Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

She transferred the phone to her other hand and frowned. “Two hundred thousand? That seems like rather a lot.”

“Okay, two. Does it really make a difference?”

“Well, to the other one hundred and ninety-eight thousand, probably. But I see what you mean. Even one is one too many. So, is that what’s up? Are you having nightmares again?”

He sounded so close, she could have sworn he was calling from downstairs. “Oh, Mom,” he said and groaned. “Can you stop with that? I should never have told you.”

“It’s okay, Jamie. I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“Did you tell Dad?”

“No. But is that why you’re calling?” At the other end of the apartment, the service doorbell rang. A delivery; she could hear the soft tones of Amélie’s voice again. A man’s voice; she couldn’t distinguish whose. She checked her watch. It had to be the wine.

She’d missed how Jamie had responded.

“Mom?” he was now saying. “So? Has anyone called?”

“From?”

“From…from anywhere.”

“Oh, Jamie. We have a really big day here. Just tell me. Have you gotten into trouble at school again?”

There was silence on the other side of the line.

“Jamie?”

“Never mind.”

She had a moment of panic. “I didn’t mean that. What’s the matter?”

“I just told you.”

She sat up, alert. Jamie had called a few nights earlier, asking permission to send an e-mail in her name requesting access to the school’s science lab after hours. Something about some homework he and his roommate, Robbie, were doing together. “I’ll write it,” she’d said, but he’d objected. “It’s just a note, Mom. Just tell me the password for the family account. Otherwise, I’ll have to give you all the times and stuff when we want to get in there.” Afterwards the thought had kept coming back to her: since when did Jamie go out of his way to do homework?

“Well, tell me again.”

Her son sputtered so hard into the phone, she had to draw her ear away. “Look, Mom,” he shouted, “I’m just saying, whatever they tell you, it’s not right that only one person carry all the blame! It’s not right!”

She tugged on a lock of hair. “Listen, honey—”

“I gotta go, Mom. I just wanted to speak to you first. Before they do.” His voice broke. “I wanted to tell you I’m…I have to come home.”

Christ, she thought. That’s it. He’s going to be suspended. “Jamie—”

But he repeated, “I gotta go. Bye,” and hung up.

She waited, as though some part of her younger son might still linger, ready to talk more, before she clicked off the phone. She’d been apprehensive about sending Jamie to boarding school; their older son, Peter, had been at Edward’s alma mater in Scotland, Fettes, for two years and professed to love it, but Jamie called Fettes “Fat-Ass” behind Edward’s back. “I know you were pleased with your years at Fettes,” she’d said when Edward had first brought the idea up the winter before, “and Peter has done fine there. But Jamie isn’t Peter. Edinburgh only gets seven hours of daylight in winter, and Fettes does have those red-striped blazers. And the bagpipes…”

Edward had squeezed his hands together once in front of him, as he always did when he was about to capitulate. Clare had seen the movement and had suppressed a smile. For a moment, she’d been happy to think Jamie would be spending another year at home and at the International School in Paris.

“Very well,” Edward had said. “I thought he might do well to be near his older brother. But if not Fettes, he will still have to go somewhere. We’ll be leaving Paris soon, and in these last years before university, a child’s education must have continuity. Besides”—and he’d paused to reach for The Guardian —“the security risk will be smaller at a British boarding school. There will be gates, there will be grounds, there will be less of a spotlight on him than on a diplomat’s son rambling the septième arrondissement with a schoolbag over his shoulder.”

And so, she had come up with the Barrow School, because it was in London and near an airport, and a friend of Jamie’s from their posting in Washington, Robbie Meriweather, had just been sent there while his father was relocated for the World Bank to Jakarta. She’d asked Robbie’s father to write a letter supporting his candidacy and, when Jamie was accepted, had had the two boys placed in the same dorm room.

But being reunited with Robbie hadn’t spared Jamie from homesickness, nor had being just an hour’s flight away from Paris. Home -sick? Could she even call Paris his home? Jamie had been born while they were posted in Cairo, but that city had never been home to any of them. When her thoughts returned to those couple of years, Clare felt Cairo rather than remembered it: the weight of her belly, then the weight of James in her arms as she’d walked him up and down the halls of their apartment, trying to calm him. The hooded eyes of their nanny whenever she’d hand James over to her, the siss-siss sound the woman made between her gapped front teeth. Stepping outside, the sun beating down, bludgeoning the back of her neck and shoulders, the smell of mint and tea and excrement heavy in the still air, the assault of car horns and shouting. Back inside the haven of their apartment, more painful sounds: the ring of phones bearing Gulf War updates, the penetrating silence of whispers and furtive conversations, and, always, the wails of the baby. James had cried steadily for the first six months of his life, his little hands screwed into tiny balls, fighting a war of his own. Why didn’t you go home to have him? the other expat wives had asked. But even then, where was home? Hers or Edward’s? Though she was married to a British foreign servant, Clare was still an American.

“Not homesick, heart sick,” Edward had corrected Clare the last time she’d brought up James’s struggles at Barrow. His studied patience had weighed on her like a heavy blanket. “Heartsick for the indulgences of his munificent mother.”

Jamie should have gone to Fettes. At least Peter would have been there to take care of him. Peter was solid, like his father. If Edward did get posted to Dublin, she’d spend more time in their London apartment and arrange for Jamie to come stay with her weekends. She would help him.

For a moment, Clare almost felt positive about Dublin. Then she remembered, and a wave of cold rode over her.

She entered St. Stephen’s Green earlier than agreed, hastening past the fountain with three stoic-faced Fates perched on a slab of stone in its center, tightening her navy sweater around her waist. Who’d think Dublin could be so chilly in August? In Boston, the heat had shown no sign of letting up; by now, even the roses had drooped from heat exhaustion. When she arrived at the memorial to Yeats, she sat down on a bench and pulled the sweater on. A man wandered in — not him — and she hunched over her now flat stomach.

A tiny yellow-and-green finch flitted down onto the bench beside her. He twittered, cocked his head left, then right, eyed her, flew away. She waited. Couples walked by, college kids like herself toting knapsacks, gray-haired men gripping newspapers, a mother with three small children. Even as the park began to fill with workers going home for the day, she waited. She couldn’t believe the person she’d become, and yet the last thing she could do was go backwards.

Still she waited.

Clare folded her hands over the telephone. If Jamie hadn’t been suspended yet, he would be in class now, and they weren’t allowed to have cell phones in class — or anywhere outside their dorm rooms. If she rang him straight back, she could get him into still more trouble.