The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  They say every single family in the city of Gyumri lost at least one person in the earthquake. Every single family.

  Young mothers were running like it was an Olympic race to the schools because there were rumors that the schools had crumpled like aluminum foil. They had. And here is saddest part. If the earthquake had come even five minutes later, lots of those children would still be alive, because the school bells would have rung by then and dismissed the kids for recess and lunch. They would have been outside playing or walking home, instead of trapped inside as the buildings collapsed.

  My father dug through the mountain of bricks and timber and glass where his parents had lived, even though he was half blind. The wiring was all like Medusa head. Everyone on the street dug like crazy people. Everyone in the city dug into the night. People dug until their fingers were broken and the skin on both sides of their hands was gone. But humans couldn’t lift the rubble from five- and six-story buildings. There were too few backhoes and bulldozers for so much damage, and it was nearly impossible for vehicles to drive down the roads because great chunks of the pavement had been thrown into the air like playing cards, and buildings had melted into the streets.

  My father had awful choice when the darkness came. Did he stay with his mother and father, who were beneath the rubble, unsure if they were dead or alive, or did he leave them and go search for his wife? He said it was agony. He told himself he would dig for half hour more and then go find her. He would see what was left of their apartment. (It would still be standing, but most of the windows would be broken and there would be no heat or electricity or water for months. And this was in December. My parents took in lots of their neighbors, and they all huddled together for warmth. Some of the old people compared it to Leningrad in 1942. For many years other survivors would live in tin houses called domiks. The government built them that winter. They were only supposed to be in them maybe one year. When I was twelve I went to Gyumri with my mother, and there were still whole neighborhoods of domiks. It was so depressing my mother just wept.)

  Finally my father gave up. There were some people buried alive beneath the rubble, but not my grandparents. They were just buried. But you could hear other victims begging for help. Pleading. Sometimes, he said, you just heard moaning. Seven hours of digging and my father had helped drag eleven corpses from the rubble, but he had found no one who was still breathing. They would need backhoes to pull the rest of the dead from that pile.

  He struggled back to the Lada through the flashlights and bonfires and the headlights from the ambulances and fire trucks at the end of block. The Lada was fine, but he couldn’t drive it anywhere. The streets were cratered like the moon. The road was choked with the bricks from collapsed buildings. So, my father did the only logical thing: he took those two big boxes of wristwatches, balancing them like circus clown, and walked home through the disaster area that hours ago had been a city. His plan was to sell the watches for food on black market, which was going to be gigantic after the earthquake. This is what I mean about my father being operator. He was very resourceful. A dependable provider. A good husband.

  All around my father that night walked zombies. Heroes, too. But mostly zombies. He saw two teenage boys carrying an old woman who had lost a leg. One of the boys was shirtless because he had turned it into a tourniquet and wrapped it around the woman’s thigh. The shirt was now the color of pomegranate wine. He saw a green and white bus on its side, the dead passengers half in and half out of the broken windows. He saw whole rows of cadavers, some mangled. People were calling out names, sobbing, wailing. It was biblical. It was like end-of-world time.

  My mother was not home when he got to the apartment. She was out looking for him. Kooky comedy of errors, right? Wrong. It was all just horrible, all just errors. There was no comedy. So he left the boxes in the living room and went back outside to find her. All night long he walked. All night long, my mother walked, too. It wasn’t just the wreckage that made it so awful. Everywhere there were bodies. Bodies on ruined curbs, bodies on trucks, bodies in big holes in the ground. Arms in trees. Legs, somehow barefoot, in store windows, the broken glass shards like Christmas icicle displays. They both saw heads with no torsos or arms or legs, the eyes open and the lips seeming to mouth the word “How?” They both saw the worst thing in the world you can see: bodies of children.

  It would not be till the sun was rising that my mother and father would both be in their apartment at the same time. They were, like everyone in the city, in shock. My father told her they would be okay. They would use his boxes of watches for food. They would survive.

  But the thing was, there weren’t watches in those two crates. There were Barbies. My mother said when he opened the boxes, he tilted his head and raised his eyebrows into a pyramid—she would imitate him and it always made me smile as a girl—like he was a confused university student. Then he got it. He sat back against the wall and lit a cigarette. He was still on the floor with the boxes. My mother curled up next to him. The apartment was freezing, and her breath matched his smoke. “Someday,” he said finally, “we will have lots of daughters and they will have some very, very nice dolls.”

  If he hadn’t died so young, I think I would have had sisters. With all those Barbies, it should have been my parents’ destiny to have lots of girls.

  But, of course, my father did die young. And so all those Barbies were mine. I didn’t have to share them with anyone. I didn’t get to share them with anyone. They were still in their pink boxes over a decade later, when I was growing from chubby toddler to skinny little girl with stick-figure legs, and my mother started giving them to me. She gave them to me one a month, always on the first day, for nearly five years. I have no idea where she hid two boxes, each big enough to hold twenty-eight American Barbie dolls, when I was a girl. Our apartment wasn’t so large.

  But my mother did. See what I mean? She was amazing lady.

  …

  Of course, my mother would die when she was young, too. Not as young as my dad, but young. She was forty-five years old. I was, as I told you, fifteen.

  “And it was right after your mother died,” Richard said to me, “that Vasily kidnapped you?” He sounded so sad.

  “Few weeks, yes.”

  It was that moment that we both heard the car doors slamming outside his house. We’d never heard the car pull into his driveway. It was maybe four-thirty in the afternoon. We looked toward the hallway and then down at the kitchen table, and at the Makarov that was still right beside the ashtray with my big mess of cigarette butts and ashes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Alexandra grabbed the Makarov, swiping it off the tabletop with the speed of a feral cat—claws extended—snatching a barn mouse from the hay. It hadn’t crossed Richard’s mind to reach for it, not when she’d first dropped it on the kitchen table and not when they heard the car door in his driveway. Together they stood, but he motioned for her to wait where she was.

  “It’s just my family,” he told her.

  “How do you know?”

  “It couldn’t be anyone else,” he said, hoping this would reassure her (though the realization did not give him particular comfort). But he was already anticipating how he would introduce Alexandra to Kristin and Melissa, aware that whatever he said would have to be perfect. He would have one, brief chance to explain to his wife that this young woman was perhaps the person she was likely to hate most in the world, but for better or worse the role of paladin had fallen to him—and now he had to help her. They had to help her. Together they had to convince Alexandra that the police were not going to put her in chains in some Bedlam-like dungeon. The reality was it was time. It was time to call the police. And it was time to call the police because they were the girl’s only chance—regardless of whether she’d killed the second Russian.

  He took a breath and opened the front door, and there indeed were his wife and his daughter, the two of them about to ascend the steps. He went outside onto the stoop and shut t
he door behind him.

  “Hey, Dad,” said Melissa.

  “Hey, sweetie,” he said back. He could see in his wife’s eyes that already she was on full alert because he had closed the front door.

  “What’s going on?” Kristin asked him.

  “She’s here. The girl from the party. She needs our help.”

  His wife started to shake her head, and Richard honestly wasn’t sure whether she meant they could not—they would not—help her, or she was simply incredulous. He reached out for her arm, and he took it as a good sign that she didn’t slap his hand away.

  “I am…dumbstruck,” she said simply.

  “The girl from the party?” Melissa repeated. “The sex slave?”

  “She’s just a girl, Kris,” he said, not precisely ignoring his daughter, but knowing that he had to address his wife’s issues first. “Whatever happened, it’s my fault. It was always and only my fault. But—”

  “Why haven’t you called the police?”

  “She has a gun,” he answered, and with that short statement instantly all that he wanted to say—all those possibly perfect words—were gone, wafting away from him like dandelion seeds on a spring breeze.

  Kristin pushed him away and took Melissa by the hand. “Are you crazy?” she said to him. She started dragging Melissa back to the car. “A gun in our house? We’re leaving right now. I’ll call the police when we’re out of here. Come on, Melissa.”

  “Please don’t. Don’t go. Don’t call the police.”

  “I’m not endangering our child. We’re going!”

  “She’s no danger to us.”

  “She has a gun!”

  “She’s a danger to herself. That’s all. That’s my fear. I’m afraid she’s going to get herself killed.”

  “Richard, you’ve lost your mind,” she said, and it seemed as if she might have been about to say more. But she stopped. She stopped because behind him the door was opening, and there she was. Alexandra. Richard saw Kristin putting their daughter behind her, protecting her, as if she expected Alexandra to start shooting.

  “I go,” Alexandra said, and she was pulling her knit cap over her ears. “I go.”

  “No. You should stay. You have to stay. But tell me now, tell me once and for all: Did you shoot”—and he paused, unsure whether he was pronouncing the thug’s name correctly—“Kirill? Did you?”

  He knew that Alexandra had heard him; she had to have heard him. But she didn’t answer, because she and Kristin were staring at each other. Or, to be precise, Kristin was staring at Alexandra. And Alexandra? She was looking both at his wife and his daughter, her gaze flat, her expression impenetrable. Melissa was peering around her mother’s ribs, as if Kristin were a tree and this were only a game of hide-and-seek.

  “Tell me!”

  She didn’t entirely return to him. Her focus was still elsewhere, though she was turning her head ever so slightly. Somehow, something in addition to his wife and his daughter had stolen her attention.

  “He shot himself,” she said finally.

  “What?”

  “He was about to shoot Sonja. Was going to kill her for killing Pavel for sure. Was going to kill her right in front of everyone in your very nice living room. But it doesn’t matter. I go.”

  “Give me your gun,” he said. “Give me your gun and go back inside. My wife and my daughter will come inside, too.” He turned toward his wife and met Kristin’s eyes; for a moment he couldn’t read them. But then she nodded ever so slightly.

  “I promise you,” he told the girl, “you’ll be safe. Someone was talking to Crystal. That means someone knows what those men were doing to you. Demanding of you. Someone is investigating them. You’re not the criminal here.”

  “They won’t believe I didn’t shoot Kirill.”

  “Let’s go inside. You can tell me exactly how it happened. But give me the pistol first.”

  He felt his wife and his daughter watching him. He had his wife back; he never again wanted to lose her. But he knew just how fragile that new bond was. How delicate. At the same time, he wanted his daughter to view him with neither disdain nor disgust. Maybe she understood he was a little clumsy, but let that be his gravest fault in her eyes. Wouldn’t any father sign up for that rep? Pure and simple, he wanted everything to be the way it had been seven days ago. God, seven days. One week. How had all he had taken for granted evaporated in the roaring, animal heat from one bachelor party? But he knew the answer to that. He needed only to glance at this Armenian girl to remember. But now he wanted only to make amends, to make things right. To caulk the hollow in the heart of his family. To make sure this poor girl whose soul had been battered almost since birth was safe. (And after viewing that body on the slab this morning, never again would he question the actuality—arguably, even the tangibility—of the soul, because without it he had seen that we are all just decomposing flesh.)

  “Are we good?” he asked Alexandra, and he extended his hand to her, palm open.

  “We’re fine,” she answered, her gaze oddly far away. “But it doesn’t matter. They still have last laugh.”

  He followed her eyes. They were no longer on his wife and his daughter. She was looking beyond them, beyond the car and the driveway, down to the corner where their little street met Pondfield Road. There, at the very intersection where almost every day of his life he or his wife made a left- or a right-hand turn in their vehicles, and where—just once—his Audi had rolled backward and driverless, a ghost car, was a black Escalade. It was just like the one that had brought this Alexandra into his life. It was emerging from the driveway beside the now empty house where their neighbors, the Habeggers, had once lived. Where, apparently, it had been parked. Waiting. Watching. It hadn’t been there when Richard had returned home; he would have noticed it. It must have arrived in the last hour or two. But none of that mattered, none of that mattered at all, because now it was moving inexorably toward him, toward them, rolling almost in slow motion past the realtor’s blue and white “For Sale” sign on the Habeggers’ front lawn.

  “Run!” He barked the word at Kristin and Melissa, and he pointed toward the trees on the side of their home, denuded and autumnal now, and the houses behind theirs. For a second they didn’t move, not understanding what he saw or why he was yelling. But then, either because he yelled once more to Go! Go now! or because Kristin had spotted the car and understood that this was connected to the girl and the dead who were now forever a part of their family’s life story—dead men (two), a dead girl (one)—she pulled her child by the hand like she was but a small dog on a leash and started to run.

  And then, almost at the same instant when once more he was wishing he had brought home a rifle, words crossed his mind the way that subtitles flash across the bottom of a foreign film: God. This is how it ends. This is how I am going to die.

  But then the girl opened the glass storm door and used both her hands to push him so hard back inside the house—through the doorway and into the front hall—that he fell into the colonial side table and then onto the floor. A ceramic bowl with an autumn-scented potpourri fell beside him and broke, the spices and scraps of evergreen and faux pumpkin scattering onto the floor like confetti. She pulled shut the wooden front door so she was outside alone on the steps. He was just starting to push himself back to his feet to get her, to drag her inside, too, when the world seemed to explode and he heard the gunshot and the door above him was splintered.

  Alexandra

  Richard yelled like crazy person for his wife and his little girl to run. Maybe because he didn’t deserve to die—none of them deserved to die, this wasn’t his fault, this wasn’t their fault—I pushed him hard as I could back inside the house and slammed the door. I shouldn’t have come. Big selfish decision on my part.

  I saw his wife and daughter turning to go, racing around the side of the house, and I could see on the poor girl’s face such confusion and such terror. I had heard her call me a sex slave through the front door. I gues
s because I was watching them, I never saw the gun—I took my eyes off the Escalade for just long enough. So I only heard the shot.

  It’s so strange what you remember and what you don’t.

  The girl from the party? The sex slave?

  …

  Kirill wore a shoulder holster. Pavel used the kind that straps onto a belt loop. Think American cowboy or police guy. It meant that he kept his shirt untucked sometimes when he wasn’t wearing his black blazer so you couldn’t see the gun, but he liked that look. Thought he looked cool. Different tastes, that’s all. But it meant the two guys drew guns in different ways, even though they were both right-handed, because Pavel kept his gun on his right side and Kirill kept his on his left. Kirill liked to cross-draw. His right arm had to cross his chest to pull Makarov from beside his left ribs. From almost under his armpit.

  The night of the party I had been in the doorway between the living room and the hall when Sonja jumped on Pavel’s back with the knife. I was stunned. Totally stunned. I knew she was avenging Crystal, but nothing else. Not yet. She hadn’t told me anything. And there was Kirill, coming back from bathroom on the first floor of the nice house. He looked up from his zipper when he heard the big commotion in the living room. There was the thump from the little table that got turned over when one of the men at the party jumped away from Sonja with her knife and Pavel, there were the yelps from some of the men who were screaming things like What the fuck? and No!, and there was the sound of Pavel gagging as he swung his arms around, trying to get Sonja off him, before he finally fell over the back of the couch. All this chaos and noise? Happened almost at once. Within seconds. Kirill couldn’t see what it was, but his first thought was to reach for his gun before going in. Which was when I threw myself at him. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do. He was big guy. They were all big guys. It was just reflex. I landed on him right when he was pulling his gun from his shoulder holster. I landed on him right when he must have been using his thumb to flick off the safety.