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Trenton felt a flicker of irritation. “Even if I was, do you think I would tell you?”

“I don’t see why not. Can’t see what difference it would make.” While she was looking down at the rope, studying it, Trenton quickly shoved the note to Minna in his back pocket. “Hey—you know what you could do with this?”

“No,” he said.

“Autoasphyxiation.” She reached up and coiled the rope once around her neck. As Trenton took a quick step back, horrified by the look of it, he stumbled on a box and had to sit down to avoid falling. Katie laughed again and unwrapped the rope from her neck. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of it. People choking themselves while they . . . Oh, man. There I go again. Sorry. God forgot to give me an off switch.” She reached out and punched him in the arm. “You don’t mind if I keep it, right?”

This was why he never talked to girls: it was like following a maze where the walls were always shifting. “Keep what?”

She rolled her eyes. “The
rope
. I mean, you weren’t using it, right?” Her eyes flashed on his again—eyes that held a challenge—and he looked away. “Didn’t think so. Besides, if you wanted to off yourself, you could do a lot better than hanging. I mean, if you break your neck, that’s all right. Otherwise you could be swinging there for ages. You know how many suicides end up clawing their fingernails to shreds, trying to take off the noose?” He didn’t think she really wanted an answer so he didn’t give her one. She plunged on, “So you sure you don’t mind if I keep it?”

Trenton did mind, kind of. But he didn’t see how he could say no, and what she’d said about suicides clawing their fingernails to bits had turned his stomach. He would probably have screwed it up with a rope, anyway. He shook his head.

“Awesome.” Katie smiled, showing off her crooked teeth. He wondered, just for a second, what it would be like to kiss her and whether she’d taste like cigarettes. “Hey, listen. You gonna be sticking around for a while? I’m having a few friends over on Saturday. You should come.”

Trenton couldn’t tell whether she really meant it. “Thanks,” he said carefully. “But I’m not really . . . I mean, parties aren’t really my thing.”

“It’ll be fun, I promise.” For a second, she looked much younger.

“What about your parents?” Trenton said, and then he immediately hated himself.

“My parents are away,” Katie said. “They don’t care what I do, anyway.” Trenton nearly contradicted her but realized it might be the truth. “It’s the big-ass farmhouse at the end of County Lane 8. Only house on the road. You can’t miss it. Just go around to the back.”

“I haven’t said I would come,” Trenton pointed out.

“You’ll come,” she said. “There’s nothing else to do.” She smiled; she knew she had him. “Just don’t tell anyone. The cops are insane around here. You are old enough to drink, right? You’re not like, fifteen?”

“I’m seventeen,” Trenton lied. He’d be seventeen in a few months.

Katie waved a hand. “Close enough. I’ll be eighteen next month. So . . . Saturday?”

“Yeah.” Trenton could feel himself relenting. “Yeah, okay.”

“Great. Eight or nine or any time after.” Katie took a step toward the stairs, and Trenton had to call her back.

“I’ll let you know about Fritz,” he said.

“What?” She had the rope coiled around her wrist.

“Fritz,” he said. “If I see him, I’ll let you know.”

She smiled wide again. “Careful,” she said. “He bites.”

Then she turned and darted up the stairs.

ALICE

I
n my day, people knew how to keep secrets. They minded their mouths and their manners.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
I remember my mother repeating that like a mantra—remember the
taste
of the words, like curls of soap and an ache in my jaw—remember my mother’s hands wrapped thickly around my neck, and the light of the bathroom, bright as a halo.

I learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles.

We kept our secrets for confession. For the priests.

The new ghost is praying. She is whispering to herself, repeating Psalm 23, over and over: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

I never told anyone, not even Father Donovan, about Thomas.

He died very young. Aneurysm: a burst bubble in the brain. I read about the funeral in the local paper. It had been fifteen years since we’d last spoken, but I went and sat in the very last pew. I’d told Ed that I was going to the store and had to change into my good black dress, and a pair of heeled black shoes, in the woods that stretched along the road to Coral River, planting my stockinged feet in the soft dirt, feeling the wind touch my armpits as I wrestled the dress over my head.

I hardly remember the memorial, the speeches, the wreaths of flowers. I do remember his widow: pale and pretty, though heavy around the jaws; dark-eyed with grief, sitting in the first pew with her children. With Thomas’s children. Ian and Joseph.

Halfway through the service, a woman next to me whispered, quite loudly: “Who was it who died? I can’t hear.” And I realized she had only come to watch, that she hadn’t known Thomas at all.

I left early. I couldn’t bear it. The church smelled like a basement, like things locked up and forgotten. And perhaps they
should
be.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

Trenton hasn’t moved since the girl—Katie—left. He sinks down on a sealed cardboard box as though exhausted by the exchange.

Go away,
I want to tell him.
Leave, and never come back.
I want them out. All of them. Even Trenton, who isn’t Trenton anymore, but some horrible version of a boy, twisted and deformed like in some Frankenstein story. Playing with ropes and guns, whispering to us in the darkness.

I don’t care what Sandra says. It’s obvious he can hear us.

“I knew he’d never go through with it,” Sandra says. “That boy’s got the balls of a bunny rabbit. What does he have to be unhappy about, anyway? He’s—what?—sixteen? Seventeen? He just came into money, for Christ’s sake.”

“Money never solved anything,” I say.

“Spoken like a true rich kid,” Sandra says, even though she knows I turned my back on my family to marry Ed.

“He maketh me to lie in green pastures,” the new ghost whispers.

“For Christ’s sake, I’m begging you,” Sandra says to her. “You’ll drive me up the wall.”

“What about you?” I say. I don’t know where the anger comes from but it’s there, immediate and overpowering. I’m sick of Sandra, sick of the way she acts and has always acted—as though everything, all of life, is there to be shrugged off, shaved away, ridiculed and minimized. She’s like a person looking through the wrong end of a telescope, complaining that everything looks small. “What did
you
have to be so unhappy about?”

Sandra says shortly, “That’s different.”

“He leadeth me beside still waters.”

“You drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol.” I know I’m overstepping my bounds. “You lost your job—”

“That’s enough,” Sandra says. Then, to the new ghost, “Will you kindly shut the hell up?”

But the new ghost keeps going. “Though I walk through the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . . ”

Now I can’t stop. Part of me knows that I’m not really angry with Sandra. I’m angry with Trenton, and Minna, and Caroline, and even Richard. I’m angry with the whole stumbling, fumbling world, which we’re forced to watch, a sick repetition of the same tired hungers and needs. I’m thinking of Richard’s body, bundled in white; and Sandra’s face half spread across the walls; and Trenton standing beneath a rope. I’m thinking of bodies hauled up from the funeral parlor next to St. John the Divine when I was a kid, and the smell of smoke and skin in the air, and how there will never be an end to it.

“You lost your friends,” I say. “You nearly lost your house. And what about the man—Martin? If you hadn’t died in time—”

“I said, that’s enough.”

I feel a spark of anger, a quick flash, like a match striking.
Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.

Trenton cries out, and everything goes dark.

CAROLINE

C
aroline heard glass breaking, and a short cry, as soon as she walked into the house. The sound cut through the “muffling”: that’s what the awful woman at Sunrise Center had called the effect of alcohol on Caroline’s brain, the time she had been forced to go to a rehab center after accidentally tapping another car on the way home from a dinner. No one had even been hurt, but the other woman, who’d had a baby in the car, had been hysterical about it and insisted on calling the police.

Muffling—the woman at Sunrise had said it as though Caroline should be ashamed. But afterward, whenever she’d had a couple, Caroline always imagined her brain nestled in a kind of hand-knitted mitten, warm and protected.

But now the muffling split apart, and for a short second everything was sharp and painful.

“Trenton,” she said, turning to Minna, feeling a sudden panic. “That’s
Trenton
.” She turned blindly in the hall; she didn’t know where the sound had come from. “Trenton? Are you okay? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” His voice was faint. She still couldn’t tell where he was. She had always hated that about the house: how it sucked up sound and voices and footsteps, as though they were all being absorbed, slowly but surely, into the walls.

“Where are you?” she cried out, still unable to quell the panic. Her chest felt as though it had collapsed, as though a big fist had reached out and punched backward in time, back to that awful night of Trenton’s accident—the two-hour drive through the dark; the dingy hospital and the ugly woman who’d barred her from going into the operating room, staring at her as though she was some species of insect; the long wait without anything at all to drink.

“He’s in the basement, Ma. Stop shouting.” Minna opened the basement door with a foot, as though it was the door to a public restroom and she was worried about germs on the handle. Amy made a rush for the stairs, and Minna grabbed her arm.

“What did I tell you, Amy?” she said. “You don’t go down there. Not unless Mommy takes you.”

Amy began to wail.

Caroline moved past both of them and angled her body so she could squeeze down the narrow staircase. Her head was pounding. “What are you
doing
?” she said, moving carefully down the stairs. Each step sent a small tremor of pain through her body:
ankles, knees, hips
. The doctor had said she should lose some weight. Cut out the booze. She had nodded and said
oh, yes, absolutely,
as she had done so many times with Richard, when she had no intention of listening.

If the doctor had her estranged husband, or her children, he would drink, too.

“Nothing.” Trenton was standing in the middle of the vast cluttered space, looking guilty about something. “I was just—cleaning up.”

It was obviously a lie. Trenton hadn’t helped at all in the three days since they’d been back in Coral River. Caroline realized that he’d probably been looking at pornography. He must have found his father’s collection.

Several months after Trenton’s birth, Caroline had gone looking for Minna’s old stroller in the basement and found a stack of magazines, stashed unself-consciously in a trunk that also contained several baby items and the hat Caroline had bought Richard on their honeymoon. She’d sat on the ground for hours, unable to look away, unable to stop turning the pages—the way she’d heard that a bad electric shock caused you to hold on.

“What was that awful noise?” she said. “Did you break something?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Trenton said. “The lightbulb just . . . exploded.”

“The wiring in this house was always screwy,” Minna said. Caroline turned and saw she had come halfway down the stairs. Amy was trying to get around her, and Minna shuffled side to side, like a hockey player protecting a goal.

Of course. Minna was taking Trenton’s side. Anyone could see he’d been fiddling around where he wasn’t supposed to—maybe he thought he had the right, now that the house was his. Caroline felt a rush of anger that replaced the fear and obliterated it.

The house had been a constant point of contention in her marriage. She had not initially wanted to move from their sprawling, sunny home in California, on its small trim lawn on a small trim street in a nice gated community not far from the ocean. She had liked the guardhouse, where an ever-rotating cast of polite young Mexicans stood watch and checked names against a list—as though each time she returned home, she was accessing an exclusive party.

And then Richard had decided he wanted to be back in New York, close to where he had grown up. He had dragged her across the country and installed her in a vast, dark, drafty house, plagued by mice and termites, erratically heated, prone to leaks and pipe freezes and toilets backing up onto the floor.

Caroline had declared war, first on him; she had refused to sleep with him for two months. When she realized that her tactics only amused him, and that he was getting it elsewhere, anyway, she declared war instead on the house. She ripped out wallpaper and replaced it with patterns of her choosing. She scrubbed the cabinets, rearranged the furniture, shopped, and shopped some more. She put lights everywhere, as many as twelve in a room. She’d never been good with her hands and never before cared to do work herself; in California, there had always been gardeners, and decorators to match the cushions with the couch, and Caroline had to do nothing but approve it all. She was surprised to find she had taste. She could get things done.

She spent a spring building up a garden—her very first—carting soil and fertilizer and new bulbs, small as presents, weeding and trimming and rooting oxalis from the soil, cursing the blue Veronica that wouldn’t bloom, and sweating into the soil beds.

And slowly, without her noticing, she had begun to love the house. She loved the way her bedroom filled up with light in the mornings, like a glass filling with rich cream. She loved the smell of the gardens after a rainstorm, and the smell of the woods in the autumn, rich and full and deeper, somehow, than anything she’d ever known in California. She even loved the creaking floorboards, and the pipes that shuddered and banged, as though they had a voice.

She loved the first freeze, which patterned the windows with lace, and making coffee in the kitchen wearing thick socks; she loved the cottonwood trees and their fluff, drifting through the weak spring light.

But she had continued to pretend to hate it. She had pretended, still, that Richard had brought her there against her will, because it gave her power over him. She had pretended that she was happy to leave him and move to Long Island with Trenton, even though it broke her heart. She had lorded it over Richard, the fact that he had made her unhappy for years and years, even though she
was
happy; at least, the house had made her happy.

But Richard won in the end. Maybe he’d thought the house would be a burden on her. During one of their last communications, he’d apologized at last.

“I should never have moved you from California,” he’d said, sounding small and old. “You always hated it here. I should have been a better listener.”

She had almost told him then. She had almost said
No, you’re wrong. I miss Coral River. I’ve missed it every day
. But it was too late to give up the lie, which she had clung to for so long, which had become as much a part of their relationship as either of the children.

And now he was dead, and he would never know, and the house belonged to Trenton.

Had Richard done it to punish her, because she hadn’t come back? Or had he really thought she wouldn’t want it?

“You shouldn’t be down here,” she said. Her headache was getting worse. “You shouldn’t be messing around.”

“I told you, I was cleaning up, okay?” Trenton said, drawing out the last word so it suggested vast indifference. The anger came in short, sharp pulses now and seemed concentrated directly behind Caroline’s eyelids. She, Caroline, had been slaving away since she’d arrived in Coral River. And Trenton, as usual, had sulked and brooded and made everyone’s lives miserable, made enjoyment impossible, like a fly in a bowl of soup.

If anything, he’d gotten worse since the accident. He sat for hours in front of his computer, doing God knows what (more porn, probably). He answered her questions in monosyllables, was cagey about Andover, and complained about having to return there.

“This afternoon I want you to help Minna,” Caroline said. Every so often she remembered that as his mother, she could tell Trenton what to do. Most days he seemed like some far-off constellation, ever present but mysteriously out of her orbit. “I want to see you packing boxes. I don’t want to hear a single complaint. And clean up that glass.”

“I told you, it wasn’t my—”

“Just do it,” she said, cutting him off.

Trenton mumbled something that Caroline couldn’t hear. But she didn’t care. She was done; she had handled Trenton, and now she could go upstairs and sit down, take the weight off her feet, have a drink in peace.

She was irrationally angry with Richard for dying and leaving her alone. Even though they had been separated for ten years, and divorced for four, he’d been a constant in her life. His phone calls, his moods, his pleas for her to return; he had grounded her.

Minna was still standing on the stairs, and Caroline couldn’t move around her.

“Oh my God.” Minna’s eyes were fixed on the far side of the basement. “Oh my God. Are you kidding me? He fucking kept it?”

“Minna!” Caroline said. Amy put her hands over her ears and began to hum.

Minna obviously didn’t hear. She moved down several steps, still fighting to keep Amy behind her. Caroline realized she was looking at the piano.

“It doesn’t even play anymore,” Minna said.

Caroline was losing patience for the basement, and for her children. “How do you know?” she said.

“Minna whacked it with a baseball bat,” Trenton said. “You don’t remember?”

Caroline definitely did
not
remember that. “When?”

“I was fifteen, Ma.”

“But . . . ” What Caroline did remember was a young Minna, her hair coiled and pinned neatly to her head, her long, slender fingers skating over the keys like a shadow passing over water. She didn’t know why Minna had stopped playing. “But you were going to go to Juilliard. And Mr. Hansley said . . . ”

“Don’t,” Minna said sharply.

“Mr. Handsy?” Trenton said.

“Hansley,” Caroline correct him, before she realized that he’d been making a joke. Then she had another memory, less pleasant: coming into the piano room on a hot summer day with a pitcher of lemonade, and Mr. Hansley scooting quickly away from Minna. Hansley smiling, fiddling nervously with his glasses, talking too fast. Minna silent, staring at the keys, refusing to make eye contact.

Gripping the banister, Caroline began to climb, forcing Minna to squeeze herself against one wall so that she could pass. When Minna shifted, Amy ducked around her and barreled past Caroline.

“Amy!” Minna reached for her and then stared, exasperated, at her mother. “See what you did?” she said.

But Caroline didn’t care. She was glad to have caused Minna some minor irritation. Minna chose not to remember all the things Caroline had done for her: the calamine lotion Caroline had applied to Minna’s bug bites; the Band-Aids she’d put on Minna’s cuts; the scrambled egg soup she’d made for Minna whenever she was sick.

She didn’t remember that Caroline had tried to buffer her from the worst of Richard’s moods—his rages, definitely, but also his indifference, which seemed to fix onto an object just as strongly as his anger. Caroline could still remember thirteen-year-old Minna curled up under her blanket, shivering, blue-lipped, after Richard forgot to pick her up from a dance lesson and she’d been forced to wait for an hour and a half in the rain.

“It would be better if he hated us,” she’d said. “But he just doesn’t care.”

“He does,” Caroline had said. But even then she had felt uneasy; Minna had hit on something that for years Caroline had tried to deny. That was why she had left Richard, ultimately: she’d realized that he had loved her only because she belonged to him.

The short climb had left Caroline winded, and she paused just before the final step, trying to catch her breath. Her feet were so swollen she could see the skin swelling around the contours of her flats. She rested her head against the wall, which was cool. Her heart was going wild in her chest. Recently she had been imagining, more and more, that it would simply stop.

“Careful of the glass,” Minna was saying below. She had followed Amy down into the basement. “Don’t touch that. It’s rusty.”

“What is it?” Amy said.

“Who knows. Garbage. Trenton, a little help, please?”

“What the hell do you want me to do?”

“Don’t curse in front of Amy,” Minna said.

Caroline could feel their voices through the wall. She lifted her head. She was so tired. She didn’t know how she would make it up the last step.

“In
The Raven Heliotrope,
” Amy was saying, in a high, pleading voice, “the Caves of Werth are filled with treasure. Can we play pretend, Mommy?”

Caroline spoke up before Minna could answer. “There’s no treasure down there, Amy,” she said. Her voice was unexpectedly loud. “Just garbage, like Mommy said.”

She hauled herself up the final step and went to the kitchen to get a drink.