Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

A sparrow flew to their feet, pecked around, and left. She searched his face for an explanation. Probably she would not have the life she had today, would never even have married Edward, if she hadn’t first known Niall. She would have become a secondary school language teacher at a good private academy or maybe worked for an international bank, sending her kids to do their First Communion, wearing a claddagh ring as a tribute to her heritage. She would have married a fellow Harvard grad or maybe one of the boys from her hometown in Connecticut. They would have gone to reunions together and remembered mutual classmates over beers and sweet cocktails with other alumni couples. Without Niall, she’d have done nothing, known nothing. He’d forced her to resurrect herself from the ashes of his betrayal. But what had she done to him? She’d meant nothing to him. He’d used her, and then he’d left her.

She looked at the hands, in her lap, that had first drawn him to her, the skin on them translucent. She’d looked at them this morning and seen the spidery veins of an aging woman. She’d looked at her face in the mirror and seen the years she’d spent without him.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

A ringing, a ridiculous sound: a clip from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. They both stared at her purse. She withdrew her BlackBerry and saw the name of the caller posted on the screen. Edward .

She squeezed the cell phone between her palms, as though the apparatus were a small wriggly rodent, unruly, foreign and unmanageable, until it stopped ringing. She turned the ringer off, lodged it back inside her purse, and closed the zipper.

“The money,” he said. “I’m talking about the money.”

She gathered her purse up and slid to the far end of the bench, turning sideways so that she could face him head-on. The sky was brighter, the afternoon later. She could hear all the birds. She could hear the breeze in the lindens.

“Are you planning to blackmail me? Is that why you’ve come back?”

The eyelids over his still-sharp blue eyes snapped open and shut like a spring-jointed door over a summer’s day. He started to speak, then turned his face away, lifting a forearm by his face.

She heard the footsteps too and glanced over her shoulder: Two middle-aged women were strolling up the walkway from the Woods, arm in arm. They were happy. They were laughing. Clare looked back again at Niall. She watched the light in his eyes flicker over them, then relax. Crossing his arms over his chest, he turned his attention back to her.

“Blackmail you? After what I done for you? And how could I blackmail you, even if I were wanting? Think, Clare. We’re in this together.”

“I’m not in anything,” she said.

He shrugged. “ Were in this. As you like.”

Another twosome approached, a mother pushing her baby in a stroller, talking on her phone. The museum was closing, the park was emptying.

Niall didn’t flinch this time, but he waited until the woman and her child had passed before speaking again.

“Look, you don’ have to worry about anyone ever knowing about you. I never told anyone, never will. If I had done, you’d be in the ground now yourself for what you did, wouldn’t you? That’s why I faked my own death, isn’ it? I never even told anyone you were my woman.”

Heat rushed over Clare, coloring her neck and prickling the roots of her hair. They’d lain together in damp sheets, their limbs heavy from the summer heat, and beside him her body had turned from that of a gangly girl’s into a woman’s. His pale skin, the tautness of his energy. The hollows they’d carved out of sand as they’d traveled up the coastline. His knee right now, right next to her. Niall. She’d looked up the meaning of his name in Widener Library: “passionate, from old Irish.”

But he was I.R.A. Niall had never uttered the word, but he hadn’t needed to. She had been a love-besotted stooge, ready to do whatever he asked, and asked he had, and then just as swiftly discarded her. Niall, explaining they were just helping regular people. Niall, taping those bills to her torso, still warm from his own hands. Niall, walking away from her in the airport, not even looking back.

“Who was it really for?” she said. She braced herself for the words she’d never heard, and had waited for, so many years. “That money?”

Niall took a cigarette out, tapped it. But he didn’t light it. “I understand it weren’t your country. That’s what they told me when they gave me the ticket to come over: The Americans, they like to think themselves more Irish than the Irish, but there you are, driving to the good jobs, dropping the kids off at the good schools. No one saying, Fuck off, you Fenian bastard, burning you out your own home, hammering you just for walking down the street. No bombs exploding before your eyes either. Easiest job they could have done me, collecting the funds from the Americans.”

He put the cigarette back in the pack and looked at her with that fixed way she so remembered. “But you, Clare. You were different.”

The bastard. She drew her leg away from his. “You said it was just to help ordinary people.”

“It was.”

“And the camper? The trip we made to Maryland?”

Niall sighed. “Come on, Clare. It was a war. And we were fighting the only way we could. What were we supposed to defend ourselves with? Sticks and stones? I wish it could have been different, but I done what I done and I don’t regret a second. It was for the freedom of the Irish people — it was worth fighting for.”

“Worth innocent bloodshed? People died, Niall. Ordinary people.”

“ We died.”

“Not just you.”

Niall shrugged. “You don’t really understand how it was. We didn’t even have a bath in our home when I was a lad. A lad like me: either you were one of them or you died fighting. But I didn’t come here to debate you. Think what you like. I’m done. I just want the money.”

“What money?”

“I know you didn’t keep it so you could spend it yourself. You hid it somewhere, didn’t you?”

“Honestly, Niall. I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“The money. That money.”

“ That money?”

“ That money.”

“Niall, I don’t have that money. You know that. I gave it to the man in Dublin just like you told me to do.”

Here he had to come back and sit next to her in the gardens, wearing that blue sweater and with those same piercing pale eyes, his rolling voice like swells on the sea, talking about the Troubles, talking about his peoples’ struggles, sucking her back more than two decades into a life she’d so carefully set behind her, and she’d gone and said it. If he was wearing a wire? Maybe he had come clean with the British government and made a plea bargain with them by handing her over. Would Edward be able to hire someone who could get her out of this? Would he want to?

Niall frowned. “You gave it to the man?”

He looked, if possible, more confused than she was. He wasn’t wearing a wire, and Interpol wasn’t waiting in a van on the street.

She tipped her head yes.

“Are you taking the piss out of me, Clare?”

A breeze brushed through the holly, causing ragged shadows to flash across his face.

She wanted to ask him the same thing. Instead she said, “No. I did what you asked. And then I waited for you. You never came.” She’d come out with it; there was no turning back. “Why didn’t you?”

“To St. Stephen’s Green? After?”

“I waited.”

“When you didn’t show up with the money, I thought maybe you’d done a runner. But how could you’ve done, you with a life like you had? So my next thought was, maybe she’s gone to the Brits.”