Read The Guest Room Online

Authors: Chris Bohjalian

The Guest Room (14 page)

“And if it wasn't a onetime thing? Who knows what he does when he's traveling? And he travels a lot.”

“I like Richard.”

“So you trust him.”

Even over the phone she heard her brother exhale. “People always surprise me. They really do.”

“That doesn't reassure me.”

“Whatever he is—whoever he is—he's definitely not his younger brother.”

“That's a low bar.”

“Your marriage has always struck me as pretty damn solid,” her brother said, trying to be more definitive.

And, the truth was, she had always thought it was. They'd been married fourteen years, and it still had its moments of wild electricity. Yes, it was different now that they were forty and lived in the suburbs; it was calmer because they had a daughter who was nine. They were ensconced in their careers. But they'd rented a tiny beach house in Montauk that summer, and those Friday nights when he would arrive for the weekend, joining her and Melissa, had been seriously perfect: the late dinners on that splinter-fest the three of them called a picnic table. The way she and Richard would ravish each other after nearly a week apart, once Melissa had fallen asleep. The margaritas on Saturday afternoons. They'd had her friends out with them two weekends, and the grown-ups had actually danced to the vinyl on the portable turntable that she had brought to the house to surprise him. They had danced like they were back at some grungy rock-and-roll venue near Saint Mark's and once again were in their twenties.

But now she found herself questioning those days in between, when she and Melissa had lived with their cat at the beach. What really had he been doing back in Bronxville? What really had he been doing in the city? She grew angry at herself for doubting him now, because he didn't deserve that. But she couldn't help it. By the time she finally fell asleep, she found herself wondering if her brother was correct and they all would have been better off if Richard had told her nothing—nothing at all.

Alexandra

My first days when I was a prisoner in Moscow, before I was brought to the cottage, Inga would sit beside me on the hotel bed. She would either use her laptop computer or my cell phone, and she would send e-mails or texts to my grandmother and pretend they were from me. At first, she would need to ask me questions: she would want to know the names of my friends at school or the girls in dance class. I was supposed to give her names of people I wanted my grandmother to say hi to, such as Nayiri. Or the name of a favorite teacher, maybe. I was supposed to come up with ballet stories my grandmother could tell Madame.

I considered making up names as a distress signal. Maybe my grandmother would understand this was big mayday and I was in trouble. But what if my grandmother asked me who these people were? Inga would know I was lying, and I was scared of the new ways they would find to punish me.

One time, Inga asked me to pick two things I wanted Grandmother to give to Vasily to mail to me. I picked my hoodie sweatshirt with the logo of the Armenian soccer team and a pair of black pajamas with white silhouettes of dogs with floppy ears. I never got them. What a surprise. Vasily probably just threw the clothes in the trashcan in his office. No, come to think of it, he probably gave them to some other girl whose mother or father was dying so he could worm his way into her family's heart, too—and then kidnap her and make one more human sex toy.

Other times, still pretending she was me, Inga would tell my grandmother how busy I was and how hard I was working. She would write that I loved the dance teachers here. She would say I was making new friends.

At some point, Inga must have suspected that I was thinking of ways to send secret, coded SOS. Maybe I hesitated. Maybe I sounded guilty. She sighed and looked at me with her big eyes like I was huge disappointment to her. Then she told me that if I did not try harder to help, my grandmother would lose her job at the hospital. Vasily would see to that. She said that if I tried to hint about what was really going on, my grandmother might even have a horrible accident on her way to work. Even nurses wind up with broken bones, she told me. And she reminded me (as she did often) of the first video they had made of me naked with the men, and how easy it would be to share that video (or any of the others they had forced me to make) with my whole world in Yerevan.

My grandmother would write back that she missed me, but was so happy for me and so excited for my future. One evening when Inga read me one of those e-mails, I wept so much that Inga rubbed my shoulders and my back, and told me that in the end we would all find happiness. To this day, I have no idea if she believed that for even a second.

…

Prisoners count the blocks in their cells or the rivets on their tin toilets. They count the squares in the metal bars of their door or in the front of the cell window—if there is a window.

I watched television those first days in Moscow. I curled up in a ball on the bed and counted the paisley teardrops on the wallpaper. I counted the stripes on the upholstery on the loveseat. I counted the birds that would sit like bookends on the edge of the roof of the building across the street. I considered breaking the window and screaming for help; I considered breaking the window and jumping to my death.

I thought of all the fairy-tale princesses locked away in towers in dark forests. Why did Rapunzel not kill herself?

Even though I had that TV and a radio, I would sit by the window for hours and stare out at the world that was now kept from me.

By then they had taken my clothes. They had removed the white terrycloth bathrobes from the closet to make sure that I was always naked. (At first, I would try and turn the bed sheets into pretend togas. When they figured out what I was doing, they threatened to take away my blankets and sheets if they ever walked in and the bed was not made.)

The only people I saw were Inga, my guards, and the men who would come fuck me.

…

Before we left for the cottage, I tried to escape from the hotel. Where I would have gone if I had made it is a mystery since I had no money, no credit card, no phone, and no passport. I had no clothes. At that point, I had not even been allowed outside my hotel room. I think I just hoped I would make it to the lobby and then to the street. I would find a police guy who wasn't corrupt. (Even that was going to be long shot.) But I want you to know that I tried.

Months later, I would try to escape the cottage, too. Obviously, that was also a failure.

But first there was the hotel disaster.

One of the dudes who watched the hallway got his tip, which basically was me: call it part of my on-the-job training. Inga would coach me as the guard climbed on top of me. Or I climbed on top of him. This time the guard was called Rad. (Who knows what his real name was? Radomir maybe.) He was drug-addict thin and I guess in his early twenties. He always reeked of cheap cologne. I could smell him in the hallway even through the shut hotel room door. I would watch him through the peephole and breathe through my mouth so I wouldn't have to inhale orange and musk. Rad hoped to be a black and white dude someday, but I didn't see it then and I don't see it now. He was not smart enough. And he was too nice. I mean that.

He had forgotten a rubber, and even though I had been on the pill for seven days, Inga said she would go downstairs and get him one. You can't take chances with new merchandise, right?

“No funny business, you two,” she said, smiling like a perky schoolteacher, and meaning simply, “Don't fuck.” Then she left the room and he sat back on the bed on his knees, his dick a thin flagpole in his lap, and I leaned up on my elbows. I heard in my head the word
downstairs,
which meant that Inga might be gone a few minutes. And Rad was in the bedroom with me. So, there was no one in the hallway. All I had to do was get past Rad, sneak to the stairwell, race down to the lobby, and then run into the street. Sneak, race, run. I am not a violent girl, but I had just spent a week trapped in hotel room as a sex slave student. This was my big chance: I was ready to attack Rad.

There were identical brass lamps on the tables on both sides of the bed. It seemed to me that I could conk Rad on the head with one. I could grab his clothes—at least his shirt—off the cushy chair in the corner. And I could be off. So now it was a five-step plan: Conk. Grab. Sneak. Race. Run.

I acted like I was stretching my right arm. I purred. I tried to smile at Rad like happy little slut. (I was not yet a “courtesan”: I was just a fifteen-year-old kid trying to look like she enjoyed getting banged by strangers with scratchy scruff on their faces.) Then I grabbed the lamp by its stand, using both my hands because I discovered it was too heavy and wide to lift with one hand, and I pulled it as hard as I could. What happened next happened quick: first, the lamp's cord did not pull easily from the wall, so Rad had an extra second to see what was coming and get his hands in front of his face. Second, the lamp had a shade which acted like automobile airbag when I tried to smack him on the skull the first time. When I tried to hit him a second time, he grabbed my arms and suddenly we were wrestling, and for a thin guy he was very strong. Or, at least, he was stronger than me—which is probably no big deal. He kicked the lamp off the bed with his bare foot and pinned me down, kneeling on my stomach and pressing my arms back into the mattress.

“Are you crazy?” he asked me.

And I was yelling at him to let me go, begging and crying that I had to get away, but he just shook his head and laughed. So I spat at him. It was the first time that I had ever spat on a person. I think growing up I had figured I would go through life without ever spitting on a person. I guess not.

It was right about then that Inga returned. She had not had to go downstairs to a drugstore for condoms, after all. She found one in her purse while she was waiting for the elevator.

She looked as mad as I would see her for a long time, her eyes wide like insane person.

Rad tried to take the bullet for me. That's what I mean about how he might have been just too nice for this line of work. Here I had just spat on him and tried to hit him on the head with a lamp, and still he wanted to protect me. He said he had gotten overanxious and I was trying to stop him so I didn't get pregnant. But Inga believed this like she believed in Santa Claus or communism.

I thought they would beat me.

But beating is just not good for the product. Makes it less attractive. Less valuable. They try not to beat a girl if they can help it. (Sometimes, at first, I made it so they couldn't help it.) Usually they drug you or hold you underwater or take away your food.

That night would be the first time they drugged me.

…

I should have kicked Rad in the crotch. I know that now. I did not know that then.

…

There was a new girl on the hotel room floor. I would discover that the next night, when I woke from my drug sleep and heard her banging on walls. At first I thought the banging was a dream. I had had a whole ballet of very strange dreams: exotic flowers (always cut), tropical fish (always plump), and men in black suits (always in need of a shave). But then I knew. I knew exactly what the pounding was. I had pounded just like that myself.

Chapter Seven

Kristin wasn't wild about this reverse commute to Bronxville on Monday morning, but it was clear that Melissa rather enjoyed it. The girl didn't like having to get up so early—the two of them awoke at Grandmother's apartment at five-thirty so that they could catch a six-forty-five train—but once they were seated and the conductor had scanned their tickets, Melissa admitted that there was something glamorous about the experience.

“Well, we'll get to do it again tomorrow,” Kristin had told her. Twenty minutes later, they were walking from the station to the school—a long, magisterial, Gothic edifice that looked like it should be anchoring an Ivy League college. All of Bronxville's children went there, whether they were seven or seventeen. It had been built in the early 1920s, and now sixteen hundred students were crammed into it between their arrival for kindergarten and their departure for colleges with (Kristin sometimes joked) nationally ranked lacrosse and soccer teams. Every school day Melissa would go to the elementary school wing, and Kristin would dive into the hormonal, seemingly primeval ooze that marked the high school section. The same architect, Harry Leslie Walker, designed three of the four buildings at the corner of Pondfield and Midland: the school, the library, and the church. When she and Richard were first showing her mother the home they were buying and what would become their neighborhood, her mother had stood at this corner and said, her tone somewhere between judgmental and bemused, “It's pretty: Disneyland for WASPs.” But it
was
pretty, and the school was supposed to be very good, Kristin remembered thinking defensively. A year later, she would be teaching there. A year and a half after that, Melissa would be enrolled in the kindergarten.

Richard had managed to reach Patricia Bryant on Sunday afternoon, and the detective believed that the crime lab would be finished sometime on Monday. But to be safe, she had suggested that Richard not schedule the cleaning crew until Tuesday. That meant, he had told Kristin, that they should plan to spend Monday night at her mother's and move back home on Tuesday—after school. After, he hoped, the cleaning crew had left. He had said he would spend Monday night at the hotel, but he hoped that she would allow him to move back home on Tuesday. She had been evasive on the phone, though she knew that in the end she would say yes. After all, he would have been at the house all Tuesday anyway, supervising whatever it was these cleaners were doing. (For reasons she couldn't fathom, she saw the crew working in white hazmat suits, as if they were cleaning up a nuclear plant meltdown.) But she agreed that he should spend Monday evening at the Millennium: one last night of penance.

“Mommy?”

Kristin looked down at her daughter. They were waiting for the traffic light to change so they could cross the street. “Yes, sweetie?”

“Nothing happened in my room, right?”

The child was not looking at her. She seemed to be gazing at a squirrel that was about to shimmy up one of the trees in the small copse by the French bistro. Still, even without being able to see the girl's face, Kristin understood the unease that festered beneath the question. What precisely was Melissa imagining might have occurred there?

“No,” she answered, forcing a firmness into her voice that she did not feel in her heart, but determined to provide the reassurance the child craved. “Absolutely nothing happened in your room.”

And if she was mistaken? She didn't want to go there. It was already proving too painful and too difficult to move forward.

…

That day the police arrested five men in two separate raids, one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan, all of whom were linked in some fashion with the escort service that Spencer Doherty used. They were all Russian, though some were now American citizens. Three were charged with, among other felonies, the recruitment, provision, and obtaining of people for the purposes of commercial sex acts. Two were charged with kidnapping. All five were charged with procurement of prostitution. There was the likelihood that some of them would be charged with laundering money as well.

In addition, five young women, two from Georgia and three from Russia, were rescued. None of them, the news reports said, would be charged with prostitution, though that was the sole reason why they had been brought to the United States. The fact that they were not arrested—the fact that the U.S. Attorney's Office was viewing them as victims, not criminals—was deemed a monumental victory by a variety of human and women's rights advocates. All five of them were illegal aliens. All of them could have been teenagers, though their actual ages were not yet known.

None of the men and none of the women, according to the papers or the broadcast news, had ever met the still missing Alexandra or Sonja.

And despite a bail figure that the men's attorneys argued was obscene—after all, none of them had murdered anyone, and the girls were healthy, well cared for, and, the lawyers insisted, rather happy—the three men who were not charged with kidnapping were back on the street by nightfall.

…

Kristin's first class that day was her section of AP American History, a dozen and a half juniors who this morning were far less interested in antebellum discord than they were in…her. She was asking them questions and trying to fuel a dialogue about the Compromise of 1850, but she could tell from their faces that most of them were focusing only on what may (or may not) have occurred in their history teacher's house. Dead Russians. Whores. An orgy. The boys looked a little awed while the girls looked a little sad. Sad for her. She was, she sensed, an object of pity in their eyes—that is, when she could meet their eyes. All of the students, the boys as well as the girls, looked down at their notes or at some mystical object just over her shoulder whenever she tried to engage them.

“How did the South benefit from the compromise?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of her desk. When no one spoke, she decided to ask Caroline directly. Caroline was one of her go-to kids whenever the conversation stalled. She had eyes that were always amused—sometimes sardonically so—a mane of lush auburn hair, and a statuesque figure that allowed her to wear jeans that looked epoxied to her legs. She was on the student council. She was an editor on the student newspaper. She was, Kristin suspected, a bit of a mean girl, and if she didn't peak in high school (which was always a possibility with these kids), she was going places.

Instead of answering, however, Caroline said—speaking slowly, haltingly, her tone uncharacteristically awkward—“Mrs. Chapman? Maybe it's none of our business, but there's kind of what my dad called at dinner last night an elephant in the room. We're worried. We're…”

“Go ahead, Caroline.” She thought she could see where this was going and wasn't happy about the direction, but she wasn't sure how to derail the digression. She saw a few of the boys were staring down at their desks as if someone had replaced their AP textbooks with the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit edition. But not all. Reed was watching her. So was Kazuo. So was Frank. And most of the girls were studying her, each of their faces a different point along the continuum between discomfort and dread.

“Well, my parents said it was better to ask you about all this stuff than not ask you. I mean, if it's upsetting you, it's upsetting us. And it might affect how we do on the AP tests.”

Kristin nodded. She got it. The girl's parents were worried that the cataclysm in their daughter's history teacher's personal life was going to affect their darling's AP score—and, thus, where she might wind up in college. Trying to keep her tone measured, she asked Caroline, “Do I look upset?”

The girl waited a second. Then: “Kinda.”

Kinda.
The word had been spoken barely above a whisper, and yet it seemed to echo in the classroom with Matterhorn grandeur.
Kinda.
Kristin didn't believe she looked upset; she was despairing inside—she was shamed inside, she was smoldering inside, she was confused inside—but she thought she was keeping it together as far as the world was concerned. As far as a bunch of ostensibly self-absorbed adolescents could tell. She found herself starting to tremble at the very notion that Caroline's parents saw in the death of two men and her husband's emotional—if not actual—infidelity only the possibility that their precious child's AP score might fall from a five to a four.

“Well, Caroline,” she began, trying (and failing) to maintain eye contact with the sixteen-year-old, “if you don't want to answer my question about the Compromise of 1850, how about taking a stab at this one: How do I look
kinda
upset? Any specifics?”

The girl and her best friend, Ayelet, exchanged glances. They were on the verge of rolling their eyes. “One specific?” she continued.

Caroline sighed, a magisterial teenage exhalation of exasperation. “Um, this,” she said, and Kristin saw some of the boys—even Reed, usually so diligent, so quiet—struggling to suppress smiles.

“This?”

“I guess. I mean, I was just asking if you were upset, and you're kind of…interrogating me.”

“I'm not interrogating you.”

“Okay. Fine. You're not.”

Kristin wanted to cry. How many times in the past forty-eight hours had she looked at herself in mirrors at her mother's and seen her eyes so red, so puffy that she thought she had looked vampiric? Three? Four? More? It seemed that she had always been crying or on the verge of crying. And when she wasn't, usually it was because she had been seething. But she thought she was keeping it together now. She had avoided the teachers' lounge before school this morning precisely so she would not have to discuss this nightmare with any of her peers and risk breaking down.

Okay. Fine. You're not.
She heard the words again in her mind and understood that she had to wipe at her eyes. It wasn't merely that she could feel them growing moist; it was also a feverish, OCD-like compulsion. But if she did, there was the danger that she would be opening the dam and she would be reduced to sobs in front of her class. She took a breath and sat on her hands.

“Caroline,” she began, unsure what she was going to say. “Yes. This was an awful couple of days. It seriously…sucked.” She paused, surprised at her candor and her choice of words. She wasn't trying to talk down to her class; rather, she wondered if she had instinctively reached out to them. “I'm sorry. But the last forty-eight or fifty or whatever hours? The worst of my life. Yup, worse than the death of my father—who I loved a lot. You just never expect to be awakened to the news that there are two dead men in your house. Criminals, yes. People you've never met, sure. But still: a double murder. In your home. And you've probably heard the rest of the story: my brother-in-law's bachelor party got a little…crazy. I guess you all know that.”

She wondered if she sounded a little crazy herself, but it no longer mattered. She released her hands from beneath her hips and wiped at her eyes. At her cheeks. Because now the tears had been set free, a glacier melting in May, the channels at the edge of her nose brimming with sadness.

“And you know what, Caroline? Your dad was right. That craziness is an elephant in the room. I'm glad you brought it up.” She forced a smile. “I am kind of a mess. But you know what else? My family will get past this and I will get past this. I'll make sure you all kill it when AP testing time comes. I'll be fine and you'll be fine. I mean that.”

Caroline nodded. Ayelet stood up, and for a second Kristin feared the girl was going to embrace her. She was afraid that was the extent of her collapse: she needed comfort from the teen girls in her class. In her care. The students had never seen anything like this, and she wondered if she was going to have to rewrite the books on adolescent psychiatry and child development: these kids were empathetic. They were actually worried about her.

Fortunately, however, the girl simply handed her a tissue.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Welcome.”

She blew her nose. Then, as Ayelet was sitting down, she had a thought. “One more thing before we get back to the Compromise of 1850. I know a lot of you have younger brothers and sisters, some in the elementary school. So, I have a favor: when you talk about Mrs. Chapman's meltdown—which I know was epic—please do what you can to make sure the story doesn't get back to my daughter. Melissa is in the fourth grade. Kazuo, your sister and my daughter obviously are great friends. They're in the same class. Same after-school dance class, too. So, I would be seriously grateful if all of you could be—and here is an SAT word to keep in mind—circumspect. Judicious.”

Kazuo grinned. “No prob, Mrs. Chapman. These days? She's all about the clothes and inappropriate TV.”

“Melissa, too,” she agreed, and once again she dried her cheeks with her fingers. She felt her wedding and engagement rings against the skin there, and found herself—much to her surprise—smiling back at the boy.

…

Richard watched the afternoon sunlight pour through the wide restaurant window and brighten the soupspoon beside his napkin. Most of the lunch crowd was gone now, and the hostess was helping a waiter straighten the white tablecloths and tidy the menus. When Richard looked up from the spoon, his brother was talking—it seemed as if his brother was always talking—moving his hands a bit like he was a lunatic given a conductor's baton and an orchestra. The gestures were too big for a table this small. And he seemed to be speaking mostly to Spencer Doherty, who was leaning back rather comfortably in the third of the four chairs. The fourth chair, the one opposite the window, was empty except for the blazer that Spencer had draped over it. He was wearing gray suspenders with silhouettes of people tangoing on them.

“I mean, I know we're lucky to be alive,” Philip was saying to Spencer, “and I'm not blaming you. It's not your fault, buddy, it's really not. But how the hell did it all go so wrong so fast? One minute those girls are like this dream come true—”

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