The Guest Room(80)
…
What I figured out about hospital was this. It was super easy to hide there in the emergency room. At least it might be for a day or two. How I found out was total accident.
I left the hostel on Thursday morning with my knapsack and my money and my cigarettes. It was so early the sun was rising, and it was yellowish-red like welding.
I hid my pistol again underneath my jacket and I walked east across the Central Park. I wasn’t sure where I was going. But I needed to go somewhere. Do something. Keep moving. I did not know what my destination would be. I did not know anything except I should not risk staying at the hostel any longer. People asked too many questions. Eventually someone would figure out who I was. Eventually the wrong kind of person would find me—and kill me.
As I was leaving the park on the Fifth Avenue, I felt funny. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck standing at attention. I felt like I was being followed. I opened my bag and took out my compact like I was a girl in one of the movies we used to watch in our hotel room in Moscow, and used the mirror in the lid to look behind me. I saw a police guy by trees on the sidewalk on one side of the street, and I saw a black Escalade outside apartment building on the other. The Escalade had its engine running. Both could be nothing. Coincidence. But either could be something. When I walked down Ninety-sixth Street, the police guy stayed where he was, but the Escalade pulled out and turned left. Maybe he was following me. Maybe not. I walked to the end of the long block and turned left onto the Madison Avenue and started walking north, which actually was crazy dumb. I should have turned right, so the one-way street would work in my favor. The car couldn’t have followed me.
But it didn’t matter, because the light was red, and so the driver had to stop and wait. I walked a little faster. I was almost, but not really, running. And when I crossed Ninety-eighth Street and the traffic was again moving north, I saw hospital. It was called Mount Sinai. And in I went. I walked fast like I had a place to go. I knew how to walk around hospital from all those weeks years ago when my mother was dying in one, and from all the times when I visited my grandmother there.
But this hospital was not just bigger than the one in Yerevan. It was total madhouse—and, for me that day, this was a good thing. A very good thing. The emergency room was like a maze. There were rows of little cubicles with curtains, long corridors with too little light, and nooks with chairs where people—some sick, some families—could wait. There were always workers pushing machines with cuffs and wires and screens. There were always doctors and nurses looking at clipboards and tablets.
Sure, there were plenty of police guys in the crowds. But they weren’t interested in me. No one was interested in me. I took a chair in a dark corner—it was all dark corners—and spent hours watching the drunks and the old people and even some guy who had been stabbed in the arm. I watched all these beautiful and handsome young nurses and doctors in their scrubs walking from the counters to the cubicles. I watched the families come and go. An old man died in one of those cubicles. Sometimes the patients would be treated and go home, and sometimes they would be wheeled on gurneys to hospital rooms upstairs.
I don’t think I ever fell asleep because the chairs were not that comfortable. But I closed my eyes. I got potato chips and sodas from the vending machines.
Sometimes I would go back outside, make sure there was no Escalade, and smoke.
Sometimes I wished I still had my phone. What if I had made a mistake throwing it away? What if Sonja had been trying to find me? But I knew in my heart I had done the right thing—the safe thing. She was gone.
And so I was lonely.
I was so lonely, I considered finding a man. I wouldn’t be courtesan. I would just be friendly. But obviously that would be insane. I needed to stay hidden until I could get help.
By Friday morning, I probably looked like shit. It had been almost twenty-four hours since I had left the hostel, and I hadn’t showered or slept. My leather jacket probably looked okay, but my skirt must have looked dirty. I was standing on the corner smoking a cigarette, and a police guy came up to me. He was young, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, and he was a little heavy. He had boyish eyes.
“Young lady, you okay?” he asked me.
I held my cigarette down by my waist so he wouldn’t have to breathe the smoke. My heart was beating like crazy because I was afraid he might know who I was. I considered dropping the cigarette and squashing it with the toe of my boot, and reaching into my jacket for the pistol. But I wasn’t going to shoot this dude. That gun was only for Yulian or the cue-ball-head babies.
“Yes,” I lied. “I’m okay.” I motioned back toward hospital. “My mom is in there. She has lung cancer. It was a long night.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Okay. You just looked…”
I smiled—my best polite girl smile. “I know. I think I’m going to check in on her one more time. Then I go home and shower.”
He smiled back at me and then walked on.
I couldn’t hide forever. I had known this for three days. But talking even for thirty seconds with the police guy made this clear. I needed help. I needed to do something. I needed to do something now.
That’s when it hit me. What I really needed was a miracle, and maybe the miracle was still behind or beside or in little girl’s bed in Bronxville—Sonja’s condom wrapper with a tiny piece of paper with a phone number on it. It might be my best chance. Yes, it was possible it was the Georgian who had turned Sonja over to Yulian. I am not big dope, I thought to that. But why would he? He didn’t work for Yulian. And she had business deal for him. So, maybe she never even got to the Georgian. Maybe Yulian got to my Sonja first. And maybe Richard, the only john ever who didn’t f*ck me or use me or hit me or want something from me that he just couldn’t have, would help me find that tiny piece of paper. Who knows? Maybe he would even help me find the Georgian.