The Invisibles (28 page)

“Nora?” Monica's grip was so tight that it was getting hard for Nora to breathe. “What are you doing?”

“Let go, okay?” Nora extricated Monica's fingers gently from her pants. “Just for a second. Hold on to Grace.” She reached out again and slid her hand toward the object. It was some kind
of rough material, slick with dust and dirt, rolled up tightly into a narrow column. She could feel hard, slender rods beneath it and a larger, thicker stick at the bottom. The picnic table umbrella. She almost smiled, thinking of it. Green, with little tassels that bobbed and swayed in the wind. They used to prop it up sometimes in the grass when it got warm and crawl under it, eating tuna fish sandwiches on white bread and potato chips, the sun slanting across their bare legs, warming their painted toes. The table couldn't be much farther away, and the chairs were probably here too. Which meant they were facing the east wall. Twenty more feet or so to the right, and they would be standing in front of the steps that led up to the kitchen door. She turned, the information poised on her lips, when Ozzie let out a whoop.

“Found it!” Nora froze as Ozzie's thumb rolled over the lighter. She was doing okay down here in the dark, she realized. She wasn't ready to see any of it, to have any of the things she was remembering come rushing back—even under the light of a tiny flame.

Ozzie worked the lighter once more, and then again. “Come
on
.” Another attempt failed. “Are you kidding me? Seriously? This thing decides to run out of juice now?
Now
?”

“Forget it, Oz.” Nora stepped forward. “I think I know where we are. Put your stuff back in your knapsack and follow me.”

Ozzie threw the lighter back into her backpack. “How do you know where we are? We're in total fucking darkness. I can't even see you, and you're standing three inches away from me.”

“Come on.” Nora dodged the question. “This way. Let's just get out of here. It'll be much lighter upstairs.”

“Upstairs where?” Grace's voice quavered a little in the back. “Do you know where the steps are?”

“I think so.” Nora moved forward, placing one foot in front of the other. They were so close. She could feel it. Still, there was nothing to see, nothing in front of her except an entire world drenched in black. She stopped as the front of her foot bumped something hard and reached out. “Here!” she said, still feeling along with her fingers. “They're right here. Come on. This way!” She reached out to the left, nodding as her hand came in contact with the wooden railing. Inch by inch, she led the rest of them upward. Her hand was slick with grime, and she could feel her fingers trembling, the edges of them like ice. She felt the door before she saw it, looming in front of her like some unseen presence, and she reached out carefully, patting around. Her hand closed around the knob all at once and she twisted it and pushed. Behind her, a collective sigh of relief sounded. The door swung open, the hinges moaning from the sudden exertion, and a faint scrabbling sound drifted from the right side of the room. Nora winced at the sudden onslaught of moonlight, filtering through the shattered glass windows. It looked electric somehow, as if it had been plugged in somewhere in the heavens, illuminating everything within.

She stepped through the doorway, swiping a clot of cobwebs blocking her way, and wrinkled her nose as the cloying odor of dust and old urine filled her nostrils. The floor was barely visible beneath the layer of dirt, but she could just make out the lemon-and-white tiles they'd walked over so many times, littered now with tiny paw prints and piles of droppings. She shuddered. It was impossible to guess just how many rodents had taken up permanent
residence in here since the property had been abandoned, but it was probably in the hundreds. She didn't want to think about it.

“All clear?” Ozzie paused, resting a hand on Nora's shoulder, and glanced around. “Jesus, look at that moon. Wait, is this the kitchen?”

“Yeah.” Nora raked at a cobweb stuck in her hair. “And I'm pretty sure the entire mice population just bolted when they heard us.” She pointed to several pea-sized piles around their feet. “Looks like they've been having a regular party up here.”

“Did you say mice?” Monica's face paled as she peered through the door.

“Yes, Mons, she said the
m
word.” Ozzie grinned and held out her hand. “An abandoned building is a mouse and rat's dream house. There's probably five thousand of them living inside this shack right now.”

Monica whimpered, recoiling at Ozzie's outstretched hand.

“Do you honestly think saying things like that is going to encourage her to go any farther?” Grace linked an arm through Monica's and pulled her into the kitchen. “Seriously, Oz.”

Monica still held back. “You don't actually
see
any mice, do you?”

“Not at the moment.” Ozzie put an arm around her shoulders. “Come on, babe. You can do this. We're all here with you.” She strode around the room with ease, undeterred by the filth. “God, remember all the time we used to spend in here?”

“You mean when we had to.” Grace rolled her eyes. “I hated the kitchen.”

“Oh, I
loved
the kitchen.” Monica sounded mournful. “It was the one place in the whole house that made me feel like I was in a real home. This kitchen could've been anywhere, you know? In any family's house.” She glanced at the dilapidated cupboards along the wall, some of which were missing entire doors, and the countertop, which had rotted from the inside out, cleaved neatly down the middle. “Let's go upstairs,” she said. “There's nothing down here to see, and it's depressing the hell out of me. Besides, I really just want to look at my old bedroom again.”

The group of them traipsed behind her, clouds of dust rising with each step. The old staircase groaned beneath their weight, and Nora held her breath, wondering if the whole thing might give way. But then they were on the second floor, another dimly lit corridor cluttered with dust and droppings. Nora paused, taking in the old familiar wallpaper on the walls, a pale green background dotted with pink cabbage roses and gold scrolls. A few times, after Ozzie and Grace and Monica had left that summer, and before Nora herself left a few weeks after that, she found herself sitting in the hallway, unable to go back inside her room, which still smelled like Grace, and counting the roses on the wallpaper. It was a way to pass the time, to keep her mind occupied with something—anything—other than their absence. One night, she had gotten to 642 of them before Elaine had come up and told her she had to go to bed.

“Come on, Mons!” Ozzie barreled through another horde of cobwebs. “Our old bedroom's right down here!”

“Wait!” Monica yelped, trotting a little to catch up with her. “Oh God, don't leave me! It's dark!”

Nora looked over at Grace as Monica and Ozzie disappeared down the hall. Grace met her eyes and then motioned with her head in the opposite direction. “You want to go see ours?”

Nora hesitated, touching her neck with the tips of her fingers.

“Just for a minute?”

There had been other girls, of course, who had occupied the room after their departure, but the bones of the little space were exactly the same as Nora remembered: the sloped alcove under which she had arranged her bed, the window against the far wall where Grace had placed hers, the strange little closet next to it shaped like a lopsided rectangle. The same cracks still snaked across the top of the ceiling, including the one that looked like a web of lightning, and the one above the window that used to remind Nora of a skeletal hand. Grace walked over to the far wall, where her bed had been, and smoothed her hand over the dusty surface. “I remember wishing I could fade into this wall when I first got here,” she said softly. “That I could merge with it somehow and then disappear.”

Nora thought back to those first few days, the silence of them, as Grace lay in her bed, staring at nothing, while she'd struggled to read Proust. She'd felt similarly, having overheard Sally, her last foster mother, a tall blond woman with bad teeth, telling Elaine that she was some kind of “weird mute.” She remembered thinking that day, as Elaine had shown her to her room and introduced her to Grace, that none of it really mattered anymore. She could be taken from place to place, introduced to twenty more people, and shown to one room after another, but it was all right. She'd found a way to hide from all of them, had figured out how to become—and stay—invisible in any sort of surrounding. Until
the day came, of course, when the opposite of that had presented itself, upending everything she thought she understood about the world. And herself.

A scream sounded suddenly from the opposite end of the hall, causing both of them to jump.

“Was that Monica?” Grace was wide-eyed as they rushed out of their room and felt their way down the corridor.

“
Why?
” Monica's voice was tremulous with rage. “Why would you ever do such a thing?” She was on one side of their old room, which faced the far side of the building. The moon peeked out from the upper right-hand corner of the window, casting a watery column of light across the floor. Ozzie had the fingertips of both hands pressed against her mouth, and a large red blotch had begun to form on the side of her neck.

“What's wrong?” Nora asked. “Who screamed?”

Neither woman looked at her. “Answer my question.” Monica stared deliberately at Ozzie. Her mouth was tight.

“I don't know.” Ozzie sounded hoarse. “It was stupid.”

Nora glanced around the room, trying to figure out what they were talking about. The floor was dirtier than she could have ever imagined, with piles of dust and so many animal droppings that it was impossible to distinguish the hardwood beneath. A single board next to Ozzie's feet had been dislodged and Nora thought she could see papers inside the shallow hole of it.

“No one's hurt, are they?” Grace held back a little, watching from the doorway.

In response, Monica thrust her hand out so that Grace and Nora could see what she was holding. They both gasped.

“The picture of your mother!” Grace whispered. “Oh, that's
incredible, Mons! You were just saying how you lost it! How you—”

“I never lost it.” Monica looked at Ozzie again with the same accusing stare. “Ozzie
took
it.” She glanced down at the floorboard opening. “And then hid it down there. All these years.”

“Took it?” Grace looked confused. “What do you mean, took it? Why?”

“I don't
know,
” Monica said. “Why did you take it, Ozzie?”

“You had two of them.” Ozzie spoke quickly, as if her words might overtake Monica's anger. “And she was beautiful and so perfect . . . I don't know . . . I thought I needed one, okay? Especially during those last few months. I was starting to freak out, thinking of all of us leaving and . . .” She stared at the floor, as if trying to reconnect the dots, and then looked up again. “I remember you saying she was like a stranger to you, that you couldn't remember anything, and I just . . . I guess I thought you wouldn't mind that much. I needed something extra to hold on to, okay? Something to look at, maybe to pretend that I had a mother out there who gave a shit. Even if it was all just in my head.”

“So how'd it end up in the floor?” Monica's voice was hard as steel. “If she meant so much to you, why'd you . . .”

“I slept for weeks with it under my pillow,” Ozzie interrupted. “But I was afraid you'd find it, so every morning, when you got up to go to the bathroom, I'd jump up and put it back in the floor. And then everything started to get really crazy, you know, with graduation and moving and everything else. I forgot I put it down there. I just totally forgot until we walked in here today and I saw the floorboard.”

Nora could see the color returning to Monica's face as she absorbed
Ozzie's explanation. “Those pictures were all I've ever had of her. You took that from me.”

“Yes.” Ozzie closed her eyes as a tear rolled down her face. “I did. I'm so sorry.”

“I would have shared her with you,” Monica said, her voice splintering. “Especially when things got hard. All you had to do was ask.”

“I was too embarrassed,” Ozzie snatched at her eyes. “I didn't want anyone to know I was even thinking of my mother, let alone someone else's.”

Nora could feel her insides clenching as Ozzie's words from the very first Invisibles meeting came back to her:
We'll choose to remain invisible. To everyone except each other.
But they hadn't, had they? For as thick as the walls they'd built around themselves to keep the rest of the world out, there had been cracks. Despite all their best efforts, doubt and shame had seeped through, nibbling at the edges of their fortress, letting the cold in.
I didn't want anyone to know.
It could have been their rallying cry, she thought later, their group motto. Each and every one of them.

Monica walked across the room and enfolded Ozzie in her arms. Ozzie sagged against her, her whole body absorbing the acceptance of her apology. Nora stared, trying to understand. How was it that, in the span of a single heartbeat, Monica was able to embrace someone who'd just betrayed her? Why couldn't she be more like that herself? What was it that kept her from letting go finally, and forgiving?

“Can I see the picture?” Grace asked as Monica and Ozzie let go.

Nora moved in too, looking at the picture over Grace's shoulder.
It was a head shot, taken when Monica's mother was in high school perhaps, or a few years later. She wore a black cardigan, buttoned up to her collarbone, and pearl earrings that were only slightly smaller than her earlobes. Her eyes were the same as Monica's, round and widely spaced, and they shared the same curve in their chins. A tangle of red curls had been pulled back neatly with a silk scarf, and the ends of it hung over her right shoulder.