The Last Guests

by J. P. Pomare

  Cain scrolls down. Dream retreat and we have the place all to ourselves. In another photo, the woman is in our bathroom. I wince seeing how dirty the mirror looks in the camera flash. Next is a man in our bed, his scruffy hair poking out of the sheet, flattening the pillow. In the background you can see the lake.

  He continues scrolling through the images. Two glasses touching in front of the fire. The glasses are full of white wine.

  These photos are getting twenty to thirty likes. Low numbers but then again Lucy Swallow doesn’t have that many followers.

  ‘So should we leave them a review?’ I say.

  ‘Wait until after we’ve seen the state of the house,’ he responds. He changes the subject. ‘How was work?’

  ‘Good,’ I say, trying to smile. Trying to block out the rising siren of panic. ‘Actually I’m a bit worried about Scotty.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean he was off at work, I thought maybe fatigued but now I’m certain he was taking something.’

  ‘What, like smoking pot before a shift?’

  ‘Yeah maybe, or painkillers. We had a call the other day, he misread it as a stroke. If Scotty wasn’t high I feel like we could have saved him. I mean the chances go from zero to maybe one percent, but that’s still a chance.’

  He closes his eyes for a moment, gives a slow nod. ‘Mmm, sounds like he needs to pull his head in.’

  ‘I could report him. I should report him. I made it clear that I knew what was going on and he’s been better these last two shifts since then. It’s always awkward with guys like that. He’s more senior. But if it happens again, I’ll have to report him. Otherwise I’m culpable too.’

  He turns back to his laptop. ‘Not your job to babysit him if he’s getting high before work. Maybe just keep an eye on him to see if it happens again. That’s odd,’ he says abruptly, checking his phone.

  ‘What?’ I say, moving towards him.

  ‘The last guests used almost no power. Just a little spike in the morning by the looks of it.’ He’s on the power app.

  ‘That is odd,’ I say, distracted.

  ‘Maybe they ate out, used the candles when they were home,’ he says but I’m barely listening.

  Changing my phone number wasn’t enough, I need to do something to block Daniel permanently. Cain looks up at me now, really looks at me. ‘If you’re worried about it, maybe ask to change partners?’

  I realise I’m frowning. I feel sick, lightheaded. ‘It’ll be fine,’ I say. But it’s not. I finally have what I’ve wanted all these years, I’m finally pregnant. But there’s a photo of me and Daniel together out there. Everything is wrong.

  THIRTEEN

  WE’RE ALMOST AT the house now. Axel was over last night, he and Cain had a couple of beers and graduated to whiskies at around 9 pm. The old stories came out, while they watched the rugby. Cain took some waking this morning, then was grumpy for not getting away earlier.

  ‘Why do you want to stay so bad? There’s supposed to be a big storm tonight,’ he says to me now.

  ‘It’s nice down here,’ I respond. That’s not the only reason. After finding that photo I’ve been terrified in the house, like someone is out there waiting to spring another surprise on me. Down here it’s isolated, quiet, private. And I want to tell him about the baby, talk about our future, practise being a family in a home we actually own. I know it’s early and I know we can still lose the baby but I want him to feel the excitement. Our plans are back on track.

  My period hasn’t come, it’s days late. I can finally let go of all the doubt, all the fear that it’s just in my head. I feel like I should be wrapped in cottonwool, buried beneath blankets, mindful of keeping myself and this cluster of cells inside me safe. It’s growing. It’s mine.

  ‘Why don’t you want to stay?’ I ask him.

  He shrugs one shoulder, his other arm is straight out before him holding the wheel.

  ‘I guess it’s just a pain to change sheets twice and clean up after ourselves. And like I said, it’s going to bucket down tonight.’

  ‘It’s nice sleeping out here when it’s raining,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe you’re right. I guess it would be nice to stay.’

  Along our road, with the swaying ferns and native bush on one side, glimpses of the shimmering lake through the trees on the other, I get that same feeling I had last time. I’m silent as we pass the spot, at the bend where the cliff drops away to the lake and the new rail is. The house could be in any state. I imagine it trashed, scratches deep in the floorboards, burn marks on the rug, stained sheets. WeStay holds the bond for ten days after checkout but that doesn’t help when it’s only one thousand dollars. You could lose tens of thousands of dollars in one weekend. Flood the upstairs bathroom, rot the floorboards, steal the furniture. Burn the house down and leave the country. Not for the first time this week I think about my grandfather, his silver ponytail, skin spotted but eyes still sharp all the way to the end. How would he feel knowing the place was being filled and emptied with strangers every week?

  Cain parks beneath the deck, and cranes his head up. ‘You can’t see anybody from here?’ he says, grinning.

  ‘Don’t joke, Cain. It’s not funny.’ Ever since that night I thought I saw a man near the lake, he’s taken every opportunity to remind me of my paranoia. If only he knew that I have a real stalker, someone who knows my secret, my phone number and address. What would you do then, Cain?

  We climb out and I follow him inside. It should be special, this moment, being back at the house, my grandpa’s home as a pregnant woman once more. It should be exciting, imagining the life we will soon have here, but it’s not. It’s tainted by my fear of Daniel, and the memory of losing the last baby, the blood and the clot on the bathroom tiles. That slow drip over the following days, emptying me out. It’s still so raw it might have happened yesterday.

  The place is … spotless. It seems almost as clean as we left it, the floors mopped, free of shoe prints. A few dishes sit on the drying rack. The table is clean with the bottle of wine we left out at its centre, unopened. It’s as though no one was here at all.

  ‘I feel like it’s too tidy,’ I say.

  Cain raises his hand, focusing on something on the dining table. A slip of paper. He crosses to it and picks it up.

  ‘What is it?’

  When he holds it out, I see messy, rushed handwriting. Almost as messy as a doctor’s scrawl.

  We just loved our time here. We will definitely be back.

  Thank you.

  They haven’t left us a review yet, but they wrote us a note.

  ‘Odd,’ I say.

  ‘It is.’ He drops the note. It falls through the air, swinging back and forth with the languid cut of a cello’s bow pass, then comes to rest on the floor. ‘Let’s get tidying.’

  ‘Tidy what? It’s tidy already.’

  ‘We should still vacuum, and we will have to do the sheets for the guests coming next weekend.’

  He goes to the kitchen, pulls the fridge open. ‘They’ve used the milk.’ He holds the open carton up to me.

  ‘I’ll do upstairs,’ I say.

  ‘You can relax if you like.’

  ‘No, I came to help. I insist.’

  Cain’s phone pings. ‘Speak of the devil,’ he says. ‘Their review has just come through.’

  He hands me his phone and I read it aloud.

  ‘A gorgeous house on the lake. Great amenities and very tidy. That’s nice I guess. A bit formal.’

  ‘Hard to please, aren’t you? Do you want to write them a review now?’

  I click their WeStay profile, to see what other reviewers have said about them. The reviews are all great. Every single host has mentioned their cleanliness.

  It’s like they never stayed, one review says. Then I see something that causes my heart to stop. A room I recognise. I swallow, but when I do, an itch starts at the back of my throat. I cough, and my eyes water. I feel sick.

  ‘You alri
ght?’

  I pat my chest and Cain goes to the kitchen. When he returns he rests his hand on my spine and holds a glass of water out for me. I take it, and sip. My eyes are fixed on his phone in my hand. It’s the same place, I can tell by the photo. That house Daniel took me to. But I’ve changed my number, I’ve deleted the app and his messages. There is nothing to trace me back to him. But obviously there is, he has my address, someone stayed both here and at the WeStay he took me to. It occurs to me now, if he saw my runs on MyTrack in the city, he must have seen them down here too. He has this address. He was in Rotorua the last time we were here.

  ‘Just an itch at the back of my throat,’ I say. I pull my shoulders back, run my hand down my face to straighten it out. He takes the phone from my hand.

  ‘I can write the review.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Nothing makes sense, everything is wrong. I thought I was safe here, hidden away, but I’m not. He knows. A weight presses down on my chest. Or could it be a simple coincidence?

  ‘Left our place clean and tidy. A pleasure to host and would recommend. How does that sound?’

  ‘Good,’ I say. ‘Fine.’ I thought I was playing Daniel, but I’m beginning to see he might have been playing a different game altogether.

  FOURTEEN

  I CLIMB THE stairs, check the rooms. They’re all … perfect. It’s almost as though no one has been here at all. All of the bedrooms, with one exception, are tidy. The covers on the queen bed in the master are ruffled and there is something else: a single black hair lying across one of the pillows. It’s so odd, because neither of the guests had black hair in their photos. I have black hair but there is no way my hair could be on this pillow.

  I open the wardrobe and, as the doors swing, something nails my feet to the floor. I’m looking at a dress. Black, knee-length and long-sleeved. It’s Witchery, I know this because I’ve seen this dress. I’ve worn this dress. I reach out and touch it. It’s hanging there like a body before me. The dress I wore the night I met Daniel. The same one I had folded up and left in the boot of my car then stowed in the bottom of my wardrobe. But did I check it was definitely in that bag? I realise I’ve been holding my breath. I let it out but there’s nothing there, just a tightness. Is it possible Cain found the dress? Decided to hang it up and forgot to tell me? I can hear him coming up the stairs. Daniel can’t have taken the dress that morning because I saw it in my bag at home. I quickly slam the wardrobe closed. Turn so my back is against the door.

  ‘How do the rooms look?’ he says.

  ‘The beds are made, except this one is a little messy. The rooms are perfectly tidy too.’

  ‘Easy money, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of. Just feels like something’s off.’

  ‘Off?’

  ‘Look.’ I point to the pillows.

  Cain leans over the bed, looks down at the hair.

  ‘So?’ he says.

  ‘Remember their photos? Neither of them had black hair.’ It doesn’t make sense. A blonde woman and a man with a shaved head. This is a black hair.

  ‘I think you’re overthinking it.’

  ‘It’s not their hair,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe someone else stayed with them, it’s not the end of the world.’

  ‘This isn’t a joke.’ The dress in the wardrobe, the stay at the other WeStay, it’s making my head spin and my heart race but I can’t let him know why this hair is so significant.

  ‘Maybe there were two couples and they didn’t want to pay for the extra guests. Is that a possibility, Lina? This is why I should do these cleans myself. So you don’t get paranoid.’

  ‘Two couples, but they only used one bed?’

  He sighs, long and slow.

  I continue speaking. ‘How would you miss a dark hair on a white pillow if you wanted to tidy up after yourselves?’ Would he recognise the dress as mine? He’d just say that I accidentally left the dress here.

  ‘Forget about it, Lina.’ Cain plucks the hair with his finger and thumb. He goes to the window, opens it and casts the hair outside. ‘Let me manage the house so you don’t have to stress. Just remember we’re now four hundred dollars better off.’ Cain takes my upper arms, looks deep into my eyes. ‘Everything is fine.’

  I try to smile, but it ends up more of a sigh, like letting go of something heavy. I slip into his embrace, feeling safe. ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘I am right.’

  Outside the window, I see someone rowing on the lake, dragging himself through the water. It’s the old man from the cafe. A green boiler suit and a bucket hat. He turns, aiming his dark eyes at the house. He continues on.

  I twist around in Cain’s arms and we stand looking out over the landscape in the shadow of the mountain. I’m still watching the man paddling along as Cain rests his hands on my shoulders, digs his thumbs in and rolls them up to the base of my neck.

  ‘We can go down to Lucky Egg,’ he says. ‘Make a night of it.’ He places his thumb tips just below the occipital bone.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, tilting my head. ‘Right there.’ He presses a little harder. The landscape outside darkens as a cloud moves before the sun. ‘Why don’t we take that bottle of wine to Lucky Egg tonight?’

  ‘It was for the guests.’

  ‘Their loss,’ he says. ‘I feel like we need a good drink and a night to unwind.’

  I nod but I feel like my emotions are tripwires that I’m going to get snagged on at any moment. Someone is doing this, someone is trying to scare me. It’s Daniel. If he has been in the house, hung my dress up like this – what else is he capable of?

  FIFTEEN

  AS WE HEAD out in the early evening towards Rotorua, I turn my eyes towards the jumping spot; I can’t quite see the ladder but I can see a group of boys moving through the trees towards it. It’ll be cold, especially in the late afternoon shade, but it’s always been a ritual for boys that age out here in the lakes area: rugby on the weekends, driving dusty old cars, drinking at the ski lane and jumping from heights into icy water. It’s a particularly Kiwi pastime. Occasionally my mind wanders away from the photo, from the dress, but always my body knows, the trembling energy inside is like an illness, something terminal.

  Cain navigates between the lakes all the way into town. We drive past the skatepark, in the twilight there are kids on bikes near the corner, talking, each with one foot on a pedal and one on the ground, others roll by on scooters. I follow Cain’s eyes to an old shopfront, long since empty. Above it the latest coat of paint has flecked off and you can make out the block letters that read ‘TV Repairs’. Next door, second-hand whitegoods crowd the footpath in front of Billy’s Electrical.

  They’re a different breed in town. Tarawera is surrounded by homes for retirees and weekenders built to accommodate Auckland millionaires. Rotorua is much more working class – tourism operators, loggers, hunters and hospitality workers catering to the constant flow of tourists. The town is big enough to have its own hospital but too small for a professional sports team. Then there are the suburban pockets you know not to venture to, particularly in the evening. The areas described in Once Were Warriors. Roads that belong to the gangs, places even the police avoid.

  Cain rasps his hand back over his shorn hair. His hairline is tongue and grove, and if he grew his hair out, you’d see how thin it had become. ‘Always weird coming back here, things seem to change every time we visit.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The KFC has closed,’ he says. Then we both laugh. It’s a relief, but once more I remember the dress, the messages, the ring and the flare of joy fades. ‘I don’t know, it’s just the streets. It’s like an old friend; we’ve grown apart and now it’s hard to recognise the place.’

  I sense it too. Especially at the lake house. In the summer the lake buzzes with engines. More homes dot the water’s edge. The old floating boatsheds have all been painted. Everything changes. What if we went somewhere else? Truly off grid for a while to let things settle. Where els
e could we disappear to?

  We reach Lucky Egg and grab a table outside, looking over the quiet street. Lucky Egg is quiet for a Saturday. Maybe the weather forecast has scared everyone away. It’s on Eat Street, a strip of restaurants near the lakefront in the heart of the town designed, I suppose, to create a carnival dining atmosphere. On weekends it’s normally packed with tourists and locals out for a nice meal, but the weather’s been threatening a storm all day. The restaurant is in an old fire station with vaulted ceilings. Those high, leaning panels of glass keep the rain from hitting the cobbled street. Instead it spots and collects, ripples the sky above, and runs in rivulets to the gutters.

  ‘Storm’s coming,’ Cain says.

  A couple on the table next to us pop a bottle of sparkling wine; he’s in boat shoes with one too many buttons undone, and the last remnants of his white hair combed forward.

  ‘Going to be a wet walk back to the hotel,’ the man says to us. ‘At least we’ve got champagne.’ I don’t point out the difference between twelve-dollar sparkling wine and champagne. My mother had the same habit of confusing the two. On the champers tonight. It was always excitable, a gleeful grin, a war cry. She probably never tasted a drop of champagne in her life. Only when I was an adult did I realise how sad that was.

  The waiter comes over and opens our bottle of pinot, the one the guests left. I raise my hand. ‘None for me.’ Even if it wasn’t about the baby, I don’t think I could stomach alcohol.

  I note the disappointment in Cain’s eyes. ‘Oh, you want a cider?’

  ‘No,’ I say, just a little annoyed he hasn’t realised the significance of why I’m not drinking at the moment. ‘Water is fine.’ He will understand tonight, when we get back and I give him the news. Will it be the same as last time? Weeks of effervescence, boiling over with plans of the future, endless speculation about what the baby might look like and planning the perfect combination of our traits? My nose, with your skin and eyes. Definitely your ankles. Or will it be dulled by the reality of what we went through, what we lost? What if it happens again? Most marriages don’t survive the loss of a child. What about the loss of two?