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“I just didn’t care about school at all. I thought it was boring and pointless. I would have rather spent my time drawing or hiking than studying all night. My mom really emphasized how important it was for her to have a daughter whosucceededbecause she was so young when she had my sister and me,” she recalls, her gaze growing distant for a moment as the memories surface. “She was obsessed with someone redeeming her for her choice to marry too young.”
It’s not the same struggle as mine, not even close, but I still feel like she’s giving me an insight into her life that she wouldn’t share with just anyone. I need to understand her better, more deeply.
“What did that look like for you? What kind of kid were you?” I ask.
“I wasn’t happy, that’s for sure. I was depressed and angry all the time because my sister stole so much time and attention from my parents for no reason. She doesn’t have anything in her past that would make her behavior make sense. She’s just so fucking selfish,” she replies, feeling her own bitterness rising to the surface again.
Something about seeing Faye upset, even just a little, makes me feel so much closer to her. Even though she’s been ornery and uncooperative for a lot of the time I’ve known her, she’s still a sweet person at her core. I can feel it.
17
Faye
We’ve been in Japan for two weeks now, and I’ve gotten far too accustomed to the lifestyle that Aleksander’s money has afforded me. We’ve been able to eat whatever we want at all hours, ordering out from multiple restaurants every day. We’ve had some of the best sushi I’ve ever had in my life, and the employees at the coffee shop below our hotel knows our orders by heart at this point.
Aleksander has been particularly irritable this week, and he hasn’t been hiding it as well as he thinks he has been. He’s been snapping at me here and there, and he’s talking on the phone at a near constant rate. It sounds like he’s talking to his men back in the US, but I don’t speak Russian, so I can’t know for sure. For all I know, he could be bitching at an ex-wife.
He’s explained to me that part of the reason that he’s so frustrated is that the shipment of his new product, a research chemical, was intercepted by the DEA. He has to figure out whether he wants to try to buy back the stock from the government or cut his losses and move on. He’s never been the type to give up, at least not in his own mind, but he’s being tested by how shitty his luck has been.
I’ve been more concerned about his brother, whom he speaks of with regularity now. Before, he was quiet about the situation with Adam, most likely because he didn’t want to acknowledge that he was, indeed, missing. Hearing about Adam more often has helped me feel like I’m getting closer to Aleksander, but I’m also concerned that he’s obsessing without being able to get a grasp on his emotions.
He says we’ll be in Japan for another month, and while I’m thrilled that I get to experience this level of luxury, I feel awful for my family and friends back home who are worried sick about me, I wish I had the ability to reach out to someone, even my mom, and tell her that I’m safe.
I know I can’t do this for multiple reasons. For one, I’m still wanted in the United States in connection with the murders that happened in my hotel room. Messaging someone, even from a public computer, would have Interpol on our doorstep within hours.
Even if that weren’t an issue, what the hell would I even tell the people I love? “Oh, hi, I just wanted to tell you that I ran away to Japan with a Russian mafia boss who threw me into the ocean from an airplane and killed two men in front of me.” I wouldn’t be able to sell myself at all. Whoever it was that I communicated with would know immediately that I wasn’t just here on a whim with a hot guy that I met. I’m sure that Dana would be happy for me, but she’s the most unstable woman I’ve ever met when it comes to dating.
“Hey, are you hungry? I was going to run down to the kakigori shop. Do you want anything?” I ask Aleksander as I see him get out of the shower.
“Huh? I don’t know, I kind of feel like we should get some real food. I’m kind of sick of eating in bed. Do you want to go somewhere in particular?” he replies, shaking the water out of his hair. “I was actually thinking we could go out for drinks.”
That’s when I freeze.
I haven’t known how to tell him, but I’m five days late for my period. I haven’t had enough reason to believe that I’m actually pregnant, but as the days go by, it gets more and more difficult to ignore. I need to find out sooner than later, especially if he’s going to expect me to drink with him.
“Um, yeah, we could go get food for sure,” I say, evading the topic of drinks entirely.
He seems unfazed by my intentional deflection. At least I know he isn’t paying that much attention to it.
“Alright, I’ll look at some places around here. I’m thinking something high-class. It’s been a minute since we ate something that didn’t come in a box,” he replies.
I’m relieved that he’s willing to go somewhere nicer, but now I’ll feel even more pressure to drink with him. He takes respect very seriously, and I’m afraid he’ll feel disrespected if I turn down a drink from him.
I don’t know what I was expecting to happen. Even though I hated school, I still spent enough time in class to remember the part where sex gets you pregnant. I wasn’t sexually active in high school, so I never even thought much about the repercussions of unprotected sex. When I got into college I took birth control, but I went off it when it made me gain weight. Since then, I’d used condoms with Cody, and he and I never had a single pregnancy scare.
I hadn’t ever had unprotected sex before Aleksander.
It wasn’t particularly alluring for me when I first began having sex in college. I had a few friends who had pregnancy scares, some of them actually ending up pregnant after sloppy drunken one-night-stands. I pitied them, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do or say to comfort them. Watching their lives crumble as their pregnancy grew scared me so deeply that I didn’t have sex for four months. I saw some of them even drop out of college right before they graduated because the stress of being a single mother and full-time student was too much for them to handle.
I was lonely in college until I met Cody, who somehow knew exactly how to keep me hooked long enough to get me into a relationship with him. I feared pregnancy then as well, but at the time I thought I had a trusted partner who would navigate the struggles of parenthood with me. Of course, looking back I can’t believe I was naïve enough to believe that about him. He was hardly a grown adult himself, leaving his dirty clothes on the floor for weeks until they became a part of the carpet.
The idea of living with Aleksander for this Japan trip was fun and exciting when I still believed that I would be returning home to my family. I figured there was no way he would want to keep me around or have a reason to do so after we returned to reality in the states. Besides, I’m wanted by the police. Having me around is just as much of a liability.
Now, my stomach twists in my guts as I consider the possibility of a future raising a child with him. I’ve gotten to know him slightly better than I did before, but I’d still call any of my friends crazy if they chose to have a child with someone they’d only known for two months. The fact that we’ve had one or two close conversations about our childhood trauma doesn’t indicate compatibility for parenthood. And besides, Aleksander is thirty-five. If he wanted kids and a wife, he could have had both of them easily by now.
So what would he do with me?
He has more than enough money to pay me off, or at least to pay child support. I would feel ridiculous trying to negotiate an appropriate amount of money to live off of with a baby. Too much and he’d think I was taking advantage of him, too little and I’m scraping by at the end of every month while he drinks champagne in Prague.
