Twelve Rooms with a View (32 page)

“Bye, Tina, be a good girl,” he said. And he gave me a little look, like there was no need to say anything about my past just now but also no need to pretend I didn’t have one. Scott and Andrew were collecting their clothes as well. I reached out and kind of grabbed Andrew’s wet fingers, and he lifted my hand to his mouth, kissing it sweetly while he raised an eyebrow at me. Vince watched the mass exodus of gay men with a smirk; there was no question in his mind that he was going to get a turn with me in the hot tub. And then the retreating Roger threw me a lifeline. “Are Dave and Edward still here?” he called from the next room.

This clipped Vince right across the back of the neck. He turned, caught out somehow, and his face got all thoughtful, like he really cared whether or not Dave and Edward were still there. “Yeah, they’re in the kitchen, cleaning up, with Jonathan,” he called back. Loose towels were lying around everywhere by this point, and I had one in my hand before he had time to turn back.

“You’re not getting out?” he asked, petulant, as he slid into the bathroom and closed the door. “Come on, I just got here.” There was a spoiled and wicked glint in his eye, and his bare chest seemed to immediately glisten as it came in contact with the humidity. This was a dangerous, soggy moment at the very least, a moment when one’s weakness for hot, problematic men might be tested. The one thought that kept me from doing something stupid was the question that good-hearted Roger had flung over his shoulder just before Vince shut the bathroom door.

“What’s the story with Dave and Edward?” I asked. “I hear they’re both in love with you.” Vince cocked his head at this, somewhat amused, and gave me enough time to wrap myself in that towel and step out
onto the tiles. I wobbled a little, as the floor was slippery and I was drunk—a little less drunk, fortunately, since Vince had arrived and put a straight male damper on things—but class triumphed. Vince reached out, a perfect gentleman, and steadied me.

“Who told you that?” he asked.

“Roger and Lyle, they said that half the gathering is in love with you. Is it possible that you have not told those nice boys which side of the fence you fall on?” I asked.

“Not that it’s any of your business, Tina, but Dave and Edward and some of the other men here have a fair amount of disposable income that they are considering investing with me. It doesn’t have anything to do with fences. Or falling. You look very fetching, wearing nothing but pearls.” He was hovering over me, and that thing had happened where I just fit so neatly into the curve of his shoulder it seemed inevitable that we were going to end up having sex on the floor. His arm was curling down my naked back, and his mouth was closing in on mine. Honestly, it was not the kind of situation I would have resisted under normal circumstances, but my loyalties were not to my past at this moment.

“Vince—I’m not going to have sex with you in your bathroom while you have guests in the next room who are in love with you, because you’re letting them think you might be gay so you can get them to give you money,” I informed him. His face was right up against mine, so I literally had to whisper it into his ear. “It’s not going to happen, Vince. I like those guys. You shouldn’t fuck around with them.” I wobbled again and wheeled myself around on my toes, grabbing on to the front of his shirt as I did. For a second he thought he was going to get lucky even though I was telling him he wasn’t, but then he realized I had just repositioned myself so I could grab my dress and scoot out the door.

Which is what I did. Lyle and Roger and Scott had moved back to the living room and the kitchen, to rejoin the party, which was still in progress. But Andrew was still there in the bedroom, pulling his ash-colored cashmere crewneck over his head carefully, to keep it from stretching. He looked up and smiled and reached out for my dress, which I handed to him. I finished drying myself off while he went back
into the bathroom to find my underwear and stockings and heels, which I had dropped carelessly in corners when I took them off. Andrew helped me slip them on, and then my dress, and neither of us said a thing about Vince watching the whole operation from the door of the bathroom. You can watch all you want, I thought; this is as close as you’re going to get to me or Sophie’s dress or Sophie’s pearls.

A
FTER
I
KISSED ALL THOSE NICE BOYS GOOD-BYE
, I
WENT
BACK
TO
my beautiful empty apartment and pulled on a T-shirt and crawled into my little bed on the floor and had a dream. It was not a very subtle dream. I was out at the Delaware Water Gap, standing in front of my trailer, alone. The wind was blowing the few trees around so violently that they looked like they might come down. I knew a terrible storm was coming, so I looked around for Alison and Lucy and Mom, but I couldn’t see them anywhere. So I ran into the middle of the trailer park to see if I could find them. I could see people in the other trailers, but they were just moving around inside, I didn’t know who they were, and every now and then one of them would come to the door to look at me and wave me away. Everyone wanted me to go back to my trailer. One lady started to yell at me and point, and when I looked where she was pointing, I could see a tornado coming, a real tornado with a funnel cloud that seemed to reach all the way to the ground. It was maybe half a mile away and coming right at us. She kept waving her arms, like you have to go home, you have to get to safety, so I ran back to the trailer, even though I knew no one was there, and I knew that a trailer is the last place you want to be during a tornado. I kept thinking, you should just get down on the ground, Tina, get down, that’s your only chance. But when I looked at the door of the trailer, I thought someone was in there, maybe Alison or Lucy or Mom had come back and I needed to rescue them. So I went into that terrible old plywood and aluminum trailer, which was empty and dark, but no one was in there, and then the tornado hit and I knew it was too late for me and everybody.

Which of course woke me up. I sat upright, my heart pounding, and for a terrible second I didn’t know where I was. That room was usually so dark, but for some reason light was spilling all down the wall.
Then I heard someone crying, like a child, long miserable sobs, and I didn’t know if it was me or the dream or the ghost or someone breaking into my apartment; honestly, it was disorienting as hell. So I held my hand over my heart, trying to force it to slow the fuck down, and then I turned to see where the light was coming from, thinking I had just forgotten to turn off the hall light, and I saw someone standing in the doorway. A child, in a nightgown, holding a club. And she was real.

“Oh my
god,”
I said. “Holy
shit
. Jesus God above, what do you want? Oh my god.” I don’t think I’d ever been so scared in my life. Truly. Over the past two months my mother had died, I’d been invaded, I’d been arrested, I’d met a ghost—and nothing tossed me into complete unblinking terror the way that kid standing there with a club did. I crept up the wall, hoping it would swallow me up and protect me from this unholy vision. It didn’t. But rather than enter the room swinging, the kid just stood there and sobbed.

“What do you want?” I said. “Seriously. Seriously. What do you want?”

“You didn’t come back!” the kid wailed. “Why didn’t you come back?” And then she just stood there and sobbed even harder.

“Katherine?” I said. She stood there and cried, and then she dropped the club on the floor. It was in fact a flashlight, not a club, and another crazy beam of light careened through the room and caught the wall with the sunset painting, then me in the face. But by this time I was out of the bed and across the floor. I scooped Katherine up and held her against my chest.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said, while my heart tried to find something approximating a normal rhythm. “How did you get here?”

“Everybody’s mad all the time,” she told me. “And Jennifer won’t get out of bed.”

Working as best I could on the shreds of information the unhappy girl choked out between sobs, I picked up the flashlight and walked out toward the front of the apartment. “You said you would come get us,” Katherine accused me. “You said we could see your apartment.”

“So now, because you are so brave and impatient, you get to see it,” I said cheerfully, flicking on the lights as I passed through rooms and
hallways. “You are right. I was just too busy and I didn’t come back and I promised I would, so now I will show you
everything
. Did you tell your mom where you were going?” I assumed the answer would be no, and I was already trying to figure out what on earth I was going to tell Mrs. White when I presented her errant daughter to her in the middle of the night.

“How come there’s no furniture?” asked Katherine, looking around. “How come the secret room has all the furniture but there’s none out here?” I stopped and looked at her.

“How do you know about the secret room, Katherine?” She looked back at me while I figured it out. “Is that how you got in?” I was standing in the great room now, and I could see, in the moonlight, that all my locks were securely fastened. “You came in through the secret room, through the trapdoor!” I exclaimed, like this was the smartest thing I had ever heard, giving her a little poke. She giggled, finally relaxing. “How did you get the trapdoor open?” I asked.

“We carved a hole in it,” she said. “Do you want to see?”

“I do. I think I would like to see that, a lot.”

So I turned around and carried Katherine back to the far end of the apartment, where the door to the lost room stood ajar, which was not how I had left it.

“Did you open the door?” I asked her.

“I had a flashlight,” she said, as if this explained everything.

“Didn’t the ghost scare you? Sometimes she’s really loud.”

“That’s not a ghost, that’s a person,” Katherine told me. “She lives in Mrs. Westmoreland’s apartment.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Jennifer figured it out when she was trying to make the hole.”

The kid was a font of information. She led me into the secret room, past the plundered cardboard boxes, and over to the far wall, where a cupboard had been jammed open, barely. With so many boxes stacked in front of it, I hadn’t noticed that cupboard.

“Look,” said Katherine. It’s just steps.” And sure enough, it was exactly as Louise had suspected that night not so long ago. The narrowest of stairways rose and turned within the wall itself.

“Wow,” I said. “That is amazing. So you guys worked the plug out?”

“Jennifer did it.”

“And how did you get this one open?”

“I just pushed it.”

“Did Jennifer help you?”

“Jennifer’s in bed. Can you come talk to her?”

“Well, it’s kind of late,” I reminded her.

“She’s really sad,” Katherine said again, her eyes wide. “She keeps getting yelled at.”

“Why?” I asked. This was not sounding so good.

“Because she won’t get out of bed.
Never
. You have to come
now.”

“All right, all right,” I agreed. “You have to go back to bed anyway.”

Now that I realized how the kid had gotten there, the need to get her back without anyone realizing she’d been gone seemed pretty paramount. I most certainly did not want her mother, or her notoriously reactive father, to stick her or his head into Katherine’s room and find her gone into a hole in the wall that led directly to my apartment. Obviously I was not the one who had cracked open the crawl space, but to someone who was inclined to look at it that way, this whole situation might look like I was the one doing the breaking and entering into the Whites’ apartment. I looked up the stairwell and then back at Katherine, formulating the shred of a plan.

“Listen,” I said. “Don’t tell anybody about this, okay? For right now this has to be a secret, and if your mommy finds out about it we’re both going to be in big trouble.”

“Why?” said Katherine.

“I don’t know, kid, that’s just the way it is sometimes. We’ve got to get you back up there and plug the hole up and then think about this.”

The ancient red brick stairs built into the wall were curled, claustrophobic, and vertical; I had to grab on to each step above with my hands, and I could hear and feel small living things moving around. Some of them, frankly, were not so small. I remembered from some grade-school history class that people in New York in the nineteenth century didn’t have enough milk, so many of them died young, and
those who survived were really short, which is doubtless how those Victorian workmen managed to fit into this horrifying space. They also lived in tiny, dark tenements, so climbing up terrifyingly claustrophobic hidden staircases must have seemed normal to them. Or maybe it’s just that being poor in any century sucks, and if you have no money you have to do impossible things to survive. Anyway, climbing up that walled-in crawl space certainly seemed impossible, and by the time I tumbled through the hole in the wall onto the floor of Katherine’s closet I was having trouble breathing.

“That’s kind of scary,” I admitted. When I glanced back at the thin snap of the stairwell as it wound its narrow way up the inside of the building, I saw the shape of an enormous rat slowly disappearing above us. “WHOA,” I said, then tried too late to lower my voice. “Wow. Whoa, there’s, that’s scary.”

“You said that twice,” Katherine noted.

“That’s because it’s really actually pretty fucking scary,” I said. “How does this work?” I looked at the wooden slab that Jennifer had somehow crowbarred out of the wall.

Before I could stop her, Katherine pushed it back in to show me. “It just sticks in the wall,” she said. “See?”

“And how did you get it out?”

“Well. You put your fingers here,” she explained, demonstrating with seven-year-old confidence. “And then you just pull it.” She pulled. Nothing happened.

“That’s how you do it?” I asked.

“It’s stuck,” she said.

“It can’t be stuck, Katherine. You just did it ten minutes ago. How can it be stuck?” I gave it a try myself, and of course the plug was stuck. On one side, several gouge marks revealed where Jennifer had located its weak spot and managed to pry it out, but because Katherine had pushed it back at an angle, the handhold was now apparently useless. “Oh, boy,” I said, trying not to panic.