Trafficked (8 page)

“Thank you.” She relaxed into her chair and smiled. She looked more beautiful than ever, but Hannah couldn't get rule number ten out of her head. That was definitely strange.
Look at the floor?

“It must have been difficult for you to leave your babushka,” Lillian said.

Hannah nodded. “She's all I have.”

“How have you made a living since your parents died?” Lillian asked.

“Working at the market.”

“Did you have enough money for food?”

Hannah lifted up her chin proudly. She'd never starved. She wasn't a street kid. “My babushka grew vegetables in her garden in the village, and we traded the carrot salad she made for whatever we needed.”

“But the winters were hard,” Lillian said, as if she'd been through them herself.

“We had canning,” Hannah answered. “I didn't go hungry.” When the canned cabbage, beets, meat, eggplant, and plums had run out at the end of last winter, Babulya traded carrots for bags of beans and they ate beans, carrots, and potatoes for weeks, but she never went hungry.

“Don't worry, we'll take care of you now.” Lillian stood up and patted her arm. “Come. I'll show you all my picky little cleaning details.”

Chapter Eleven

B
y noon, Hannah had already written three pages of notes about things like how to cook broccoli so Michael would eat it and how to work the coffeemaker in the morning. And Lillian still wasn't finished.

In the master bedroom, Lillian plunked down on the bed. She patted the spot on the bed next to her. “Sit down. Relax.”

Hannah sat down. She was already exhausted.

“I have a favor to ask,” Lillian said, shifting on the bed, running her hand over the down comforter, and crossing her legs in a way that seemed almost flirtatious.

Oh no. “Yes?” Hannah's voice croaked out of her.

“Sergey thinks it's too much to ask.”

Hannah inched away, trying not to be too obvious about it. She felt like she had little rocks rolling about under her skin. This was the moment Lillian would ask her to do some sick sexual thing, and everyone back home would be right.

“I stayed in this beautiful hotel in Japan once with Sergey on a business trip when we were still living in Moscow.” She paused and let out a nervous laugh. “Every morning, a girl came to clean my room. She brought my breakfast and washed my hands with warm washcloths. And then–” Lillian hesitated, licking her lips, as if she was uncertain about whether to go on.

Hannah was ready to vomit. She'd heard men sniffed girls' underwear in Japan and did all kinds of weird things.

Lillian continued, “She put a chocolate on my pillow.”

Hannah waited for more, but when Lillian didn't continue, she said, “I don't understand.”

“A chocolate.” Lillian strode to her long dresser, pulled open the top drawer, and took out a box of wrapped truffles. “I want you to put one of these on my pillow after you make my bed each day. Just one. And hide the box somewhere.”

Only a chocolate.

“Under no circumstances do I want you to tell me where you've hidden the box.”

“I can't hide it from you.”

“I insist. I will thank you later, believe me.”

“What if you're hungry, and you eat your chocolate before you go to bed?”

“That's too bad for me, isn't it?” Lillian flashed Hannah her pale yellow smile. “That's all I get. Just one.”

Hannah could see some problems with this situation, but at least she didn't have to wash Lillian's hands with warm washcloths. Then she'd really feel like a servant. Lillian had listed so many cleaning jobs that Hannah had no idea how she'd have time to babysit. Olga had told her that most of the time she'd be babysitting and she'd do some light cleaning. But it looked like the opposite was true.

Later, Hannah was scrubbing the bathtub in the bathroom off Sergey and Lillian's room, her fingers all wrinkled and raw, when she heard Sergey drop on the bed with a loud groan.

She thought he might start undressing, so she called out, “I'm in here.”

The bed creaked again as he stood up and walked to the bathroom. “Yes?”

She glanced back at him standing in the doorway. “I just wanted to warn you.”

“Why? Are you going to beat me?” He grinned.

Hannah looked at him in confusion and then realized he was flirting with her. Katya would say something sassy back, but Hannah felt embarrassed and didn't want to give him the wrong idea. What was he looking at anyway? She was wearing the baggy gray sweat suit, possibly the most unflattering clothing known to mankind.

He cleared his throat and seemed embarrassed. Maybe he hadn't meant anything by it. “Lillian has put you to work already?”

“Yes.” Hannah continued scrubbing, remembering that she wasn't even supposed to look at him. But if Lillian thought she was going to stare at the floor, she was out of her mind.

He didn't leave. She could smell his sports deodorant right behind her. He was still watching her. Maybe he was looking at the strap on the back of her pouch. The sweatpants were a bit loose. She touched the back of her sweatshirt. The strap was covered, but what if he'd seen her check? She had to find a place to hide the documents, a place where no one would look.

“Sergey!” Lillian said.

Hannah stiffened.

“What?” he said, stepping away.

“Let the girl clean,” Lillian said, her slippers slapping across the hardwood floor. She appeared in the doorway and stared down at Hannah as if it was her fault. “Why do you have so much soap? And why are you using the sponge? I said to use the scrub brush.”

Hannah stood up, wiping the sweat off her forehead with the back of her soapy hand. The sweat suit was too hot. “I guess I forgot. There are so many things.”

“You've only done the upstairs. You need to work faster than that or you'll be up all night.” Lillian turned and stalked out of the room.

Hannah cleaned all day. At night, after Michael's bath, she was picking up the bath toys, which he'd thrown around the downstairs bathroom, when a burst of male laughter came through the bathroom window. It was so loud, it felt like someone was in the room with her.

She peeked past the frilly green curtains and looked out. There was a high green fence between the two houses, but from above, she could see a few feet into the kitchen next door. They had no curtains or blinds, just windows wide open with the lights on for the whole world to see.

The blond-haired boy was sitting in a yellow chair at a round, bright yellow table, with his mother and a younger brother, around fourteen, who was the opposite of his brother: skinny with longish dark hair. Probably took after his father. Hannah wondered where the father was. Maybe he was dead too. Maybe he died in one of America's wars, she thought, noting a picture on the wall of a man in a military costume. She wouldn't wish that on anyone, but at least then they'd have something in common.

They were eating a brown dessert, maybe chocolate pudding. “Mom, you've got to lick the spoon,” the older boy was saying. He stepped out of view and then came back in, licking his spoon with his whole tongue. “Look.” He tilted his face up and hung the spoon on his nose. He wasn't holding it or anything. Hannah leaned in, mesmerized. She'd never seen anything like it and wondered if it worked better with some noses than others. The whole family seemed to have upturned noses and oversize nostrils.

The mother was licking her spoon with her whole tongue. There was no way Hannah's mother would have done this, and it amazed her that any mother would. In Moldova, mothers were too busy or too serious, and sticking your whole tongue out like that, well, it wouldn't be polite. Hannah kind of liked it that Americans weren't so worried about being polite or doing what everyone expected, but it also made them a little unpredictable.

The mother's spoon stuck to her nose. “I got it,” she screeched. “I got it. Hurry.”

The younger brother got his spoon up too. Yes! They had it—all three of them had spoons on their noses. It was miraculous. Then the mother's spoon fell and they all burst into laughter. The older boy laughed with his whole body, clapping one hand on his thigh again and again, head down, belly shaking. Hannah grinned.

Lillian came into the bathroom and looked over her shoulder, tisking.

“They're funny,” Hannah said, glancing back at her.

“Strange, you mean. They make so much noise, it drives me crazy.”

Hannah released the curtain. Lillian looked at her firmly, as if she didn't want her to start acting too American. “You still have to wash the kitchen floor and take out the garbage.”

Hannah nodded, glancing at the clock on the wall in the bathroom. It was nine thirty. All the rooms had clocks.

“The rest of the house looks clean,” Lillian said, smiling briefly, before she walked out of the room. Hannah listened to the laughter coming from next door. She couldn't remember ever hearing her neighbors' laughter in Moldova.

It was eleven thirty before she finished working. She climbed into the sleeping bag on the sofa in the hot, windowless garage and stared at the haphazard shelves of toys. This job was going to be much tougher than she'd expected, but it would all be worth it when she got her first four hundred dollars. It would be a glorious thing, that moment when she held the crisp American bills in her hand. She wondered how they would pay her—with four one-hundred-dollar bills or maybe twenty twenty-dollar bills. After three weeks of work, Babulya would get her operation.

She smiled to herself. Just when it seemed like life wasn't going to get better, it did. She closed her eyes and fell into such a deep sleep, it was as if she'd been hit on the head by a good old American baseball bat.

Chapter Twelve

I
t was after midnight. Hannah had been in America for one whole week. She wanted to collapse on the musty-smelling sofa in the garage, but there was something she had to do first. She'd stayed up an extra hour to make sure everyone was asleep.

There were no sounds coming from the bedrooms upstairs. It was safe. She reached under the sofa for the packing tape she'd hidden earlier in the day and then crept across the garage. After Lillian had told her that she really didn't like playing with the children's toys, Hannah had decided the toy area would be the best place to hide something. Everywhere else was risky because everything was super organized, but Lillian didn't like to come in here. Toys made her cringe, she'd said, and not once in the last week had Hannah seen her sit down on the floor with Michael to play with him.

Hannah took a small board book called
Goodnight Moon
from the bookshelf, taped the passport in the back, and closed the book. Nobody would ever guess it was where she'd put her documents. She lifted the seat of a fire engine riding toy, which Michael never rode because the wheels didn't work, and placed the book inside with a small ball on top to grab Michael's attention if he ever looked there.

Was that a creak? She listened, holding her breath, but didn't hear anything else. She wished she could lock the door to the garage.

Now she had to get rid of the money pouch. If Lillian found even that, she'd know that Hannah had been lying. All week, Hannah had been terrified her shirt would come up while she was cleaning and someone would see the strap. She opened the door to the garage and tiptoed past the washer and dryer, then peeked around the corner, down the hall. The house was quiet. All the lights were off. As long as she could make it to the kitchen, she'd be fine.

She took off her slippers and held on to them while she slid down the dark hallway in her socks. In the dark kitchen, she dropped the money pouch into the garbage under the sink.

There was a creak, the sound of a footstep on wood. She smelled the vodka on Sergey's breath and his overly strong sports deodorant. She spun around. He stepped into the kitchen, from the dining room, wavering a little.

He gripped the wall. “You are working in the dark?” he slurred.

Immediately she thought of her socks and how she'd taken off the slippers to be quiet. She put them on the ground and stepped into them, figuring he wouldn't notice since he was so drunk. “I'm almost finished.”

He flicked on the switch and stared at her, as if she'd startled him. “You look so much like—” he slurred, stopping suddenly as if remembering himself.

“Who?” she asked, thinking he was acting strangely.

“Nobody,” he murmured. “Just someone I knew in Ukraine.”

A lot of Ukrainians looked like Moldovans if they had Russian in them, but Hannah knew she looked more Moldovan than Russian, even though she was three-quarters Russian, one-quarter Romanian. Her grandfather on her mother's side had been Romanian, and that was perhaps the reason her olive skin tanned so well, rather than burning like Katya's, though the bright green of her eyes came from the Russian side. Her mother, her uncle Vladi, and Babulya all had the same eyes.

Sergey stepped back into the dining room, where she heard the glug of alcohol being poured. She hated that sound. It reminded her of the man her father had become. The brandy her father used to make from sweet beets would fill their house with a rotting, sour odor that she'd never forget. More than once, the pressure cooker he'd rigged to make the alcohol had exploded and burned him. Her mother used to treat his wounds with a leafy plant called plantain that she found in the woods near their apartment on the edge of Chişinău, but Hannah wouldn't have anything to do with it. She thought the pain served him right.

Hannah heaved the garbage bag from under the sink. But she wasn't fast enough. Sergey stumbled out of the dining room, spilling a glass filled with an amber liquid, and stopped, blocking her path to the door.

She looked up, worried he knew what she was doing. Maybe he wasn't as drunk as he seemed. His hand was steady as he placed the glass of whiskey on the kitchen counter. She'd seen a bottle in his collection, one that looked a lot like the Moldovan brand her father used to drink when he had money.

“This is for you,” he said, pushing the glass an inch toward her. “Good job.”

“I don't drink alcohol.”

When her father had started drinking, she'd promised herself she'd never drink, no matter what happened to her, and she never had, not even after her parents were killed. Her friends drank, and she'd hang with them but drink Cola instead.

“Good,” he said, lifting the glass and gulping down the alcohol, fast.

She lifted the garbage bag, turned away from him, and took a step toward the back door.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

Was he suspicious? It would be horrible if he looked in the garbage at that moment and found the pouch. She licked her lips. “I'm taking out the garbage,” she said.

He gave her one of his toothy smiles. His jaw always seemed a little tight, even for a Russian, like he was nervous around her, though that was impossible. “It's after midnight,” he said. “You've worked hard. I'll do it.” He tried to take the bag from her.

“Please,” Hannah said, holding on to the bag and trying to keep her voice even. “You're so good to me, but you need to relax. This is my job.”

“For years I have been taking out the garbage,” he slurred.

She didn't know what to say to that. She heard Lillian's voice in her head. Rule number ten. Maybe there was a good reason for this rule.

Finally he laughed and waved his hand forward. She picked up the bag and carried it outside into the hot night air, where she took in a shaky breath.

Her slippers sank into the wet grass. The sprinklers were off. The automatic sprinkler went on every night around dinnertime, making a sudden, if quiet, machine-gun noise. The first day, she'd run to the window to watch, beef stew boiling on the stove behind her. It was incredible, water shooting up from the ground like that. Even elites in Moldova didn't have automatic sprinkler systems. She'd gone for a walk one day with Katya near a gated community in Chişinău and they'd seen a gardener putting out a sprinkler with a long hose. They'd admired the grass, breathing it in, until the gardener made a sharp hissing noise to get them to leave. They'd run off, laughing, and declared that one day they'd have a lawn with real grass.

Hannah swooshed her feet through the grass to the side of the house. Her slippers crunched on the gravel walkway. From the neighbor's house, she heard some loud bangs like shooting, combined with rap music. She recognized the sounds from the video game system Daniil had bought on the black market. A male voice yelped and then shouted, “Yeah!”

She couldn't keep herself from grinning. It reminded her of Daniil. Even though she tried not to think of him, sometimes she couldn't help but miss the way he used to look at her.

She reached the garbage bins, which had wheels, of all things. There was no limit to American luxuries. Holding her breath, she reached into the garbage can and pulled out an older, full garbage bag, and dropped the one from the kitchen to the bottom of the can. She stuffed the older bag on top. If Sergey suspected anything, she hoped he'd look in the wrong one.

When she came back in the house, the kitchen was dark and Sergey seemed to have gone to bed. Her heart was beating so fast, she could hear it pounding in her ears.

She went down the hall to the garage, dropped down onto the sofa, and glanced at the glowing yellow numbers on the alarm clock. It was almost one o'clock in the morning. She wondered where her uncle Vladi was and in what time zone. She was sure he was still alive. He had to be.

It was eleven in the morning in Moldova. Babulya would be ironing clothing for Valeria's horrible girls. Katya would just be waking up since it was summer, and Daniil would have already finished his morning soccer practice and might even be at the appliance store where he fixed rich people's dishwashers.

She'd gone out with him for three years, but they'd had sex only once, just a month ago, though so much had happened since then, it felt like more than a month. After she had told him she couldn't continue on to twelfth grade, he had been so angry he hadn't come to see her at the market for the next three days. Finally she'd told her babushka she couldn't work because she had her annual checkup.

She'd called him from a pay phone—her home phone had been disconnected months before. “We need to talk,” she said. “Can you meet me for pizza at eleven?”

There was a pause over the phone, a pause that made her heart stop.

“We'll go to my apartment after,” she rushed, even though she knew she sounded too desperate.

“Okay,” he'd said at last.

She'd dressed carefully, wearing her green button-up shirt with a white skirt that stopped modestly above her knees and two-inch black heels. In the summer, many girls in Chişinău wore half tops and super miniskirts with just enough fabric to hide their underwear, but when Hannah wore anything too revealing, she couldn't stop tugging at her shirt or her skirt the whole time.

When she walked into the pizza shop, she could tell immediately he liked how she looked. He gazed down her body at her legs, which had gotten skinnier over the last few months from all the standing on her feet and pushing the heavy cart back and forth to the market.

He wrapped his arms around her. She looked over his shoulder toward the door, worried her babushka would be standing there with her hands on her hips.

“I love you,” he murmured, kissing her ear, as if nothing was wrong between them.

After a quick pizza, which he paid for, they hurried to her apartment. It was hot and humid, but they headed up the open-air concrete staircase. Even though her apartment was on the fourteenth floor, they didn't take the elevator because they had to avoid the curious neighbors, especially the older ones who took the elevator.

He pinched her behind and she swatted at his hand. He laughed and pinched her again. She started running and he chased her. By the time they reached the fourteenth floor, they were drenched in sweat and laughing their heads off.

She grabbed his hands. “Shhh,” she said. “Wait here.”

He stayed out of sight while she walked up the remaining steps to her floor to make sure no other tenants were leaving their apartments. She unlocked her door and then she hurried him in before anyone saw. His hand was warm and sweaty as he pulled her into the main room, where he started to kiss her with a strange hunger. Laughing, she folded her convertible armchair down into a single bed. He wanted to use the blue sofa, which folded down to a double bed, but it had been her parents' bed and it was the one Babulya now used, so she said they couldn't. She was always worried that her parents would be able to see her somehow.

He pulled a small square cardboard box from his pocket. On the front, there was a knight with a sword. Inside, the condom was green. She hoped it could be trusted.

It was over sooner than she had thought it would be. It was three minutes of pain and wrestling, and nothing more. Afterward, he gave her a quick kiss, like one you'd give a sister. This was supposed to be their moment of reconnection, their moment to realize that they could make it through this tough time together, that it didn't matter if she had to delay school; all that mattered was that they were together. After all, he'd said he loved her.

He got dressed too quickly. Maybe he was worried about her babushka, she thought, and she got dressed with him. But at the door, he burst out, “I can't do this.”

“What do you mean?” she cried.

He mumbled that he had to focus on school and didn't want to get more serious. He couldn't even look her in the eye. And then he ran.

Half an hour later, Hannah stood in a line of people outside her apartment waiting for the pay phone. She clenched her hands together to keep them from shaking. The rule was you were only supposed to talk for two minutes if people were waiting, but Hannah took longer. The moment her best friend answered, she started bawling. Long, wrenching sobs came out of her, making it difficult to breathe. Finally, she explained.

Katya said she'd be right over and Hannah hung up and hurried past the people in the line to wait next to her building, wiping her tears in embarrassment. When Katya came, they talked for hours in the courtyard, crouching on their heels. Katya said all the right things, how he was a dog and Hannah was wonderful and he was lucky to have her, but she still felt miserable.

When Katya left, Hannah made her way upstairs. Babulya had come home and already knew what had happened. Probably a neighbor had told her that Hannah was crying in the courtyard and Babulya figured it out. She made Hannah some tea and said it was for the best, though of course she didn't know exactly what had happened in the apartment that afternoon, only that Daniil had left her.

Hannah only spoke to him one time after that, to tell him she was going to America. She met him after soccer practice as he came off the field. He looked beautiful in his green uniform, his hair sticking to his sweaty brow, his blue eyes shining with exertion.

When she told him about the job in America, she saw the relief in his face. She asked him what he thought and stupidly hoped he'd tell her not to go.

“I don't know, Hannah. You're too naive,” he said, his blue Russian eyes blinking sharply, as if he were the smart one.

It bothered her, him saying she was naive, but she hoped he was only saying it because he wanted her to be near him. “You think I shouldn't go?” If he begged her to stay, she would.

He shrugged and looked away, like he didn't care.

“What?” she asked sharply.

“You could get hurt,” he said.