Rooms (18 page)
Authors: Lauren Oliver
But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything at all. Minna’s whole world teetered on the edge of a long second. Then Danny continued downstairs, leaving Minna alone.
S
ecrets were for grown-ups. That’s what Uncle Trenton said. And Amy had a secret now, and that meant she was all grown up like Uncle Trenton and like Mommy.
The secret was about the dead girl, who had a name, which was Katie. But Amy couldn’t tell anyone about the dead girl, not her name or anything else about her, like the fact that she smelled like flowers and not dirt.
“Remember, Amy,” Uncle Trenton had said. “I’m counting on you. This is big-girl stuff.”
Amy promised because she liked the dead girl and didn’t want to get her in trouble. The dead girl had carried Amy away from the fire and had stood holding hands with her outside while they listened to the
scream scream
of fire engines in the distance and Trenton shouted on the phone, and when Amy’s socks got all wet with dew, the dead girl helped her take them off and even took off her own shoes and socks, too, so they could have bare feet together.
“Shhh,” she said, when the trucks were so close Amy could see the trees lit up red and white and blue from all the sirens. The dead girl smiled and pressed a finger to Amy’s lips, and the finger tasted a little like smoke. “I was never here.”
Amy watched her disappear into the darkness, holding her shoes in one hand.
I
t has been four days since the fire, and since Sandra first decided on the silent treatment. Even though I’ve spent decades trying unsuccessfully to get her to shut up, now that she has, I find that I miss her conversation.
I went through the same thing when Ed died. I’d longed for his death, prayed for it, fantasized about it the way some people do about tropical vacations. One time, after a bad storm, we were confined to the house for four straight days; we both must have gone a little crazy. Ed was taking shots from our bedroom window at the crows huddled on the bare branches of the sycamore tree across the field, and missing every time but one; later he fell asleep, whiskey-drunk, with his arm still around the shotgun. In the middle of the night I got out of bed and stood above him, staring at that barrel gleaming sharp as a promise, staring at the shadowed blot of his head, thinking,
I could do it. I could really do it.
I stood there for what felt like hours, until my arms ached, until my toes were numb with cold. Then he rolled over and his face moved into the square of moonlight on his pillow and I drew back, ashamed of myself, horrified.
Then it happened. March 22, 1972. I was making coffee and three fried eggs and bacon; Maggie was living in San Francisco by then. Ed was upstairs, shaving. We’d had a bad fight the night before. He’d come home late, drunk. I’d shoved my fingers down my throat to be sick so he wouldn’t force himself on me.
I heard a heavy thud, like a sack of new dough dropping. I found him on the bathroom floor with his trousers off and a razor in his hand, and a small bit of toilet paper clinging to his chin, where he’d nicked himself and tried to stop the bleeding. He died even before he reached the hospital.
The doctors told me later it was a heart attack. It happened that way sometimes, they told me. Too much drinking, too much fat in his diet, too much stress. We’re all just a collection of wires pulled tight, charged beyond capacity—a tangle of plugs and valves, waiting for a surge to take down the whole system.
He hadn’t even finished his shave. When I came into the bathroom, I saw there was still hair stubbling the right side of his face. And after I called the doctor, I don’t know what got into me, but I sat there and finished for him. I sat on the ground and pulled his head into my lap and finished so he could have his last good shave. He liked a good shave.
I hadn’t expected to miss him. I’d expected only relief. And I was relieved, more than I could say or express—sometimes I’d find myself laughing, and I had to be very careful at the funeral and in front of neighbors to seem sad, when sometimes all I wanted to do was sing. At night I walked the house in the dark and touched all the things that belonged to me: the sofa he would never sit on again, the chairs he would never knock over, all the dishes he would never throw.
But sometimes I woke from the middle of a dream and found myself reaching for him or rolling over toward the place his warmth should have been. The house was so quiet, so still, I listened unconsciously for the sound of his footsteps, the door slamming, the roar of his voice or his laughter from the living room. For months I expected him to call out to me to bring him a beer, hurry up already, where’s dinner. For months I threw burned bacon into the trash thinking of Ed, thinking of how foul a mood he would be in, before remembering that he wasn’t coming down to breakfast. I had carried the weight of him for so long that without it I felt dizzy. I guess it’s the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they’re strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.
I didn’t really, deep down, believe he was dead. At least, I didn’t believe he was gone forever. I was constantly waiting for him to come back, and dreading it, too, and even the dread was like grief.
Ed liked to smoke his pipe in the bathroom. He’d grown up in rural Virginia and shared an outhouse with five brothers; I think the bathroom might have been his favorite room in the house. Sometimes he’d flush two, three times in a row. He liked the sound of it, he said. And even in deep winter he’d crack open a window and sit there with his pants around his ankles, puffing on his pipe, so over time the wallpaper went yellow with it.
Two months after he died, I woke up in the middle of the night and I knew: he’d come back. I could smell his pipe. The smoke was seeping into the bedroom, clinging to the weave of the sheets. And I knew I had only to push open the bathroom door and I’d see him, his pale thighs and knees like doorknobs, his nightshirt wrinkled and the wispy tufts of his hair sticking straight up, like the feathers of a baby bird. Go back to bed, Alice, he’d say. Can’t you leave a man in peace for even five minutes?
But there was nothing: nothing but the toilet, and the bath, and the old yellow wallpaper, and the window, closed. And it was then, in that moment, that I really understood that I was alone and I would be alone.
I sat that night on the toilet seat. I leaned my forehead against the wallpaper. The smell of his pipe was so strong, I could nearly taste it. I stayed there until morning.
T
renton was nearly out of time.
Seeing the ghost, and learning about the woman whose brains had gone splat in the den, had made Trenton temporarily reconsider his plan to die. For a few short days he’d felt that he had a purpose; there was a mystery for him, layered underneath the visible world, like a gift nestled inside folds and folds of tissue paper. He’d felt that everything was connected: coming back to Coral River, meeting Katie, and the ghost. Or ghosts. Whoever they were.
Katie had been . . . what? A friend? A kind-of friend? He didn’t know.
Now Katie was gone. Vanished. The day after the fire, while Caroline, Minna, and Amy were at the doctor, making sure Amy wouldn’t be asthmatic or psychologically scarred for life, or whatever Minna was worried about, Trenton had once again walked the mile and a half to Katie’s house, as he had for the party, and found all the doors locked, the house dark, the driveway empty—as if no one had ever lived there at all. He had rung the doorbell anyway and pounded on the door so loudly that a group of birds had startled up from the field and gone cawing together into the sky, like a shadow breaking apart and re-forming.
It occurred to him he hadn’t even gotten her number, though she had gotten his at her party.
Write your number on my arm,
she’d said, uncapping a blue marker with her teeth and pulling up her sleeve. He’d been so happy he nearly got his own number wrong.
But no matter how much he stared at his phone and willed it to ring—or locked it up in a drawer and told himself he didn’t care either way—his phone stayed quiet. Maybe, he thought, Katie had never even existed; she could have been a figment of his imagination.
Except that Amy remembered her. He’d had to swear Amy to secrecy, so she wouldn’t tell. Katie couldn’t get in trouble; she told him so herself.
Minna and his mom were treating him like he was a psych case, like he might go on a shooting rampage if they said the wrong thing. Minna thought there was something wrong with his brain—he’d heard her say so to their mom. She thought he’d started the fire, maybe even deliberately. He wasn’t allowed to be alone with Amy anymore. She hadn’t said so explicitly, but any time he went to check on Amy or play a game, Minna suddenly materialized, eyes sharp and worried, and whisked Amy away for a meal or a nap or a walk.
Maybe he had started the fire. Maybe it was all his fault. Maybe he was really, truly crazy.
His father’s memorial service was tomorrow. The ghosts didn’t leave him alone, even for a second, anymore.
“I wish they wouldn’t fight so much.” She was sitting in the bathtub, or maybe not sitting. It was hard to tell, since she didn’t have a clear silhouette. She was just a shadow on the tiles, shifting in the sun. “My mom and my stepdad were always fighting. Then he left. My real dad left, too, before I was born. I never even knew him.” Then: “I wish they’d just stop.”
She talked to him this way, in sudden bursts, half nonsensical, about people he didn’t know and places he had never seen, brief and jumbled outpourings of old memories and whispered complaints. He still had trouble figuring out how old she was. Sometimes she seemed as old as he was and sometimes just a kid. She had told him she was sixteen; based on what he knew about girls of that age, which admittedly wasn’t much, he guessed that she was younger.
She hadn’t told him her name, either. Sometimes she claimed to be the missing girl, Vivian. But when he had called her by that name, she had suddenly burst into tears—breaking apart in waves, like a pattern of broken sunlight across a wall—and sobbed that no one knew who she really was, no one would ever know her again, she was dead and she would be forgotten. It made Trenton want to die and strangle her and hold her all at once.
The other voices were still going, too.
“For a newbie, you got a lot of opinions.”
“Leave her alone, Sandra. She’s a child.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“You can’t avoid me forever.”
“Hey. Newbie. Tell Alice to buzz off.”
“Shut up, all of you!” Trenton didn’t realize he’d spoken out loud until there was a sudden silence. He had been trying to count. Now he had to start over.
There was a knocking on the bathroom door. “Trenton?” his mom called out. “Trenton, are you all right?”
“Fine.” He shook all the pills back into his palm and began a recount.
“You’ve been in there a long time,” she said.
“I have to dump,” he replied.
He heard his mom sigh. “Language,” she said, and moved off.
The ghost went on as though nothing had happened. “I’m not a
child,
” she continued. “My birthday’s in July. My mom said we could go anywhere I wanted. I asked to go to Six Flags.” She was quiet for a moment. “Do you think . . . do you think my mom misses me?”
“Please,” Trenton said. His head was going to burst; the voices were like insects burrowing through his brain. “Please.” He didn’t want to care but he couldn’t help it; the world was fucked.
Nine. He had nine pills so far.
“That isn’t enough to kill you,” the ghost said. She was suddenly next to him. He hated that, how quickly she could move. And her touch was like a shiver, like something going wrong in his stomach. “You’ll just throw up.”
“How do you know that?” He was annoyed because she was right. He’d looked online and realized he needed at least twenty, to be safe. But he couldn’t take too many from Minna at a time.
“I saw a story like that on TV.” She paused. “It’s not fair,” she said. She was trembling. They weren’t touching anymore, but he could feel it—cold air, the hair on his arms standing up.
“No,” he said. He longed, suddenly, to touch her—this fragile, needy, broken child, to kiss the top of her head and pull her down into his lap, as he did with Amy when she was having a bad dream. But she wasn’t Amy, and she was only half a child. And, of course, he couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t even see her face clearly: just shifting patterns of light and shadow, a faint impression of hollow prettiness.
“When you die,” she said. “We’ll be friends, won’t we?” She hesitated, then said shyly, “We can be together all the time.”
He felt a sudden wave of panic. He hadn’t thought about it like that. He’d thought only of sleep, and of Minna sobbing and blaming herself; and the kids at Andover lighting candles in his name. What if death turned out to be just as awful and depressing as life? What if he was just as powerless?
“Don’t count on it,” Trenton said. “I’m not planning to stick around.” But he had trouble pouring the pills back into an empty bottle of calamine lotion, where he was hiding them, and dropped two. He had to get down on his hands and knees to retrieve them.
“You’ll stay,” she said. “You’ll stay, and then I’ll always have someone to talk to.”
She grew quiet, and Trenton felt her withdraw, saw her shadow-self shifting across the cold tiles, and the old shower curtain, spotted with mold. Soon, she wouldn’t even be a shadow. She would be nothing but a voice, telling stories no one could hear.
“I’m lonely,” she said, in a whisper.
He placed the bottle in the back of the medicine cabinet, which smelled like old Band-Aids and nail polish and the bubblegum scent of kids’ Tylenol. It comforted him. He thought of Katie leaning forward as she reached behind him to light a candle, her breast bumping his shoulder.
“Me, too,” he said.
