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.
I decided I was going to like Eve when she gave me a heavy coat and some boots and walked me to the edge of hospital parking lot and handed me a cigarette. I no longer had any tubes in me, not even the one in my right arm, but I was very sore and had to take baby steps. I was happy to have on more than little hospital gown and little hospital slippers. Eve said she did not approve of smoking, but I was getting desperate and cranky, and she wanted me to be able to “focus on my options.” It had gotten cold and I could see her breath.
She took me to a corner of the parking lot where there would be no reporters. She said there were reporters and TV guys who wanted to talk to me, but I didn’t have to talk to them and probably shouldn’t until I had met with some lawyer lady she works with. She said from now on my life should be just that: my life.
…
Options. Such a word. Such an idea. Try having options when you have never had options before. Very difficult.
I figured when I got out I would go to Los Angeles, which was Sonja’s plan. Find a Bachelor. Find Kim. I knew I couldn’t go home to Yerevan—not with Vasily. Not with so many cue-ball-head babies. But then Eve told me instead I could go to halfway house if I wanted. I told her that I still had all my money. (No one had stolen it, which seemed even bigger miracle than miracle I was alive.) But Eve thought I should live with other girls for a while in a place in Brooklyn. She said halfway house was not called that, when I asked, because it was halfway between two places or because it was half a house. It was a place where I could live with other girls and learn to be normal girl. I could even go back to dancing, if I wanted.
“It’s been too many years. You can’t just pick up and be Velvet Bird,” I mumbled.
“I didn’t say you’d be preparing for the New York City Ballet. I only said you could go back to dancing. It might be…fun.”
When she said I would be living with other girls, I grew suspicious. Maybe this Eve was actually like Inga or Catherine, and she had just been nice to me for a couple of days because she was worming her way into my life like Vasily. I would never forget how it had been dance that had turned me into sex slave in the first place.
“So, I live with other girls like courtesan?” I asked. “I thought you didn’t want me to be courtesan. I thought I had options.”
But Eve said it would be nothing like that. It was for girls like me who did not want to be sex slaves and whores. The next morning, she brought in a girl for me to meet who lived there right now. Girl was from Kiev. She used to dance, too. Now she was taking lessons at studio again. She said there was a full moon coming, and she was going to be dancing in a little Brooklyn show where they had built a stage by windows in old factory so the ballet would have actual full moon as backdrop.
I asked her more about this halfway house, and she made it sound okay. Not perfect. But not scary either. And I would have to go somewhere.