Stranger in the Room: A Novel (6 page)

T
he Georgian Terrace was built less than fifty years after Sherman’s red-hot March to the Sea torched our architectural history. It’s all buttery brick and limestone, a French Renaissance design meant to evoke Paris in a city that was literally rising up out of its own ashes. That I had scored living quarters here at all was still a source of amazement. The first-shift manager and his crabby concierge in the little black blazer would agree with that. They are the only hotel employees who flat-out refuse to warm up to me. Who can blame them? I have the only two thousand square feet in the hotel the manager can’t control. I try to be respectful. I’m fully aware that I’m a visitor in every other pocket of the Georgian Terrace. I made the deal with the previous owner to buy and renovate his private living space after I helped him resolve some personal matters. Okay, so I got the goods on his cheating wife before she walked away with a disproportionate slice of his fortune. My contractors jammed the garage with their oversized trucks, set up a construction dumpster, marched in and out with drywall dust on their boots, and were not always sensitive to the new management’s daily trials. On those rare occasions when White Trash needs to leave the building, I’m aware of their displeasure at seeing me hauling an awkward carrier through the lobby with a yowling cat. What is it about towering ceilings and crystal and glass and marble that creates something like an echo chamber when
an unhappy feline’s voice is thrown into the mix? And White Trash doesn’t know when to stop. It’s not just a little meow; it’s a howling torrent of misery. By the time we get from the tenth floor to the lobby, she’s just getting warmed up. Anyone who had been unlucky enough to share the elevator ride stumbles out a glassy-eyed cat hater for life.

Having the only privately owned living space in the hotel took some getting used to at first. While the anonymity of a revolving neighborhood is really nice on a bad-hair day, I missed having a sense of community. But over time, a working-class neighborhood came into focus—servers, housekeepers, the baristas, chefs, cabbies and security guards, clerks and valets. Once it was clear I did not have to be treated like a guest, I was allowed to tiptoe my way into this after-hours society where food is shared along with complaints and gossip about guests and supervisors and sometimes fellow employees. A couple of months ago, Rauser and I were invited to a rooftop pool party. All very hush-hush. Management had gone home for the night, uninvited and uninformed. Second- and third-shift employees staggered their hours to relieve one another and showed up in waves. Rauser drank too much and went swimming in his briefs along with Marko, the brilliant chef at the hotel’s Livingston Restaurant. When it got very late and there were only a few of us left, we all took a chaise longue next to the pool, Rauser and I sharing one, me leaning back into his arms. With Atlanta’s purplish chessboard skyline in front of us, we all took turns saying something about ourselves and our lives. Every story seemed to lead us into another conversation, and I remember the gradual brightening of dawn and Rauser’s breathing changing. He’d fallen asleep with his arms around me.

“Hello, my friend.” I heard Marko Pullig’s thick Slavic accent and big booming voice. I had nearly reached the gleaming brass elevators. “I was just taking this upstairs to Miki.” He was balancing a covered tray. He bent and gave me one cheek, then the other.

“Room service isn’t one of the perks I’m allowed here, Marko.”

He glanced at the manager, who was having a conversation with a clerk across the sprawling, gleaming lobby. “The order came directly into the restaurant. Since I was fortunate enough to meet your charming cousin today in the lobby, I volunteered.”

“Marko, you’re hitting on my cousin?”

“Keye, please. Find your romantic self. We’ve talked about this. There is such a thing as being too firmly grounded.”

Oh yeah. That’s me. Grounded
.

“I prefer to think of it as exploring the possibility of new love,” Marko said.

“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t think Miki’s here. I tried to call a bunch of times.”

“You look worried. Relax. She was out shopping. That’s how we met. I helped her with groceries. She told me about the break-in at her home.”

The elevator doors opened. “You want me to take that up, or are you going to make me watch you flirt?”

Marko bowed with his usual flair, handed me the tray. “Please deliver this with my compliments. And in the event she has further needs, feel free to give her my private number.”

I smiled as the doors closed. I love this hotel and the people.

It’s interesting that I would end up living in a hotel. Before my drinking days came to a screeching halt, I had a kind of love affair with hotel rooms. It was where I was free to do what was unacceptable everywhere else—drink until I was out cold. Even now, when room service is at full-blast on weekends and holidays, the smell of tomato juice takes me back to a cold Bloody Mary with a stalk of celery and a lime twist. I’m no different from any other addict. I romance the memories. Tipping my chair over backward in a nice restaurant is never what springs to mind when I want a drink. No, what I remember is the way good cognac coats a glass, meets your nose, then your palate, like liquid calm. Or the cold, hard edge of vodka and soda loaded with ice and lemon on a hot day. My mouth still gets wet when I think about it—the cellular memories of a drunk.

I pushed open the door to my loft and smelled cooking food. Miki was in the kitchen, wearing jeans and a T-shirt that looked very familiar.

“Hey, you’re early. I was going to surprise you with dinner.” She was standing over a steaming saucepan, tasting something with a wooden spoon. “I took a shower and borrowed some clothes to go to the market. Not quite ready to go home alone. I hope that’s okay.” She was surprisingly perky. “What’s that? It smells yummy.”

“The food you ordered from downstairs,” I said, setting it on the bar. I headed down the hall to change. “Marko offered his phone number too, by the way.”

Miki appeared at my bedroom door. “Why would I order food? I’m making dinner.”

“I wondered the same thing,” I told her, and got out of my skirt, pulled on some Levi’s, searched my closet for a blouse.

“Keye, I’m serious. I didn’t order anything.”

“Okay,” I said lightly. But what I was thinking was
Ooo-kay, sure
. I pulled out my running shoes. I discovered awhile back that comfortable shoes were necessary equipment for bond enforcement. “You okay today?”

“Yeah. I mean no. I mean, I didn’t order that food.”

I looked at her. She seemed to be fraying.
Oh boy
. Would the fun ever stop? “Hey, it’s no big deal. Maybe Marko just wanted to come upstairs.”

A slight smile. She touched her hair. “He helped me with groceries earlier. He did everything but dim the lights before I could get him out.”

I slipped into a pullover and followed Miki back to the kitchen with my shoes in my hand. “He’s a charming guy, huh? Any interest?”

Miki lifted the cover on the tray and we eyed Marko’s shrimp ravioli with shaved truffle, an arugula salad, his famous homemade leek bread, and a flourless chocolate cake about the size of a hockey puck on a white plate with a sprig of mint.

“They’re all charming at first,” Miki said, proving she was just as jaded as I was. She handed me a fork and got one for herself.

I took a stool at the bar that divided my living area and kitchen, speared a pillow-shaped piece of Marko’s homemade pasta. “All I’ve eaten is doughnuts and coffee,” I confessed. “I have stress hormones bleeding out my eyeballs.”

We both had a bite and took a minute to enjoy it. Marko was an artist with food and with plating it. He had an incredibly delicate touch. Miki turned around and stirred whatever she had in the pot, adjusted the flame on my gas burner. “I didn’t know you cooked,” I said.

“We don’t know one another, Keye. Not really. We haven’t since we were kids.”

Miki is a photojournalist, successful and sought after. Her moods had derailed her career a time or two, but she had always been welcomed back to her professional life. I knew some of the details only because my mother is an unapologetic gossip. I’d seen Miki’s photographs in magazines for years. And in her house. Huge talent. Walks into war and natural disaster with cameras hanging off her. It seemed the perfect job for someone perpetually suicidal. She’d made the tabloids a few times during a steamy three-year relationship with a famous rocker. And then again with Cash Tilison.

She cut a piece of ravioli with her fork. Shrimp and cream spilled out. “Ever think about finding your biological parents?”

“Where’d that come from?”

Miki shrugged. “Just curious.”

“Like I need another crazy mother?” I broke off a piece of leek bread.

Miki chuckled. Crazy mothers were something she was intimately familiar with. “I mean seriously.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I have a narcissist’s desire to see if they look like me. But that’s all it is. Medical questions, maybe. Oh, and I’d like to know when I was born. And where. There are no hospital records. And my grandparents hadn’t enrolled me in school yet when they were killed. No paperwork at all on me until I went to the children’s home.”

“So your bio mom just squatted in the woods and squeezed you out or what?”

“More likely she squatted in the back room of some strip joint.”

Miki grinned at me. “So April Fool’s Day isn’t your birthday?”

“I think somebody with the State ballparked me and wrote in April first just for fun. Bastards.”

“Sure was fun on your birthday when we were kids,” Miki remarked.

“Yeah. Good times. Huge shocker I’m in therapy.” I stabbed at some arugula. “You know, what I really want to know is how I ended up with the last name Street. I know my parents had tried to have biological kids for a long time. They always told me that. I know they’d decided to adopt when Mother couldn’t get pregnant. But I’m pretty sure adopting a Chinese kid wasn’t in the plan.”

Miki frowned. “But, Keye, they love you so much.”

“Oh I know they do. But something’s off. I know it. I’ve always known. I mean, who adopted minority kids thirty years ago in Georgia? I guess somebody did, but not my mother. You know what kind of shit my parents had to put up with from neighbors and teachers and everyone. Back then, nobody in our lily-white neighborhood looked like me and Jimmy. I overheard them talking when I was little. It was just before Jimmy came. Mother was venting, saying life would have been easier with a white child. She said it was Dad’s fault. I always assumed from that conversation that something in his past put them out of the running. Everybody knows the paperwork got a little fuzzy back then on kids with alternate ethnicities. They were practically begging people to take us and make room for white children who were actually considered adoptable.”

“But then they adopted Jimmy,” Miki pointed out.

“Yeah, well, maybe it’s like adopting a shelter pet. It changes you. Once you’ve seen the need, you don’t go back to a breeder. My parents are decent people. My father has this huge sense of social responsibility. Plus, they’d always wanted a boy and a girl. I wanted to run the records on my dad when I was at the Bureau, but you can’t do that unless it’s tied to an investigation. Every request for sealed records has to be explained. It’s not something they take lightly. And, to be honest, I’ve always been a little afraid of finding out the truth.”

Miki used her fork to stab the cake. Gooey dark chocolate ran across the plate. “Does it really matter?”

“No. Not anymore.”

Miki touched my hand. “I can’t imagine growing up without you and Jimmy.”

I liked my cousin. I always seemed to forget this during the long stretches between our visits. I liked her sober. Not so much last night. I’d had enough drama in my life. I’d avoided hers. Maybe I hadn’t been there when she’d needed family. Miki’s mother had been institutionalized for years. Her father was dead. Jimmy and I and our parents were what she had left. She was right: We’d been close as kids.

I thought again about Miki going shopping, then ordering food. Or not ordering food. Or not remembering that she’d ordered food. And not answering her phone. I thought about the cuts up and down her
arms and the unsettling darkness inside her. I thought about how confrontational and defensive she’d been at the bar last night. Creeklaw County and the counterfeit urn were starting to sound pretty good.

“Thanks for taking care of me last night.” Miki must have seen something in my face. “I was pretty shaky. And I got a little drunk.”

“Understandable.”

“I’m sorry I’m still here, Keye. I’m sorry I’m wearing your clothes.”

I loaded my fork with chocolate cake. “You should be. You’ve got camel toe really bad.”

She laughed. “I promise I’ll go home tomorrow. I’ve just got the creeps right now. I need a day.”

“It’s okay. You’re family.” I remembered staying in her house when mine was unlivable because of construction. She had handed her keys over without a second thought.

I felt White Trash weaving around the stool legs. She was as accomplished as any beggar I’d ever met on Peachtree Street. I picked a piece of feta out of the salad and dropped it for her. “Listen, I have a job up in Big Knob, so if you want the place to yourself for a couple of days, it’s all yours.”

“Big Knob?”

“I know, right? I’ll have Mom come by and take care of White Trash.”

“Are you kidding? I can take care of White Trash. We’re buds.”

“I mean
really
take care of her.”

“I grew up with cats and dogs just like you did, Keye. I know how to take care of them.”

“She has a litterbox and she needs fresh water and food and stuff.”

“Oh really. Well, the deal’s off, then,” Miki said. “I get it. You think I’m a drug addict. And flaky. Anything else?”

“I think you might be an alcoholic,” I said. I didn’t feel like pulling the punch. And I sure as shit was not going to leave my cat with someone I couldn’t trust. I’d found White Trash having breakfast in a garbage bin on Peachtree Street when I’d first moved into the Georgian, half starved, covered with all forms of parasite, half wild and extremely unappreciative of my efforts. But she’d warmed up very quickly to regular meals and human attention. New people still scare
her at first, as do Rauser’s big shoes on my hardwood floors. He gives in to her neurosis most of the time and tries not to stomp. Or he removes his size-twelves when he comes in.