The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Same with the two girls?”

  “That’s right. Which is too bad for them. Because those two corpses the M.E. will autopsy in the morning? They weren’t working alone. And even if they were pretty low on the food chain, there are still going to be some seriously pissed-off people out there who want those girls back: either they’ll want to put them back to work because they are just so incredibly lucrative or they’ll want to kill them. And if I were a betting woman, I would bet the latter. They’ll want to make sure their other girls don’t think for one second they can get away with this sort of…disobedience. Let’s face it: as lucrative as those girls might have been, they’re still just a commodity. They’re just not all that hard to replace.”

  He finished the last of his water and stood up. He took a step and stumbled, nearly falling into the credenza. He held up his hands for Patricia. “Not drunk,” he said. “At least not…anymore.”

  “Just clumsy?”

  “I am clumsy. I really am. You would not believe the ridiculous things I’ve done in my life,” he said, recalling the Audi as it rolled backward down his driveway. “But just now? That was just me being…”

  “Shaken?”

  “Yeah. Shaken.” He knew he had to call Kristin and tell her to remain at her mother’s. Tell her that he’d join her there. He had to tell her that she couldn’t come home. And in a few hours—he would wait until eight-thirty as a courtesy, but not a second later—he would call his lawyer, Bill O’Connell. The very idea that he needed Bill for something like this caused his stomach once more to lurch, and he made a mental note to try and recall every single thing he had said at the police station. God, how drunk had he been that he hadn’t called Bill right away?

  “One more thing,” the detective said.

  “Yes?”

  She tilted her head toward the top of the breakfront. “You will need to take your cat with you.”

  He glanced up at Cassandra. Sure enough, she was still watching them.

  “Okay. Sure. Of course.”

  “But take nothing else. The rest of your life? Has to stay right here.”

  He saw the world was starting to lighten outside the eastern window, a thin, quavering band of bleached sky. He realized he was dreading the sunrise: it would illuminate just how much his world had changed since yesterday—and how damaged was the little bark that carried his soul, how far it was from the shore, and how menacing were the waves in between. No one, he knew, was ever going to look at him quite the same way again.

  Alexandra

  The day after my mother died, Vasily appeared at our apartment, this time with bouquets of flowers. And jars of honey for my grandmother. And traditional pomegranate wine. And less traditional but more modern Armenian red wine. And a necklace for me. And a Bible. And, surrounding him like marble columns and carrying all these presents, two hulking Russian dudes in black suits and shaved heads. You know the look. Gangster. Vasily called them his security. I had seen these guys or guys like them around him before. Vasily owned that brandy factory in Yerevan and another one in Volgograd. He was very big deal. Or at least he thought he was very big deal. Looking back, why would a brandy factory executive need security? I thought it was just vanity. I thought he just wanted to feel like even bigger shot than he was. Nope. It was because of his other businesses—mostly businesses involving girls like me—that he wanted thugs all around him. You probably don’t need bashers if all you do is make brandy.

  My grandmother and I were both in shock those days. Those weeks. Those months. Neither of us was at our best or thinking straight. Maybe if my mother had not just died, we would have seen through Vasily’s bullshit.

  He claimed that he knew people in the Moscow Ballet. He said they were important people. He told my grandmother this in a hushed voice, as if the truth was so great it could only be spoken in whispers. He added that he would tell my dance teacher this, too.

  But maybe I would never have seen through his lies. Remember, I was a kid who loved ballerinas. It was just a few years earlier I had been playing with dolls.

  …

  My dance teacher was named Seta Nazarian and she had the most beautiful curly hair. Her eyes always were smiling. Her heart was big. But she was tough on her dancers, and I think she missed how orderly the world was when it was communist. Sometimes I worry she would have been in difficult position if she and Vasily had ever spoken. Looking back, I’m honestly not sure she believed I was so good it would have been worth a trip to Moscow for me to audition. Maybe she would have thought so. But maybe not. Would she have guessed what Vasily had in mind and protected me? Again, I’ll never know. But I don’t think she would have figured it out. She probably would have decided I was long shot for the company. But I was a good student and a good dancer. I really was the best in her class. I think she would have liked what it said about her if I had wound up in the ballet in Moscow. The old communist inside her would have been proud. So I had to try. I think she would have let me.

  But we’ll never know. Maybe I’m just kidding myself.

  Vasily said the plan was for me to train for the audition with a special coach he knew in Moscow. I would train for three months before the audition. He promised my grandmother that I would go to school, too. All the girls and boys in the company did. The dancers, he said, were all very good students. Most made it into the company, but the few (and he said it was very small number) who did not become dancers came home with very good educations. He said this was a detail that he knew would have been important to my mother, but he looked at me like this was not something I needed to worry about. His eyes said I would be a dancer for sure. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was setting and the big room that was the only room other than the kitchen and our two bedrooms was getting dark. I remember thinking that moment how much I missed my mother. I had been living alone with Grandmother since my mother had gone to hospital for the last time. My grandmother was sixty-two and had seemed to age many years in the last months of my mother’s life. It wasn’t just that her hair now was the gray of cigarette ash. Her eyes were red because she seemed to begin and end her day with tears, and she seemed always to have a cold. She seemed always to have sores on her arms. I worried that I was a burden, since obviously nurses do not make oligarch kinds of money. Besides, it was almost time for her to retire.

  So, going with Vasily and his marble column bodyguards to Russia to become a ballet dancer was no-brainer. It really was. I went.

  …

  When I was twelve, I sold my Barbies on a folding table on a street in Yerevan. I was too old for them. I sold them to tourists for lots of money, which probably sounds crazy since tourists come from places where you can buy all the Barbies you want. But if I sold them to younger girls or their mothers or fathers in my neighborhood, I wouldn’t have made very much money. Those people didn’t have very much money. It wouldn’t have been worth it. The tourists from California and New Jersey bought my Barbies because my mother and I dressed them up in traditional Armenian clothes we made ourselves. For instance, for one doll we sewed an ankle length red wedding dress with a gold lace apron. For others, we embroidered beautiful white lace scarves and shawls. We cut out elegant blue velvet vests and trimmed tiny strips of leather into tiny belts.

  I was allowed to keep all the money I made because we didn’t need it for food or the rent. Both my mother and my grandmother were working. We weren’t rich, but two jobs is two jobs. We did okay. I bought my mother some earrings and a necklace from a vernissage vendor as gifts to thank her for helping me make all those clothes and because I loved her. I bought my grandmother a new dress. For me, I bought blue jeans and a handbag and new leotards. I bought new ballet slippers.

  And while I had a big collection, I was never the most loony of Russian or Armenian Barbie doll lovers. There were far worse. I read about one girl in the Ukraine who, when she was a young woman, dieted and worked out and dieted some more, and then had her boobs done so she would look like huma
n Barbie. Vasily, if he had known how much I loved Barbies, would probably have paid whatever it cost to make me look like human Barbie, too. I still remember the first time I heard a boob job referred to as “plastic surgery.” I smiled because my brain made a big jump to the dolls I had loved when I was a little girl.

  A few days after I sold the dolls, when I was beside my mother’s desk at the brandy factory—just visiting for some reason before dance class—Vasily would compliment me on my new jeans. My mother got seriously pissed: at him and at me. The jeans were tight, which was why I liked them.

  I don’t know, maybe this was the beginning of my end. It was the first time that Vasily took notice of me as, well, a hot chick. But I really was only twelve.

  Maybe I just should have given away all those Barbies to the girls in the classes behind me at school. Maybe everything would have been different.

  But maybe not. Maybe I was just destined for badness.

  You’ll see.

  …

  This is how insane things were for me and how quickly my life changed: one afternoon I was walking like I did most days each week from my school to the dance studio. I had a little canvas dance bag with my ballet slippers and toe shoes inside it over my shoulder. The next afternoon I was on an airplane for the first time in my life. I was going to Moscow. Now my ballet slippers and toe shoes were in a handsome black suitcase that Vasily gave me. He called it a “rollie” because it had wheels, and we both laughed.

  I stood for a long time at the big windows by a gate at the Yerevan airport and looked at Ararat, thinking how maybe when I next saw the mountain I would be on my way to becoming a ballerina at the opera house. Maybe I would be a ballerina at the opera house. I thought this to myself: someday I will bathe in the footlights like a star.

  And maybe it was the word star, which is just a sun, but then I thought of Icarus and I had a little shudder of fear. Maybe I was more like Icarus than Velvet Bird, and my wings were just wax. Maybe they would melt in the hot lights and I would fall.

  …

  Vasily’s assistant and I boarded the plane together. His name was Andrei, which is very common Russian name, and he had been with me since picking me up at my home in a black stretch limousine. (He called it a “stretchie.” Looking back, how innocent does a world seem where grown men use words like rollie and stretchie?) We sat in the very back of the car, but in the very front of the airplane. I only saw the face of our stretchie’s driver when he took our rollies and put them in the trunk, and when he opened the back doors for us. In the car, I focused on the refrigerator built into the seat, which was no less glamorous to me because it was empty, and the side or the back of Andrei’s massive neck as he looked at the streets and casinos and the clubs with the strippers—neon versions of naked women over their entrances—on the way to the Yerevan airport.

  Andrei was not a big talker. But he was a big smoker. You can’t smoke inside the airport or on an Aeroflot jet, which he understood going in, but he was still not happy about it. He kept taking his Jackpot Golds out of his black suit pocket and fingering the box like it was an actual gold brick. Opening and closing the cardboard lid. He was thirty years old, with a shaved head and no mustache or beard. His shoulders seemed the size of a couch, his neck a pillar at the temple at Garni. He could barely fit into his airplane seat and complained lots. But I loved my seat. I had a window. I tilted the seat back almost like chair in my dentist’s office.

  I figured I shouldn’t ask Andrei too many questions: this was a gift, after all, and you do not look a gift horse in the mouth. (I first heard that expression before going down on an American telecommunications executive in his hotel room in Moscow. He had expected a blonde, which I am not, and he was disappointed. I made sure he got over it. At the time, however, and for many months afterward, I believed the expression was this: you do not look a gift in the mouth because it will make you hoarse. I believed the expression was some old superstition about being grateful for all gifts. Speak bad of them, and maybe you’d lose your voice.) Besides, Andrei worked for a wealthy brandy factory president, so I figured he was important, too. Finally he fell asleep on the plane. I stayed awake all the way to Moscow, listening to the sounds of the engines and enjoying the colas and apple juice that the flight attendants kept bringing me. I read the book and the magazine I had carried with me. I watched other people watching movies on their computers or their tablets. This was the most glamorous thing I had ever done, except dance. (Dancing—real dancing on a real stage, not teasing men in my lingerie—will always be the most glamorous thing I ever did.) I felt like royalty.

  Some girls asked me later why I was not suspicious. They wanted to know why I thought Vasily was spending all this money on me: airplane tickets, the chance to study dance in Moscow, a place to stay. One girl said I must have been a mountain-sized dope not to have known that something was up. Maybe. But I just thought Vasily was doing it for my mother. I thought he cared about her because she had been his secretary for so many years—and that meant he cared about me. I thought this was my break, my future.

  I believed that. Really I did.

  …

  What did my dance teacher think? Even though her name was Seta, we always called her Madame as students. I will never know what she thought because she wasn’t at the studio when I went to share with her my good news and say good-bye. She had been told by some government official that there was a permit issue with her studio space—which meant that someone wanted a bribe—and she was trying to straighten out the problem with the bureaucrat at his office. Andrei and one more of Vasily’s bodyguards brought me there to tell her about my audition. But in Madame’s place at the studio was an assistant named Maria, who was kind of a dull knife. Still, she was happy for me. She was teaching one of the classes of little girls. She thought this was all very exciting and—because she always seemed to say the first thing that came into her head—told me how surprised she was that I was getting this opportunity and not Nayiri. She implied that Nayiri was a better dancer. (Nayiri was an excellent dancer, but I was better. As I said, I was the best in the class.) The bodyguards explained that Vasily wanted to do my mother a favor. They did not say, which is what I would have liked them to have said, that Vasily had seen me dance and I had earned this honor. But the truth was that Vasily had never, ever seen me dance, which—in front of Maria—made me uncomfortable. I wanted to say something to defend myself, but there really wasn’t anything I could say. I thought I looked nervous that moment in the long wall of studio mirrors. It felt odd to be there in pants instead of my leotard. Still, Maria wished me good luck and said that she would clap for me someday when I was on the stage at the opera house.

  But it was disappointing for me that Madame was not there. I remember when I told my grandmother that she was gone my voice had broken—which I hadn’t expected when I had opened my mouth.

  Later I would figure something out: Madame was not at the studio because Vasily did not want her at the studio. The guy had his grubby hands in everything. Everything! He had made sure that Madame was summoned to the government building when I was supposed to be at the studio to say good-bye. Madame knew way more about ballet and my prospects than Maria: she might have tried to stop me from going, even if it would have meant breaking the news to me that I was no Velvet Bird.

  But you never know. How do you dim the light of promise? How do you wake someone from such a beautiful dream? How do you break a teenage girl’s heart?

  …

  Here is how you do all three of those things: you take the teenage girl from the Moscow airport to a carefully selected Moscow hotel where you own or have rented all the rooms on a corridor. Then you rape her so violently that when you’re done, the girl just puts the sheet with the bloodstain in the gray plastic trash bag that was in the wastepaper basket, so that later she can secretly throw it away.

  That is what Andrei did to me.

  Then you take away her luggage and her passport and her cell pho
ne, and you have someone stand guard all night long outside her hotel room door so the teenage girl can’t run away.

  So none of the girls in the other rooms can run away.

  Then the next morning, after the teenage girl has somehow cried herself to sleep in the middle of the night, you return with some other young thug and say to the teenage girl, “You take clothes off and suck dick and then we take you home. We promise. This was all big mistake. You are not ready for this life.” The girl resists, but then she sees it as her only hope, and so she does it. Somehow she stifles her desire to throw up. She does just what you tell her to do. She does it on her knees for both men. Then for a third. She does more—far more, things she never imagined people did—because this is what you are demanding and because she sees it as her only way home.

  Then when she is done, you show her the video you have made. There she is. There you are. Her face is clear. Recognizable. Your face? No one ever sees your face in the video. How clever. You tell her that you will show the video to the whole world—including the girl’s grandmother and the reverent fathers and her dance teacher and her schoolteachers and all of her friends—if she doesn’t follow your instructions to the letter and do everything you say.

  Then, that night, you bring in a woman to convince the teenage girl to eat a little something—and to explain to her just how fucked she really is.

  Chapter Four

  When Melissa awoke, she could hear her mother and her grandmother speaking in the apartment kitchen, their voices an underwater-like thrum from which only an occasional word would bubble to the surface. She thought the plan was for her mother to go home to Bronxville on the first train; she’d expected that her mother would be gone by now. Apparently, something had changed. She looked at the antique clock on the nightstand—it was so old that a person had to wind it, and the twin bells on the top were lusterless with age—and saw it was not quite seven-thirty. The curtains were drawn on the window, and so she emerged from beneath the quilt and opened one side: it was the sort of city morning where the clouds hung so low that the fog looked a little grimy. She jumped back into bed and curled her body into an egg, wrapping her arms as tightly as she could around her ankles and bringing her forehead to her knees. She liked to lie like this, her eyes shut tight. After a few moments, when she felt her forehead and the back of her neck starting to burn, she would pretend that she was a mythical bird being born, and slowly—as slowly as possible—stretch out her arms and her legs and her torso. She would blink. She would flutter her eyes like a creature seeing the world for the very first time. She would lie like this in the mornings some days before school, just after waking up, but she would also do it some evenings before finally getting undressed and into her pajamas before bed. It was especially fun to do it at the end of the day when she was wearing her more interesting tights. She would sit up and gaze at the patterns, and feel unexpectedly rewarded: the tights that looked like the night sky or the ceiling of a planetarium were always fascinating to her after she had emerged from her egg or (sometimes in her mind) her cocoon. She was intrigued by what the constellations and zodiac signs looked like after opening her eyes and uncoiling her body. She would compare the universe on her legs to the universe her father had created for her on the ceiling of her bedroom, a world of glow-in-the-dark stars (some shooting) and planets (Jupiter, with its playful, winking eye; a cherry red Mars; Uranus, with its celestial hula hoops).