The Last Guest by Tess Little

Author:Tess Little [Little, Tess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

When I recalled these late, late-night scenes, as I did many times throughout the investigation, Richard was entirely absent. Kei and I continued talking as she rolled and smoked her cigarettes; Jerry and Miguel were snoring; eventually the films ended and the projector blared blue light. Sabine and Honey whispered in the corner; Charlie stared into the middle distance, with peeled-white eyes. Persephone watched us from her rocky lair. Tommo stumbled in and out, muttering to himself—picking up open champagne bottles by the neck and taking them outside, where he sat on the wall, drinking alone.

I could account for everyone but Richard in those quiet hours past midnight. Was it that my muddled brain had erased him from the record? Perhaps he had simply been silent or elsewhere. Perhaps I was incorrectly placing all of us together in the atrium at the same time.

With each interrogation session, I had strained to recall the slightest scrap of memory. I didn’t think Richard and I had spoken again, alone, after the conversation on the mezzanine where he had thanked me and I had backed away. This seemed odd. There were only nine of us at Sedgwick that night, and the conversations I could recall surely didn’t amount to the hours I’d spent at the party. Maybe dancing whiled the night away—more likely, conversations were lost to glasses and shots.

But I did remember the last thing he told me.

It must have been two or three in the morning when Richard returned from wherever he’d been. We had hauled a wading pool up from the basement. After Sabine’s incessant whines about swimming, Richard suggested someone venture down and take a look. One could have traveled, he said, from house to house, a relic of our daughter’s childhood. Lo, there it was: dusty and grimy, held aloft by victorious Charlie and Sabine. Jerry and Miguel woke up with the cheers.

The unexpected treasure drew us all into the game. We were kids again: brushing off cobwebs and stretching out the large inflatable on the atrium floor. The men took turns blowing it up by lung. It was Sabine’s idea to fill it warm; we sloshed stove-boiled pots from the kitchen, back and forth like ants. Kei squirted in dish detergent.

We slipped into the lukewarm foam, fully clothed. Tommo had found some chilled champagne and we drank it straight from the bottle, not caring when it splashed into the sudsy water. My chiffon blouse ballooned beneath the surface. I remember catching myself staring at it, tumbling, furling.

“We were never well suited, were we, Ellie darling?”

I looked up. Richard had shifted himself beside me. His shirt was undone to the sternum; his hair in wet, boyish curls. I could not think of a reply—no sentence could do justice to our relationship, the pain that lay at the heart of it. And so I didn’t answer. My gaze returned to the water; I drifted my hand through the bubbles, each a globe of its own. Richard pinched my chin, lightly, between crooked forefinger and thumb, lifted my face back to him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.