Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

She racked her brain. She’d get the ring out of the safe now and put the place cards into their proper spots on the table. That was all there was left to do before Edward’s dinner. All the rest would have to wait.

She knelt down before the safe, careful not to snag her stockings or wrinkle her skirt. “It’s a question of fire,” Edward had said about the safe when he’d brought it home, “not security.” They were living in Cairo at the time, and Edward had had the safe built behind what looked like the lower two drawers of a three-drawer side table inlaid with mother-of-pearl. They’d moved it from residence to residence ever since, along with the Turner, Sam Gilliam, and Farouk Hosni paintings, the silver from his family and crystal from hers, and the handful of other personal mementos they used as homing devices as they traded residences every few years. Placing the safe in whatever was to be Peter’s room had become part of their moving ritual. He stored his stamp collection in its top drawer.

Only she and Edward knew the combination, though; they kept a written record of it in their safe deposit box at Barclay’s in London, along with a duplicate version of their will, in case something ever happened to both of them. She twirled the knob to the right three times, twice to the left, once again to the right, and tugged.

The safe swung open. Clare pulled out the papers: her and Edward’s will, their marriage certificate, the children’s birth certificates, everyone’s passports, and Jamie’s Consular Report of Birth Abroad. Some jointly owned stock certificates, the certificate of ownership for the Turner. Underneath them all, in the back, the box holding her maternal grandmother’s ring.

I mean, if you still had it. If you hadn’t given it over to the wrong person.

His clear eyes on her.

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?

“Aren’t you coming, too?” she asked, grasping the towel to her chest.

“I’ll be back. You go for a swim.” He climbed into the driver’s seat of the camper and looked into the side mirror before putting it into reverse. And there she was, in a beach parking lot, somewhere on the middle Atlantic shoreline, like a little crumb waiting for a seagull to sweep down and devour it.

She watched the camper disappear. She picked her way through the beach grass down to the sand. All around her, families were setting up for the day, children racing for the water and returning, squealing from the cold, mothers laying out hampers. She found a rounded-out hollow in the base of low dunes and dug in a space for herself.

When he returned to get her, the families were all gone. The sun was already setting. Her skin was painfully red, and her nose and arms were erupting in freckles. She trailed him back to the parking lot without saying a word. He opened the back of the camper to get her a beer, and she saw that whatever had been in there had been emptied. There were his knapsack and her tote bag. A paper grocery bag with cokes and beer in it. And the duffel bag.

When she got behind the steering wheel, she couldn’t help herself. She checked the odometer. He had driven one hundred and fifty miles since he’d dropped her off that morning. But she had no idea to where. She didn’t ask either. She turned the key in the ignition and put the car into gear.

“That’s it,” he said, sliding into the cab of the camper with the duffel. The mixed smell of sun, sea, and cigarettes entered with him. Sweat glued her naked skin, where her tank top didn’t cover her shoulders, to the car seat. The feeling was pleasant, even the sunburn, like summer vacations were supposed to be. “We can return the camper to the car hire now.”

She didn’t ask what was inside the duffel, now tucked between his legs half under his seat. Nor did she ask why he took it in with him when he stepped out to use a service station restroom north of Philadelphia on the Jersey shore.

When they dropped off the camper at the rental agency, she looked at the odometer again. She didn’t know when, but sometime before they’d returned — maybe when she’d gone into the restroom herself — Niall had managed to alter it. Almost none of the miles they covered, together or separately, were recorded.

She put the certificates back into the safe and opened the ring box. Granda had been first generation in America, born on a dirty street in Brooklyn, but he grew up to be a baseball star of sorts in addition to a canny businessman. He’d kept his baseball jacket, Phineas O’Donnell printed across the back, in a glass case in his den and, until the year he died, would take Clare’s brothers out into the backyard of their house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and throw a ball around with them. He met her future grandmother just off the boat from Sweden, working days as a clothier’s model and nights at a nightclub as a coat-check girl. She was just taller than he was, with a twenty-two-inch waist and icy blond hair that she wore in a neat chignon at the nape of her long neck. He found out when she’d be working at the nightclub and reserved a permanent table for those evenings. He sealed the deal by offering her the grandest emerald she’d ever seen, held in place by a Celtic trinity knot in 18-carat platinum and two diamonds.

“Go Irish,” he famously told her.

“Yah,” she said. “I better.”

Granda’s cheeks turned fatter and redder with every year they were together. Mormor stayed as tall and sleek and taciturn as when she graced the pages of the Franklin Simon & Co. catalog. She outlasted him by a decade, growing paler every year, until one morning she simply didn’t wake. Their descendants received two surprises at the reading of her will. The first was that Mormor had been six years older than she’d told everyone. The second was that she’d bequeathed her famous emerald engagement ring to Clare.

Clare closed the ring box and slipped Mormor’s ring on her finger. She wouldn’t fuss over not having time left to clean it before the dinner. The emerald, cosseted by the diamonds, sparkled on her finger, casting deep green-blue prisms of light over her thin skin and polished fingernails. Delicate coils of platinum wove around it, shooting pinpricks of silvery light, like moonlight breaking over the crests of waves. It was a ring that demanded to be looked at by everyone who came near it.

“It’s a dinner ring, in truth,” Mormor had once said to Clare. “Your silly Granda, always making a big show. You can’t wear a ring like this daily.” But she had.

The clock in Peter’s old room chimed once, marking the quarter hour. Clare laid the stock certificates back into the safe, placed the empty ring box down on top, and swung the door shut, turning the knob. She needed to get the place cards out before their guests arrived. And she needed to wake Jamie, bundle him off into his room before Edward and the rest of them got there.

Within five minutes, she had slipped the place cards into their little silver holders around the table. She peeked into the kitchen. Amélie and her cousin were finishing a quick supper. Mathilde was standing over them, ladling out potatoes like a character from Dickens. Half-readied plates of starters marched up and down the other side of the long central table, waiting for the asparagus to be added to them. Yann, the waiter-cum-butler, was out of sight — on the little kitchen balcony having a last smoke, no doubt.

Just enough time to nip back into the bedroom and wake Jamie. She strode back down the long hall, listening to the sound of her heels. The efficiency of their clip-clip-clip reassured her. Everything else was crazy, but she’d managed to get dinner in place.