The rain was pouring down in thick sheets his whole drive home. Geoff hated driving in the rain, especially in his little Mercedes. He never could get used to driving such a little car. I won’t be able to keep it, he suddenly realized. They’re going to take it back. He’ll have to start driving his Izuzu again. Thankfully, out of nostalgia, he had kept it stored in the garage. The garage. He won’t have that for much longer either. What a great garage. A man’s garage. Room for four cars. What an odd American custom, size. Everything he owned now was oversized. Except for this damned car. Over time he had come to resent the size of everything here. Back in Russia he had lived in an apartment that was a hell of a lot smaller than his garage here. He’ll probably have to go back to that too.

“Shit,” he breathed to the empty glistening wet road in front of him. He was going to have to go back to Russia. How was he going to tell Katrina? She would probably leave him. Good luck trying to figure out how to stay here without me, he thought bitterly.

Back at their condo, Katrina sat on their screened porch looking out at the rain, waiting for Geoff to get home from hockey practice. He was in his third season playing for the Hurricanes. He’s always such a pussy driving in the rain, she thought. He probably won’t be home for hours. She picked up her copy of US Weekly and started to read again. She had barely finished skimming over the “Out and About” section when the door to the condo swung open noisily. She dropped the magazine and walked into the living room. Geoff was standing in the hallway, bent over, slowly untying his boots.

“What’s up?” she asked, her bumpy Russian accent rising with confusion. “Practice ended early?” Geoff still hadn’t looked up at her. “Tell me,” she said, “Is something wrong?”

Geoff sighed. Katrina’s millions of questions always annoyed him, and he had told her so many times. He slowly finished taking off his boots, his scarf, his jacket, then placed them all carefully in the closet.

“Can you just relax for a second?” he asked. His head pounded. He brushed past her into the living room and dropped into their huge leather sectional couch. He opened his mouth to just get it over with, to just tell her, but he hesitated.

Katrina could tell something had happened. She feared the worst—that he had made the decision to return to Russia. He was always threatening her with it. She knew he would never leave his team, though. America was the only place he would be able to play like this, at this level. Her stomach twisted with fear. Geoff told her all the time that he didn’t need all this stuff. That he could go back home to nothing and be happier, but she didn’t think he understood the word. Nothing. He didn’t know what it meant like she did.

Her family had plenty of money back in Russia. She and her brother had been sent to private school even. But having nothing wasn’t about material things. It wasn’t about her clothes or vacations or having a television in every room. It was about so much more than that. It was about what came above all of the stuff—an understanding of what to do with it. In Russia those things had meant little to her and her siblings. Nobody there taught her what to think of them, or how important they were. Here in America it seemed people were just born with that knowledge. Here nobody was able to overlook those material things. Here they meant something, and Katrina felt so much fuller here, so much more complete. She would never go back to her old life. America was her home, and her gut ached with her need to stay.

“I was let go from the team,” he said flatly. Katrina stood motionless in the hallway, staring at him. Part of her expected it, but she still felt the shock of the statement ripple through her body.

He continued. “Coach Tally brought me into the office with Bullard and Gamble and told me they weren’t renewing my contract. For next season. They let Kuzi and Alex go as well.”

Katrina’s mouth had dropped open. “You’re the fucking goalie, how do they cut you?”

“Back up goalie.”

“What are you going to do?” She stomped into the living room and stood in front of him.

“I don’t know, Kat, I need to think. I don’t know what I can do. I need to call Bill.”

“He’s a shitty agent, Geoff. He screwed you with this contract already. I can’t even understand him when he talks! He’s a fucking hick!”

“Calm down.”

Geoff could feel her desperation. They had so much more here than back in Russia. More stuff. Too much stuff, he thought. He felt dirtied by all the stuff, it consumed them. Sometimes he woke up in the morning sick with the need to get rid of all this stuff. He couldn’t explain why he put up with it, but he also couldn’t explain why deep within his gut he wondered if he would really be able to part with it as easily as he always promised.

Katrina stared at him. “I’m not going back to Russia.”

“Of course you aren’t,” he snapped back, sarcastic.

“Don’t start with this, Geoff. I did not make you come here.”

“Oh really?” With that he slapped a hand on to the leather, making a huge smack and then stood up off the couch, towering over Katrina. She knew better than to be intimidated by him. Despite his muscles and towering frame, he was always very passive with his strength; somehow he seemed unaware of his physical power over her, a fact that she was constantly aware of, but always careful not to take too much advantage of.

“America is our home, now, Geoff,” she said carefully.

“This place will never be my home. You only think you are an American because you carry the biggest Chanel purse and talk on that pink cell phone. You are a sell out, you know, as weak as all these stupid American girls.”

They had gotten in arguments like this before. She knew that deep down he resented how easily she had made her life here. Even though she had waited to come over for five months after Geoff found an apartment and started training with the Hurricanes, she had been able to make friends much more easily, and picked up English quicker than he had been able to. She was already reading novels in English, and had brought up a few times her intentions to enroll in classes at the nearby state university.

“You don’t know what you are talking about,” she said to him. “Are you so stupid you don’t even understand? I will never go back to Russia.”

“How do you think you are going to stay? I am not staying here for you. I hate this place.”

“You only hate it because you failed here.”

“You’re a bitch, Katrina.” He dropped his head. “I’m not speaking this fucking language anymore,” he barked in Russian. They had made an agreement once Katrina moved here a year ago to only speak in English, even to each other. He turned away from her and walked into the bedroom, leaving the door wide open behind him. She could hear the shower come on.

She wandered into the kitchen, then stood with both of her hands braced on the marble topped island. She didn’t know what to do. The only reason she was able to live in America was because Geoff had her officially listed as his personal assistant. She was here on a work visa. She tried to work out a plan in her head, but she knew nothing about immigration laws. Geoff’s agent had handled it all out for them. The only thing she knew for sure, from watching TV, was that she would be able to stay here if she married an American citizen.

In the shower Geoff let the water dump down on him from the waterfall showerhead. Even their showerhead was oversized. It was the size of a dinner plate. Suddenly he felt sick with hate. Hate for everything he had. He hated it because he couldn’t understand it. How had he become so dependent on all this? He hated his Mercedes. He hated his old Isuzu. He didn’t know what he wanted. Maybe he wanted not to want it all. Maybe he wanted to punch the tile shower wall, smash his thick fist into a mangled bloody mess, to see the emotions bright and raw dripping down and mingling with the steaming water then disappearing down the drain. In times like these he could understand how a person can get so overwhelmed that they feel the need to harm them self. Sometimes he felt frustration like that—so powerful that it felt like if he didn’t inflict the pain himself then something else would do it for him even worse. He turned the water off, fear of his spinning thoughts pushing some of the anger away.

When he walked out into the bedroom with a towel tied around his waist, Katrina was crying, packing up a suitcase. He wasn’t entirely surprised.

“What are you doing?” He had to force out the words in English. She didn’t answer him. He sighed. “We can figure this out together. If you want,” he said in Russian.

She stopped packing and looked up at him. “Can we stay in America?,” she responded carefully.

“I can’t stay here. I hate myself here. Nothing is real.”

“You don’t know what that means.” She hated how Russian he was. He had that same dark heaviness seeping from behind his eyes just like she had seen in everyone back home. She couldn’t go back to it. It was a land of gravity and yearning, so deep that it was passed from generation to generation, living forever behind their eyes. She didn’t know what caused such heaviness, she didn’t know if any of them did. All she knew was that here in America she could be happy. She could watch Reality TV and eat at fancy restaurants and let the heaviness drain out of her. She felt lighter here. Geoff had never let himself feel that lightness, and she felt sorry for him. She had always known he wouldn’t stay forever.

“You can go home,” she said to him, “but I need to stay here. I need to make this my home.”

“You’ll never have a home now,” Geoff responded flatly. “You have given up your home. It is all a lie now.”

As she felt the hulk of Geoff’s body disappear out of the bedroom door behind her, Katrina remembered the words of her mother on the day she left Russia. She was standing over the same black suitcase, stuffing in the few items of summer clothing she had tucked away in her closet.

“Once you decide to follow a man somewhere,” her mother said, her head lowered as Katrina continued packing. “You’ll always be following. It’s a chain that cannot be broken. I hope you realize this.”

“I’m not following, Mother, I’m going to live in America. For myself. This is what I’ve always wanted, you remember.”

“It won’t be like you imagine,” her mother whispered. “Don’t ever forget, it is all an illusion.”

“Mother, this is the illusion. I have nothing to live for here, I don’t even know who I am here. It’s not real. America is what is real. Why do you think it’s where all the movie stars are? Even Victoria and David Beckham, they were superstars in their own country, and they still chose to go to America.”

“I don’t know those people,” her mother said. “Are they Russian?”

“No mother, English, but that’s not the point. I want to go to America for me, to make my own dreams come true. I’m not following any man.”

“Well, all I can offer you,” her mother said, looking up at her with hard determined eyes. “All I can tell you is to be sure of what your dreams are. If you don’t know, if you say you have dreams but don’t know what that means, then someone will decide for you. Dreams are dangerous things, Katrina.”

On the plane ride over a week later, Katrina had thought about her dreams. Until nine months before, when Geoff was scouted for an American league, Katrina’s mind had been empty of dreams. It wasn’t as if she consciously shut out the possibility of dreaming for something “better,” but the thought had never occurred to her. Until Geoff, her boyfriend for four years since her final year of high school, had asked her if she would want to come to America with him. Giddily, perhaps foolishly, Katrina started picturing herself in the scenes of Beverly Hills 90210, with short skirts and cars with no tops to them. The show—her favorite show—came on every day at lunch time and Katrina hadn’t missed one episode in the five months while she was waiting to leave to join Geoff in North Carolina.

Her mother’s warnings seemed hollow to her, as all parental warnings had for her entire life. They don’t know me, they don’t know how strong I am, how much I want this, she had thought. Before the modeling competition when she was fourteen, when her father told her if she won they would only sell her as a prostitute to rich Middle Eastern men (she was awarded third place and never found out if he was right), before she took a job as a waitress at the Marriott hotel downtown, and her mother had begged her to not fall in love with an American man because they are all violent and secretly homosexual. And then, before she left for America, with her kind Russian boyfriend, still they had no faith in her. How weak she must look to them, she thought, staring out the small window of the plane as it taxied along the runway, the brown grass and grey sky whizzing by like a carnival ride.

Her dreams. Nobody would make them for her—she knew what she wanted. She wanted to live in America, she wanted to speak like an American, and own beautiful clothes, and go out with other American girls and drink colorful drinks and talk about movie stars. She knew how simple they were, her dreams. But that was only the beginning. Once she was an American, there would be no need for dreams so big. Nobody tried to fill in the hollow dreams of confident women.

With a heavy slam that sent a nervous vibration up her chest and into her dry scratchy throat, Katrina felt Geoff stomp out the front door of their apartment. She set down the red sweater she was folding on the top of her suitcase and tiptoed out to the living room. She felt the emptiness of the apartment surround and suffocate her like the thick humidity of summer, even though the air had already begun to cool into fall weeks before. The white of the couch and the floor tiles and the carpet sparkled so loudly that it hurt her eyes and she raised a shaking hand to shield the glare.

About the Author

Rebecca Erpf

Rebecca currently is in the process of finishing up her M.F.A. in Fiction Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She is a native of North Carolina, now living in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. Her stories have previously appeared in The Chick Lit Review, Centaur Magazine, and Amarillo Bay.