KILLING SARAI(14)

He sighs with annoyance and shakes his head subtly.

“I was born in Boston,” he says. “I have a sister. A year younger than me. My mother is somewhere in Budapest. My father, he’s dead. He was my first kill.”

That small ounce of bravery I summoned evaporates right out of my pores. I look carefully to both sides of me, looking for the man behind the counter who sold us the food. He’s on the opposite side of the store, sweeping the floor and not paying a lick of attention to us.

I look back at…Victor, nervously swallowing what’s left of the saliva in my mouth.

“You killed your father?” I have to believe it was for some obvious reason: his father beat his mother, something along those lines.

He nods.

“Why? How old were you?”

“I think you know enough about me,” he says and takes a sip of his coffee, his long, manicured fingers curled gently around the tiny white Styrofoam cup. “You asked to know more about me and I told you. It was a favor. Not an invitation to ask more questions.”

I wonder why he told me something like that to begin with. Maybe he was just trying to scare me into submission so I’d stop talking altogether.

I stand up from the tiny table. He raises his eyes from the newspaper again.

“I need to use the restroom,” I say.

Setting the newspaper on the table beside his coffee, he stands up to join me. He takes my wrist gently into his hand and I pull it away, shaking my head no. “I can go by myself,” I insist.

“Yes, but I’m going to go with you.”

I cross my arms over my chest and blink with surprise. “You can’t be serious. I’m not using it with you standing there.”

“Then you’re not going to use it.”

My mouth falls open with a spat of air. I look back and forth between him and the door behind him that I’m hoping is a restroom—there are no obvious signs indicating anything. I can detect his annoyance with me, faintly in his face; it makes me feel like I just interrupted his nightly love affair with a glass of wine and classical music.

It doesn’t take me long to understand, really.

“I doubt it’ll be like it is in the movies,” I say. “I try to climb out the window after you make the rookie decision to let me go in alone.” I’m not trying to be mouthy, I’m only stating the obvious. I hope he gets that.

“Take it or leave it,” he says. “If you don’t go now, you might be holding it a while.”

I bite down on the inside of my cheek. “Fine,” I give in and step around and in front of him.

He walks behind me into the restroom. There is one toilet that looks as though it has never once been cleaned in the decades it has been here. Four dirty walls with peeling paint and a burn mark near the tiny window that I doubt I would’ve been able to squeeze through if I had been given the chance to try. The room is so small I can reach out and touch Victor as he stands facing the door with his back to me, his hands folded down in front of him. Feeling only a little embarrassed—unfortunately, peeing in front of a madman isn’t new to me, either—I pull my shorts and panties down and take a seat. When I’m done, I have to drip dry. Toilet paper really is a luxury that Americans take for granted.

As I’m pulling up my clothes, I notice Victor’s shoulders from behind tense up. And then I hear voices as though someone just came inside the store.

Victor reaches around to the back of his pants and slips his hand underneath his shirt, pulling a gun into view, his strong index finger already wrapped around the trigger.

“What is it?” I ask, fearful; already my hands are shaking.

Victor cracks open the door and peers outside, putting up his free hand behind him as if to tell me to be quiet.

Then he turns his head to me briefly and whispers, “Stay here,” and before I can question him, or protest, he disappears out the door and I’m left hiding inside yet another restroom. Only, this one doesn’t have a bathtub to help shield me from flying bullets and I find no comfort in that.

Despite my fears, I can’t stop myself from trying to get a glimpse of what’s going on, so I step up to the door and crack it just like Victor had and press my body against it, looking out. My hot, unsteady breath fills the confined space between the door and my face. I can barely make out the counter where the store owner stands off to the side with the broom still clutched in his old, chubby hands. But I can’t see his face. And I can’t see Victor. Several long anxiety-filled seconds go by and still no gunshots. I take that as a good sign. I notice a figure pass my line of vision, but it’s not Victor. And then another man walks by.

I hear voices in Spanish, though not entirely clear to me from my position behind the door. Something about a car part and a few seconds later, the store owner says he has one, but he’ll have to go around back to get it. I still see no sign of Victor. Did he leave me here? That thought strangely makes me even more afraid and I crack the door open just a little more, trying to get a better visual. At first my misplaced panic of being left alone here makes me second-guess my sanity, but then I realize all over again that despite Victor being an assassin and the fact that I’m being used as leverage in a dangerous game of pay up or die, I’m still a girl all alone in the most dangerous parts of a country that I’m not a native of.

Like it or not, Victor is my only protection until I can get over that border and I’m going to stick with him for as long as I can regardless of my desperate need to get away from him, too.