The Guest Room(39)

“I don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll figure it out. Not long. I mean that: not very long. And the good news? I’m getting paid. And I like the idea of getting to go home before the two of you and working with the cleanup crew. I’d love to make sure that the house is in tip-top shape so that when you walked in the door you’d never even know what happened.”

She thought of what he had told her about the couch. And the painting. She thought of the bodies in the living room and the front hall. He was, she understood, kidding himself. They’d always know what happened. Always. Still, she reached for his hand as they walked. It was a reflex. They walked the last block to her mother’s in silence, but holding hands. When they arrived, she nodded at the doorman.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asked Richard.

“Of course! Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. Remember, I’m still getting paid.”

“It’s not money I’m worried about. It’s you.”

“Well, I’m fine, too. I mean it.”

She rather doubted he was, but she wasn’t going to press him. She simply reminded him to call her once he had spoken to the detective—or whoever at the police station could tell him anything. She watched him kneel and hug Melissa. She accepted another kiss from him on her cheek and his hands on the waist of her jacket. Then she waved good-bye and led their daughter back upstairs to the apartment. She was, she realized, unmoored by his touch. But she was also unprepared to have him beside her in bed.

…

As Kristin was falling asleep that night in her mother’s guest bedroom, her daughter beside her, she replayed in her head her conversation with her brother. They had spoken by phone that evening after dinner.

“You should be glad he told you that he went upstairs with the girl,” he said. “I think a lot of men would have lied. They would never have told their wives anything.” She was relieved that her brother hadn’t donned his therapist superhero cowl and asked her how she was feeling.

“But did I really need to know?”

“You said you asked him. He didn’t lie.”

“Or maybe he did. Maybe he did have sex with her.”

“Okay, then. As you just asked yourself: Did you really need to know? Maybe he was sparing you. He was drunk, it was meaningless. So he dialed down what really happened. He told a white lie.”

“That’s not a white lie.”

“Look, I know this sounds awful, but sometimes if you screw up the way some people do in a marriage, it’s best to keep whatever you did to yourself. Especially if it’s a onetime thing. Does your partner really need to know? Not always.”

“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.