Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

“Edward, I—”

“Wait, Clare. Think. You can tell me whatever it is you are about to say. I will listen. But, for the more than two decades of our life together, you have not wanted to and once you’ve told me, you can never not have told me. I do not want you to wake in the morning regretting anything, and I do not need you to explain to me. I trust you.”

There was Niall, sand in his wavy hair, the freckles popping out of his fair skin, the sound of the Atlantic at their feet, the way their same-size bodies had curved into each other. There he was, disappearing into the crowd at the airport in Dublin, like the last drops of water plunging into a funnel, her trying to cling on to them.

His scent, the heat of him sitting on the bench next to her today.

There was Edward, undressed but for his socks and underpants and unbuttoned dress shirt, with a fat golden band on his ring finger. He thought she was going to tell him about something personal, something intimate; he had no idea the enormity of her betrayal. If she told him now what she’d done all those years ago in Dublin for Niall, he would be worse than betrayed. He would be forced to become an accomplice.

She shook her head. “How can you be so accepting?”

Edward sat down on the bed and pulled off a sock. “It’s simple, really. Look, I don’t know why suddenly, at almost midnight, after two decades, you have decided to admit to me you have been to Dublin any more than I understood why you felt obliged in the middle of dinner to ask after the well-being of an accused assassin of an important government official. But I do know — whatever it is you are trying to sort out in your heart and head at this moment — in the end, you will do the right thing.” He pulled off the other sock and held them in his hand. “Actions mean something. You’re a good person.”

She felt like crying out. There he was, Edward. The face she saw each morning, the hand that rested on her shoulder came back into focus. She sat down on the bed beside him and slid her arms around his broad chest, laid her head against his neck. He wrapped his arms around her and held her. She looked up into his face and kissed him.

“Jamie’s here,” she said. “He’s in his bedroom. I hid him.”

Edward sighed and released her. “Well, at least he’s safe. You better go make sure he’s sleeping and not waiting up for us. It’s too late to talk sensibly with him.”

She hesitated before Jamie’s door. If she knocked, she might wake him up. But she didn’t want to step in on him unbidden, possibly embarrass him, a teenager. She laid a hand on the door as though by doing so she might be able to feel whether or not he was awake. She hoped he wasn’t. Edward was right — talking with him would have to wait until morning.

Edward was right about so many things. He was wiser even than she’d given him credit for. She’d done everything in her power to make herself as unnoticeable as possible, swathing herself in beige cloth and neutral opinions. She’d buried the pivotal choice of her life, like the city of Troy, under layers and layers of sediment, even as she carried the remembrance of it with her every minute. And still she hadn’t managed to fool him. He had watched her lie, year after year of their marriage, and had never said a thing to her about it.

Was he right also in thinking he could trust her?

Actions mean something. Sitting beside Niall on the bench at the Rodin Museum this afternoon, she’d felt as though they knew each other better than anyone because they’d shared this one thing that no one else on earth knew about and that had defined her every waking moment since it had happened. But she didn’t even know where he’d slept the night before. And people weren’t just their pasts, or their dreams for the future. They were the drugstore where they went to purchase shampoo, and the shampoo that they purchased. They were the jobs they got up and went to in the morning or didn’t get up and go to, the movies they chose to watch, the magazines they read. The way they dealt with the people they employed or the people who employed them, whether or not they enjoyed the scent of calla lilies. Whether they brushed their teeth before or after breakfast, or both. When you are young, you can believe you still are your dreams. Then you become.

She pushed open the door to Jamie’s room. The desk lamp cast a dim halo over the edge of Jamie’s bed, its neck stooped down and forward like a swan’s. Jamie lay just out of its reach, asleep. He’d pulled her sweater, which she’d shed on his bed and forgotten earlier in the evening, over his shoulders, so that one arm flung out around him in an empty embrace. She lifted it from over his neck and chest and drew the afghan on the foot of the bed over him. His long, thin limbs shuddered; he groaned and sleepily pulled the blanket in around him.

No one planned to grow up and become a bad person. As a young girl, she’d cried over a neighbor’s three-legged cat and tried to stanch the bleeding of an injured chipmunk. She’d been horrified by the televised images from Vietnam. Then, one day, she’d found herself combing the dunes of the Atlantic for seashells while her Irish lover was probably delivering guns, and smuggling dollars in a bandage around her midriff.

She understood the source of Jamie’s confusion. He had picked up her ambiguity. But she was not going to be ambiguous anymore. She wasn’t going to allow the sum of her life to be based on one sole defining moment that had happened when she was too young to know better. Maybe there was no going back, but there still could be going forward. People had to be able to change. A better world had to be possible.

Jamie’s face looked flushed, but when she laid the back of her hand against his cheek, his skin felt cool. A wisp of night flew in, and she rose and shut the windows, carrying her sweater over her arm. She returned to the bedside and tucked the afghan in still closer around him. She stood looking at him a few minutes longer, twisting the emerald ring on her finger. Then she kissed him softly, so softly he’d be sure not to awaken.

Edward had drawn a bathrobe on over his pajamas, making him look strangely formal for being in his nightclothes.

“He’s fast asleep,” she said, “and so should you be. You look exhausted.” She slipped her sweater over her shoulders.

He sat down on the bed, swung his long legs onto it. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

She came to the edge of the mattress and smoothed the hair back from his brow. “I have some things I need to do. Don’t wait for me.” In the silence of the night, the sound of heavy, even breathing from Jamie’s bedroom grew like a heart between them.

Edward propped himself up on his elbows.

She withdrew her hand. “Just a couple of chores. Cleaning up. You should take off your bathrobe before you fall asleep in it. You’ll be too hot otherwise.” She leaned down to kiss him also, and he pulled her down to him.

“Thank you, Clare, for this evening.”

“It was a good dinner.”

“Yes, it was.”

She turned off the overhead light, closed the door to their bedroom, and continued down the hall. She stopped in the formal living room to turn off a lamp that had been left on. In the dining room, she closed a door of the buffet that had opened. She checked that the china plate, with the queen’s crest printed around the rim, stood neatly washed and all in its crates, ready to be picked up as soon as the sun rose. She slipped into the kitchen and made sure the back door was double-locked.