The Guest Room(79)

“In case you actually find a family member?”

“That’s right.”

“But we won’t,” the detective added. “Hart Island. That’s where we bury the anonymous. It’s in the Bronx. A couple of inmates from Rikers will handle it.”

“Any news on the other girl?” Richard asked.

“The other girl from your party?”

“Wasn’t my party,” he said, correcting the detective. He hoped he hadn’t sounded as defensive in reality as he had in his head.

“Sorry. The party at your house,” the detective agreed. “We haven’t found her yet. With any luck, her body will wash up, too.”

From the moment Richard had confirmed that the girl on the slab was Sonja, he had failed to consider that Alexandra might be dead, too. In his relief, the notion had been vanquished from his mind. When he had asked about Alexandra just now, he had meant, Any news on her whereabouts? Any leads where she might be hiding? And so the possibility—so likely in the detective’s opinion—that her body was decomposing in the East River hit Richard like a slap. Of course. Of course, it was in the East River. They’d most certainly killed her, too. For the second time since he had walked into the morgue, he thought he might be sick. The world went fuzzy. He gulped a little burbling acid back down his throat.

“You need some water?”

It was Harry. Richard blinked and breathed. He saw the pathologist’s hand on his arm, but he had to look there to feel it.

He focused on the room and tried to gather himself. He was clammy now and he felt like shit. But at least he wasn’t going to vomit. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll have a glass. Thank you.”

“You got pretty pale there,” said the detective. “You okay?”

The record shows—

“Yeah. I’m…I’m fine,” he said. From somewhere far away the radio had returned.

I took the blows—

Harry handed him a paper cup, and he took a small sip.

And did it my way.

His eyes lingered on the pathologist’s elbow, where the fellow had covered his cough, and he thought once more of that moment on the stairs in his home when Alexandra had held on to his elbow. He saw there her demure and lovely fingers. He saw her eyes. He saw her dancing in a wedding dress, but with whom he couldn’t say. How—and why—she had morphed from inamorata to daughter, he couldn’t say. But he was relieved. Maybe it made him less…hateful. He heard horns. A violin.

But with the revelation came a disturbing feeling that he wasn’t, in the end, ever going to dance at his own daughter’s wedding. It wasn’t as visually concrete as a premonition (which he didn’t believe in, in any case), and he tried to take comfort in that. He reminded himself that there were no clichés about men’s intuition. But it wouldn’t go away, even when he tried to drown it in his relief that he had regained his wife, and that Alexandra—living or dead—would live on in his memory as a child and not a whore.

Yes, it was my way.





Alexandra


I stayed in the youth hostel two nights.

I stayed in the waiting area of an emergency room at a big hospital on the third.

And, then, on Friday morning, I took the train back to Bronxville.

…

I went to the hospital emergency room on Thursday to hide. That’s all. No one had hurt me. I hadn’t had some terrible accident. Once a cabdriver almost ran over me, but that was my fault because I was walking across a street in sleepwalker daze. He didn’t end up hitting me, and so I didn’t die like my grandmother. He swore at me to pay attention.

And so I did. I paid lots more attention. And when I did, it felt like they were getting close. They: the police guys. Yulian’s dudes. His cue-ball-head babies who actually were killers. Even in the hostel it felt like the walls were closing in on me. I had stayed two nights in this lower bunk, curled up in little ball beneath a sheet that smelled of soap, dozing, but with one eye open when I was awake. I slept with my knit football team cap on. I slept with the Makarov beside me.

And finally, it seemed to me, I needed to move on.

Some girls at the hostel had wanted to be my friends. Girls from the Netherlands and England and Texas. They were young and pretty, some of them, and would have made good prostitutes. But they were there to see the city and America as tourists. They wanted to see the museums and then dance. They wanted to see the Times Square and then dance. If they pleasured men—and I do not know if they did—it was because they were also getting pleasure themselves.

Two of the girls worried about me because I was dozing with that cap on. I had told them I was cold and maybe I was getting a cold. They wanted to share with me their NyQuil. To make them happy and so they would leave me alone, I drank some. I think that is when I slept the deepest—and that scared me. But I know I was in deep sleep because I had such dreams. I dreamed of my grandmother, maybe because I had almost died like her. I dreamed of a man who I thought was my father, who was telling me stories of a town called Chunkush, where so many of my ancestors had been slaughtered in 1915, and of a crevasse in the ground that seemed to fall to the center of the earth. But still the Turks and the Kurds had filled it with bodies. That’s how many Armenians they killed there. Ten thousand, at least. And I dreamed of a house in Bronxville and a man named Richard. The two of us were sitting on the edge of a bed, and he was feeding me a Middle Eastern sugar cookie called a maamoul.