The Guest Room (29 page)

“You won't call police guys?” she asked.

“I haven't yet,” he said, and she sat back down. And so he did, too. “But if I'm going to help you, I need to know a couple of things.”

“Like what?”

“Like your real name. I'm going to go way out on a limb and guess that it's not Alexandra. Outside just now, you said…”

“No, it's not Alexandra.”

“Okay, then. What is it?”

“Anahit.”

He repeated it. “That's pretty.”

“Armenian. Means goddess.”

“Were you both—you and Sonja—Armenian?”

“Yes. But Sonja grew up in Volgograd. I grew up in Yerevan. She had blue eyes, remember? Very rare for Armenian girl. It's because her grandmother was part Russian.”

“How long have you been here? In America?”

“A month.”

“So you'd only been in the United States three weeks when you were brought to my brother's party.”

She nodded, and for a moment they both were silent as they recalled how it was exactly a week ago that their worlds had collided—and exploded.

“Why did Sonja kill your bodyguards? Why last Friday night?”

She raised a single eyebrow. “Just guards. Not bodyguards.”

“I'm sorry. Is that why she killed them? Because they were your…your captors?”

“She was afraid they were going to kill us on way back into New York City. There was a third girl you never met. Crystal. They had already killed her because she was talking to police guy.” She put her cigarette down in the ashtray, and he stared at the circular smudge of her lipstick on the filter.

“A detective,” he repeated, trying to focus. “She was talking to a detective? Who was he working for? A Manhattan D.A.? Or the U.S. Attorney's Office?”

She looked at him, confused, and replied, “For police guys. He was working for police guys.”

“Got it,” he said. There was no point now in explaining the fine points and particulars of a criminal investigation in America. “So, the police know about you?”

“I don't know what they know. I just know they arrested some dudes this week and then let most of them back out. A girl like me has no power. I can't trust them.”

He shook his head. He would correct her. He would tell her that she needn't fear the police, she needn't worry about going to jail. She was going to be fine. Perhaps he would introduce her to Dina Renzi. The firm would surely pro bono their services on her behalf. Besides, she wasn't a criminal. Not really. She was a victim, for God's sake! All this fear she had about jail? She was never going to jail. He began crafting in his head how he would explain to her what the witness protection program was—if she even needed such a thing, which he thought was unlikely—and how she'd be fine. She'd be just fine.

“Look,” he began, “the police are already investigating the people who brought you to America. That's clear. They know you were doing what you were doing against your will. But let's also be clear about this: it was Sonja who killed the two men at the party. Right?” The question was out there before he could frame it properly. He believed in his heart this girl was incapable of that kind of violence, but after all she had been through, one never knew. But, just in case, he had meant to lead her more, to make sure that she didn't tell him something he shouldn't know—something not even Dina Renzi would want to know.

Instead of answering him, however, she reached into her leather jacket and pulled out a handgun. Instantly he grew alert. Not scared, not at all. But watchful. He was surprised, and understood on some level that he shouldn't have been. Of course she had a gun. Of course.

“That's what you think?” she asked.

Instead of answering, he stared at the weapon. Here he had tried and failed to come home with a handgun just the other day, and now there was one in his kitchen. Just a few feet away. In the slight hands of this nineteen-year-old girl. It was, it seemed to him, strangely and surprisingly beautiful. Russian, he surmised, though he couldn't have said why. It actually looked a bit like the kind of pistol James Bond used to carry—the old James Bond. The Sean Connery Bond. She dropped it onto the table, rattling her cup and saucer.

“What makes you think I didn't kill Kirill?” she continued when he was silent. “What makes you think I didn't kill that big, mean cue-ball-head baby?”

“Because I don't,” he answered finally. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Because…Anahit…you didn't. Okay?”

Using a single finger, she spun the pistol in a circle on the tabletop, pushing the gun by its grip. “Six bullets left in magazine. Six. You don't know me. You don't know anything about me.”

“Then tell me something,” he said. “Tell me one thing. Tell me one thing I should know.”

I told him lots.

I told him about my mother and my grandmother and the sculptures on the streets in Yerevan. I told him about Vasily. I told him about the cottage and Moscow and coming to America. I told him that like his little girl, I once had whole trunk full of American Barbie dolls.

“But how?” he asked. “Where in the world did you get them? How did you get them?”

I only had three cigarettes left in the pack, but I smoked another one as I told him. I told him the story just as it had been told to me.

On Wednesday, December 7, 1988, my father and grandfather—my father's father—were stealing two boxes of wristwatches for a Communist Party official. Very big-deal guy. The official was going to give them away at fancy gathering at his fancy dacha on Lake Sevan. And the wristwatches were with other stuff in these two crates.

My father and grandfather were smooth operators. You had to be in the Soviet Union in 1988. But they were also strong and smart and kind. My father, my mother said, was among the bravest freedom fighters in Nagorno-Karabakh. He was a hero. I wish I had gotten to spend more than eighteen months with him, but I didn't, and I don't remember a single thing because I was just a baby and then just a toddler. I told Richard how my father had died in hydroelectric plant accident.

The crates had come to Armenian city you've never heard of called Gyumri. They had come to the airport from East Berlin. That's how long ago this was. And Gyumri was still called Leninakin. The watches were supposed to go to a jewelry store at the Alexandrapol Hotel. It was the sort of store that has velvet ropes and plush carpeting and glass cases with lights inside them to make the diamonds glitter like a disco ball. But that party official had other ideas. My father and my grandfather worked at the airport, and so it was easy for them to “redirect” the crates into my grandfather's sand-colored Lada. They put one crate in the backseat of the car and one in the trunk. It barely fit, not because the crate was so big but because the trunk was so small. One time, I was dancing at a party for group of Moscow gangsters—it was scary, because Moscow gangsters are so insane they make cue-ball-head babies look like kindergarten teachers—and someone made a joke about putting a body in the trunk. Then someone else said that it would have to be very little body. It sure couldn't be anyone in the room, they laughed, not even me or Sonja, who was with me that night. It's true. You can't even fit a teenage exotic dancer who is really just sex toy into the trunk of a Lada.

My grandfather and father were supposed to drive the wristwatches to Lake Sevan, but my grandfather had forgotten the directions to the dacha. They were on the dresser at his and my grandmother's apartment. And so the two of them went there. Six stories and thirty apartments, lots of concrete and many thousands of cinder blocks. And none of it built to withstand an earthquake, especially the sort of 6.8 magnitude earthquake that would destroy the city. They say the Soviet Union building codes were the same in Gyumri, where there was always big chance of an earthquake, as they were in Kiev, where there really wasn't big chance at all.

Of course, Kiev had other problems in 1988. The city's not that far from Chernobyl, and 1988 isn't that far from 1986. As Americans like to say, do math.

My grandfather ran up the stairs to my grandparents' apartment on the fifth floor while my father waited in the car, smoking a black-market cigarette. My grandfather probably went two steps at a time, skipping every other stair. He was very vigorous. My grandmother used to put her hands on his cheeks and kiss him, calling him her Cossack.

It was while my grandfather was upstairs that my father heard the rumble. It was very low. But he knew what it meant.

Within seconds, that rumble became a roar. As my father was snuffing out his cigarette, the road rippled up like giant sea swell, the asphalt growing cracks like big black spider veins. Then some of those veins swelled into canyons wide enough to swallow whole cars. But not my grandfather's Lada. Instead, my grandfather's Lada was suddenly facing uphill. The telephone and electrical wires were snapping, and the transformers on top of the poles became like the sparklers children play with on big holidays. Then one by one they exploded.

My father climbed from the car, planning to run up the stairs and rescue his parents. Crazy, yes? But he was their son. Then, before his very eyes—which soon would be filled with so much dust that he would only be able to see out of his left one for hours—the building pancaked. It just collapsed in a funnel of smoke and soot that fluttered down upon him like volcanic ash. He was twenty-three years old. Most of the buildings on that street pancaked like that; most of the people were flattened. The whole street was rubble.

They say every single family in the city of Gyumri lost at least one person in the earthquake. Every single family.

Young mothers were running like it was an Olympic race to the schools because there were rumors that the schools had crumpled like aluminum foil. They had. And here is saddest part. If the earthquake had come even five minutes later, lots of those children would still be alive, because the school bells would have rung by then and dismissed the kids for recess and lunch. They would have been outside playing or walking home, instead of trapped inside as the buildings collapsed.

My father dug through the mountain of bricks and timber and glass where his parents had lived, even though he was half blind. The wiring was all like Medusa head. Everyone on the street dug like crazy people. Everyone in the city dug into the night. People dug until their fingers were broken and the skin on both sides of their hands was gone. But humans couldn't lift the rubble from five- and six-story buildings. There were too few backhoes and bulldozers for so much damage, and it was nearly impossible for vehicles to drive down the roads because great chunks of the pavement had been thrown into the air like playing cards, and buildings had melted into the streets.

My father had awful choice when the darkness came. Did he stay with his mother and father, who were beneath the rubble, unsure if they were dead or alive, or did he leave them and go search for his wife? He said it was agony. He told himself he would dig for half hour more and then go find her. He would see what was left of their apartment. (It would still be standing, but most of the windows would be broken and there would be no heat or electricity or water for months. And this was in December. My parents took in lots of their neighbors, and they all huddled together for warmth. Some of the old people compared it to Leningrad in 1942. For many years other survivors would live in tin houses called
domiks
. The government built them that winter. They were only supposed to be in them maybe one year. When I was twelve I went to Gyumri with my mother, and there were still whole neighborhoods of
domiks
. It was so depressing my mother just wept.)

Finally my father gave up. There were some people buried alive beneath the rubble, but not my grandparents. They were just buried. But you could hear other victims begging for help. Pleading. Sometimes, he said, you just heard moaning. Seven hours of digging and my father had helped drag eleven corpses from the rubble, but he had found no one who was still breathing. They would need backhoes to pull the rest of the dead from that pile.

He struggled back to the Lada through the flashlights and bonfires and the headlights from the ambulances and fire trucks at the end of block. The Lada was fine, but he couldn't drive it anywhere. The streets were cratered like the moon. The road was choked with the bricks from collapsed buildings. So, my father did the only logical thing: he took those two big boxes of wristwatches, balancing them like circus clown, and walked home through the disaster area that hours ago had been a city. His plan was to sell the watches for food on black market, which was going to be gigantic after the earthquake. This is what I mean about my father being operator. He was very resourceful. A dependable provider. A good husband.

All around my father that night walked zombies. Heroes, too. But mostly zombies. He saw two teenage boys carrying an old woman who had lost a leg. One of the boys was shirtless because he had turned it into a tourniquet and wrapped it around the woman's thigh. The shirt was now the color of pomegranate wine. He saw a green and white bus on its side, the dead passengers half in and half out of the broken windows. He saw whole rows of cadavers, some mangled. People were calling out names, sobbing, wailing. It was biblical. It was like end-of-world time.

My mother was not home when he got to the apartment. She was out looking for him. Kooky comedy of errors, right? Wrong. It was all just horrible, all just errors. There was no comedy. So he left the boxes in the living room and went back outside to find her. All night long he walked. All night long, my mother walked, too. It wasn't just the wreckage that made it so awful. Everywhere there were bodies. Bodies on ruined curbs, bodies on trucks, bodies in big holes in the ground. Arms in trees. Legs, somehow barefoot, in store windows, the broken glass shards like Christmas icicle displays. They both saw heads with no torsos or arms or legs, the eyes open and the lips seeming to mouth the word “How?” They both saw the worst thing in the world you can see: bodies of children.

It would not be till the sun was rising that my mother and father would both be in their apartment at the same time. They were, like everyone in the city, in shock. My father told her they would be okay. They would use his boxes of watches for food. They would survive.

But the thing was, there weren't watches in those two crates. There were Barbies. My mother said when he opened the boxes, he tilted his head and raised his eyebrows into a pyramid—she would imitate him and it always made me smile as a girl—like he was a confused university student. Then he got it. He sat back against the wall and lit a cigarette. He was still on the floor with the boxes. My mother curled up next to him. The apartment was freezing, and her breath matched his smoke. “Someday,” he said finally, “we will have lots of daughters and they will have some very, very nice dolls.”

If he hadn't died so young, I think I would have had sisters. With all those Barbies, it should have been my parents' destiny to have lots of girls.

But, of course, my father did die young. And so all those Barbies were mine. I didn't have to share them with anyone. I didn't
get
to share them with anyone. They were still in their pink boxes over a decade later, when I was growing from chubby toddler to skinny little girl with stick-figure legs, and my mother started giving them to me. She gave them to me one a month, always on the first day, for nearly five years. I have no idea where she hid two boxes, each big enough to hold twenty-eight American Barbie dolls, when I was a girl. Our apartment wasn't so large.

But my mother did. See what I mean? She was amazing lady.

Of course, my mother would die when she was young, too. Not as young as my dad, but young. She was forty-five years old. I was, as I told you, fifteen.

“And it was right after your mother died,” Richard said to me, “that Vasily kidnapped you?” He sounded so sad.

“Few weeks, yes.”

It was that moment that we both heard the car doors slamming outside his house. We'd never heard the car pull into his driveway. It was maybe four-thirty in the afternoon. We looked toward the hallway and then down at the kitchen table, and at the Makarov that was still right beside the ashtray with my big mess of cigarette butts and ashes.