The Guest Room(7)

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 f*cking 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 *s—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 f*ck 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.