Twelve Rooms with a View (3 page)

“Moss doesn’t grow inside apartments,” Alison hissed. “We have to get out of here. We have to leave immediately, it will make us all sick. It’s probably what killed Mom.”

“Mom died of a heart attack,” I reminded her.

“We have to leave now, before we all get sick.
DANIEL! WE HAVE TO GO.”

“There’s another apartment back here!” Daniel yelled.

“What?” said Lucy, following him into the black hallway.

“There’s a whole second apartment, another kitchen and another living room or parlor—there’s like six bedrooms and two dining rooms!” he yelled.

“How can there be two dining rooms?” Lucy muttered. And then she disappeared. I looked at Alison, standing very still, arms at her sides. I completely did not want to contribute any fuel to the coming conflagration. But I did want to see the rest of that apartment.

“It’ll be okay, Alison,” I said. “It’s not mold. It’s moss! And Mom
died of a heart attack. Let’s go see the rest of this place, it sounds awesome.” Realizing that I didn’t sound particularly convincing, I bolted down the hallway.

The place
was
awesome. The hall was dark and twisty, and there were rooms everywhere that hooked into other rooms and then hooked back to that twisty hallway farther down. Seriously, you never quite knew where you were, and then you were in a place you had gone through six rooms ago, but you didn’t know how you had gotten back there. And while some of those rooms were as empty and lonely as that giant front room, some of the others were cozy and interesting. One was painted a weird shade of pink that I had never seen before, with no furniture but with framed pictures of flowers on three walls and a gigantic mirror on the fourth wall. No kidding, the room looked six times as big as it was because of that mirror, and you’d jump when you walked in because you thought someone else was there with you, but it was just you. Another room had little beds that were only six inches off the ground and old solar-system stickers stuck on the ceiling, and someone had painted a giant sun setting over the ocean, right on one of the walls. Another room was painted dark purple, with stars on the ceiling and a little bitty chandelier that had glass moons and suns hanging from it. There was no furniture in that room either.

Twelve rooms is a lot of rooms. That apartment felt as if it went on forever, even before I got to the second kitchen and the two dining rooms. That’s where Lucy and Daniel had ended up and were figuring things out.

“This is where they lived,” Lucy observed, looking around.

She was right. There was furniture in these rooms, a couple of chairs and a comfortable couch across from a television set, and a coffee table with a clicker and some dirty plates on it. On one side was the so-called second kitchen, but it was really more of a half-kitchen dinette. It had the smallest sink imaginable, a very skinny refrigerator, and an old electric stovetop with a tiny oven. It was kind of doll-sized, frankly, but nothing was growing on it. And on the other side of this TV room–kitchen area was an archway, and beyond an old bed, with two bedside tables and a chair with some dirty clothes on it. The bed wasn’t made.

“Jesus,” I said, and sat down. Compared to the rest of that great apartment, this little TV-bedroom-kitchen space seemed stupidly ordinary. They lived in the most amazing apartment ever, but they just holed up in the back of it and pretended they were living in a boring normal place like the rest of us. It was overwhelming. Alison, arriving behind me, took a step forward.

“Look,” she said, pointing to the coffee table. “Fish sticks. She was eating fish sticks when she died.”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Lucy, and she reached over, grabbed the plate, and turned back to the tiny kitchenette, where she proceeded to bang the cabinet doors.

“What are you looking for now?” I sighed, lying down on the couch. I could hardly keep my head up.

“It’s disgusting,” she snapped. “That’s just been sitting there for days, I can’t believe no one cleaned it up.”

“Who would clean it up?” I asked.

“Someone, I don’t know who. Who found her—wasn’t it a neighbor? What did they do, just let the EMS people pick up the body and then leave the place like this? It’s disgusting. It could attract bugs, or mice.” Lucy started looking under the little sink for a garbage can. “Oh god, if there are mice, I’m just going to kill myself,” she muttered. “It’s going to cost a fortune to take care of that mold issue; I do NOT want to have to deal with exterminators.”

“Relax,” Daniel told her, turning slowly and taking it all in with a kind of speculative grimace. “We won’t have to do a thing. What’d he say, eleven million? This place is worth more than that as is. With mold and mice and fish sticks on dirty plates and a shitty economy. This place is worth a fortune. We won’t have to do a thing.”

“Oh, well,” said Alison, apparently having something like a philosophical moment. “She had a good life.”

“She had a shitty life,” I said.

“Look, there’re actually some things in the freezer,” Lucy announced, swinging open the little door. “Some hamburgers and frozen vegetables, and the ice-cube maker seems to work … plenty of food. You’ll be all right at least for the next couple of days, Tina, then we’ll
have to spring for some groceries, I’m guessing, because as usual you are completely broke, is that the story?”

“That’s the story.” I shrugged. “Look, seriously, Lucy, maybe we should wait a day. For me to move in? So we have time to like tell the building super and stuff, so they know I’m here?”

“There’s no reason you shouldn’t move in right now,” Lucy said. “You need a place to stay, my place is too small, and so is Daniel and Alison’s. Where else are you going to go? By your own account you can hardly afford a hotel room.”

“This is—it’s just—”

“It’s our apartment. Why not stay here?”

There was a
why not
, obviously. There was a good reason to slow things down, but not one of us wanted to mention it. Even me. You split eleven million dollars three ways, even after taxes? Every single one of us suddenly has a whole new life. I’m fairly certain that was the sum total of all the thinking going on in that apartment when they handed me the keys and told me to sit tight.

I
CAN’T SAY
I
WAS SORRY TO SEE THEM GO
.

The first thing I did was take my boots off. Alison would have thrown a fit if she had seen me. She had already moaned about how dirty the place was, and “who knows what might be lurking in that crummy shag carpet,” like bedbugs or worms or slime from distant centuries might just be waiting for some idiot’s bare foot to come along so it could spread fungal disaster into the idiot’s system. Alison has that kind of imagination; sometimes talking to her is like talking to someone who writes horror films for a living. But I didn’t care; my toes were so hot and tired and I just felt like being flat on my feet before checking the place out more carefully. As it turned out, the carpet was dry and seemed clean enough, just a little scratchy. It really was a pretty hideous color, but I think that’s the worst that could be said about it.

By then the sun
had
gone away, as predicted, and I didn’t have a lot of light to explore by, so I went back to the boring area where Mom and Bill had camped out. I slipped out of the dark blue skirt I had brought for the funeral, pulled on the jeans I had stashed in my backpack, and took a look around their rooms. Lucy had already cased the refrigerator, so I knew there was frozen food. A little casual probing in the cabinets yielded something like sixteen packets of ramen noodles, and then I noticed, on the teeny tiny counter, half a bottle of wine, open and useless, next to three empties. The search continued, and sure enough, when I poked around the laundry room behind the kitchenette I spotted a big pile of clothes on the floor, which looked like nothing until I nudged it with my foot and found two mostly full cases of red wine. I was feeling pretty good about that, so I kept looking, and up in the freezer of that skinny refrigerator, back behind the ice-cube machine, I hit the mother lode: a big bottle of really good vodka with hardly a dent in it.

Knowing my mother, I was sure that would not be the only bottle around. She liked to have a few in reach, so I was pretty sure I’d find some squirreled away in other thinly disguised hiding places. The two cases of pricy red wine told me that Bill was a drinker himself, and for a second I thought, well, at least she finally hooked up with someone who could pay for the good stuff as opposed to the truly undrinkable crap she had survived on the rest of her life.

Anyway, in the door of the refrigerator I found half a bottle of ruby red grapefruit juice, which meant I could have an actual cocktail instead of trying to down the vodka straight or over melted ice. So I made myself a drink, put the water on to boil for the noodles, and turned the television on for company. They had only basic cable, so I found one of those stations that run endless documentaries all the time and started to look around.

The bedroom was not really a bedroom, even though it had a bed. The enormous pocket doors were clearly meant to shut the room off, but they had been left open for so long they were stuck on their rails. Another set of pocket doors made up the entire wall on the other side of the room, but they were stuck closed, with the bed shoved up against them. There was a small alcove built into one wall, with fancy plasterwork up the sides and a crown at the top. That had a dresser in it. There were no closets—just clothes everywhere on the floor—which along with the pocket doors made me think this room was not ever meant to be a bedroom. Daniel had said there were two dining rooms, but I decided this bedroom was really the dining room, and the room behind it with the television was originally the kitchen, where the servants would cook, and then bring the food in through the pocket doors, which probably opened and closed at some previous point in history. Well, honestly, I had no idea what was supposed to be what in this crazy apartment in the other century when it was built. But that’s what I thought.

I also thought, I wonder where Mom’s perfume is? Because back in that freaky bedroom area I smelled it everywhere; it was in all the clothes and the blankets and the sheets, along with the red wine and the cigarettes and dirty laundry and mothballs. I kind of had it in my head that I might find that little black bottle and snag it before Lucy turned it into
a big issue for no reason whatsoever. Seriously, you just never knew when she was going to get all twitchy and start making lists and arguing about everything, and Alison sometimes went along with that shit just because it wasn’t worth arguing with Lucy. The next thing you knew, Lucy would be telling everybody that we’d have to put everything smaller than a paperback into a box and sell it all together because that would be the only way to be fair, and then she’d hand it over to some thrift store for ten dollars, not even enough to buy a pizza. It made no sense to let Lucy try that, so I started looking for that little bottle. I thought that if I found it I could stick it in my backpack and no one would ever know.

The first place I checked was the dresser in the alcove, which seemed like the only place Mom would have put anything of value to her; the rest of the room was nothing but piles of clothes, a chair, a couple of books on the floor, and the unmade bed. Besides, it looked as if she’d been using the dresser as a vanity; there was an old gilt mirror on the wall above it, with the feet of a cherub hanging down from the top. The top of the dresser held a few items—a hairbrush, a comb, an empty glass with a little dry well of alcohol stuck to the bottom. There was a tarnished small round silver box thing, with curlicues and a big French fleur-de-lis on top, and inside was a whole bunch of keys and an old wedding ring and three medals. One of them said CHEMISTRY. There were a couple of really old frames with old photographs of no one I knew, and behind them a couple of unframed photos with the edges curling toward the middle. One was of me when I was about fifteen and going on the first of many disastrous dates with Ed Featherstone. He was a mighty jerk, but at fifteen who knew? But it is a bit of a shock to see yourself seventeen years ago, with your arms around someone who is now seventeen years older and who made a fortune on Wall Street back when everyone was doing that, got out while the getting was good, and now owns lots of property in Connecticut. Whatever. I set aside the silver can of keys, which I thought might be useful for future exploration, and then I looked in the dresser.

The top drawer held her underwear, lots of sad bras and panties, several old pairs of neutral-colored support hose, and a quart bottle of that good vodka. In the drawer just beneath it was Bill’s underwear,
gigantic white and light blue cotton briefs. I so did not want to paw through that stuff—I mean, really, I wanted that little bottle of perfume, which I didn’t think anyone else would want, but I was quickly losing my nerve. I had never even met this nutty alcoholic—who knew what lurked in his underwear? Rather than give up, I pulled the drawer all the way out of the dresser and upended it. There was nothing in there except all those huge pairs of underwear, and a wallet.

A wallet, there was a wallet, and the guy who owned it was dead, and everything he owned got left to my mom, who apparently left everything she owned to me and my sisters. I figured that gave me some rights, so I sat on the floor and looked through it, and lo and behold there were three receipts from a liquor store, a couple more pictures of people I didn’t know, and a lot of money. Bill had seven hundred dollars in that wallet, which would be a significant windfall to pretty much anybody, I think, but it was a miracle to a person of my limited means. I pocketed the cash.

When I leaned over to scoop the now empty wallet and all that underwear back into the drawer, I also happened to notice the no-man’s-land under the bed, which was crowded with boxes. These turned out to be really hard to get to, because they all were just a little bit too big for the space, which meant they were really squashed in there. They also each weighed a ton, as I discovered, since they were full of used paperbacks, most of them mysteries. After about twenty minutes of dragging the boxes out, I was ready to completely give up, until I got to the very last box, which was up by the headboard on the far side of the bed. That one was not full of books. It was full of junk—a crummy handbag, a little red change purse, two pairs of reading glasses, another quart of vodka, nearly empty, and an old cedar jewelry box filled with fake pearls and junky necklaces and a tiny bottle of French perfume.