The Guest Room (3 page)

“Kristin?”

“I'm awake,” she said, just loud enough for her mother to hear. Already her mind was cataloging the possible reasons why someone would call like this in the small hours of the night. She took comfort in the presence of Melissa beside her, but the geographic distance that separated her from her husband—How far apart were they really? Fifteen miles? Sixteen?—was sufficient to inject into her veins a creeping dread against which she was helpless. She climbed out from under the covers, trying to keep the sheets snug for her daughter, and swung her bare feet onto the floor. Her mother was silhouetted in the doorway, her face half in shadow. The small chandelier in the corridor was off, but her mother must have switched on the lamp by her own bed. She looked disturbingly skeletal in the half-light.

“It's Richard,” her mother whispered, as Kristin passed her, walking instinctively toward her mother's bedroom.

“That's what I suspected,” she murmured. “Is everything okay?”

“I don't know.”

Kristin blinked against the glare as her eyes adjusted slowly to the brightness—it felt positively solar to her at this hour of the night—walked around the bed in which her mother had been sleeping, and picked up the phone off the nightstand. It was pink. It was so old, it was attached to the cradle by an undulant, matching pink cord. Kristin was, as she was always when she held the receiver in her hands, struck by its weight. Its heft. It made a cell phone seem so insubstantial.

“Richard?” she asked. It was, according to the digital clock by the bed, 2:58 in the morning.

“I'm sorry to wake you,” he said. She saw that her mother was watching her. She was standing with her arms folded across her chest, her worried face oily with the skin cream in which she slept. Her white hair was usually impeccable in Kristin's mind. It wasn't now; it was—like she presumed her own hair was—wild with sleep. “But something happened,” he went on, his voice hoisted high onto the ledge between quavering and devastated. He was, she realized, still a little drunk. “Something horrible. We never saw it coming. We never saw it—”

She cut him off: “Are you okay, sweetie?”

“Yes, I'm okay. We all are.”

“Okay, then,” she said, relieved because he was safe and no one was hurt. Something must have happened at the house; something was broken; something was wrecked. That's all. And he was still drunk and saw it as worse than it was. Much worse. But he was safe and so the sun would rise. “If you're all okay, that's all that matters. If something happened to—”

This time he interrupted her. “I mean I'm okay and Philip's okay. All the guys at the party are fine. More or less, anyway. But the girls—”

“Girls, as in strippers? You mean there was more than one?”

“Yes. And they weren't strippers. Maybe they were. I don't know. But things got wild and some of the guys were…”

“Some of the guys were what?”

“It got crazy. I don't know how it started. But some of the guys were having sex with them.”

“You can't be serious. They were having sex in our house? What the hell happened? Sweetie, where are you?” A part of her understood that she had just rifled three questions at him, and so she took a breath to try and calm herself.

“Look, the point isn't that some of the guys were having sex,” he said. “As bad as that was. As wrong as that was. The point—”

“Were you?” she interrupted. Something in his tone had caused her to flinch—something in the way he had said
wrong
—and when she uncoiled, she had asked the question reflexively.

“Was I what?”

This time, the question caught in her throat. “Were you having sex with them?” Her tone was more incredulity and fear than anger and accusation.
Please,
she thought,
just say no. Tell me I'm being a crazy person.

“No. I didn't. Not really…”

“Not really? What do you mean,
not really
?”

“The issue,” he said, not answering the question, “is that the girls…”

At some point, she had sat down on her mother's bed. She wanted to shoo her mother from the room, but her whole body was collapsing in upon itself. Her husband had just fucked some stripper in their house. Perhaps in their living room. She was sure of it, and she felt her stomach lurch as if she were on an airplane trying to navigate wing-rattling turbulence. “The girls what?” she asked, her tone numb, her voice almost unrecognizable to herself. It was like when you listened to a recording of your own words: the sounds and the intonation were never what you expected. She glanced up at her mother, who had heard every word that she'd said. Her mother looked stricken.

“The girls killed the guys—the guys who brought them. They killed them. There were two of them—two guys—and now they're dead. Both of them, Kris. The girls used a carving knife we keep in the cutting block in the kitchen to kill one of them. Then they took his gun and shot the other one. And now these two big Russian dudes are both dead.”

For a moment she said nothing, her mind trying and failing to process the oneiric horror of what he was sharing. People had died in her home. Men—including her husband—had been fucking strippers in her home. Somehow these travesties were connected, the umbilicus a bachelor party for a man, her brother-in-law Philip, who she didn't especially like. Among the riot of emotions she was experiencing, she understood that fury—rage at Richard's juvenile younger brother—was bubbling to the surface, subsuming even the despair and sadness and embarrassment that her husband had had sex with a stripper.

“Where are you?” she asked finally. There were so many things to ask. There were just so many things she didn't know.

“I'm at the police station. We all are.”

“Oh, God. In Bronxville?”

“Yes. They're taking our statements. We're telling them what happened.”

“And the girls?” The word
girls
reverberated in her mind; suddenly it seemed like the wrong word. But, of course, that was the word for a stripper. When you passed places like the Hustler Club on the West Side Highway, the signs never boasted “Hundreds of Women.” They advertised “Hundreds of Girls.”

“They're gone. They disappeared. They killed these two big assholes—handlers, bodyguards, thugs; I don't know what you call them—took their wallets and wads of cash, and then drove away in the car they came in. But they're gone.”

In the bedroom doorway, behind her mother, she saw her daughter. She was wiping the sleep from her eyes. She was wearing her Snoopy pajamas: pink-and-white-plaid flannel bottoms and the iconic dog surfing on the top. The word in the cartoon balloon was
Cowabunga.
She was asking her grandmother what was going on, what was happening, who had called.

This child, Kristin thought to herself, her husband saying something more on the other end of the line but the words merely white noise, was a girl. A girl doesn't fuck other people's husbands at a bachelor party and then take a knife to her bodyguards. A girl…

A girl was nine.

But the thought was lost to the relentless stream of images—a whitewater cascade that was swamping her and which she was helpless to resist—of her husband atop some stripper on the couch, her ankles upon his shoulders; of her brother-in-law beneath some stripper on the living room floor; of two other men, her mind conjuring for them black T-shirts and tight jeans, the sorts of biceps you only see in the gym, bleeding to death. But bleeding to death…where? She saw them dead in the kitchen, imagining their corpses on the Italian tile simply because her husband had said the girls had grabbed one of the very knives that she had used for years to prepare dinner for him and their daughter.
Kitchen.
That was the word that some part of her mind was comprehending from Richard's brief chronicle. But the truth was, the two men could have been killed anywhere: The living room. The dining room. The den.

“Kris?” her husband was saying. “Kris? Are you still there?”

“Uh-huh, I am,” she said. Then she asked, “One of my knives?” Four words. One question. It was all she could muster.

“Yes,” he said. “One of our knives. The girl with the blond hair. Yeah, I think that's right. It's all this horrible blur. It all happened so fast.”

“Okay…”

“And there's more.”

“How? Seriously, Richard, how could there possibly be more?” she asked, and he started telling her about the condition of the house and the blood on a painting, but the news had grown too cumbersome, too unwieldy for her to assimilate. There was too much and it was too awful. It was too awful for him. For her. For them. She looked across the room at her mother and her daughter. She realized that she was shaking.

It wasn't clear to Kristin where the memory came from or what it meant: she was sitting alone on the front steps of her family's colonial in Stamford, Connecticut, the shingles a beige cedar, and she was in the fourth grade. Her daughter's age now. It was late on a summer afternoon, a weekday, and her mother was in the kitchen unpacking groceries and then starting to prepare dinner. A storm was nearing from the west, the gray clouds racing across the sky like they were part of a theater backdrop. But it hadn't started raining yet and the air was electric and alive. She had been with her mother at the supermarket, and her mother had bought her packs of
Back to the Future
trading cards and a
Back to the Future
lunchbox. She had loved that film. Had the same crush as many a nine-year-old girl on Michael J. Fox. She had sorted the cards as soon as she and her mother had gotten home, prioritizing the ones with Marty McFly and Lorraine Baines over the ones with the flying DeLorean. Now, decades later, she associated that moment not merely with happiness, but with security. She had felt so safe on that stoop. Her older brother would be home soon enough from wherever he was hanging out that August afternoon, as would their father from work. And inside the house, through the front hallway and past the powder room—that was indeed the euphemism her mother had used for the downstairs bathroom—the sounds of her mother folding brown paper grocery bags and stacking cans in the pantry were replaced by the thwack of the heavy wooden cutting board and then the rapid-fire
crack-crack-crack
as she started to dice an onion. Kristin recognized the smell of barbecue sauce.

The memory waned as Kristin understood the connection—and why her mind had excavated that distant moment now. She thought instead of her own knives: the knives with which, over the years, she had chopped carrots and cubed beef and sliced lamb. She saw the cleaver that she had never used and the bread knife with its serrated edge that she seemed to reach for daily. She saw the nakiri knife that was instrumental when she made salads. She saw the black wooden handles with the three steel rivets. Her knives were handcrafted in Japan. They had been a wedding present for Richard and her.

She stared at her legs, naked from mid-thigh. She wondered now which knife the strippers had used to kill one of the men who had brought them to the house.

“Kristin?” She looked up from her mother's bed in her mother's apartment. She had sat there after hanging up the phone, stunned and unmoving, her mind finding solace in recollections far from the carnage that perhaps even now was her living room. She was a marble sculpture: Devastated Woman in Sleep Shirt.

“Kristin?”

She rolled her eyes in the direction of her mother. She tried to rise from her paralysis, to focus on what to do next. It was taking work. She had told Richard that she would catch the first train to Bronxville in the morning. She would have driven home that very moment, but her mother hadn't owned a car in two years; she had sold the Volvo wagon after her husband had died. Her mother drove so infrequently now that she lived in Manhattan that it had seemed ludicrous to spend so much money every month on a parking space in the nearby garage. So the plan, which was still evolving in Kristin's mind, was this: she would get dressed. That was the start. She might as well get dressed now. She would catch a train in a few hours to Westchester. Melissa would spend the weekend here with her grandmother and go to the matinee today as planned. Her grandmother would take her. Kristin would drive her car from the Bronxville train station to her house, because Richard had said he expected he would be home by then. Home from the…police station by then.

Kristin feared that she was reaching like a drowning woman for normalcy and it was only a matter of time before she failed and went under: two people had been killed in her home after her husband and her brother-in-law and his friends had been watching a couple of strippers.

No: they had been fucking a couple of whores.

She sighed. She was trying to climb up from a deep slough of hopelessness and despair, but there were no convenient vines or tree roots near this quicksand. Whores. In her home. With her husband. People had been murdered in the house where she and Richard were building their life together, where they were raising their daughter. These were the bricks and mortar behind which they felt safest, were happiest.

“Mommy?”

Both her mother and her daughter wanted her. Or, perhaps, wanted only to be reassured that she had not become stone before their eyes. She ran her hands through her hair and then patted the side of the mattress beside her. “Come here, my adorable little one,” she said to her daughter. “Sit down beside me.”

“Kristin, what's going on? Is Richard okay? He didn't sound like himself on the phone,” her mother was saying.

“Richard's fine,” she answered. “Daddy's fine,” she added, turning her full attention now on Melissa. She tried to recall what she had said at her end of the conversation with her husband and, thus, what her mother and her daughter might have heard. Had she said “sex”? Had she said “strippers”? She had. She had indeed.