The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  And so we were off. In some ways, we were the most naive girls in the whole world about everything except sex and makeup and clothing and the New York Post. (Once we got to Manhattan, I read them the New York Post like it was the Bible and we were nuns. We studied Page Six. We looked for stories about pop stars and reality people and, of course, The Bachelor. They had told us to read a newspaper and we sure did.) But it had been a long time since we were free—in some ways, never.

  Never.

  And maybe we weren’t really free, even then. After all, we were terrified. We were afraid of practically everyone. The Russians. The police guys. This was not like that day long, long ago when I was still in Yerevan and I was packing for Moscow. When I thought I was about to become a ballerina. This was not about the future at all. This was just about trying to find ways to be invisible. To stay alive. To not be killed like our poor baby Crystal.

  Chapter Nine

  The conversation Tuesday night was infuriating and brief. Richard texted Philip for Spencer Doherty’s cell and then went outside in the dark to call the son of a bitch. He stood in his driveway, occasionally staring up at the light in the master bedroom from which he was exiled.

  “You fucked the girl in my daughter’s bedroom! You left your goddamn rubber there! What the fuck were you thinking!” he said the moment Spencer answered his phone.

  “Not your girl,” said Spencer. “I fucked the blonde. So chill, okay?”

  “My girl? I don’t have a girl! I have a daughter, and—”

  “Look, I was drunk. I don’t know what I did with the condom. If I dropped it someplace stupid, I’m sorry. Blame it on the tequila.”

  “You’re an ass, you know that?”

  “Are you finished?”

  “Am I finished?”

  “Are you finished getting medieval on my ass about something that really doesn’t matter? I kind of assumed you were calling to tell me how I was getting my twenty-five grand. Whether you were going to drop off a check at the hotel or make me meet you someplace for it.”

  “How can you look at yourself in the mirror?”

  “Think about it another day. Maybe two. But screaming at me and insulting me only makes me less…patient. And it makes me focus on how much I’m really going to need. So, that twenty-five grand? It just became thirty.”

  “Already you’re asking for more? How did I know you’d do that? Is it because you’re such a pathetic, sexist loser?”

  “Just words, buddy. Just words. So, here are the only ones you should be thinking about: I will ruin you. I really will. I’m in survival mode. So make no mistake: I…will…ruin…you. Sleep on ’em, okay?”

  And then Richard heard him hang up.

  …

  The next morning, Wednesday, Richard sank deep into the leather couch in the TV room and tried to make sense of the unexpected numbness that came with aloneness. The way it had stunned him into a somnambulant torpor. Outside on the street a TV news van had parked for about fifteen minutes, filmed the house, and moved on. They probably had him peering from behind the curtains. He wondered when they’d go away once and for all.

  He flipped the channels aimlessly among the talk shows, soap operas, and reruns of ancient sitcoms that seemed to dominate daytime TV, uninterested in a digital buffet even hundreds of channels long, and tried to imagine what Kristin and Melissa were doing or thinking that moment at the school. He was having far more success entering the mind of his wife: yesterday she had looked at the bloodstains and detritus and told him that their house had been scarred. She had seen the used condom and said their marriage had been violated. Last night he had slept downstairs on a futon on the living room floor—there was no way he was going to sleep on the living room couch, now a prop from a splatter film—because it was clear that his wife couldn’t abide him beside her after all. She couldn’t abide him on the same floor.

  Or, more accurately, last night he had tried to sleep. Mostly he had dozed fitfully on the futon, wondering if he would have been better off at a hotel. Kristin said that before she had walked in the front door, she had convinced herself that the party wasn’t as bad as her visions. Now? Now she knew it was worse. The condom in her daughter’s bedroom had destroyed the fragile equilibrium she had recovered. She was, she had said, her voice muted by despair, unsure now whether they could even stay in the house. In the neighborhood. She dreaded having to return to her classroom.

  “But you’ve been back two days. The worst is over,” he had said, believing his argument was eminently reasonable. “It’s not like your students will know about the condom.”

  “But I will,” she had countered. “Besides…”

  “Go on.”

  “They all know how sordid last Friday night was. Everyone does.”

  He nodded. She was, he feared, in fact underestimating how sordid everyone presumed the party was. And how squalid. He knew what was in the newspapers and on the web. He knew the sorts of photos and video that existed on Spencer’s cell phone. But he sure as hell wasn’t going to correct her.

  His daughter’s frame of mind was less clear to him, in part because she wasn’t asking him questions about what specifically had occurred—which, when he was honest with himself, he was actually rather thankful for—and in part because he wasn’t sure how much she understood about sex. She hadn’t known that it was a used condom when she had started to reach for it, curious. Thank God, Kristin had been with her. He wasn’t there, but in his mind he saw Kristin diving like a cornerback to grab a loose football off the ground. She had scooped it up before their daughter could touch it. It was a testimony to the reflexive courage of a mother—the maternal selflessness—that Kristin had grabbed the damn thing with bare hands as if it were a mere pretzel that had fallen to the floor, rather than the preternaturally disgusting biohazard that it was.

  Still, he knew his daughter was scared. He suspected that she was afraid for her parents’ marriage, and he had a sense she was unnerved that he wasn’t going in to work. It was like he was in time-out—which he guessed he was.

  About two hours ago, he had phoned Hugh Kirn, that doctrinaire pedant of a lawyer at Franklin McCoy, but either Kirn was truly on another call—as his secretary had said—or he was avoiding him. Still, the lawyer hadn’t yet called him back. And so half an hour ago he had phoned Dina Renzi. She’d said she would give Kirn a ring and check in. She would remind Kirn once more how unlikely it was that Richard would be subjected to criminal charges, and how already the public spectacle was dissipating: the stories in the tabloids and on the web were all about Monday’s arrests, and filled more with legalese than prurience. Even a tale as juicy as this one—investment bankers and hookers, dead Russian mobsters in a refined Westchester suburb, a manhunt for a pair of female killers—had a pretty short shelf life in the digital age. And as for Spencer’s increased demand? She had said two things, neither of which made him feel any better. Pay it. And remember these weren’t naked pictures of Jennifer Lawrence someone had hacked from her iCloud account. He wasn’t Brad Pitt. They really weren’t worth a whole hell of a lot.

  He reminded her of all he still could lose, and she had reminded him that this is what happens when you take naked girls upstairs to the guest room.

  And now he was waiting for Dina or Kirn to call him back.

  Absentmindedly he fingered the Band-Aid on his neck; for the first time in years, he had cut himself shaving, and it was a doozy. Thank God you couldn’t kill yourself with a Gillette Fusion razor.

  He scrolled through the contacts on his iPhone. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find, but he was hoping there was a name there he could talk to. Just call and say hello. He had noticed that none of his golf buddies had phoned him since that one call on Saturday afternoon, and that was well before the scope of the violence and bacchanal were clear. Of course, those guys might be more accurately described as golf acquaintances: a group of men, all five to ten years older than he was, whom he saw on occasional Saturdays. They
talked about work and they talked about their families, but he was pretty sure he had never spent any time with any of them away from the country club. Away from the golf course. Their wives recognized each other when their paths crossed at supermarkets and restaurants, but Kristin had never taught any of their children.

  He was also acutely aware that none of the people he thought were his friends at Franklin McCoy had checked in. He guessed he was glad the women he worked with hadn’t called. He was embarrassed, and he wasn’t sure what he would have said—what someday soon he would have to say—to Anna Gleason. Or to Sue Miles. Would they be sickened or merely surprised? He couldn’t decide. And the men? He had almost invited two of his male work pals to the party, so he would have some friends of his own there: David Pace and Will Dundon. He always enjoyed having lunch with one or both of them, and they were clearly a pair who wouldn’t have minded a stripper and a little harmless drinking. But in the end, he hadn’t. And he hadn’t, he knew, for the same reason he hadn’t invited the men with whom he played golf or the fellow he went to college with who lived in Scarsdale or the male halves of any of the couples with whom he and Kristin socialized. (Lord, the male halves of those couples didn’t dare call him: they were all friends through their wives.) He hadn’t invited any of his friends because he had understood on some core level that this whole bachelor party thing was kind of juvenile. Kind of disturbing. Kind of gross. He hadn’t even told anyone ahead of time that he was hosting it.

  He guessed that was why his friends hadn’t called him first. But Dundon and Pace from Franklin McCoy? He feared there was another reason, one that transcended awkwardness: self-preservation. At the moment, he was in exile. He was a pariah at the bank, and he was going to be given a very wide berth.

  He wondered what would happen if he called his idiot younger brother and told him what Spencer was doing. So, Philip, your good friend Spencer is trying to blackmail me. His brother might be able to shame Spencer into letting go or at least stopping at thirty. But probably not. Spencer was a loose cannon. For all Richard knew, Spencer might go ballistic if the Chapman brothers ganged up against him: he might launch the video. He might become the wolf in a trap that chews off its own leg: upload the video and watch it go viral faster than the flu. He might be throwing away its blackmail potential, but he’d be ruining a certain Franklin McCoy managing director.

  Besides, Richard knew he wasn’t emotionally prepared to tell Philip that the video existed. He was ashamed. He was Philip’s older brother, and older brothers never went to their younger brothers for help—at least not in the Chapman family. He held himself to a higher standard than Philip, and the video compromised that moral authority. He understood on some level that eventually he might have to tell his younger sibling. But he wasn’t there yet.

  Now he tossed his iPhone onto one of the leather couch cushions beside him and watched it slide over the stains where strangers had been fucking last week. The bottom line? All of those names in his iPhone were worthless. He had absolutely no one on his side but Dina Renzi, and she was only there because he was paying her.

  …

  It was Claudia’s family’s turn that Wednesday to drive the three girls to dance—Melissa and Claudia and Emiko—and because dance didn’t begin until four-thirty, there was always time for ice-cream between school and studio. The ice-cream parlor was around the corner from the dance studio in Scarsdale. The three girls had ballet for an hour and then jazz for an hour. It was, Melissa had heard Claudia’s mom observe any number of times, a pretty serious workout, even for kids who were nine. But Melissa looked forward to it immensely: she and Emiko (and even Claudia, once in a while) practiced daily what they learned each Wednesday afternoon. This deep into the autumn, it would be dark when the girls emerged from the studio.

  Today Claudia’s mother, Jesse, was driving, but equally often it was Claudia’s dad. The two of them both worked from home a lot. Her dad was a computer engineer and her mom was a copywriter. Now the three girls were sitting in a booth and eating different variations on the ice-cream sundae, while Jesse sipped her coffee, read news stories and texts off her smartphone, and occasionally chimed in on the girls’ conversation. Claudia was sitting beside her mother on one side of the booth, while Melissa and Emiko sat across from them on the other.

  Abruptly Jesse put her phone down on the thick wooden tabletop and leaned across the table toward Melissa. Melissa thought that Jesse was—very much like her own mom—very pretty. But unlike her mom, Jesse dressed more like a teenager. Or at least, Melissa guessed, like a much younger woman. Her mom said it was because while Jesse worked at home most days, when she had meetings she had to look more stylish and hip than a schoolteacher. Melissa could tell that she must have come straight to the school from a meeting to pick up the girls, because she was decked out in black and gray animal print leggings and a black jacket that looked sort of like a man’s, except it was cut like an hourglass. Her leather boots had stitching the same color gray as her leggings.

  “So, Melissa,” she asked, “how are you?” She had emphasized the verb to stress that she genuinely wanted to know—that she was sincerely interested. Melissa understood that this was no mere social formality, where she was only supposed to nod and say fine. She paused the spoon with her chocolate ice cream in midair and thought for a moment. Claudia and Emiko were watching her. Jesse was watching her. She knew that everyone was talking about her father behind her back, but only Claudia—who, Melissa’s mom said, was one of those brilliant math kids who were born without filters—had wanted to talk to her face-to-face about the dead men and the prostitutes in her house. Claudia had wanted to know if she was afraid of the dead men’s ghosts (Melissa had not been afraid until Claudia had suggested that the spirits might have chosen to remain in the house), and whether her parents were going to get a divorce because of the prostitutes (she was indeed stressing about that, and the fears only became more pronounced when her mom had told her dad that he had to sleep downstairs in the living room—not even upstairs in the guest room).

  But even if Jesse had asked the question with the hope that Melissa would respond with a deep and honest answer, the girl wasn’t prepared to go there. At least not yet. Melissa shrugged and said, “Fine.” Then she put her ice cream into her mouth.

  Jesse shook her head and reached across the booth, gently resting her fingers atop Melissa’s hand that wasn’t holding the spoon. “I get it,” the mother said. “This stuff is really confusing and scary. It’s hard to talk about.”

  “I’d be scared of the ghosts,” Claudia piped in. “I told her, Mom.”

  “Claudia, I specifically asked you not to talk with Melissa about this weird thing you have about ghosts,” Jesse said, exasperated.

  Claudia shrugged and stirred what was left of her sundae into soup. “Anyway, that’s what would make me not fine.”

  “There is no such thing as ghosts,” Jesse said pointedly, staring deep into Melissa’s eyes. “I’ve told Claudia that. And now I’m telling you that.”

  Melissa looked away. She stared down at the woman’s hand atop hers. Jesse’s nail polish was a shade of red that reminded her of the maple leaves on the trees in their yard a week ago. Now most of those leaves were on the lawn. If her dad hadn’t still been in the city on Sunday—or maybe if they had all been allowed to go home—he probably would have raked them up that day.

  “Claudia, dear, I’m not judging here,” Jesse was saying now to her own daughter. “But if you want the ice cream to be soup, why don’t you just order a shake?”

  “Because a shake is a shake and soup’s soup.”

  Melissa focused on Jesse’s nails. They were perfect. She wanted nails just like that, she decided. She wanted to wear leggings just like Jesse’s.

  “How is your house?” the woman asked her, the tone nothing like the playfulness that marked her question to her own daughter about why she insisted on liquefying her ice cream.

  Melissa thought about this. She
thought about the bloodstains. She thought about the rubber on the blue plastic Tucker Tote lid. Before she could respond to Jesse, however, Emiko was saying something, and so Melissa turned her attention to her other friend.

  “My grandmother always saw ghosts,” Emiko was explaining. “My grandfather never did, but my grandmother was always seeing them. She saw her aunts. She saw this friend of hers from elementary school who had died super young. She used to talk to them.”

  Jesse lifted that beautiful hand of hers off of Melissa’s, and sat back against the bench on her side of the booth. She folded her arms across her chest. Then: “Melissa, are you scared of ghosts?” Again, there was that elongation of a single syllable—in this case, you. A sheep, it seemed to Melissa, when stretched so far. A homonym. Baaaaaaaa. She tried to remember how to spell the word for a female sheep, but she couldn’t.

  “Melissa?” Jesse asked when she didn’t answer right away.

  She put her spoon into the dish and pondered the…undead. She really hadn’t been scared until Claudia had put the idea into her head the other day that her house might now be haunted. Certainly last night she had been relieved that she was allowed to share her parents’ bed with her mom, even though it was because a man and a prostitute had had sex in her own bedroom, and because now her mom didn’t want her own husband in bed with her. Dad had been—and here was a word he had taught her, trying to make light of the situation—exiled to the living room. She guessed she would have been scared if she had had to sleep alone in her own bedroom. And now the idea that Emiko—far and away the sanest of her friends—seemed to believe in ghosts, only gave more credence to Claudia’s suggestion that she and her mom and dad were now sharing the home with a couple of dead men. Moreover, they were dead men who did bad things when they were alive. Which meant they might not be especially playful ghosts. Not Casper. They might be the kind who killed you in the night. When it was dark. They might be the kind of ghosts who quite literally scared you to death.