In the Red

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A
t first Irina was scared of colors. She wore the black crayon down to a tiny nub without touching any of the others, outlining amorphous shapes and filling them in, sometimes filling up the entire page. When they would try to hand her one of the colors, she would cry. This is what they told her years later; she didn't remember any of this. She didn't remember that she once spoke Romanian either, though she was already almost five when they adopted her. She didn't speak at all for nearly a year, and then she spoke English. English is when the memories begin.

By then, she was using the colors. Not the red, though; she was still scared of the red. Maybe thinking that if she touched it, it might be flame hot or frozen-metal cold. They never knew what she thought would happen. When they asked her, she shook her head and clammed up. She spoke so little that developmental problems were suspected. The suspicions were dispelled by the speed with which she learned to read. She was just a taciturn little soul, watching the play of other children rather than joining in. Did she consider herself too far above them or too far below? Did they bore her or was she afraid of them? She seldom exhibited temper. She obeyed almost every order, but when she chose not to, her rebellion was silent. A hearing problem was suspected but test results showed she was on the acute side of the normal range.

Sometimes her adoptive father was disturbed by something that looked like mute, expectant pain in her eyes. What she seemed to be waiting for could not be known. The mystery of the pain's source unsettled him more than the pain itself. It was that look she had of waiting for some kind of blow that made him decide that they should tell her she was adopted, that she wasn't born in the United States. Did she remember? She said she remembered nothing, but didn't seem shocked at what he'd told her. Telling her must have helped somehow. At eight years old she must have been old enough to absorb the news and do something with it. It gave her an explanation for the great big blank of the first four years of her life. Maybe she was strange because she wasn't from here. Maybe that was all.

They showed her Romania on a map. It was far. They said it was much smaller and much older than the United States. She stopped her father at the word “older.” She wanted to know how one country could be older than another. Was it the same way one person could be older than another?

They found two books for her: a Romanian history and a collection of Romanian fairy tales. She read them both. Because she was alternating reading the fairy tales with reading the history, the two volumes became mashed together in her head. Her native country became for her a place where myth and fact were the same thing. Maybe she had been given the texts too young—or maybe she understood them in a deeper way than if she'd seen them later, when her rational mind was more developed. As an amalgam, the stories coalesced into a kind of sense only she could discern.

Her mother read the books she had given her daughter after it was clear that Irina was quite fascinated by them. She had to wrench the volume of fairy tales loose from her daughter's grasp before she got to look at them. When she was finished with the book, she thought maybe she had made a mistake. She should not have trusted that they would be like the stories she knew where the princess got her prince and lived happily ever after. What had she done, giving a little girl such unremittingly gruesome texts, in which everybody was torn apart and died?

Irina must have been thirteen years old the day she came home from school and whipped past her father into the bathroom faster than he'd thought she could move. She came back out silently brandishing her underwear like the head of a vanquished enemy. It was bloody. She looked, of all things, unfathomably angry. Weren't girls supposed to be happy to become women? He called his wife. She took Irina away to the cocoon of her room to talk about womanly things, sending him out to the store to buy sanitary pads.

After that, Irina started to pick up the habit of disappearing. She would go off on aimless walks for hours, even—especially—when she knew her parents were looking for her. When she was gone, she didn't think of their worry or agitation. She didn't think of them at all in her unmoored space. She liked to drift into forgetfulness; she hated returning to the life she had been given. Her parents' recriminations made her feel awful. She didn't want them to suffer. More importantly, she didn't want to watch them suffer. The only way not to see their suffering, really, was to disappear forever.

I
t had to be a beautiful day. Late summer in California could be so beautiful. There must have been a bright blue sky naked of clouds, a breeze carrying the scent of invisible flowers over the entire campus. The stately quad was radiant, its sandstone a warm yellow in the sunlight. The palm trees suggested a tropical vacation spot more than a venerable institution of higher learning. The place looked like a postcard.

An enormous surge of new, clever, well-adjusted, good-looking youths flooded campus that day. A convergence of valedictorians, star athletes, music prodigies, math whizzes. Clear complexions, cooperative temperaments, perfect scores on standardized tests, bright futures, impressive careers. Dressed in good clothes but never ostentatious. White, leavened with a gratifying sprinkle of the finest yellow and brown America could provide. The new students would be immediately at home here. Their very first meal at the dorm cafeteria would confront them with a sea of smiling faces, in every direction a new friend. Such fine young citizens away from home for the first time would never slide into loneliness, unsightly binge drinking, crippling bouts of impostor syndrome. Counseling services would not be overwhelmed during the first rush of midterms.

Irina's new room in her new dorm was shaped like a train car, with the door at one end and a window at the other that opened out onto a green field, where the fine young citizens threw Frisbees during the daylight hours or kissed and held hands while looking up at reams of bright stars during the night hours. A closet, a bed, a dresser, a desk, were lined up on each side of the room. Sturdy institutional furniture, each side of the room mirroring the other. Her roommate had arrived before her and piled all her things on the right-hand bed. Left would be Irina's side.

Later, after all the unpacking, the right side of the room would feature an ironic lava lamp and a couple of large posters from the university bookstore: a favorite band performing in a stadium, a French Impressionist painting. Pictures of parents, a brother, a dog, pinned over a desk lamp. There would be a worn stuffed tiger tucked into the bed like a tiny sleeping person, the comforter just covering its round, high belly where some cotton batting was starting to leak out of a side seam. The left side of the room would lack such personal touches. A lamp, a computer, a blue bedspread, all new and untouched as if they had come directly from the big-box store where they were purchased. The bare white wall suggested an identity completely indifferent to announcing itself with either borrowed art or family photos. It was as if Irina were staying in a hotel, as if someone opening her dresser drawer might find only a Bible left there by the Gideons instead of her neatly folded clothes.

White plastic glow-in-the-dark stars had been stuck all over the ceiling by the pair of girls who'd occupied the room the previous year. In the daylight, they were easy to miss on the white ceiling, which was why maintenance had neglected to take them down over the summer. But Irina noticed them right away, noticed the implied friendship of last year's unseen girls who were somewhere on the campus right now, starting their second year.

When Irina arrived, her roommate was not there. Only her things were in the room. Irina went to run campus errands—picking up her student ID card, getting a box at the post office—without having met her. When she returned to the dorm, the rest of the afternoon was a blur of where-are-you-from-what-did-you-get-on-the-SAT-do-you-like-your-roommate-what's-your-major-what-classes-are-you-taking-what-kind-of-music-do-you-like. So many faces and names, it was hopeless to try to remember anybody. She would, in time. She would differentiate all eighty-five dorm mates, somehow. She would recognize their shoes under the stall partitions in the bathroom. She would recognize their voices while they squealed in drunken glee outside her door at 2 a.m. the night before an exam. She would recognize their smiles when they received a good grade, a package from home, flowers on Valentine's Day. She spoke to them little, but she watched them attentively.

Back in the train-car room, the roommate was there, on the phone, talking loudly to the lanky brother whose face Irina would know from a family photograph.

The roommate shouted, as if the connection was bad, “Okay, bye, you have a great time there at the Stanford of the East!”

After hanging up, she explained to Irina, “He told me to have a good time out here at the Harvard of the West.”

Irina nodded, gave a tight smile, and offered her hand to the girl to shake. The two girls were awkward with each other immediately, and would remain so the entire year. There was something about Irina that put the other girl off. Something about the stark contrast between her long, loosely curly black hair and the pallor of her skin. Or maybe her slow, uncomfortable smile. Something about Irina forbade chumminess, keeping the two girls at a distance with a faintly crackling tension in it, like a high-voltage power line.

The first day of the school year was supposed to end with the new roommates chatting themselves happily to sleep about where they had come from and where they intended to go, but for Irina it ended in silence tinged with preemptive disappointment. It wouldn't be different this time; Irina was not suddenly good at making friends just because she had gone away to college. The plastic stars on the ceiling glowed softly in the darkened room.

September at the university was warmer than Irina had expected. Those who knew the area called it an Indian summer. Those from other parts of the country wondered if fall would ever come. To get away from the confusing youthful buzz of the dorm, Irina walked to the adjoining town on a weekday afternoon when she had no class. She looked into shop windows, strolling slowly along the sunny street. There were few people. In the courtyard of a bookstore that had formerly been a movie theater, there was a small fountain. The water glittered like an invitation. Irina took off her sandals and sat on the edge of the fountain, dipping her feet in. The slight shock of the cool water made a pleasant shiver run through her. She gazed at the Italian tile work under her submerged feet, losing herself in the bright, tiny squares.

“Does that help?”

She looked up at the source of the voice. A man was standing there looking at her with his hands in his pockets and the sleeves on his white linen shirt rolled up to his elbows. “I'm sorry?” she answered, though she might have preferred not to.

“Does it help against the heat, to sit with your feet in the water like that?”

She shrugged. It would be best to ignore him, but she couldn't look away from his eyes. They were so dark that she couldn't quite tell the irises from the pupils, as if he were looking out at her through two vortices. She watched him untie his shiny black leather shoes and ball up his socks inside them. He rolled the cuffs of his slacks to just below his knees and sat next to her. She stared at his bare feet next to hers in the shimmering water. He had tawny skin, delicate bones. She considered picking up her sandals and running away.

“I am sorry. I am very forward. But are you, perhaps, Romanian?”

“No,” she answered, before she had time to be surprised at the question.

“Ah. It's just that…you look like a girl from the old country. You have a Romanian face.”

What precisely about her face was Romanian? How could she resist this observation? She had to relent, had to allow him to reel her in at least a little bit. “Well, I'm of Romanian origin.”

“Oh? What is your name?”

“Irina Greene.”

“Greene? You must be Romanian through your mother.”

“I was adopted by Americans.”

“So you were born there.”

There was a silence while the idea of Irina not having been born an American hung in the warm air between her and the strange man. If Irina were older, she might have said that he was undressing her with his eyes. But she was young enough to know that what he was doing was entirely more alarming than that. He said, “I was in the eastern side of your country this summer, and I heard a sound there that I had never heard before. Have you ever heard cicadas?”

“No, we don't have them out west.”

“We don't have them where I come from either. It was prodigious, like a jungle sound. I had to ask people what it was. They said that it was the insect's mating call. Only the males make this sound.”

“The females don't say anything?”

“Yes, they are silent. When they are receptive they flick their wings. Then afterward they lay eggs in tree bark. When the eggs hatch, the nymphs fall and burrow in the ground and come up seventeen summers later. To live only a few weeks during which they do not eat, only fuck. And once they do they all die. There were little rotting shells all over the place. They will dissolve into the earth to feed their brood.”

“Yes, but in English you can only dissolve into a liquid. Decompose, more like.”

He gave her an evaluating once-over. “Ah, you are clever, I see.”

“Sorry,” she answered tartly.

He laughed and said, “Don't worry. Being clever is forgivable when you are so pretty to look at.”

He laughed some more at the look she gave him, flashing his perfect teeth. She didn't know what to think of him, whether she found him interesting or completely ridiculous or frightening or all these things at once. He made it difficult to think when he wore his shirt with the top two buttons undone like that. She wanted to put her face there and peer at what was inside. “Are you a student at the university here? You look almost too young.”

“I skipped a grade.”

“What does this mean?”

“It means I didn't go to fourth grade. They put me in fifth grade after third.”

“Then you are
very
clever.”

Irina shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, attempting to cover her growing embarrassment with worldliness. “Fourth is a fairly disposable grade. What's your name?”

Still smiling, the man spoke with mock solemnity. “I am Andrei Vadrescu. I was born the Gypsy bastard of the village whore, and now I am a respectable American entrepreneur. Pleased to meet you, Irina Greene. Very pleased to meet you.”

When he extended his hand, she had no choice but to take it. When he offered her a ride back to her dorm, she had no choice but to accept, though it wasn't the sort of thing she would normally do, get in some strange man's car. What called her there? The air-conditioned chill inside his nearly soundless luxury sedan? What made her ask him, on the drive back, to tell her a story?

“What sort of story?” he asked pleasantly.

“Tell me a Romanian story.”