Rooms (10 page)
Authors: Lauren Oliver
“A
re you proud of yourself?” Sandra asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You did that,” Sandra says. The new ghost whimpers—a low, animal sound. “Congratulations on a nice little show.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, even though of course I do.
She means the lightbulb—the explosion. And I
am
proud. I’m ecstatic. It has been many, many years—decades—since I’ve felt that kind of power.
And it gives me hope.
I’ve only seen one bad fire. I was seven or eight when a conflagration spread through our neighborhood in Boston and leaped across several houses before attacking St. John the Divine and the funeral parlor next to it; by morning, the houses were gone and the church was blackened with smoke and ash. The air stunk like melted glass and something chemical I couldn’t name, and volunteers were enlisted to bring coffins out of the wreckage. My sisters and I went down to watch the action, and in particular, to see the bodies come out: coffins covered in a layer of silt and ash, bodies bundled in tarpaulin and half burned away, bits of hair and fingernail.
The fingernails keep growing,
my sister Delilah told me.
The hair, too.
Someday you’ll be dead like that,
my sister Olivia said.
You’ll be nothing but bone and fingernail, and no one will miss you.
Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.
Sandra doesn’t know about my plan for the fire. How could I tell her? If I’m right, it will be the end of us. That’s the whole point. In fiction, ghosts remain because of some entanglement with the living world, something they must do, resolve, or achieve.
I assure you that isn’t the case for me. The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I’m a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon.
There was Maggie. But even she might be dead by now. I like to think I would have known, would have felt it, but I know that’s fantasy. Maggie was a stranger to me in her adult life, a stiff-backed, short-haired woman with tastes and habits I hardly recognized.
Tofu,
she told me, the last time I visited her in San Francisco, when she served me a plate of vegetables and brown rice and some lumpy, milk-white substance that reminded me of curdled fat.
I’m a vegan now.
Amazing, isn’t it? That hearts that once beat in sync could be so perfectly and forever separated. That’s the whole process of life, I think: a long, slow process of separation. It can be cured only by the reabsorption into everything, into the single heartbeat of time.
It’s my time to go home.
T
renton hadn’t been inside the greenhouse in years and was startled by the bird: as soon as Trenton closed the pantry door it rose, flapping, to the sky, so close that Trenton could feel the air shredded beneath its big, black wings.
Several of the glass panes in the roof were missing—shattered, Trenton assumed, or blown away during the last big storm. A rusted ladder was still leaning against the exterior wall, as if someone had abruptly decided the repairs weren’t worth it. There was a covering of fine green grass embedded in the dirt, so his footsteps made a crunching sound.
The greenhouse he remembered was a jungle, a riot of flowers as big as a child’s head, trembling with moisture, humid and exotic and totally off-limits. He remembered the emerald light, the alien-looking orchids, the summer roses climbing trellises all winter long.
There was no longer anything green in the greenhouse, except for a dozen fake plants—squat Christmas trees with plastic bristles, fabric lilies, improbable plastic orchids, and even a miniature palm tree—crammed into one corner of the rectangular space. What plants did remain were dry, brown, and brittle.
It was Saturday, 10
a.m.
, and Trenton was, for all intents and purposes, alone in the house. Amy was in the den, all the way on the other side of the house. His mom was still sleeping. She’d gotten drunk in her room last night, doing whatever the hell she did, and would probably stay up there until at least noon. And from his bedroom window he’d spotted Minna skirting the edge of the woods, a felt cap pulled low over her ears even though it was already probably sixty degrees, wearing an old pair of waders.
Getting up onto the shelf was difficult; the old wood groaned underneath him as though it might collapse under his weight. But he managed. When he stretched out on his back, he was mostly concealed by the fake planters and the intersection of their manufactured leaves, and thus invisible from both the pantry side and the door that led out toward the lawn.
He had one joint left from the stash he’d bought from an older guy who worked at the Multiplex in Melville, Long Island. He sparked up, took three hits in quick succession, and stamped out the end of the joint so he could save it for later. He lay back, feeling a delicious heaviness in his legs and arms, a sudden wave of calm.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Katie and the party. He was dreading it. He shouldn’t go. He would have an awful time. Most of Katie’s friends probably knew one another. They would stare at him and whisper behind his back.
But a small part of him was eager to see her again. Did that mean he wasn’t ready to die?
No. The plan was the plan, and he would still go through with it.
The sun was weak and the sky above Trenton was full of scudding clouds, breaking apart and re-forming. Like a kaleidoscope. His thoughts, too, broke apart and re-formed.
Light flickered. Shadows skated across the shelves, and Trenton shivered. He thought about the accident. He had memories, fragmented and strange, of a hundred shadowlike hands carrying him down a dark tunnel.
And then he felt it. Or heard it. He didn’t know which but he
knew:
someone had just entered the greenhouse. He sat up, suddenly alert, his mind sharpening.
Trenton’s throat closed so tight he couldn’t even scream.
She was there. And yet she was not there. A
thing,
an unmistakable presence. He knew it was a girl—or a woman—because of the way it moved, shifting in the sun, watching him from behind a shadow of hair.
It didn’t occur to him that he was just high, and seeing things. He’d smoked plenty of times before—weed was the only thing that helped him float through his months at Andover—and once had even seen a bathroom wall pulsating in and out.
But never anything like this. She was
real
. He felt it, too, in the stiff terror that seized him, the desperate desire to cry out, and the dryness of his mouth.
The longer he looked, the more she materialized: shoulder blades cut from shadow and green eyes flashing like dark leaves. Hair teeth mouth, breasts small as two bare flower buds.
Go away,
Trenton tried to say, but couldn’t. He felt like he was back in the hospital again, paralyzed, arms and legs useless and unresponsive.
Leave me alone.
She spoke. The words came to him, a faint, dry rustle on the wind that lifted and turned the leaves scattered on the greenhouse floor.
“What am I?” she asked. “What happened to me?”
The terror left Trenton at once, replaced by a sadness so cutting and deep he felt like he wanted to cry. It was worse than anything he’d felt in years—worse, so much worse, than the lack of happiness he was used to, a hollow negative space of no feelings at all. This was a dark, black pit of sadness, like staring into a well and seeing a child trapped at its bottom. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that she was scared.
Almost without realizing it, he sat up and extended a hand to her, the way he would have done with a stray animal.
There was a loud crack, then the sound of splintering glass. Trenton ducked, cursing. His first thought was that another lightbulb had exploded, but then he remembered there were no lightbulbs in the greenhouse.
“Shit!” Minna’s voice, muffled through the thick glass walls, came to him; then she was shoving into the greenhouse from the garden, using her shoulder. That door had obviously remained unused for years and was practically rusted shut.
“What the hell?” Trenton was shaking, furious. The girl—
the ghost,
he thought, and then knew that it was true—was gone. Where she had been was nothing more than a narrow rectangle of light, and dust mites revolving slowly. He felt an unaccountable sense of loss.
“Oh.” Minna had finally managed to get the door open and entered, red-faced, pushing her hat back from her forehead. “Hey. I didn’t get you, did I? That fucking thing fires to the left.”
“Get me?” Only then did Trenton understand what the cracking noise had been, just as he noticed a bullet wedged into the wooden shelf two inches from his left knee. Distantly, he heard his mom calling for them, her voice high-pitched, hysterical.
He was so angry he could hardly speak. “What the hell, Minna?” He was screaming; even he was surprised to hear it. “What the fuck were you thinking? You could have killed me.”
“I said I was sorry,” Minna said, even though she hadn’t. She plunked down a pistol; Trenton recognized it as the one from his father’s desk, and he was even angrier that she had figured out how to load it. “It wasn’t my fault, anyway. I’m telling you, that thing—”
“Pulls to the left. Yeah. You said.” Trenton’s head was pounding. He hadn’t imagined it. He knew he hadn’t. Minna said someone had been murdered in the house. Had he really just seen her?
“I was trying to get that goddamn coyote.” Minna was still wearing the thermal shirt she liked to sleep in.
“What?” When Trenton tried to stand, he realized how stoned he was. He got a rush of black to his head.
Minna wasn’t looking at him, thank God. “It’s the size of a frigging pony. It was sniffing around the house this morning. I was worried Amy would try and pet the damn thing.”
Caroline burst through the door that connected the greenhouse to the pantry, wearing nothing but a thin bathrobe, open, over her nightgown. For one horrifying second, Trenton had a perfect view of his mom’s breasts, each shaped like the flap on an envelope, swinging loosely beneath the thin silk. He looked away quickly. “What happened? I thought I heard a shot.”
“There was a coyote,” Minna started to explain, but Caroline cut her off.
“A coyote? What about the police? Did you call them?”
Trenton looked up sharply. “The what?”
Minna stared. “What are you talking about?”
Caroline had obviously just gotten out of bed. The sheets had left faint creases, small webs, across her chest and cheek. “The police,” she said. “There’s a squad car coming up the drive.”
“I
don’t want them in the house,” Caroline said. “Don’t let them come into the house.” She knew she sounded hysterical but couldn’t help it.
She felt a panic attack coming on. That happened to her sometimes. Her mouth would go dry and she couldn’t breathe and her heart would beat like a dry moth in her throat, and she would know, absolutely know, that she was dying.
There had been streaks of blood in the toilet this morning—her lungs, maybe, or her liver. Ever since the doctor had lectured her about the possibility of cirrhosis, she had imagined her liver like a dying fish, gasping in the middle of a toxic oil spill.
She needed a drink. But she couldn’t drink with the police in the house. She still remembered the cop who had arrested her after she’d rear-ended that stupid woman, the way he’d hauled her roughly to the car, not caring that she was sick, not caring that Trenton was in the backseat. And the cop who’d called to tell her about Trenton’s accident—a woman, that time.
He might not make it,
she’d said casually, like a grocery store clerk explaining that a coupon was no longer valid.
Minna stared. “Why not?”
“I just don’t. Make them go away.” She heard the sound of car doors closing, and voices, muffled, from outside. “They have no right. We didn’t do anything. They can’t come poking around.”
“What are you afraid of? They’ll turn up a dead body?” Minna said.
Caroline couldn’t tell her daughter that she had a sense that the police were here about the woman—Adrienne, to whom Richard had left all that money. She couldn’t stand to hear the woman’s name spoken out loud again.
Late last night, Caroline had taken Minna’s laptop into her room and spent hours clicking through links and search bars, looking for pictures, articles, anything related to an Adrienne Cadiou in Toronto. The weight of the darkness, the weak blue light—it had made her feel comforted, somehow, like being in a bubble.
And yet at the same time, she was terrified Minna or Trenton would wake up and find her, and every time the house moved or the radiators hissed, she froze, hands hovering over the keyboard. She wondered if this was how Richard had felt reading porn, or watching it, later, on their shared computer. But no. He had not been embarrassed. Sometimes he even left the videos up, so that when she sat down to type an e-mail—painstakingly, with many errors, because she had never been a fast typer—she was surprised by the sudden vision of labias as pink as orchid blooms, or breasts like Minna’s were now, hard as bowls. She suspected he did it deliberately, to punish her.
She found five Adrienne Cadious in Toronto. One was a college student, nineteen, with a mouth full of braces. A second woman, seventy-four, was mentioned in several articles as being one of the first female runners of the Boston Marathon. The third woman was probably Caroline’s age, with red hair too long for someone in her late fifties. Caroline couldn’t figure out whether she was still alive—several articles mentioned she’d been the victim of a recent hit-and-run and showed her with her arms around a girl, presumably a daughter, with the same pattern of freckles and wide-spaced eyes—but it didn’t matter, anyway. Richard hated redheads.
There were two others: a mother of four, a little fat but not as fat as Caroline was now, and with a pretty smile, who ran a cooking blog called TheGoldenSpoon. Caroline had spent nearly an hour scrolling through recipes, reading about techniques for peeling tomatoes and how to make a perfect omelet, searching all the time for a code layered beneath the surface of the words, a message to her, to Richard.
There were dozens of pictures, not just of meals but of Adrienne herself, and, often, her children: fat-faced, grinning, holding up chocolate-covered fingers toward the camera.
Would Richard have done it? She wasn’t sure. But she couldn’t rule it out.
The last Adrienne was forty-two, and there was a single article that appeared about her on the second page of search results. She had spoken at the Ottawa Regional Breast Cancer Benefit; she was a breast cancer survivor, and she worked as a lawyer at the Canadian Immigration Bureau. The photograph was disappointing—head only, and slightly blurry, and moreover taken from an angle that made it difficult to see her features clearly. Whether she was pretty or not, it was hard to say.
Caroline spent another hour searching for more information about this Adrienne, looking for a better picture, but had found nothing. By then it was two
a.m.,
and she was very drunk and she knew she would sleep, finally. Still, it had taken her another half an hour to figure out how to clear the history so that Minna wouldn’t know what she was doing; Caroline knew about clearing the history because Trenton had spoken about it after she went on his computer looking for evidence that he was developing normally and wasn’t reading about assault weapons or how to make a homemade bomb, which had been suggested to her by a magazine she’d read at the dentist’s. He had caught her, and said, in the annoying smirking way he had recently perfected, “Ever hear of deleting history, Mom?” Then, of course, she was left to wonder whether he’d deleted history
because
he’d been researching bombs.
Caroline heard footsteps coming up the front path; she could see two men, distorted by the glass.
“Go and see what they want,” she told Minna. “Even better, make them leave.”
Minna rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She left through the garden door.
Caroline heard the doorbell ring once, sharply, and then fall silent. She heard Minna’s called greeting and a burst of overlapping voices, then footsteps, crossing back toward the greenhouse.
Minna hadn’t gotten rid of them.
For the first time since entering the greenhouse Caroline saw, suddenly, what it had become: the sad plastic simulacrum, the withered plants crying out for water, the boxes of old Christmas decorations and dirty wooden shelves, still imprinted with watermarks and ghostly rings where flowerpots and planters had once stood. This had been her place, the only spot in the house that had really belonged to her. She could make flowers grow, could coax even the most difficult orchid to life and make thick coils of plumleaf azalea overspill their planters.
Richard had left the greenhouse to die. Now Richard was dead.
There had been blood in the toilet this morning.