An Unexpected Guest (5 page)

She was so tired. What time was it back in Boston now? She gathered her stiffened limbs up and wandered the park as dark began to settle in. All around her, she heard Irish voices. Could he have passed by, but in disguise? Had she missed him? But she knew how he moved, as though he were a song that she heard over and over in her head. She knew the way he held his head up, the strange scar like a sickle on his neck. She spent another sleepless night in the
Let’s Go
hotel, and the next day was back amidst the half-hidden stone amphitheater surrounding Henry Moore’s sculptural paean to Yeats, even as raindrops began to plop down like huge cold tears. She moved under a tree. She pulled her sweater in around her. Still, she waited.

He’d had her book a return trip for five days later, but after a third empty day, she went to the airport and asked if there was room left on the next flight to Boston. She knew now that Niall was never going to join her in Boston either. She had brought the money over to Ireland as he wanted, and she would never see him again.

“Aren’t you having a nice time?” the ginger-haired lady at the ticket counter asked, looking concerned.

“My father’s not well,” she answered, and realized she’d learned how to lie.

She climbed onto the plane home, feeling sickeningly weightless, half numb and half terrified. If anyone in her family found out about her trip, she had been instructed to pretend she’d taken off as a lark to find her roots, normal enough for an
Irish-American
girl of twenty. Niall had pretended to leave days earlier, hiding out in her room, and in other rooms he didn’t tell her about, so no one would connect their departures. But no one was likely to find out about her trip. She’d been instructed to lose her passport as soon as she got back, and school hadn’t started back up yet. No one would notice she wasn’t around for a week; she had no roommates, and though she was friendly enough with other students, she wasn’t the sort of girl people instinctively kept track of. But there was still the risk someone from the flight over would make the flight back with her and remember how recently she’d seemed so very pregnant.

“You just tell them you lost the baby,” Niall had advised her back in Boston before they’d set off, narrowing those eerily blue eyes at her. “You tell them you’re grieving.”

Clare stared down at the heavyset stranger’s street map in her hand, trying to bring into focus the lines and addresses, but all she could see was herself, after her plane had touched down in Boston’s Logan Airport, throwing out every last piece of evidence from the flight, even the small suitcase she’d carried and the clothing she’d worn and the book she’d brought on the plane with her and never opened. Already beginning to hate herself for having smuggled money into Ireland. At the request of a man who’d abandoned her.

“We’ll see in Dublin, then,” Niall said, as they stood face-to-face, eye-to-eye, their bags at their feet, their bodies separated by her now-expanded abdomen, preparing to leave separately for the airport. He didn’t kiss her. He reached out and clenched her hands, then turned and walked out the door of her room in Cambridge.

“You okay, Madame?” the heavyset stranger asked, looking at her queerly. He used his hand, freed from the map now, to hold her elbow. “You okay?”

Clare flushed and nodded. “Just thinking, just thinking where…the best way for you to get where you are going. I can help you. You are on the wrong street.”

She’d done what she’d done and now she was heading full speed ahead back to Dublin where maybe she’d even cross paths with the man who had taken the money from her. But there was nothing to be done about that now. Nothing but to help this man right now find his own way, as any decent human being would do.

He was Turkish, not Albanian. By the time she and the man parted ways, she felt as though she knew all about him: his former career as a wrestler, the village where he grew up, why he was in Paris, and what he thought about French food and French women.

“They are very proud,” he said of the last, “and very nervous. The others, they not stop. Maybe they not understand English? This is why I make sure you stop. I think you see paper you understand and show me with hand if you not speak English. But I
know
you English.”

Clare didn’t correct him. “Oh?”

“You tall. And”—he hesitated—“you have very nice…” He pointed to the skin on his face and pulled on it.

Clare smiled. His own skin was thick and pocked, perhaps from repeated steroid use or some similar type of muscle-
enhancement
drug. He’d told her about that, too, in his broken English, how his body had been abused by the rough usage of his days as a competitive athlete. How he was sure that was why he was sick now.

“Thank you,” she said.

They’d reached the intersection of the Rue de Sèvres and the start of the Rue Saint-Placide. The entrance to the food hall at Le Bon Marché was just a few steps away, but there wasn’t any reason to reveal her immediate destination to him.

She stopped and pointed to the Rue Saint-Placide.

“You follow that little street two blocks until it ends. You come out on the Rue de Vaugirard. Your doctor’s building should be somewhere right there.” She gave him a closer look. “Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes, yes,” the man said, waving a hand. “Is no problem. I good now. Back in my own country, I never am lost. You know?”

“I know,” Clare agreed, nodding. Although, she
didn’t
know. If anything, she usually felt less lost when she was
away
from home. In Paris or London or Cairo, she could create her person rather than try to read it off the faces of the people who’d known her all her life. That was one of the greatest unspoken perks of being married to a diplomat. She was never lost—because she made up her destination as she went along.

The man gave her a last smile and a grunt and stepped into the street, narrowly missing being knocked down by a taxi. She realized she still had his map in her hand, but she didn’t want to call him back. Surely now he wouldn’t need it. She stuffed it into her sweater pocket. She watched until his silhouette had disappeared down the Rue Saint-Placide and she could be sure he wouldn’t turn around and see where she was now headed. Once he was gone, she thought to herself, Well, that’s one thing taken care of.

She checked her watch. 10:29 a.m.

T
he tall wooden doors of Le Bon Marché food hall felt stiff against her push. Inside, the store was crowded, as usual: tourists seeking mementos from France to take home, expats seeking memories from home to bring to their Paris apartments, and well-heeled Parisian housewives selecting fine cuts of meat and Jean LeBlanc walnut oil for their dinner parties. A woman brushed past, toting a camera, and a guard glided out from the shadows and raised a single finger. No words were exchanged, but the woman dropped the camera into her knapsack. The guard returned his walkie-talkie into its holster and fell back into the shadows.

Clare moved forward, giving herself up to what felt like a glorious golden machine. Pale wood, brass fittings, and countless hanging lamps pouring amber over the aisles played backdrop to the heavy jewelry and braided-chain straps of the Chanel bags of the customers. Parisians scoffed at Le Bon Marché grocery store for being un-French, with its neat mountains of flown-in foodstuffs, and greasy tubs of overcooked, overpriced ready-made curried chicken and salmon Florentine, but they couldn’t stop shopping here. Over the years of moving from one city to another, she had always found grocery stores and markets to reflect each posting’s inner world in a way that was so reliable as to be almost laughable. In Cairo, the souk had been a sprawling Byzantine affair, a jumble of spices, beans, teas, and fruits, not always appetizing in odor or appearance but communal, a chaotic but exacting map of local relationships and social hierarchies. In Washington, she’d frequented a Safeway where even the uncut melons had been wrapped in plastic, as remote as the smiles on the other women shoppers’ faces, the only scent that of the cleaning products used to wipe the floors and the occasional underscrubbed grocery bagger. The grocery closest to their apartment in London was run by a brooding Bangladeshi family and filled with dusty tins of curry, chili, and turmeric, dried fenugreek and
dhania
leaves, jars of ghee, their labels rubbed pale, side by side with the marmalade and marmite and Walker’s Shortbread that Edward liked to have around. A fast-paced Jewish bakery, popping out oven-steamed bagels, shared the same building front. The packaging on British goods seemed more charming than the food itself, and all the print was neatly spaced across the labels. In Paris, the women dressed to shop, and the way they selected ingredients was as meticulous as their appearance.

She adjusted her basket onto her left arm and lowered her eyes so they’d be less likely to fall upon the gaze of another shopper. Le Bon Marché’s food hall doubled as a haven for expats hoping to encounter other aliens in the hunt for marshmallows and pumpkin pie filling. There was a pleasant feeling of camaraderie to be found in spending a few chance minutes poring over fruits and imported crackers with similarly inclined hostesses, but she didn’t have time to spare today getting caught up in any extensive conversations. Adjusting her pace, she skirted the islands stacked with foreign preserves, and zeroed in on the produce stalls on the far side of the food hall. One was piled high with asparagus. She lifted a couple of stalks and examined them. Delicate lavender crept up towards their tips, a pinkish shadow on one, a splash of purple on the other. There was something animate about asparagus, the irregularity of each spear.

She brushed the thought away and began filling a paper bag, selecting only the thinnest spears, which were the most tender—and also required less peeling. With Amélie’s cousin coming in to help, there’d be enough hands to manage the asparagus, but Mathilde might still get fussed about it.

The cheese counter held a fresh supply of Irish cheddar. Clare requested two small wheels, ruddy yellow cakes sheathed in red wax. When she was a kid in suburban Connecticut, she and her friends used to buy a candy that looked like that casing, ruby lips of wax that they would chew on, not for the flavor but for the delightful sensation of their teeth sinking into the pliable plastic unsticky substance.

“Est-ce que ça sera tout, Madame?”
the white-coated vendor asked. All the servers at Le Bon Marché’s market wore thin white cotton jackets, as though they were working in a pharmacy.

She shook her head and surveyed the other cheeses in the counter. She’d heard that the ambassador’s wife had cheeses sent over direct from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London every fortnight, but, though she and Edward entertained constantly, they hosted such lesser numbers than the embassy that ordering cheese in bulk made even less sense to her than wine. She pointed out two large wedges of Stilton and considered whether she should ask Mathilde to defrost some tayberries and fill a few small pots with chutney to decorate the cheese plates. Her free hand strayed towards the pocket holding her list. But, no, she didn’t need to direct Mathilde. She’d given Mathilde the guest list, which was all that was necessary. Mathilde understood who the guests were, and she’d know to do up the cheese in a suitably British fashion that wouldn’t shock the handful of French guests. That was the thing about Mathilde. Other than her personality, she was perfect.

“Prenez ceci, Madame,”
advised the vendor, when Clare asked for two triangles of Brie de Meaux. She directed Clare to a too-firm semicircle with a chalky off-white interior.
“Celui-ci sera bien pour vous.”

Whether it was unripened or not, Edward would not touch the brie. He’d take a respectable portion of the Stilton for the sake of decorum and, perhaps, a slice of the cheddar as well. Or maybe not, as he wouldn’t want to be seen as taking everything but the French cheese. She pointed to an adjacent brie, creamier in color and leaking onto the cheese counter. She herself loved the French cheeses, the smellier the better.

“Celui-là,”
she said.
“Deux grands morceaux, emballés séparément, s’il vous plaît.”

An expression of approval flitted across the vendor’s face.
“Bien sûr, Madame.”

“Good choice,” a voice said from behind her in American English.

Clare turned around to find Patricia Blum, the mother of one of Jamie’s former classmates, standing behind her; tiny, round, and always cheerful, with dark hair and an extraordinarily beautiful face. For reasons she herself didn’t understand, Clare found Patricia alarming. Patricia’s daughter, Em, had been one of the most popular girls in the class and had never had much time for Jamie.

“They’re always trying to sell us the sucker slices,” Patricia whispered. She flashed a brilliant smile at the vendor. “They think that’s what we want.”

The vendor smiled back. She handed the cheese over, wrapped and ticketed. Clare laid it in her basket and wondered whether the vendor understood English.

“How’s James doing?” Patricia asked. “Em says he’s gone home for school this year.”

Jamie is probably going to flunk right out of that damned boarding school, and this failure would stay on his permanent record. Unless she managed to do something about it, something that wouldn’t drive him crazy for its intrusiveness. And not in a million years did Em bother to tell her mother about his having left the International School. Jamie’s absence would barely have registered on Em’s radar. Jamie would conquer his long frame and fair surprised face someday, but he was too obscure, too erratic, to rate amongst girls like Em at present.

“Very well, thank you. Yes, he’s gone to England,” she said, exchanging first one and then a second cheek kiss. Patricia had probably learned about Jamie changing schools from another parent. There was a lot of talking within the expat community. Although true intimacy was rare, everyone knew everyone else’s business. She’d just have to hope word wouldn’t get around about the troubles he was having. At least he hadn’t been kicked out—yet. Suspension wasn’t expulsion.

“Ahhh, his father’s school, I bet,” Patricia said. “What was it? Like, Eton?”

“No,” she said. “I mean, my husband didn’t go to Eton.”

She shifted the basket in her hand. She wanted to call Barrow by 11:40; any later than that and she might catch the headmaster just as he was heading out to eat, which was never the best time to catch anyone.

“He’s at Barrow, on the outskirts of London,” she added. “How’s everything at the International School? James misses it. I mean, he didn’t leave because we didn’t like it. We just thought it was the right time.”

Patricia laughed. “I understand. Well, everything’s fine. They had to cancel the annual class trip to London. You know, security reasons. But I’m taking Em and a couple of her friends up there, anyway. Week after next. Maybe we’ll even run into James!”

“Maybe.” This was neither within any realm of likelihood nor particularly to be desired, and Clare knew that Patricia knew this. “Well—”

Over Patricia’s shoulder, she glimpsed a familiar face disappear behind a row of juice bottles.

Her heart froze up inside her rib cage. His face, thinner, grayer, but
him.
The same pale skin and hollow cheeks, the same high ridge of cheekbone buttressing a stare so brilliant it entered her in a way no one ever had before or after.

Niall.

The first time she saw him, he was standing atop the stone wall surrounding her aunt’s house in Newton, outside Boston, and she’d ever after have an exaggerated sense of his height.

The face didn’t reappear. Her breath caught in her throat, and she felt her hand reach out.

I must not be alone, she thought. He won’t come to me if I’m not alone.

He’d been standing atop the stone wall, chewing on a stalk of grass while he watched her cousin Kevin change the oil in his car, in the driveway. “You aren’t going to get nowhere like that,” she’d heard him say, and she’d known he was different. Not Irish-American like her or Boston-Irish like Kevin, but Irish-Irish.

She gripped the closest thing to her, Patricia’s arm. But she couldn’t have seen him. Already she was going crazy. And yet, it had looked so like him.

“Come on, Clare. Hand me that wrench, will you,” Kevin grumbled, and she understood her cousin was trying to ignore the stranger. Beads of sweat rolled off Kevin’s dark blond hair and jiggled on his earlobes. One dropped onto the tar of the driveway. The heat was a net, trapping everything and everyone. The temperature must have been about ninety degrees.

She was twenty years old, and the summer seemed to drag as heavily on her limbs as the heat wave. The summer internship she’d been so happy to land at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston had turned out to be hours of cataloging in an office with a small window and even smaller fan, and sometimes the days felt so heavy and still, she could hardly bear it. Even the green of her aunt’s suburban lawn when she returned in the evenings provided no relief.

“Which one?” Tools lay sprawled out across the drive. She spotted at least three wrenches, each slightly different.

“Fuck if I know,” Kevin had said. “That one.”

She picked up the one Kevin had indicated, trying to ignore the stranger as well, but his eyes bore into her. She let her hair fall over the wrench and stole a glance, not towards his face but at the rest of him: he had on threadbare corduroy pants that seemed impossibly heavy for a day this hot. The skin of his knees, visible through the worn cloth and almost at her eye level, was white as birch. He looked unlike anyone she knew, not least because of the blunt way he was examining her.

Kevin grunted and threw the wrench back at her. She had to hop to one side to avoid being hit. “Too big. Give me another.”

“You aren’t going to get nowhere like that,” the stranger said, after she’d handed over the second wrench. His voice was soft but not gentle. He jumped down from the wall, and using one booted foot—despite the heat, he was wearing leather boots—kicked the remaining wrench towards Kevin. “You need that one, you stupid feck,” he tossed over his shoulder, sauntering towards Aunt El’s kitchen. The door slammed shut behind him.

Clare sat down on the wall where he had been. “Who was that?”

“Aw, fuck.
Him?
Some cousin. Some ten-times-removed fucking cousin. One of my mom’s charity cases.”

She tried not to cringe. Aunt Elaine had had her move in with them in Newton after seeing the dank, cramped room Clare had planned to rent for the summer in downtown Boston, not far from the museum. Aunt Elaine had a big heart for everyone.

Kevin reached out for the final wrench, the one the ten-times-removed cousin had kicked, and applied it to the gasket. Oil came rushing out. He cursed and grabbed for a bucket. “Motherfucker!”

She got up and went into the kitchen.

And there he was, seated in the kitchen alcove, one hand clasped around a glass bottle of Coke. A film of condensation had developed around its neck, and water sweated down its sides. He flicked a few drops from his fingers and lifted the bottle to his mouth.

She sat down beside him on the bench and watched his Adam’s apple as he drank. He was barely older than she was, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two. He wasn’t taller either. They were shoulder to shoulder at the table, and she could feel his exposed knee beside hers. The smooth heat of his skin penetrated through the stupor of the summer, through her lanky, indolent limbs. She had to move her leg.