Rooms (15 page)
Authors: Lauren Oliver
I
t took me nearly two weeks to track Maggie down. Back then, there was no e-this and online search—just columns of identical names, and lots of dialing and dead ends and finger cramps.
At last, I got her. She was a low-voiced woman who paused before every sentence as if she was debating whether to speak at all. Even when she picked up the phone, she paused, and I counted several seconds of heavy breathing. By the time she said hello, I was about to hang up.
Why did I call her? Why did I think it was important?
Up and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly you’ve run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then it’s oops, sorry, turn’s over.
“Are you Maggie Lundell?” I said. “From Coral River?”
“Not anymore” is what she said. Then: “How did you find me?”
“I found a turtle with your name on it,” I answered.
There was another pause. And then a sound like she was overcome with the hiccups. It took me a moment to realize she was laughing.
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “I knew he would come back.”
Maggie arrived two weeks later. How could I have known it wasn’t a good idea? That even then, Alice was waiting, watching, twitching in the walls like an overgrown cockroach?
It was a day that made me glad I’d left New York and the Lower East Side and its crusty people, with faces like moth-eaten cloth. Here it was all bluebells and honeysuckle, climbing roses and birds chasing each other across the sky—a place where nothing bad could happen.
A bit of golden dust unwinding like smoke in the sky announced her; then a wide, boxy maroon Mazda came bumping up the drive. The owner matched the car: wide and squat, with a square jaw and a thatch of bright red hair, cut short. I pinned her for queer right away.
She moved slowly, deliberately, the same way she spoke. It was only eleven
a.m.,
but when I asked her if she wanted a soda or something to drink, she said, “Got any gin?” I liked her right away.
We sat on the deck and bullshitted for a few hours—she told me about the way the house had changed, and about the turtle she’d named Norman, and how she suspected her mother had deliberately turned him out of the house, and I told her about how I’d ended up in the middle of Buttshit, Nowhere, USA, and how glad I was. She was interested in the New York scene. She’d been living in San Francisco for three decades but had grown tired, she said, of all the “faghags.” She’d followed a job to Philadelphia after she found her last girlfriend cheating with her ex-husband—“an engineer,” she said, as if disgusted.
I didn’t blame her. I’d been with an engineer once in my life, and every time we were screwing around I felt like I was some kind of mechanical model he was trying to deconstruct or decode. Pull a wire here, twist a nob, oops, that’s not working, how about pressing this button? It’s like he expected me to start beeping and flashing a green light.
She did installation art and worked in TV production to make ends meet.
As we got deeper into the bottle, she started pausing less, talking a little freer, telling me about some of the stuff she did—trash cans inverted and made into toilets, that kind of stuff, but I’ve never been much of an art lover, and I certainly don’t know why someone would pay fifty grand for a piece of rusted metal, but whatever floats your boat. She told me, too, about the commercial work: regional stuff, mostly, although I had seen one of her TV advertisements for toilet bowl cleaner and thought it was very well done.
The afternoon lengthened and sharpened, too, like a microscope had been adjusted; the sun, the drinks, the coolness of the house every time I went inside to pee. I told Maggie about where I worked, the Rivers Center for Psychiatric Development, and about the kooks and the weirdos my boss researched: phobics, neurotics, psychotics, freaks of all shapes and sizes.
“It’s the liars I’d be most interested in,” she said. “What do they call it? Compulsive liars.”
“What about them?”
She stared out over the back lawn; sloping down toward the woods, it dropped suddenly into shadow where the sycamores and the oaks began. “Aren’t we all, in a way? Liars, I mean. Unable to help it.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’ve always been a straight shooter. What you see is what you get.”
“But that’s the whole point.” Her voice had softened as she got drunker. She wasn’t slurring, exactly, but where before she spoke in short staccato, now her voice was all melody. For a quick second, I thought of Georgia, and even missed it—the tip of a hat, the drawl of the postman saying
hey there, little lady
. “We don’t know we’re lying,” she went on. “Not about ourselves, anyway. Everything we see, everything we remember—it’s all just made up, isn’t it?”
A fly was drowning spectacularly in her half-empty glass. She went to take a sip, grimaced, and then fished the insect out with an unsteady finger.
“Looks pretty damn real to me,” I said and laughed.
We’d finished most of the bottle of gin before I got around to showing her the suitcase. I was sorry almost as soon as I did, because just like that the good times were over, and I realized—with the kind of bottlenecked clarity only a solid afternoon of drinking brings—that she was very, very drunk. Later that night, I would come upstairs and see her passed out in my bedroom, clothes on, spread-eagle, mouth open in a puddle of drool.
She was quiet as she examined the objects one by one, like she was puzzling over a crossword. I started getting impatient and made a joke about it, but she didn’t seem to hear me.
I started thinking about food, and whether I should eat something and risk killing my buzz, or whether I should just open the whiskey, which I didn’t particularly want to share. Would she notice if I refilled my glass in the kitchen? Was she too drunk to notice?
“This isn’t my father’s jacket,” she said abruptly. Her eyes were red and her mouth wet, like a wound in the center of her face. “It’s too small. Not his style, either.”
I was bored already—wishing now that I had asked her to leave, so I could open the whiskey and drink it in peace, while the shadows swallowed up the hill.
“I never really knew her,” Maggie said. A little bubble of spit had formed at the corner of her mouth.
“Who?” I asked automatically.
“My mother,” she said. “My father, either.” She was quiet for a bit, and I thought this might be a good time to excuse myself, take a pee, sneak some whiskey into my glass. She wouldn’t even notice.
But then she blurted out: “Did you know your parents?”
I knew what she meant, but I didn’t think it was the right time to tell her: about my dad playing tug-of-war with his buddy’s privates, about my mom babbling to Jesus in nonsense words behind the chipped white doors of the Holy Light Pentecostal Church, and bleaching the walls until plants withered in their vases and cats asphyxiated on our doorstep.
So I just said, “Parents are a bitch.”
That’s more or less how I’ve always felt about it, anyway. Parents teach you a lot of things, but the most important thing they teach you is this: how people will fuck you up in the future. If they’re any good, they teach you to get used to it.
“She never said she loved me,” Maggie said. She didn’t bother to try and wipe her nose or eyes, just sat there with her thick arms useless in her lap, one hand still wrapped around her drink. “Never once.”
Something in my stomach tightened, like she’d sunk a fishing hook just below my belly button and started to pull. I never could stand the sight of crying—hadn’t cried myself since I was a little girl and Mom walloped me ten times over the head with the King James Bible after she heard me tell my cousin Richie Rodgers to “go to hell.”
And maybe it was because I was thinking of that—the old home in Georgia, and Richie, and what had happened to him—but when Maggie looked up at me, eyes big and pathetic and desperate as an animal’s, I had a sudden memory of this time when I was twelve and my uncle Ronnie took me hunting. Richie was there, too: by then fourteen, with a face like an open sore and teeth too large for his mouth and a laugh like a donkey getting kicked.
Ronnie and I split off from Richie—I don’t remember why—and halfway through the afternoon we came across a deer, and Ronnie fired like an idiot, too far to the right. Still, the deer ran for a good half a mile before collapsing. By the time we got to it, it was gasping, kicking in pain, eyes rolling up to the sky. And I remember it fixed on me for a second and I could practically hear it: kill me, it was saying. Please kill me. Ronnie was shooting with shells the size of a thumb and I knew that inside the deer, a hundred sharp-toothed pellets had exploded like shrapnel, burrowing into its organs.
I grabbed Ronnie’s shotgun and fired three times straight into the deer’s head, until it didn’t even look like a deer anymore and I knew it could feel nothing.
That’s exactly what Maggie looked like in that moment—like that deer, silently pleading with me. And I knew that those unsaid words,
I love you,
were her own exploded shell: that those hurts were embedded deep, killing her slowly. I guess we all have some of these—memories like artillery shells, fired at close range.
“Well, maybe she didn’t, then,” I said to her. It may seem cruel, but sometimes, you got to just pull the trigger.
And like I said: I didn’t know Alice was watching.
T
hree more seconds. Two. That’s all she needed.
She had to
know
.
She knew she shouldn’t. She tried to stop. But her fingers weren’t obeying her brain.
Caroline picked up the receiver and dialed Adrienne’s number again.
M
artin loved the attic. Don’t ask me why. Until he insisted on exploring the house bottom to top, I’d probably been up there twice in the whole time I lived in Coral River: once, to unload the dump of stuff my dad saddled me with after he died; and once to check for a dead animal after the whole house went rank with a bad smell. (It was a raccoon and I found it after two days of searching, in the old laundry chute; it had crawled halfway up the wall before getting stuck. The plumber had to draw it out with one of those steel wires they use for breaking up matted hair in the drain.)
If you’d asked me—if you asked me, still—I would have said attics are like the spleen of a house. Ignored, forgotten, useless.
But six months after Martin and I first shared that watermelon, we went exploring. It had been snowing for days—that was a bad winter. Even in the ten seconds he stood inside the door, stamping ice from his boots and shaking it from his beard, a half inch of snow gathered on the kitchen floor and afterward melted all over the linoleum. He hadn’t been inside twenty minutes when they announced on TV that the road back to town was closed.
“I guess I’ll have to spend the night,” he said, putting his arms around me. Cheeky bastard. Like there was any doubt.
We were deep into a bottle of cognac (Martell, 1950) when he said it: “I want to see where you live, Sandy.”
“You’ve been here plenty of times,” I said. “Besides, I never get to see where
you
live.”
He ignored that. “I’ve seen the kitchen. I’ve seen the den. I’ve seen your bedroom.” He leaned forward and put his hands over mine—warm hands, but raw from the weather and the cold and rough from long-ago summers spent hauling lobsters at a wharf in Maine, calluses that had never gone away. Funny how the past gets down into the skin.
It was so cold in the attic we could see our breath hanging like miniature ghosts. Martin went back downstairs for a second bottle of cognac and a blanket, and we sat together on the hardwood floor, between the boxes, inhaling the smell of wood and damp and cold.
“Close your eyes,” Martin said. “Listen.”
“To what?” I said. There was nothing: no sound at all. Even the house was still, wrapped in its drifts like a fat old baby in a blanket.
“The snow,” he said.
I opened my eyes. “You can’t hear snow.”
“You can,” he said. He still had his eyes closed. He looked like a different person when he wasn’t smiling. Older. Tired. A stranger. “Shhh.”
I closed my eyes again, just to humor him.
But the weird thing is after a minute or two, I thought I
could
hear it. Not sound, but the opposite of sound. It was the slow accumulation of silence, the sticky, heavy drift of nothing, like watching shadows grow and turn to dark, or like this time I was a kid and saw a solar eclipse, watched a black disk float over the sun and saw all the light get swallowed up in an instant. Now I was hearing all the sounds of the world get swallowed up.
When I opened my eyes, Martin was smiling again. “The sound of snow,” he said.
After that, it became like our thing. Even when he wasn’t around, I used to go up there sometimes, because it reminded me of him. I even started to get used to the smell, like an old person’s laundry basket, and the spiders spinning silently in their corners. Cissy would have liked it in the attic.
Alice told me later she used to hang around in the attic, too. She had a whole rig up there, a desk and everything. First she was pretending to write because it gave her an excuse to keep away from her husband, and he was too lazy and usually too drunk, so she says, to climb the stairs. But then, after a while, she started really writing, and she churned out
The Raven Heliotrope,
three hundred pages in two years.
It was peaceful up there.
Then, a week before the big
wham-o blam-o
, brains on the wall, the roof collapsed. It had been another frigid turd of a winter, and for months the snow, fine as sifted flour, had been piling up quietly, so I hardly noticed.
I wasn’t home. I’d gone looking for Martin. It had been a rough winter on me. We’d been at it, me and Martin; I got canned from my job for no good reason; and on top of everything else, I got the news from my doctor: cancer. A knot on my lung, tight as a web, lit up like a Christmas tree on the scan.
I needed to tell Martin. I called him at home, which was forbidden, and I’ll never forget what it felt like when
she
picked up the phone: like standing out in the cold and seeing warm lights off in the distance and knowing you’d never make it.
“Hello?” she said, half laughing; and I heard his voice, too, in the background, like he’d just finished telling a joke. There were other voices too, overlapping, and a song playing in the background. Something with a violin.
I knew where he lived. He was careful but not careful enough, and it was no big secret. He knew I wouldn’t show up there unannounced, but that’s just what I did. I drove all the way to Buffalo through the funnel of snow and parked right in front of his house, which was bigger than I’d imagined and prettier, like a big cupcake covered in white icing. I could see him moving in the living room, passing out drinks to his guests. And I could see
her,
too: blond and small as an insect, touching his face, his arm; rearranging the chairs, opening the window to let out the smoke; and every time she moved it was like she was saying,
I belong here. I belong here.
At the last second I lost my nerve so I just sat there. I had a bottle of Smirnoff to keep me warm, and I sat until it was finished and the guests had all gone home, spilling out into the darkness and cold, still laughing, waving scarves like people in old movies leaving on a ship. Martin and his wife stood waving at the door, transformed by the warm light behind them into a single shape.
Driving home, I lost control on the ice and went headfirst into a fence and some idiot cop barely out of puberty threw me in the tank overnight for being drunk. The cell was white and empty and smelled like piss, but in the morning when the sun came up on the walls, it was almost pretty.
When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference.
Don’t think I felt sorry for myself. The way I figure it, life’s the sum total of all our small mistakes, little tragedies, bad choices. Addition on top of addition. They pile up and pile up until the cost of keeping up appearances is too high and the weight is just too much.
Then: collapse.
Alice says we got to let go. Maybe she’s right.
If you want the plain truth, it wasn’t the gun that killed me. What I mean is: it wasn’t the gun that killed me
first
.
When I was six, I started having a dream about a long white hallway full of closed doors. It looked like a hospital, except there were no doctors and no nurses, no people at all. Just a long stretch of closed locked doors.
Sometimes it was quiet. Sometimes I could hear people talking inside the locked rooms, voices muffled by the walls. Sometimes there was even music playing. And I knew if I could just find the right door, it would open for me, and I’d pass through into my house, into my room, with the big bay windows where a decade later a spider would sit spinning for Cissy, and the view of the front yard and the big sky and the birds pecking worms out of my mom’s garden.
But I never could. Find it, I mean. All the doors stayed locked.
The dreams stopped after a while, when I got a little older and got into boys and dope and music and beer. But I’ll tell you something. For a while, I thought Martin was going to be the door.
When his wife found out and he said he was ending things with me, I think I went a little crazy. After thirty years, the dreams came back. Even when I woke up, the dream was there: a long hallway of locked rooms, and people laughing inside of them.
The gun was just the go-between. It was the loneliness that got me in the end.
