Her Russian Brute: 50 Loving States, Idaho (3 page)

T
he world was
on fire and someone was knocking to tell her to get out of the building. But the drums were banging too loud for Sola to find her way to the door.

Sola’s eyes cracked open, only to immediately squeeze shut when confronted with the bright sun streaming in through her front room’s window. This small action of squeezing her eyes shut hurt. As did raising a hand to her pounding head. Everything hurt. Everything was sore.

She tried again, slowly cracking her eyes open this time. Giving herself a few moments to adjust to the light. It only helped a little. She wasn’t really in a burning building, but laid out under a sizzling patch of sunlight in her living room. That only brought on more questions. Why was she on the floor? How had she gotten there?

Had she been sleep walking again?
No
…she always returned to her bed after a sleep-walking episode. In fact, one of the major signs she’d been sleep walking was waking up in bed with her glasses on, an action so automatic, she literally did it in her sleep.

But she was on the living room floor, and the world was blurry. So she hadn’t been sleep walking. What then?

The answers to all her questions came to her in sudden flash of shocking memories: Her shouting over the marching band to ask Scott if they could talk…how angry the clean-cut football player became when she tried to gently tell him she thought they should not get married, as he’d proposed, but instead break up.

“Do you know how lucky you are to have a guy like me asking you to marry him? Don’t you get that?”

He’d kept saying this to her over and over, and at one point she’d had to point out, Anitra-style, that if she were really that lucky, he wouldn’t have to keep reminding her how lucky she was.

That was when the weird accusations started flying. That she’d tricked him. That she was “talking back” to him. Followed up by the even more bizarre reassurances that everything would be okay, all of their problems would be solved, once she finished growing out her hair…and moved to Omaha with him in January.

Wait—what?!?! This had been the first Sola ever heard of this plan, and at that point she’d had to make it perfectly clear to Scott that she’d never, ever move to a place with zero opportunities to pursue her dreams of becoming an opera director.

His response? A small, nervous chuckle and, “That’s not how I expected you to respond to my proposal, Sola. This is very disappointing. Very disappointing.”

“I know, Scott. I am sorry. I’m really sorry, but I just think—”

That was when he punched her. Once. Twice. Three times. Each right hook had felt like getting hit with a mallet. Of course she’d fallen to the ground, only to have him start kicking her. That was the last thing she remembered. She must have blacked out.

And now she hurt everywhere. And someone was knocking at the door.

“Sola? Sola are you in there?” It was Vanessa, the kindly home aide who took care of Brian’s husband while he was at work or out of town. She sounded worried.

Sola’s eyes cut to her watch. But it was a weekend. Vanessa didn’t work on weekends. In fact, Brian had purposefully scheduled this last business trip so he’d be back by Friday.

She forced herself to her hands and knees and was happy to discover she could still stand. That meant Scott probably hadn’t broken anything. Which she supposed was something to be thankful for, even if getting to her feet was still a blurry, bitch of a job.

Where were her glasses?
she wondered as she took the first steps toward the door—only to hear an unwelcome crunching noise beneath the boots Eddie bought for her two Christmases ago.
Oh no!

But no time to mourn their loss. She had to answer the door…

“Are you okay?” Vanessa demanded, her forehead furrowing with deep concern, when Sola opened the door.

“I’m fine. Long story,” she answered, not quite knowing what else to say. Or how to explain this.

Should she call the police and file charges against Scott?

She dismissed the notion immediately. People who weren’t exactly legally sanctioned to live in the United States didn’t go to the police to file charges against men who were.

“Do you need a doctor?”

Vanessa’s question brought Sola back out of her troubled thoughts.

“No…” she forced herself to look like she wasn’t in a crap-load of pain and asked Vanessa, “What’s up? Is everything okay at the house?”

Brian’s husband, Eddie, once a vibrant and energetic character actor turned college acting teacher, had been diagnosed with an extremely rare and completely debilitating disease a few years ago. To Sola, the orphaned student attending ValArts thanks to the California Dream Act, it had felt like she was losing yet another parent. Brian had been encouraging towards her from the beginning. In fact, he’d been the one to guide Sola, one of the few female Directing majors in his Musical Theatre Direction class, toward opera as a main interest for her future studies. And Eddie had taken it even further, not only drawing her into their formerly two-person fold, but also offering up their guesthouse to the undocumented student Brian had decided to take under his wing.

Eddie had attended every single performance Sola directed up until he’d been confined to a wheelchair. And on his better days, he’d still pepper Sola with questions about her latest projects and insist he’d make it to the next show, often just minutes before sinking back into a catatonic state.

For these reasons and more, Sola felt like a daughter to Brian and Eddie. Which was why she was much more concerned about Eddie than her own bruised and mottled face as she peered down at the petite home aide.

“Oh no, please no worry, Sola. Mr. Eddie is fine,” Vanessa assured her in deeply accented English. Then she switched to Spanish to ask, “But do you know where Senor Brian is?”

“He did not come home last night?” Sola asked, switching to Spanish as well, although hers, unlike Vanessa’s, was spoken with a strong Guatemalan accent.

Brian had gone on a business trip—something about an Idaho scout job for Alexei Rustanov, the billionaire who’d financed the new work Brian had directed at the Santa Fe Opera the summer before last. But he was supposed to have returned yesterday evening.

In fact, Sola had arranged for a shuttle to pick him up from the Van Nuys airport since she was supposed to be driving down to Marina Del Rey that evening break up with Scott. But Scott had shown up here with his marching band proposal, and apparently, Brian hadn’t gotten on the shuttle…

So twelve plus hours after Brian was due back, Sola put on a pair of old, faded tortoiseshell glasses from about two prescriptions ago, and tried to locate him using the Find My Friends app she’d made him download after a few too many missed rehearsal calls in New Mexico. But it only said his phone couldn’t be located.

Sola’s stomach rolled with the image of Brian drunk in some Idaho bar. She knew it had been a bad idea to let him go there by himself. Brian had been super vague about the assignment, and she suspected that Alexei trusted Brian more than he perhaps should or would have if he’d known just how much covering Sola had done for him that summer in New Mexico.

But she’d had one last final to take on the Thursday he’d left, and her Math for Artists professor hadn’t been feeling all that magnanimous. He’d told her in no uncertain terms that no, she couldn’t reschedule the final for a class she’d put off until the second-to-last semester of the school year in order to accompany another professor on his business trip to Idaho, of all places. And with Eddie’s medical bills piling up, Brian had definitely needed the extra money, so Sola had let him go alone.

But she was deeply regretting that decision now. After making a few calls, Sola discovered Brian had picked up his rental car once he’d arrived in Idaho but there was no trace of where he’d gone after that. The rental agency said they weren’t allowed to disclose customer information. And the Idaho police department hadn’t been any more helpful.

Her mistake had been in telling them her missing person wasn’t a hiker. Because unless he was a hiker, a person needed to be missing for at least seventy-two hours before the police would start a formal search, and Brian had only been gone for forty-eight.

That was how she found herself on the mainframe in Brian’s extremely cluttered home office a short while later. Sweeping empty bottles of bourbon off his desk and hoping to God he was one of those people who’d opted to let his browser save his passwords.

He wasn’t.
Dammit
! But a few minutes of frantic searching later, Sola found a small index card with all his passwords written down in precise, legible handwriting. Yes! Old people were the best!

She typed in the user name and password for his online credit card account and went through his most recent charges. No hotel, she noted, but there was a charge from a bar called The Thirsty Wolf...a rather large charge.

Of course there was. Sola had picked Brian up from enough New Mexico and Valencia bar floors to know how deliriously drunk he could get when he wasn’t caring for Eddie. Visions of him on a random bar floor, being stepped over by strangers, assaulted her already pounding head as she looked up the bar’s phone number. She punched the numbers into her cell phone, and waited for someone to pick up.

“Thirsty Wolf, how can I help you?”

“Hello, do you have a customer there by the name of Brian Krantz? I’m his—his daughter,” she lied, just to make the conversation go more smoothly “I’m concerned about him because the last charge on his card was at this bar and he hasn’t returned home yet.”

“Oh hell,” said the leathery male voice on the other end of the line. She heard the raspy sound of what she could only assume was a hand being placed over the receiver, and then the same voice, now muffled, yelling, “Ma! That outsider the Russkie’s got holed up at the kingdom house has a daughter. And she’s on the line, wanting to know where he is!”

“Well, don’t just announce all our business to everyone,” came another muffled, more distant, voice. “Here, give me that phone!”

There was the brief sound of muttering and the phone being handed off, then: “Hello, this is Lorraine,” a woman said, her voice equally as leathery as the previous man’s but with a slightly more feminine lilt to it. “How can I help you?”

Sola looked down at the phone in her hand, truly alarmed. “Did I just hear you say Bri- I mean, my father, is being held by a Russian at some house in your town?”

“Yeah, sweetie, I’m afraid you did,” Lorraine answered with a loud tsk that spoke volumes to Sola.

“Is it against his will?” Sola felt compelled to ask, since it had been a Russian who’d sent Brian on this job in the first place.

“I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to be there if that’s what you’re asking,” Lorraine answered dryly. “Let me tell you, honey…that Russkie Monster is a piece of work. He caught your poor father trespassing on his property and threw him right into a cage! Judge don’t come back through town until the spring thaw, so I guess your dad’s just going to have to stay where he is until March, at the earliest. That’s when Old Farris will be able to hear his side of the story. But don’t you worry, Old Farris doesn’t want outsiders hanging around Wolfson Point any more than the rest of us do. He’ll probably tell that crazy Russkie he’s got to let your daddy go. I never did like them damn Russians. You ever seen
Rocky 4
?”

“No,” Sola admitted, still trying to wrap her confused brain around what she’d just been told.

“Well you should, because then you’d see what I mean. They’ve got no business on American soil, taking over kingdom houses that don’t belong to them, and pissing all over folks! I don’t even understand how he’s allowed to be here in the first place, let alone own property!”

As a person who still didn’t have a clear path to United States citizenship after her upcoming graduation and who didn’t look a thing like the man she claimed was her father, she carefully steered the conversation down a safer path.

“The thing is, we can’t wait until March. His hus—uh, my mom—is very sick,” Sola felt guilty about lying, but like Brian always said, “direct for your audience, not yourself.” And the Russian-hating woman on the other side of the phone didn’t exactly sound progressive. “He needs to take care of her. He also has classes he’s supposed to teach out here in California. Are you sure there’s nothing that can be done?”

“I don’t know. You cute?”

Sola blinked. “Um, what?”

“What I mean is, if you’re cute, you could go up there. Pretend to be a hooker. Or something like that. Those are the only kind of women been up to the kingdom house since he moved in.”

Hookers? Kingdom house? She was so confused.

“Listen,” she told the odd woman on the other side of the line. “This Russian man cannot keep my father there against his will. That’s called abduction. He has a partner and a job and people who love him. I am sure this is all just a big misunderstanding and I know I can help clear things up. Just hold on…I’m coming.”

“Okay, well, come on out here if you want, sweetie,” Lorraine said, not sounding very optimistic about the prospect of Sola being able to get Brian out of jail—or the Russkie’s house, or wherever the hell he was being held. “But you better come quick. The only road into or out of town closes at 6:00 PM sharp tonight.”

“
W
ait
, wait, wait! You’re heading to a town in
Idaho
with only one road? And that one road will close tonight for the entire winter? Seriously?!” Anitra asked incredulously on the other side of the line. “And I thought West Virginia was backwards…”

“I know, right?” Sola replied into the small microphone attached to her earbuds. “And I’ve only got, like, a few hours to get Brian out of there or we’ll both be stuck in that place until spring!”

“Wasn’t there a movie kind of like that? What was it called…?”

“I have no idea, “ Sola answered, nervously eyeing the increasingly mountainous scenery outside the shuttle windows. Any other day, she would have found the snow-capped mountains, so different from the retrofitted desert she called home, awe-inspiring and beautiful. But now, as the sun began to descend behind the jagged peaks, they just seemed ominous.

It had been a hard scramble to get to Idaho. First, she’d had to find a non-stop flight to Boise. Then drive all the way to LAX to catch it. And apparently the debit card gods hadn’t felt like she’d bled nearly enough money, because now she was trapped in an airport shuttle with a driver who kept asking her, “Wolfson Point? You sure that’s where you want to go? You know the road out of there’s closing in a few hours, right?”

Finally, in a last ditch attempt to get out of reassuring the driver yet again that yes, Wolfson Point was exactly where she wanted to go, she called her best friend. However, less than a minute into her conversation with Anitra, Sola’s stomach began to knot up tightly with dread.

“
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
!”

“What?”

“That’s the name of the movie. It’s about these seven brothers—six really, because the oldest is already married to some woman he met in town. Anyway, this dude and his six younger brothers—they’re all like these wild mountain men who can sing and dance really well…cause, you know,
that
happens—come up with this plan to kidnap a bunch of women, and then they cause an avalanche over the mountain pass so they can keep the girls there until spring.”

“And what happens?” Sola asked, interested despite herself. “Do the women get rescued?”

“No! They end up staying there until spring. Then they marry the brothers.” Anitra sucked on her teeth as if she were just now seriously thinking about the film’s storyline for the first time ever. “Really, that movie should have been called
Stockholm Syndrome for Seven Sisters
.”

Sola looked at her phone, wondering—not for the first time—whether she should consider finding a best friend who didn’t live on the other side of the country, and perhaps more importantly, didn’t tell her about movies featuring young women being successfully kidnapped by wild mountain men. “Anitra, why would you even tell me that story right now?”

“I’m just saying if you bump into this Russian guy and he’s got six brothers—run.”