Dark Rooms (10 page)

“That's him,” Max says, his face lighting up. “Renee, too.” He calls
out, “Hey, come in here, both of you. I want to introduce you to the newest member of our team.”

The woman, Renee, is through the door first. She's fortyish, blond, a little chubby, in black jeans as tight as leggings. She's smiling at me nicely, though. And right behind her is Damon Cruz. He's peeling the lid off a cup of coffee, head down. By the time he raises it, he's almost walked into me. He stops short, freezes, his face only inches from my own. Up close I notice all sorts of things I missed earlier: the grit of beard, a day or two's worth, on his cheeks and jaw, the faint smattering of acne scars near his hairline, the bridge of his nose, slightly crooked, like the bone had been broken and then inexpertly set. It's a tough face, a face that matches up with the wife beater and the muscles, the morning drinking and the pulpy mouth. There's one thing on the face that doesn't match up, though. The eyes. They aren't hooded, and they aren't hard and black, the kind that give back nothing when you look into them. They're bare and a soft liquid brown.

He's staring at me, his gaze intense but not quite focused. Then he lowers his lids in a long cutoff blink. When he lifts them again, they barely come up halfway, and I realize that his eyes are normally hooded, were wide only temporarily, with surprise. The softness in them, too, is gone, if it was ever even there in the first place, if it wasn't just some trick of light.

“Damon,” Max says, “this is your driver. Her name is—” He turns to me. “What's your name?”

Damon takes a casual step back. “Hi, Grace.”

“Hi,” I say, surprised he knows my name, though classes are small enough at Chandler that it's hard not to know everybody's.

Max's eyebrows climb his forehead. “She a friend of yours?”

“Chandler,” Damon says.

“Then I can save my breath, skip the introductions.” Max holds out a stack of slips. “I just approved these bonds.”

“Max, I told you, I don't need a driver. Frankie doesn't start at U
Bridgeport until the second week in September. He said he'd take me around.”

“The second week of September is in a few days. Forget Frankie.”

“Then I'll find somebody else.”

“You ready to go out again?”

“But I—”

“Or do you want to ice the knee first?”

I glance down at Damon's knees, see a brace on the left one, black so that it blends in with the dark blue of his jeans, my brain going click, click, click: he wasn't lurching around Glen Flynn's office this morning because he was drunk, he was lurching around because he was hurt.

Damon shakes his head, an angry muscle twitching in his cheek, and snatches the slips from Max's hand. Without a word, he turns, exits the office. For a couple beats I just stare at the coffee cup he left on Max's desk. Then I snap to, grab my bag from the back of the chair. I have to run to catch up. For a guy in a brace, he moves fast.

That puke smell sure isn't fading in a hurry. For the rest of the afternoon I sit in my car, windows down, breathing through my mouth while Damon goes in and out of the courthouse, consults with his uncle via cell. He barely looks in my direction, doesn't say a word to me other than
left
,
right, stop,
and
wait
. We finish at six. He tells me to take him to the YMCA downtown.

“Okay,” I say, “sure. But the equipment in Houghton's nicer.”

He glares at me. “You think I don't know that?”

“So why don't you go there?”

He's silent for so long I assume he's ignoring me. But then he says, “Because the fob in my Chandler ID expired today.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot. First day of the new school year. Maybe, though, an exception can be made. I mean, it's to do your rehab exercises and you were, like, the best guy on the baseball team, right?”

Another lengthy silence. And then he says, “I met with some
asshole administrator who's supposed to be in charge of maintaining Chandler's buildings or operating them—some fucking thing.”

Glen Flynn, Director of Facilities. So that's what Damon was doing in the Business Development Office this morning. “What did this asshole say?”

“Current students only. I told him Coach Morrissey would vouch for me, to talk to him.”

“So did he?”

Damon snorts. “Said he did, left the room for twenty minutes, but I doubt it. Probably hid out in the faculty lounge.”

“I can let you in with my ID. Employees are allowed to use the gym too.”

“Forget it. They don't want me, they don't have to have me.”

I shrug, start the car.

After dropping off Damon at the Y, I drop off myself at home. I close the door behind me, toss my keys in the bowl on the end table.

The house is quiet, the only sound the laundry tumbling around in the dryer in the basement, a button or a zipper pinging the sides of the machine every few seconds. I feel a thump of tiredness, sit down on the bottom step of the staircase. Then I feel a thump of hunger, start foraging around in my bag. Find the package of Wheat Thins and two of the Hershey's Miniatures. I begin to eat. The rhythmic motion of my jaw soothes me, puts me in a trance, and I stare straight ahead, eyes unfocused, munching, munching.

Dad's voice comes down from upstairs. “Hello?”

“It's me, Dad.”

“Gracie?”

“Uh-huh.” I alternate bites of chocolate with bites of cracker: sweet, salty, sweet, salty.

“Good timing, sweetheart. Dinner's just about ready.”

“Do you need me to set the table?”

“Already done. Just go wash your hands. I'll be right down.”

I put the last bite in my mouth but my appetite's vanished as suddenly as it appeared, and it seems like too much energy to chew or swallow. So I wait for enough spit to build, then let the lump slide down my throat. Slowly I get to my feet, walk to the kitchen.

I must have seen it a hundred times, so you'd think by now it would have lost its power, fail to affect me. But it always does.
Nica's Dream,
the black-and-white photograph of my sister hanging above the table, taking up almost the entire wall length-wise and half of it height-wise. In it, Nica, eleven, is lying in the grass in the backyard of our house, head turned away from the camera. The cutoffs she's wearing have ridden up so high you can see the pale linty lining of her pockets, the dim hollow of her groin. Her halter top's twisted around her torso, revealing her stomach, smooth and concave, stretched between the twin knobs of her hipbones. A Band-Aid hangs off her right heel and the paint on the nail of her big toe is chipped. In spite of the fact that she's slender to the point of scrawny, totally undeveloped, her body gives off a glow, a heat that's as undeniable as it is unsettling. Maybe it's the way her mouth, greedy and carnal, is nuzzling her bare shoulder. Or the way one of her hands is tucked between her thighs, like she's in the throes of a sex dream, dreaming but somehow also dead, climaxed in death, eyes closed, neck limp, skin waxy. Her other hand loosely clutches a peach, round and dimpled and fuzzed, glossed to sinister perfection. The poisoned fruit from a fairy tale.

I remember the day the picture was taken. It was in the spring, a Sunday. Mom woke up that morning hungry for peaches. She sent dad to the farmers' market at Billings Forge. Wouldn't even let him shower first. I liked to look at the arts and crafts stands—jewelry made out of sea glass, woodcut magnets in the shapes of states and vegetables, hand-knit hats with animal faces—so I went with him.
In front of a sign for eggs from free-range chickens we ran into Dr. Brewster, Chandler's headmaster, tall and elegant and silver-haired, carried a black cane like Mr. Peanut. He and Dad started talking, a conversation full of too-long pauses and downward looks, smiles that came at the wrong time. Hoping to bring it to an end, Dad asked Dr. Brewster to stop by the house for lunch. Dr. Brewster was known to be reclusive, hardly ever socialized with faculty, so Dad wasn't expecting him to say yes. He did, though.

When Dad told Mom, his eyes wet and blinky as he unhooked the canvas tote bag from his shoulder, she put down the proof she'd been examining. Silently she watched while he and I unloaded the papayas and mangoes and strawberries and apricots onto the counter. Then she turned, exited the kitchen. Mom had recently taken the job of weekend high school sports photographer for the
Farmington Valley Post
because she needed extra cash to rebuild her darkroom. Her Saturdays were now spent hopping all over Hartford County, from baseball diamond to lacrosse field to tennis court. So Sunday was her one free day, and she liked to devote it to her own work, her real work, she called it.

As she mounted the stairs, she shucked her T-shirt, no bra underneath, flung it at Dad, who was trailing her, me trailing him. He paused at the threshold of their bedroom to peel it off his face, then followed her inside. She was already ransacking the closet, small high breasts bobbing as she pushed the hangers brutally apart, kicked at the shoes in her way, knowing her half nakedness embarrassed him, not caring, taking angry pleasure in his discomfort.

He looked at her, then at his feet, blinking rapidly, as if his eyes hurt. “I could”—hesitating, trying to figure out what he could say that would calm her, that would fix this—“call Dr. Brewster. The Chandler Directory's right in the desk drawer.”

“And tell him what, Hank?” she said, eyes sharp, full of scorn. “That you just remembered the kitchen burned down? It's too late.”

As she yanked something silky out of a dry-cleaning bag, she glanced up at the doorway from which I was peering. Now those sharp, scorn-filled eyes were on me.

Dad turned, saw me standing there, unmoving, transfixed, so vulnerable to attack I might as well have had a target painted on my face. He took two quick steps to his right so that, once again, he was at the other end of her gaze, and shielding me. “Let's go make lunch while Mom finishes getting dressed, sweetheart,” he said, talking to me but looking at her. And then, hand in hand, we backed slowly into the hall.

Dad barely ate or spoke the entire meal. Just sat there, gripping his fork, blinking like a nervous dog. He was waiting for Mom to act up—to pout or sneer or give monosyllabic answers, signal in some way to his boss and hers that the invitation had been extended against her wishes. I knew she wouldn't do any of those things, though. Not for reasons of self-preservation, which, as far as she was concerned, weren't reasons at all, but for reasons of pride: she'd never let an outsider see her anger. And while she hated to be social, she was extremely good at it when she wanted to be, and that day, as it so happened, she did.

Early afternoon turned into late afternoon turned into later afternoon and, when Dr. Brewster finally left, bending deeply over Mom's hand to press his lips to it, saying something to her in French in a low tone, the smile died on her face and she sagged against the back of the door. “The day's almost gone,” she wailed. And as she brushed past me I could feel her frustration, hot and urgent, surging through her body, coming off her skin, scorching mine.

She grabbed her Leica and rushed outside to the daffodils blooming at the base of the tree in the backyard, the ones she'd been photographing since they'd appeared three weeks before. The pictures were failures so far, she'd said, and had torn them all up, though I loved them—the extreme close-ups of the flowers' eyes, beady and jaundiced, the whorls in their petals as distinctive as fingerprints, and, in
the corner of the frame, the roots of the tree, gnarled and big-knuckled and scarred-looking, rising up out of the earth like a zombie hand.

Mom went through her usual routine: adjusting a leaf, straightening a stalk, coaxing one blossom forward, pushing another back, then appraising the composition as a whole, waiting for the light to get the way she wanted it, bringing her lens in tight. But, after twenty or so manic clicks of the shutter, she stopped. Stumbling over to the porch, she sank onto the top step.

I'd followed her outside, was reading on a blanket a few yards away. From behind my book I watched her. She didn't move. For five minutes. Ten minutes. A quarter of an hour. Finally I slid on my flip-flops, crossed the grass so that I was standing in front of her. Her eyes were shut and her face was less like a face than a mask: beautiful and sculpted and cold. I put my hand on her arm, knowing she disliked to be touched but needing reassurance, proof that she only looked lifeless. She twitched under my fingertips. Relieved, I held out my book to her. “I only have fifty pages left and I started last night. See?”

“Why don't you show your father, Grace,” she said, her voice coming out a raspy whisper. “I have a headache.”

“Should I get you an aspirin?”

“No thank you.”

She was answering me, politely even. And I knew I shouldn't push my luck, should leave her alone. I couldn't, though. She was unhappy and I felt her emotions too keenly to do nothing. “What about a cold facecloth for your forehead?” I said. “I could go inside and get you one.”

This time she didn't answer. Just shook my hand off her arm.

Dad appeared behind the screen door, a dishtowel tucked in the waist of his pants. “Everything all right?”

“Mom doesn't feel well.”

He exchanged an uneasy glance with me, then stepped out onto the porch. “Claire, honey, why don't you lie down? You can take pictures
next weekend.” When there was no response, “You didn't eat a bite at lunch. I could make you something. Anything.” After a pause, he said, “Or you could just have some of the fruit I bought. I washed all of it. I know you wanted peaches but I spoke with one of the farmers and apparently there was a frost at the beginning of the month, which means that peach season will be delayed a few weeks.” His laugh came out a stutter. “There was nothing I could do.”