An Unexpected Guest (18 page)

“
You’re
Irish,” she said.

“No, I’m not. I’m half American and half English. Superpowers! Colonizers! What could be less Irish?”

“I see.” She took a deep breath. There’d been no other boy. It was the girl he felt was being mistreated. Not himself. “What was because she’s Irish?”

“The way they treated her. The way they…” His voice trailed off and he looked away.

“Right.” She took a deep breath and steeled herself. “Were you…? Did they find you…?”

“Mom!” Jamie protested, his cheeks flooding with red. He folded his arms over his chest.

“I need to know, Jamie. At least what Barrow knows.”

He dropped back down flat on the bed, turned away, buried his face in the pillows.

“No, Mom,” his muffled voice. “Nothing like that. You don’t understand what happened.”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “You’re right, I don’t. Tell me.”

He didn’t answer.

In the silence between them, she felt as though she could hear the ticking of his heart, hidden and subdued but just waiting to go off, ready to explode his young life into a million ragged pieces. All the passions her son experienced, and yet he managed to hold them so close, so much the same as she’d been when she was younger. She stood up.

She just hoped Jamie’s girl was a
nice
girl. And that being in love for the first time, if that’s what they were talking about, wouldn’t compel him to pull any more stunts like faking his mother’s signature and hopping on planes without permission. And all the rest. Barrow strictly forbade bringing girls on campus, outside of the specific events to which they might be invited.

“Well,” she said, “let’s start from the beginning. I gather this was the Ryan you mentioned?”

Jamie didn’t say anything.

“I guess Ryan can be a girl’s name, too?”

“Mom!”

“Okay, okay.” She sighed. “Do you like her?”

He rolled his eyes and pointed to the clock on the bedside table. “Hadn’t you better get ready? Won’t Dad’s dinner be soon?”

“You’re going to have to tell me everything eventually. It’s not like you’re just going to stay home from school a week and then go back without any discussion.”

She got up and opened the door to her wardrobe. Her outfit for the evening hung inside, the top part still wrapped in paper, as the dry cleaners did it in France.

“Rian,” he said softly, pronouncing it with just a hint of a lilt. “R-i-a-n.”

R-i-a-n, she thought to herself. R-i-a-n.

She stopped, her hand on the suit. Edward had said Barrow had sent the girl away. Not that they’d “sent her home” or “sent her back to her own school” or even “sent her packing.” If she wasn’t a Barrow student, how could they have sent her away? Unless he meant
fired.

“Jamie,” she said carefully, “was Rian a student? I mean, what was she
doing
at Barrow? Was she just visiting?”

“What’s the difference?” he mumbled and said nothing more.

She turned to face him, putting her hands on her hips. “Listen, James, you are going to have to talk about it whether you want to or not. You are just making things worse for yourself with the way you are behaving.”

He shook his head again.

“Jamie.”

Jamie rolled his eyes. “No, she isn’t a student. I mean, she is, but
obviously
not at Barrow. It’s all boys, Mom.”

“You don’t need to take that sarcastic tone with me,” she said. “I’m not the one who’s been acting the fool here.” She heard herself and thought: If that’s not the biggest lie on earth.

“Right, whatever.
Sorry.
” Jamie crossed his arms over his chest and pressed his lips shut.

“Rian.”
She swung her dry cleaning off the rack, selected a fresh package of pantyhose from a shelf within the armoire, and carried them into the bathroom. She left the door ajar, just enough so she could still hear him. “Okay. Where was she a student, then?” she said. Her sweater and pants fell away from her body. Underneath, her skin felt cool. His knee next to hers. She turned on the tap, dampened a washcloth, and turned the water back off so Jamie could hear her. “At another boarding school? At a school in London? One of the Catholic schools?”

When Jamie didn’t answer, she widened the opening of the door and looked out. He was kneeling on the floor, whispering into his cell phone. She hadn’t heard a ring, but maybe a call had come while the tap was on. “Whom are you talking to?”

Jamie frowned and cupped his hand over the phone. “Not
her,
if that’s what you mean.” He looked away, from her, from the phone. “I don’t even have a number to reach her now.”

She pulled her head back into the bathroom. She knew as much as she needed for the moment. If the girl was staff, there would be all hell to pay at Barrow. No wonder they weren’t expelling Jamie.
They
were the ones responsible. But the main thing was, she had him here now, safe, away from any immediate trouble. Like all kids should be.

She closed the door and peeled off the rest of her clothing. She drew the washcloth across her cheekbones, and around her neck, careful not to touch her hair, then gently smoothed in cleanser. How warm the sun had felt on her and Niall’s heads as they sat beside the statue of Andrieu. The sun was gone by now. She dipped the washcloth under the tap and slid it across her face. Then she dabbed at her skin with a clean dry towel.

“Don’t,” he said the morning after they’d stayed in that seedy motel, when she’d gone to open the back of the camper.

She felt as though the horrible night still hung to her. “I’d like to change my clothes. My bag’s back there.”

“We’re going to the beach today. You don’t need to wash.” He pointed to the cab of the camper. “I’ve put your suit and a towel in front already.”

Towel, he’d said. Singular. She climbed into the driver’s seat. There was, indeed, only one towel bunched up against the dashboard.

She decided not to ask any questions about it. Niall never swam. Maybe he didn’t plan to get wet at the beach.

“Can we stop for breakfast?”

He nodded. “I’ll tell you.”

They drove north until the motel was well behind them. After about forty minutes on the road, he indicated a diner with big glass windows.

“Leave the car right in front of the window, by the door,” he said.

They sat down by the window that gave out over their rental camper. He kept his sunglasses on, and instead of slipping into the side of the booth facing her, pushed into her side after her. He threw an arm over her shoulder and drew her into him.

“Coffee, black,” he told the waitress. “My wife will take hers with cream. You fancy pancakes? With a wee bit of sugar on them?”

Once, while sitting around her aunt and uncle’s kitchen on a Saturday morning, her aunt cooking up breakfast for all of them, her cousin had started teasing her for eating her pancakes with sugar on them instead of maple syrup. Niall remembered how she liked her pancakes.

He’d never touched her, not even her arm, in front of another human being before. Now he was calling her “my wife” to this waitress.

“What are you having?” she asked.

If he had next announced that they were going to visit a justice of the peace, she would have said yes without hesitation. She didn’t even care what had happened at the motel. She didn’t want to know what he’d been doing.

Niall laughed and nodded to the waitress. “She’ll have the pancakes, no syrup. I’ll have the eggs and bacon super, the toast.” He smiled. “Honeymooning makes you hungry.”

The waitress smiled back at him and tucked a bleached lock behind one ear. She was just a girl, about the same age as Clare but with an already tired-looking face and a creamy bosom and round bottom. While Niall watched it sway back behind the counter, Clare made a boat out of her napkin. She reminded herself he didn’t like heifers.

“You planning to sail away on that?” he asked her.

“Never,” she told him. And she meant it.

When she came out of her bathroom fully dressed, her hair combed and lip gloss applied, Jamie was asleep on the bed, his phone clutched in his hand. She checked her watch. His flight over from London this morning would have left very early, and who knew when all this had happened? In his room, in the dark, he’d have opened his computer to write the fake e-mail from Clare granting him permission to leave, packed up some things—the novel by Philip Roth, his passport—and slipped out before his roommate was even awake. Maybe he’d even slept in the airport. She checked her watch again. Edward wasn’t scheduled to be back with the P.U.S. for another twenty-four minutes. She’d give Jamie fifteen minutes to nap then shepherd him back to his own room, where Edward would be unlikely to venture during the course of the evening. Jamie could eat later, after all the guests were gone. He could go back to sleep in between times, and even if he woke before the dinner party ended, he’d know better than to wander out into his father’s evening.

She racked her brain. She’d get the ring out of the safe now and put the place cards into their proper spots on the table. That was all there was left to do before Edward’s dinner. All the rest would have to wait.

She knelt down before the safe, careful not to snag her stockings or wrinkle her skirt. “It’s a question of fire,” Edward had said about the safe when he’d brought it home, “not security.” They were living in Cairo at the time, and Edward had had the safe built behind what looked like the lower two drawers of a three-drawer side table inlaid with mother-of-pearl. They’d moved it from residence to residence ever since, along with the Turner, Sam Gilliam, and Farouk Hosni paintings, the silver from his family and crystal from hers, and the handful of other personal mementos they used as homing devices as they traded residences every few years. Placing the safe in whatever was to be Peter’s room had become part of their moving ritual. He stored his stamp collection in its top drawer.

Only she and Edward knew the combination, though; they kept a written record of it in their safe deposit box at Barclay’s in London, along with a duplicate version of their will, in case something ever happened to both of them. She twirled the knob to the right three times, twice to the left, once again to the right, and tugged.

The safe swung open. Clare pulled out the papers: her and Edward’s will, their marriage certificate, the children’s birth certificates, everyone’s passports, and Jamie’s Consular Report of Birth Abroad. Some jointly owned stock certificates, the certificate of ownership for the Turner. Underneath them all, in the back, the box holding her maternal grandmother’s ring.

I mean, if you still had it. If you hadn’t given it over to the wrong person.

His clear eyes on her.

I never told anyone, never will. If I had done, you’d be in the ground now yourself for what you did, wouldn’t you?

“Aren’t you coming, too?” she asked, grasping the towel to her chest.

“I’ll be back. You go for a swim.” He climbed into the driver’s seat of the camper and looked into the side mirror before putting it into reverse. And there she was, in a beach parking lot, somewhere on the middle Atlantic shoreline, like a little crumb waiting for a seagull to sweep down and devour it.

She watched the camper disappear. She picked her way through the beach grass down to the sand. All around her, families were setting up for the day, children racing for the water and returning, squealing from the cold, mothers laying out hampers. She found a rounded-out hollow in the base of low dunes and dug in a space for herself.

When he returned to get her, the families were all gone. The sun was already setting. Her skin was painfully red, and her nose and arms were erupting in freckles. She trailed him back to the parking lot without saying a word. He opened the back of the camper to get her a beer, and she saw that whatever had been in there had been emptied. There were his knapsack and her tote bag. A paper grocery bag with cokes and beer in it. And the duffel bag.

When she got behind the steering wheel, she couldn’t help herself. She checked the odometer. He had driven one hundred and fifty miles since he’d dropped her off that morning. But she had no idea to where. She didn’t ask either. She turned the key in the ignition and put the car into gear.

“That’s it,” he said, sliding into the cab of the camper with the duffel. The mixed smell of sun, sea, and cigarettes entered with him. Sweat glued her naked skin, where her tank top didn’t cover her shoulders, to the car seat. The feeling was pleasant, even the sunburn, like summer vacations were supposed to be. “We can return the camper to the car hire now.”

She didn’t ask what was inside the duffel, now tucked between his legs half under his seat. Nor did she ask why he took it in with him when he stepped out to use a service station restroom north of Philadelphia on the Jersey shore.

When they dropped off the camper at the rental agency, she looked at the odometer again. She didn’t know when, but sometime before they’d returned—maybe when she’d gone into the restroom herself—Niall had managed to alter it. Almost none of the miles they covered, together or separately, were recorded.