Upstairs, Melissa was sleeping in the master bedroom with Kristin. It was Kristin who had insisted. It was Kristin who had somehow kept it together when she surveyed the living room and the kitchen and the front hallway—when she, too, had watched in fascination as the cleaning crew had tried to wash away the stigmas of madness and degradation—and it was Kristin who had then brought Melissa up to her bedroom, the child still carrying her school backpack over her shoulder.
And that meant it was Kristin who had been with Melissa that afternoon when their daughter had found—there it was, right atop the plastic Tucker Tote filled with Barbie dolls, but somehow he had managed to miss it—what the child had mistaken at first for a jellyfish. A sick jellyfish. A dead jellyfish. Something she might have found washed ashore at the beach that summer.
It seemed that Spencer had taken Sonja to his daughter’s bedroom. That’s where he’d gone on the second floor. And when he was done with her—on his way back downstairs, perhaps just before pulling his iPhone from his pants pocket and peering through the camera lens into the guest room—he’d tossed his used condom onto a child’s plastic carton of Barbies.
Alexandra
How I changed. How much I changed. I could see I was the same girl in the mirror, even if now I looked like courtesan instead of regular girl going to dance class. But inside I was different. So different. It wasn’t just that I knew things about people. I knew things about me.
…
I said I was a better dancer than my friend Nayiri back in Yerevan, which probably makes you think I am a very ambitious person. Maybe once. And maybe Nayiri and I were competitive. But we were also friends. I would say we were as close as sisters, but I was an only child so I don’t know. Once I read an Armenian translation of Little Women, and those girls were very different from Nayiri and her two sisters. Nayiri and her sisters seemed to fight like wolves day after day. Nayiri was always angry with one or the other. They stole each other’s clothes and bangles, they argued over chores. So, I have no idea what having a sister is really like. But Nayiri and me? We never fought. We had played together as little girls, and then we danced together as we grew up. I would watch her in the studio mirror and she would watch me, so there was a little tension. She perfected her adagios before I did, but I got my toe shoes first. I could pirouette the length of the stage before she could, but she mastered her tours en l’air like boy: full rotations. Maybe she has mastered two rotations by now. It’s possible. It’s been a long time.
For a while, Inga made up lies I could e-mail Nayiri, too. But I think Nayiri could see we were growing apart. My pretend life must have seemed too glamorous to her. We stopped e-mailing when I was still at the cottage.
Sometimes I lost track of how I had wound up where I was. Who I was. I would hate myself when, sometimes, the sex would feel good. I would hate myself when, other times, the men were lower than pigs. I would hate myself for being too weak to kill myself. Why, I would wonder, had I not thrown myself out that ninth-floor window those first days in Moscow? I would think of my ancestors who had chosen to die rather than be dishonored. In 1915, after their men had been slaughtered by the Turkish gendarmes and the Kurdish killing parties and they had seen their children die of starvation or terrible diseases, many Armenian women would throw themselves into the Euphrates River to drown. Or they would throw themselves off the mountains on the way to desert killing fields like Der-el-Zor. It was, they knew, better than being raped. Better than being nothing but harem girl or the wife of one of the men who had murdered your husband and your father and your brothers and your children.
But I hadn’t killed myself in Moscow, and I didn’t later at the cottage. I would try and make myself feel better by telling myself I still could.
Anyway, the girls at the cottage were nothing like Nayiri. I probably wouldn’t have been friends with any of them except maybe Sonja and Crystal if we’d been classmates in Yerevan or had lived in the same building. But when you are in the same boat, you make the best of the situation. Just like Nayiri and her two sisters, we fought over clothes—even though Inga picked them out specially for each of us—and we snapped about who was better with the black and whites. We even climbed over each other like kittens to get attention and those sometimes smiles from Inga and Catherine.
This is what I mean about capture-bonding. I know it seems strange that we wanted the approval of people who kept us prisoner. But if you are a person who needs no one’s approval, you are probably crazy and live alone on an island or the top of a mountain somewhere. We all need to be appreciated, even if it’s just because we are taught to spread our legs and smile for a man like this was something we wanted.
And I’ll bet there is no one who needs approval more than teen girl.
…