Rooms: A Novel (6 page)

CHAPTER 10

Saturday afternoon Micah strolled into Osburn’s Ice Creamery on Main Street to order two scoops of frozen bliss.

The girl behind the counter dug out a double portion of Cookie Dough Hunk for the customer ahead of him as he breathed in the sugar-sweetened air and waited for his turn.

Micah glanced back and forth between the comics on the wall—some new, some faded from years of entertaining tourists with a taste for Rocky Road and Chocolate Chip Mint—and the girl with shoulder-length dark walnut hair. A wayward strand draped across her eye. Tiny dimples set off her genuine smile perfectly. Beautiful.

She was quick with the ice cream and quicker to share a smile with the tourists on their way to a cold sugar high. “Hi. What can I get for you?”

Micah gazed out the window and watched the tourists meander down the sidewalk, thinking about how radically different this world was from the one back in Seattle.

“Ice cream! Anyone up for ice cream today?” The girl pretended to call out to the whole crowd before turning back to Micah. Her smile filled the room.

“Sorry. Yeah, ice cream.” He looked into her eyes and saw laughter behind them, then glanced at her left ring finger. No gold.

“What flavor is calling to you today?”

“Pralines and Cream, definitely.”

“Ah, he goes for the slightly plain ice cream with just enough flavor to avoid the ‘vanilla’ label.” She brushed the hair away from her face, but it drifted back down.

“Do you always give personality profiles to people based on their ice cream choices?”

“Only when they’ve just returned from a foreign land in their mind.”

He smiled inside. This girl had wit.

She dug out a huge scoop of Pralines and Cream and packed it down tight. “New in town?” She handed Micah his scoop on a waffle cone and winked.

“Aren’t all the tourists?” He handed her a five-dollar bill over the top of the Plexiglas ice cream case. She took it, bumped the cash register with her hip, and the drawer opened.

“You’re not a tourist.” She gazed at him with the hint of a challenge in her double-shot espresso brown eyes. He waited for her to explain how she knew that, but she reached into a register overflowing with Georges and Abes and handed him his change without comment.

“And what, Ms. Sherlock, is your first name?”

“Watson,” she said with a twinkle in her eyes but no smile on her lips. “But I only let my friends call me that.” She turned to the next person in line and asked for his order.

Micah eased over to the side of the cash register. “So how’d you figure out I’m not a tourist?”

She started working on a triple scoop of Strawberry Cheesecake for the next customer. “Most of the tourists stay the weekend, a week, maybe even two. Then they go home. So since you’ve been frequenting these parts for six or seven, I figured you were down here for more than a few pictures.”

Micah blinked. “And you know I’ve been here off and on for seven weeks because . . . ?”

She glanced at him, one corner of her mouth turned up, but didn’t reply.

“You the owner?” Micah took the first bite of his ice cream.

“No, why do you want to know?” She looked away to make change for a Vanilla Fudge Ripple customer.

“Well, I feel I have an obligation to let him know—”

“Let her know.”

“An obligation to let
her
know her employee spies on tourists.”

“Wouldn’t get you anywhere. She’s a spy just like me.”

The girl didn’t smile but Micah grinned. He toasted her with his cone. “Touché.”

He turned and walked out of Osburn’s, the smile staying on his face. He put buying another couple of scoops at Osburn’s in the near future on his mental to-do list.

||||||||

Micah got back to the house at six-thirty that evening. After a quick run down to Haystack Rock and back, and an even quicker dinner of pot stickers and rice, he strolled toward the library. He never got there. Next to it was another new door.

Great, here we go again.

Micah paused, pushed open the door, and groped for a light switch. As he snapped it on, he eased inside. The room smelled like a winter morning and felt unnaturally still. More than the absence of noise, the silence felt like a panther ready to strike. In his peripheral vision he saw the far wall move. No. Did it?

Fear darted around the room like a bat. Micah walked in farther, refusing to lose his nerve. Against one wall from floor to ceiling were mail slots—the type seen in an old office building. Nothing else was in the room. Each mail slot was six-by-three inches, with off-white paint peeling from the edges. Each held papers. Most were crammed full; others held only one. All were yellowed, some stained with water, some with corners torn off.

The room was wrong.

When he reached the slots, his hand seemed to move in slow motion toward the first paper. Just before he touched it, something inside said stop.

Too late.

The instant his forefinger touched the parchment, his stomach twisted as if he were free-falling from ten thousand feet. He turned and looked at the door. It was shut. He knew he’d left it open, but it hardly mattered. Micah forced himself to stay calm as he opened the parchment. A series of headlines scrawled on the paper described memories of deep pain from his childhood.

His favorite Hot Wheels car getting smashed by his dad at age six.

His fourth-grade teacher joking that he was “Mindless Micah” almost every day during class for the entire year because he couldn’t understand the problems.

Headline after headline about what he had missed, lost, failed at, and what had been stolen from him—the sting as fresh as when they’d first happened.

Halfway down the page he pulled away and looked up. It would’ve been better if he’d kept his eyes on the paper.

The wall in front of him was covered with moving pictures of more disappointments. He spun to his right to avoid them. It was futile. Every wall—even the floor—played grainy, mini-film scenes from his life, as if an old Super 8 camera had recorded every emotional scar from childhood and was replaying them all at once.

A girl promising she’d go with him to the seventh-grade dance then dumping him for his supposed best friend.

Being bullied on and off by Brandon Kopec during his freshman year of high school.

Dropping the game-winning touchdown pass in front of the whole school in tenth grade and getting ridiculed by his teammates for weeks afterward.

He dropped the parchment, tried to steady himself against the wall to his right, and fought the vise grip clenching his stomach. Micah stared in fascination and fear as the images came faster, now covering the ceiling as well.

Cut from the basketball team his sophomore year because one of the coaches’ pet players spread the lie that Micah was smoking pot.

Chewed up and spit out by his boss for ruining a stack of wood at the sign company at sixteen.
“You idiot! I should call you Scarecrow. Get a brain!”
His boss swore for thirty seconds straight, jabbing his finger like a metronome into Micah’s collarbone.

Micah sank to the floor and gasped for air. He felt as if twenty-foot waves were pounding him into the sand. As the torrent assaulted him, part of his mind shouted, “This isn’t real!” But his body wouldn’t listen. He struggled to get to his knees. Not possible.

He wanted to strike out. At anything. Everything. Rage and rejection slammed into his mind.

Come on!
He had to get control.

He raised his arm, as if he could block the hurricane of emotions.

Clarity. Have to focus. It . . . is . . . not . . . real!

But it was.

The memories jumped back and forth across the years and went faster.

“Leave him alone!” he shouted as he watched his fifth-grade basketball coach scream at his younger self for missing a free throw in the last game of the season.

Tears formed as he watched his three best friends from junior high go to the Alanis Morissette concert without him, laughing about how they’d been able to ditch Micah.

He lashed out with his arms. “Help me.”

No answer.

“If You’re here, help me!”

All the images vanished.

Silence.

It was over.

Wasn’t it?

An instant later a scene filled the entire back wall of the room. A nine-year-old Micah ran along the beach, stumbling, lips trembling, deep lines of worry etched into his face.

“No.” A moan escaped his lips and surged into a guttural scream. “Not this.”

“Come back, Mom! Come back!”

Micah leaped into the air, straining to see out over the ocean. The boy spun and screamed north up the beach, “Help her! Help my mom!” He turned south and screamed again. He started to run toward the row of houses behind him. Two quick paces before he stopped, turned, and ran back to where he’d started, his bare feet kicking sand onto a Spider-Man beach towel.

Then he froze, not knowing which way to go. What to do.

Micah’s mind continued to scream what he was seeing wasn’t real; his heart screamed louder it was all too genuine. “This will kill me. I can’t do this. Can’t see this. I need You, God.” The last part was a whisper.

The young Micah leaped into the air, legs shaking, eyes filled with tears. Micah now watched himself scream again and again and again.

He huddled on the carpet on his side, knees held up to his chest.

“God, help me!”

The room shifted. Hope appeared inside like a pinprick of light in a black sky. The pain receded somewhat. Breathing came easier. The tentacles of fear wrapped around his mind loosened. But not enough.

“Please help me.” He didn’t know if he’d said it out loud or only in his mind.

The struggle raged on.

The younger Micah knelt in the sand now, sobbing. A man sprinted past him into the waves. His father.

“Don’t make me face it!” Micah shouted at the scene.

He wasn’t going to make it.

Micah slid into darkness.

In that instant it came. A flash of light, then peace, and a sensation he hadn’t felt in years—the presence of God.

Silence. This time it remained.

The peace built till he was able to get off the floor and stumble through the door, through the house, into the star-filled night, onto the beach.

He reached the sand, collapsed, and let the tears come.

||||||||

When he awoke, the sun had climbed halfway to noon. He guessed it was as late as nine o’clock. He rubbed his eyes, stumbled to his feet, and eased toward the ocean.

People clad in bright jackets ambled up the beach. Three kids filled the sky with their multicolored kites, laughing as they kicked up little clouds of sand with their dark feet, racing to keep their flying machines aloft.

It made last night seem like a dream.

Maybe it was just a nightmare.

But he knew it wasn’t. God had rescued him. Right? Or was He the one who pushed Micah into that room?

But he’d felt God, just like he did back in high school. At least he thought it was God. Maybe it wasn’t.

Micah stood in the surf, and his stomach churned—maybe from hunger, possibly from the thought of going back inside. Probably a combination. The thought of facing that room again made hackles dance on his neck. He paced in two inches of water for ten minutes. But there was no way he would let one of Archie’s rooms have control over him.

As he trudged toward his house like a climber taking the final steps to the top of K2, strong gusts pushed gray clouds off the ocean, blocking the sun.

He stepped inside, his sight roving from the fireplace to the circular staircase leading upstairs, to the hallway, to the kitchen, back to the fireplace. Looked normal. Even felt normal. After grabbing a bagel and an apple, he stepped back outside onto his deck.

He needed a moment to settle his thoughts.

A gust of wind smacked into him, almost tearing the food out of his hand. Must be blowing thirty or forty knots. Rain swept in a few seconds later, pelting him with fat drops. Families and couples jogged off the beach, hoods pulled over their heads. A storm was brewing. Micah shook his head. Perfect metaphor for what was happening in his brain.

As bizarre as the room was, he wanted to fight. To conquer his fear of the past. He marched inside and headed for the memory room. A cold blanket of sweat broke out across his back.

“Don’t . . . back . . . down. You want me to face what happened here all those years ago, Archie? All right. Let’s do it.”

As he walked down the hallway toward the door, Micah bowed his head and wiped the sweat from his palms on the side of his jeans.

When he reached the door, he wouldn’t hesitate; he’d walk right in. But he didn’t get the chance. The door was gone. Where it had been was now smooth wall. No evidence it had ever been there.

It wasn’t a comfort.

He sucked in two quick breaths.

Micah tramped back down the hall toward the living room. When he reached the fireplace, he slumped to the floor, head in hands. This was not a dream. There would be no waking up. He checked his pulse with clammy fingers. Clammy? They were wet.