An Unexpected Guest

by Anne Korkeakivi

  “Last months, eh?” A woman put a hand out to steady her. “Difficult time to travel.”

  A jolly man with white hair and red cheeks offered to lift her bag. By then, she was half convinced that she was with child, Niall and hers. “How kind,” she mumbled, repeating something she must have read in a book or seen in a movie. Nothing felt real anymore, not even herself. She added, “I’m all right. Just a little tired.”

  He wasn’t outside the terminal either, and she slid into the backseat of a taxi, stumbling over the address Niall had made her memorize: Portobello Road 83. Dublin.

  “Portobello sounds like someplace in London,” she’d said when he’d first given her the address, spelling out the word in the notebook by her mattress, under a list of texts about courtly love in Italian. They were in the dark of the tiny room in Cambridge she’d signed the lease on for the upcoming school year, as the end of summer approached. Her skin still felt sore from the mysterious, fleeting trip they’d made, renting a camper, to the Eastern Shore the weekend before. She’d moved in right after their return.

  “Well, this one isn’t,” he’d said and scrutinized her sunburned face in the dim light, as though he were looking to see whether he’d made a mistake in trusting her. “Focus, Clare.”

  She’d nodded, feeling heat rise in her face, laying down her pen. “Will you meet me there?”

  He shook his head.

  “Where, then?”

  He shook his head again.

  She’d never asked him for anything, never dared. She steadied her voice. “Not at all?”

  “Here, in Boston. I’ll get back over before the winter comes.”

  She kept her eyes on him.

  “All right, then, Clare.”

  Still, she waited. This much she needed from him.

  Finally, he acquiesced. “St. Stephen’s Green. The Yeats Memorial. An hour after noon, the next day. I won’t speak to you. But I’ll give you a sign so you’ll understand if it’s all right for you to follow. I’ll stop to light a fag.”

  He’d never bent in any way to accommodate her before, and his compromise sent a surge of astonishment through her. His plan wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but his offer felt like so much more than she’d ever had from him before.

  She picked up her pen to finish writing the address in her notebook. “Portobello Road…?”

  “It won’t have a sign outside. It’s just a small, gray stone building. Don’t write it down,” he’d continued, “in case you get caught and they search you,” and she’d torn the page out of her notebook and ripped it into a hundred small pieces before she even got around to writing down the number.

  “Portobello Road, number eighty-three,” she told the cabdriver after she’d climbed into the cab, taking care to cradle her tummy in a protective fashion, trying to keep her voice from quivering, and when they pulled up in front of the unmarked square building, she made a mental note to point out to Niall that the building was brown, not gray. Something about this mistake, this proof that even Niall was fallible, gave her courage. She rang the front door of the shabby building and announced to the big-eared boy who opened it, his face and body remaining passive as his eyes swept all over her before stopping on her belly, “I need a room.” She heard the slippery sound of the taxi taking off but didn’t look backwards. Her only thought was to complete her mission, to move on from this horrendous task so she and Niall could be reunited. She didn’t even think about what could possibly come next for them, what it would be like when he returned to Boston as he’d said he would. She just wanted it to happen, to have Niall’s focused energy beside her again, as soon as possible. St. Stephen’s Green. The Yeats Memorial. “Here, take them,” she said to the man who appeared in her squalid room shortly after her arrival, entering without knocking, a knife glinting from under his shirt cuff, the River Liffey rushing past below them, and she didn’t bother to turn her back as she stripped off her dress, unwinding the money-filled bandages, throwing them over to him one after another, as though each handful was payment to bring Niall back. “What’s this, then?” he said, his heavy eyebrows rising, as though he’d hadn’t known what she’d be delivering or at least the quantity. And maybe he hadn’t, maybe he’d been told even less than she about the mission, but she didn’t say a further word to him, not even when he pointed to her worn backpack and said, “Empty it.” She dropped her passport and wallet and the copy of Thérèse Raquin, which she’d brought to read on the flight over, onto the bed. “Well, that was some day’s work,” he said, letting out a laugh when he’d finished stuffing the bills into the pack. “You never saw me, mind.” She spent the night huddled on the room’s lumpy bed, waiting, flat-stomached again but full of expectation. Next day, she moved into a different hotel, as Niall had instructed her to do when they were still back in Boston, an only slightly less dismal affair she’d picked out of a Let’s Go guide. “I can’t know which one,” he’d told her. “That way, if they lift me before you leave, they can’t get it out of me. No one will know, not me and not the man they send down.” She arrived at St. Stephen’s Green well before the appointed time, a sweater pulled around her once-again svelte torso. And if someone from the plane should see her? She sat down on a bench and folded her arms over her stomach.

  And she waited. Even as the park began to be crisscrossed by people leaving work for the day, she waited. She folded and unfolded her arms.

  She was so tired. What time was it back in Boston now? She gathered her stiffened limbs up and wandered the park as dark began to settle in. All around her, she heard Irish voices. Could he have passed by, but in disguise? Had she missed him? But she knew how he moved, as though he were a song that she heard over and over in her head. She knew the way he held his head up, the strange scar like a sickle on his neck. She spent another sleepless night in the Let’s Go hotel, and the next day was back amidst the half-hidden stone amphitheater surrounding Henry Moore’s sculptural paean to Yeats, even as raindrops began to plop down like huge cold tears. She moved under a tree. She pulled her sweater in around her. Still, she waited.

  He’d had her book a return trip for five days later, but after a third empty day, she went to the airport and asked if there was room left on the next flight to Boston. She knew now that Niall was never going to join her in Boston either. She had brought the money over to Ireland as he wanted, and she would never see him again.

  “Aren’t you having a nice time?” the ginger-haired lady at the ticket counter asked, looking concerned.

  “My father’s not well,” she answered, and realized she’d learned how to lie.

  She climbed onto the plane home, feeling sickeningly weightless, half numb and half terrified. If anyone in her family found out about her trip, she had been instructed to pretend she’d taken off as a lark to find her roots, normal enough for an Irish-American girl of twenty. Niall had pretended to leave days earlier, hiding out in her room, and in other rooms he didn’t tell her about, so no one would connect their departures. But no one was likely to find out about her trip. She’d been instructed to lose her passport as soon as she got back, and school hadn’t started back up yet. No one would notice she wasn’t around for a week; she had no roommates, and though she was friendly enough with other students, she wasn’t the sort of girl people instinctively kept track of. But there was still the risk someone from the flight over would make the flight back with her and remember how recently she’d seemed so very pregnant.

  “You just tell them you lost the baby,” Niall had advised her back in Boston before they’d set off, narrowing those eerily blue eyes at her. “You tell them you’re grieving.”

  Clare stared down at the heavyset stranger’s street map in her hand, trying to bring into focus the lines and addresses, but all she could see was herself, after her plane had touched down in Boston’s Logan Airport, throwing out every last piece of evidence from the flight, even the small suitcase she’d carried and the clothing she’d worn and the book she’d brou
ght on the plane with her and never opened. Already beginning to hate herself for having smuggled money into Ireland. At the request of a man who’d abandoned her.

  “We’ll see in Dublin, then,” Niall said, as they stood face-to-face, eye-to-eye, their bags at their feet, their bodies separated by her now-expanded abdomen, preparing to leave separately for the airport. He didn’t kiss her. He reached out and clenched her hands, then turned and walked out the door of her room in Cambridge.

  “You okay, Madame?” the heavyset stranger asked, looking at her queerly. He used his hand, freed from the map now, to hold her elbow. “You okay?”

  Clare flushed and nodded. “Just thinking, just thinking where…the best way for you to get where you are going. I can help you. You are on the wrong street.”

  She’d done what she’d done and now she was heading full speed ahead back to Dublin where maybe she’d even cross paths with the man who had taken the money from her. But there was nothing to be done about that now. Nothing but to help this man right now find his own way, as any decent human being would do.

  He was Turkish, not Albanian. By the time she and the man parted ways, she felt as though she knew all about him: his former career as a wrestler, the village where he grew up, why he was in Paris, and what he thought about French food and French women.

  “They are very proud,” he said of the last, “and very nervous. The others, they not stop. Maybe they not understand English? This is why I make sure you stop. I think you see paper you understand and show me with hand if you not speak English. But I know you English.”

  Clare didn’t correct him. “Oh?”

  “You tall. And”—he hesitated—“you have very nice…” He pointed to the skin on his face and pulled on it.

  Clare smiled. His own skin was thick and pocked, perhaps from repeated steroid use or some similar type of muscle-​enhancement drug. He’d told her about that, too, in his broken English, how his body had been abused by the rough usage of his days as a competitive athlete. How he was sure that was why he was sick now.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  They’d reached the intersection of the Rue de Sèvres and the start of the Rue Saint-Placide. The entrance to the food hall at Le Bon Marché was just a few steps away, but there wasn’t any reason to reveal her immediate destination to him.

  She stopped and pointed to the Rue Saint-Placide.

  “You follow that little street two blocks until it ends. You come out on the Rue de Vaugirard. Your doctor’s building should be somewhere right there.” She gave him a closer look. “Do you think you can do that?”

  “Yes, yes,” the man said, waving a hand. “Is no problem. I good now. Back in my own country, I never am lost. You know?”

  “I know,” Clare agreed, nodding. Although, she didn’t know. If anything, she usually felt less lost when she was away from home. In Paris or London or Cairo, she could create her person rather than try to read it off the faces of the people who’d known her all her life. That was one of the greatest unspoken perks of being married to a diplomat. She was never lost—because she made up her destination as she went along.

  The man gave her a last smile and a grunt and stepped into the street, narrowly missing being knocked down by a taxi. She realized she still had his map in her hand, but she didn’t want to call him back. Surely now he wouldn’t need it. She stuffed it into her sweater pocket. She watched until his silhouette had disappeared down the Rue Saint-Placide and she could be sure he wouldn’t turn around and see where she was now headed. Once he was gone, she thought to herself, Well, that’s one thing taken care of.

  She checked her watch. 10:29 a.m.

  Six

  The tall wooden doors of Le Bon Marché food hall felt stiff against her push. Inside, the store was crowded, as usual: tourists seeking mementos from France to take home, expats seeking memories from home to bring to their Paris apartments, and well-heeled Parisian housewives selecting fine cuts of meat and Jean LeBlanc walnut oil for their dinner parties. A woman brushed past, toting a camera, and a guard glided out from the shadows and raised a single finger. No words were exchanged, but the woman dropped the camera into her knapsack. The guard returned his walkie-talkie into its holster and fell back into the shadows.

  Clare moved forward, giving herself up to what felt like a glorious golden machine. Pale wood, brass fittings, and countless hanging lamps pouring amber over the aisles played backdrop to the heavy jewelry and braided-chain straps of the Chanel bags of the customers. Parisians scoffed at Le Bon Marché grocery store for being un-French, with its neat mountains of flown-in foodstuffs, and greasy tubs of overcooked, overpriced ready-made curried chicken and salmon Florentine, but they couldn’t stop shopping here. Over the years of moving from one city to another, she had always found grocery stores and markets to reflect each posting’s inner world in a way that was so reliable as to be almost laughable. In Cairo, the souk had been a sprawling Byzantine affair, a jumble of spices, beans, teas, and fruits, not always appetizing in odor or appearance but communal, a chaotic but exacting map of local relationships and social hierarchies. In Washington, she’d frequented a Safeway where even the uncut melons had been wrapped in plastic, as remote as the smiles on the other women shoppers’ faces, the only scent that of the cleaning products used to wipe the floors and the occasional underscrubbed grocery bagger. The grocery closest to their apartment in London was run by a brooding Bangladeshi family and filled with dusty tins of curry, chili, and turmeric, dried fenugreek and dhania leaves, jars of ghee, their labels rubbed pale, side by side with the marmalade and marmite and Walker’s Shortbread that Edward liked to have around. A fast-paced Jewish bakery, popping out oven-steamed bagels, shared the same building front. The packaging on British goods seemed more charming than the food itself, and all the print was neatly spaced across the labels. In Paris, the women dressed to shop, and the way they selected ingredients was as meticulous as their appearance.

  She adjusted her basket onto her left arm and lowered her eyes so they’d be less likely to fall upon the gaze of another shopper. Le Bon Marché’s food hall doubled as a haven for expats hoping to encounter other aliens in the hunt for marshmallows and pumpkin pie filling. There was a pleasant feeling of camaraderie to be found in spending a few chance minutes poring over fruits and imported crackers with similarly inclined hostesses, but she didn’t have time to spare today getting caught up in any extensive conversations. Adjusting her pace, she skirted the islands stacked with foreign preserves, and zeroed in on the produce stalls on the far side of the food hall. One was piled high with asparagus. She lifted a couple of stalks and examined them. Delicate lavender crept up towards their tips, a pinkish shadow on one, a splash of purple on the other. There was something animate about asparagus, the irregularity of each spear.

  She brushed the thought away and began filling a paper bag, selecting only the thinnest spears, which were the most tender—and also required less peeling. With Amélie’s cousin coming in to help, there’d be enough hands to manage the asparagus, but Mathilde might still get fussed about it.

  The cheese counter held a fresh supply of Irish cheddar. Clare requested two small wheels, ruddy yellow cakes sheathed in red wax. When she was a kid in suburban Connecticut, she and her friends used to buy a candy that looked like that casing, ruby lips of wax that they would chew on, not for the flavor but for the delightful sensation of their teeth sinking into the pliable plastic unsticky substance.

  “Est-ce que ça sera tout, Madame?” the white-coated vendor asked. All the servers at Le Bon Marché’s market wore thin white cotton jackets, as though they were working in a pharmacy.

  She shook her head and surveyed the other cheeses in the counter. She’d heard that the ambassador’s wife had cheeses sent over direct from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London every fortnight, but, though she and Edward entertained constantly, they hosted such lesser numbers than the embassy that ordering cheese in bulk made even less sense to her than wine.
She pointed out two large wedges of Stilton and considered whether she should ask Mathilde to defrost some tayberries and fill a few small pots with chutney to decorate the cheese plates. Her free hand strayed towards the pocket holding her list. But, no, she didn’t need to direct Mathilde. She’d given Mathilde the guest list, which was all that was necessary. Mathilde understood who the guests were, and she’d know to do up the cheese in a suitably British fashion that wouldn’t shock the handful of French guests. That was the thing about Mathilde. Other than her personality, she was perfect.

  “Prenez ceci, Madame,” advised the vendor, when Clare asked for two triangles of Brie de Meaux. She directed Clare to a too-firm semicircle with a chalky off-white interior. “Celui-ci sera bien pour vous.”

  Whether it was unripened or not, Edward would not touch the brie. He’d take a respectable portion of the Stilton for the sake of decorum and, perhaps, a slice of the cheddar as well. Or maybe not, as he wouldn’t want to be seen as taking everything but the French cheese. She pointed to an adjacent brie, creamier in color and leaking onto the cheese counter. She herself loved the French cheeses, the smellier the better.