Her grandparents filled a cardboard box with Irina’s clothes and a new image of Saint Parascheva that they bought in a holy icon market in the nearest town, and tied it up with string. Possibly all three of them suspected they would never see one another again. After her escape from Texas, Irina had wandered around for years, and the only fixed point in her tumbling life was the altar she set up wherever she landed, even if only for one night, with the saint’s image and the single, carefully hand-tinted photograph she had of her grandparents. It was taken on their wedding day, and they were decked out in traditional costumes: Petruta in an embroidered skirt and wearing a lace veil; Costea in knee breeches and a short jacket, with a broad sash around his waist. They stood upright and were almost unrecognizable, since the years of hard toil had not yet crippled their backs. Not a day went by without Irina’s praying to them, because they could achieve more miracles than Saint Parascheva; as she had told Alma, they were her guardian angels.
The girl somehow managed to get from Chisinau to Dallas all on her own. She had only traveled once before, when she went with her grandmother to visit Costea in the hospital in the nearest city, when he had his gallbladder removed. She had never seen an airplane close up, only in the sky, and knew no English apart from the latest pop songs, which she had learned by heart without understanding their meaning. The airline put a plastic envelope around her neck with her name, passport, and ticket in it. Irina had nothing to eat or drink on the eleven-hour flight, because she didn’t know that the food on board was free, and the air hostess neglected to tell her, or in the four hours she was stranded and penniless at Dallas airport. The gateway to the American dream was that enormous, confusing place. When her mother and stepfather finally arrived, they said they had gotten the flight’s arrival time wrong. Irina did not recognize them, but they saw a very blond little girl sitting on a bench with a cardboard box at her feet and were able to identify her from a photograph they had. All Irina could remember from that first meeting was that they both stank of alcohol; that sour smell was very familiar to her, as her grandparents and the other villagers often used to drown their sorrows in home-brewed wine.
Radmila and her husband, Jim Robyns, drove the new arrival to their home. To Irina this seemed the height of luxury, even though it was an ordinary-looking clapboard house in a working-class neighborhood in the south of the city, and was very run-down. Her mother had made an attempt to decorate one of the two bedrooms with heart-shaped cushions and a teddy bear with the string of a pink balloon tied to one of its paws. She advised Irina to sit in front of the television for as many hours as she could face: that was the best way to learn English, as she herself had done. In forty-eight hours Radmila had enrolled her in a public school where the students were mostly black or Hispanic, two races the girl had never seen before. It took Irina a month to learn a few phrases in English, but she had a good ear and could soon follow her lessons. Within a year she could speak English without any trace of an accent.
Robyns was an electrician. He belonged to a union, charged the maximum hourly rate, and was protected against accidents, but didn’t always have work. Contracts were awarded according to a list of union members, the first job going to the first on the list, and so on. When one of them finished a contract, he was put at the end of the list, and sometimes had to wait months before being called again, unless he was well connected with any of the union bosses. Radmila worked in the children’s clothing section of a department store; it took her an hour and a quarter to get there by bus, and the same to come home. When Robyns had work, they hardly ever saw him, because he made the most of it and worked all hours to the point of exhaustion; he was paid double or triple for overtime. During these periods he did not drink or take drugs, because any slip could mean he was electrocuted, but in the lengthy periods he was laid off he got wasted with alcohol and used so many drugs it was amazing he could still stand.
“My Jim is as strong as an ox,” Radmila boasted, “nothing can knock him out.” She joined him on his sprees as far as possible, but her body could not take as much as his, and she soon collapsed.
From Irina’s very first days in America, her stepfather made her understand what he called his rules. Her mother knew nothing about it, or pretended not to, until two years later, when Wilkins knocked on her door and showed her his FBI badge.
SECRETS