The Guest Room(93)

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 f*cking 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.





Alexandra


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.