The Guest Room (31 page)

At the sound of the gunshot, Kristin threw her daughter to the damp earth, a sloping patch of yard by the garage that was always in shade because of the house and a copse of nearby evergreens, and fell on top of her. She could smell the autumnal reek of humus beneath the moldering, wet leaves; she could feel her daughter breathing hard through her navy blue peacoat. There she waited for…

She didn't know what for. A second shot? The sound of running feet? A car engine? Sirens?

“Shhhhh, don't move, love, don't move,” she murmured into her daughter's ear. She decided she would count to ten. Then she would roll over and turn around. If no one was coming, she would lift Melissa from the leaves and dash to the next house. The Sullivans.

And if the bullet had hit Richard? God. Please, no. Please, please no. She wasn't sure she could bear it. But she couldn't risk their daughter's life by going back. How in the name of heaven could she help him anyway? No, she needed to protect Melissa. It was what he would want. He'd told them to run, and that was the only thing to do.

And if it was the girl who'd been shot?

She was…tiny. Never had it crossed Kristin's mind that she would look more like a child than a…than a prostitute. No. She wasn't a prostitute. She had been kidnapped. Even Melissa had said the words: she was a sex slave.

“Mommy, I can't breathe,” Melissa whispered, and for a split second Kristin feared that it was her daughter who had been shot, and in the midst of her convoluted mental gymnastics she had failed to notice. But then Kristin got it: she was trying so desperately to protect her little girl that inadvertently she was smothering her. She raised herself up on one elbow and looked over her shoulder. The Escalade was idling—Had anyone even gotten out of the car?—but there didn't seem to be anyone coming after them. Could whoever was in the vehicle even see them? For all they knew, the two of them were already at the next house. At any house.

She reached into the back pocket of her pants for her phone and dialed 911 with her thumb.

Richard could see sky through a vertical chasm in the front door—a sky tinged with eggplant as dusk rolled in from the east—and the skin on his hands and his face was awash in pinpricks: the small shards of glass from the storm door that had been blown in through the rift. He felt like a coward, a feeling that was exponentially worse than feeling like a bad husband or even a bad father, and so he pushed himself to his feet. And, in fact, he was peculiarly not scared. Perhaps it was because of what had transpired in this very house a week ago. Maybe it was because of what he had seen at the morgue that very morning. Didn't matter. He brushed the glass off his hands (which only made the skin there hurt more) and stood up. He presumed the girl was dead, but he had to be sure. He had to be sure that Kristin and Melissa had fled. The Russians might kill him, too, but if the last things he did in this world were warning his wife and his daughter to run and seeing if there was a life he could save on his front steps, that was not the worst way to exit. Once he had brought the girl inside—if, by some miracle, she was still alive—then he would call the police.

So he opened what was left of the door, once more thinking to himself,
This is how it ends. This is how I am going to die,
but this time not caring. Not caring at all. So be it.

And there he saw the girl on the ground. Her body was a heap on the stoop—a marionette without strings—her left arm dangling over the side of the concrete, her legs and her hips against the antique milk jug that now housed a dying red zinnia. She was on her side and bleeding—bleeding out?—from a wound somewhere in her abdomen or chest that he couldn't see. But there was a rivulet starting to spread across the coralline plateau, ballooning already into a puddle. It seemed, on second glance, to originate nearer to her stomach. He knelt before her, presuming she was unconscious, and lifted her arm onto the concrete and rolled her onto her back. When he did, she surprised him and opened her eyes.

“If only I didn't have stupid dreams of being ballerina,” she murmured, her voice so soft that he wasn't sure he had heard her correctly. Her leather jacket was unzipped and the stain on her blouse—no, this wasn't a blouse, it was a T-shirt from a tourist kiosk or souvenir store in Times Square—reminded him of the moment when Melissa's friend Emiko had spilled fruit punch all over her white dress at one of his daughter's birthday parties three or four years ago. Everything had been pink. Of course. He shook his head involuntarily, shuddering at how the mind could link something as horrific as a bullet wound with a little girl's birthday party. And then, perhaps because Alexandra had seen him shaking his head, she tried to repeat herself, this time abridging what she had said. Fewer words. Fewer syllables. “Stupid to dream of ballerina,” she whispered, and ever so slightly she winced.

He shushed her like she was a baby and tried to smile down at her, but his eyes were welling with tears. He reached back with one hand to open the glass storm door.

Which was when he heard the second gunshot, was aware of something slamming into his head with incalculable force—for the tiniest fraction of a second he thought,
Car accident,
as if he imagined his head was slamming into a windshield—and then…

And then nothing.

The lead EMT, an admitted adrenaline junkie with thick black hair he slicked down with a gel his girlfriend brought home from the salon where she worked and earlobes (ears, actually) forever deformed from the myriad piercings he'd subjected them to when he was younger, knew this very hot teenager would be dead if the bullet had pierced the heart. And if the bullet had penetrated the lung, there'd be bubbles in all that blood. Pneumothorax. One of those classic sucking chest wounds that he had seen before in Yonkers and Mount Vernon, but never here in Bronxville. Untreated, there would be hypoxia and shock and, eventually, death. But treated? Eminently survivable. Pop open an occlusive bandage to seal the wound. Maybe perform a needle decompression, the needle the size of a pen tip, and insert a catheter to allow the air to escape the chest.

But this wound was lower. And no bubbles.

The EMT's name was Charles, and he liked people to call him that, because even though he thought he looked nothing at all like a Charles, in his opinion he looked even less like a Charlie or a Chuck. This call was about as good as it got if you were into EMT rush, and he knew it was going to stay with him a long while if they saved this chick's life—and if the shooters, wherever they were, didn't whack him, too. When he arrived, there were two people down. Cops everywhere, a SWAT team en route. A chase for some Escalade. Some little girl—near catatonic—being walked away from the shitstorm by a couple of moms pulled straight from a TV commercial for laundry detergent. It just didn't get better than this.

When he'd gotten to the teen on the stoop, a woman—the victim's mom, he'd assumed at first, until a cop had told him otherwise—had already taken off her coat and wrapped it like a blanket around the girl to try and keep her warm. That had been smart and he'd been impressed. She'd been pressing a folded hand towel against the hole in the victim's side, holding it down as hard as she could when he and his partner, Ian, had run up the walkway to the front porch. The towel was a robin's-egg blue, and the monogrammed C was white. He saw that the teenager's blood had seeped through the layers of plush cotton the moment they lifted off the woman's jacket. Her heartbeat and blood pressure were rising, as her body tried to compensate. But a stomach wound in battle? For better or worse—and, in the old days, usually worse—you could live a long time. What he couldn't tell from where the bullet had entered was whether it was in the stomach or the intestines or the liver. Given the blood, he guessed liver. He threw on a non-rebreather mask to get as much oxygen transport as he could from her diminished blood volume.

And then there was this: the spine. Even if this chick lived, for all he knew the bullet had severed the spine, and she'd be left paralyzed.

Still, thank God that woman had kept her warm and sacrificed a good hand towel.

While he had gone for the girl, Ian had beelined for the guy whose body was lying half in and half out of the doorway. It was holding open the storm door, the window blown out, and at first the two EMTs could only see the victim's legs. But Ian had joined Charles almost instantly to help with the girl, because the dude was long dead. Probably killed in a heartbeat. The poor son-of-a-bitch's head was half gone, and so he wasn't their problem: they weren't supposed to bother with or even transport the dead.

So their focus was only on the girl. Stabilize her and get going.

Which they did. Charles decided pretty quickly that she was going to live. Pulse was elevated, skin was clammy. May have lost a freakish amount of blood. But he'd seen a lot worse.

As they were starting across the lawn with her, a couple of cops helping Ian and him carry the stretcher and the IV and the oxygen tank to the ambulance, they passed the woman, and he said, “I think you saved her life. Nicely done.”

The woman nodded. She looked about as white as he'd expect a person to look after pressing one of your monogrammed hand towels on a bullet wound that must have been a fucking spigot when she started. When they got to the ambulance and she was no longer in earshot, Ian whispered to him, “Buddy, that was her husband back there. The one with, like, only half a head.”

He nodded. The woman, he thought, must have really loved this chick they were bringing to the hospital. Maybe the cop was mistaken when he'd said the victim wasn't her daughter. She had to be. Had. To. Be. To keep this one alive with her husband's corpse right there? That was love, man. That was love.

The first time I woke up, I knew I was in hospital room. I didn't know if it was hospital in jail, but I didn't think so. It seemed nice, and there were no handcuffs on me. There was no police guy around. It was, I guessed, early in the morning. I could see the sky growing light outside the window. I had tubes going into my arms, and I felt an ache in my side. I thought of my mother and my grandmother, and I thought of the hospital in Yerevan. I thought of all the time I had spent in that hospital. Then I fell back into drug sleep. I don't remember a single dream from those days. Not one.

It was third or fourth time I woke up that they brought in police guys to ask me questions. I didn't trust them, but I was done fighting. And there was no way I could run. There was no place for me to go. I asked them about Richard, but they wouldn't tell me anything. Kept changing subject.

They told me I was going to live and that Yulian and Konstantin were in jail. They were not sure where the guys they had sent to kill me were, which did not make me feel very safe. But they said they would find them or they had already left the country, and either way I would be okay. Maybe. I was so weary I told them whole story. By then, I might have told them whole story even if Yulian and Konstantin weren't in jail. I told them everything I have told you. One of the police guys looked like a grandfather. So many wrinkles on his face. So many pouches. Other one was woman with nice eyes who told me I could call her Patricia. They both asked me lots of questions. They said they wanted me to tell my story in a courtroom, and that was the best thing I could ever do for Crystal and Sonja and girls like us. So I said I would do that, too.

Older guy said I was not going to jail, that was just crazy talk they used to scare me.

But, still, when I asked him where I would go after hospital, he couldn't tell me. He wasn't sure. He just knew it wouldn't be jail. But Patricia said they were bringing in a therapist for me—lady I could talk to who would have lots more answers.

Finally, after asking and asking and asking again about Richard, they told me. It was Patricia. She held my hand and told me whole story. She said the big reason I was alive was Richard's wife.

And that's when, finally, I wept.

All day, it seemed, I was crying. One time, when the tubes were taken out of my left side and my catheter was plucked so all I had left was little drip in my right arm, I pulled the sheet and the blanket over my head and curled into a ball and sucked on the pillow like it was a baby bottle and I was a baby. I cried like I had years ago in a hotel room in Moscow, those body-shaking sobs that take your whole breath away. A nurse tried to help me, but I told her, no, no, please go away. I tried to explain, but I had no air for words other than short ones like
no
and
away
.

Idea crossed my mind I could drown from my tears. Remember that word,
noyade
? Execution by drowning.

But this time, unlike in Moscow, I wasn't crying for me.

I was crying for my mother and my grandmother and baby Crystal and Sonja dear. I was crying for Richard and his wife and his kid. His little kid. A girl like me who once played with Barbies and now had no dad. I was crying because there was just so much violence and just so much death.

They brought in that lady therapist for me, and I asked if it was because I was insane girl. Crazy girl. She told me they did not think I was insane. She said it was because of what I had been through. This lady—her name was Eve—told me she was there for me because people are supposed to have sex because they are in love, and that was something I did not know. She was very elegant and spoke with a very proper accent. She was maybe forty years old and said she had once been a courtesan, too.

I decided I was going to like Eve when she gave me a heavy coat and some boots and walked me to the edge of hospital parking lot and handed me a cigarette. I no longer had any tubes in me, not even the one in my right arm, but I was very sore and had to take baby steps. I was happy to have on more than little hospital gown and little hospital slippers. Eve said she did not approve of smoking, but I was getting desperate and cranky, and she wanted me to be able to “focus on my options.” It had gotten cold and I could see her breath.

She took me to a corner of the parking lot where there would be no reporters. She said there were reporters and TV guys who wanted to talk to me, but I didn't have to talk to them and probably shouldn't until I had met with some lawyer lady she works with. She said from now on my life should be just that: my life.

Options. Such a word. Such an idea. Try having options when you have never had options before. Very difficult.

I figured when I got out I would go to Los Angeles, which was Sonja's plan. Find a Bachelor. Find Kim. I knew I couldn't go home to Yerevan—not with Vasily. Not with so many cue-ball-head babies. But then Eve told me instead I could go to halfway house if I wanted. I told her that I still had all my money. (No one had stolen it, which seemed even bigger miracle than miracle I was alive.) But Eve thought I should live with other girls for a while in a place in Brooklyn. She said halfway house was not called that, when I asked, because it was halfway between two places or because it was half a house. It was a place where I could live with other girls and learn to be normal girl. I could even go back to dancing, if I wanted.

“It's been too many years. You can't just pick up and be Velvet Bird,” I mumbled.

“I didn't say you'd be preparing for the New York City Ballet. I only said you could go back to dancing. It might be…fun.”

When she said I would be living with other girls, I grew suspicious. Maybe this Eve was actually like Inga or Catherine, and she had just been nice to me for a couple of days because she was worming her way into my life like Vasily. I would never forget how it had been dance that had turned me into sex slave in the first place.

“So, I live with other girls like courtesan?” I asked. “I thought you didn't want me to be courtesan. I thought I had options.”

But Eve said it would be nothing like that. It was for girls like me who did not want to be sex slaves and whores. The next morning, she brought in a girl for me to meet who lived there right now. Girl was from Kiev. She used to dance, too. Now she was taking lessons at studio again. She said there was a full moon coming, and she was going to be dancing in a little Brooklyn show where they had built a stage by windows in old factory so the ballet would have actual full moon as backdrop.

I asked her more about this halfway house, and she made it sound okay. Not perfect. But not scary either. And I would have to go somewhere.

And then there was this. When I read about Richard's funeral in the newspaper and saw the things that people on TV were saying about me, I asked Eve to please tell Richard's wife how I knew it was all my fault and I was so sorry. So very sorry. I asked her to please thank the lady so much for saving my life. And Eve said, “Maybe you should thank her yourself. Would you like that?” It seems telling her myself was all part of having options.

My hospital room looked out at trees and a thin river, and was maybe only two miles from Richard's house. I guess it was near the cemetery, too.

The day after the funeral, Eve made phone calls and got phone calls back. She said if this worked out, if Richard's wife came to hospital, it would just be our secret. It was nothing police guys ever had to know. No way. So, I understood she was breaking some rule, but so much of my life was breaking rules and she was doing me big favor, I didn't care. I wanted to do one nice thing and tell this widow that her husband was good man and she was good lady.

Eve talked on her phone in the hallway outside my hospital room a couple of times. Then she came back in and said, “She's on her way here. Right now. She's bringing her daughter.”

I wanted to put on makeup and lipstick, but I had none and Eve would not lend me hers. She said it didn't matter how I looked. I must have been fretting like crazy girl, so Eve said—lying maybe—that I looked fine.

And then there they were. In my hospital room. A mom and her little girl. A widow, like my mom. A girl with no dad, like me.

“I'm Kristin,” the lady said, her voice wobbly. “And this is Melissa.”

The girl looked at me with wide eyes, but said nothing. She stood right beside her mom at the edge of the hospital bed. She was wearing a pink puffer coat. Lots of down in the puffs. Kristin had on the same navy coat she'd been wearing the day we saw each other for the first time, and I got shot and Richard got killed. She was pale and looked very tired. Maybe sickly.

“I'm Alexandra.”

Eve looked at me and said, “You can tell them your real name. If you want.”

“I'm Anahit.”

“Armenian, right?” asked Richard's wife. Her voice was very soft. I had to listen carefully to hear.

I nodded. Then I said, “Thank you. You saved my life.”

“You're welcome.”

“I bet lots of women would have let me die.”

“No. I hope that's not true.” Then she said, “I don't know how much my husband told you about us. Melissa here is nine.” The girl nodded. She was wearing very colorful stockings on her legs. Looked like raining books. “She wanted to come, too.”

“Hi,” said the girl, and with one hand she gave me a very small wave. I think she was a little scared of me—of what I was.

“Hi,” I said back. “I like your stockings.”

“They're tights,” said Richard's wife. “Not stockings. They're tights.”

“Thank you,” said the girl.

“Richard told me a little about you two. He loved you lots. I know that. He loved you so much.”

“Why don't you both sit down,” suggested Eve, and she pointed at the empty bed and then at this ugly orange chair. “Want me to bring you some coffee or a juice?”

“No, we're just going to be here a minute,” Richard's wife said. I was glad she didn't want any coffee or a juice. I didn't want Eve to leave us alone. But Kristin sat in the chair, and Melissa put her hands on the mattress of the other bed and hopped onto it. She unzipped her coat but didn't take it off. For what felt like very long minute, but probably wasn't all that long really, we sat in silence. I wanted to tell little girl it is overrated thing to be pretty. It is overrated thing to be fetching. It is overrated thing to bathe in the light like a star. But I didn't know where to begin.

“Are you in a lot of pain?” Richard's wife asked me finally.

“No.” Then I added, “Not like you.”

“It's different.”

It was, but I didn't say anything. Biggest difference? I would get better. She wouldn't. Little girl wouldn't. Hopefully, little girl wouldn't become whore like me. I didn't see why she would. She still had her mother. She still had a nice house. But I guess you never know. Maybe they would leave that house. Maybe they
should
leave that house.

Kristin took a big breath and sighed. Then: “After the funeral, Richard's brother, Philip—the bachelor—told me I should steer clear of somebody named Spencer. Just ignore him, no matter what. I have a feeling you know why.”

I shook my head. “He hired us. He was guy at party. He—” and I stopped myself. He was the guy who'd been upstairs with Sonja in the little girl's bedroom. But I didn't want to say anything about that in front of Melissa.

“Well, according to my brother-in-law, Spencer has pictures of you and my husband. The kind that might,” and here she paused, looking once at her daughter before looking back at me, “make me sad. He told Philip about them before the funeral. He thought my brother-in-law might…negotiate…with me. But instead Philip went right to the police. My brother-in-law is a jerk, but he loved my husband. Anyway, I thought you should know. Those pictures can't hurt me. Not now. But someday, if Spencer ever does share them, they might hurt you. I felt I should warn you.”

“Nothing like that can hurt me either.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay then,” I repeated.

She looked around the room. “I should have brought you some flowers. God. I have nothing but flowers at my house.”

“No one's ever brought me flowers. I wouldn't have known what to do with them.”

“You'd figure it out. Mostly you just put them in water.”

“Thank you.”

“The strangest thing is this. When I came here—when Eve called—I thought I was coming to forgive you. I was quite literally going to tell you that,” she said. I waited. Eve waited. She was trying to find the right words—the perfect words. I know the feeling. “But that's not correct. Because you don't need my forgiveness. You didn't do anything wrong.”

“I did many wrong things,” I corrected her.

“Maybe. But you didn't kill my husband.”

“I shouldn't have come to your house. I didn't think cue-ball-head babies would be so smart.”

She raised her eyebrows into pyramid. Eve explained what I meant. “The traffickers,” she said. “This particular group of Russians. Anahit calls them that because they shave their heads.”

“I see. But you couldn't have known. And you had to go somewhere.”

I shook my head and started to say again how many big mistakes I had made, and to tell her about the piece of paper with the Georgian's phone number. But the words got lost in my mouth because suddenly I was crying again. I put my face in my hands and swatted Eve's fingers when she went to touch me, because I didn't want to be touched and I didn't want to be forgiven, and I wished to God I could stop crying. But I couldn't, I couldn't, and the way I was shaking made my side hurt, which made me cry even harder, I guess. Somewhere, and it seemed so far away, I heard the girl's feet hit the floor as she jumped off the bed, and I heard Eve leading her and her mother from the hospital room. I heard the door shut.