Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

There must be some explanation, some code. But whatever it was, she couldn’t break it. “But, I did show up with the money. I’m telling you, I gave it to him just like you told me.”

He held her wrist fast. His skin was dry and heated, just as she remembered it. “I’m not playing games here. I’ve been hiding for my whole man’s life now. My cousin said it was me in that casket, he the only one who knew it was really Sean O’Faolain, what was drowned and my cousin fished him out. Sean O’Faolain lying under a gravestone with my name on it, and everyone thinking he’s the one disappeared and not me. The poor bastard, he looked so bad no one could tell the difference. I’ve been a dead man in the county records for twenty years since.

“Do you understand, Clare? I don’t exist either in life or in death. You erased me.”

Niall was still Niall, resolute, enigmatic, a battered but unfaltering church along the windswept shore, but now she was the one holding the door open, and from inside she heard the echo of weeping. She wanted to slam it shut. She wanted him to stay as she remembered, the stone she couldn’t overturn, the fire she couldn’t douse. She wanted him to stay the Niall he was in her memory. She wanted him to stay only in her memory.

She shook her wrist free from him. Still she couldn’t bring herself to stand up.

“But I don’ think you went to the Brits with it,” he continued, trying to hold her not by force anymore but by watching her face closely. “They’d have got my name out of you whether you’d wanted to give it or not, the bastards. I would have heard about it, even as a dead man. So, what, then? What did you do with it?”

His eyes were trained on hers, completely serious. He wasn’t talking in code. He meant exactly what he was asking.

“I gave it to him,” she said softly. “I swear. I did just what you said.” She saw it all. The airport. The taxi ride. The miserable house that had been the wrong color. The number beside the bell. “Eighty-three Portobello Road. Just like you said. He followed me right up. He came almost immediately. I gave it all to him. And then I waited.”

And now she waited again. Niall said nothing. Shadows emerged from his sharp eyes, lassoed her, dissipated into the late spring afternoon. He breathed in and out slowly. He stretched his arms out across the back of the bench, and leaned his head back against it.

“Eighty-three Portobello Road? You gave it to a man there?”

“Yes. I did.”

“Clare,” he said. “The address I gave you was thirty-eight Portobello Road. You would have gave the money to a pimp. Eighty-three Portobello was a whorehouse. Everyone come down to Dublin knew it.”

A door through time dropped open beneath her, and she was falling weightless, into the past. Twenty-five years of fear and guilt, accompanying each step she put forward in life, evaporated. The ecstasy, the lightness of burden she felt, were indescribable. Replaced with something else, a strange new blend of joy and release mixed with guilt and compunction. This was the miracle she couldn’t have hoped would happen. The miracle she didn’t deserve. She had never helped kill anyone. She’d just helped a pimp get richer than he’d ever dreamt possible. A part of her wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh. She wanted to stretch out on her back in the budding grass and laugh until she cried, sending her howls of laughter up to the gathering evening above her. Laugh at her newfound freedom; laugh at the ridiculousness of how she’d earned it.

But seeing the expression on Niall’s face, she couldn’t laugh. He had trusted her, and she’d ruined him.

“I—”

Niall got up. He walked around back of the statue of Andrieu, and for a few moments, she wondered whether he might just continue walking.

“Niall—”

She heard him sigh. He came back around and sat down again beside her. She searched his face for anger, tears, anything, but his expression was impassable. “I combed the streets of Dublin. And I started thinking: could she have scared? But I saw you on the plane coming from Boston, I saw you still had the big stomach. I knew you must have brought it. So, I walked around, asking myself: what could she have done with it? I even went down to Dublin ferry, thinking you might have taken the boat to England. I asked myself: how far could have she gone, this American girl? How far would she go in betraying me?”

He stopped, as though expecting not her but history to answer the question. It had. Her imperfectness had betrayed him, completely.

“If you’d have gone to the Brits,” he continued, “if they knew about me and found me, they’d’ve put me away at least ten years, maybe twenty. I couldn’t tell my own either. Ne’er mind me. Someone would have found you and killed you. So I walked the streets of Dublin, walked them up and down, all the time asking myself which would be worse: the Brits or my own. It was like a song in my head, drumming over and over. I went out to the airport the day you were to go home and watched as every passenger boarded, waited until the plane was but a tiny speck in the sky, disappearin’ over the water.

“Can you imagine,” he said, “what that bastard would be thinking, you unloading all those dollars on him? Must have been one happy fuck.”

“Niall—” she started again.

He shook his head and stared at Andrieu’s feet. In a life of nothing but bad news, this still was a wild blow. She couldn’t think of one single thing to say. They sat in silence until he looked up at her. He shrugged and released a short laugh. “Ha.”

“I was not so smart as you thought,” she said.

He shook his head again. “Fuck. I got what I asked for, didn’t I? The whole thing was daft. The whole plan. I was just a lad, you know. It weren’t as though I was the most experienced Volunteer. Throwing rocks about all I’d done before they sent me over. That’s why they sent me.”

“I’d thought you were older than anyone I’d ever known.”

“So I was pretending. But I wasn’t, or I would have known better than to mix up a woman and a mission. And my own woman at that. Feck, you got me goin’, did’n’ you?”

Her chest ached. From regret, from relief, she wasn’t sure why. She crossed her arms again over it. “Look, Niall. The thing is. You — we — didn’t kill anybody. I mean weren’t involved in anyone’s dying. That’s what this means. Think about it.”

He shrugged and hung his head. “Yeah, maybe. Except for myself. You just don’ understand. I was a soldier. Killing’s not a sin when you’re a soldier.”

“Maybe not — but not everyone who died in your war was also a soldier.”

“Eh—” Niall started to speak, then stopped as the elderly trio whose path she’d crossed earlier in the main path of the garden came walking past. He lowered his head again, lifting one hand to screen it.

She turned from their vision also, feeling for a moment what Niall had doubtless felt every waking moment for the last quarter century.

“I have seen you, haven’t I?” she said once the walkers had passed out of view.

“You’re always surrounded by people. Even all the police on your street know you, so. And I didn’t know if you were with them now. So, for a long time, I just watched you. Sometimes with the papers, the Internet, sometimes for myself.”

She had seen him, not in Cairo, never when she was living in America. Visa issues would have made that impossible. But in England maybe, definitely in Paris. Maybe not outside the hairdresser’s, but this morning. He’d withdrawn into the obscurity of dusk and denial, unsure how or whether to let her know he was amongst the living. But he hadn’t been able to tear himself completely away.