The Guest Room(8)

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 f*cking 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.

Melissa sat beside her on the bed. She was trembling, as Kristin herself had been only a few moments ago, and so she put her arm around the child’s shoulders and pulled her against her. “Everything’s okay, my little one,” she murmured. She knew she was going to have to offer a G-rated version of what had occurred, sanitizing it as much as she could for her daughter. She could fill in the blanks—God, the blanks—for her mother after she had gotten dressed and (she hoped) Melissa had fallen back to sleep. “But there was an accident at the house. At Uncle Philip’s bach—at Uncle Philip’s party.”

“His bachelor party,” her daughter said. Of course Melissa knew it was a bachelor party. She was going to be in her uncle’s wedding in two weeks. She was the flower girl.

“Yes.”

“What kind of accident?”

“Two of the men who were there…died. There were some people at the party who weren’t invited—who weren’t supposed to be there. And there seems to have been a…a fight.” Kristin could feel her mother watching her, listening intently so she could parse the truth from this carefully dumbed-down circumlocution.

“A fight or an accident?” Melissa asked.

“Oh, I am not quite sure myself,” she lied. “But here is what is important: Daddy is fine. And Uncle Philip is fine.”

“So it was their friends who got killed? Were they grown-ups I knew?”

“Nope. See? It’s all going to be okay,” she said, and she tried to believe that short sentence herself. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. And so she held her daughter close and rocked her gently. She tried to immerse herself in the movement, to quiet the roiling despair in her soul. In a minute or two, she would walk the girl back to the guest bedroom and tuck her into bed. Pull the sheets and the blanket up to her shoulders. She would kiss her once on her forehead and once on both cheeks—as she always did when she said good night. As Richard did when it was his turn to read to their daughter and kiss her good night. Then Kristin would get dressed by the light from the corridor. She would brush her hair in her mother’s bedroom and perhaps even put on some makeup. She would have some coffee and share with her mother the truth. The shameless and appalling and loathsome truth.

Then she would take a cab to Grand Central and go home.





Alexandra


My mother was a secretary at a brandy factory in Yerevan, and her boss was the president himself. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—was a nurse. The three of us had lived together since my father had died years and years ago. I was toddler. He’d died in an accident at the hydroelectric plant where he worked. Electrocuted—one of six men who died that morning, but the only one who died quickly. The other five would drown, which people tell me is a much worse way to die. I think that’s probably true from the time a guard at the cottage held my head under the water in the bathtub. Nearly drowning us was one of the ways they would discipline us. There are no bruises. There are no scars. The merchandise still looks good. There is even a word for this: noyade. It means execution by drowning. Comes from French Revolution. I looked it up.