The Guest Room(10)

…

Why did that older girl think Vasily had had my mother murdered? She overheard Vasily talking to a bodyguard about us when he was visiting Moscow. My mother had seen through his story that he wanted to make me superb dancer. Really he just wanted to make me superb prostitute—which he did.

Of course, I am not sure that my mother would have wanted me even to become a ballerina. She was clingy with me—not just protective, but needy. Many people noticed. They would tell me that it was because of the earthquake, followed by her husband’s death. She wanted me safe in Yerevan with her, not going away to dance in Russia or Europe or America. I would attend university near our apartment and become a doctor. A pediatrician. I would help Armenia. That was the plan. At least that was her plan. Her mother was a nurse, so why should her daughter not become a doctor?

My grandmother disagreed. She had no objections to me becoming a dancer. I think she had decided that being a doctor (or nurse) was overrated. As Americans say, she was “all in” at the idea of me becoming a ballerina. I tried to bob between the two of them, but one wave or the other would knock me down and give me snootful. My mother would tell me I was a good writer. She had a friend who said that maybe I could become a poet if I wanted to be an artist so bad. Maybe I could become a doctor and a poet. When you’re twelve years old, the future seems to have no limits.

But this was all just talk for me. I would tape my toes and I would rub my feet and I would stretch and toss my shoes—especially my toe shoes, which made me so proud—into my dance bag, and off I would go to studio. Some days, I would practically skip down the sidewalk. That was how happy dance made me when I was a girl.

…

Yerevan had plenty of orphanages, but I didn’t need one after my mother died. After all, I was already living with my grandmother. All that was different was that suddenly I had a whole bedroom to myself. I was no longer sharing one with my mother. And now I was as sad as my grandmother had been for weeks. When you’re a teenager, it’s hard to believe your mother really is dying. I guess the teenage brain doesn’t get it that the chemotherapy is going to fail or the radiation is only postponing things. The teenage brain doesn’t accept what’s coming. I only saw the little steps forward, not the bigger steps back. My mother was never in remission. The doctors never said she was cancer-free. And yet I viewed her hospital stays and the ways she got sicker only as phases. I saw setbacks, sure. But I believed in the end she would get better. She had to, yes? How could a girl lose her father when she was toddler and her mother when she was teenager? I would join my grandmother in church when my mother was hospitalized, and the reverent fathers were very kind. Looking back, they probably thought my teenage quiet was my understanding of how sick my mother was. It was actually the opposite: total teenage denial.

During the last two weeks of my mother’s life, I would sit beside her hospital bed and try and hold her hand. By then I was holding all bones. I would go there for few minutes right after school and before dance, and then I would go again right after dance. It was amazing how quickly she deteriorated those last days. We could still talk when she went into hospital for the last time, even if her sentences were short and often racked by a hacking cough. But by the end, I would just hold her hand. We didn’t speak. When she slipped first into morphine cloud—when she finally stopped coughing and her body was no longer spasming in agony—and then into death, I was so stunned.

In the days that followed the burial, Grandmother and I were lonely, even though we had each other. But she had lost a child and I had lost a parent. My grandmother had obviously seen lots of people die, but it’s different when it’s your daughter. It’s different when you have to witness your granddaughter watching her own mother die.

We were both very quiet those days. There really was very little to say.

…

Those weeks, we also had Vasily. Or, at least, we had Vasily’s people. He would show up at our apartment or at hospital—always foreshadowed by his cologne—and he would hug us. He would tell us very funny stories and laugh at his own jokes like crazy person. And his laugh was so big, so contagious, that sometimes we would laugh, too.

At least a little.





Chapter Three


Richard stood in his driveway, his arms folded across his chest, and gazed at the police cars and the mobile crime scene van. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour and he was cold. He hadn’t bothered to get a jacket when they had all left for the police station a while back. His younger brother was on his way back to Brooklyn by now; all of the guests were straggling home.

He couldn’t bring himself to go inside. Not yet. He needed a moment. But he was curious as to what awaited him, and so he went to a window, crunching the pine nuggets beneath his shoes and pushing aside branches from the dwarf hydrangea. From there he peered into the living room. He presumed the corpses were long gone, and, indeed, he didn’t see the bodyguard who had been killed there. His blood, however, was everywhere. The couch, upholstered with a beige brocade patterned with dark blue shadows of flowers, looked as if it had been sitting on a slaughterhouse kill floor. In the sepulchral, hungover darkness of his mind, Richard saw a cow on a stalled conveyor belt bleeding out above it and wondered briefly where he had ever seen such a thing. Then he remembered. PBS. A documentary. He recalled the thug at the moment of his death and why so much of the blood had wound up on the couch: the man, a Russian with an almost comically bad Boris Badenov accent, had been leaning over its back, reaching for something that had fallen onto one of the cushions. A cigarette lighter, Richard thought—the first of two glimmering flashes, one silver and the other steel. They’d been getting ready to leave, Richard presumed, the four of them. The bodyguards and the girls. He’d just brought…Alexandra…downstairs. And then the blond one—so tiny, so very, very small, her weight gossamer when she had been straddling him on the couch, pressing her breasts into his face, her nipples erect—had appeared out of nowhere, a raptor, throwing herself onto the Russian’s back and plunging a knife deep into the right side of his neck. The fellow had reared up like a horse and tried throwing her off of him, but already he was gagging, his eyes wide. Richard had watched (they all had watched, studies in suburban male impotence) as his blood had sprayed like the paint on one of those pinwheel paint machines for little kids at community carnivals, soaking primarily the couch but also splattering the spines of the novels on the white built-in bookshelves on the nearby wall and—when the bodyguard lashed out one last time before collapsing onto the rug—the Hudson River School landscape by a minor but still immensely talented painter from the nineteenth century. A wannabe Bierstadt. The girl had reached into the dead man’s jacket, grabbing his wallet, his pistol from his holster—dear God, Richard recalled thinking, the guy was actually wearing a holster with a gun—and the wads of twenties and fifties and (yes) hundreds she and her partner had earned. Then she looked at the rest of the men briefly (in hindsight, Richard couldn’t decide whether that glance was dismissive or regretful) and rushed into the front hallway. Her arms were tattooed with the pimp’s blood. There was some on her neck and her cheek. It was like she was a five-year-old who had been finger-painting. A moment later, all of the men at the party, stupefied by the way the hooker had gone banshee, some afraid that they would be next, had heard the gunshots—two pops, a few seconds between them, the noises not deafening but still horrifying because it was the middle of the night and because everyone knew what the sounds were. What they meant. It was then that Richard saw the girl (like her partner, so petite) with the black hair, a gun in one hand and a key ring in the other. He had no idea if it was the same gun the blonde had taken from the dude she had just stabbed, or a second weapon. She, too, surveyed the room before climbing back into her clothes—some of them, anyway, because through the window Richard could see the white blouse in which she’d arrived, draped on one of the living room chairs—and disappearing with the blonde into the night. None of the men thought to stop them. Richard guessed that all of them were, like him, utterly dazed. And, without question, terrified. It was only when they heard the car’s engine roar to life in the driveway that any of them stopped cowering. Because, in fact, they had been cowering. They had.