It was on my twenty-first night in America that everything went to hell. I mean that: to hell. First, Sonja and I learned that Crystal was dead. They’d killed her—our Russian daddies, that is. And then Sonja finally lost her mind. I saw it coming that night—her going totally crazy—but I thought she was going to make it through the party for the bachelor. Nope. I don’t know, maybe we had both lost our minds years ago. Probably. But this was the night when Sonja went wild. She went wild and stabbed Pavel, because he and Kirill were the muscle who had shot baby Crystal and disposed of her tiny body God alone knew where.
Here’s a memory that surprises me: I saw a bunch of Barbie dolls in this little girl’s bedroom that night at the house where they had taken us. They were in a big plastic trunk. The dolls had reminded me of my own collection of Barbies when I’d been a kid, and I still think of that other girl’s Barbies sometimes. There was a rubber on the trunk’s lid. It was a few minutes after the best man had decided not to fuck me (there was a first), and then we went downstairs. The Barbies were maybe the last thing I would notice before I would see Sonja, naked but for a thong, on the back of that bastard named Pavel. Her legs were wrapped around his belly, and her left arm was hugging his chest. Her right arm was like a piston with a carving knife in it, and she was plunging the knife over and over into his neck.
That’s also an image you never forget. Later I would see that his blood was on her arms and in her hair. I would see his blood everywhere.
Somehow, until that moment I had kept it together that night at the party. I was scared not to. I did my job. They had told us what they had done to Crystal, and then put us in the car and driven us out to Westchester to work a private party. (The party was for a bachelor, but the man getting married was nothing like the bachelors we had seen on TV. Oh, he was handsome. He had nice eyes and he was always laughing—at least until he saw Pavel getting killed. But he was not the type who was ever going to get down on one knee and give a girl a rose. I have been around enough men that I can tell pretty quick. Maybe his brother the best man was. But he was twice my age. And the other men at the party? Most were the kinds of dudes who only had girls like us when they paid.) I did whatever they wanted—I even smiled and played along as if it was just another night and another party—because I knew Pavel and Kirill were watching.
But Sonja? She was just biding her time a lot of the evening. She was pretty sure they were going to kill her, too—after the party.
She told me that later. But by then we were gone. By then we were running for our lives.
Chapter Two
“Kristin?”
“I’m awake,” she said, just loud enough for her mother to hear. Already her mind was cataloging the possible reasons why someone would call like this in the small hours of the night. She took comfort in the presence of Melissa beside her, but the geographic distance that separated her from her husband—How far apart were they really? Fifteen miles? Sixteen?—was sufficient to inject into her veins a creeping dread against which she was helpless. She climbed out from under the covers, trying to keep the sheets snug for her daughter, and swung her bare feet onto the floor. Her mother was silhouetted in the doorway, her face half in shadow. The small chandelier in the corridor was off, but her mother must have switched on the lamp by her own bed. She looked disturbingly skeletal in the half-light.
“It’s Richard,” her mother whispered, as Kristin passed her, walking instinctively toward her mother’s bedroom.
“That’s what I suspected,” she murmured. “Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know.”
Kristin blinked against the glare as her eyes adjusted slowly to the brightness—it felt positively solar to her at this hour of the night—walked around the bed in which her mother had been sleeping, and picked up the phone off the nightstand. It was pink. It was so old, it was attached to the cradle by an undulant, matching pink cord. Kristin was, as she was always when she held the receiver in her hands, struck by its weight. Its heft. It made a cell phone seem so insubstantial.
“Richard?” she asked. It was, according to the digital clock by the bed, 2:58 in the morning.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” he said. She saw that her mother was watching her. She was standing with her arms folded across her chest, her worried face oily with the skin cream in which she slept. Her white hair was usually impeccable in Kristin’s mind. It wasn’t now; it was—like she presumed her own hair was—wild with sleep. “But something happened,” he went on, his voice hoisted high onto the ledge between quavering and devastated. He was, she realized, still a little drunk. “Something horrible. We never saw it coming. We never saw it—”
She cut him off: “Are you okay, sweetie?”
“Yes, I’m okay. We all are.”
“Okay, then,” she said, relieved because he was safe and no one was hurt. Something must have happened at the house; something was broken; something was wrecked. That’s all. And he was still drunk and saw it as worse than it was. Much worse. But he was safe and so the sun would rise. “If you’re all okay, that’s all that matters. If something happened to—”
This time he interrupted her. “I mean I’m okay and Philip’s okay. All the guys at the party are fine. More or less, anyway. But the girls—”