The Guest Room (28 page)

But first and forever? She was always going to think
rubber
.

She looked at her watch. They should probably continue on their way to Grand Central. They had to catch a train home.

Richard knew this was neither a vision nor a dream, and his first reaction was flight. He should continue right past his driveway. Instead of braking, he should hit the gas pedal and drive up the thin street off Pondfield Road. Drive around the block. Just take a moment and try and figure out what the hell the girl was thinking. But he didn't. His brother might do that, but he wouldn't. Instead he glided up his gently sloping driveway and came to a stop just before the garage doors.

The girl was sitting on the front stoop of his house, her chin resting on the knuckles of one hand, a cigarette dangling from the other. She was wearing a knit cap with the Giants' logo—his team, a sign or a coincidence he couldn't have said—and sunglasses, but he knew instantly it was her. He could see enough of her face. Her lips. Her posture. He recognized the leather jacket.

But he would have known it was her regardless of what she was wearing. It wouldn't have taken a sixth sense. It took only a glimpse.

She didn't move when he shut off the car engine and pulled the key from the ignition, but he could tell that she was watching him. He was watching her. She was wearing a miniskirt and boots, and he had one of those thoughts that was comically inappropriate in his mind, and caused his lips to quiver upward ever so slightly:
What would the neighbors think? Hot girl in a miniskirt and boots, smoking a cigarette on my steps?

Well, never mind what they thought. They couldn't possibly think less of him. He couldn't possibly think less of himself.

Mostly, he realized, he was smiling because Alexandra was alive. That detective was wrong, all wrong. Thank God. (Had he murmured those two splendid words aloud in his seat? He thought he had.) Her decomposing body wasn't about to wash ashore somewhere in Brooklyn or on Staten Island, or bump for hours against the stanchion of a Navy Yard dock before someone called 911 or fished it from the water. Nope. She had wound up…here. In Westchester. And she was, quite clearly, breathing. Not decapitated. Not drowned. He was so relieved that he was shivering ever so slightly when he climbed from the car. She didn't stand until he had crossed the driveway and marched all the way up the slate walkway and front steps. When she finally did rise, she held her cigarette away from the two of them and bowed her head against his chest. He felt the wool cap against his neck and the earpiece to her sunglasses against his collarbone. He felt her whole body lean into him.

“I bet you did not expect to find courtesan back here,” she murmured.

Awkwardly he rubbed her shoulder blades. He felt simultaneously that it was morally wrong to touch her, and morally imperative that he did.

“No,” he agreed, “I didn't. I…”

She waited.

“I was afraid something had happened to you.”

“You thought I might be dead.”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

He felt the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. “Nope. Still here.”

“I'm very glad. I was afraid for you.” He wondered if she knew her partner was dead. Sonja. He considered telling her where he had been earlier that day, but then thought better of that idea. In time. Maybe.

“I couldn't think of anyplace else to go,” she murmured.

“Well, I might have started with the police,” he said, a suggestion born more of paternalism, he hoped, than self-preservation.

Abruptly she pushed him away with her free hand and took a step back. “No. I am not going to jail.”

He wished he could see her eyes behind the sunglasses. Was this an admission that she had shot the Russian in the front hallway?

“They showed me the Rikers Island. They told me about prisons in America,” she went on, her voice a little louder now, a little more frantic. “I know what goes on there. I know what really goes on there.”

“Whoa,” he told her, putting his hands up, palms open. He wasn't sure who
they
were, but presumed it was whoever had brought her to America and then, most likely, butchered her friend. “Let's go inside. Let's talk, okay? I want to know who you are. Who you really are. I want to know what you need—what I can do.”

“You won't call police guys?”

He shook his head. “I can't promise that I never will. But I won't right this minute.”

“Look…”

“Go on.”

“I've come because Sonja might have left something here by accident. Something important. I need it.”

“I'm sure it's long gone. The police were here for a couple of days. Anything Sonja left is in a police evidence locker somewhere. I mean it. They scoured the downstairs.”

“It was upstairs.”

He thought about this. He recalled what his wife had found in their daughter's bedroom. “They were less thorough there,” he admitted. “What is it?”

“A phone number. It was hidden in”—and she seemed to grow almost shy when she continued—“a condom wrapper. Sonja went upstairs with a man.”

“I know.” He gazed for a long moment at the street and the houses around them “Okay, let's go inside. We'll look. We'll talk there.”

“You worry about people next door?” she asked.

“Alexandra—and it is, Alexandra, right?”

She gave him a strange half nod that he couldn't quite decipher.

“Well, Alexandra, the people next door are the least of my problems—and, I would wager, the least of yours.”

But the condom wrapper and the slip of paper weren't there. They weren't anywhere in the bedding, and they weren't behind the mattress. Together Richard and Alexandra actually moved the bed, and they searched amid the clothing and books and video game discs that had wound up over time beneath the box spring. And Richard was relieved. He knew if he found the number he was going to give it to the police; he certainly wasn't going to allow this girl to try and make a run for it with an illegal passport and fake credit cards.

It was only when he was making the bed once more, pressing the sheets under the mattress, that he understood what had happened: Kristin had thrown the bedding away Tuesday night. She hadn't wanted to wash the sheets or the pillowcase; in her opinion, there was no water in the world hot enough to cleanse them for their little girl after a strange man and an escort had had sex in that bed. And the garbage had been picked up yesterday morning. If the number had ever been in this bedroom, it was long gone.

“I'm sorry,” he said, a white lie that he hoped would help console her.

She was leaning against Melissa's bookcase. “It was my only hope,” she said, her voice flat. “That was it.”

“No, you'll be okay,” he said. “You will.” He suggested they go downstairs and have a cup of coffee while he figured out what to do next.

They sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee. It was barely two-thirty in the afternoon; he doubted that Kristin and Melissa would be back for at least another couple of hours, which diminished any sense of urgency he might otherwise have been feeling. He could text Kristin to see what they were up to—make sure they were still somewhere in midtown Manhattan—but somehow that felt incriminating. Later, he thought to himself, a text like that could only come back to haunt him. He assumed by the time Kristin returned that either he would have brought the girl to the police station or the two of them would be sitting right here. He certainly wasn't going to hide the fact that Alexandra had shown up at their house. He wouldn't; he couldn't. Still, that conversation was not going to be pretty.

She had taken off her sunglasses and knit cap, and brushed her hair with a white plastic brush she had pulled from her backpack. Now she looked more like the girl who had sat naked upon one of the beds upstairs, and less like the runaway waif who had been waiting for him outside on the stoop.

“What if my wife had come home first? What if my wife had been here when you knocked on the door?” he asked, hoping he hadn't sounded judgmental or angry. He was honestly curious as to what she was thinking.

“I would have said hi. I would have asked to look upstairs in bedroom for piece of paper.”

“I'm serious.”

“Me, too. I would have said hi. I would have asked her for help—just like I asked you.”

“But why in the world would you think she might help you?”

“Did you tell her we had sex?”

“No—because we didn't. But I told her I went upstairs with you and we almost did.”

“Wow. Did not see you doing that.”

“We're married.”

“Look, I am in very big trouble and you are very nice man. It seemed to me that you must have very nice wife.”

“I do have a very nice wife. But she's human. She's not a saint. Hell, maybe she is a saint; she isn't divorcing me. But she was really mad at me. I'm not an adulterer. I don't have affairs. And yet, you are…well, Alexandra, you're beautiful. You're beautiful,” he repeated. “And you were there on that bed and, that moment, mine. I mean…tell me something.”

“Okay.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“You swear that's the truth?”

“Yes.”

“God. That is still so ridiculously young.”

“There are girls like me who are younger.”

“That only makes this all the sadder. And at nineteen? You're not that other woman. I mean, my wife would never view you as a romantic rival. But I was upstairs with you. I was undressed. We were undressed. That should never, ever have happened. And so my wife is—was—justifiably pissed off at me. To be honest with you, Alexandra, I'm not sure she would have helped you.”

“I know that expression, ‘other woman.' I am mere courtesan. Plaything.”

He sighed.
Courtesan
and
plaything
were both euphemisms, though each word conjured for him a very different image. The first summoned Versailles. The second? A motorized toy car for a child. But he knew what she meant. He knew exactly what she meant.

“Where is she now?” asked Alexandra.

“She's in the city with my daughter.”

Abruptly Cassandra appeared out of nowhere and leapt onto the kitchen table, nearing sliding into Alexandra's cup and saucer. The cat looked at the girl and then at him. He lifted her into his lap, but she was more interested in sniffing the girl's backpack and boots and jumped back onto the kitchen floor.

“So, if your wife comes home and finds me here?” she asked.

“I would wager, at least at first, that she would be a tad angry.”

“Then I should leave.” It was a statement, not a question.

“No. You can't leave. Not after what I just saw. Where I just was.”

“You were at work? You get to dress like boys' soccer coach at work?” She was smiling ever so slightly.

“No. I wasn't at work. I wish I had been at work, but no such luck,” he said. He sipped his coffee and gathered himself. He had to tell her about her friend. She had to know. “I was just in Brooklyn,” he continued. “I was at King's County Hospital. I was at the morgue. I was asked to identify a dead body.”

“Sonja,” she said, that smile instantly evaporating and her voice growing wistful and sad. She reached into her jacket pocket for a cigarette. He considered stopping her, but then didn't. Let her smoke. If a cigarette was going to help her hear this, fine. He had no plan, he realized, no plan at all. He was fumbling in the dark, trying on the fly to figure out what the hell was the right thing to do.

“Yes. Sonja. I'm sorry. I'm very, very sorry. I guess you two were friends.” He watched her light the cigarette with a cheap Bic lighter, and he found himself focused on her fingers and the polish on her thumb. He stood up and found her an ashtray in a cabinet filled with place settings and serving dishes they never used.

“We were friends,” she said. “But I knew it. I knew she was killed.”

“How?”

The tip of her cigarette glowed like a planetarium constellation when she inhaled. “She didn't call me when she was supposed to. Our signal.”

“Do you know who killed her?”

“I do. Guys who worked for dude named Yulian. Bunch of cue-ball-head babies.”

“How did they not kill you?”

“I wasn't with her.” She took another long drag on the cigarette. “Maybe it's good thing we didn't find that number. I would have used it—gone to the Georgian—and maybe gotten myself killed like Sonja.”

A thought came to him and he sat up a little straighter. How in the name of God had he not realized this the moment he saw her on his front stoop? He recalled what the cop had said to him that morning in the morgue:
Maybe if they thought you were a witness to something. But it's not like you're hiding one of their girls in your guest room. It's not like one's hanging around your sunroom.

“Yes. Obviously they're after you now,” he said.

“Obviously.”

“Could they be on their way here? To my house?”

“I don't think I was followed. Maybe they were following me in New York City. But I was at your front door a long time and no one killed me.”

“But they might look for you here.”

She shrugged. “I had to go somewhere.” Then she rose to her feet, saying, “I'll go. I'm sorry.”

Quickly he put his hand on her shoulder and stopped her. “No, don't. Please…don't. You came here for help. I'll help you.” Nevertheless, he knew that no good could come from her being here. A collage of faces flickered behind his eyes: There was his wife and there was his daughter. There were the girl's bodyguards, now dead, but there were plenty more just like them. And there were the detectives he had met in the past week, the women and men who had explained to him that his house was a crime scene or showed him the secrets that only a morgue could share. But Alexandra was far more child than whore. She was nineteen. He couldn't possibly send her outside into the chill October air, where all that awaited her were men like Spencer Doherty and, eventually, death. He thought of the hunting rifle he'd chosen not to buy. The bullets he'd seen in the box. But then he recalled Sonja's corpse and realized that he could have purchased an assault rifle—he could have bought a bazooka—and he still wouldn't have had a chance against the kind of men who brought Alexandra to America.