Read The Guest Room Online

Authors: Chris Bohjalian

The Guest Room (12 page)

…

Sonja and Crystal had faith in hatred. They were good at it. They believed the world is filled with evil and people are devils, and you can only fight evil and devils with hatred.

Me? I was never good at hatred. I felt it. I knew it. But it did not live inside me the way it did inside them. Maybe things would have turned out better if it did. If I had been better at hatred.

Chapter Six

Before falling asleep at the hotel on Saturday night, Richard flipped through the photos on his iPhone. He wanted to see pictures of Kristin and Melissa. He hoped they might calm him. But among the hundreds of images were some scans of shots from his own childhood, and after looking at a dozen photos of his wife and his daughter, he paused on one of Philip and him. There he was at seventeen and Philip at twelve, the two of them in T-shirts on a beach on Grand Cayman. They were on a family vacation. He couldn't believe how long their hair was. He couldn't believe his seventh-grade brother was wearing a T-shirt that said “How to pick up chicks.” Granted, the image was of a stick-figure human picking up baby chickens. But still. What were his parents thinking? Sometimes Richard liked to blame his brother's idiosyncrasies on the friends he had made at college—a bunch of hazing- and party-obsessed frat boys who lived for beer pong and porn—but perhaps it was genetic. Maybe Philip had been born a jerk. But Richard didn't view their father as especially sexist. He was a management consultant. Their mother was a librarian. And despite the fact that their father made scads more money than their mother, Richard viewed their parents' marriage as a partnership. It was rather like his own marriage with Kristin. He earned the lion's share of their joint income, but every decision they made was a joint one.

He remembered taking Philip and two of his frat brother friends to dinner one night between Christmas and New Year's when Philip was a junior in college. Richard had his MBA by then and had been working at Franklin McCoy for six months. He brought Philip and his pals to a steak restaurant in the gentrifying meat packing district, but the place was a throwback: heavyset waiters with walrus mustaches who frowned at you dismissively if you ordered any salad other than the iceberg wedge. When it was time to consider dessert, the three younger guys thanked him and bolted. They said they had fake IDs and planned to go to a strip club. Richard knew they thought less of him—they viewed him as a little less manly—because he didn't go with them. But the reality was that he was dating a schoolteacher with hazel eyes and lustrous amber hair that fell to her shoulders. A young woman with a laugh that he loved, and who liked indie rock as much as he did. He didn't see the point of a strip club. Besides, he was planning to work that night. The fact was, back then he worked every night he wasn't with Kristin.

He put down his phone and gazed out the window at Times Square. His room was on the eighteenth floor. He decided he would give almost anything to go back in time. Two days. That was all he wanted. Even a day and a half. Down there somewhere were strips clubs, which instantly made him think of Alexandra. Of strippers and escorts and sex slaves. He recalled the girl's eyes when she kissed him. It was going to be years, he feared, before he would find a way to forgive himself.

He wondered who among the thousands of people out there right now was going to screw up tonight as badly as he had twenty-four hours ago.

…

The next morning was the first time that Richard and Kristin Chapman had been in the newspapers since their wedding announcement had appeared in the
Times
. Richard read the articles just before sunrise, having slept little the night before. The bed at the Millennium was fine; so were the pillows and the heater's strangely mellifluous white noise. He tossed and turned because he feared the quiet of the room and the emptiness of the bed were harbingers. He vacillated between anger and despair, a ping-pong ball lobbed back and forth in gentle, transparent arcs. One moment he felt victimized; none of this, especially those dead Russians, was his fault. The next? He would see himself naked and erect at the edge of the guest room bed, a hauntingly beautiful young woman reaching out her hands to him. Her mouth. And he would be overwhelmed with regret. Sure, he had drawn back. But he should never have been in that position in the first place.

And yet in the smallest hours of the night he couldn't stop thinking about Alexandra: who she was and how in the name of God she had wound up in that bedroom, too. He tried to imagine her shooting the second Russian later that night, but it was hard. He guessed she had. But she seemed too (and he understood the irony of the word, but that in no way diminished its rightness in his mind) innocent. He knew he would never see her again.

In some ways, he found the
New York Times
article more painful to read than the ones in the tabloids, because the reporter simply laid out the facts as he understood them. At least the
New York Post
had alliteration in their front-page headline:
STRIPPERS GO PSYCHO
. (The accompanying image was a stock photo of a woman's thighs and seductively bent knees in a garter and stockings.) All of the newspapers ran pictures of the front of his house. The
Post
described it as the smallest house on a street full of mansions, and Richard took umbrage with the statement, even though he knew it was true. He also knew it was ridiculous to care; he had far greater concerns than the importunate needs of his ego. The
Times
had quotes from his lawyer, the police, and their neighbors. The
Post
had these, too, but they had also interviewed a schoolteacher Kristin worked with.

He thought of what his father had said to him last night when, finally, he had returned his parents' calls:
This is what happens when you think with your little head instead of your big one, Richard. Jesus, I expect this sort of thing from your brother. Not from you.

Reflexively he'd snapped back,
You expect people to get stabbed and shot around Philip? Seriously? Is that what you expect from Philip?

But his mother, who had been on the line, too, calmly observed that his father was only referring to the generally adolescent lack of judgment that sometimes marked Philip's decisions.

Occasionally Richard had gotten up in the night and gazed out the window, as he had hours earlier before going to bed. If he stared long enough, the lights would lull him into a momentary stupor. Then the serrated skyline would strike him like a piranha's open mouth, and he would remember where he was and why he was there.

He sighed. He'd ordered up a pot of coffee, but nothing to eat. He was going to call Kristin in a couple of minutes, when he was sure she was awake, and see if he could come…not home…but to his mother-in-law's and spend Sunday night there. When he had first gotten dressed, he had been quietly confident that she would acquiesce; he was less sure now that he had read the stories in the papers. At the moment, he wasn't even convinced that she would allow him to join them for breakfast or brunch.

…

Kristin tried to peruse the stories without conveying any emotion, but it was difficult: the more she read, the sadder she grew. And, yes, angrier, too. They were toxic, and she could feel her blood pressure rising. Her only comment to her mother—at least over a breakfast of coffee and croissants in the Manhattan apartment kitchen—had been that Dina Renzi sounded very competent. Though, she added after a moment, she hoped the attorney's capabilities would never really matter.

“Why is that, dear?” her mother asked. “I don't understand.”

“Because I am hoping Richard won't need her for more than”—and here she held up the section of the
Times
—“this. For public relations.”

It surprised her that she found the newspaper coverage far more chilling than the local news the night before, or even her home's brief cameo on CNN. The videos were predictable, and she felt she had seen exactly this sort of footage a hundred times before: the beautiful woman with a winning smile, a perfect nose, and expertly coiffed hair standing with a microphone before a suburban home that, hours earlier, had been the site of a domestic cataclysm. There was the cut to a police detective—in this case a woman her husband had already described for her, Patricia Bryant—who was professional and polite and revealed almost nothing. Without a trace of irony her mother had remarked that the house looked nice, especially the black gum trees lining the slate walkway. She was nodding with approval when she shared how much she liked the trees' purple foliage.

“Is Richard coming back today?” she asked her daughter now.

Kristin was about to rub the bridge of her nose; she stopped herself when she saw the newsprint on her fingertips. “No.”

“Will you go to him?”

“Will I go to him? Mother, you make it sound like he's a wounded warrior who needs his selfless wife.”

“I didn't mean that at all. I was simply wondering if you were going to meet him someplace to talk.” Her mother didn't sound defensive; she sounded reasonable. Kristin realized that she herself sounded far less rational.

“We can talk on the phone,” she answered. “And I am sure we will.”

“Good.”

“I'm not going to do anything drastic. I promise.”

“I know you won't.”

And perhaps it was her mother's simple equanimity, but suddenly Kristin felt very much a child herself—once more a shamed schoolgirl or rejected girlfriend in need of a little mother's love. “I will just be so embarrassed when I'm back at school tomorrow. When I'm in the teachers' lounge and the classroom,” she said, and her voice broke ever so slightly. “How will I face everybody? I feel so…so violated. I feel humiliated.”

Her mother reached across the small circular kitchen table and tenderly, albeit awkwardly, embraced her. She put her hands on her daughter's shoulders and upper back and ran her fingers gently over her linen blouse. Kristin bowed her head against her mother and asked, “How could he do this to us?” And then, much to her surprise, she was crying, her whole body spasming with her sobs. She was vaguely aware that her mother's gray cashmere sweater was growing wet from her tears and her nose, but she couldn't stop herself and she didn't care.

“There, there,” her mother was saying. “There, there.”

…

Melissa ran her fingers over the waist-high border of the wainscoting that ran along the dining room walls. She was afraid to continue into the kitchen because she could hear her mother crying in there. Again.

Before this weekend, the only other times she could recall her mother crying were when Grandfather had died and then, a year later, when Cassandra's brother—their other cat, Sebastian—passed away. Sebastian had cancer and there was nothing more the veterinarian could do, and so they had put him to sleep. The lumps, and they were everywhere at the end, were horrible. Melissa recalled how she had cried, too. The veterinarian had come to their house, and Sebastian had been in her mother's lap when the vet had put him down. Her father had sat rubbing her mother's shoulders. They'd all been in the living room. Even Cassandra.

She recalled Sebastian's death a little better than her grandfather's, because she had been younger when Grandfather died. Not too long ago she had asked her dad if Mommy had cried more for Sebastian, and he had explained that she had been in shock when her father had died. It had been so sudden. So horribly sudden. But still, he had said, her mother had cried plenty.

Nevertheless, Melissa knew that the crying she was hearing now was much worse than anything she had heard from her mother before. It was louder. It was almost childlike in its inconsolability. Hysterical. Her grandmother was trying to comfort her, but having very little success.

Melissa understood that these sobs were brought on because her mother was hurt. Her father had done this. Daddy. She had seen the TV coverage, but she couldn't imagine her father with any woman but Mommy. In truth, she couldn't even really envision that. But it was clear that this…wailing…was triggered by whatever her father had done with the women at the party, and not because two people had been killed at their house.

Yet when Melissa tried to re-create in her mind whatever had occurred in Bronxville on Friday night, it was the violence that was most real to her. Two dead people. Strangers murdered with knives and guns, their bodies in the living room and the front hall. She recalled the moments she had seen from scary movies; though those moments were few, they were indelible. Surreptitiously—with babysitters or at her friend Claudia's house—she had seen her share of zombies and vampires and corpses on late-night TV. And though she had been frightened, she had always taken comfort in the idea that this was make-believe. There were no such things as zombies and vampires; the corpses always were actors in Halloween makeup. But whatever had occurred at her home on Friday night? That was very real.

Now she leaned against the wall and listened to her mother blowing her nose. She was telling Grandmother that she had to get her act together for Melissa. She had to figure out what she was going to say to her daughter. A second later the wooden chair slid against the kitchen tile. Her mother was standing up. Quickly Melissa retreated through the dining room and down the corridor to the guest bedroom. She didn't want her mother to know that she had been listening. But the one question she was going to be sure and ask her mother when her mother joined her in the bedroom was this: Just how much danger were they in? That was what she wanted to know. She was pretty sure her mother would answer “none,” but Melissa was going to try and read her face when she responded. She also wanted to know when Daddy would be back. She feared she was going to need both of her parents to feel secure—but she had a sick feeling that this just wasn't going to happen.

…

Richard tossed his cell phone down onto the hotel bed and watched it bounce on the mattress. He took comfort in his restraint: his initial thought had been to hurl it as hard as he could—a baseball and he was twelve—against the wall with the framed black-and-white photograph of construction workers high atop a Manhattan skyscraper in (he presumed) the 1920s. He had just gotten a call from a lawyer. A fellow who worked at Franklin McCoy and whom Richard had never met. Said his name was Hugh Kirn. Apparently, Richard's boss—Peter Fitzgerald, great-grandson of Alistair Franklin himself, a keeper of the firm's torch, and utterly humorless—thought it best if Richard took a leave of absence. Seems all the managing directors and the CFO himself felt that way. Paid, Hugh had made clear. Paid. Of course. At least for now. And if this blew over? Then they could revisit what to do next, and whether it made sense for him to return.

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