To understand what happened, you should know first who I am and where I come from.
My people immigrated from Russia to Campulung. It is a small town in Romania near the Carpathian Mountains and the Moldova River. Not many people know Campulung. It is not a place you visit if you come to Romania because it is so small. You go to see castle where Vlad the Impaler lived. He inspired Dracula and now all girls fall in love with vampires like in Twilight, but these are handsome vampires with hair mousse, not like the real Vlad who killed virgins to bathe in their blood.
My mother, my sister Alexandra, and me live in a small house shaped like the letter “A.” Americans might find the house charming because it has a red tin roof where the rain pings, and round windows. The outside is gray stone, and the floors are packed dirt. We have cows and sheep and chickens, and a garden where we grow mint, persimmon, and tomatoes.
We have four dogs that live in the barn. They are not inside dogs. We toss them meat and keep fresh water in tin bowls. Sometimes, the dogs throw their heads back howl at the moon. In our lore, these dogs could be descendants of the pricolici or werewolves.
We have all the things Americans have, but different—more countryside, a wide river that curves around the trees, the ancient monastery where nuns were sacrificed, and spires that go up into the air like soft ice cream cones. We have the Wooden Spoon Museum, but it makes people yawn, so I do not recommend it. We have a community center where I teach swimming and tutor children and Karma Lounge where my sister is a waitress. She has a twisty leg from birth, and she is all the time falling in love with the musicians with long hair and commitment issues.
Though I love my country, I decided to try for an even better life.
I meet Tommy on Zoosk, the international dating app for singles. He likes me right away. I am used to the men who text me photos of body parts, but not Tommy. He sends pictures from his life—his teenage sister Amber, his mother. Photos of traveling to Disney, of going on roller coasters and down water slides. Photos of all of them dressed like characters from Peter Pan, even the dog is made up to like a crocodile.
I like Tommy. He has a face like a baby, and a buzz cut short as if he were a solider, but he does not work in the Army or for government. His biggest dream is to be the manager at Best Buy. He lives with his mother and sister in Dunedin Florida. He shows me around on What’sApp. The garage is bigger than our house. They have a giant freezer large enough for whole winter filled to the top with dead meat in plastic and corn and pot pies. They have another refrigerator box just for fizzy drinks and alcohol and wine coolers called Balmy Breeze.
When I meet Tommy at the Tampa International Airport, he reaches to just my height, five inches shorter than he said. His palms are wet when he shakes my hand. I give him a hug. He smells like fresh like soap. I like that, and I like his big teeth spaced far apart. I like that his blue eyes are looking at me like he can’t believe I am real. That is a good sign for me.
“You freaked me out. You look even better in 3-D.”
Then he turns red at the ears because my chest is so big, and he apologizes, but I say, “Tommy, honey, we can be a couple now. It is okay.”
And it is okay, because at least I have arrived. I made it and no one bombed the plane, no one put a razor blade to my throat in a Bucharest Airport bathroom, telling me to smuggle something in my vagina, no one stuffed me into a truck with fifteen other girls like what happened last year in the city next to ours.
Those girls are all still missing.
I am here, and I like the caw of seagulls and Tommy’s arm around my shoulder, and the song he plays on the radio that sounds like candy. I like it, even if he is a damp and short.
Tommy drives me in his Chevy Impala to a fancy dinner at Applebee’s restaurant. They have big menus of plastic, many pages long with pictures of the food that is enough for five people. I order the plate with what looks like the most meat piled high on top of potato fries.
Over crunchy nacho chips, Tommy says, “Have you ever been to Disney World?”
I have no wish to visit Disney World, but I do not say this to him, because he seems to love it and he tells me that every year, they visit and wear mouse ears, and the mother keeps all the princesses on a shelf. I say, “That sounds fantastic.”
Tommy tells me that he has not been serious with girls before because he used to weigh many more kilograms and you can see that in the T-shirt and pants he wears, they are too big, like he is shrinking. Usually I like the big men, but they are also dangerous. I say, “What’s your favorite TV show or movie?”
He talks about The Office and a comic book movie about spiders who turn into superheroes and a video game with zombies you must kill. I nod my head and dip the chip in yellow cheese sauce. It is so good. I eat most of that on the chips and finish the rest with a soup spoon. I ask him where we can get this cheese, and he says, “It’s just melted? From American cheese?”
I think how I will describe this to my sister, like hot milk but a thousand million times better.
We drive to his house to meet his sister and mother, who are very friendly and full of smiles. They hug me like we are old friends. The tiredness comes to me then, all the traveling and fear and adrenaline. I sit in kitchen and look around. I am frozen like a statue. Tommy’s mom is nice, and his sister Amber is nice, even though she keeps staring at me and biting at her nails. She has a short hair like a boy and dark eyeliner. She reminds me of my sister Alexandra because she tries to look hard on the outside, but inside, she is probably a puffy mamaliga, which is like a porridge.
The mom shows me the appliances and how they work like I have never seen a dishwasher before. She opens the cabinet, and ta da! All spices you can name, all the oils, all the spaghetti you want to eat for the rest of your life. They have these signs around the house that scrawl messages like “This is Our Happy Place” and “Dreams Come True” in white cursive letters.
The mom takes me to the back yard and shows me the pool because she knows I teach swimming. I dip my fingers in the chlorine and inhale the smell of it because it reminds me of school days when I did competitive swimming. Get up early for practice, do laps, and go to competitions on the weekend. But then my dad died, and it was too much money. The pool, I think, will be the best part of the trip.
I start to believe it will be okay. We are laughing about how the dog watches our every move. Then, the sliding glass door opens and in comes a man I never heard about. Everything stops. The man is handsome with dark hair in a vee on his forehead ending in a curl. He sees me and smiles a big smile. He has sharp canine teeth like a dog. We have We have these men too. They live everywhere. They live in the parks of Campulung, in the mountains, the city of Manhattan. These men cannot be fixed. A part of them is broken, like a mechanical pulley that doesn’t work, like the one outside of the Wooden Spoon Museum that is rusted shut.
He crushes the hand of Tommy. Then he grabs me up and hold me too tight so my breath whoosh out of me and my breasts are pressed against his t-shirt that has a picture of a red, white, and blue flag on it. “You tell her about me?” he asks Tommy. Tommy shakes his head. “I’m Greg, this dude’s stepbrother.”
The little dog cowers in the corner by the microwave stand. Amber stares off into space like she is in a trance. Mom chain smokes Kool cigarettes and stubs them out in an ash tray with Mickey Mouse face on it.
Greg is the kind of guy who hurts people, breaks arms, or crushes small creatures with rocks. I see he probably does worse things, like the guy who tell girls in my town he can get them into show business or a motel job and then lock them into a van and take them somewhere and put a needle in their arm.
He reminds me of the soldiers my mother hid from, she said they wore a look that said, This is mine. You are mine. That is mine, like the world belongs to him.
Greg takes a beer can and drinks it all in one gulp, then crushes the can in his hands. He says, “Are you a gypsy?” He wears a shirt with no sleeves. He flexes his biceps and watch them.
Amber says, “Don’t use that word. That’s not cool.”
Greg gives her a look. She flinches like he just put his fist on her body.
Everyone goes still at the table. Even the dog freeze from drinking out of his bowl. They are all afraid of Greg. And they show it. They don’t know the first thing about animals, which is that you keep your fear away, or else he will hurt you worse.
When we serve the food, no one talks very much. Greg looks at me and says, “You let me know when you’re ready for some real meat.” He turns to Tommy and laughs.
The next day, the mother drives me and Amber to the Kohls store where all the people put whatever they want in giant carts, push it around, and find electronics, TVs, tires for your big car. The store has a high ceiling where sparrows live. It makes me feel dizzy, the stacks of things, you name the thing, it is there—a windshield wiper next to outdoor table next to crackers with sesame seeds next to diet Sprite next to bad looking cheese wrapped in plastic. So much stuff and the people still walk around saying, “I’m bored, there is nothing to do,” like Amber does, biting at her nail polish.
I ask the mother, “Where is your husband at?”
“California.” That’s all she says, no explanation, like California is a place you might go to and never come back, like it’s dangerous.
The mom tells me to pick out anything I want from Kohls. She has a credit card and five dollars off anything, and she says, “Go try on this shirt. It’s cute.” She hands me a fuzzy white shirt that look like it is made of baby animal.
When I come out of the dressing room, the mom says, “That is just right for your eye color. You’re a winter.” She has a book that tells what seasons all women are and what they should wear. “I am a spring, honey, and I could never pull off pure white like that, not in a million years. You are the luckiest, all the colors will look good on you.”
Amber nods her head, but she has her eyes on her phone. Amber thinks we are from a village where we wash our clothes in the river, and barely own a light bulb, until I explain it to her how we also have Disney Plus and Victoria’s Secrets, yes, we go to school, no, we don’t have goats that live in our house or climb on top of the roof. She thinks I should be wearing a red kerchief on my head and have missing teeth, that to her is what a girl from another country looks like, but she tells me she has never been flying on an airplane. “Like, I like it here,” she says while we are getting a coffee. Her leg goes jittery, and she bites her fingernails down until you see the blood. The sides of her fingers wrinkled like she is swimming all day long because they are always in her mouth.
I Facetime with my sister Alexandra and she tells me that our chicken Puck is not doing so good. He flew away into the trees after I left, and he won’t get down and now they don’t have any baby chicks. “This is not a reason for me to come back,” I say. I do not tell her about Greg, even though he worries me. He is a problem.
Amber is boy crazy because our dad is dead, and our mother is busy with bills and work and trying to find a way to help get her medical care. Before I left, Alexandra got a baby by a musician who luckily blew up in motorcycle accident. The baby came out early, so she moped around the house for two weeks until my mother bought her an iPad. Now, she stares at that all day long, but I don’t care because it’s better than getting with a boy who is only a tadpole.
She says, “I miss you,” and that make me scrunch my hands into fists to stop from crying.
Later, after the TV is off and the house is quiet, Greg comes into the room. He says, “You think you’re hot shit, don’t you? You think you can come in here with your tits and just take everything we have.” He gets up close to my face, so close I can see the hair in his nostrils, the nick of blood on his neck from a cut. He smells like beer and smoke. He has dark eyebrows and if he were a normal person, nicer, I might want to kiss him, but he is a bad man, and they do not get better. It’s like a banana that looks okay, then you check back the next day and it’s full of rotten spots.
I do not back away because he wants me to be afraid. I think how he has big hands and could snap my neck, but he won’t do that. I say, “I am sure there is a girl for you somewhere in the world. It is not me.”
I want him to know that I am not afraid of him. He chews gum with his jaw snapping, pop, pop, pop. What he cannot understand is why I like Tommy and not him. Tommy has no muscles; Tommy plays video games. Tommy is quiet and does not need to be the first person to be heard in a room. He does not stomp. This makes other men think he is weak, but to me, all of this is positive. I know Tommy will always feel lucky to have me, and that means it will be harder for him to do bad things to me.
My phone rings. It is my sister. I pick up the phone, still looking at Greg. You do not turn your back. I say into the microphone, “You will come visit soon. Hang on.” I turn to Greg, sniff. I say, “What is it I smell?” I sniff around him. “I think you step in doggie’s release,” I tell him.
He leaves the room, slamming the door so the mirror rattles.
We have a story my mom tells my sister and me about a gray wolf that put on a sheep costume to hide in the meadow, sneaky, pretending he is sheep. He fools the shepherd. He creeps along the ground wearing the skin of a dead sheep and eat the lambs one by one, brings his wolf pals to eat them too. The shepherd only realize it when no grass is grazed, and he try to shave the sheep that is really a wolf. Too late. The shepherd gets gobbled up in two snaps of wolf’s jaws.
The lesson of the story is always pay attention. You never know when a wolf might be among you.
The next night, Tommy is very quiet when we try to play board game of Life. He does not hold my hand. He says, “You like Greg better.”
He tells me a story that is supposed to be sad about how everyone always thought Greg was the cuter stepbrother and he got all the women and Tommy just watched it happen. I slap my hand on the table. “He is hotter than you, and he’s louder, and sob, sob, sob.” His head jerks back like a chicken. I say, “So what? You want to walk in another’s shoes once in a while? Half my mother’s family were killed in the revolution. You think we sit around worrying about how sad we feel if someone does not like us?”
He drinks the rest of his Coca Cola and says, “I bid you good night,” then he does a little bow like he is a prince in a story and leaves.
I did the wrong thing, saying what I think. But part of me is angry that this world that seems so easy is so hard for them.
I ask Amber if I can sleep on her bedroom floor and she says, “What’s wrong with your bed?” But she gives me a sleeping bag with Cinderella on it. I love this sleeping bag, how her hair curls in long swoop like a wave of wheat. It seems like nothing bad can ever happen if you are in this sleeping bag that has a smooth slippery pink inside like a throat. Amber locks the bedroom door. She has an extra lock on it that she slides shut. We don’t say anything more about that.
Amber wants to know if I have Disney World where I grew up. I tell her that we didn’t go to Disney World, but we read Disney stories, except we read the real ones, from the Brothers Grimm. When I tell his sister about the evil stepsisters cutting off their feet to fit Cinderella’s glass shoe, the children stuffed into ovens to make pies for the gingerbread house, Bluebeard’s castle with the hidden room containing the headless corpses of his wives, her mouth hangs open so wide, I can see the fillings in her back teeth.
“What about Snow White?” she asks.
“We have Little Snow White and the huntsman has been instructed to cut out her liver and bring it back to the wicked queen. In the end, the wicked queen has to dance in fiery hot shoes until she dies. That is how that story ends.”
Amber says, “That is so harsh.”
She turns on a TV show on her laptop. She says I can scooch in on her bed and look at it too. It is a bed for three people, but she is the only one who sleeps in it. This show Amber likes is called Forensic Files and it is about men who kill other people and how they get caught because they leave fingerprints or footprints or do searches on Google for murder weapons. This is the wrong way to get rid of a problem.
You find another person to do it for you or you make it look like an accident.
My mother liked to tell the other story of the little girl in a red cloak who goes into the woods with a basket of fresh bakery items. On the path, she meets a wolf dressed like a man with suspenders and a hat with a feather in it. He asks her where she is going and tells her to go pick some wild flowers. Then, he races to the grandma’s house and eats her all up. He puts on her nightie and gets under the bed covers. When the red cape girl comes in, she says he has big eyes, big nose, big teeth. She notices a feather hat on the floor, but she pretends not to see it. When the wolf asks her to come closer, she grabs a knife and hides it behind her back. As soon as he grabs her, she cuts him open with a knife, splitting his stomach so the grandma jumps free. Together, they cut off the wolf’s head and put it on a post for other wolves to see. Then, they slice him up into bite size pieces and eat him for dinner with the wildflowers on the table.
The moral of the story: pay attention. Never let down your guard. Keep your eyes open. Strike first. Otherwise, you get gobbled up.
When it happens, Tommy is not home. Amber is in her room listening to her songs in her earbuds. Mom is at bar for trivia night. I stand a kitchen counter with meat cleaver, pounding out hamburger patties. Tommy is doing inventory tonight late, lots of refrigerators coming in. I get a meal ready for him, hamburger raw, which is best way. The dog sits at my feet, and I throw him some little bits of meat to keep him happy.
The back door opens, and in he comes. He has a look on his face that tells me he is drunk, or “shit faced,” like they say. He has been above the garage all day, drinking since lunchtime with loud music bleeding out of the window. Now, it is getting dark outside.
Greg weaves a little and this is good sign because it means he will move slower.
I know he wants to hurt me, but I don’t know how much.
He chomps his teeth together like a horse. He says, “You want to go swimming?”
I say, “No, thank you. You can go.” I am holding the meat cleaver and I try to judge the distance, how hard I could throw it, how much chance I have at hitting his wide forehead.
He moves closer. He says, “How do they say ‘fuck’ in Romanian-ese?”
Before I can speak back, Greg picks me up and throws me over his shoulder. It happens so fast, even the dog does not know what to do. Greg takes me outside and next second, I am in pool. I sink to the bottom, my shirt from Costco floating out around me like wings.
I like how quiet it is. This is a noisy place—cars, music, television. I like the quiet feeling of underwater. I open my eyes and see the blurry shape of the magic vacuum on the bottom, and I let the bubbles go up my nose. This is what I want, this peace, and all the things float away, my mother, Tommy’s mother, Amber, Tommy, my sister Alexandra and her bad leg, Greg and his dark face.
Greg is in the water with me. He grabs at my ankle, but I move quick like a mermaid. I slide out of his grasp and into the deep end of the pool. “You want me to catch you, huh? You like to play hard to get?” He swims toward me, hands grasping. He is pulling off his shorts. I take a deep breath and go under again. When he gets close, I lock my legs around his waist and let the water escape through my nose. That helps you to sink to the bottom. I teach this to little kids so they can get used to if they go under suddenly, so they do not get scared and drown.
In the distance, I can hear the dog barking, barking, barking.
They picked me for this show because I look good, because I have a nice butt, because my legs strong, muscular. I have my legs wrapped around Greg. He sinks in the water with me. I keep my eyes closed, feeling the way he struggles. He is reaching for me, trying to slip out, trying to punch at my face, but it is slow motion because in water, you can’t move fast. I know what he will do. He will panic. He will open his mouth to scream. Water will fill into his mouth and lungs. He is a big guy, but in water, we weigh the same, him and me.
I just have to hold on tight, like he is a fish I am wrestling.
On the beach of Targului River, my sister and I spent last summer in the sun, racing each other across the water. She always gets head start because of her leg, and she has stronger arms than me. We swam out to the buoy, and I liked the way my body felt in the water, light, strong, not a thing only to admire, but a thing that can move faster than some of the boys from town.
I come in the house holding the dog. He licks my face like he rescued me.
Amber is on the sofa wrapped up in blanket big and fuzzy like a shaggy bear even though it fake. She has wet eyes, and she is shaking. This means she saw what happened. She has her phone in her hand. This is the phone where she plays the jewel games for hours on end—that’s where you match colors, and everything tumbles down.
I peel off the shirt from Costco. “Call the police if you want.” My eyes sting from chlorine.
She looks at me. We stare together at the sliding window, but it is pitch black now, so we can’t see anything. We listen. No splashing sound. Her leg goes up and down like when she drinks three Coke Zeroes. She says, “Let’s give it a minute.”
Tommy is still at work. He has an alibi. That is important to me.
Amber takes my clothes and puts them in the dryer. She pushes me toward the bathroom with a Lucky sweatshirt and jogger pants that cling to your ankles like hands.
I sit down next to her, and she puts the blanket on my shoulders. My teeth are chattering too. It reminds me of when the bad thing happened to me. I couldn’t stop shaking for two days.
We are not going to hold each other and rock in front of fake fireplace like they do on the channel of Hallmark, everyone in soft fuzzy sweaters, drinking cocoa. In the real world, women do what we can to stay alive, even here. It surprises me. All seems perfect like candy cane and sugar and throw pillows but under it is the same danger, just hidden by “please” and “thank you” and Disney music.
I grab the dog and put him up to my face. He is still shaking like a baby. “You are a wolf,” I tell him. “You remember that. You come from wolf.”
When Amber comes back from laundry, we sit in the dark together. She turns on the TV and we look at the screen, but really what I see this reflection of us like ghost sisters in the sliding glass door.
Everyone is sad when police find Greg found floating face down in the pool with his Jimmy Bahama shorts billowing out in the water like flags. Mom screams, Tommy covers his mouth, Amber pulls at her sparkly earrings.
The police question me for many hours and I tell them the story of what happened, the made-up version that makes the most sense. An accident.
We have funeral and I wear black dress belonging to Amber and I cry because I am so happy.
After Greg is safely in ground, Tommy takes me behind a mausoleum, gets on one knee and gives me diamond ring from Costco. He asks, “Te casatoresti cu mine?”
I say, “Da, da, da.” The first thing I do when I am alone is to call my sister, tell her to start packing.
Amber asks me if she will find true love someday. All these girls and boys watch too much TV. They see The Bachelor show with the roses and the hot tub and champagne popping, and they think it should be easy, but love is not easy, and it shouldn’t be.
I tell Amber that true love comes in all different sizes. Sometimes, I tell her, you weigh the love in your hands like stones, which love is stronger, which love is more important?
I know I can love Tommy enough for him and almost enough for me. That I know.
In the Carpathian Mountains, if you go for walk near nightfall, you catch sight of the grey wolves.
My mother told me story from her real life. When there were communists, she and her sister fled their home, ran deep into the woods in December to keep away from the soldiers. They hid in a small cottage with stone floors, no fireplace, no matches. They were so cold their fingers and lips turned blue. They almost froze to death. But at night, they stayed alive because the wolves would come in. They smelled like smoke and fresh dirt. While the winter raged outside, the grey wolves huddled next to them, their fur itchy like wool, keeping them warm until dawn when they crept away again. This happened every night until someone from the town came and told them it was okay to return home. They had taken the general secretary and his wife and cut their heads off in the local square. All was okay All were happy again.
“The wolves,” she said, “they saved our lives.”
