Rooms (11 page)

ALICE

T
he new ghost is nervous. Sandra, too. She hates the police, probably because of her many unpleasant run-ins with them. There was, for example, the time she accidentally drove her car onto a neighbor’s property and parked it nose-first against their mailbox; the time she played the Grateful Dead on full volume until four
a.m.
while consuming an entire bottle of Maker’s Mark; the incident of the stolen goldfish from the restaurant in Dover Plains . . .

“I don’t believe it.” Minna reenters the greenhouse, flushed, excited. “I can’t believe it. My mom won’t, either. You know I still have our prom photo somewhere?”

Two men trail after her, like marine animals riding the wake of a boat. The first is about her height, broad shouldered and balding, with a big smile and a stomach. His uniform is dark blue and looks rumpled, as though he stores it in a corner.

The second man is wearing a bright red windbreaker, dress pants, mud-encrusted leather shoes. He is tall, thin, and unsmiling.

Minna stops when she finds the greenhouse empty. “She was just here,” she says apologetically. “Mom!” she calls out. “Mom!”

The tall man frowns and checks his watch.

“I’m right here.” Caroline emerges from the pantry door, holding a cup so tightly the veins on her hand stand out. She has fastened her bathrobe, at least, although the mottled surface of her chest is still visible. “No need to shout.”

“Mom, look.” Minna gestures to the shorter man; he is still standing there, beaming, while his partner shifts impatiently. “You remember Danny Topornycky, don’t you?”

Caroline frowns. Minna charges on impatiently, “Toadie, Mom. We called him Toadie. My prom date?” Minna nudges Danny’s arm. “My very first boyfriend.”

“Somehow, I doubt that.” Danny laughs. “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Walker.”

“I go by my maiden name now,” Caroline says. “Bell.”

Minna looks happier than I’ve seen her in all the time she is home, except for brief moments with Amy: tickle wars and raspberry kisses, and when they lie entwined, sleeping. “I had no idea you were a cop.”

“Yeah, well, the old man was a cop,” Danny says, shrugging. “You remember he busted Richie for DUI on prom night?”

Caroline says, “Why are you here?”

Minna glares at her, then turns back to Danny. “Do you want coffee or anything?” She starts toward the pantry door. “We can sit down and catch up—”

“No!” Caroline bursts out. Everyone turns to look at her. “I—I’m sorry,” she says. “The house is a mess . . . I’m sorry. It’s embarrassing.”

“That’s all right,” Danny says. He’s stopped smiling, at least, and looks less like an overstuffed teddy bear and more like a cop. “Sorry to barge in on you like this. This is Detective Rogers, from Suffolk County.”

“Suffolk County?” Minna frowns. “In Long Island?”

“Massachusetts.” The taller man speaks for the first time. He has a voice to match his face: worn down, stretched thin.

“You’re a little far from home, aren’t you?” Minna’s eyes keep returning to Danny. But now he’s keeping his eyes on his feet, playing his part.

“I’m investigating a disappearance,” he says, and for just one second, Minna and Caroline, the greenhouse, the whole house—us, me—seem to vanish, and all I feel is that tiny pulsing presence, the new ghost, drumming like a heartbeat. “Vivian Wright. Sixteen.”

Rogers reaches into his back pocket and extracts a photocopied picture of a girl. Long blond hair, dark smears of eye makeup, rings in her lip, ears, nose. The picture quality is terrible: she is half turned away from the camera, grinning at something offscreen, her features charcoal-smudgy.

The new ghost stirs. I can sense her fumbling to see, to learn her way into the air currents, to see with her no-longer-eyes and taste with her no-longer-tongue. She does not know how to be, yet.

“It’s an awful picture,” Minna says. She leans close to Danny to look—so close her breasts nearly end up on his elbow. But he doesn’t seem to notice. She draws back. “Don’t you have anything better?”

“We’re waiting,” he says. “The parents are on their way back from Cape Town now. Apparently they were on safari. No phone, e-mail only once in a while. It was the babysitter who filed the report. Said she showed up for the job and Vivian”—he tapped the photo—“was just gone. Vanished. At first she thought Vivian had just blown out of town for a few days, for a joke. She’d done that kind of thing before. But . . . ”

“But what?” Caroline says.

Detective Rogers blinks. “It’s been over a week,” he said.

“And you think she came all the way up here?” Minna says.

“We’re not sure,” Rogers says. “She used her credit card to buy a ticket—one way, no return—on a Greyhound heading to Buffalo. And a 7-Eleven in Milford has her on surveillance tape, buying chips and some sodas. She’s wearing a baseball hat, but it’s definitely her. The cashier remembers asking about the piercings. We’ve been hitting the towns on the line, asking around.”

“I’m just helping out with the locals,” Danny jumps in. “Disappearances aren’t our typical gig.”

Sandy mutters, “He turned out just as stupid as the rest of them.”

“You think she was alone?” Caroline is slightly calmer now, but she’s still gripping her glass. “When a young girl runs away, there’s usually
somebody
. Right?”

“We’re not sure she did run away,” Rogers says. He’s good. Noncommittal. “She could have been compelled to leave. Or lured up here by someone. There was no one with her on the tape, but that doesn’t mean she was alone.”

“Do you think she’s . . . ?” Minna trails off.

For a moment, there is silence. The clocks seem to pause; the pulse stops in this ticking, groaning body. Even Sandra doesn’t dare make a sound. The word, unspoken, hangs like a mist.
Dead.
Do you think she’s dead?

The new ghost trembles.

“We’re investigating every possibility,” Detective Rogers says, which I know means yes, he does. “She hasn’t used her card again. Hasn’t used her cell phone, either. She used to have Facebook, Twitter, all that, but her parents made her shut it down a few months ago, so no help there. Problems with an ex-boyfriend—that’s what her friends said, anyway.”

“Maybe she’s with her ex-boyfriend,” Minna suggests. She nudges Danny, smiling. “It’s always the ex, isn’t it?”

Danny glows as red as a fire poker. “I don’t know about that,” he says. He pats his shirt down over his stomach.

Rogers doesn’t smile. “It isn’t this time. The kid hasn’t spoken to her in months. He moved to Austin with his family in November.”

“Well, then what
did
happen to her?” Caroline’s voice is shrill.

There’s another beat of silence. This time Rogers comes out with it. “She might be hiding somewhere. She might have been kidnapped, although there’s been no ransom. And she might be dead. But we hope not.” He takes the photograph, folds it, returns it to his pocket. “Sorry for barging in. Here’s my card, and Danny will leave you his, too.”

Danny’s already working his card over with a pen. “I’m leaving you my cell, too, Min,” he says. “We should catch up while you’re here.”

Rogers looks faintly annoyed. “If you see anything suspicious, please call right away.”

“You expect us to trip over a dead body in our garden?” Minna says. No one laughs, and Caroline says, “Minna,
please,
” and presses one hand to her head.

“Anything suspicious,” Detective Rogers repeats.

Then they’re gone, and Caroline and Minna are left standing together in the greenhouse, surrounded by dead and rotting things.

I’m expecting Sandra to make an idiotic comment but instead she simply mutters, “Bad business.” I can feel her withdraw, curling into the walls, into the wood shavings, small, hard, and impregnable, as she always does when she’s in a bad mood.

The ghost, the new ghost, is still shaking.

“Vivian?” I whisper. “Is that you?”

But she doesn’t make a sound.

The search party for Annie Hayes was organized two days after her parents first noticed she’d gone missing; I heard about it as I did almost all my gossip, from Dick Harte, who ran a dairy farm in Depew and delivered the milk. It had been a bad winter, and the ground was just beginning to thaw from the latest assault: fissures appeared on the blue-veined rivers, still slickly coated with ice; the ground was patchy and raw, the trees had their hackles raised to the wind. On some mornings, with the wind howling and the gas sputtering under the kettle, I even missed Ed. I sweetened my coffee by drinking it through a sugar cube. There was a war on, and at home we felt it this way: in the cold-bed mornings, and sugary grit between our teeth.

Dick Harte had a truck embossed with a cow and the name of the farm, but for most of the winter he made his rounds in an old-fashioned sleigh, hitched to two of his horses. I remember he had the sleigh the day he told me about Annie Hayes and the search party, because he complained that the remaining snow was so slushy and full of muck he’d practically had to turn around; and the horses stood there, breath steaming in the dawn, and I thought of how cold Annie must be, wherever she was.

We were to meet at noon in front of the church in Coral River, a walk of just over four miles. The sky was dense and knotted with clouds, like a gigantic, fleecy eyebrow.

All this has stuck with me.

I don’t remember receiving instructions, or the early part of the search. I don’t remember seeing Thomas among the volunteers, although he must have been there, and it seems strange that I shouldn’t have noticed, since so many men were away. I do know at some point we were fanning out across a field and it had begun to rain. Black expanses of mud grinned up at us between the snow; I was freezing again and had called Annie’s name so often my throat was raw.

How awful, I was thinking. How unbearably awful to lose a child.

I got separated from the group—there was movement in the forest at the edge of the trees; I was sure it was Annie, scared, hiding in the shadows. The rain was rattling hard through the branches, and I could hardly see, my eyes were watering so badly; my fingers were swollen to uselessness.

A few feet into the woods, my foot drove straight through a fine surface of gray ice, down into a pit of mud and pulpy leaves—some kind of animal hole. I pitched forward onto my hands and knees. Immediately I knew I’d twisted or sprained my ankle, and the pain cleared my head. I realized I’d been following some animal, a fox or a deer. There was no child out here, in these woods. If there were, she was no longer alive.

I tried to stand, and suddenly there was a hand guiding me firmly to my feet.

“Are you all right?”

Glasses, beaded with rain; a beard, not too closely trimmed; the smell of damp wool and tobacco; a fine, straight nose, with a bead of moisture hanging from its end.

Those were my first impressions of Thomas.

Afterward he claimed to have noticed me even earlier, standing in the crowd, though I never believed him. I’ve relived that moment so often in my head, I can never be sure what really happened and what we only embellished afterward. But does it matter? We make reality our own, handle it until it is as soft as pressed butter.

There was the offer of a ride; the polite resistance, his insistence—
you can’t make it back on your own, not on
that
foot
—and, finally, the
yes
,
thank you, if it really isn’t too much trouble.
He kept calling me
Miss
Lundell, even though Lundell was my married name. I didn’t correct him.

There was his arm around my waist as he supported me across the field through the endless sheet of rain. There was feeling as though we were alone, with a sky of glass above us.

Thomas had a Hudson touring sedan, which felt novel and very luxurious to me, even though it was corroded with rust and the engine turned over several times before it would start. Ed and I didn’t own a car.

Thomas told me he was a professor of classics at St. Aquinas University, in Buffalo; I asked him several questions, and I thought he was ignoring me until he apologized and told me he was deaf in his right ear. He’d lost his hearing as a little boy, after his older brother stuck a pen in his ear, as an experiment, to see how far it would go.

It was then—in the car, as he explained about the pen and why he wasn’t at war, when he had to tilt his left ear toward me so that I could give him directions to the house and twice made the wrong turn, anyway—that I began to love him.

Do you think that’s unrealistic? That this, too, is a story I made up after the fact? To justify and excuse, perhaps—to make sense of everything that came after? Maybe. But it happens—every day, for someone.

Take little Annie Hayes, for example. Two days after the search, it was discovered that she’d been hiding in the cellar of the local pharmacist. His eight-year-old son, Richard Kelly, had been sneaking her chestnuts and milk from the kitchen all week, and they were plotting to run away together. A month earlier, he’d given her free ice cream at the counter of his father’s shop, and she had decided it was love.

Both children were whipped, of course. But Annie did, finally, grow up to marry the pharmacist’s son, and in the spring of ’52, when I had not spoken to Thomas in nearly a decade, I threw handfuls of rice at the new Mrs. Annie Kelly and tilted my face up to the sun to watch it scatter.

SANDRA

M
emory is as thick as mud. It rises up, it overwhelms. It sucks you down and freezes you where you stand.

Thrash and kick and gnash your teeth. There’s no escaping it.

Down.

In Georgia, the mud was thick and dark as oil.

Down.

I remember my dad scraping his shoes on the rusted shoe box he inherited from
his
father, who I met only once, and who had chins like fat rolls of sausage; and my mother, vibrating like a plucked string, hitting high notes of rage, whenever he forgot and tracked mud across the floor.

And further down:

My friend Cissy’s housekeeper, Zulime, smearing cold mud on my arms swollen with poison oak, telling me to
hush, now.

The flood of 1987, and the wash of water and silt thundering down the lawn from the river, and the poor turtle on the front porch.

Down and down, until all that’s left is the memory of ghosts.

Trenton’s been slinking around outside, spying, because the cops aren’t gone three minutes before he sticks his head back into the greenhouse. Caroline has gone inside, probably reloading on the sauce. Minna is just standing there, leaning against the shelves, eyes closed, birds twittering through the broken ceiling, sunlight slanting hard as knives.

“What did they want?” Trenton says, trying to act casual.

“Some girl disappeared,” Minna says, without opening her eyes, “from Boston.”

Trenton’s a little less wound up than he was before. His face isn’t so cigarette-ash gray. “Boston? So what’re they doing out here?”

“I don’t know.” She straightens up. “Hey—do you remember Danny Topornycky? Toadie?” Minna waits for Trenton to respond, which he doesn’t. “Forget it. You were too young.”

“What about him?” Trenton says.

“Nothing. He’s a cop now, that’s all. We just ran into him.” She picks at her thumbnail with her teeth. “I always really liked Danny.”

“Don’t,” Trenton says, shoving his hands in his pockets and making for the pantry door.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just don’t.” Then he stops, suddenly, and pivots. “Wait. He’s a cop?”

“Yeah. So?” It’s Minna’s turn to play sullen.

Trenton licks his lips, which are dry, full of flaking skin. “You . . . you have to do me a favor.”

“Do I?” But then: “What is it?”

“That person . . . ” he says. “The person who was shot in the house . . . ?”

Minna rolls her eyes. “That’s just a story, Trenton. I don’t even know if it—”

“Just find out, will you?” he says. “Just find out when, and, and . . . who. I’m just . . . curious, okay? Just ask him. For me.”

Minna sighs. “All right,” she says. “I’ll ask. But that was years and years ago. He may not know.”

“He saw her,” Alice whispers, awed. “I told you. He saw her.”

“But he thinks she’s me,” I say. That gives me a nice, long laugh.

Martin better be ready.

I wonder whether he still fiddles with his watch when he’s nervous, whether he still wears socks to his knees, whether his laugh still sounds the same: like a quick explosion.

I wonder whether he kept the letters. Probably burned or shredded them. He knew what I could do, what I
would
do, if I’d had the chance. He’d fed me nothing but lie after lie until I was choking on them, like one of those geese that gets cream shoved down its throat.

I wonder whether he still does his shopping at Gristedes, and whether it even still exists.

I first met Martin over the watermelons. That’s not one of those expressions, either, that means something dirty even though it doesn’t sound like it. I used to like going to the grocery store, even when I didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

I liked the way the vegetables were all laid out like jewelry in a velvet-lined case: cabbages tucked neatly next to shiny red peppers next to cucumbers next to lettuce, all of it misted over, regular, with a fine spray of water. Sometimes on hot days I’d go to the store just to bend down and put my face over the lettuce and inhale, let the water hit the back of my neck and shoulders, and pretend I was nothing but a cabbage, or a flower in a greenhouse—with nothing to do but be cared for.

Maybe that’s why Caroline was so crazy about her greenhouse. Maybe she liked pretending, too.

I’d seen Martin once or twice in passing. He had the kind of face you remember: broad and flat, with eyes as round as gumdrops, like a little kid’s face that’s just been stretched and pulled a little by the years. He was tall, too: six foot two, and sturdy as a bulldozer. That’s just how I like my men: if I wanted someone I could knock over, I’d start going in for women.

It was July and a heat wave and I’d come to the store to cool off, stick my face in the freezers and under the mist, pick up a refill of tonic and maybe some ice cream to eat for dinner. And there in the center of the produce aisle was a huge display of watermelons: a pyramid of them, stacked halfway to the ceiling, and several of them cut open to show off their insides, juicy and red, winking at me like a promise.

Of all things, it made me think of my mother, how she greased one up in lard before the church social every June, and how the kids would fight to catch hold of it; and spitting watermelon seeds off the front porch and watching the birds swoop down to eat them; and the first bite, letting juice run all the way to your elbow. The heat was making me loopy. It nearly made me start crying to think of how long it had been since I’d had a watermelon.

So I went poking and squeezing and looking for the perfect one, like I’d seen my mother do hundreds of times, working my way around the pyramid and taking my time. I never saw Martin come up. But just when I got my hands around a watermelon, his hands landed on it, too.

“It’s mine,” was the first thing I said, not taking my hands off it.

“I don’t think so,” he said. He didn’t take his hands off, either, so we were standing there, two strangers, holding a watermelon between us.

“Ladies first,” I said.

He laughed. I have a thing for teeth, and he had nice ones. “That’s old-fashioned,” he said.

“I’m old-fashioned,” I said.

“I doubt that.” The smile stayed in his eyes. “I’ve got an idea.”

“What’s that?”

“How about we share it?” he said.

So we did. We drove back to my place, and we polished off the whole damn watermelon and a bottle of Glenlivet he picked up on the way. It was the most fun I’d had in a long time, and I was flattered, too. Martin worked on the Buffalo City Council and had his own business selling medical equipment. He wasn’t some lowlife I’d picked up in a bar.

That first night was great. One of the best of my life, I’d say. I pretended not to notice his wedding ring the whole time.