The Guest Room(42)

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.