Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

“Yeah?”

“Do you have any rooms?” The question was ridiculous, but she felt no temptation to laugh. Laughter didn’t exist here.

He showed no sign of getting up to let her in. “How many?”

“Just one.”

He dropped his feet to the ground. She saw there was a second man sitting behind him in the corner. His eyes were riveted to the television.

The first man fumbled in a box on top of the desk and lumbered towards the door. He did not unlock it. “That your car?” he asked and pointed to the camper.

She nodded.

He nodded back. “I see. Number ten.” He held a key up. Its silver face slipped and dangled in the fluorescent lighting over the entrance. She put her hand forward to take it, but he kept it out of reach. “Twenty-five,” he said.

“Oh, yeah.” She felt her face go warm. “Hang on.” She fished around in her little sack for her wallet, and extracted two tens and a five-dollar bill. He accepted them through the metal bars and slipped the room key back through them to her.

“Thank you.”

The man waited until she was behind the steering wheel before turning his back on her. She handed the room key over to Niall. In the obscurity of the parking lot, she could hardly make his face out, just the light of his eyes. He lit a cigarette.

“He gave me the very farthest room,” she said. “I don’t know why. They’re not busy.”

Niall didn’t reply, but she felt his hand slide onto her thigh. Warmth slipped through the skirt she was wearing. He squeezed.

She turned the ignition back on and drove to the bottom of the lot. Their room was almost barren: a large bed covered with a cheap, worn orange bedspread, a bedside table with a clock on it, a linoleum chest of drawers with a television on top. The tiled floor was rugless. She didn’t like to take her shoes off; she didn’t want the feel of the floor on the soles of her feet. When she went to flip on the light in the bathroom, the bulb burned out in a pop and a fizz.

“I’ll walk over to the office and get a new one,” she said.

“Leave it,” he said. He came up behind her, his body so similar in height and size that it felt like a shadow, and ran his hands under her T-shirt and over her chest. She turned to him, forgetting about the burned-out lightbulb in the bathroom.

She woke in the night to the sound of cars pulling up, farther down the parking lot. She could hear what sounded like a black man’s voice and then another’s, car doors opening and closing. Drug dealers, she thought, then chided herself for being racist. She crept to the window.

“Come away,” he told her.

“I thought you were sleeping,” she said, climbing back into bed beside him.

He didn’t answer and she fell back to sleep.

She awoke again what must have been a couple hours later. A sense of emptiness had penetrated her dreams, disturbing her. She lay quietly and listened. The men’s voices were gone. Niall also was gone. The room was so dark that she could only feel his absence. She could see nothing. She sat up, waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark, and when they didn’t, realized that the shutters on the room’s window must have been closed from the outside. She felt her way to the door, banging one of her knees against the foot of the bed. The door was locked, and the key was missing. She couldn’t leave if she’d wanted to.

She made her way back to the bed, because there was nothing else for her to do. She lay there awake, reminding herself over and over that Niall would never let anything bad happen to her, until, overwhelmed by heat and exhaustion, she fell into a sweaty stupor. Then it was morning and Niall was back in bed beside her.

“Mommy?” A voice broke in through her memory.

She almost jumped out of her skin. She swiftly slid her rings back on her fingers and turned around. Jamie was sitting on the end of her bed.

“James.”

“Don’t get all mad. Dad didn’t see me.”

“You’ve been here this whole time?”

Jamie shrugged. “I got back around five. When I heard Dad come in, I hid.”

The drapes were open, and the last moments of sunlight illuminated her son’s pale face. He looked so much like her as a teenager for a second there that she was startled. There it was: the same taciturn but curious hazel eyes, same hesitant upper lip. She could almost see how others must have looked on her as a fifteen-year-old.

“You don’t need to hide,” she said.

Jamie shrugged. “Whatever. You’re the one who said Dad had some big dinner tonight, and I shouldn’t mess it up for him. I was just trying to be helpful.”

“Helpful?” Clare stared at her son, trying to figure out whether he was being sincere. “Well, Jamie, I wouldn’t say that ‘helpful’ is the first word that came to mind regarding your recent behavior.” She glanced at the clock on the bedside table. 6:48 p.m.

“You’re busy,” Jamie said.

“No, I’m not.”

“I saw you look at the clock.”

“I’ll dress while we talk. You’re not going anywhere,” she said. “What about this girl?”

Jamie flopped backwards onto her bed. “Hmph.” He had been a wakeful baby, and many were the times Clare had profited from one of Edward’s work trips to bring him into their bed. He would giggle in his sleep, even before he was old enough to say “Mama,” and she’d hear the sound as part of her dreams. Sometimes, she still heard it in her sleep.

She sat down on the bed beside him. “You didn’t mention her.”

“Whatever,” Jamie said.

“‘Whatever’? Are you kidding? What’s going on, Jamie?” When he pulled away from her, she added, “The school called your father.”

Jamie flipped up beside her, so violently his face almost hit hers. She had to restrain herself from recoiling. “It’s a whole class thing! It’s because she’s Irish. ”

She bit her lip. A “whole class thing” could only mean a Catholic from Northern Ireland. She’d never engaged in any discussion with her sons about the Troubles or any part of Irish history. On the contrary, she’d spent two decades avoiding all discussion of Ireland, except as pertained to leprechauns, four-leaf clovers, and claddaghs. But she knew how a Catholic from Northern Ireland would be viewed at Barrow, and she knew Jamie would refer to a Catholic girl from Northern Ireland not as British but as Irish. Despite how it might gall his father. Perhaps because of how it would gall his father.

“ You’re Irish,” she said.

“No, I’m not. I’m half American and half English. Superpowers! Colonizers! What could be less Irish?”

“I see.” She took a deep breath. There’d been no other boy. It was the girl he felt was being mistreated. Not himself. “What was because she’s Irish?”

“The way they treated her. The way they…” His voice trailed off and he looked away.

“Right.” She took a deep breath and steeled herself. “Were you…? Did they find you…?”

“Mom!” Jamie protested, his cheeks flooding with red. He folded his arms over his chest.

“I need to know, Jamie. At least what Barrow knows.”

He dropped back down flat on the bed, turned away, buried his face in the pillows.

“No, Mom,” his muffled voice. “Nothing like that. You don’t understand what happened.”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “You’re right, I don’t. Tell me.”

He didn’t answer.

In the silence between them, she felt as though she could hear the ticking of his heart, hidden and subdued but just waiting to go off, ready to explode his young life into a million ragged pieces. All the passions her son experienced, and yet he managed to hold them so close, so much the same as she’d been when she was younger. She stood up.