Rooms (6 page)

MINNA

I
t took Minna forty-five minutes to get Caroline into bed after she polished off three-quarters of a bottle of vodka in under an hour. Caroline’s face was swollen and streaked with makeup, and there was a little dried vomit on her lower lip.

Minna rolled her mother over, onto her side, pushing against the warm fat flesh of her thighs and stomach, thinking of a documentary she’d seen once where a half-dozen men had strapped a beached whale with hooks and ropes and pulleys and tried to haul it back to the water. She wished she could sink a hook straight into her mother’s fat ass and heave. At some point, Caroline had taken off her pants, and Minna was disgusted by the sight of her cheap nylon underwear, full seated and worn thin in places, clinging desperately to her thighs like lichen to the side of a rock.

Minna was tired. Something kept twisting in her stomach, an alien pain; she should never have come back. She thought of calling Dr. Upshaw but knew it would just make her feel worse. She couldn’t even make it two days in the old house without cracking. Pathetic.

There had to be someone else she could call, but she couldn’t immediately think of anyone. She was half tempted to call Greg, Amy’s father, just so she’d have something to pin her anger to: nail it down, give it a name, the way she had enjoyed shoving thumbtacks into the corkboard map she’d had as a kid.
Find Sweden
.

But Greg was still at work, and she’d never get past his secretary. She was only allowed to call him between the hours of 7:00 and 8:00, when he was commuting back to his home in Westchester, back to his wife and his
real
kids, as he’d once slipped up and referred to them, and half the time he screened her phone calls, anyway. The checks still arrived regularly, though, thank God. She’d burned through four jobs in three years. Fired from two, laid off from two. She had less than two thousand dollars in her savings account.

Amy believed that her dad was a firefighter, a hero, and dead.

There was Alex, whom she’d been fucking recently, and Ethan, who still wanted to fuck her. But they never actually talked, not about real things. Some bullshitting over dinner, flirtation in the back of a cab, and maybe some back-and-forth in the morning, just so it didn’t feel too cheap.

She didn’t have female friends. For the most part, she didn’t trust other women, and other women certainly didn’t trust her. There had been Dana—Minna was still sorry about how that ended. Stupid. Dana’s boyfriend hadn’t even been good in bed. Kind of soggy and spongy and bland, like wet toast. She didn’t know why she had done it.

She never did.

She went downstairs to get her cell phone from the study, where she had left it, and found Trenton suctioned like a giant starfish to the carpet, dominating almost all the free space in the room, staring at the ceiling. He sat up on one elbow when she opened the door.

“What are you doing?” Minna was in the mood to get angry at someone.

“Listening,” Trenton said, and returned to his back. “Do you hear that?”

He’d probably gotten into their mom’s booze. Or maybe he was stoned. This might normally impress Minna—if Trenton had weed, it meant he actually had friends, or at least a friend, to buy it from—but today she felt nothing but a sharp surge of resentment.

Fucking Trenton. The house belonged to him now. And Trenton would go on believing their dad was some kind of misunderstood saint, and feeling superior to Minna for hating him. Maybe she should tell him about Adrienne Cadiou; she had found at least one card with Adrienne’s name on it from the stash Trenton had located earlier, and though the messages weren’t romantic, the fact that her father had kept them obviously was. She’d been hoping, after the reading of the will, that there might be some other explanation, like maybe her dad had mowed Adrienne down with his car and now she was paralyzed. Hush money.

Stupid.

She had stuffed all the cards and that disgusting lock of hair deep into a trash bag and taken it out immediately to the garage, as if it might contaminate the whole house.

“I don’t hear anything.” Minna stepped over him, nudging him in the ribs accidentally-deliberately with her foot. But he didn’t even flinch.

“I think—I think this house might be haunted,” Trenton said.

“Are you high?” Minna said. “Or just dumb?”

When Trenton blushed, even his pimples got darker. He sat up clumsily, and Minna remembered what the doctors had told her mom: that he would never have the same range of motion as before.

“Sorry,” Minna said. “Mom’s blotto. I’m a little stressed out.”

Trenton nodded, but he wouldn’t look at her. He picked at a spot on the carpet with his thumbnail. Minna, realizing that the ache had spread from her stomach into her whole body, sat in the chair the lawyer, Dennis, had vacated. The chairs were still arranged in a little circle, like the room had recently hosted a group therapy session.

After a long minute of silence, in which Minna ran an inventory of everything that hurt, from her shoulders to her knuckles to the small, calloused little toe of her right foot, Trenton looked up.

“So you don’t believe,” Trenton said.

“Believe in what?” Minna said.

Trenton looked embarrassed. “Ghosts.”

Minna couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “What is this about, Trenton?”

“We don’t
know,
” he said, and then she knew he wasn’t joking. “Nobody knows. You said yourself someone was murdered here.”

“That’s just a story I heard,” Minna said. “I don’t know if it’s true. And I never said she was murdered.”

“And Dad—” Trenton began.

“Dad died at Presbyterian Medical,” Minna said.

It was like Trenton hadn’t heard. “But he could be,” Trenton insisted. “He could be, I don’t know, stuck somehow—”

A sharp pain went straight through Minna’s head, like a flash going off. “If he’s stuck anywhere, it’s somewhere hotter than this,” she said, and then regretted it.

Sometimes, it felt as though the words came out of her mouth without looping in her brain first. Trenton looked so pathetic, and she had a sudden memory of little Trenton, baby Trenton, before his bones had distended his body and made it gawky and puppetlike. She remembered him crawling into her lap, accidentally putting his knee in the soft space between her ribs, just below the two mosquito-bite boobs newly formed, wrapping a fat fist around her hair, saying “Mama.” And Minna, nearly thirteen years old, had not corrected him.

“You hated him, didn’t you?” Trenton looked up at her. His eyes were still the same as they had been then: a blue that was startling against his other features, like coming across a lake in the middle of an expanse of concrete.

Minna pulled her right foot into her lap and began to knead it with her fist. “I didn’t hate him,” she said.

“You didn’t love him, though,” Trenton said.

“I’m not sure,” Minna said. “Probably not.”

She didn’t know anymore whether she had ever loved her father. She must have. When they lived in California, he had taught her to swim—remembered the feel of his rough warm hands around her waist as she paddled through the water, the sting of chlorine, the high sun and the vivid grass, and dim, watery sounds of her mother calling to them to be careful.

She had been furious when they first moved to Coral River, midautumn, after the leaves had already gone down, when the whole place was nothing but grays and browns, mud and smear. She’d hated it: the colorlessness. The sky crowded by trees. The trees themselves, huddling in their long shadows, letting off the smell of death—so different from the improbable-looking palm tree with its perky crown of leaves, a practical-joke tree, like something designed specifically to make people smile.

The trees in Coral River didn’t make people smile.

And the wind and the fingers of cold that reached past the window frames and thumbed up through the floorboards, the bubbling and hiss of the radiators and the banging of the rusty pipes—all of it was strange and ugly and old.

Then one night, her father had shaken her awake—it must have been two, three in the morning—his face so close she could feel the tickle of his beard, so close his smile was like a half-moon. “Wake up, Min,” he said. “You gotta see this.”

He had picked her up even though she was already too big, just so her bare feet would not touch the cold floor, and he’d carried her downstairs and into his study. He’d held her at the window, where the cold came through the glass and lodged straight into her heart, like a razorblade.

“Look,” he whispered. “Snow.”

She had never seen snow before, except in TV shows and movies. It had looked to her like the stars were flaking out of the sky. It had looked like thousands of fireflies in the moonlight; like breathlessness, like time stopping, like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Then, she had loved him.

It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time.

When the phone rang, she jumped; she’d forgotten there was a house phone, and for one confused moment she thought she was hearing an alarm.

“Are you going to get that?” Trenton said, watching her, and making no attempt to get up.

It took her a minute to locate the working phone since there were a dozen telephones from different eras crowded on a shelf next to the desk. Finally, on the fourth ring, she found it. It was only when she went to pick up the phone that she realized her hands were shaking.

“Walker,” she said past the tightness in her chest.

There was no response. Minna thought at first the line was dead, but then she heard a rustle, the unmistakable sound of someone breathing. She was suddenly on high alert. Instinctively, she angled her back to Trenton, clutching the receiver. Outside the window, the yellow coneflowers were waving in the grass.

“Hello?” she said. And again: “Hello?”

“Who is it?” Trenton said, from the floor.

Nothing but the sound of breathing. Minna felt the up-and-down roll of nausea. It had been here, on this spot, that her father had held her all those years ago and shown her the snow, which fell like a secret between them. Now he was dead and she was getting old.

“Hello?” she repeated one more time. The wave of nausea had brought with it a sudden crystallization of anger. And she knew. Knew it was a woman on the phone—knew it was
that
woman. Adrienne.

“Who is it?” Trenton said again.

Minna ignored him. She gripped the phone so tightly her knuckles ached.

“Listen,” she said, and swallowed, wishing her throat weren’t so dry. “Listen,” she tried again. “Don’t call here anymore.”

“Who
is
it?” Trenton grunted a little, sitting up.

“He’s dead,” Minna said. Was it her imagination, or did the woman suck in a breath? She wished she could tunnel down the wires and watch the words take their effect, spitting like small barbed things directly into the woman’s flesh. “He’s dead, and he left nothing for you. So don’t call anymore.”

Then she hung up, slamming the receiver, feeling the impact all the way to her elbow.

ALICE

A
t night, the house falls into silence. It’s a relief. It has been many years since I’ve shared the house with so many people, and I’ve forgotten how exhausting it can be: to be filled with so much motion and so many needs, so much sound and tension. It’s like the arthritis that swelled my joints in my old age and brought painful awareness to the parts of my body I had always safely ignored.

Do we dream? No. We don’t sleep. There isn’t any need for it. The body is solid, its corners intact—it doesn’t need to be restored.

On the other hand, and especially at night, there are certain times of
drift
. There are moments when the house, the body, has gone still, when we are full of empty air, when nothing needs our attention. Then, sometimes, ideas converge: memory and present, wish and desire, silhouette shadows of people we have been or have known. This is the closest we come to dreaming.

What is now the study was once the sitting room, which became the living room, as times and fashions changed. There was a yellow-and-white loveseat that Ed hated. He traded it, later on, for a couch in green plaid we covered in plastic, so the upholstery wouldn’t fade. There was a wireless set we eventually moved into the cellar, to make room for our television, and a faded rug we replaced, when Ed retired, with nubby gray wall-to-wall carpeting: the newest thing. I used to walk it in my bare feet when he wasn’t at home, pacing all the way to the corners, kneading my toes against the fabric, marveling at the look of it.

This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.

That’s what I return to again and again, no matter how many times I think about it: how naive we were, how we believed in the promise, how we believed the past could be kept down. No. More than that—how we believed in a future that was distinct from the past.

We had bookshelves. Ed liked books, although he didn’t read them. He was sensitive about his background, and careful, in public, never to betray the fact that he hadn’t finished high school. He liked to collect things that made up for his childhood, as though the weight of his possessions would somehow hurtle him forward into a new life.

Maybe that’s why he was obsessed with the railroad. Ed liked to talk in front of company about the
architecture of our country,
and the way it was written in railroads and highways: pistons moving forward, spokes and wheels rolling over a landscape of natural obstacles, chugging headfirst into the future. That was what Ed did his whole life: push, and push, and push.

Ed kept a slim volume of nineteenth-century railway maps, which he had bought for ten cents at an old flea market in Buffalo, displayed proudly on the top shelf. He insisted it not be moved, touched, or even dusted.

This was one of the first secrets I kept from him: when he was gone, I would move the little footstool, climb up to reach the top shelf, take down the book, and read it.

At first it was simply rebellion. But it quickly became more than that. There was something sad about the illustrations, the tracks stitching the land, like a body that had been sewn up after a terrible accident: it was the very attempt to connect that made it ugly.

Thomas and I liked to look at maps together. Even now, when I see the large-bundled volumes on Richard Walker’s shelf, or the cardboard map that leans against the bookshelf, I can’t help but think of Thomas, and the way we used to trace our fingers over the contours of the pages, following suggested routes, and feeling in our fingertips the possibility of escape.

I suppose, in some sense, wills are like maps: they are the imprint we leave, the places our affections have been entrenched; the work we have done; the money we have burrowed away; the furrows and the paths that lead back to spaces we have gone, and marked, and loved.

I left everything I had—which wasn’t very much—to Maggie. In the end, my map was a dry place, a single road tethering me to my only child. In the end, my map was lonely.

I know that that’s how it seemed to others. I know what I looked like: a devoted wife, despite everything, and then a cautious, solitary widow; a mother, perhaps too strict, perhaps too careful in her loving. A dry, dusty, throwaway woman, like many others: a woman made to fade, and dry out, and die shaking in her hollow skin.

This is the map I left. I know this. I knew it even before I became old.

And yet there were times when I felt my life full of such richness, such fullness, I couldn’t express it, couldn’t speak or breathe a word because I feared the disruption—even a single breath could ruin it, like wind over a pond. I didn’t want even a ripple.

There were times when, exhausted, I held Maggie, in the dark, to my breast, and her tiny hands clutched at the air, and nobody in the world might have been awake but us. And then the small rosebud mouth, so needy, would find its object, and every mistake and blemish in my life was absolved: there was only giving, there was only the rhythm of life restored: the small pull against my breast, regular and ingrained, like a second heartbeat.

There were times with Ed—in between the storms, in between the distance—when for a miraculous moment, we seemed to wash up on a shore together, and for that moment (an hour, a day, a week), everything that had happened seemed like the long, littered road on the way to happiness. There was a picnic in Saratoga; there was the Fourth of July in Maine, when he surprised me with the ice cream cone.

There was watching Maggie waddle across the kitchen; there was the box turtle she found, and named, and insisted on attempting to keep in a cardboard box filled with long grass and nubby pebbles. Norman. She named it Norman.

There was the Christmas when Ed filled the house with tiny, winking lights and insisted I come downstairs with my eyes covered; there was snow piled deep and quiet in the woods, and sun turning slender cones of ice to diamond.

These are my secrets: roads branching, endlessly branching, each turn leading to a hundred others. When Sandra first came, I was tempted to share, to explain. But now I know: certain stories must remain mine, so that there is a me to remain.

Thomas wasn’t mentioned in my will. How could he be? He was by then a phantom.

It’s funny—I knew him a little less than two years. Even in living terms, that hardly amounts to anything. And in time that is not-living, in the endless, chalky sweep of eternity, which wears years to sand and blows everything back, dustlike, into void, it is nothing.

But that’s the beauty of life: time is yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon.

For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second’s breath, you get to stand up to infinity.

But eventually, and always, infinity wins.

Sandra is talking to herself, going on about the morning and the will in particular. She’s still delighted by the mystery of Adrienne Cadiou. I wish she would be quiet; the Walkers have exhausted me, left me with a shivery sense of discomfort, like a body gripped with fever.

“New bet,” Sandra says. “What are the chances that Minna will bed that—?”

Just then, something
moves
. A disturbance—a rippling feeling, a passage through spaces, like coming up to the surface when you’ve been submerged and holding your breath. For a second there is only confusion: a rush of sounds; a blur of brightness, painful and unexpected.

I think of penetration: Ed and the sound of the hyena; Thomas exhaling; a high belly, full with strangeness.

“What in the devil . . . ” Sandra’s voice is high, strained. She feels it, too. “What
is
that?”

And then I know, all at once, what is happening. It has happened to me before, many years ago, when Sandra first arrived.

Now comes the nausea, and a sense of swinging; then the world breaking apart, as it did when I was small and would spin and spin until I fell backward, watching everything dissolve into color.

Just like that, there it is. A third presence.

Another ghost.

The nausea subsides, leaving me gasping. Sandra lets out a mangled cry. For once in the history of her death, Sandra is struck dumb. I have a brief moment of panic: Richard Walker has, after all, come back.

But then it speaks.

“It’s dark,” she says simply. Her voice is faint, barely audible. She must be young. She is small; she takes up hardly any space. A child.

“God help us,” Sandra says.