Rooms (4 page)

PART II

THE STUDY

SANDRA

“M
onstrous,” Minna says. “Absolutely monstrous. It looks like a vulva.”

I’ll say this about Minna: she may be as deep as a puddle but she
is
funny. And she’s right. The lamp on Richard Walker’s desk is meant to look like a rose—all droops and loops of pink and white fabric, with tiny electric lights budding in between—but the effect is more like a fat lady peeling back her skirt.

“Minna.” Caroline presses her fingers against her temples. It’s 9:30
a.m.
and she’s on her first drink. She won’t be over the hump until her second or third.

“A drooping vulva,” Minna adds. She shakes her head and returns to wrapping up Richard’s collection of clocks. “Who would buy something like that?”

“Your father.”

“What did he think he would do with all of it?” Minna says, making a face. “It’s like a trash heap in here. Like one of those hoarder shows.”

“Your father wasn’t a hoarder,” Caroline says. “He was a collector. Be careful, Minna. Some of those clocks are valuable.”

“Junk,” Minna says, as she nestles a paperweight on top of a folded afghan, in yet another box. The boxes are slowly sprouting all over the house. “And more junk.”

“I’ve talked to Dani Sutherland,” Caroline says, keeping one hand on her temples and taking a sip from a plastic cup with the other. Screwdriver. Two parts vodka, one part orange juice.

Minna gives her mother a blank look.

“You don’t remember Dani Sutherland? Her son, Hank, used to babysit? Oh, well. Dani does realty now. She’s worried about the market. Says it might take two or three years to really get the price we want. We might get lucky, though, with a buyer from the city. I guess we’ll have to see.”

Minna rips off a bit of packing tape with her teeth. “Maybe we shouldn’t sell,” she says. “At least not right away.”

“Of course we’re going to sell.” When Caroline frowns, her face looks like a collapsed pudding.

“It’s not only your decision,” Minna says.

“Yes, it is,” Caroline says. “It’s my house now. I call the shots.”

Minna stares at her. “Trenton was right,” she says. “You really don’t care—about Dad and the house and all of it.”

“Please, Minna. Don’t be so childish. Of course I care. But I’m also broke. And you need the money just as much as I do.” Caroline takes a sip that nearly empties her cup. Now it makes sense: the ugly luggage, all that expensive clothing showing its age, cashmere spotted with holes.

Minna starts assembling another box, wielding the tape aggressively, as if trussing a live animal. “You should have married that guy—what was his name?—the one from the cosmetics family. Henry something.”

“Harry Fairfield,” Caroline says.

“Then you would have been set.”

“He had sweaty palms.” Caroline sighs. “Besides, you can’t fall in love with someone just because he has buckets of money.”

Minna snorts. “Isn’t that why you fell in love with Dad?”

“Minna. No. Of course not.” Caroline’s either shocked or doing a good job of pretending to be.

“He was ten years older,” Minna says.

“He was sophisticated.” Caroline’s voice gets quiet, and for the first time she releases her death grip on her forehead. “I loved your father. I did. He was just . . . ”

“An asshole?”

That’s the understatement of the century.

“
Difficult,
” Caroline says, scowling down at her drink. It’s nearly empty: pulp clings to the sides of the cup.

Minna opens the top drawer and makes a noise of disapproval. “Papers. Envelopes. Postcards. No order. No
system
.” She slams the drawer shut and moves on to the next one, then inhales sharply. “I didn’t know Dad kept a gun.”

“A gun?” Caroline repeats.

Minna lifts up a pistol slowly, holding it with two fingers, as if it’s a dirty sock.

“Don’t point that thing at me, Minna.”

“I’m not pointing it.”

“Put it away, please, before you hurt yourself.”

Minna rolls her eyes and replaces the gun in the drawer. “It’ll take weeks to go through all this stuff.”

Caroline stares at her cup for a minute. Then she looks up. “Do you have
any
happy memories here?”

“No.” Then, a pause: “Some. I remember you used to let me bowl in the hallway upstairs. Remember that? You set up pins and everything. And when it rained, we watched movies in your bed.”

“
The Wizard of Oz
was your favorite,” Caroline says. “You were always praying for a tornado.”

“And I remember Trenton learning how to walk. Then he wouldn’t stop following me. Jesus, it drove me crazy.”

Alice stirs; I hope she won’t start sniveling. You should have seen her when Caroline brought Trenton back from the hospital: a patchy red blob with a single tuft of hair growing from the center of his forehead, one of the ugliest babies I’ve ever seen. And the smells! Diapers, spittle, puke. Horrible.

But Alice just went to pieces. I’d catch her when she thought I was distracted, drawn close around his crib, singing nonsense songs and whispering to him as though he could hear.

“Do you remember the Christmas parties we used to have? Your father would sing. And you and Trenton always argued about who got to hang the angel. I remember you played the piano so beautifully . . . ”

“I
hated
the piano,” Minna says loudly—so loudly Caroline blinks.

“Did you?” she says. “But you were so good. Everyone said you would go to Juilliard.” She tries to shake the last remaining drops of liquid onto her tongue.

Minna glares at her. “Are you serious? You really have
no
fucking idea, do you? About anything.”

Caroline widens her eyes. “I don’t know why you’re being so hostile, Minna,” she says. “We’re just having a conversation.”

Minna stares. “Have another drink, Ma,” she says finally, then slams down a plate so hard it cracks in two, and storms out of the room.

TRENTON

T
renton was disappointed by the gun Minna had found. He’d been expecting something sleek and black. He’d pictured tucking it into his waistband, swaggering around with it for a bit, getting the feel. He’d pictured the kind of gun that would make you think twice about messing with someone—guns evened the score, turned losers into big shots.

This gun was old, first of all, and it was heavy. He couldn’t even fit it into his waistband, and if he did, he thought he’d probably blow his balls off accidentally. It looked more like something you would see at a museum than at the scene of a crime. Plus he didn’t know if it was loaded, and he wasn’t sure how to check.

He’d seen a gun only once before, at the disastrous party last winter that had earned him his nickname. It had been, without doubt, the worst night of his life. Most people probably thought the accident had been the worst night of his life, but for Trenton, that had been a kind of liberation.

Everything afterward—the pain and the pills and the metal rods holding his shins together and the wire in his jaw and the shitty power shakes that tasted like sand sipped through a straw—had been awful. But in the moment of the accident, the sheer blazing terror of it and the certainty, just then, that he would die, he’d found a kind of peace he’d never known, or at least hadn’t felt in years.

This is it,
he had thought, just before the scream of metal on metal and the sparks and then the darkness. And he was, purely and simply, relieved. No more failing, no more fucking up, no more loneliness like a constant pressure on his bladder that he couldn’t piss or sleep or drink away.

And then he’d woken up. He had never thought about suicide before. But lying in the hospital, it had occurred to him that suicide was the only possible solution. Clean. Elegant. Brave, even.

Suicide, he decided, had integrity.

He supposed he could just shove the barrel of the gun in his mouth and fire, but Russian roulette lacked integrity. If you were going to kill yourself, you had to know, in advance, that it was going to work. Chance was for idiots.

That’s what Derrick Richards had suggested at the party: that they all play Russian roulette. Trenton had kept his mouth shut, like he did at every party, hoping that if he stayed quiet, no one would notice that he didn’t belong. Derrick was dumb enough to do it and his friends were dumb enough to follow along. Fortunately Derrick was so drunk he’d stumbled backward and sent a bullet straight through the window, and after that someone had taken the gun away and everyone had moved on to strip poker, even though it was December and flakes of snow were swirling in through the shattered window.

From upstairs, Trenton thought he heard laughter, faintly, and shoved the gun quickly into his dad’s desk drawer, where he had found it, where Minna had casually mentioned it would be—almost like she knew what he was planning and was encouraging it. Well. Why wouldn’t she? Nothing was worse than being a disgusting pock-faced freak with a sister who looked like Minna. He was sure she suspected him of being a virgin.

If only she knew the truth: that he’d never even been kissed. At least not in a way that counted.

The laughter stopped. Maybe he was hallucinating. Last night, before falling asleep, he thought he’d heard whispers, voices in the creaking of the floorboards, the sighing of a woman. He would have blamed it on the painkillers, but he’d stopped taking them. He was saving them up, just in case.

He opened the drawer and removed the gun once again. It was heavy. What the hell had his dad used it for? What had his dad used
any
of this stuff for? Pencil sharpeners in weird shapes, antique toys, old radios. Craziness.

He was suddenly aware that the whole house had gone silent. His mom had left, he knew, probably to go buy more booze. Minna had gone to the kitchen to make Amy lunch.

He could do it. Right here. Right now. Could bite down on the metal, taste iron on his tongue, say boom, and head toward that place of calm again, where he wasn’t such a nothing. Where he
was
nothing.

But he couldn’t bring himself to lift the gun to his mouth. He kept thinking of stupid Derrick Richards and his salmon-colored pants pooled at his ankles, comfortable as anything, his pale chest exposed, already curling with a man’s worth of hair, his fleshy thighs splayed like two fat white fish, losing hand after hand in strip poker and not caring. And Trenton, who wasn’t even playing, sitting stiff as an arrow, mortified, desperate that no one move or even breathe in his direction, because Angie Salazar was sitting on his right (he’d never even thought she was hot) and down to her bra and underwear, and every time she moved to take a card the fat swell of her boobs moved with her, and he could see where her butt was compressed by the chair, and imagine the heat of her thighs pressed together, and he had such a raging boner he thought he might die or, worse, explode right there in front of everyone.
Bang.

When he finally couldn’t take it any longer, when it was too much, he’d gotten up stiffly, bowlegged as a sailor, holding his cup in front of his crotch, and hurtled into the bathroom. He’d slammed the door shut and locked it—at least, he thought he had, but in his desperation to get his pants down and release the explosion that had been building inside of him like some awful time bomb ticking away to social humiliation—well, he hadn’t double-checked. And so when Lanie Buck had stumbled into the bathroom less than a minute later because she had to puke, the whole party had caught Trenton mid flagrante delicto, if you could be in flagrante delicto by yourself—head back, pants around his ankles, cock in his hand, eyes closed, and practically crying with the sheer, tremendous relief of it.

Splooge. Derrick had led the chant, and everybody had picked up on it. Splooge. Splooge. Splooge.

He hadn’t even buckled his belt before fleeing. As he walked back to campus, the snow stinging his cheeks like new tears, he’d known that he was finished at Andover.

Sometimes he fantasized about killing Derrick, instead of himself. But he knew he’d never have the guts for it.

There was a footstep outside, in the hall. Before Trenton had time to put away the gun, Minna pushed open the door, carrying yet another box.

“Oh,” she said. “Did you decide to help after all?”

Trenton had successfully avoided helping for most of the morning, claiming that his leg was acting up. He was pretty sure Minna knew he was faking, but she wouldn’t say anything; besides, she had no right, after what she had done.

That was life, Trenton thought: people knew your secrets, but if you had shit on them, too, they couldn’t rat you out. So everything evened out, piled under one huge shit sandwich.

Minna dropped the box, which was empty, and nudged it with a foot to turn it right side up. “You found Dad’s dirty little secret, I see. One of them, anyway.”

Now that she had acknowledged the gun, he felt he could safely return it to the drawer. He was relieved when it was out of his hands, and he opened a few drawers casually, so Minna might think he’d just been rooting around in the study, idly curious, when he’d happened on the gun. “I was just looking at it,” he said.

“You weren’t planning on shooting anyone?” she said.

“Not today,” Trenton said. He wasn’t sure if he was making a joke or not.

“I might shoot Mom,” Minna said matter-of-factly. Some of her hair had fallen out of her ponytail and she brushed it back with a wrist. “We haven’t even made a dent in this room, have we?”

In one of the lower desk drawers, Trenton found a half-dozen cards, stuffed haphazardly on top of some ink cartridges. He opened one and jerked back in his chair. “Ew.”

“Ew what?”

“Hair.” He held up a small brown curl, held together by a faded blue elastic. There was no signature on the card. No message, either. Just the words that had been printed:
Thinking of you
.

Minna stood up quickly, snatched the card and the lock of hair from him, and tossed it back in the drawer. “Don’t touch Dad’s stuff,” she said.

“I thought I was supposed to be helping,” he said.

“Well, you’re not.” She slammed the drawer closed with a shin. She stood for a minute, massaging her temples, and Trenton thought viciously that she would probably look just like his mom in a few years.

“I’m getting old,” she said, as if she knew what he’d been thinking. Then Trenton felt guilty.

“You’re twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-eight next month.” She moved another box—this one full of books—from the chair opposite the desk onto the floor and sat down with a small groan and closed her eyes. She said, “Someone died in here, you know.”

Trenton felt the tiniest flicker of interest. “What do you mean?”

“Someone was shot. In here. Years ago, before Dad bought the house. There were brains splattered all over the wall.” She opened her eyes. “I remember Mom and Dad talking about it when we first moved in.”

It was the first interesting thing Trenton had ever heard about the house. “How come you didn’t tell me before?”

Minna shrugged. “You were so little. And then I must have forgot.”

Trenton turned this piece of information over in his mind and found that it gave him a little bit of pleasure. “Like . . . a murder?” That word, too, was pleasurable: a distraction, a temporary lifting away from the everyday. Like being just a little drunk.

“I don’t know the whole story,” Minna said. She seemed to lose interest in the conversation. She started picking out dirt from underneath her nails.

In the quiet, Trenton heard it again. A voice. Not quite a voice, though. More like a shape: a solidity and pattern to the normal creakings and stirrings of the house. It was the way he’d felt as a kid listening to the wind through the trees, thinking he could make sense out of it. But this wasn’t just his imagination.

There were words there, he was sure of it.

“Do you . . . do you hear that?” he ventured to Minna.

“Hear what?” Minna looked up. “Did Amy shout?”

Trenton shook his head.

Minna tilted her head, listening. She shrugged again. “Nada.”

Trenton swallowed. His throat felt dry. Maybe something had gone haywire in his head after the accident. Like a popped fuse or something. Because directly after Minna had spoken, he heard the word, uttered clearly in the silence.

The word was:
Idiot.