Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

“Thank you, Mathilde,” she said.

The lights were off in the living room. She walked down the hall to her and Edward’s bedroom. Standing at the foot of their bed, Edward was holding his BlackBerry in one large smooth hand, scrolling down through his messages. “No word from Jamie still,” he said. He laid his phone down on the bureau. “I’ve left I don’t know how many messages today. When did you speak to him?”

“This afternoon,” she said. “Hang on.” She stepped back out into the hall to check that Jamie’s door was still closed and there was no sign of light under his door. It seemed cruel to leave Edward worrying about Jamie, but she had enough things to handle without the midnight revelation that she had Jamie hidden here in the Residence.

“Just wanted to check I’d turned the hall light out,” she said, returning. She took her suit jacket off and hung it over the back of a chair.

Edward loosened his tie and lifted it over his head. He undid the knot and looped it in half, the dark violet silk slipping through his blunt fingers.

“Clare,” he said, his eyes trained on her, “why did you go out to check the light was off and then come back in with it still on?”

“I — it was just…I’m tired.”

Edward removed his own suit jacket and hung it up. He unbuttoned his white shirt.

“I forgot,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, unfastening the buckle on his belt.

“Okay, then,” she said.

“All right,” he said. He slipped the belt out of his pants’ belt straps. “Clare?”

“Yes.”

“At dinner. You made an unusual comment.”

Her fingers fluttered up before her. How they beat at the air, grasping for something to hold on to. “I know. I’m sorry! I don’t know what came over me.”

“You surprised me.”

She shook her head. “I know, I know. I don’t usually make mistakes like that.” But I do make mistakes, she thought. If only you knew.

Edward pulled his pants off and laid them over the shelf of his suit rack. He walked across the room to her, his bare legs long and white in his boxers, his chest under his unbuttoned shirt also white, softer than it used to be. “ Everyone makes mistakes,” he said. “It’s only human. ‘To err is human,’ right? Alexander Pope?” He smiled. “A Pope, but not a cleric poet.”

She didn’t smile back. She shook her head. “Not everyone does. You don’t.”

“Of course, I do. It was probably a mistake sending Jamie to Barrow. That was my idea.”

“No, you wanted to send him up to Fettes. At Fettes, Peter would have taken care of him. He would have made sure nothing like this ever happened. Barrow was my bad idea.”

The heat of the bills wrapped around her stomach as she’d walked through Dublin customs. The heavy weight in the back of that camper, driving it up along the Atlantic shore, and the sound of wooden boxes shifting as she went around a corner. She and Niall had never discussed it, but she was sure now that there had been guns back there. Maybe Niall had traded them for the money she later carried, or maybe they also were being gathered to be sent to Ireland and she’d help transport them. All she knew was that she had gone ahead and married Edward and given birth to Jamie and Peter — and her life with them had been built on lies, the biggest lie of all being that she was perfect. She wasn’t perfect. Far from it. She couldn’t continue pretending.

“Edward, I did something bad once. Very bad.”

Edward held a hand up. “Stop,” he said. “Wait. Before you say anything, think whether you need to.”

She shook her head and seized his hand. “I led you to believe I’d never been to Ireland. It’s not true.”

“Oh, that. Clare,” Edward said. An expression of vague relief flitted across his face. “Is that what all this is about? All this strangeness from you? I know that.”

She withdrew from him, releasing his hand so forcibly that her own fingers clattered up and almost hit her face. “You knew? ”

“Clare, I’m career Foreign Office. I’m working for the British Embassy in Washington with Irish Affairs as part of my portfolio. I meet a lovely Irish-American girl, already in her twenties, who says she’s never been to Ireland and shows no interest in going. Doesn’t even want to talk about it. No Irish-American girl doesn’t want to go to Ireland. Half the Irish-American girls have even managed to get themselves Irish passports. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” He shrugged. “Never mind that last statement. I didn’t mean that how it sounded. I’m not angry about it. Whatever you did, your personal life before you knew me, is your own business. You seem to want forgiveness from me, but I don’t need to forgive you for anything, Clare. I’m not Divine. But of course I noticed.”

“And…?”

He stopped to close the door before continuing. “And when I decided to ask you to marry me, I had it checked out. I had to make sure something wouldn’t come up later. For you as much as for me; in this world, we’re both under scrutiny. And I saw you’d been there. Passport records are easy to come by. But the trail ended there. We checked Northern Ireland, too. I’m sorry. It was the times. I had to. Your name didn’t come up there either.

“So, I don’t know whom you went there to see or what you did while you were there or why you wanted to keep it secret from me. I just know you went, and I can surmise the visit didn’t go as you wanted. End of story. I tried to suggest we visit Ireland a couple times, thinking maybe you’d gotten over whatever it was, and when you brushed me off, I dropped it. I hope nothing very bad happened to you there, that someone didn’t hurt you, and that it won’t affect how you feel about moving there now. I mean, should I get the embassy in Dublin. If it would, then, yes, maybe we need to talk further. But you didn’t say anything last night when I mentioned the possibility; instead, you worked hard to make this dinner happen. And you are still wearing your claddagh. So if this is just about having pretended not to have been there, and if there is something you’d still prefer to keep to yourself about it, I can live with it. I didn’t know you when you went to Ireland. The person you were when I met you, the person you’ve been every day of our married life together, that’s whom I am married to.”

Clare felt dizzy; she felt breathless. She saw the calm gray-eyed face she woke next to in bed all these years. Then she saw the slightly doughy, creased face of a stranger with a British accent and receding hairline. Was this what life came down to? A succession of shadows, each darker than the last, masking the consummate isolation of human existence. Puff, you dissipated like the sprung seeds on a dandelion weed, one last shadow obscuring the garden furniture.

“You checked up on me? You checked up on me behind my back? And you never told me?”

“That’s a bit like the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?”

He was right. He had married her in good faith and she had lied to him, and lied to him again and again. She’d been far more deceptive than he’d ever been, and than he realized. And in addition to all the rest, she’d pretended she was unattached when she’d still been as attached to Niall as the rusty unbending clasps on an attic trunk. Every waking hour, every night, she’d thought about him. And so she’d stretched her fingers out to Edward before a linen-draped altar and let him slip his family’s rings on her fingers and swore before God and their families and a church full of witnesses that she would love and cherish him till death parted them without letting him know that she’d already done the same in an imaginary world over guns and blood money with someone else. As though, with Niall’s disappearance, she could make that whole summer evaporate into nothingness by pretending to the rest of the world it had never happened.