The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  It was only when he was making the bed once more, pressing the sheets under the mattress, that he understood what had happened: Kristin had thrown the bedding away Tuesday night. She hadn’t wanted to wash the sheets or the pillowcase; in her opinion, there was no water in the world hot enough to cleanse them for their little girl after a strange man and an escort had had sex in that bed. And the garbage had been picked up yesterday morning. If the number had ever been in this bedroom, it was long gone.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, a white lie that he hoped would help console her.

  She was leaning against Melissa’s bookcase. “It was my only hope,” she said, her voice flat. “That was it.”

  “No, you’ll be okay,” he said. “You will.” He suggested they go downstairs and have a cup of coffee while he figured out what to do next.

  …

  They sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee. It was barely two-thirty in the afternoon; he doubted that Kristin and Melissa would be back for at least another couple of hours, which diminished any sense of urgency he might otherwise have been feeling. He could text Kristin to see what they were up to—make sure they were still somewhere in midtown Manhattan—but somehow that felt incriminating. Later, he thought to himself, a text like that could only come back to haunt him. He assumed by the time Kristin returned that either he would have brought the girl to the police station or the two of them would be sitting right here. He certainly wasn’t going to hide the fact that Alexandra had shown up at their house. He wouldn’t; he couldn’t. Still, that conversation was not going to be pretty.

  She had taken off her sunglasses and knit cap, and brushed her hair with a white plastic brush she had pulled from her backpack. Now she looked more like the girl who had sat naked upon one of the beds upstairs, and less like the runaway waif who had been waiting for him outside on the stoop.

  “What if my wife had come home first? What if my wife had been here when you knocked on the door?” he asked, hoping he hadn’t sounded judgmental or angry. He was honestly curious as to what she was thinking.

  “I would have said hi. I would have asked to look upstairs in bedroom for piece of paper.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Me, too. I would have said hi. I would have asked her for help—just like I asked you.”

  “But why in the world would you think she might help you?”

  “Did you tell her we had sex?”

  “No—because we didn’t. But I told her I went upstairs with you and we almost did.”

  “Wow. Did not see you doing that.”

  “We’re married.”

  “Look, I am in very big trouble and you are very nice man. It seemed to me that you must have very nice wife.”

  “I do have a very nice wife. But she’s human. She’s not a saint. Hell, maybe she is a saint; she isn’t divorcing me. But she was really mad at me. I’m not an adulterer. I don’t have affairs. And yet, you are…well, Alexandra, you’re beautiful. You’re beautiful,” he repeated. “And you were there on that bed and, that moment, mine. I mean…tell me something.”

  “Okay.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “You swear that’s the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “God. That is still so ridiculously young.”

  “There are girls like me who are younger.”

  “That only makes this all the sadder. And at nineteen? You’re not that other woman. I mean, my wife would never view you as a romantic rival. But I was upstairs with you. I was undressed. We were undressed. That should never, ever have happened. And so my wife is—was—justifiably pissed off at me. To be honest with you, Alexandra, I’m not sure she would have helped you.”

  “I know that expression, ‘other woman.’ I am mere courtesan. Plaything.”

  He sighed. Courtesan and plaything were both euphemisms, though each word conjured for him a very different image. The first summoned Versailles. The second? A motorized toy car for a child. But he knew what she meant. He knew exactly what she meant.

  “Where is she now?” asked Alexandra.

  “She’s in the city with my daughter.”

  Abruptly Cassandra appeared out of nowhere and leapt onto the kitchen table, nearing sliding into Alexandra’s cup and saucer. The cat looked at the girl and then at him. He lifted her into his lap, but she was more interested in sniffing the girl’s backpack and boots and jumped back onto the kitchen floor.

  “So, if your wife comes home and finds me here?” she asked.

  “I would wager, at least at first, that she would be a tad angry.”

  “Then I should leave.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “No. You can’t leave. Not after what I just saw. Where I just was.”

  “You were at work? You get to dress like boys’ soccer coach at work?” She was smiling ever so slightly.

  “No. I wasn’t at work. I wish I had been at work, but no such luck,” he said. He sipped his coffee and gathered himself. He had to tell her about her friend. She had to know. “I was just in Brooklyn,” he continued. “I was at King’s County Hospital. I was at the morgue. I was asked to identify a dead body.”

  “Sonja,” she said, that smile instantly evaporating and her voice growing wistful and sad. She reached into her jacket pocket for a cigarette. He considered stopping her, but then didn’t. Let her smoke. If a cigarette was going to help her hear this, fine. He had no plan, he realized, no plan at all. He was fumbling in the dark, trying on the fly to figure out what the hell was the right thing to do.

  “Yes. Sonja. I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry. I guess you two were friends.” He watched her light the cigarette with a cheap Bic lighter, and he found himself focused on her fingers and the polish on her thumb. He stood up and found her an ashtray in a cabinet filled with place settings and serving dishes they never used.

  “We were friends,” she said. “But I knew it. I knew she was killed.”

  “How?”

  The tip of her cigarette glowed like a planetarium constellation when she inhaled. “She didn’t call me when she was supposed to. Our signal.”

  “Do you know who killed her?”

  “I do. Guys who worked for dude named Yulian. Bunch of cue-ball-head babies.”

  “How did they not kill you?”

  “I wasn’t with her.” She took another long drag on the cigarette. “Maybe it’s good thing we didn’t find that number. I would have used it—gone to the Georgian—and maybe gotten myself killed like Sonja.”

  A thought came to him and he sat up a little straighter. How in the name of God had he not realized this the moment he saw her on his front stoop? He recalled what the cop had said to him that morning in the morgue: Maybe if they thought you were a witness to something. But it’s not like you’re hiding one of their girls in your guest room. It’s not like one’s hanging around your sunroom.

  “Yes. Obviously they’re after you now,” he said.

  “Obviously.”

  “Could they be on their way here? To my house?”

  “I don’t think I was followed. Maybe they were following me in New York City. But I was at your front door a long time and no one killed me.”

  “But they might look for you here.”

  She shrugged. “I had to go somewhere.” Then she rose to her feet, saying, “I’ll go. I’m sorry.”

  Quickly he put his hand on her shoulder and stopped her. “No, don’t. Please…don’t. You came here for help. I’ll help you.” Nevertheless, he knew that no good could come from her being here. A collage of faces flickered behind his eyes: There was his wife and there was his daughter. There were the girl’s bodyguards, now dead, but there were plenty more just like them. And there were the detectives he had met in the past week, the women and men who had explained to him that his house was a crime scene or showed him the secrets that only a morgue could share. But Alexandra was far more child than whore. She was nineteen. He couldn’t pos
sibly send her outside into the chill October air, where all that awaited her were men like Spencer Doherty and, eventually, death. He thought of the hunting rifle he’d chosen not to buy. The bullets he’d seen in the box. But then he recalled Sonja’s corpse and realized that he could have purchased an assault rifle—he could have bought a bazooka—and he still wouldn’t have had a chance against the kind of men who brought Alexandra to America.

  “You won’t call police guys?” she asked.

  “I haven’t yet,” he said, and she sat back down. And so he did, too. “But if I’m going to help you, I need to know a couple of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like your real name. I’m going to go way out on a limb and guess that it’s not Alexandra. Outside just now, you said…”

  “No, it’s not Alexandra.”

  “Okay, then. What is it?”

  “Anahit.”

  He repeated it. “That’s pretty.”

  “Armenian. Means goddess.”

  “Were you both—you and Sonja—Armenian?”

  “Yes. But Sonja grew up in Volgograd. I grew up in Yerevan. She had blue eyes, remember? Very rare for Armenian girl. It’s because her grandmother was part Russian.”

  “How long have you been here? In America?”

  “A month.”

  “So you’d only been in the United States three weeks when you were brought to my brother’s party.”

  She nodded, and for a moment they both were silent as they recalled how it was exactly a week ago that their worlds had collided—and exploded.

  “Why did Sonja kill your bodyguards? Why last Friday night?”

  She raised a single eyebrow. “Just guards. Not bodyguards.”

  “I’m sorry. Is that why she killed them? Because they were your…your captors?”

  “She was afraid they were going to kill us on way back into New York City. There was a third girl you never met. Crystal. They had already killed her because she was talking to police guy.” She put her cigarette down in the ashtray, and he stared at the circular smudge of her lipstick on the filter.

  “A detective,” he repeated, trying to focus. “She was talking to a detective? Who was he working for? A Manhattan D.A.? Or the U.S. Attorney’s Office?”

  She looked at him, confused, and replied, “For police guys. He was working for police guys.”

  “Got it,” he said. There was no point now in explaining the fine points and particulars of a criminal investigation in America. “So, the police know about you?”

  “I don’t know what they know. I just know they arrested some dudes this week and then let most of them back out. A girl like me has no power. I can’t trust them.”

  He shook his head. He would correct her. He would tell her that she needn’t fear the police, she needn’t worry about going to jail. She was going to be fine. Perhaps he would introduce her to Dina Renzi. The firm would surely pro bono their services on her behalf. Besides, she wasn’t a criminal. Not really. She was a victim, for God’s sake! All this fear she had about jail? She was never going to jail. He began crafting in his head how he would explain to her what the witness protection program was—if she even needed such a thing, which he thought was unlikely—and how she’d be fine. She’d be just fine.

  “Look,” he began, “the police are already investigating the people who brought you to America. That’s clear. They know you were doing what you were doing against your will. But let’s also be clear about this: it was Sonja who killed the two men at the party. Right?” The question was out there before he could frame it properly. He believed in his heart this girl was incapable of that kind of violence, but after all she had been through, one never knew. But, just in case, he had meant to lead her more, to make sure that she didn’t tell him something he shouldn’t know—something not even Dina Renzi would want to know.

  Instead of answering him, however, she reached into her leather jacket and pulled out a handgun. Instantly he grew alert. Not scared, not at all. But watchful. He was surprised, and understood on some level that he shouldn’t have been. Of course she had a gun. Of course.

  “That’s what you think?” she asked.

  Instead of answering, he stared at the weapon. Here he had tried and failed to come home with a handgun just the other day, and now there was one in his kitchen. Just a few feet away. In the slight hands of this nineteen-year-old girl. It was, it seemed to him, strangely and surprisingly beautiful. Russian, he surmised, though he couldn’t have said why. It actually looked a bit like the kind of pistol James Bond used to carry—the old James Bond. The Sean Connery Bond. She dropped it onto the table, rattling her cup and saucer.

  “What makes you think I didn’t kill Kirill?” she continued when he was silent. “What makes you think I didn’t kill that big, mean cue-ball-head baby?”

  “Because I don’t,” he answered finally. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Because…Anahit…you didn’t. Okay?”

  Using a single finger, she spun the pistol in a circle on the tabletop, pushing the gun by its grip. “Six bullets left in magazine. Six. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Then tell me something,” he said. “Tell me one thing. Tell me one thing I should know.”

  Alexandra

  I told him lots.

  I told him about my mother and my grandmother and the sculptures on the streets in Yerevan. I told him about Vasily. I told him about the cottage and Moscow and coming to America. I told him that like his little girl, I once had whole trunk full of American Barbie dolls.

  “But how?” he asked. “Where in the world did you get them? How did you get them?”

  I only had three cigarettes left in the pack, but I smoked another one as I told him. I told him the story just as it had been told to me.

  …

  On Wednesday, December 7, 1988, my father and grandfather—my father’s father—were stealing two boxes of wristwatches for a Communist Party official. Very big-deal guy. The official was going to give them away at fancy gathering at his fancy dacha on Lake Sevan. And the wristwatches were with other stuff in these two crates.

  My father and grandfather were smooth operators. You had to be in the Soviet Union in 1988. But they were also strong and smart and kind. My father, my mother said, was among the bravest freedom fighters in Nagorno-Karabakh. He was a hero. I wish I had gotten to spend more than eighteen months with him, but I didn’t, and I don’t remember a single thing because I was just a baby and then just a toddler. I told Richard how my father had died in hydroelectric plant accident.

  The crates had come to Armenian city you’ve never heard of called Gyumri. They had come to the airport from East Berlin. That’s how long ago this was. And Gyumri was still called Leninakin. The watches were supposed to go to a jewelry store at the Alexandrapol Hotel. It was the sort of store that has velvet ropes and plush carpeting and glass cases with lights inside them to make the diamonds glitter like a disco ball. But that party official had other ideas. My father and my grandfather worked at the airport, and so it was easy for them to “redirect” the crates into my grandfather’s sand-colored Lada. They put one crate in the backseat of the car and one in the trunk. It barely fit, not because the crate was so big but because the trunk was so small. One time, I was dancing at a party for group of Moscow gangsters—it was scary, because Moscow gangsters are so insane they make cue-ball-head babies look like kindergarten teachers—and someone made a joke about putting a body in the trunk. Then someone else said that it would have to be very little body. It sure couldn’t be anyone in the room, they laughed, not even me or Sonja, who was with me that night. It’s true. You can’t even fit a teenage exotic dancer who is really just sex toy into the trunk of a Lada.

  My grandfather and father were supposed to drive the wristwatches to Lake Sevan, but my grandfather had forgotten the directions to the dacha. They were on the dresser at his and my grandmother’s apartment. And so the two of
them went there. Six stories and thirty apartments, lots of concrete and many thousands of cinder blocks. And none of it built to withstand an earthquake, especially the sort of 6.8 magnitude earthquake that would destroy the city. They say the Soviet Union building codes were the same in Gyumri, where there was always big chance of an earthquake, as they were in Kiev, where there really wasn’t big chance at all.

  Of course, Kiev had other problems in 1988. The city’s not that far from Chernobyl, and 1988 isn’t that far from 1986. As Americans like to say, do math.

  My grandfather ran up the stairs to my grandparents’ apartment on the fifth floor while my father waited in the car, smoking a black-market cigarette. My grandfather probably went two steps at a time, skipping every other stair. He was very vigorous. My grandmother used to put her hands on his cheeks and kiss him, calling him her Cossack.

  It was while my grandfather was upstairs that my father heard the rumble. It was very low. But he knew what it meant.

  Within seconds, that rumble became a roar. As my father was snuffing out his cigarette, the road rippled up like giant sea swell, the asphalt growing cracks like big black spider veins. Then some of those veins swelled into canyons wide enough to swallow whole cars. But not my grandfather’s Lada. Instead, my grandfather’s Lada was suddenly facing uphill. The telephone and electrical wires were snapping, and the transformers on top of the poles became like the sparklers children play with on big holidays. Then one by one they exploded.

  My father climbed from the car, planning to run up the stairs and rescue his parents. Crazy, yes? But he was their son. Then, before his very eyes—which soon would be filled with so much dust that he would only be able to see out of his left one for hours—the building pancaked. It just collapsed in a funnel of smoke and soot that fluttered down upon him like volcanic ash. He was twenty-three years old. Most of the buildings on that street pancaked like that; most of the people were flattened. The whole street was rubble.