Dark Rooms (39 page)

Seconds later, or possibly minutes, the baggie slips from my hand and several pills slip from it, making light pinging noises as they bounce off the hardwood floor. At the sound, my gaze, loose and drifting, falls on the end table and Dad's trazodone, still in its bag from Arrow Pharmacy on Main Street. Staying on my knees, I lunge for it. It's stapled shut, so I just rip it open, pull out the bottle.

Shep leans over me, frowning. “That's prescription, Grace. I was thinking more along the lines of chamomile tea. At most a melatonin tablet.”

“Please,” I say.

He twists my hand so he can read the label on the side of the bottle. When he's finished, he sighs. “Okay, but only for tonight. And stick to the recommended dosage—two pills, that's it. The stuff's more powerful than you think.”

I nod without looking at him, not wanting to take my eyes off the bottle.

“I'll get you some water.”

I already have the two pills waiting on my tongue by the time he comes back. He hands me a glass, and I bring it messily to my mouth, the water tasting funny, though possibly that's the pills flavoring the water, as it goes down my throat.

“Feel better?” he asks me with a smile.

I smile back because I do feel better. A second later, though, I feel worse, much worse, feel nothing but panic and fear. What if two pills isn't enough? What if they don't push me over the edge into sleep?
What if all the Benadryl and NyQuil I've been taking has built up my tolerance? Shep bends over his flip-flop again, this time to adjust the thong, and I shove the rest of the pills in my mouth, swallow them down with the water left in the glass.

As he straightens, he looks at the bottle, an opaque orange, thankfully. But his eyes linger on it and, when they do, dread begins to rise in me. Does he see that it's empty? Casually, I screw the cap on the bottle, slide the bottle in my pocket. To my relief, he returns his gaze to my face.

“Think you can shut off the lights, close your eyes now?” he says.

I'm sure I can do both those things so I nod. Almost instantly, though, doubt sets in and I'm not sure at all. Then more panic, more fear. I don't want to be by myself in the dark. If I know nothing else, I know that.

As if reading my mind, he says gently, “Would you like me to come upstairs with you, sit with you until you fall asleep?”

A lump is forming in my throat and I'm unable to speak, so again I nod. Shep opens his arms. I fall into them. As they close around me, I break down in grateful sobs.

Minutes later I'm climbing the stairs, eyes dry, washed clean, heartbeat measuring every step. I hear Shep's soft-footed tread behind me. Reaching the second floor, I start to turn into my room, then stop. I turn instead into Nica's, untouched by me—by anyone—since I took the clothes from her closet the night of Jamie's Fourth of July party. Without switching on the lights, I crawl into the still unmade bed.

I think Shep is going to sit in Nica's desk chair. He doesn't, though. He pushes to the floor the fleece I'd placed at the bottom of the bed those many months ago, its sleeves tucked tidily under its torso, its zipper zipped snugly all the way to its collar, and arranges his long body at my feet. The room is quiet, so quiet it starts to unnerve me,
and I'm hoping he'll break the silence by talking, and when he doesn't, the panic and fear I thought I'd managed to quell are back, are stronger than before, than ever. But then he takes my hand in his and leans over me, smiling. His smile is full of kindness. And even though he's wearing his sunglasses and I can't see his eyes, I can feel them. And as soon as they touch mine, I experience an instant of communion. I swoon to it.

The pills are already beginning to take effect, the room and everything in it, including me, getting slow and distant and hazy. As the blood in my veins turns to sludge, and my heartbeat slackens to a thud, muffled and thick, then to an ache, dull and monotonous, I continue to look at Shep. I want to keep feeling his kindness, keep feeling that sense of communion while my life grinds to a halt. But it's not his face I'm seeing. It's my own, two of them, reflected in the lenses of his mirrored glasses. And my face is not kind and it doesn't inspire a sense of communion. It's appalling—eyes doped-looking and glazed, mouth hang-jawed and spitty—and all it inspires is disgust. Quickly, I fix my gaze to the ceiling. Seconds go by, and more seconds. Minutes go by, and more minutes. And then I experience an exhaustion so powerful that to not give into it is physically painful.

So I do.

The bed grows meaningless beneath my back. Gravity rolls off me and I'm no longer inside myself.
This is the moment of my death,
I think.
This is when I die
. My gaze, hoisted up over Shep's head, begins to slip. And as it drops down to his face, I'm waiting in dread, expecting to see my own ghastly one, doubled and staring back at me. I don't, though. Or I do, but it's not doubled, and it doesn't look ghastly. Nor does it look like mine. Not quite, anyway. I peer harder. That's when I realize: it's Nica's face.

It's Nica's face!

Quickly I put my hands behind me, half raise myself. She doesn't move forward to embrace me. She doesn't move backward so I can sit
all the way up. She doesn't call my name. She doesn't faint. She doesn't do anything, just stares at me. She looks the same as she did in my car that night in front of Damon's grandmother's house: cutoffs and halter top from when she was eleven, bullet hole in her stomach, cigarette dangling from her lips. Her eyes, though, are dark, darker than I've ever seen them, so dark they seem to glitter.

At first I'm disappointed that she's not as excited as I am. Then I realize that she's probably too shocked to be anything else. “Nica?” I say gently.

At the sound of my voice, her eyes turn darker still. “What are you doing here?” she says in an ugly hiss-whisper. Hearing it, I understand that it's anger her eyes are dark with. That she shouldn't be happy to see me after all I've gone through to get to her seems terrible. Tears sting my eyes. I blink them back.

We stay locked in our positions, our faces inches apart. As time passes, I can feel the silence begin to harden around us like plaster. And then the ash hanging from the tip of her cigarette drops into the hollow at the base of my throat. “Oww! Jesus! Watch it!” I say, scrambling to sit up, holding my shirt away from my skin.

“Sorry,” she says, sounding anything but. She sits back on the bed, resting her spine against one of the posts. Her cigarette has died between her lips. She goes to her pocket for a fresh one and her zebra-striped Bic. I watch as she snicks the lighter, holds it to her mouth. Her face is smooth now, all traces of emotion gone, and when her eyes meet mine, they're steely-cool and faintly disdainful. I wouldn't have thought anything could be worse than her anger but I was wrong.

“Why are you acting like this?” When she doesn't answer, I say, half joking, “This is because I borrowed your jacket without asking, isn't it?”

“You don't understand anything. You never have, you never will.”

I wait a beat, then I say, “I understand you.” In the motionless dark air of her bedroom, it sounds like a profound statement. I mean
it to sound profound. It
is
profound, should change everything between us, rock our relationship to the very foundations. And I wait eagerly for her to respond. But she doesn't appear to have heard me, is staring out the window, smoking.

“Nica,” I say, “I'm telling you, I understand you now.”

Still nothing. It's as if my words are taking a wrong turn somewhere between my lips and her ears. And then she flicks her cigarette to the floor, turns to me, and my heart lifts for a second because I think I've finally reached her. Letting her lids go heavy, she holds her hand in front of her nipple, and, slowly, deliberately, flaps it back and forth.

I explode. “Titty hard-on? Are you kidding me?”

“Why not? It's what you deserve.”

“I don't see that.”

Nica gives a snort of contempt, then goes back to staring out the window.

For a moment I lose my feeling of conviction, as if everything I'm doing makes no sense: I've come to the wrong place to say the wrong words to the wrong person. But I push past my doubts. Say, “You were all I thought about for a long time. Even when I wasn't thinking about you I was thinking about you. Then something happened that made me know I needed to put my thinking into action. Who really killed you? I believed that was the mystery I was trying to solve. It wasn't, though. You were the mystery I was trying to solve.”

“So you solved the mystery, Grace. Big deal. You solved the mystery and it solved nothing.”

I look at her. Her face is still turned toward the window, the white line of her jawbone stark against the blackness of the room. “Knowing who you are isn't nothing.”

She says nothing back, just shakes her head.

I can't help myself. I begin to cry. As I swipe at the tears leaking from my eyes, angry and ashamed, she turns and watches me with clinical interest.

“It isn't nothing,” I say again.

For a while she's quiet. And then she says, “I never wanted this.”

“This what?”

“You, here.”

“What did you want?”

“I wanted you to forget about me, move on with your life. Who cares whether or not you knew who I really was before I died? Who cares why I died, or how? I was dead, and dead's dead. No fixing it, no changing it. So no matter what you learned, how good your detective work was, it would finally be useless, bullshit. You should have seen that right off, let it all alone.”

I'm paying careful attention to her voice as she delivers this speech, am listening for a false note. If she hits one, I don't hear it. Still, though, I don't believe her. I think this is just something she's said to herself so many times it's become truth to her. I need to find a way to crack her surface, break through. And, before I have a chance to stop myself, I start talking, the words just pouring out of my mouth:

“You're telling me you wanted me to forget everything. As if that was possible. But let's just pretend for a second that it was. I don't think that's really what you wanted. Of course I was wrong before when I thought your death and my pregnancy were connected. Obviously I was wrong. It goes without saying I was wrong. At the same time, though, I wasn't wrong at all. The night of Jamie's party, when I dressed in your clothes, wore that wig, I wasn't just out of my mind with grief and pills like I'd always thought. I was doing something deliberate—unconscious, okay, yes, admittedly, but still deliberate. I was trying to seduce your ghost into the present, bring you back one last time, make everybody—Jamie, Maddie, Ruben, and most especially me—see you again. What happened instead, though, was you seduced me into the past. And it wasn't only me you seduced. It was Damon, too. You went to bed with him, I woke up with his baby growing in me. Really, how could I have been the one to lure him
into that room when I didn't even know who he was to you? When I can't remember the act? Not the beginning of it. Not the middle of it. Not the end of it. Nothing. It was as if I wasn't there while it was happening, was outside my body. Which is exactly where I was because you were inside me. And if we—
we,
Nica,
we
—didn't trick him into doing what he did, I would have gone on to Williams and on with my life, though always with one eye over my shoulder and on the past since in the back of my mind there would have been this niggling doubt, this feeling that I'd let you down somehow, screwed it all up. But I did try to seduce you, which got you to seduce me, which got me pregnant. And because I got pregnant, I returned to Chandler, and because I returned to Chandler, I found out the truth about you and what happened to you. And in one sense—the practical sense, the logical sense, the rational sense—you're right, the knowledge is useless and couldn't matter less. But in another sense—the emotional sense, the psychic sense, the deeper, darker, truer sense—it's the only thing that matters. And you know this as well as I do, even if you want to pretend you don't.”

I have no breath left by the time I finish talking and my voice is raw. I've just given words to everything that my imagination and my obsession have taught me. Part of what I said came from half-formed thoughts that have been floating around in my head, and the rest took shape in my mouth as I spoke. Maybe the darkness helped. And having Nica right there in front of me. It's all conjecture, obviously, and of the wildest kind. Still, though, I know it's true.

She's looking at me, her face flushed, her eyes bright, feverish. “You don't have to stay here,” she says. Her voice is taut, urgent. “It isn't too late. Not if you fight.”

“I'm done fighting. And I'm not leaving. Not without you.”

“You know I can't. You still can, though. At least you can try. Try, Grace, try.”

“No.”

“If our situations were reversed, I'd leave you behind.”

“You wouldn't.”

“I would! In a second I would! So fast it would make your head spin I would!”

I just shake my head.

Nica slumps against the bedpost. Then she turns away, eyes closed. When she turns back, her eyes are open and they're as hard and flat as nail heads. Suddenly she's up on her knees, leaning forward and into me. “Do you think you're doing me a favor? Jesus Christ, I had to take a bullet to the stomach to get away from you once. Do you think I want you hanging around me again, a tagalong for all eternity? Don't you have any pride? Any self-respect? Can't you see when you're not wanted?” Tears are streaming down her cheeks now, and her voice has risen almost to a scream. She starts beating on my chest with her fists. “I'm telling you to go! Get out of my sight! Leave!”

I let her hit me, don't try to ward off any of the blows. “I'm not leaving you again,” I say. “Not if I can help it. Not ever.”