Authors: Lauren Oliver
Rooms (12 page)
“W
ell, she didn’t waste any time, did she? Couldn’t have been quicker if she’d tripped and fallen on his—”
“Please, Sandra. Not today.”
I’m trying to ignore Sandra’s voice. I am trying to ignore what is happening in the Yellow Room entirely, but the rhythm of grunts and groans, the tapping of the headboard, like a periodic spasm, keeps drawing me back.
There is no way to get around this fact, and no point beating around the bush: Minna is bedding the undertaker in the Yellow Room.
The room smells sweet and slightly rotten. It brings back memories of nausea, makes long-ago echoes in my head—Ed’s hand gripping the headboard, eyes squeezed shut in concentration, a bead of sweat tracing its way from his forehead to the tip of his nose.
Knock, knock, knock.
Iron and hardness; as though he could pound away all the past disappointments.
Ed closed his eyes and saw railroads. I, too, learned to escape. Maybe that’s why I was able to adapt to this new body so quickly. I severed the connection to the old one long ago.
“Do you know what her problem is? Nymphomania. Sex addiction.”
Sandra fancies herself an amateur psychologist because she did office work for a Dr. Rivers before he fired her for stealing pills. She has the names of over two hundred phobias memorized, as she is fond of reminding me, including the word
geniophobia,
which is a fear of chins. For the most part, I think that psychology is no better than phrenology.
However, in Minna’s case, Sandra might have a point.
The man was in the house less than twenty minutes before she had him stripped down to his socks and he was mounting her like a dog. That is, in fact, exactly what he looks like: his pale, mole-speckled back reminds me of the shaved, ridged spines of a greyhound.
Minna is closing her eyes. I can tell she doesn’t want to look at him. I used to close my eyes, too, with Ed. The undertaker is speaking, a low murmur of babble words, curses, and exclamations. Impossible to ignore, however disgusting it is.
I try to think my way into the tangle of wiring behind the radiator. Just a little spark . . . a little friction is all I need . . .
“I think I’ve underestimated the girl,” Sandra says. “It’s impressive, really. Just think about it. Urns to underwear in thirty minutes or less! It could be a TV series, don’t you think?”
For two days, Danny Topornycky has been ignoring Minna’s calls; she’s been walking around with her phone plastered to her palm, checking it constantly. Today, she has had better luck.
Are you really here to talk urn styles? Don’t you find it depressing? I could never do what you do for a living. I’m pleasure oriented—that’s what everyone says. I love to have a good time. Do
you
like to have a good time, Chris?
Now Minna is quiet—surprisingly so. Her face is perfectly composed—a look of relief—as though she has finally, after a period of exhaustion, been allowed to sleep. Christopher Deber, of Deber & Sons, does all the work, and I can’t help but see: the animal haunches rising and falling under the tented sheets.
Then: a gust of air, of Outside. A twinge in our side: the kitchen door opens, and Amy runs into the house.
“Oh, no,” I say. “No.”
Sandra says, “Here comes trouble.”
“Do something,” I say, as Amy heads for the stairs.
“Mommy!” Amy calls, but not loudly enough—not so loudly that she can be heard over Chris’s grunting.
“This is terrible,” Sandra says, but I can tell she doesn’t mean it.
Amy is on the stairs. Chris is saying
justlikethathuhyoulikeitlikethat
and Amy is running, running. I try to think myself past the steps, out of the banister, into her feet.
Turn around,
I want to scream.
Go back.
“Mommy!” she singsongs. Not loudly enough. She is almost at the landing. Two more steps. One more minute. Chris lifts and thrusts, lifts and thrusts.
Then: a miracle. Amy trips. She stumbles on the last stair and falls flat on the landing, hard, on an elbow. Instantly, she begins to wail.
Minna snaps her eyes open. She launches Chris off her; he practically flies off the narrow bed, hitting the ground with a thud.
“What the—?”
“Shut up,” she says.
“Jesus, I was just about to—”
“I said shut up.” Her voice is low and urgent. She is looking not at him, but at the door, which is open a crack. “Get under the bed.”
In the hall, Amy picks herself up, sniffling. “Mommy,” she wails. For just a second, I have the overwhelming urge to reach up through the floorboards, to wrap myself around her.
“What?” Chris climbs to his feet, covering his
Thing
with one hand. His body is long and pale and lumpy, and his chest glistens with sweat. “I’m not going to—”
Minna looks at him. “Get under the bed,” she says calmly. “And don’t say a word. Don’t cough. Don’t fucking breathe. Do you understand me?”
“Christ,” he mutters. But he gets on the floor, lying down on his back. He has to uncup himself, and though I don’t want to see It, I have no choice: there it is, socklike and pathetic, already shriveling, the animal that leads men, hot and panting, through their lives. Then he wriggles, wormlike, under the bed, seeping his sweat into our floorboards, pricking us with the sparse constellation of hairs that grow from his shoulders to his waist. His heart stutters against the floorboards—staccato, irregular, bringing memories of other heartbeats. Ed, pounding; Maggie, sucking; Thomas, fitting his body to mine. Sandra, lying naked on the bed, and a small brown spider traveling her neck, her chin, her open mouth, and disappearing finally into the darkness of her throat, where I could no longer see it.
For a second, I truly hate Minna.
“In here, sweetheart!” Minna is rearranging the duvet, so it pools over the side of the bed, concealing Chris from view. She tugs the sheets to her chin, sweeps a hand through her hair.
Amy comes to the door, sniffling. She stops when she sees her mother in bed. “What are you doing?” She wrinkles her nose. I wonder if she can smell it.
“Headache, precious,” Minna says, with an exaggerated sigh. “I was taking a nap.”
“I want to nap, too.” Amy bounds toward the bed.
Minna shoots out one hand. With the other, she keeps the sheets at her chin. “Don’t come in here,” she says, too sharply. Then, in a normal way, “I might have germs.”
Trenton comes in after Amy. He leans—or rather, collapses—against the doorway. “What’s up with you?” he says.
Minna flashes him a dirty look. “Migraine.” She reaches out and touches Amy’s chin. “Princess? How about you wait downstairs so I can talk to Uncle Trenton, okay?”
“I want to nap,” Amy insists.
“Come on, Amy.” Trenton takes a step forward and puts a hand on Amy’s shoulder, drawing her away from the bed. “I’ll meet you downstairs, okay? It will only take a second.”
“What the hell?” Now that Amy is gone, Minna doesn’t bother controlling her anger. “I thought you were going for more boxes.”
“Forgot my wallet.” Trenton shrugs. “We got all the way to Oakbridge, and—”
“Jesus Christ, Trenton,” Minna explodes. “What the hell is wrong with you? I ask you to do one goddamn thing—”
“What’s wrong with
me
?” Trenton backs out of the room. “It was a mistake. You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.”
“Don’t you dare call me a bitch.” If Minna were not stuck in bed, naked, I’m pretty sure she would get out of bed and slap him. She lies stiff, white-faced, for several long minutes, until she hears Trenton pound downstairs again, until she hears the front door open and then slam. She keeps her sheets at her chin. She leans her head against the headboard. Otherwise, she is frozen.
“Can I come out now?” Chris’s voice is muffled.
“Yes,” she answers.
He wriggles out from the bed and stands again. This time, he doesn’t bother cupping. His Thing has returned, now, to its normal, shriveled state, and again I think of an animal that has retracted, burrowed away to nurture its hunger.
“Phew.” Chris sits heavily on the bed. “I had no idea you had a kid. God, that could have been awkward. Well, all’s well that ends—”
“Get out.” Minna closes her eyes.
Chris starts. “Hey,” he says softly, after a long pause. He reaches out and touches her face. She doesn’t withdraw. She doesn’t open her eyes. “Hey. Look, I’m sorry about that. But I thought you wanted to have a good time. That’s what you said, right? And we were just getting started . . . ”
“Please leave now,” Minna says simply. “The kitchen door should be open. Or you can leave through the hall. It’s up to you.”
For a moment, Chris watches her. Then he stands abruptly, searches the floor for his shirt, and angrily wrestles on his pants.
“Crazy,” he says. Just as he did during intercourse, he lets out a volley of curses, a string of half-muttered words: “Fucking insane. I just came here . . . and I had no idea . . . you were the one who wanted . . . That’s fucked up, you know?”
Minna says nothing.
When he has laced up his shoes, and cinched his belt, he stands, staring down at Minna. She must sense it. Still, she doesn’t open her eyes.
“Fucked,” he says, one last time, and then bursts out of the room, and down the stairs, and out the door, leaving his small black folio, full of urn styles, sitting on the hall console. I think he may remember and come back for it, but he doesn’t.
For a long time, Minna lies there. I can’t help but remember the way her father sat for a whole day after Caroline had taken the children, while the milk curdled in his coffee.
“Good-bye,” she says finally, into the empty room.
Then she pushes off the sheets and stands, and goes into the bathroom, and turns on the shower.
I wanted Amy to trip. I wished for it. I willed my way up through the stairs. And then she tripped.
First, the lightbulb in the basement. And now Amy.
I’m working my way back: into a real body, into feeling.
Touching, pushing, blowing.
Power.
I wasn’t always as helpless as I am now. When I first died, when I found myself here, in this house, I could still feel my old body—hands, legs, arms. And I could still go blundering, occasionally and blindly, and find that I had accidentally upset a vase or rattled a table or bumped against the washing machine and turned it on. The Killigans were in the house then, and they used to joke about it:
the house is haunted,
they’d say at dinner parties.
I swear, just the other day, the TV turned on by itself.
It’s like the men who came home from the war missing limbs. Afterward, for a long time, there were the agonizing itches in long-lost toes, the cramps in amputated calves. Ed lost his left pinkie finger to an artillery blast, and until the day he died he claimed he could feel a hangnail there. One time, I came downstairs in the middle of the night and found him, half drunk, hacking away at the air with nail scissors.
Phantom limb syndrome,
they called it.
When your whole body is gone, it’s the same thing, just on a larger scale—phantom body syndrome. You feel it, you sense it, and somehow this keeps you grounded in the physical world and allows you to knock elbows with the TV and bump shins against chairs.
But as time went on, as I learned to see by touch, and hear by echo, as air does, and smell the ways walls do, by absorption, the old body receded further and further into the past, and so did my ability to affect things in the physical world.
Is that why Trenton can see her? The girl, Vivian—if it is Vivian—is still so new. She hasn’t forgotten how to be alive.
That’s the trick: to remember the old body as closely as possible, to feel my way back into it. The narrowness, the needs; the exhaustion and hunger; the pains and the explosions of pleasure. If there’s any hope of escaping, I must.
The bed in the Yellow Room isn’t so very different from the bed we bought for Maggie once she had outgrown the cradle—from Woolworths, of course, delivered to us sheathed in plastic by men as solemn-faced as pallbearers. For the first six months after we moved her from the cradle, Maggie would wake up screaming. I would climb into bed with her and gradually she would calm down, while I whispered into her hair and kept one arm locked tightly around her waist, to show her I was there.
I remember: the frantic fluttering heartbeat winging through her back, against my breasts and rib cage.
I remember: her sputtering, sniffling breaths, the feel of sweat seeping through her pajamas, and the smell of raspberries in her hair.
I remember the ramrod terror, too, when I heard her crying—the fear that she would never calm down, the fear that I could never pull her back from that black dream-space, the yawning nightmare mouth. Even after she calmed down, the fear would keep me awake: this fragile shell-person, this strange miracle of bones and blood, so easily ruptured and broken.
I wanted to absorb her back inside of me. I would have taken off my skin like a snake and folded her away, to be my secret again.
But she grew, and grew, and grew; and our bodies took us farther from each other. Did she remember those nights? Did she remember how I used to hold her, and rock her to sleep, and sing lullabies into her hair?
Probably not. Most likely, those memories were swallowed up in the long, tangled dream of childhood, swept back into the darkness that used to surround us, thick as syrup, when we slept side by side.
I’ve had to come to terms with that.
But who knows? It’s
possible
. It’s possible that underneath the layers and layers of resentments and fights, of distance and criticism, some memory of those early days was preserved, in some rarely used place, the way that a body stores memory of motion and rhythm. Perhaps, later in her life, she was able to excavate the feel of my arms around her, the repetition of my voice saying
I love you, I love you.
Perhaps it brought some comfort to her.
The body restoreth, and the body taketh away.
I remember: