Dark Rooms (31 page)

But I do know it. I've been driving past it enough lately. It's half a dozen blocks from Damon's grandmother's house. Sleazy is right. The kind of place where everyone who checks in is named Smith or Jones.

Mr. Wallace continues: “That night she stood me up. Bill had too much paperwork to do, decided to skip his meeting last minute. She texted me but by the time I got the message, I was already there. Sitting on that ratty bedspread in that room that reeked of disinfectant, I started to get pretty down about the entire situation. So I wandered into a dive bar around the corner to get good and drunk. Only I couldn't because I'd rushed out of Minot with my money, but not my wallet. The bartender refused to serve me without proper ID. And not just me. There was a young woman having the same problem.”

“Let me guess. Nica.”

“Yes, but I didn't know it. She was all the way at the other end of the bar. I almost fell off my stool when she walked up to me and said, ‘You left your fake ID at home, too, Mr. Wallace?' I started apologizing, making excuses, talking a million miles a minute. She waited until I was done babbling, then told me to relax, that she was the one doing something wrong, not me.”

I grin. “That sounds like her.”

“I walked her out of the bar, was going to take her straight back to campus. But we made a stop first—a liquor store. They didn't want to see my license, just my money. I bought a bottle of Absolut. Then Nica
and I sat in my car, talked, and drank. Correction, I talked and drank. Didn't let her do either.” He laughs, then falls quiet. A minute or so later he says, “I'm sure I seem old to you, but I'm only twenty-three. Last year I was twenty-two, a couple months out of college. Jeanne's my first girlfriend.” He looks at me, his face reddening. “That's probably hard for you to believe. It's true, though. It was—is—an incredibly intense experience for me. Not just the newness of being in love, but being in love with a woman, not a girl. A woman with a husband and a daughter and twelve more years of life lived. It's a lonely experience, too. Because of Jeanne's situation, the tough spot she's in, I can't talk to anybody about what I'm going through. Least of all my closest friend.”

“You mean Mr. Tierney?”

“I do.”

“I'm kind of surprised to hear you call him that. Obviously I know you two hang out but it's hard to believe you're friends—real ones.”

“Maybe if we'd met in another context, college or something, we wouldn't be. In fact, I'm certain we wouldn't be. It's different, though, here. At Chandler we're so cut-off. And he and I are the youngest teachers by a pretty wide margin. We live in the same dorm, neither of us is married, so we're thrown together a lot. I know Nick seems like a self-involved guy, wrapped up in his looks, the things he's going to accomplish when he leaves Chandler—and he is—but underneath it all he's a sweet person.”

“Why couldn't you talk to him then? Is it too weird that you were sleeping with the same woman?”

Mr. Wallace looks at me, startled. “We weren't sleeping with the same woman.”

For the first time it occurs to me that he might not know that there's another Other Man. “Well,” I say awkwardly, “not at the same time maybe, but Mr. Tierney was sleeping with Mrs. Bowles-Mills, too.” When this gets no response, I joke, even more awkwardly, “I know, I know, I wouldn't have thought she was his type either with
those earth mother skirts and that Heidi braid.” Then, realizing how insulting this sounds, conclude lamely, “Not that she's not perfectly nice-looking.”

“Nick never slept with Jeanne. And she was his type. He wasn't hers.”

“I hate to burst your bubble, but Jamie Amory saw Mr. Tierney knocking on the Millses' back door in the middle of the night. Mrs. Bowles-Mills let him in.”

I'm expecting anger or dismay—shock at the very least—but I get none of these reactions. “When was this?” Mr. Wallace says, calm as can be. “March?”

I nod, surprised.

“She let him in because she didn't want him making a scene. But he never got past the kitchen.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I was there, in the upstairs bedroom. I heard the whole conversation, all three hours of it. That's when I realized how strong Nick's feelings actually were. I knew he'd been interested, of course. But he'd played it off to me as a casual-type thing. Like he was just looking to get physical with a lonely, sex-starved housewife in a bad marriage.”

It takes me a few seconds to phrase my next question. “If you'd known how Mr. Tierney felt, would you have still gotten together with Mrs. Bowles-Mills?”

Mr. Wallace closes his eyes and lifts the frame of his glasses. I can see my interrogation is tiring him out. He's going to answer me, though, patiently and thoughtfully, same as he's been doing. And as he rubs the pink patch of skin above the bridge of his nose I think what a good teacher he must be. “I probably still would have,” he says with a sigh. “Scummy, I know.”

“At least you're honest.”

“Honestly scummy. Well, that's something, I guess.”

We share a smile, and then I say, “But back to my sister.”

Mr. Wallace lets out another sigh. “Right, your sister. She was a good listener. She was so young, but she seemed to understand things—the complexities of relationships, how you sometimes end up in them with people you wouldn't expect, in circumstances that are less than ideal, how arbitrary the rules of attraction are, how you have no control over who or what excites you.”

I'll bet she understood, I think. Better than anybody she understood. “So you spilled your guts?”

He laughs. “Basically. The next day in class, I could barely raise my head I was so embarrassed. And hungover. Mostly, though, what I was was nervous. Would Nica treat me like a peer now, a buddy? Show that she no longer viewed me as an authority figure? And how could you view the guy whose car keys you'd wrestled away the night before, poured into a cab, as an authority figure? But when I finally did make eye contact, she just gave me a blank look back and I knew I had nothing to worry about. Later I found my car keys in a plain white envelope in my faculty mailbox.”

So cool, I think admiringly. Always so cool.

For a while Mr. Wallace stares at his hands, resting on his wide-apart knees. Then he says, “You've seen the note. Obviously it was me who approached her, who couldn't keep my distance even though I swore to myself I would. It's just that Jeanne was being cold and I thought I saw Bill give me a loaded look and I started to imagine all sorts of awful things. I wrote the note on the bottom of Nica's paper, the one I was grading for Fowler. It was stupid and it was risky. But I was desperate.”

“Did it work? Did she meet you?”

“Outside the same bar. Me telling pretty much the same story.”

“Was she helpful?”

“Oh yeah. I was about to march over to the Millses' house to I don't know what—challenge Bill to a duel, throw Jeanne over my
shoulder caveman style—something idiotic. Nica calmed me down. A good thing, too. I talked to Jeanne the next day. Turned out she was just preoccupied because Beatrice had come down with an ear infection. And Bill's a hostile guy in general. Probably shoots everyone bad looks without even realizing it. Nica saved me from blowing my cover. Blowing Jeanne's and my cover both.”

“Your covers are blown now,” I say, not knowing how else to say it, so just blurting it out.

He looks at me.

“With Mr. Tierney, anyway.”

“What?” he finally says.

I take a deep breath, tell him about my initial misidentification of
T,
the scene that took place in the studio, Mr. Tierney's near-successful attempt to trick me into revealing the affair to Mr. Mills.

“Now I know why he's been avoiding me for the last few days,” Mr. Wallace says when I'm finished. And then, “So Bill doesn't know yet?”

“No,” I say, uneasy at the hopeful note in his voice, “but it's only a matter of time, don't you think? I mean, rightly or wrongly, Mr. Tierney feels deceived. Vengeful, too, obviously.”

Mr. Wallace's head drops, like it's suddenly too much of a burden for his neck to bear. “Yeah, you're probably right. I better warn Jeanne.”

I shouldn't feel guilty. I'm the only participant in this drama besides Beatrice who has nothing to feel guilty about. But I do.

Mr. Wallace and I sit in silence for a long time, watch the last of the day's light shrivel and recede from the room. Finally, I stand and say something about having someplace to be. He looks at me briefly, nods. When I've reached the door, opened it, I turn back to wish him good luck, but he's staring at the note in his lap, neck limp, off somewhere in his mind. I close the door quietly behind me.

I haven't had more than a catnap in what feels like weeks, so I skip dinner, head directly to my room. Climbing the stairs, I write a text to Damon, asking him to check to see if a Mr. and Mrs. Mellors stayed at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge the night of Nica's death. I hit Send as I open the door. My bed has never looked so inviting—rumpled comforter, unwashed sheets, caseless pillow and all.

I'm just tugging on my pajamas when, on impulse, I reach for Mom's camera with the telephoto lens. As I take it over to the window, about to aim it at the Millses' house, I see Jeanne and Beatrice on the sidewalk below. The strap on Beatrice's sandal has come undone and Jeanne is trying to refasten it. Beatrice is looking down at what her mother's doing, sucking her thumb.

Mr. Mills's voice calls out, “Bedtime!” From half a block away I can hear his irritation. “Coming!” Jeanne shouts back. She tries once more to fasten the strap. When she fails, she slips the shoe off Beatrice's foot and into her pocket. Then she stands, gently but quickly lifting
her daughter off the ground. Beatrice is a little big to be picked up like that. She doesn't fight it, though, keeping her thumb in her mouth and settling into her mother's body as if it had been made for her to rest on, the breast formed to pillow her cheek, the arm crooked to support and protect her head. Jeanne starts walking hurriedly, sidestepping the stroller Mrs. Wheeler forgot to bring into the house. Beatrice looks up from her mother's shoulder. When she sees me in the window staring down at her, she returns the stare, her eyes large and grave. Her mouth shapes the word
Hi
around her thumb.

The days of this little girl's happiness are numbered, I think as I mouth a
Hi
back. She'll be separated from the mother who adores her, maybe permanently, and all because of me. The guilt that descends is crushingly heavy. But I feel something else, as well, something lurking beneath the guilt that's even more troubling: a sense of wonderment, of awe almost, that a thing I'd done—
me,
quiet, passive, lives-in-my-thoughts
me
—is having such an impact on other people's lives. It's as if a power I never dreamed of possessing is suddenly mine, and having it fills me with a kind of weird elation.

Ashamed now on top of guilty and whatever else, I shut the curtains with a violent yank. Then I jump into bed, pull the covers over my head.

I fall asleep immediately but it doesn't last long. I'm awake again at midnight. At one. At two. At three. Sick of looking at the clock, watching one hour after another go down for the count, I decide to get something to eat, a Fig Newton maybe. I'm at the bottom of the staircase, a couple feet from the kitchen, when it occurs to me that Dad's probably in it. That's okay as long as he's dead drunk, which he should be if tonight's going for him the way every other night goes. But what if, for some reason, it's not? It'll be awkward if I walk in on him in that in-between state. I should just go back to my room, spare us both the possibility. Thinking about that Fig Newton, though, has made me
want it. So for a full minute I stand there, clutching the banister, head cocked, ears straining. All I hear is the sound of my own breathing.

I step into the kitchen. The first thing I see: Dad, at the table, pitched bonelessly forward, head buried in his arms. In front of him is a bottle of Jim Beam, capless, the warm amber liquid picking up whatever light's in the room. As I creep past him, inhaling through my mouth so I don't have to take in his sad, fusty smell—pencil erasers and herbal throat lozenges, anti-dandruff shampoo—I reach for the whiskey, thinking a slug or two might knock me out. Holding the bottle, though, I can feel the ridges of his fingerprints, their slight tackiness, see a bit of backwash floating on top. My stomach lurches, and I put the bottle down, move on to the cookie drawer.

I've just opened it when I hear a buzzing noise. I jump back, look around wildly. See Dad's cell an inch from his elbow. It's facedown and lit up, the surface of the table tinged green by the reflected glow. Another buzz. Dad stirs in his chair, groans a little. I quickly walk over, grab the phone. It's the alarm. He must've set it accidentally, screwed up the
A.M./P.M.
option.

I'm hunting for the Off button, when I see something that stops me cold: the photograph on the screen. It's of a sheet of loose-leaf notebook paper. I recognize the tiny, crabbed writing, know who it belongs to even before I spot the signature at the bottom of the page. Manny Flores. I'm looking at his suicide note. I read it back in April when the police showed it to my parents and me. I read it again now.

Not quite believing my eyes, I read it a third time. A charge of purest electricity runs through me. This isn't a murder confession.
This. Is. Not. A. Murder. Confession. I know it without knowing how I know it, my intuition faster than my brain. Eventually, though, my brain catches up: when Manny's body was found, Nica's unsolved shooting was on everybody's mind. Manny left behind a note in which he referred to himself as a murderer. A murderer, I'm betting, not because he gunned Nica down, but because he was about to string himself up. And the thing that he did that he was so so sorry for—it could have been anything. My guess, based on his other writing sample, “A Flower's Lament,” is that after finally acting on his same-sex urges, he was so racked with guilt he couldn't live with himself. That's why he said it was done out of love. And the person he hurt? Maybe it was the other guy, thought he seduced him, coerced him into committing a sin. Or maybe it was his mother, like it would pain her to find out she had a gay son. I don't know. I do know the note proves—okay, not court-of-law proves, proves to me, though—not just that he didn't kill Nica, but that someone didn't kill him to frame him for killing Nica either.