The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Nothing happened in my room, right?”

  The child was not looking at her. She seemed to be gazing at a squirrel that was about to shimmy up one of the trees in the small copse by the French bistro. Still, even without being able to see the girl’s face, Kristin understood the unease that festered beneath the question. What precisely was Melissa imagining might have occurred there?

  “No,” she answered, forcing a firmness into her voice that she did not feel in her heart, but determined to provide the reassurance the child craved. “Absolutely nothing happened in your room.”

  And if she was mistaken? She didn’t want to go there. It was already proving too painful and too difficult to move forward.

  …

  That day the police arrested five men in two separate raids, one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan, all of whom were linked in some fashion with the escort service that Spencer Doherty used. They were all Russian, though some were now American citizens. Three were charged with, among other felonies, the recruitment, provision, and obtaining of people for the purposes of commercial sex acts. Two were charged with kidnapping. All five were charged with procurement of prostitution. There was the likelihood that some of them would be charged with laundering money as well.

  In addition, five young women, two from Georgia and three from Russia, were rescued. None of them, the news reports said, would be charged with prostitution, though that was the sole reason why they had been brought to the United States. The fact that they were not arrested—the fact that the U.S. Attorney’s Office was viewing them as victims, not criminals—was deemed a monumental victory by a variety of human and women’s rights advocates. All five of them were illegal aliens. All of them could have been teenagers, though their actual ages were not yet known.

  None of the men and none of the women, according to the papers or the broadcast news, had ever met the still missing Alexandra or Sonja.

  And despite a bail figure that the men’s attorneys argued was obscene—after all, none of them had murdered anyone, and the girls were healthy, well cared for, and, the lawyers insisted, rather happy—the three men who were not charged with kidnapping were back on the street by nightfall.

  …

  Kristin’s first class that day was her section of AP American History, a dozen and a half juniors who this morning were far less interested in antebellum discord than they were in…her. She was asking them questions and trying to fuel a dialogue about the Compromise of 1850, but she could tell from their faces that most of them were focusing only on what may (or may not) have occurred in their history teacher’s house. Dead Russians. Whores. An orgy. The boys looked a little awed while the girls looked a little sad. Sad for her. She was, she sensed, an object of pity in their eyes—that is, when she could meet their eyes. All of the students, the boys as well as the girls, looked down at their notes or at some mystical object just over her shoulder whenever she tried to engage them.

  “How did the South benefit from the compromise?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of her desk. When no one spoke, she decided to ask Caroline directly. Caroline was one of her go-to kids whenever the conversation stalled. She had eyes that were always amused—sometimes sardonically so—a mane of lush auburn hair, and a statuesque figure that allowed her to wear jeans that looked epoxied to her legs. She was on the student council. She was an editor on the student newspaper. She was, Kristin suspected, a bit of a mean girl, and if she didn’t peak in high school (which was always a possibility with these kids), she was going places.

  Instead of answering, however, Caroline said—speaking slowly, haltingly, her tone uncharacteristically awkward—“Mrs. Chapman? Maybe it’s none of our business, but there’s kind of what my dad called at dinner last night an elephant in the room. We’re worried. We’re…”

  “Go ahead, Caroline.” She thought she could see where this was going and wasn’t happy about the direction, but she wasn’t sure how to derail the digression. She saw a few of the boys were staring down at their desks as if someone had replaced their AP textbooks with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. But not all. Reed was watching her. So was Kazuo. So was Frank. And most of the girls were studying her, each of their faces a different point along the continuum between discomfort and dread.

  “Well, my parents said it was better to ask you about all this stuff than not ask you. I mean, if it’s upsetting you, it’s upsetting us. And it might affect how we do on the AP tests.”

  Kristin nodded. She got it. The girl’s parents were worried that the cataclysm in their daughter’s history teacher’s personal life was going to affect their darling’s AP score—and, thus, where she might wind up in college. Trying to keep her tone measured, she asked Caroline, “Do I look upset?”

  The girl waited a second. Then: “Kinda.”

  Kinda. The word had been spoken barely above a whisper, and yet it seemed to echo in the classroom with Matterhorn grandeur. Kinda. Kristin didn’t believe she looked upset; she was despairing inside—she was shamed inside, she was smoldering inside, she was confused inside—but she thought she was keeping it together as far as the world was concerned. As far as a bunch of ostensibly self-absorbed adolescents could tell. She found herself starting to tremble at the very notion that Caroline’s parents saw in the death of two men and her husband’s emotional—if not actual—infidelity only the possibility that their precious child’s AP score might fall from a five to a four.

  “Well, Caroline,” she began, trying (and failing) to maintain eye contact with the sixteen-year-old, “if you don’t want to answer my question about the Compromise of 1850, how about taking a stab at this one: How do I look kinda upset? Any specifics?”

  The girl and her best friend, Ayelet, exchanged glances. They were on the verge of rolling their eyes. “One specific?” she continued.

  Caroline sighed, a magisterial teenage exhalation of exasperation. “Um, this,” she said, and Kristin saw some of the boys—even Reed, usually so diligent, so quiet—struggling to suppress smiles.

  “This?”

  “I guess. I mean, I was just asking if you were upset, and you’re kind of…interrogating me.”

  “I’m not interrogating you.”

  “Okay. Fine. You’re not.”

  Kristin wanted to cry. How many times in the past forty-eight hours had she looked at herself in mirrors at her mother’s and seen her eyes so red, so puffy that she thought she had looked vampiric? Three? Four? More? It seemed that she had always been crying or on the verge of crying. And when she wasn’t, usually it was because she had been seething. But she thought she was keeping it together now. She had avoided the teachers’ lounge before school this morning precisely so she would not have to discuss this nightmare with any of her peers and risk breaking down.

  Okay. Fine. You’re not. She heard the words again in her mind and understood that she had to wipe at her eyes. It wasn’t merely that she could feel them growing moist; it was also a feverish, OCD-like compulsion. But if she did, there was the danger that she would be opening the dam and she would be reduced to sobs in front of her class. She took a breath and sat on her hands.

  “Caroline,” she began, unsure what she was going to say. “Yes. This was an awful couple of days. It seriously…sucked.” She paused, surprised at her candor and her choice of words. She wasn’t trying to talk down to her class; rather, she wondered if she had instinctively reached out to them. “I’m sorry. But the last forty-eight or fifty or whatever hours? The worst of my life. Yup, worse than the death of my father—who I loved a lot. You just never expect to be awakened to the news that there are two dead men in your house. Criminals, yes. People you’ve never met, sure. But still: a double murder. In your home. And you’ve probably heard the rest of the story: my brother-in-law’s bachelor party got a little…crazy. I guess you all know that.”

  She wondered if she sounded a little crazy herself, but it no longer mattered. She released her hands from beneath her hips and wiped at her eye
s. At her cheeks. Because now the tears had been set free, a glacier melting in May, the channels at the edge of her nose brimming with sadness.

  “And you know what, Caroline? Your dad was right. That craziness is an elephant in the room. I’m glad you brought it up.” She forced a smile. “I am kind of a mess. But you know what else? My family will get past this and I will get past this. I’ll make sure you all kill it when AP testing time comes. I’ll be fine and you’ll be fine. I mean that.”

  Caroline nodded. Ayelet stood up, and for a second Kristin feared the girl was going to embrace her. She was afraid that was the extent of her collapse: she needed comfort from the teen girls in her class. In her care. The students had never seen anything like this, and she wondered if she was going to have to rewrite the books on adolescent psychiatry and child development: these kids were empathetic. They were actually worried about her.

  Fortunately, however, the girl simply handed her a tissue.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Welcome.”

  She blew her nose. Then, as Ayelet was sitting down, she had a thought. “One more thing before we get back to the Compromise of 1850. I know a lot of you have younger brothers and sisters, some in the elementary school. So, I have a favor: when you talk about Mrs. Chapman’s meltdown—which I know was epic—please do what you can to make sure the story doesn’t get back to my daughter. Melissa is in the fourth grade. Kazuo, your sister and my daughter obviously are great friends. They’re in the same class. Same after-school dance class, too. So, I would be seriously grateful if all of you could be—and here is an SAT word to keep in mind—circumspect. Judicious.”

  Kazuo grinned. “No prob, Mrs. Chapman. These days? She’s all about the clothes and inappropriate TV.”

  “Melissa, too,” she agreed, and once again she dried her cheeks with her fingers. She felt her wedding and engagement rings against the skin there, and found herself—much to her surprise—smiling back at the boy.

  …

  Richard watched the afternoon sunlight pour through the wide restaurant window and brighten the soupspoon beside his napkin. Most of the lunch crowd was gone now, and the hostess was helping a waiter straighten the white tablecloths and tidy the menus. When Richard looked up from the spoon, his brother was talking—it seemed as if his brother was always talking—moving his hands a bit like he was a lunatic given a conductor’s baton and an orchestra. The gestures were too big for a table this small. And he seemed to be speaking mostly to Spencer Doherty, who was leaning back rather comfortably in the third of the four chairs. The fourth chair, the one opposite the window, was empty except for the blazer that Spencer had draped over it. He was wearing gray suspenders with silhouettes of people tangoing on them.

  “I mean, I know we’re lucky to be alive,” Philip was saying to Spencer, “and I’m not blaming you. It’s not your fault, buddy, it’s really not. But how the hell did it all go so wrong so fast? One minute those girls are like this dream come true—”

  “Wet dream,” Spencer said, pretending to correct him.

  “Wet dream. Agreed. But the next? A nightmare. I mean, how much legal trouble are you in?”

  “Me? A lot. My lawyer is going to stress that I thought I was just hiring dancers. The problem is that I used this service before, and the girls—different girls, but still smoking hot imports—were pretty much down for whatever. So, it will depend on how much the police feel like digging and how much the feds feel like prosecuting me. It’s early, but it looks like the deal will be something like this: no criminal charges in exchange for my testimony against the escort service.”

  “You would testify against the Russians? Are you nuts?”

  “I probably don’t have a choice. If I don’t, I’m looking at charges that may even include sexual assault on a minor—if they can prove either of the girls was underage.”

  Richard felt himself cringe reflexively at the word underage. He almost said something, but his brother beat him to it. “How would they prove that? And…either? Does that mean you fucked them both? You dog, you! Wow!”

  “I only fucked the blonde. But I had the other one naked on my lap, and it’s not like I was sitting on my hands. That could be a problem if it turns out she’s a kid. Besides, that’s only part of the nightmare.”

  “Only part? God. Can’t wait to hear the rest, man.”

  “My legal fees are going to be…costly. You would not believe what I had to plunk down. Scary big. And I may be looking at some very costly civil crap.”

  “Civil crap?”

  “My lawyer has already gotten…overtures…from Chuck’s lawyers. And Brandon’s.”

  “Are you kidding me? What the fuck is that about?”

  “It’s all just preliminary right now. But he’s hearing words like ‘emotional distress.’ ‘Mental anguish.’ All, of course, caused by my ‘reckless’ conduct.”

  “Those pricks! Those gutless bastards! Look, I’ll call them right now and—”

  “Don’t. It’s Brandon’s wife. And I don’t know what the deal is with Chuck. It may be nothing at all. This all may go nowhere. But your calling them won’t make it better and could make it worse.”

  “Bottom line, you’re not looking at jail time, right?” Philip said, both hands silencing an imaginary percussion section.

  “God, no. Can you imagine? Holy fuck, that would be crazy awful. Still, even my legal fees are going to be astronomical. I wonder…”

  “Go on,” Philip encouraged him.

  “Do you think your friends at the party would kick in some dough to cover my lawyer?”

  “Yeah, I don’t see that happening. Didn’t everyone already give you a few hundred bucks each for the girls?”

  “Most of the guys did. Not all. But this isn’t about that. We’re not talking a few hundred bucks each. My legal bills are going to be batshit crazy.”

  “We’re all dealing with fallout,” Philip told him. “I have a fiancée that is still royally pissed. I mean, I have a sick feeling any minute now she is going to call off the wedding.”

  “Are you serious?” Richard asked. He had been so appalled at the conversation around him—it was like dining with sexist (and sexually voracious) seventh graders—that he hadn’t spoken in a few minutes, and the sound of his voice surprised him.

  “I am. And you have to really fuck up to get someone like Nicole so pissed off at you that she calls off a wedding.”

  “I am really sorry, Philip.”

  His brother rolled his eyes and put out his hands palms up, the universal sign for what-the-fuck. Then Philip turned to Spencer and continued. “Meanwhile, my brother here? Leave of absence from work. Not kidding. His company is making him take a leave of absence. How messed up is that? And I think he’s going to have to burn his fucking house down and rebuild it. He’ll have to salt the dirt and the ashes. I mean, you saw the living room. You saw the front hall. You saw—”

  “Spencer?” Richard asked, interrupting his brother and turning toward his brother’s friend.

  Spencer swallowed the last of the beer in his mug and waited.

  “You’re younger than me,” Richard began.

  “Oh, but I aged in the last two days, man. I have aged a lot.”

  “Do you guys just naturally bring hookers to bachelor parties? These days, is that a thing? Is that just…done?”

  “These were party girls. Not hookers.”

  “You just said you were paying for girls who were down for whatever.”

  “Well, yes. But it’s a fine line. An escort—a real high-class chick—can cost a lot more than what I was paying. Given what I’d forked over and what I’d told them, I kind of assumed they were going to fuck Philip and fuck you. I did. I mean, I would never admit that in a deposition or a courtroom. But even that was just an assumption. It’s not like there was a legal expectation. It’s not like I was paying a housekeeper and we laid out precisely what she was supposed to clean—or not clean. And I had no idea that the blonde
would let me fuck her. That was just a happy little treat. And, man, it was a treat. Wow…”

  Philip clapped those hands of his. “I know, I know, I know. It was like fucking a porn star—but real!”

  “Spencer said he had sex with the blonde,” Richard pressed his brother. “And obviously I saw you with her. We all did. But what about Alexandra? Did you have sex with her, too?”

  “God, she has a name,” Philip said, his grin a little mordant. “Nope, I only fucked the blonde. Why, my older brother? Do you have a proprietary interest in this Alexandra?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “I was just giving you shit. But seriously, what do you think her real name is? I guess we’ll find out when they arrest her.”

  “Or when they find her corpse,” Spencer added. “Which would, I must admit, decrease dramatically that whole underage issue thing they’re holding over my head.”

  Philip sat back in his chair and dropped his hands into his lap. “You know, I kind of prefer just viewing them as the blonde and the one with the black hair. It makes this all easier.”

  Philip continued to talk, but Richard stopped listening. He was exasperated and had to shut them out.

  Still, a part of him was relieved that neither Philip nor Spencer had been with Alexandra. She wasn’t his daughter—after the party, he could never view her as a daughter—but he had felt a fatherly pang spring from his chest when he had imagined her with his brother or a creep like Spencer. And the idea of her…dead? Or hiding? Or hurt? It left him woozy. He recalled that moment when she had taken his arm on the stairs in his home, and there in the restaurant he looked down at the spot near his elbow. She was just a kid. It just wasn’t fair.

  He felt a wave of sadness nearly smother him and wondered where she was now.

  …

  Richard was walking two blocks north of the restaurant on his way back to the Millennium when suddenly someone was calling his name and jogging through the afternoon crowds on the sidewalk to catch up to him. It was Spencer.