Free The Houseguest by Kim Brooks Page B

without end. For what purpose? For what cause? His eyelids grew heavier. His breath moved slowly. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and now he saw there was actually a great deal of light—moonlight and streetlight. Utica. Quiet Utica. A sleeping city. Peace. He’d been right to come here. Here, they were safe. The curtains were white, half-translucent. The curtains in his childhood home had been thick, velvet ripples of fabric, too heavy to be moved by the breeze, designed to keep out cold as well as light. These were thin as tissue paper. They reminded Abe of a hotel near the Black Sea where he’d once spent the night. Sometimes he still heard the streets of Grodno in his mind. He still heard the sounds of the forest from their summer trips. Abe pulled himself out of the memory. It wasa long-perfected trick, a balancing act. He focused on the softness of the armchair’s upholstery, the shadows of the ceiling fan. He listened to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the dining room, stared at the red darkness behind his closed lids, a red like the coals inside a kiln.
    He was about to doze off. Then, a noise. It was coming from upstairs. Laughter. Hysterical laughter. He sat up straight, waited for it to stop, which it did for a moment. Then it resumed. He rose, climbed the stairs. It was coming from the guest room. The laughter grew louder as he approached. He knocked softly. The laughter stopped but there was no reply. He knocked again, waited, then pushed the door open a few inches. There, on the floor beside the bed, sat Ana Beidler. She had not been laughing but sobbing, weeping. She lay there hunched over, gasping for breath, her face wet and red and swollen with tears. Her whole body heaved as she wept. She was hardly dressed, just a black slip. Her hair hung in her face and was matted with tears. He came in the room slowly and waited for her to look up at him, which she did after what seemed a long time.
    â€œMiss Beidler,” he said. “Can I get you something? Some water, maybe?”
    When she looked at him directly, he could hardly bear the openness and urgency of her gaze. Her face seemed changed once more. Her lips were twisted, pained, her eyes panicked.
    â€œYes,” she said, nodding.
    He hurried back to the kitchen, took a glass from the cabinet and filled it to the brim. His hands were shaking as he carried it, tried to prevent it from sloshing over the edges on his way back up. When he pushed through the door again, she was lying on the bed, her head resting on the pillow, her face obscured. She sat up stiffly as he crossed the room and set the glass on the nightstand.
    â€œHere,” he said. “Please, how can I help you?”
    â€œHelp me?” she said, no longer weeping but smiling. The words were hardly more than a whisper. “Forgive,” she said. “Can you forgive me?”
    He sat on the edge of her bed. “But there’s nothing to forgive.” The words seemed to soothe her. And so he repeated this phrase the way he used to repeat to his daughter the chorus to a lullaby when he didn’t know the other words. “Nothing to forgive. Nothing to forgive.”
    Her skin was darker on the sides of her forehead where her tears had washed away the paint. She looked up at him, calmer, blinking slowly. A long time passed before she spoke, and when she finally did, he was expecting her to thank him, or to say she felt better, or to offer some explanation or excuse. Though they’d only just met, he somehow expected she’d confide everything in him, her deepest secrets and regrets. She seemed to him, right from the beginning, a woman incapable of keeping secrets, a woman who needed to be heard and seen the way others needed the nourishment of food or the oxygen in air. No, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d told him everything that first night. But when she spoke again, there was a hardness to the words he