“Look, I know this sounds awful, but sometimes if you screw up the way some people do in a marriage, it’s best to keep whatever you did to yourself. Especially if it’s a onetime thing. Does your partner really need to know? Not always.”
“And if it wasn’t a onetime thing? Who knows what he does when he’s traveling? And he travels a lot.”
“I like Richard.”
“So you trust him.”
Even over the phone she heard her brother exhale. “People always surprise me. They really do.”
“That doesn’t reassure me.”
“Whatever he is—whoever he is—he’s definitely not his younger brother.”
“That’s a low bar.”
“Your marriage has always struck me as pretty damn solid,” her brother said, trying to be more definitive.
And, the truth was, she had always thought it was. They’d been married fourteen years, and it still had its moments of wild electricity. Yes, it was different now that they were forty and lived in the suburbs; it was calmer because they had a daughter who was nine. They were ensconced in their careers. But they’d rented a tiny beach house in Montauk that summer, and those Friday nights when he would arrive for the weekend, joining her and Melissa, had been seriously perfect: the late dinners on that splinter-fest the three of them called a picnic table. The way she and Richard would ravish each other after nearly a week apart, once Melissa had fallen asleep. The margaritas on Saturday afternoons. They’d had her friends out with them two weekends, and the grown-ups had actually danced to the vinyl on the portable turntable that she had brought to the house to surprise him. They had danced like they were back at some grungy rock-and-roll venue near Saint Mark’s and once again were in their twenties.
But now she found herself questioning those days in between, when she and Melissa had lived with their cat at the beach. What really had he been doing back in Bronxville? What really had he been doing in the city? She grew angry at herself for doubting him now, because he didn’t deserve that. But she couldn’t help it. By the time she finally fell asleep, she found herself wondering if her brother was correct and they all would have been better off if Richard had told her nothing—nothing at all.
Alexandra
My first days when I was a prisoner in Moscow, before I was brought to the cottage, Inga would sit beside me on the hotel bed. She would either use her laptop computer or my cell phone, and she would send e-mails or texts to my grandmother and pretend they were from me. At first, she would need to ask me questions: she would want to know the names of my friends at school or the girls in dance class. I was supposed to give her names of people I wanted my grandmother to say hi to, such as Nayiri. Or the name of a favorite teacher, maybe. I was supposed to come up with ballet stories my grandmother could tell Madame.
I considered making up names as a distress signal. Maybe my grandmother would understand this was big mayday and I was in trouble. But what if my grandmother asked me who these people were? Inga would know I was lying, and I was scared of the new ways they would find to punish me.
One time, Inga asked me to pick two things I wanted Grandmother to give to Vasily to mail to me. I picked my hoodie sweatshirt with the logo of the Armenian soccer team and a pair of black pajamas with white silhouettes of dogs with floppy ears. I never got them. What a surprise. Vasily probably just threw the clothes in the trashcan in his office. No, come to think of it, he probably gave them to some other girl whose mother or father was dying so he could worm his way into her family’s heart, too—and then kidnap her and make one more human sex toy.
Other times, still pretending she was me, Inga would tell my grandmother how busy I was and how hard I was working. She would write that I loved the dance teachers here. She would say I was making new friends.
At some point, Inga must have suspected that I was thinking of ways to send secret, coded SOS. Maybe I hesitated. Maybe I sounded guilty. She sighed and looked at me with her big eyes like I was huge disappointment to her. Then she told me that if I did not try harder to help, my grandmother would lose her job at the hospital. Vasily would see to that. She said that if I tried to hint about what was really going on, my grandmother might even have a horrible accident on her way to work. Even nurses wind up with broken bones, she told me. And she reminded me (as she did often) of the first video they had made of me naked with the men, and how easy it would be to share that video (or any of the others they had forced me to make) with my whole world in Yerevan.
My grandmother would write back that she missed me, but was so happy for me and so excited for my future. One evening when Inga read me one of those e-mails, I wept so much that Inga rubbed my shoulders and my back, and told me that in the end we would all find happiness. To this day, I have no idea if she believed that for even a second.
…