The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  “No. I didn’t. Not really…”

  “Not really? What do you mean, not really?”

  “The issue,” he said, not answering the question, “is that the girls…”

  At some point, she had sat down on her mother’s bed. She wanted to shoo her mother from the room, but her whole body was collapsing in upon itself. Her husband had just fucked some stripper in their house. Perhaps in their living room. She was sure of it, and she felt her stomach lurch as if she were on an airplane trying to navigate wing-rattling turbulence. “The girls what?” she asked, her tone numb, her voice almost unrecognizable to herself. It was like when you listened to a recording of your own words: the sounds and the intonation were never what you expected. She glanced up at her mother, who had heard every word that she’d said. Her mother looked stricken.

  “The girls killed the guys—the guys who brought them. They killed them. There were two of them—two guys—and now they’re dead. Both of them, Kris. The girls used a carving knife we keep in the cutting block in the kitchen to kill one of them. Then they took his gun and shot the other one. And now these two big Russian dudes are both dead.”

  For a moment she said nothing, her mind trying and failing to process the oneiric horror of what he was sharing. People had died in her home. Men—including her husband—had been fucking strippers in her home. Somehow these travesties were connected, the umbilicus a bachelor party for a man, her brother-in-law Philip, who she didn’t especially like. Among the riot of emotions she was experiencing, she understood that fury—rage at Richard’s juvenile younger brother—was bubbling to the surface, subsuming even the despair and sadness and embarrassment that her husband had had sex with a stripper.

  “Where are you?” she asked finally. There were so many things to ask. There were just so many things she didn’t know.

  “I’m at the police station. We all are.”

  “Oh, God. In Bronxville?”

  “Yes. They’re taking our statements. We’re telling them what happened.”

  “And the girls?” The word girls reverberated in her mind; suddenly it seemed like the wrong word. But, of course, that was the word for a stripper. When you passed places like the Hustler Club on the West Side Highway, the signs never boasted “Hundreds of Women.” They advertised “Hundreds of Girls.”

  “They’re gone. They disappeared. They killed these two big assholes—handlers, bodyguards, thugs; I don’t know what you call them—took their wallets and wads of cash, and then drove away in the car they came in. But they’re gone.”

  In the bedroom doorway, behind her mother, she saw her daughter. She was wiping the sleep from her eyes. She was wearing her Snoopy pajamas: pink-and-white-plaid flannel bottoms and the iconic dog surfing on the top. The word in the cartoon balloon was Cowabunga. She was asking her grandmother what was going on, what was happening, who had called.

  This child, Kristin thought to herself, her husband saying something more on the other end of the line but the words merely white noise, was a girl. A girl doesn’t fuck other people’s husbands at a bachelor party and then take a knife to her bodyguards. A girl…

  A girl was nine.

  But the thought was lost to the relentless stream of images—a whitewater cascade that was swamping her and which she was helpless to resist—of her husband atop some stripper on the couch, her ankles upon his shoulders; of her brother-in-law beneath some stripper on the living room floor; of two other men, her mind conjuring for them black T-shirts and tight jeans, the sorts of biceps you only see in the gym, bleeding to death. But bleeding to death…where? She saw them dead in the kitchen, imagining their corpses on the Italian tile simply because her husband had said the girls had grabbed one of the very knives that she had used for years to prepare dinner for him and their daughter. Kitchen. That was the word that some part of her mind was comprehending from Richard’s brief chronicle. But the truth was, the two men could have been killed anywhere: The living room. The dining room. The den.

  “Kris?” her husband was saying. “Kris? Are you still there?”

  “Uh-huh, I am,” she said. Then she asked, “One of my knives?” Four words. One question. It was all she could muster.

  “Yes,” he said. “One of our knives. The girl with the blond hair. Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s all this horrible blur. It all happened so fast.”

  “Okay…”

  “And there’s more.”

  “How? Seriously, Richard, how could there possibly be more?” she asked, and he started telling her about the condition of the house and the blood on a painting, but the news had grown too cumbersome, too unwieldy for her to assimilate. There was too much and it was too awful. It was too awful for him. For her. For them. She looked across the room at her mother and her daughter. She realized that she was shaking.

  …

  It wasn’t clear to Kristin where the memory came from or what it meant: she was sitting alone on the front steps of her family’s colonial in Stamford, Connecticut, the shingles a beige cedar, and she was in the fourth grade. Her daughter’s age now. It was late on a summer afternoon, a weekday, and her mother was in the kitchen unpacking groceries and then starting to prepare dinner. A storm was nearing from the west, the gray clouds racing across the sky like they were part of a theater backdrop. But it hadn’t started raining yet and the air was electric and alive. She had been with her mother at the supermarket, and her mother had bought her packs of Back to the Future trading cards and a Back to the Future lunchbox. She had loved that film. Had the same crush as many a nine-year-old girl on Michael J. Fox. She had sorted the cards as soon as she and her mother had gotten home, prioritizing the ones with Marty McFly and Lorraine Baines over the ones with the flying DeLorean. Now, decades later, she associated that moment not merely with happiness, but with security. She had felt so safe on that stoop. Her older brother would be home soon enough from wherever he was hanging out that August afternoon, as would their father from work. And inside the house, through the front hallway and past the powder room—that was indeed the euphemism her mother had used for the downstairs bathroom—the sounds of her mother folding brown paper grocery bags and stacking cans in the pantry were replaced by the thwack of the heavy wooden cutting board and then the rapid-fire crack-crack-crack as she started to dice an onion. Kristin recognized the smell of barbecue sauce.

  The memory waned as Kristin understood the connection—and why her mind had excavated that distant moment now. She thought instead of her own knives: the knives with which, over the years, she had chopped carrots and cubed beef and sliced lamb. She saw the cleaver that she had never used and the bread knife with its serrated edge that she seemed to reach for daily. She saw the nakiri knife that was instrumental when she made salads. She saw the black wooden handles with the three steel rivets. Her knives were handcrafted in Japan. They had been a wedding present for Richard and her.

  She stared at her legs, naked from mid-thigh. She wondered now which knife the strippers had used to kill one of the men who had brought them to the house.

  “Kristin?” She looked up from her mother’s bed in her mother’s apartment. She had sat there after hanging up the phone, stunned and unmoving, her mind finding solace in recollections far from the carnage that perhaps even now was her living room. She was a marble sculpture: Devastated Woman in Sleep Shirt.

  “Kristin?”

  She rolled her eyes in the direction of her mother. She tried to rise from her paralysis, to focus on what to do next. It was taking work. She had told Richard that she would catch the first train to Bronxville in the morning. She would have driven home that very moment, but her mother hadn’t owned a car in two years; she had sold the Volvo wagon after her husband had died. Her mother drove so infrequently now that she lived in Manhattan that it had seemed ludicrous to spend so much money every month on a parking space in the nearby garage. So the plan, which was still evolving in Kristin’s mind, was this: she would get dressed. That was the start. She
might as well get dressed now. She would catch a train in a few hours to Westchester. Melissa would spend the weekend here with her grandmother and go to the matinee today as planned. Her grandmother would take her. Kristin would drive her car from the Bronxville train station to her house, because Richard had said he expected he would be home by then. Home from the…police station by then.

  Kristin feared that she was reaching like a drowning woman for normalcy and it was only a matter of time before she failed and went under: two people had been killed in her home after her husband and her brother-in-law and his friends had been watching a couple of strippers.

  No: they had been fucking a couple of whores.

  She sighed. She was trying to climb up from a deep slough of hopelessness and despair, but there were no convenient vines or tree roots near this quicksand. Whores. In her home. With her husband. People had been murdered in the house where she and Richard were building their life together, where they were raising their daughter. These were the bricks and mortar behind which they felt safest, were happiest.

  “Mommy?”

  Both her mother and her daughter wanted her. Or, perhaps, wanted only to be reassured that she had not become stone before their eyes. She ran her hands through her hair and then patted the side of the mattress beside her. “Come here, my adorable little one,” she said to her daughter. “Sit down beside me.”

  “Kristin, what’s going on? Is Richard okay? He didn’t sound like himself on the phone,” her mother was saying.

  “Richard’s fine,” she answered. “Daddy’s fine,” she added, turning her full attention now on Melissa. She tried to recall what she had said at her end of the conversation with her husband and, thus, what her mother and her daughter might have heard. Had she said “sex”? Had she said “strippers”? She had. She had indeed.

  Melissa sat beside her on the bed. She was trembling, as Kristin herself had been only a few moments ago, and so she put her arm around the child’s shoulders and pulled her against her. “Everything’s okay, my little one,” she murmured. She knew she was going to have to offer a G-rated version of what had occurred, sanitizing it as much as she could for her daughter. She could fill in the blanks—God, the blanks—for her mother after she had gotten dressed and (she hoped) Melissa had fallen back to sleep. “But there was an accident at the house. At Uncle Philip’s bach—at Uncle Philip’s party.”

  “His bachelor party,” her daughter said. Of course Melissa knew it was a bachelor party. She was going to be in her uncle’s wedding in two weeks. She was the flower girl.

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “Two of the men who were there…died. There were some people at the party who weren’t invited—who weren’t supposed to be there. And there seems to have been a…a fight.” Kristin could feel her mother watching her, listening intently so she could parse the truth from this carefully dumbed-down circumlocution.

  “A fight or an accident?” Melissa asked.

  “Oh, I am not quite sure myself,” she lied. “But here is what is important: Daddy is fine. And Uncle Philip is fine.”

  “So it was their friends who got killed? Were they grown-ups I knew?”

  “Nope. See? It’s all going to be okay,” she said, and she tried to believe that short sentence herself. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. And so she held her daughter close and rocked her gently. She tried to immerse herself in the movement, to quiet the roiling despair in her soul. In a minute or two, she would walk the girl back to the guest bedroom and tuck her into bed. Pull the sheets and the blanket up to her shoulders. She would kiss her once on her forehead and once on both cheeks—as she always did when she said good night. As Richard did when it was his turn to read to their daughter and kiss her good night. Then Kristin would get dressed by the light from the corridor. She would brush her hair in her mother’s bedroom and perhaps even put on some makeup. She would have some coffee and share with her mother the truth. The shameless and appalling and loathsome truth.

  Then she would take a cab to Grand Central and go home.

  Alexandra

  My mother was a secretary at a brandy factory in Yerevan, and her boss was the president himself. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—was a nurse. The three of us had lived together since my father had died years and years ago. I was toddler. He’d died in an accident at the hydroelectric plant where he worked. Electrocuted—one of six men who died that morning, but the only one who died quickly. The other five would drown, which people tell me is a much worse way to die. I think that’s probably true from the time a guard at the cottage held my head under the water in the bathtub. Nearly drowning us was one of the ways they would discipline us. There are no bruises. There are no scars. The merchandise still looks good. There is even a word for this: noyade. It means execution by drowning. Comes from French Revolution. I looked it up.

  My mother’s boss was one of those crazy-savvy, post-Soviet players. He went from communist to capitalist like very exotic chameleon. His name was Vasily. Super smooth. He knew all the angles and how to play them. He was a Russian oligarch who came to Armenia from Volgograd and bought a brandy factory on the outskirts of the city for nothing. It might have been a scandal, but it was just one more factory bought by just one more oligarch.

  When my mother died, he was there for me. In the long run, of course, this would be earthquake-level bad. Life-changing bad.

  But those first days and then first weeks after my mother died? I felt safe. I felt like princess. I felt that in the end—no matter what—everything would be okay.

  …

  I grew up speaking Armenian and Russian, but I started learning English in school when I was seven. By the time I was fifteen, I was fluent. This increased my value in Vasily’s eyes: I was exotically beautiful, still slender, still slight. With some TV time I’d be able to speak like courtesan after fucking American bankers when they were in Moscow for business. That was the plan.

  My teachers, Inga and Catherine, really used the word courtesan. I think they preferred it to whore.

  …

  In the years before I was born, my mother told me, Yerevan only had electricity for a few hours a day. Never all day. After the earthquake and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenians shut down the nuclear plant on the earthquake fault line. This was a good decision if you didn’t want two Chernobyls in one decade, but it was bad if you are trying to build democracy. Blackouts made people miss the Soviet Union. My parents’ neighbors said they wished that they lived in villages instead of the city, because the villagers at least had cow shit they could burn to stay warm.

  Some people said that peasants in the countryside also ate better than we did, but I don’t remember being hungry.

  And by the time I was born in 1996, the electricity was back. I could play with my toys all I wanted after dark.

  …

  Yerevan was a great city, even after the earthquake and the end of the Soviet Union. As little girl, I thought it had to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. The buildings were made of volcanic rock. The opera house was like palace. There were statues and sculptures in our neighborhood wherever we turned.

  And it was in Yerevan where I took ballet. Like lots of little girls, I danced all the time. Unlike lots of little girls, I was very good. I was going to be next Victoria Ananyan—next “Velvet Bird.” My dance teacher seemed to think so. I danced every moment when I was not studying or playing, and then I stopped playing and danced even more. I was at the studio six days a week.

  Someday, I thought, I was going to lead a glamorous life in Russia and then in America. But first I was going to dance Swan Lake and Gayane at the Spendarian Opera House. First I was going to train with the Moscow State Academy.

  But I so loved the idea of going to America. I had met Americans before in Yerevan. By the time I was ten, they were coming all the time. And not just teenagers or young maniacs who believed they were going to rebuild the count
ry. Everyday tourists. I would see them on the Northern Avenue and the Cascades and the Republic Square. They would watch the fountains dance in the square near the government offices for hours. They would have their pictures taken by the opera house or beside the statues of Komitas, Khachaturian, and Saroyan. They were from Los Angeles, which I always associated with the movies. They were from New York City, which would be attacked by terrorists when I was five, but by the time I was ten was simply that city with all the skyscrapers and a harbor with the Statue of Liberty. They were from Massachusetts, which I associated with red socks and only later would learn was the name of their baseball team. But all of these Americans were glamorous. They were like rich Armenians who would visit from Lebanon and Syria and Dubai. Maybe they were even more glamorous.

  So, Vasily. A couple years after my abduction, an older girl would tell me that he had probably killed my mother. Or, to be exact, he had had her killed. Vasily wasn’t the type to kill someone himself. He had henchmen. He had bodyguards. They would do the Russian businessman’s dirty work.

  I remember correcting this girl. I told her that my mother had died in hospital. I told her how it had not been pretty at the end. Not pretty at all. My grandmother and I were there. My mother died of cancer.

  But this girl said that maybe Vasily had poisoned her. Injected cancer into her blood.

  This was how naive and how crazy we were that she could believe such thing.

  She said I should go to the police to have my mother’s death investigated. But by then I was in Moscow—and I wasn’t dancing. Or, at least, I wasn’t dancing ballet. Occasionally I was dancing naked for (mostly) sweaty men, which usually didn’t even involve a stage and a pole. It involved hotel room ottomans and couches and the laps of the men, and then the bedrooms where I would do whatever they wanted. So who in Moscow was I going to tell? What could people in Moscow do? Answer? No one and nothing. They could and would do nothing. Besides, who would have wanted to help me? Why should someone else get involved? What was the point of rescuing a useless orphan whore?