The Guest Room Read Online Free Page B

Richard’s juvenile younger brother—was bubbling to the surface, subsuming even the despair and sadness and embarrassment that her husband had had sex with a stripper.
    “Where are you?” she asked finally. There were so many things to ask. There were just so many things she didn’t know.
    “I’m at the police station. We all are.”
    “Oh, God. In Bronxville?”
    “Yes. They’re taking our statements. We’re telling them what happened.”
    “And the girls?” The word
girls
reverberated in her mind; suddenly it seemed like the wrong word. But, of course, that was the word for a stripper. When you passed places like the Hustler Club on the West Side Highway, the signs never boasted “Hundreds of Women.” They advertised “Hundreds of Girls.”
    “They’re gone. They disappeared. They killed these two big assholes—handlers, bodyguards, thugs; I don’t know what you call them—took their wallets and wads of cash, and then drove away in the car they came in. But they’re gone.”
    In the bedroom doorway, behind her mother, she saw her daughter. She was wiping the sleep from her eyes. She was wearing her Snoopy pajamas: pink-and-white-plaid flannel bottoms and the iconic dog surfing on the top. The word in the cartoon balloon was
Cowabunga.
She was asking her grandmother what was going on, what was happening, who had called.
    This child, Kristin thought to herself, her husband saying something more on the other end of the line but the words merely white noise, was a girl. A girl doesn’t fuck other people’s husbands at a bachelor party and then take a knife to her bodyguards. A girl…
    A girl was nine.
    But the thought was lost to the relentless stream of images—a whitewater cascade that was swamping her and which she was helpless to resist—of her husband atop some stripper on the couch, her ankles upon his shoulders; of her brother-in-law beneath some stripper on the living room floor; of two other men, her mind conjuring for them black T-shirts and tight jeans, the sorts of biceps you only see in the gym, bleeding to death. But bleeding to death…where? She saw them dead in the kitchen, imagining their corpses on the Italian tile simply because her husband had said the girls had grabbed one of the very knives that she had used for years to prepare dinner for him and their daughter.
Kitchen.
That was the word that some part of her mind was comprehending from Richard’s brief chronicle. But the truth was, the two men could have been killed anywhere: The living room. The dining room. The den.
    “Kris?” her husband was saying. “Kris? Are you still there?”
    “Uh-huh, I am,” she said. Then she asked, “One of my knives?” Four words. One question. It was all she could muster.
    “Yes,” he said. “One of our knives. The girl with the blond hair. Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s all this horrible blur. It all happened so fast.”
    “Okay…”
    “And there’s more.”
    “How? Seriously, Richard, how could there possibly be more?” she asked, and he started telling her about the condition of the house and the blood on a painting, but the news had grown too cumbersome, too unwieldy for her to assimilate. There was too much and it was too awful. It was too awful for him. For her. For them. She looked across the room at her mother and her daughter. She realized that she was shaking.
    …
    It wasn’t clear to Kristin where the memory came from or what it meant: she was sitting alone on the front steps of her family’s colonial in Stamford, Connecticut, the shingles a beige cedar, and she was in the fourth grade. Her daughter’s age now. It was late on a summer afternoon, a weekday, and her mother was in the kitchen unpacking groceries and then starting to prepare dinner. A storm was nearing from the west, the gray clouds racing across the sky like they were part of a theater backdrop. But it hadn’t started raining yet and the air was electric and alive. She had been with her