An Unexpected Guest

by Anne Korkeakivi

  He shrugged and waved her in.

  Cold rushed her as she entered the church’s ancient interior. Centuries of unheated winters seemed to have settled into its stones, a chill that no amount of summers would ever dissipate. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the dimness, then let them sweep the pews, raking the audience. Only a smattering of people were there, tossed amongst the front half of the pews like droplets of rain. A few were gray-haired, but most seemed of that indeterminate age around twenty when teenagers discover they’ve somehow become adults. Music students, probably; friends of the performers.

  She sorted through them until her eyes located an older, sparer figure.

  He was on the far left, in one of the last pews, several rows back from anyone else. He didn’t look up when she tiptoed in beside him. He moved over to accommodate her, as though she were returning from having stepped out briefly to make a call or use the lavatory. Chanting echoed around them, and she felt she knew this song; it was the story of her years of waiting. The sound filled her body with a supreme sadness. Defying the skeptical look of the peaked arches above them, he took her hand in his, cradling it as though it were a fragile, curious object left tossed up on the banks after the tide receded.

  The music stopped and people clapped, but still he held on to her hand. People rose, some to depart, others in order to view the bowing musicians over the heads of the people already leaving. Niall stayed seated, and so did she.

  People began streaming back towards the doors. He lowered his face from any hint of light.

  “What kept you?” he said with a bit of a smile. He was dressed in the same clothes as earlier in the day but wearing a worn leather jacket. It looked soft against the sharp lines of his body, as though it would melt against her cheeks if she were to bury her face in it. Looking down, she could see the edges of his knees pressing through denim. He was still so handsome. That would have been another one of the reasons they’d sent him to the States to collect the money.

  “I never knew you liked music,” she said. There was so much they had never talked about. They’d shared so little except for that most intimate act, a crime.

  “All Irish like music.” He laughed. “I saw you were having people coming round for dinner, and there was a notice for this concert at the museum. I didn’t know it would be so bloody cold. I could have just as well waited on a park bench.”

  She shook her head. “The Luxembourg Gardens would be closed. The Rodin also.”

  Up against the nearest wall stretched a heavy stone tomb, its contours rubbed away from centuries of frigid obscurity. This was Niall’s life, shadows and austerity. The first time she saw him, he was standing on top of a stone wall in a comfortable suburb outside Boston, the sun playing on his hair, and ever after, she’d had the feeling he was taller than he really was. He hadn’t bothered to hide his disgust for her and her cousin’s ignorance, and she’d taken that to mean he himself knew everything. Sitting beside him in her aunt and uncle’s kitchen, she’d been surprised to look into his face and realize he was barely older than she was. He’d been so young and full of life and promise, not much older than Jamie was now. She’d gained much in the years since—​Edward, her children, a world so much bigger than the cloistered one she’d begun with in Connecticut. A world she understood so differently. If only he had.

  This is a war, he’d said. He still believed it.

  “I need to tell you something,” she said. “I’m glad I lost the money. I’m not saying you were on the wrong side of the argument. I’m just saying I’m glad I don’t have that at least on my conscience.”

  Niall let go of her hand. He nodded. “Right. You married a Brit. And not just any Brit either, but a feckin’ servant of the Crown. Diplomatic service.”

  “That has nothing to do with it. Edwa—my husband’s a good person.”

  “They all…” Niall stopped. “Well. I hope so.”

  The church was nearly empty now. Up by the altar, the musicians had returned from the vestry to fold chairs and gather their music stands. The guardian was with them, helping. The church’s bell rang out: midnight.

  “Do you know that’s the oldest church bell in Paris?” she said.

  Niall studied her. “You always were a clever one,” he said softly for the second time that day. He rose and she followed him out of the pew, out of the church, into the street. The inky night air felt gentle and smooth now, after the cloying damp of the church interior. They walked silently through a narrow alley, absent of street lamps, away from the random sounds of motorcycle and car engines and nightclub music, falling back into a long-buried habit of not speaking until they were no longer within view of others. A stray cat ran in front of them.

  I never knew you liked music.

  All Irish like music. I saw you were having people coming round for dinner.

  She stopped. “What did you mean you saw I was having people round for dinner?”

  “I figured you weren’t buying all that cheese and asparagus just for you and your husband. He’s a Prods. You can’t have too many children.”

  He had never seen her sons. He didn’t know anything about them. She brushed the air with her hand. “Did you see me buying flowers before that?”

  “I saw you come out of a flower shop.”

  And so had her Turk. Niall must have seen the Turk also, there, with her, at 10:29 a.m.

  “Did you see me talk to someone?”

  “A man. And then you were in the shop with a woman. But I’d seen how you go about the city. I thought of the flowers and how they’d come out with the sun shining. I knew this was the day I’d find you in the garden, alone by the statue.”

  Niall had seen the Turk, too, yet another horrible quirk of fate. There couldn’t be a worse witness on earth to corroborate her word. Niall. A dead man.

  “Never mind him right now,” she said. “Look, I want to help you, and your cousin. But if I gave you money, how could I know it wouldn’t end up in the war coffers now? I mean, if things started up again.” How could she explain to him? The weight that had been lifted from her shoulders this afternoon, all those years of thinking about what she’d helped do. What they’d helped do. “We’re so lucky. God, Niall, we are so lucky.”

  “Lucky? Are you taking the piss out of me?”

  “Yes, lucky.”

  Niall stopped. He stepped in towards her, letting a bit of the streetlights glance off his profile. He seized her hands and held them to him. In the moonlight, the emerald on her finger sparkled, dark and green as the Atlantic under a troubled sky. “I’m not lucky, Clare. I’m not even alive.”

  The feel of his skin against hers, so rough against her smoothness, the energy within them. Twenty years of his life, wasted.

  My green island is on the other side of all that water, he’d said. Then another voice, a smooth, calm one: I trust you.

  She withdrew her hands.

  There was a flurry of dark wings in the street, only roosting pigeons awakened by their passage, but Niall shied away, receding into a doorway. He was hiding, forever hiding. A younger Niall, with the summer sun bouncing off his dark hair, his white skin; his every movement an expression of committed, concentrated energy. A Niall who, already as a teenager, was prepared to risk his life for what he believed in. She and her youthful crowd had learned to play tennis competitively and read the important tomes by the important Johns: John Maynard Keynes, John Milton, John Quincy Adams. They’d worn the right clothes, seen the right movies, and supported the right political causes. But if something went wrong, it had always been someone else’s mess to clean up.

  She stretched her right hand back out.

  They both looked at it.

  “Take it,” she said.

  “Are you trying to buy me off?”

  “No. I want to give you something of mine. Because…” She looked away. “I want some part of me to go with you. Look, I know nothing I can give you will equal twenty years of your life. But this is what I hav
e that is mine and mine alone to give. For the first time in decades, I feel hopeful, and I want you to have some hope, too.”

  She held her hand out for what seemed like ages, one long hot summer rising between them, twenty-five long cold years pressing back down beside it.

  He held her wrist fast as he slid the ring off her finger. He turned it over in his hand, as though he were reading it. One arm looping around in platinum, two posed hands holding a huge heart-shaped emerald betwixt them, secured further by diamonds; how that ring had sparkled on her grandmother’s graceful, slowly aging hand. Go Irish, Granda had said and Yah, I better, Mormor had answered, the start of a love that had seemed to stretch beyond the grave. Every time Clare slid the ring over her finger, she felt the pride her grandfather had had for his motherland in having it made, as well as his pride in the woman who would wear it. All that love. All that certainty. In Niall’s hands now.

  “It’s a claddagh,” he said softly.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “That can’t have come from your man.”

  “No.”

  He examined its deep green edges, felt the smooth of its facets with his thumb. “I’m not fighting anymore, Clare. If you were ever to read about some bastard down Derry way lifted for blowing up a police station, it wouldn’t be me. That much I can tell you.”

  She hesitated. “You’re going home.”

  He shrugged, held the ring under the light of the street lamp, causing it to sparkle. “If I tried to sell it, they’d think I stole it. Or worse, for both of us, that I blackmailed it out of you. Either way, it could come back to you.”

  He didn’t say anything further for a while, and she had no idea what was going through his mind. She wasn’t sure what was going through her own. He looked up, gazing at her face with the same air of appraisal he’d given the emerald. “The British government didn’t give us any other choice, Clare.”

  “I’m not saying you were bad men. I’m not saying I even understand any of it. But innocent people got hurt, on both sides, and that can never be right. There has to be a better way.”

  “Not all wars can be fought around a conference table. You think we were risking our lives for a bit of craic?”

  “Of course, I’m not saying that. But while very few things in the world are black and white,” she said, “maybe one or two things are. It can’t be right to kill innocent people. It can’t be right to go blowing up cars in the middle of the street on a Friday afternoon.”

  He sighed. “Think what you want. I’m glad if it’s over. I’m not glad the British are still there, but I’m glad if there’s peace in the streets and bread on the tables. But remember this. You don’t get peace unless first you fight a war. And for the one man to be a peacemaker, the other has to have made the war. I don’t like those stories either. But we had our own stories.” He handed her the ring back. “Not enough, Clare. You keep your ring. You keep your guilt also. And I’ll keep mine.”

  “Niall—”

  “I deserve what I got, but not for what I tried to do. For the amateur way I went about doing it. And for involving an innocent American girl. I’m sorry for that, Clare. I am. Honest.”

  “You aren’t hearing me, Niall. I am keeping my guilt. I know neither of us can change the past. But we can use it to do better tomorrow.”

  The night air stirred, caressing her neck. A piece of paper glanced off her calf, vanished. Niall leaned against the door behind him and shook his head.

  “I made a fecking hash of it, didn’t I?” he said. “But I paid the price, too, didn’t I? That’s the big laugh—I might as well have just gone straight to the R.U.C. myself, said I’d dropped the money in the Liffey, then after I got out of prison, told the lads the Brits took it off me. No one would have known about you, I would have done ten, fifteen years, been out in time to enjoy the benefits of the Good Friday Agreement. Not stuck in this hell of my own makin’.”

  “So, you’re going home.”

  He shrugged. “There’s my cousin.”

  “Even without the money.”

  “Feck the money. Feck it all,” he said, stepping out of the gloom. He drew her to him, kissing her as though he were kissing right through her. There was nothing but that feeling, that feeling of him, spreading through her gut, her limbs, into her fingers, obliterating all the time that had passed between.

  He released her, and she felt him drain from her body slowly; a shock, that iridescent glow that came at dusk as the light leveled and faded until all that was left was a glimmer, a silhouette. It spilled away, another life’s blood, into the night, into the Parisian gutter.

  His eyes searched hers, and she remembered the first time she’d seen them. How startled she’d been by their color. So bright, so clear, like a winter day.

  She shook her head.

  He held her in his gaze. Finally, he nodded. “You always were a clever one,” he said, for the third time, the last time.

  She put her ring back into his palm. She folded his fingers around it. “Have it taken apart. It will be worth a lot. It’ll give you a head start.”

  He lifted the ring in his hand, not so differently than he’d lifted her hand so many years ago in her aunt’s steamy kitchen, as though it were not just an object or a small piece of a whole he’d just come upon but something that, thanks to the greatness of its fragile beauty, possessed an existence of its own. After so many years, his history, her history, their history, had all been rewritten. She would no longer try to forget Niall, but he would no longer haunt her.

  They looked at each other one last time.

  “You go that way,” he said. He pointed down the unlit street towards a beacon of light, a busier thoroughfare. “I’ll watch till you’re out of the darkness before I go the other way.

  “Good-bye, Clare,” he said.

  She forced herself to say it. “Good-bye, Niall.”

  Seventeen

  She would not look back.

  They’d said good-bye now; the good-bye they hadn’t said in Dublin. She placed one foot ahead of the other until her steps took on an existence of their own. She listened to the rhythm of her heels on the pavement and allowed it to lead her through the narrow cobbled streets of the fourth arrondissement. They twisted and turned, and slowly they felt firmer and surer, and she knew she was going in the right direction. Now she was on the Rue de Rivoli, and the street widened and flattened out. The Ile de la Cité was a short way; she would walk there. How far she had come from yesterday morning, when she’d woken up to the feel of Edward’s reassuring hand on her shoulder and the alarming thought of moving to Dublin. How much had happened! But this was life: random. What she would do next might make moving to Dublin impossible again, but that was hardly her purpose. The thought of moving to Ireland no longer scared her. The only thing that scared her now was the possibility of repeating her mistakes—and then watching her child repeat them also.

  La Tour St.-Jacques jutted up into the blackened sky before her, its jagged heights looking like the peaks of an ornate sand castle after being hit by a wave. She turned left onto the Rue St. Martin. Again, awakened pigeons fluttered up, blackened silhouettes less a shape than a movement. They cooed overhead and bobbed from one sill to another. They were the carrion birds of the inner city, hovering over the decay and discard of urban life. A window was drawn shut, and they flew up then relanded, settling back down to sleep.

  She reached the Avenue Victoria. A sprawl of couples spilled out of a restaurant across the street from her. The restaurant front read The Green Linnet, written in spindly white lettering against a green background. Of course she would now come upon an Irish pub, on probably the only street in Paris named for an English monarch. Could this day become stranger? But it was no longer the same day, or day at all. It was past midnight, in those odd hours where night flirts with morning. The women teetered on spiked heels, reaching for cigarettes and their companions’ arms to support them. The men bantered loudly amongst themselves. One pulled
out a lighter. How happy they looked. How vulnerable! A violent burst of nails in a London tube stop during the morning rush hour, an airplane shoved through an office wall. Who was to say that a bomb wouldn’t go off right here, right now? La Conciergerie’s majestic spires rose up in front of her. People had died here already; Marie Antoinette spent her last hours here before being carted off to La Concorde for beheading. The tiny gilt tube of lipstick, smooth black-leather wallet, shoe heels, forearms, calves, and ankles, hours spent loving, dreaming, arguing, plotting, fussing…exploded into millions of pieces splashing through the air. It took one moment: the wrong place at the wrong time and someone with a wrongheaded notion of justice. How insane. She’d secretly lived a lifetime in the shadow of this world, well before 9/11 occurred and checking under waiting-room seats for unclaimed luggage became a global habit. But all those years of thinking about what might have happened, what she might have helped make happen, had taught her something. Fear could be converted into a kind of terrorism of its own. She had to live in the world, for good or for bad. She had to be part of it.

  The sight of the Seine interrupted her thoughts. There was a song to the way the water moved. It swayed like a woman’s body, nudging the banks of the Ile de la Cité, the lights of the Pont Notre-Dame burnishing her liquid flesh in gold. Reaching the Ile de la Cité, the small island at the center of Paris in whose soil a raggle-taggle group of Celtics known as the Parisii first jabbed their spears and unfurled their animal skins amongst the willows, thus founding what was arguably the most lovely city in the entire world, Clare had to stop a minute to take it in, to make a final assessment of herself and her surroundings, before surrendering herself to someone else’s description. She was Clare Siobhan Fennelly Moorhouse, forty-five years old, married with two teenage sons. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in a suburb of false colonials with clapboard finishes. She was standing all alone on a bridge in the middle of the night in the middle of Paris, something she hadn’t done since she first visited the city as a college freshman. And the world before her eyes was beautiful.