Rooms (22 page)

SANDRA

“I
always wanted a brother,” Eva says quietly. She pauses. “Mom would never tell me anything about my dad. She said I was born from a tube. But she was lying.”

“Now you know,” Alice says softly.

“I think . . . I think that’s all I wanted,” Eva says. “To know.” In the quiet, her mother continues sniffling into Caroline’s shoulder. “I wish she wouldn’t cry. It wasn’t her fault. I know it wasn’t.” Then: “I think I’m ready now.”

“Ready for what?” I say. But she doesn’t answer. For a second, I feel her trembling like a violin string, vibrating out a high note of fear and loss. “Ready for what?” I say, a little louder.

A sharp pain goes through me, a feeling like being socked in the stomach. Alice cries out. For a second, everything goes dark. When everything comes into focus again—the dining room, the bones of our staircases and the doors like jaws that open and close—I feel lighter, and emptier, too. Like I’ve just taken the world’s most epic dump.

“Eva?” Alice whispers. No answer.

She’s gone.

“Well.” I don’t know why I feel sad about it. But I do. I’m sad and sorry and jealous, all at once. “There you have it. Vivian and Eva. That’s two out of three missing children accounted for.”

“Stop, Sandra.” Alice’s voice is shaky, like
she’s
the victim, like I’m the bad guy.

“It’s too late, Alice,” I say. “There’s no use in pretending anymore.”

She sucks in a deep breath: a whistle through a teakettle. “What about you?” she asks.

“Not even for me.”

There’s a moment of silence. In that minute, I can practically feel our walls coming down, slowly down, pulled earthward by the pressures of gravity and decay.

Alice says, “Why did you tell me Martin shot you? For all these years, all our years together, you lied about it. Or did you really forget?”

“Does it matter?” I haven’t felt so tired since I was alive—too tired to keep the truth back, to stuff it into dark corners and keep it shored up behind heavy walls. It comes creeping out into the open, like a mouse sniffing around a darkened house. “You knew the truth all along. You were there.”

“I was there,” Alice agrees. “I was waiting for you to remember.”

“I remembered,” I say. It hurts to speak, to think, to remember. As if we’ve been planed and sawed down into splinters—as if everything is about to fall. “I just didn’t want it to be true.”

We’re quiet for a bit. Adrienne is still staring dull-eyed as an idiot. Trenton has torn her napkin to strips. All of them so clear and sharp, like individual cardboard cutouts. In that moment I’d trade places with any of them, just to have a beginning and an end.

“Why did you do it?” Alice asks quietly.

“I don’t know,” I say, although that’s not exactly true, either. I did it for a hundred reasons and for no reason at all. Because Martin told me I needed help and I knew it was his way of saying he was getting tired of me. Because I couldn’t stand to keep drinking and I couldn’t stand to stop. Because I was so tired that even sleeping didn’t help me at all.

But mostly because I was lonely. It was like living at the bottom of a pit. There was only one way out. “They’re digging,” Alice says. She’s gotten her voice under control. “Under the willow tree.”

“I told you,” I say. No point in lying anymore. I blamed Martin for not loving me, until the blame and what happened became the same story.

Everything comes up in the end.

TRENTON

A
sister. Trenton had—or used to have—a sister. He wished he’d known earlier.

He was alone in the dining room. The woman, Adrienne, had gone to wash her face in the bathroom. The ugly cop, who had skin just as bad as Trenton’s, was waiting outside in Adrienne’s car. Everyone agreed she was in no state to drive; there was talk of getting her a place to stay the night, until a relative could come and get her. Caroline had gone to change her clothes, and Danny was waiting outside her bedroom door, like Caroline might shimmy down the drainpipe and make a break for it. Trenton thought Danny was enjoying himself, even if he was pretending to be sad and apologetic. He probably didn’t get to arrest people very often.

Poor, lonely Eva. Trenton had always wanted a younger sister—had dreamed of it, especially after Minna moved out and went off to college and left Trenton alone with his mother. He would not have tortured her, as some older brothers did, or locked her in the bathroom after he’d used it or put her in headlocks until she screamed for mercy.

He would have showed her how to catch toads by making a cup of his hands, as Minna had done with him when he was very small. He would have taken her to the creek behind Mulaney’s so they could root out newts together, shrieking over a sudden flash of orange belly; he would have told her stories at night, saving the scary ones for when she was older.

Adrienne emerged from the bathroom. Her shirt clung to her shoulders where it was damp. Trenton got quickly and clumsily to his feet. He hadn’t expected to see her; he had assumed she would go out the way she came in, through the hall. But of course she didn’t know the house.

He felt embarrassed in her presence—embarrassed that he got to live, when he had wanted to die; that her daughter had died, when she had wanted to live. He wanted to say he was sorry, but the words felt insufficient. What would that mean, coming from him? From anyone?

Instead, they stood there in silence. Trenton was aware of the slow drag of time, the air in the house stifling, thick with funeral smells.

Adrienne spoke first. “You have her eyes,” she said. “Beautiful eyes.”

Trenton didn’t know how to respond. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked her.

She smiled, but it was the saddest smile he’d ever seen. Trenton remembered the first time he had seen Eva’s ghost in the greenhouse—the dry rustle of her voice, like autumn leaves tumbling over a barren riverbed. He was as sad now as he had been then—sadder, even, than he had ever been for his father.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Am I?”

“You will,” he said, although he didn’t really know. He felt a subtle shift, as if the air had suddenly begun rotating in the other direction. This was why people lied: sometimes, it was only the stories that mattered.

After Adrienne had gone, Trenton stood for a while in the quiet, listening hard to the familiar sounds of the floors creaking and the house settling minutely on its foundations—listening, too, for a voice, a whisper, a word of forgiveness, maybe. But there was nothing.

He cleared his throat. He knew his mother and sister couldn’t hear him, but he still felt embarrassed speaking out loud. “Eva?” he said, and then, a little louder, “Eva?”

There was only silence. He wondered whether she was upset at him, because he hadn’t gone through with killing himself. But no. The silence was dull and complete—not even the faintest rustle or whisper or creak. The ghosts were gone, or he had stopped hearing them. He wondered if it had been like a virus, and he had gotten it out of his system when he puked.

Was it because he had refused them? Because at the last moment, he had refused to cross over?

“I’m sorry, Eva,” he said. “I let you down.” He hated to think of the ghosts trapped in the walls, with no one to listen or hear.

But the problem with death was that you could never get tired of it and go home. No one would ever come and put a jacket around your shoulders, as Detective Rogers had done with Vivian, and put you in the backseat of a warm car and send you back to being alive. If only bodies were like rooms, and people could pass in and out of them at will.

He wondered whether Minna was almost finished digging. The hole didn’t have to be very deep to bury an urn. He moved to the window to check, but his view was obstructed. There was a white work van parked in the driveway. Connelly Roofing was stenciled in black on its side. Connelly. The name seemed familiar somehow.

“Hello?” a man called out. Before Trenton could go to the door, he heard it open; heavy footsteps came down the hall.

“Can I help you?” Trenton said, when the man passed into view. He was old—at least sixty—and dressed in gray work pants and a T-shirt saggy as a loose skin. But his shoulders were wide and his arms still roped with muscle.

“Who’re you?” the man said.

“Who’re you?” Trenton fired back.

“Joe Connelly,” he said. “I got my guys working the job upstairs.” His skin was webbed with burst capillaries, and Trenton smelled beer on him. But he must have been okay-looking, back in the day. Joe seemed to register the food on the dining room table for the first time. “Sorry. I didn’t know you were having a party.”

“It isn’t a party,” Trenton said. He didn’t feel like explaining what it was. “Anyway, it’s over.”

“You Caroline’s kid?” Joe asked, and Trenton nodded. “One of my guys left a ladder up there. We need it for another job. You mind if I go up?”

“I guess not,” Trenton said. Why, he wondered, were they even bothering to fix the roof? Would they ever come back? He couldn’t imagine it. It wasn’t their house anymore—it wasn’t his house—no matter what the will said. They should leave the roof open and give the birds a place to nest.

Joe didn’t move right away. He stood there, sucking on his lower lip, like he was debating whether to say something else. Trenton thought he might not know where the stairs were. “Straight down the hall,” he said.

Joe nodded. “Yeah,” he said, but still didn’t move. “Yeah. I remember this place. Did some work here years ago. It was a lot different then. Smaller.” He shook his head. “Time flies.”

Then Trenton remembered: Joe Connelly. Joe Connelly was the name of the man who’d found the dead woman, the one with her brains blown out—Sandra.

“Wait!” Trenton took two quick steps forward, nearly tripping over the rug. Joe stopped, turned to face him. “Wait. You—you were the one who found her. The woman who died here.”

Instantly, Joe turned guarded. “How’d you know about that?” he said, wetting his lips with his tongue.

“My sister dates a cop,” Trenton said. He could never explain what had really happened: the voices, the visions, the sense of touch whenever Eva came near—like a cool blade running through his very center. It was all true. There was an invisible world; there was meaning gathered like clouds on the other side of a mountain.

“Oh.” Connelly was clenching his fists and unclenching them, like he was squeezing an invisible rope. “Yeah. Wrong place, wrong time. That was a bad winter. Lots of snow. Poor lady’s roof caved in.”

“Sandra,” Trenton said, watching Joe carefully.

“Something like that,” he said. “Screwy the things you forget. She didn’t have a face by the time I got to her. That I remember.”

“What happened to her?” Trenton asked. “The police—I mean, they never found out who did it, right?”

“No,” Joe said hoarsely. He turned away. “No, they never did find out.”

Trenton grasped for another question, something that would keep Joe in the room and talking to him. His pulse was going wild. He didn’t know why it was important for him to know about some stranger who’d died here decades ago, only that Joseph Connelly’s arrival seemed like a sign. There was something he was missing, something he’d forgotten. Eva had told him that the ghost Sandra had been shot; there had been an important letter, too, which was stolen.

“What about the letter?” he blurted out, and Joe stiffened like Trenton had just reached out and electrocuted him.

“How—how’d you know about the letter?” Joe asked. When he turned around, his face was awful: white and frightened, older than it had looked just a minute earlier. “Who told you?”

Trenton didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Joe stood there, still trembling like a wire, his eyes like two dark gashes in his face. Then he pulled out a chair, abruptly, and sat down.

“Are you all right?” Trenton said cautiously.

But when Joe spoke, it was in a normal voice. “Blood pressure,” he said. “I’m an old shit. You got any water?”

Trenton went to the sideboard, where Minna had lined up pitchers of ice water for their guests. He poured a big glass of water and passed it to Joe at the table. Then he sat down.

“Thanks,” Joe said. But he didn’t drink. He just spun the glass between his hands. After a minute, he said: “I got rid of it. I thought it was the right thing to do. Seeing her like that . . . There was blood everywhere.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t help to know the reason. People say it helps. But it doesn’t.”

“Know the reason for what?”

Joe looked up, frowning. “For why they do it in the first place.”

Trenton suddenly understood. He’d been chasing this story of an old murder, feeding on it like carrion birds did, but it was a sadder story than that: digging up the old, dry bones of someone’s misery.

“So it was suicide,” Trenton said.

Joe put two hands on the table and pushed himself to his feet. “My dad roped himself when I was a kid. My mom told everyone he bust an artery in his brain. Aneurysm. She was embarrassed. Even changed our name back a few years later, from Houston to Connelly. Connelly was her maiden name.” He shook his head again. “It doesn’t help to know. It doesn’t make it easier. Still, I shouldn’t have burned the letter. It wasn’t my business.”

Trenton sat there for a long time, thinking of his father’s many conferences and Adrienne’s letters, unanswered; thinking of a man hanging from the ceiling and his wife lying about it because she was embarrassed. He thought about faceless women. He thought about time coming down slowly around their ears, like a roof under the pressure of snow.

It was time, he thought, to bury his father. It was time to put the ghosts to rest.

ALICE

“D
on’t go.” I’ve been trying to ignore Sandra for the length of her death, trying to expel her; and now I’m begging her to stay, like a child. “Please don’t go.”

“The jig’s up, isn’t it?” Already Sandra sounds fainter, as if I’m hearing her from a distance. “It’s about damn time, too.”

“Don’t leave me.” I hate myself for saying it, but I can’t help it: she’s my other, my boundary. Now there will be no one to hear me. It’s almost the same thing as not-existing, but worse. Lonelier. The Walkers will go home, and I will remain here, alone, openmouthed and silent in the doorways; frozen in the ice box; full of the darkness of empty closets and rooms that no one enters.

“You need to let go, Alice. That’s the whole trick. Let go of everything.”

“Tell me how,” I say. “I’m ready to learn.” Silence. “Sandra? Are you there?”

The only answer is a hole, a deep bottoming out, as if I still had a body and all the bones had suddenly vanished. Then—a sudden sickness, a reverse nausea, the sickness of something good and necessary going out.

Everything comes up in the end.

Sandra was right: old crimes expiated, truths revealed, curiosities satisfied.

How could I have been so blind? Sitting, watching, waiting, like a fat cat in a patch of sunlight, for years before she came along—but seeing nothing, really, feeling nothing but the slow crawl of time and minutes hardening like plaster in my veins. I remember Sandra’s death, vaguely. I saw the last fight she ever had with Martin, and the twenty-four hours that followed: the glass refilled and refilled, the stumbling and vomiting, the crust of blood on her lips.

I saw her load the gun, of course. How could I not? We can’t choose what we see.

But afterward . . . was I happy that she came to join me? Was I secretly pleased when she elbowed her way through the soft folds of my new nonbody, like a splinter beneath a surface of skin? Probably. And so I barely noticed the cleanup, the police, the sad small group of strangers who came to haggle over her pots and lamps and sofas when they were put up for sale.

I didn’t notice little Joey Houston, all grown up to become Joe Connelly, whom I had last seen sitting next to his mother at his father’s funeral service. I didn’t see the resemblance in the proud, hooked nose and determined chin, in the ears that stick out just a little more than usual.

Joseph Houston. Thomas’s son.

I’ve been so wrong—so wrong about everything.

I want to tell Sandra.
You were right.

And Thomas:
I forgive you.

And our little baby girl, the small promise that grew inside me like a flower under glass:
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

But those are just words, and words are just stories, and eventually, always, stories come to an end.

Caroline has changed into old jeans and a nubby sweater, and she returns to the dining room with her makeup scrubbed off and her hair tied in a ponytail. She must have snuck a few drinks. She is brighter eyed than she was just twenty minutes ago.

“Trenton, are you ready? Do you have the ashes?”

“Minna has them,” Trenton says. “I was just going to check—” Trenton is cut off. The kitchen door bangs open, and a second later Minna appears in the dining room, breathless, her hands covered with dirt.

A shadow moves across the sun; the house, my rooms, my mind goes dark. The end is very near.

“Come quickly,” Minna says, speaking not to her mom or brother but to Danny. “I—I found something. Holy shit.”

“What kind of something?” Trenton says.

Minna’s hands tighten on the door frame. I feel as if every single door in the house had been slammed shut at once—tight with expectation and terror. “It’s a kid.”

“A
what
?” Danny says.

“A baby.” Minna swallows and pushes her hair back, leaving a smudge of dirt on her cheek, like a single tear. “In a box.”