The Guest Room(6)

But Sonja? She was just biding her time a lot of the evening. She was pretty sure they were going to kill her, too—after the party.

She told me that later. But by then we were gone. By then we were running for our lives.





Chapter Two


“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 f*cked 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.”