Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

Except…he could know exactly who she was. He could have been following her this whole time. She hadn’t looked around when she’d stepped out of the Residence’s courtyard. American wife to a high-powered British diplomat. What a twofer she represented for a terrorist — and the children, offspring of both nations. Thank God it wasn’t Jamie standing on this street right now. Edward had been right about sending him away.

Clare reached her left hand up to pull on a strand of hair, then quickly dropped her hand back to her side. No reason to flash the diamond.

“Uh…,” she said. “I…”

“Please, to help me?” One of his eyes was smaller than the other, heavy-lidded. He unfolded the paper and lifted it.

She stopped trying not to look and, instead, looked closer. The paper contained a photocopied map of the center of Paris, torn maybe from a phone book, in faded black and white and gray. Written in round blue script along the margin of the sheet were a couple of phone numbers and the address for what was labeled as a medical clinic.

The labored breathing, heavy jacket, resolute stance…Color rushed to her cheeks. The man was ill. He was speaking in English with her not because he knew she could but because he could. He was sick and lost, and looking for a doctor. And she was everything bad in the world, a racist, a profiler. She didn’t know what she felt in greater quantities, relief or shame.

“Let me see,” she said and took the map from him.

Hardly a week after she’d married Edward, she’d received a booklet from an association of spouses in the FCO with advice on keeping safe. And that was twenty years ago, before it had become commonplace for people to turn their own bodies into bombs and acceptable to broadcast images of people jumping out of blazing skyscrapers. Maybe her reaction had been inevitable; violence was the shadowy partner of the tea-and-handshake life of the diplomatic corps. But she couldn’t blame Edward or the world he’d brought her into. Her life of violence had begun before she married Edward, the day she said yes to Niall, maybe the very day she met him. Certainly the day she allowed him to wrap her abdomen with layers of hundred-dollar bills, pounds of paper taped to her tall frame, and then headed for the Boston airport.

“We’ll be safe coming in,” Niall had assured her. “No one looks twice at a pregnant girl in Dublin, no one looks twice at an American tourist either,” and she’d clung to that word “we.”

“That’s why you’re carrying the money into Dublin,” he’d said. “No one would believe a tourist arriving up north. But we get it safely onto the island, and the lads will ferry it up to Belfast. No worries.”

That “we” again. Still, as soon as they boarded the plane in Boston, bound for Dublin, the “we” seemed to disappear.

She was alone, just she and the phantom child, and the fear she felt, as the plane took off, as they sailed above puffy white clouds and plunked down on the Irish tarmac in a gust of rain, as she undid her seat belt, stretched to accommodate her extended midriff, and padded along the jetway, trying to remember everything Niall had told her about how a pregnant woman shifted her weight from hip bone to hip bone. The arrival terminal in Dublin sucked her in, and she gave herself to it, all the time half wishing she was back at Harvard studying how to say amar, the Spanish verb for “love,” in the first-person past-perfect subjunctive. During the flight, she’d resisted the temptation to make eye contact with Niall, seated two rows ahead of her under a separate booking, even as she made her way up and down the airplane aisle to the lavatory—“You be remembering to go often,” he’d instructed her. “Women with child do.”—but as she and all the other passengers tottered towards the baggage carousel, she had to restrain herself from using her long legs to catch up with him. “I can feel the baby kicking,” she might say, making light of this whole crazy escapade, when she realized she couldn’t see him anymore, that he’d walked straight through the baggage claim and disappeared into the crowd of Irish voices. Was the rush of panic that overcame her from fear of the customs authorities or from having lost sight of him? She felt herself sway. For a moment, she thought she might faint.

“Last months, eh?” A woman put a hand out to steady her. “Difficult time to travel.”

A jolly man with white hair and red cheeks offered to lift her bag. By then, she was half convinced that she was with child, Niall and hers. “How kind,” she mumbled, repeating something she must have read in a book or seen in a movie. Nothing felt real anymore, not even herself. She added, “I’m all right. Just a little tired.”

He wasn’t outside the terminal either, and she slid into the backseat of a taxi, stumbling over the address Niall had made her memorize: Portobello Road 83. Dublin.

“Portobello sounds like someplace in London,” she’d said when he’d first given her the address, spelling out the word in the notebook by her mattress, under a list of texts about courtly love in Italian. They were in the dark of the tiny room in Cambridge she’d signed the lease on for the upcoming school year, as the end of summer approached. Her skin still felt sore from the mysterious, fleeting trip they’d made, renting a camper, to the Eastern Shore the weekend before. She’d moved in right after their return.

“Well, this one isn’t,” he’d said and scrutinized her sunburned face in the dim light, as though he were looking to see whether he’d made a mistake in trusting her. “Focus, Clare.”

She’d nodded, feeling heat rise in her face, laying down her pen. “Will you meet me there?”

He shook his head.

“Where, then?”

He shook his head again.

She’d never asked him for anything, never dared. She steadied her voice. “Not at all?”

“Here, in Boston. I’ll get back over before the winter comes.”

She kept her eyes on him.

“All right, then, Clare.”

Still, she waited. This much she needed from him.

Finally, he acquiesced. “St. Stephen’s Green. The Yeats Memorial. An hour after noon, the next day. I won’t speak to you. But I’ll give you a sign so you’ll understand if it’s all right for you to follow. I’ll stop to light a fag.”

He’d never bent in any way to accommodate her before, and his compromise sent a surge of astonishment through her. His plan wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but his offer felt like so much more than she’d ever had from him before.

She picked up her pen to finish writing the address in her notebook. “Portobello Road…?”

“It won’t have a sign outside. It’s just a small, gray stone building. Don’t write it down,” he’d continued, “in case you get caught and they search you,” and she’d torn the page out of her notebook and ripped it into a hundred small pieces before she even got around to writing down the number.

“Portobello Road, number eighty-three,” she told the cabdriver after she’d climbed into the cab, taking care to cradle her tummy in a protective fashion, trying to keep her voice from quivering, and when they pulled up in front of the unmarked square building, she made a mental note to point out to Niall that the building was brown, not gray. Something about this mistake, this proof that even Niall was fallible, gave her courage. She rang the front door of the shabby building and announced to the big-eared boy who opened it, his face and body remaining passive as his eyes swept all over her before stopping on her belly, “I need a room.” She heard the slippery sound of the taxi taking off but didn’t look backwards. Her only thought was to complete her mission, to move on from this horrendous task so she and Niall could be reunited. She didn’t even think about what could possibly come next for them, what it would be like when he returned to Boston as he’d said he would. She just wanted it to happen, to have Niall’s focused energy beside her again, as soon as possible. St. Stephen’s Green. The Yeats Memorial. “Here, take them,” she said to the man who appeared in her squalid room shortly after her arrival, entering without knocking, a knife glinting from under his shirt cuff, the River Liffey rushing past below them, and she didn’t bother to turn her back as she stripped off her dress, unwinding the money-filled bandages, throwing them over to him one after another, as though each handful was payment to bring Niall back. “What’s this, then?” he said, his heavy eyebrows rising, as though he’d hadn’t known what she’d be delivering or at least the quantity. And maybe he hadn’t, maybe he’d been told even less than she about the mission, but she didn’t say a further word to him, not even when he pointed to her worn backpack and said, “Empty it.” She dropped her passport and wallet and the copy of Thérèse Raquin, which she’d brought to read on the flight over, onto the bed. “Well, that was some day’s work,” he said, letting out a laugh when he’d finished stuffing the bills into the pack. “You never saw me, mind.” She spent the night huddled on the room’s lumpy bed, waiting, flat-stomached again but full of expectation. Next day, she moved into a different hotel, as Niall had instructed her to do when they were still back in Boston, an only slightly less dismal affair she’d picked out of a Let’s Go guide. “I can’t know which one,” he’d told her. “That way, if they lift me before you leave, they can’t get it out of me. No one will know, not me and not the man they send down.” She arrived at St. Stephen’s Green well before the appointed time, a sweater pulled around her once-again svelte torso. And if someone from the plane should see her? She sat down on a bench and folded her arms over her stomach.