at all when Maggie was just helping her. “It’s not right,” she spoke up suddenly, reaching her arm out.

  “What?” Lillian asked Hannah, hugging the dolls to her body. “Don’t contradict me. I am the mother.”

  Hannah looked down at the floor and stepped back. Hold your tongue, she told herself. For once, think of yourself.

  “Those are my dolls!” Maggie yelled, jumping up from the bed and trying to grab at Rebecca.

  “Sit on your bed,” Lillian barked, yanking the dolls back. Her face was red. Hannah didn’t think she’d ever seen Lillian this angry. Maggie swung her hand forward, reaching for the book under Lillian’s arm. Lillian jumped back. “Sit,” she yelled, and raised her arm as if to strike her. Maggie shrank down on her bed. Lillian shook her finger at Maggie.

  “You know the rules. No English. If you don’t speak any English in the house for the next week, you’ll get them back. Now stay in your bed!”

  Maggie asked in a quiet voice, “Can I have the book, please?”

  “No, you can’t have the book,” Lillian said indignantly.

  “But it’s not even mine. It’s Roberta’s.”

  “I guess you’ll have to tell her you lost it.”

  “No, Mommy, please . . .” Maggie burst into tears and covered her face with her hands.

  Lillian glared at Hannah, clearly blaming her. “Put Michael to bed, baba.”

  Michael wrapped his arms around Hannah’s neck, and she knew she should just leave now, before she made things worse, but she felt sick that Maggie was getting punished instead of her. “She didn’t do anything wrong. I asked her to teach me. It was just a game to her.”

  “You, get out,” Lillian said, shaking her finger at Hannah. “She knows the rules. I’ll deal with you later.”

  Hannah hurried out of the room, carrying Michael down the hall. Her heart was pounding. She’d deal with her later? What did that mean?

  “Maggie, stay in your room,” Lillian barked, and shut the door.

  “I hate Russian and I hate you!” Maggie yelled in English from inside her room.

  Hannah waited for Lillian’s response, scared she was going to go back into Maggie’s room, but thankfully, she stormed down the stairs. Hannah put Michael in his room in front of the television, turned on a Russian cartoon, Nu, pogodi!, and then crept back down the hall to Maggie.

  Through the door, she could hear Maggie’s long, muffled sobs. It was such a sad, lonely cry. Hannah opened the door, walked over to the bed, and sat down next to her. Maggie was stretched out on her belly, her head buried in her pillow. Her back jumped up with each sob. Hannah clucked her tongue like her mother used to do when she was little.

  Maggie let out another wail, and Hannah glanced toward the door, worried that Lillian would rush in and see her comforting Maggie. It was a risk she’d have to take.

  “Shh, it’s okay,” she said, rubbing Maggie’s back in small circles.

  Maggie relaxed into her touch for a few moments, but then her arm swung back and she hit Hannah hard in the arm. “Get out! You’ll make my mother angry.”

  Hannah stood up and walked out of the room, her arm throbbing. She had some sense of how Anna Karenina must have felt, forlorn and rejected by all, before she stepped off the train platform.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  That night, Hannah awoke to someone touching her shoulder. Maggie was standing in the garage in her frilly white nightgown, looking so small, despite her age. “I’m scared.”

  Hannah blinked, groggy. “Come here,” she said. Maggie climbed onto the sofa next to her, and Hannah wrapped her arms around her skinny, quivering body.

  Tearfully, Maggie told Hannah about her nightmare. She’d dreamed that her mother was a vampire, and only Maggie knew, so she had to lock herself in Michael’s room at night to protect him, but he wanted to see their mother, so he finally got away and then he became a vampire too and then they were both chasing after her. She sniffed. “It was so scary.”

  She seemed much younger than eight at that moment. “It was only a dream, Maggie. Vampires aren’t real. You know that, right?”

  Maggie sucked in a haggard breath and nodded in agreement.

  But it wasn’t the vampires she was afraid of—it was her own mother. It was no wonder Maggie had a nightmare after Lillian’s freak-out. She’d nearly hit her. Over a book. Hannah tickled the back of Maggie’s hair by the nape of her neck, shushing her softly, and Maggie wrapped her arm over her chest, resting her head on Hannah’s shoulder.

  Hannah held her until she fell asleep, then lifted her up and carried her out of the garage and down the hall. At the bottom of the stairs, she paused and listened. All she heard was her own heavy breathing. Even though Maggie was a skinny eight-year-old, she had to be sixty pounds, an
d it was no easy task to carry her. But she had to get Maggie up the stairs without anybody knowing that she’d woken up. She could just imagine what Lillian would do if she learned that Maggie had had a nightmare about her being a vampire. Slowly, she walked up each step, wincing as the stairs creaked.

  Finally, she reached Maggie’s room. Fortunately, the door was already open. Her arms were aching. She placed Maggie gently in her bed and shook out her arms, gazing down at Maggie. She looked so young with her flushed cheeks and puffy eyes. Hannah smoothed a strand of dark hair away from her face, surprised and a little frightened about how much she cared about her.

  She stepped out of the room. Still, the house was silent. She crept down the stairs. Near the front door, she heard someone yelling outside. Sergey? No, it sounded like English. She glanced back up the stairs. Everyone was asleep.

  It would be best to ignore it, she thought, but she was curious; she’d always been too curious. She pressed her head against the crack in the door. Definitely English. Maybe it was Colin.

  The dead bolt was cold in her fingers as she slid it open. She paused and listened for any noises coming from upstairs. This is what it would feel like if she were running away. It was tempting, sometimes, but where would she go?

  She cracked the door and peeked out. A fancy black Mercedes convertible was in the next-door neighbor’s driveway. She took two steps out to the landing at the top of the front steps and peered around the white stucco of the house.

  A tall, dark-haired man in a tailored suit was standing at the bottom of the neighbor’s steps. He had his hands jammed in his pockets and he was leaning back, unsteady on his feet.

  The mother stood in the doorway of her house, holding the metal screen door open with her body. With her other hand, she pulled a short red robe tighter around her flowery nightgown. “We’ll talk in the morning, Will.”

  “Why’d you have to take me to court? I’ll give you money for the boys if that’s all you want,” he said, slurring, looking up at her.

  Hannah wondered who this man was. She understood that the mother wanted to talk to the man in the morning and the man was angry that she wanted money.

  Colin came up behind his mom, rubbing his eyes, in blue pajama bottoms and a gray T-shirt.

  “Dad?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

  Dad? Hannah couldn’t believe it. This was his father? She’d thought that the picture of the military man in the kitchen was their father, and she’d assumed he was dead like her own parents. She’d kind of hoped it, if someone could hope such a thing without being a horrible person.

  “Just having a conversation with your mother,” the father said, trying to steady his voice so that he’d seem sober. Parents never understood how smart their children were.

  “It’s two in the morning.”

  The father stared at him as if something about Colin displeased him. It wasn’t a look of love, like Hannah’s own father would give her even when he was drunk. “Son, did I give you everything you wanted for Christmas?” he asked him.

  “Yeah.” Colin glanced at his mother, as though he were afraid of betraying her.

  “And your birthday?”

  “I guess.”

  “You have a roof over your head?”

  His mother interrupted. “You haven’t paid their September or October tuition. It’s almost the end of October. The school won’t give us their report cards until you pay.”

  Tuition. Hannah didn’t know that word. If only she could use a dictionary.

  “I’ll pay it by the end of the month,” the father said. “I got a lot of bills right now. We’ve got only so many pieces of the pie, Izzy.”

  Her voice rose. “You mean you’ve got to pay for an expensive wedding when you can’t even pay for your children’s goddamn tuition!”

  Hannah looked into Colin’s face, illuminated in the porch light, and noticed the anger in his eyes.

  The younger brother came to the door in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. He ran his hand through his messy brown hair and squinted. “Do you have to fight outside at two in the morning?”

  “Hey, my man!” The dad took two steps up the stairs and gave him a high five. Colin shifted back. “We’ve got to take out the ball this weekend.”

  “Sure, Dad!”

  The father stumbled backward down the stairs. The younger boy stepped forward to help, but their father recovered in time. Colin stared down at his father. Didn’t step forward to help. Didn’t even care.

  Colin glanced in Hannah’s direction. Their eyes met, and his face revealed a look of pure humiliation. She stepped backward, out of view. No matter where kids lived, nobody liked people to know what a mess their parents were.

  She remembered the time she’d been on a school field trip to the National Opera House when she was fourteen and her father had been passed out on the steps. She’d noticed him right away. So had Katya. Hannah had looked straight ahead. Katya had glanced at her in alarm, but Hannah had been too embarrassed to acknowledge it even to Katya. Her face had heated up in anticipation. The class had walked in a row past her drunk father, and all she could do was hope that no one would recognize him. But someone did. The girl she hated, Elena, had yelled out, “Isn’t that your father, Hannah?” Katya had turned to glare at Elena and then she’d reached over and grabbed Hannah’s hand, squeezing it tight.

  Hannah stepped back into the house and closed the door behind her. She clicked the lock shut and sighed. Colin’s father was a drunk, just like hers had been. He was a rich drunk, but a drunk nonetheless. She walked down the hall into the garage, and dropped down on the sofa.

  One of her last memories of Papulya was of him pacing the living room, a glass of vodka jumping in his hand, as he raged on about the corrupt government that stole money from the people. “We were rich under the Soviets. Rich!”

  Hannah was sitting on a cushion in front of her mother, who was sitting on the fold-out sofa, rubbing Hannah’s neck with a mild smile on her face as if to say, Yes, yes, we’ve heard this before. Daniil was sitting beside Hannah, nodding vigorously, drinking a glass of vodka her father had poured from the bottle Daniil had brought for him.

  Papulya bent down, a few inches from Daniil’s face, and said, “You know, you know.” A dollop of spit flew from his mouth, landing on Daniil’s cheek, but Daniil didn’t wipe it off. Hannah was grateful for that.

  Her father stood and shook his drink at Hannah, spilling it on the floor by her foot. “This is a good man, Hannah. A good man.” Daniil was only sixteen at the time, but that didn’t matter to her father.

  Her mother had squeezed Hannah’s shoulders tight then, a squeeze that Hannah had tried to interpret for the last year, because she’d never had the chance to ask her mother about it. She never knew if it meant that she didn’t think Daniil was a good man or if it meant she should not listen to her father about anything or if it was just a strange way to show she agreed. A week later, they were both dead.

  Chapter Thirty

  Hannah was folding clothes on the long narrow table in the garage. If she had her choice, she’d do it at the kitchen table with the back door open so she could listen to the birds and the lawn mowers, but Lillian didn’t like a mess in the kitchen.

  She folded Michael’s pants. All his little clothes took forever. If taking out the garbage had become her unexpected favorite chore in this country, doing the laundry was her unexpected least favorite. She hadn’t known to dread laundry, because she’d never had to do it before. Her mother and then her babushka had done all the washing by hand and hung it to dry outside over the balcony in the summer or on a rack next to the heater in the winter.

  The washing machine stopped. She banged open the lid and reached in for the white clothes and heaved them into the dryer. At least she had a washer and a dryer.

  Dark clothes n
ext. On cold. When anything got ruined, Lillian said, “I’ll just add this to what you owe us.” Hannah’s debt was an invisible number that seemed to be forever expanding. The bill for the new stove and for repainting the kitchen had surely been added to her debt, and who knew what else.

  She reached into one of Sergey’s pockets. Emptying pockets was one of the many gross parts of doing laundry. She always hoped for something that would be useful to her, like keys to his office or a letter from her family, but instead she found cigarette butts, receipts from restaurants and coffee shops, and spare change. One time she got gum on her fingers that he’d stuck between two pieces of paper. Another time she found an unused condom in its package, and ever since, she’d worried she’d find a used one. That would be even worse than the poop on Michael’s pants and the bloodstains on Lillian’s underwear, which she’d had to spray with stain remover.

  Hannah pulled out a wad of bills and one piece of paper from the pocket of Sergey’s jeans. She unfolded the bills and counted them. Four hundred dollars, all in twenties. Was it an accident, or had he left the money there for her? He’d never had this much money in his pockets before, just random change and one-dollar bills now and then. It was especially odd to leave four hundred when that was the exact amount she was supposed to get paid per week or per month, depending on who she believed.

  “Take it,” Colin said. He was sitting on the dryer. Well, not actually sitting, and he wasn’t speaking out loud, just in her thoughts. She liked to imagine him hanging out with her, so that if she wanted to share her opinion, someone would respond.

  “I thought you were a nice boy,” she chastised.

  He laughed his big American laugh. “They owe you,” he said. In her daydream, Colin was speaking Russian because that’s what came naturally to her and she couldn’t imagine him speaking broken English. Anyway, daydreams didn’t have to be realistic.

  “They say I owe them,” Hannah said.

  “It’s for your grandmother. What are they going to do once you’ve sent it?”