In the Red (23 page)

I
rina will later reflect that, of course, there could have been nothing but money in that safe-deposit box. There was no way that the box was going to yield anything illuminating; that fantasy was all hers. It will take her several months of aimless traveling to reach this conclusion. It will come to her while lying fully dressed on a generic hotel coverlet, looking up at the blank white ceiling, the grainy chocolate the maid had left on her pillow slowly melting on her tongue. Not quite communist chocolate, but close.

Somewhere out in the great big world, Elena is in another anonymous room with hotel chocolate dissolving in her mouth—this is what Irina will tell herself. She will tell herself that her double is out there doing all the same things that she does, except with more purpose and panache. She will hold on to the idea that there is someone out there who is better at being her than she is. Someone who knows what to do with the money. The heavy, unwieldy cash she drags everywhere and spends apologetically, both boon and embarrassment.

When all that is left of the chocolate is the taste, Irina will sit up on her undisturbed bed and call her parents. A few days later, she will even visit them. They will not quite know what to do with her; maybe they will even be a bit afraid to touch her, as if she has returned not quite herself. They will ask her if she is all right, if she needs money. She will tell them she doesn't need any money, she has plenty. They will want to know where she went, what she's been doing, and why she doesn't need any money. She will give them the silence they know so well, the refusal she's had in her since she was a tiny child afraid of colors. They will suggest that she go back to the university to finish her degree. She will think about this suggestion and come to the conclusion that
going back
to anything is not what she wants at the moment. Going back doesn't seem as though it's any use.

She could take a plane to Romania. She could sleuth out which orphanage she came from. Would someone answer when she knocked on the door? Would someone recognize her sad blue eyes and take her to a gray little room and say, Look, this is where you used to sleep? What would this get her?

The place is probably an empty ruin anyway. She would walk into a dilapidated building looking for a past and no past would come to her. She would only frighten a homeless child huffing paint from a plastic bag in a dark corner. The story would refuse her an ending. She would not even crumble to dust. She would merely walk out again, stand in the hollow entryway looking out into a sunless, mild day. There would be illegible graffiti in a foreign language on the wall next to her. Even if she could read it, it would make no difference, would tell her nothing.

This would have been a good time to be a smoker; it would have been the moment to light a cigarette and squint in a mildly pained way as she inhaled. It would give her something to do with her hands.

She waited for them and they didn't come for her, she would think. A small cat would come around the street corner to soundlessly sit at the foot of a tree. It would look at her with its fiery orange eyes. It would not be an enchanted fairy-tale princess; its fur would not be a luminous white. A mottled, greasy-looking calico, gangly-limbed and not yet full-grown, but no longer a kitten. Soon the cat, a she—Irina knows all calico cats are female—would start to yowl in the night until some passing tom made her heavy with young.

The cat would lick her forepaw and pass it several times over her head, to reach behind her ear. Irina would realize that she flew across the whole world to watch a gutter cat groom itself. That is, should she ever choose to get on the plane in the first place.

Today Irina's double is out somewhere in the great big world, unfindable. Irina reaches out to her the only way she knows how. She goes to a large, windowless department store like the ones they used to shop in together. She picks out a gauzy silk scarf, dark blue with golden curlicues. It feels like a breath passing between her fingers. She pays for it in cash. On the money she hands over to the salesclerk, she has written her message in tight black script, the unanswerable query she has for her friend she will never see again:

Special thanks to Bonnie Nadell for helping me flesh out the protagonist, Laura Tisdel for tightening a tentative manuscript into a lean book, Betsy Uhrig and Eleanor Beram for their untiring attention to detail.

Big thanks to Simona Necula for vetting the fairy tales, and to my writing group (Louise Aaronson, Catherine Alden, Natalie Baszile, Leah Griessman, Susi Jensen, Kathryn Ma, Bora Reed, Suzanne Wilsey) for their support.

Most of all, undying gratitude to Harris Shapiro, whose steadfast love keeps me sane.

13, rue Thérèse

Elena Mauli Shapiro is the author of the novel
13, rue Thérèse.
She lives in the Bay Area with her husband.

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