In the Red (17 page)

S
omething was different that month. The fatigue was the same as usual: it felt almost drugged, filling her with a warm lust for sleep. It sunk her into a sensuous bliss when she curled up in bed, gathering the plush comforter around her drowsy body. The hunger was what was not the same as usual. Usually she craved the greasy and the savory. Hot French fries with too much salt on them, the grains smarting her taste buds. A juicy cheeseburger with a layer of crisp bacon, the hot blood in the meat flooding her mouth when she bit down. A wedge of steaming pizza, with bright, salty red rounds of pepperoni crumbling into the gooey cheese when she chewed down a too big mouthful. All the best, most American foods. But this month was different: her body wanted the sweet and the soft. A brioche smothered in honey, the bread so yielding it could be wrenched apart by the tongue. A cut mango, the fruit's mellow flesh melting into liquid gold once bitten. Angel food cake washed down with a mug of hot milk, combining in her mouth to taste like the soft, warm version of the color white. She wanted the texture as much as the taste of these tender things, an approximation of some smooth ambrosia she'd eaten only in dreams. Forgotten mother's milk.

What if this month the blood didn't come? She wasn't late yet, but her own body seemed to be turning foreign on her. Her urine smelled strange. All smells, actually, were a bit off and more intense.

If this were really happening, she would not know for another week at least. Even a pregnancy test would not tell her yet. It was ridiculous of her to think she could feel it this early. If there was indeed an incipient life inside her, it was not even the size of a poppy seed. Even the princess with her famous pea would not be able to feel something so small. It would be less than a disturbance, less than a grain of sand on the beach, less than a fleeting thought.

Even when the seed took, many times the body flushed it out before a woman knew she was pregnant. If the seed had indeed taken, whose was it?

It must have been that she was just trying to thrill herself, scare herself. It was her idle, corrupt life that was doing it to her. It made her thirst for a sign. It made her look up at the sky waiting for a retribution that would not come. It was the men who were doing this to her, swallowing her into the underworld, and finally a tiny part of her was fighting the descent. She needed to talk to a woman. There was only one she could call.

A
ndrei's father had gone to another village by the time Andrei's mother knew she was pregnant. Andrei's mother gave a few coins to some other Gypsy to track him down and tell him of the impending arrival. When Irina asked Andrei what had happened after that, Andrei shrugged and said, “There's nothing to tell.” He must have meant to let her think that the Gypsy had pocketed the money and didn't go to look for his father. Or that the Gypsy had delivered the message but that it was not heeded—for how does a moment of careless abandon become a person? It was the woman's body that willed a person into being, a woman's body that ran its blood through the moment of careless abandon until a child was formed. What had the man's body done except indulge in brief forgetfulness? A man was essentially a bystander. Did it really matter which man a child came from after all?

But what if it had been worse? What if Andrei's father had gotten the message and come back? What if he'd asked the woman to come with him in his Gypsy wagon and she'd said no? What if he'd tried to live in her family's house, giving up his nomad ways and submitting to the hateful stares of her parents, to do right by his accidental creation? What if he'd tried and he simply couldn't stand it and left again? What if he had met Andrei, held Andrei as a blurry-eyed baby, felt the grip of the child's tiny hand on his index finger while his heart swelled with recognition? What if he'd done all that and still gone away? Andrei seldom got genuinely angry, angry in a way that was not tinged with irony, but Irina had a feeling that if she asked about such things, he might be devoid of quips. He would turn quiet and become cold, a cold that was a greater augur of violence than the hot flare of his heedless temper. Andrei had only one father, and that father was absent, and that was that. He did not want to talk about fathers and fathering; the whole question was one that did not deserve to be addressed.

For Irina, it was clearly different. She had two fathers, who somehow both had the qualities of phantoms. There was the father who sent for her. Granted, he did so partially at the insistence of his wife. Still, this father wanted her; he waited for her; he gave her a room in his house. He taught her to speak; he forged her mind; he made her an American. And yet there was a strange remoteness in him, something not quite right. An uncharitable soul might have surmised that there was an ineffable emptiness at his center—but Irina didn't want to be an uncharitable soul. Perhaps the fault was hers. Perhaps it was she who was remote. Perhaps they were both inept, reaching for each other in all the wrong ways. Were they both haunted by the first father? The father who sent her away, or worse, did not even know she ever existed? That father gave her no sustenance, taught her nothing, gave her nothing but life. That father had nothing to do with the forging of her mind—he hadn't been there to make her a Romanian.

Somehow these two fathers had brought her to Andrei's bed. Somehow these two had made Andrei a father himself. Somehow Irina would have to tell him.

Whatever happened, whether a child was born or not, it was too late. Their union had made a ghost that would follow Irina around forever. That ghost must have been a certainty from the moment she had chosen to get in Andrei's car on that hot summer day before she was legally a grown woman.

The ghost would forever wander the world unseen, wearing Irina's face. Somewhere, a woman with a name but no body was wearing a string of large, blushing pearls, matching earrings, a lavender sapphire on her right hand, and a ruby on her left—like a woman betrothed on both sides. She had never been given life, but there she was. Her name was Vasilica Andreescu and she was a series of numbers in a bank database. For someone who did not exist, she certainly had a lot of money. She was lucky not to exist. She would never have to be anyone's mother.

H
ow late are you?” Elena asked.

“Only a couple of days. It's not so much that; it's more that I feel strange,” Irina answered.

Elena looked her up and down. “You seem good to me.”

“It's not that I feel bad—just odd. Do you have the test?”

Elena took out a rectangular cardboard box from her crinkly grocery bag. The box was a saturated pink, almost magenta.
FREE PREGNANCY TEST,
the box announced. It had been a two-for-one promotion.

“Why would you need an extra?” Irina asked. Elena shrugged. Irina tore open the box and took out one of the packets inside. It looked like a long candy, wrapped in plastic the same loud color as the box. Inside was a white plastic stick with a little window to view the results. It had a cotton tip with a translucent protective cover on it.

“So I'm supposed to pee on this,” Irina said flatly, turning the plastic stick in her hands.

“You are not vomiting?” Elena asked.

“No, not yet. If anything I'm really hungry all the time.”

“Well, you could just be hungry.”

“Just…just stay while I take the test, will you?”

Elena sat on the bed while Irina went into the bathroom. It was some minutes before she came back out, her clothes askew, looking as disheveled as if she'd been in a fight.

“So?” Elena asked.

“We have to wait a little bit now. Three minutes.” Irina plopped down heavily next to her friend. She sighed. “It's probably nothing. I'm probably just freaking out.”

“If it is a child, it is Andrei's, yes?”

Irina would have liked to be able to be outraged at such a question. She had tried her best not to consider the paternity possibilities too deeply. The fact was that the timing of this new development was terrible, that this had to have happened the month she'd gone to bed with Dragos. There was a chance, however slim, that it was his seed that had done it. Irina tried to answer Elena, but nothing came out. She only felt the blood drain from her face, leaving her cold.

“Irina.” Elena spoke softly, with a slight edge that might have been reproach.

“He practically sent me there!” Irina snapped. “It wasn't even my idea!”

A silence. Elena put her hand on Irina's arm. They looked at each other. Elena's eyes seemed even bluer than usual, as if her feelings were saturating the color.

“Look,” she said, attempting calm Russian pragmatism, “we will do what has to be done if it comes to that. Nobody is going to die.”

Irina did not even have to ask Elena whether she was sure that no one would die before the pronouncement collapsed under the weight of doubt. Given the men they were dealing with, maybe somebody would, and soon.

“It's true,” Elena whispered. “If what is happening to you happened to me and I carried the child of some other man Vasilii made me go to bed with, he would do only one of two things. He would marry me or he would kill me.”

“You think Andrei might marry me?” Irina's voice squeaked.

“Andrei is not Vasilii.” Elena waved her hand dismissively. “Andrei would not kill you.”

The two girls did not notice that Irina had asked a question about a marriage and Elena had answered a question about an execution.

“Come on. It's been three minutes,” Irina said.

In the yellow light of the bathroom, the two girls' heads met over the tiny window in the white plastic stick.

“Two lines.” Elena breathed out.

The lines were the same glaring pink as the box the stick had come in. The line on the right looked slightly lighter than the one on the left but was indisputably there.

“One line says not pregnant. Two lines says pregnant,” Irina announced, reading from the folded flier that came in the box, as if she needed to. As if saying this aloud as calmly as possible would make it so she was not watching her own body from a great height.

“We should do it again to make sure,” Elena said, catching her friend by the arm and steadying her.

Irina laughed. “There. Now I know. That's why it was two-for-one. That's why they put an extra test in the box. For when the results are positive and you can't fucking believe it and you have to do it again and hope that your fucked-up life might reverse itself. Elena, I can't do it again right now. I'm all out of pee.”

Without answering, Elena gently guided Irina out of the bathroom, across the bedroom and living room, and into the kitchen. She started to open cabinets.

“What are you looking for, Elena?”

“Something to drink. We have to make you make more pee.”

“It's that cabinet there. I don't think there's anything to drink in there besides vodka and wine. You want vodka or wine? Or vodka in some wine?”

Elena wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “Tired of it,” she said.

“Me too.”

Besides, if Irina was really with child, shouldn't she give up drink? Isn't that what they said all good expectant mothers were supposed to do? What a ludicrous idea. Irina, a mother. She had not yet felt any nausea, but at that moment, the need to vomit rushed up her body from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head—and then went away as quickly as it came.

“Look.” Elena reached into the back of the cupboard and pulled out a half-empty bottle of something viscous and bright. Fuchsia, almost the same color as the lines on the test. “Grenadine, like when we were children!”

“I didn't even know we had that in there. It must be for mixed drinks? I don't get it. I've never seen Andrei have a mixed drink in my life.”

Elena put some of the syrup in two glasses and then filled them up with water from the tap.

“America calls this a Shirley Temple,” Irina observed when her friend handed her the concoction.

“Who is Shirley Temple?”

“She was a kid actress many years ago, in the thirties, I think. She had cute corkscrew curls in ribbons and sang songs about lollipops and things.”

“And now,” Elena observed, “she is probably dead.”

“Not yet. I think she's in politics or something.”

Both girls took a first sip. The drink was intensely sweet and did indeed taste like more innocent times.

“Politics?” Elena said. “Americans are strange.” She was about to giggle at the incongruous idea of a child actress turned politician when she flinched slightly, put her glass down.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine.” Elena waved her hand as if to sweep some feelings away. “You drink all of that down. You drink all of that down and make more pee.”

The second time, Irina did not come back out to talk to Elena before the test yielded its result. She stayed in the bathroom with it for the interminable three minutes, the door locked behind her, watching the two lines appear slowly in the little results window as if she could will them not to by concentrating hard enough. The lines came ever so lightly at first and then deepened, more sure of themselves, until the answer was definite. The oracle had spoken. Irina was expecting. She tossed the stick into the trash can and put her face in her hands. She breathed deeply for a few moments, smelling the sweat on her palms. Then she opened the door.

“So?” Elena said.

“Yes.”

“It's really real then.”

“Yes.”

The two of them stood in the doorway as if in the wake of an earthquake, looking around at a shaken world. What to do now? Had the test been negative, there would have been more waiting, and then probably relief. But now there could be no more waiting. Someone had to be told. Unless the incipient person inside her suddenly thought better of coming into this broken world under such unhinged circumstances and decided it would be best to recede back into oblivion. But was a merciful miscarriage what Irina really wanted? Rationally, it ought to have been—but she simply could not resist the beginning of another story. Even if the bitty thing inside her was nothing but a blank page, a blank page demanded words, demanded to be written, as harrowing as the story might turn out to be. To tear up the blank page and disperse its white flakes to the four winds was awful, more awful than any cataclysm. Oblivion was worse than any hell. And so, it was hell that Irina now wanted. It was hell she had brought upon herself.

Why did it feel as though this had to happen? Why did it feel as though some part of her had willed it?

Without a word, Elena went to Irina and hugged her. The two girls held each other tightly for what felt like a long time, swaying gently. Irina smelled the light fragrance Elena had sprinkled on her shoulders to make herself appealing to Vasilii. The two girls had picked it out together in a store the previous week. The previous week felt so far away! Hot tears welled inside Irina and began to gush out of her eyes. When Elena felt the wetness on her neck, she cooed something unintelligible that sounded like a comfort. Something in Russian that her mother must have spoken to soothe her when she was a little girl and hurt herself. Irina was about to ask what the words meant when Elena quaked in Irina's arms, made a noise that sounded like a sob. Was she crying too?

Elena crumpled away from Irina's embrace. She was suddenly doubled over on the bed. She was not crying. She was in some other kind of pain. She was breathing fast, her eyes wide and afraid.

“Elena.” Irina gasped. “You're bleeding.”

Elena looked down at herself. There was a small red stain on her belly, spreading on the light blue silk blouse with lace embellishments that the two girls had also picked out together, in a store with piano music and the clothes neatly spaced out on the racks, some expensive store that was receding rapidly into another life.

Elena covered the stain with her hand. She would not look her friend in the face when asked what was the matter, what was happening.

“Do you have a cut there? It looks like a cut,” Irina said. At these words, Elena looked plainly terrified.

“Please, let me see.”

“No.”

“Let me see!”

Elena shook her head but without conviction. Irina pulled her friend's hand off her belly. “Let me see,” she whispered, unbuttoning her friend's shirt. There were Elena's small pert breasts, encased in the pretty lingerie Irina had prescribed for her. Under the bra's cradle was where sanity stopped. If Irina had been the kind of person who shrieked when confronted with horror, she would have. But she merely stared in the deafened silence that follows an explosion, while her heart thrummed thunderously in her ears.

A careful hand had written on Elena's belly in small, tidy letters Irina could not read. There were many words etched into the skin with something thin and clearly very sharp, from her diaphragm down, disappearing into the waistband of her skirt. The wounds looked nearly fresh. The alphabet was Cyrillic. One of the words, near the belly button, had been rubbed raw and was bleeding. That was the word that had soaked through Elena's shirt.

“What is this? Who did this to you? Did Vasilii do this to you?” Irina demanded.

“With a tiny knife,” Elena said, finally looking into Irina's face. “One of those tiny knives doctors use for surgery.”

A scalpel. That was the word she was looking for. Both girls were pale, stunned. One at what she was seeing, the other at being discovered. What had been seen could not be unseen. What had been seen turned Elena's eyes the bluest, most furious blue they had ever been. A blue like a flying shard of ice in a snowstorm. There was no going back to the way things were.

“That fucker!” Irina spat. “That fucking fucker!”

Yes, so many things had happened and something had to be done. They had all accrued too many debts. They were all too far in the red.