The Guest Room (25 page)

“I want to know what the police want. I'm tired of learning everything about that party online or at school.”

And that was when the room seemed to really go mad. Her father wanted to know what she was doing reading about the party on the computer, and her mother was asking her what people were saying at school. They were talking at the same time, over each other, their words running together like the great buzz at the Broadway theater before the show started last week, a burble from which all meaning had to be extracted from the single words that would rise up from an otherwise incomprehensible thrum. It made her angry. It made her furious. She didn't know why she was the one who had to answer questions. None of this awfulness was her fault. She'd done nothing wrong. She just wanted things to be the way they were.

Suddenly both of her parents were kneeling on the kitchen floor beside her, rubbing her arms and her back, because those tears had become sobs. She tried to stop, shaking her head and rubbing her face with her napkin, but she was a mess. She just couldn't help it, and now all those questions were forgotten as her father kept saying, “It's okay, it's okay,” and her mother kept murmuring, “Shhhhhh. Shhhhhh.”

But it wasn't okay, it just wasn't. That was horribly clear, because now her mother was asking her father again, “What did the police want? Why are you going into the city?”

Melissa felt her father looking at her again. And this time he answered her mother, all the while continuing to rub her back. “I'm going to the morgue. They want me to identify the body of a person who was…who passed away. They think it's the body of one of the girls who was at the party.”

Her mother sat back on the floor as if she were a toddler. “No,” she said.

“Do you mean you have to go look at a dead body?” Melissa asked her father, sniffling, her voice now a desperate little pant in her head.

Her father nodded. “Yes. One of the girls.”

For a long second, Melissa focused on the way he had said the word
girls
. At the way a moment earlier he had said
girls at the party
. She repeated the expression in her mind.
Girls at the party.
But they weren't girls. They were sex slaves. And now, it seemed, one of them was dead.

I had lots of American cash, but no idea how far it would go or how useful paper money really was. It wasn't just that I only knew how much some things cost in New York City. Things like manicures and spray tans and makeup at stores like Sephora. It was that even I understood you couldn't just buy an airline ticket with dollar bills. They think you're a terrorist and are going to hijack or blow up the airplane if you try. You need a credit card, which I didn't have yet. I remembered what Sonja had told me when we were buying our train tickets when we left Bronxville: you could buy bus tickets and train tickets for short trips with cash, but you couldn't rent cars or fly anywhere on airplanes without what she called “plastic.” Besides, even if I did have a credit card, wouldn't the police guys find me? Of course they would. And then I would be in that dungeon of a place called the Rikers Island because they thought I was a murderer.

I knew I needed to find someone who could make me a pretend person passport and pretend person credit cards—someone like the Georgian from Tbilisi. But I wasn't sure where to begin, so that was as far as I got that afternoon with a plan. Still, I took every dollar I had and I left the hotel. I took the gun, which I loaded and tucked inside my leather jacket. And I took the clothing I had bought, which obviously was not very much. It all fit inside the backpack Sonja and I had gotten in the Times Square. It was seven o'clock at night.

I threw my phone into a garbage can on the street. If Sonja hadn't called me by now, she never would. The only people who had my number were whoever had Sonja's phone. And I was afraid that somehow they would use our calls—use my number—to track me down.

The main thing was, right that second I had to find a new neighborhood. I had no clue how much Sonja had told them before they killed her or beat her up or put her on a plane and sent her back to Moscow—or someplace worse. I figured I had to stay far away from the two clubs where I had stripped for the men or either of our hotels or anyplace near the Broadway. I knew I had to stay away from the East Village. So that evening I started walking north on the Tenth Avenue, not sure where I was going, when I saw a newspaper in a rack on a newsstand with the headline that some of the Russians had been let out of jail. They had “made bail.” I stared at the headline for a few seconds. It made me a little nauseous. But then I kept walking.

Maybe if they hadn't made bail, I would have gone to police guys and tried to explain what happened. But they did make bail.

And this meant Americans were probably as corrupt as Russians.

Maybe if I knew or could somehow find police guy who had talked to Crystal, I would have gone to him. But that was at least as crazy impossible as finding someone who could get me pretend person passport.

Besides, the police would only see me now as Kirill's murderer. They would only see me as whore who shot pimp.

And that would mean American prison for sure.

The neighborhoods in New York City change as fast as they do anywhere. Yerevan. Moscow. One minute you're on a block where girls like me sit on men's laps in clubs, wearing nothing but G-strings and high-heel shoes, and the next minute there are luxury apartment buildings or beautiful brick town houses that look like they belong in another century. There are mothers walking their little girls home from early evening ballet class. (When I saw those girls with their dance bags, I crossed the street. It was like whatever I had could be contagious. Just breathing on them would turn them into courtesans.) I saw a father in a business suit and raincoat holding his daughter's hand walking in my direction. She was maybe six years old and she was holding a Barbie doll in a red ball gown. I thought of Richard and his little girl. Based on the pictures of her I saw in his house, she was older than this child. But maybe not by much. She still had her Barbies. I had seen the plastic box of them in her bedroom. I saw the rubber the suspender dude had left there after fucking Sonja.

It seemed to me that Richard was a good father. A good husband. A good provider. At least that was the feeling I got. (And girls like me have to learn to trust our feelings about a person. We have to figure out who the dude is from a first impression. It can help us make our money, and it might help us save our lives.) He was not an oligarch, but he had a nice house. If that plastic tub was all Barbies, then his little girl might have had as many Barbies as me when I'd been a kid back in Yerevan. And I bet Richard had actually paid for those Barbies. That was different from my father. He left me all those Barbies before he died, and he had never paid a single ruble—not one single dram—for any of them. (It's a long story.)

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.

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 dare 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.