The Guest Room(75)
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 f*cked 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.
Chapter Twelve
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.