The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  She considered correcting his use of the plural pronoun, but that would only be bitchy. They could discuss when he should return home later. By phone. When their daughter wasn’t walking beside them. “That would be great,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Of course. There is one more thing.”

  She almost stopped walking. Instead she succumbed to superstition and took a long, careful step so that her foot did not land on a sidewalk crack. “Okay.”

  “Well, it’s good news. I can seriously help whatever cleanup team we bring to the house—whether that’s tomorrow or Tuesday or, I guess, even Wednesday. The bank wants me to take a little leave of absence. But I’m fine. It’s all good and it makes sense.”

  “How long is a little?” she asked. The news didn’t knock the wind from her the way it might have before the bachelor party. Before two men had been killed in her house. Before her husband had taken an escort upstairs, stripped, and…

  She pushed the thought away.

  She knew this was devastating to him and he was putting a brave spin on this for her. Like most men, he was what he did. He was an investment banker. He worked hard. He liked his job. He probably liked (And what was the right noun? How could she have been married to him for so many years and not know?) banking more than she did teaching—and she enjoyed teaching a very great deal. At least she did most of the time. She turned toward him and tried to see the hurt and the fear (because surely this scared him) behind the facade. And she did see it in the way his lips quivered ever so slightly when he tried to smile, and she could see it in the way that he blinked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll figure it out. Not long. I mean that: not very long. And the good news? I’m getting paid. And I like the idea of getting to go home before the two of you and working with the cleanup crew. I’d love to make sure that the house is in tip-top shape so that when you walked in the door you’d never even know what happened.”

  She thought of what he had told her about the couch. And the painting. She thought of the bodies in the living room and the front hall. He was, she understood, kidding himself. They’d always know what happened. Always. Still, she reached for his hand as they walked. It was a reflex. They walked the last block to her mother’s in silence, but holding hands. When they arrived, she nodded at the doorman.

  “Are you going to be okay?” she asked Richard.

  “Of course! Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. Remember, I’m still getting paid.”

  “It’s not money I’m worried about. It’s you.”

  “Well, I’m fine, too. I mean it.”

  She rather doubted he was, but she wasn’t going to press him. She simply reminded him to call her once he had spoken to the detective—or whoever at the police station could tell him anything. She watched him kneel and hug Melissa. She accepted another kiss from him on her cheek and his hands on the waist of her jacket. Then she waved good-bye and led their daughter back upstairs to the apartment. She was, she realized, unmoored by his touch. But she was also unprepared to have him beside her in bed.

  …

  As Kristin was falling asleep that night in her mother’s guest bedroom, her daughter beside her, she replayed in her head her conversation with her brother. They had spoken by phone that evening after dinner.

  “You should be glad he told you that he went upstairs with the girl,” he said. “I think a lot of men would have lied. They would never have told their wives anything.” She was relieved that her brother hadn’t donned his therapist superhero cowl and asked her how she was feeling.

  “But did I really need to know?”

  “You said you asked him. He didn’t lie.”

  “Or maybe he did. Maybe he did have sex with her.”

  “Okay, then. As you just asked yourself: Did you really need to know? Maybe he was sparing you. He was drunk, it was meaningless. So he dialed down what really happened. He told a white lie.”

  “That’s not a white lie.”

  “Look, I know this sounds awful, but sometimes if you screw up the way some people do in a marriage, it’s best to keep whatever you did to yourself. Especially if it’s a onetime thing. Does your partner really need to know? Not always.”

  “And if it wasn’t a onetime thing? Who knows what he does when he’s traveling? And he travels a lot.”

  “I like Richard.”

  “So you trust him.”

  Even over the phone she heard her brother exhale. “People always surprise me. They really do.”

  “That doesn’t reassure me.”

  “Whatever he is—whoever he is—he’s definitely not his younger brother.”

  “That’s a low bar.”

  “Your marriage has always struck me as pretty damn solid,” her brother said, trying to be more definitive.

  And, the truth was, she had always thought it was. They’d been married fourteen years, and it still had its moments of wild electricity. Yes, it was different now that they were forty and lived in the suburbs; it was calmer because they had a daughter who was nine. They were ensconced in their careers. But they’d rented a tiny beach house in Montauk that summer, and those Friday nights when he would arrive for the weekend, joining her and Melissa, had been seriously perfect: the late dinners on that splinter-fest the three of them called a picnic table. The way she and Richard would ravish each other after nearly a week apart, once Melissa had fallen asleep. The margaritas on Saturday afternoons. They’d had her friends out with them two weekends, and the grown-ups had actually danced to the vinyl on the portable turntable that she had brought to the house to surprise him. They had danced like they were back at some grungy rock-and-roll venue near Saint Mark’s and once again were in their twenties.

  But now she found herself questioning those days in between, when she and Melissa had lived with their cat at the beach. What really had he been doing back in Bronxville? What really had he been doing in the city? She grew angry at herself for doubting him now, because he didn’t deserve that. But she couldn’t help it. By the time she finally fell asleep, she found herself wondering if her brother was correct and they all would have been better off if Richard had told her nothing—nothing at all.

  Alexandra

  My first days when I was a prisoner in Moscow, before I was brought to the cottage, Inga would sit beside me on the hotel bed. She would either use her laptop computer or my cell phone, and she would send e-mails or texts to my grandmother and pretend they were from me. At first, she would need to ask me questions: she would want to know the names of my friends at school or the girls in dance class. I was supposed to give her names of people I wanted my grandmother to say hi to, such as Nayiri. Or the name of a favorite teacher, maybe. I was supposed to come up with ballet stories my grandmother could tell Madame.

  I considered making up names as a distress signal. Maybe my grandmother would understand this was big mayday and I was in trouble. But what if my grandmother asked me who these people were? Inga would know I was lying, and I was scared of the new ways they would find to punish me.

  One time, Inga asked me to pick two things I wanted Grandmother to give to Vasily to mail to me. I picked my hoodie sweatshirt with the logo of the Armenian soccer team and a pair of black pajamas with white silhouettes of dogs with floppy ears. I never got them. What a surprise. Vasily probably just threw the clothes in the trashcan in his office. No, come to think of it, he probably gave them to some other girl whose mother or father was dying so he could worm his way into her family’s heart, too—and then kidnap her and make one more human sex toy.

  Other times, still pretending she was me, Inga would tell my grandmother how busy I was and how hard I was working. She would write that I loved the dance teachers here. She would say I was making new friends.

  At some point, Inga must have suspected that I was thinking of ways to send secret, coded SOS. Maybe I hesitated. Maybe I sounded guilty. She sighed and looked at me with her big eyes like I was huge disappointment to her. Then she t
old me that if I did not try harder to help, my grandmother would lose her job at the hospital. Vasily would see to that. She said that if I tried to hint about what was really going on, my grandmother might even have a horrible accident on her way to work. Even nurses wind up with broken bones, she told me. And she reminded me (as she did often) of the first video they had made of me naked with the men, and how easy it would be to share that video (or any of the others they had forced me to make) with my whole world in Yerevan.

  My grandmother would write back that she missed me, but was so happy for me and so excited for my future. One evening when Inga read me one of those e-mails, I wept so much that Inga rubbed my shoulders and my back, and told me that in the end we would all find happiness. To this day, I have no idea if she believed that for even a second.

  …

  Prisoners count the blocks in their cells or the rivets on their tin toilets. They count the squares in the metal bars of their door or in the front of the cell window—if there is a window.

  I watched television those first days in Moscow. I curled up in a ball on the bed and counted the paisley teardrops on the wallpaper. I counted the stripes on the upholstery on the loveseat. I counted the birds that would sit like bookends on the edge of the roof of the building across the street. I considered breaking the window and screaming for help; I considered breaking the window and jumping to my death.

  I thought of all the fairy-tale princesses locked away in towers in dark forests. Why did Rapunzel not kill herself?

  Even though I had that TV and a radio, I would sit by the window for hours and stare out at the world that was now kept from me.

  By then they had taken my clothes. They had removed the white terrycloth bathrobes from the closet to make sure that I was always naked. (At first, I would try and turn the bed sheets into pretend togas. When they figured out what I was doing, they threatened to take away my blankets and sheets if they ever walked in and the bed was not made.)

  The only people I saw were Inga, my guards, and the men who would come fuck me.

  …

  Before we left for the cottage, I tried to escape from the hotel. Where I would have gone if I had made it is a mystery since I had no money, no credit card, no phone, and no passport. I had no clothes. At that point, I had not even been allowed outside my hotel room. I think I just hoped I would make it to the lobby and then to the street. I would find a police guy who wasn’t corrupt. (Even that was going to be long shot.) But I want you to know that I tried.

  Months later, I would try to escape the cottage, too. Obviously, that was also a failure.

  But first there was the hotel disaster.

  One of the dudes who watched the hallway got his tip, which basically was me: call it part of my on-the-job training. Inga would coach me as the guard climbed on top of me. Or I climbed on top of him. This time the guard was called Rad. (Who knows what his real name was? Radomir maybe.) He was drug-addict thin and I guess in his early twenties. He always reeked of cheap cologne. I could smell him in the hallway even through the shut hotel room door. I would watch him through the peephole and breathe through my mouth so I wouldn’t have to inhale orange and musk. Rad hoped to be a black and white dude someday, but I didn’t see it then and I don’t see it now. He was not smart enough. And he was too nice. I mean that.

  He had forgotten a rubber, and even though I had been on the pill for seven days, Inga said she would go downstairs and get him one. You can’t take chances with new merchandise, right?

  “No funny business, you two,” she said, smiling like a perky schoolteacher, and meaning simply, “Don’t fuck.” Then she left the room and he sat back on the bed on his knees, his dick a thin flagpole in his lap, and I leaned up on my elbows. I heard in my head the word downstairs, which meant that Inga might be gone a few minutes. And Rad was in the bedroom with me. So, there was no one in the hallway. All I had to do was get past Rad, sneak to the stairwell, race down to the lobby, and then run into the street. Sneak, race, run. I am not a violent girl, but I had just spent a week trapped in hotel room as a sex slave student. This was my big chance: I was ready to attack Rad.

  There were identical brass lamps on the tables on both sides of the bed. It seemed to me that I could conk Rad on the head with one. I could grab his clothes—at least his shirt—off the cushy chair in the corner. And I could be off. So now it was a five-step plan: Conk. Grab. Sneak. Race. Run.

  I acted like I was stretching my right arm. I purred. I tried to smile at Rad like happy little slut. (I was not yet a “courtesan”: I was just a fifteen-year-old kid trying to look like she enjoyed getting banged by strangers with scratchy scruff on their faces.) Then I grabbed the lamp by its stand, using both my hands because I discovered it was too heavy and wide to lift with one hand, and I pulled it as hard as I could. What happened next happened quick: first, the lamp’s cord did not pull easily from the wall, so Rad had an extra second to see what was coming and get his hands in front of his face. Second, the lamp had a shade which acted like automobile airbag when I tried to smack him on the skull the first time. When I tried to hit him a second time, he grabbed my arms and suddenly we were wrestling, and for a thin guy he was very strong. Or, at least, he was stronger than me—which is probably no big deal. He kicked the lamp off the bed with his bare foot and pinned me down, kneeling on my stomach and pressing my arms back into the mattress.

  “Are you crazy?” he asked me.

  And I was yelling at him to let me go, begging and crying that I had to get away, but he just shook his head and laughed. So I spat at him. It was the first time that I had ever spat on a person. I think growing up I had figured I would go through life without ever spitting on a person. I guess not.

  It was right about then that Inga returned. She had not had to go downstairs to a drugstore for condoms, after all. She found one in her purse while she was waiting for the elevator.

  She looked as mad as I would see her for a long time, her eyes wide like insane person.

  Rad tried to take the bullet for me. That’s what I mean about how he might have been just too nice for this line of work. Here I had just spat on him and tried to hit him on the head with a lamp, and still he wanted to protect me. He said he had gotten overanxious and I was trying to stop him so I didn’t get pregnant. But Inga believed this like she believed in Santa Claus or communism.

  I thought they would beat me.

  But beating is just not good for the product. Makes it less attractive. Less valuable. They try not to beat a girl if they can help it. (Sometimes, at first, I made it so they couldn’t help it.) Usually they drug you or hold you underwater or take away your food.

  That night would be the first time they drugged me.

  …

  I should have kicked Rad in the crotch. I know that now. I did not know that then.

  …

  There was a new girl on the hotel room floor. I would discover that the next night, when I woke from my drug sleep and heard her banging on walls. At first I thought the banging was a dream. I had had a whole ballet of very strange dreams: exotic flowers (always cut), tropical fish (always plump), and men in black suits (always in need of a shave). But then I knew. I knew exactly what the pounding was. I had pounded just like that myself.

  Chapter Seven

  Kristin wasn’t wild about this reverse commute to Bronxville on Monday morning, but it was clear that Melissa rather enjoyed it. The girl didn’t like having to get up so early—the two of them awoke at Grandmother’s apartment at five-thirty so that they could catch a six-forty-five train—but once they were seated and the conductor had scanned their tickets, Melissa admitted that there was something glamorous about the experience.

  “Well, we’ll get to do it again tomorrow,” Kristin had told her. Twenty minutes later, they were walking from the station to the school—a long, magisterial, Gothic edifice that looked like it should be anchoring an Ivy League college. All of Bronxville’s children went there, whether they were seven
or seventeen. It had been built in the early 1920s, and now sixteen hundred students were crammed into it between their arrival for kindergarten and their departure for colleges with (Kristin sometimes joked) nationally ranked lacrosse and soccer teams. Every school day Melissa would go to the elementary school wing, and Kristin would dive into the hormonal, seemingly primeval ooze that marked the high school section. The same architect, Harry Leslie Walker, designed three of the four buildings at the corner of Pondfield and Midland: the school, the library, and the church. When she and Richard were first showing her mother the home they were buying and what would become their neighborhood, her mother had stood at this corner and said, her tone somewhere between judgmental and bemused, “It’s pretty: Disneyland for WASPs.” But it was pretty, and the school was supposed to be very good, Kristin remembered thinking defensively. A year later, she would be teaching there. A year and a half after that, Melissa would be enrolled in the kindergarten.

  Richard had managed to reach Patricia Bryant on Sunday afternoon, and the detective believed that the crime lab would be finished sometime on Monday. But to be safe, she had suggested that Richard not schedule the cleaning crew until Tuesday. That meant, he had told Kristin, that they should plan to spend Monday night at her mother’s and move back home on Tuesday—after school. After, he hoped, the cleaning crew had left. He had said he would spend Monday night at the hotel, but he hoped that she would allow him to move back home on Tuesday. She had been evasive on the phone, though she knew that in the end she would say yes. After all, he would have been at the house all Tuesday anyway, supervising whatever it was these cleaners were doing. (For reasons she couldn’t fathom, she saw the crew working in white hazmat suits, as if they were cleaning up a nuclear plant meltdown.) But she agreed that he should spend Monday evening at the Millennium: one last night of penance.

  “Mommy?”

  Kristin looked down at her daughter. They were waiting for the traffic light to change so they could cross the street. “Yes, sweetie?”