Dark Rooms (40 page)

I mean it and she knows I mean it. I can see the resignation in her eyes as she pushes off me, goes back to the bedpost.

At first I'm relieved that she's giving up. But then I look at her face as she plays with the fringe on her cutoffs, see the sadness there, and my heart feels like it's breaking apart in my chest. I reach out for her hand. She lets me take it, but her fingers are limp in mine. And even though we're touching, there's something so distant in her expression and in the silence between us that I'm frightened. “Nica?” I say.

Her eyes, bleak and shutdown, turn to me.

“I know you think what I'm doing is stupid. Maybe it is stupid. But I love you more than I love anyone. And there's no place I'd rather be.”

I don't know till that moment that I'm going to say these words, and I think I'm just saying them to get that sad look off her face. As soon as they're out of my mouth, though, I realize they're true.

She realizes it, too, her eyes widening and clearing, her tears stopping, her breath catching in her throat. And then her fingers shift in my hand, curling around the side. It's a movement toward drawing me closer, faint but definite. I feel as if I've crossed every boundary that exists—between past and future, living and dead, world and underworld—to reach this point, this moment.

I must blink because without seeing her come toward me, she's suddenly got me by the shoulders, her fingers clutching, squeezing, grasping, making me wince. She presses her mouth to mine, so hard I can feel the teeth under the flesh, and under the teeth the bones of her skull. Her tongue splits my lips, keeps going, not just into my mouth, down my throat. I try to move back but her grip only tightens. Her tongue is probing, deeper and deeper. I start to gag on it, to choke. It's impossible to breathe.

I blink again and Damon's face fills my eyes. Only for an instant, though. I twist away as everything inside me floods out in a hot, wet gush. It comes and it comes until there's nothing left, just saliva, then just air. I fall back on the bed, my stomach empty but still contracting, my brain spongy and strange. I stare at the ceiling, try to sync myself with where I am and what is happening.

And then Damon's voice says, “I found these at the bottom of the stairs.”

I look. He's sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed. He's holding Ruben's baggie with a hand covered in throw up. Seeing the pills makes me remember something. Quickly I turn to the floor on the other side of the bed. No Shep.

“Is this all you took?” Damon says. When I don't answer, he shakes the baggie to get my attention.

I turn back to him, pull the trazodone bottle out of my pocket.

Rolling to his feet slowly, like he's tired or in pain, he flips on the lamp and takes the bottle from my hand. “Jesus, and you washed it all down with vodka?”

I look at him dazedly, uncomprehendingly, then at the bottle of Smirnoff Silver, what Dad drinks when the Jim Beam's gone, tucked under his arm.

His manner suddenly brisk, Damon says, “Get up. I'm taking you to the hospital.”

“Where is he?” I say, croak, really, my throat torn up from the violence of the vomiting.

“Let's go. Give me your keys. Now. We need to make sure all that poison's out of you.”

“Damon, where's Shep?”

“Shep?”

“Mr. Howell, okay? Mr. Howell.” There's a hysterical rise in my voice. “He didn't do this to me. I did it to myself. He was just trying to help. He didn't know anything. All he was doing was sitting with me.” I'm near tears. “Did you hurt him?”

Damon looks at me for a long moment before shaking his head.

“Then where did he go?”

Damon places his non-throw-up-covered hand on my arm. “Come on,” he says gently.

I push him away. He's lying. He hurt Shep. Or if he didn't, he must've threatened to, or yelled, scared Shep off somehow. Shep couldn't have gone far, though. I crane my neck, straining to catch a glimpse of him. Had he slipped into the bathroom? The hallway? Or was he hiding somewhere? Behind the bookcase maybe? In the closet?

And that's when I see the fleece, folded neatly at the foot of the bed.

I'm still looking at it when Damon says, “You were by yourself, Grace. You were all alone.”

That kiss Nica gave me wasn't just a kiss of life, it was a kiss of death, too.

I passed out on the way to the hospital. And even though Damon had already induced vomiting, they jammed a tube down my esophagus, pumped my stomach anyway. I'd overdosed not only on trazodone, as it turned out, but on Xanax, as well. (Ruben's supplier, I guess, hadn't been fucking with him after all. At least not that time.) And when I woke up, a doctor with gray skin and stubble, eyes razor-slits of exhaustion, asked me if I knew I was pregnant, then told me I wasn't anymore. I cried and cried, my tears a mixture of relief and disappointment, the same mixture I'd felt in Nica's bedroom once I'd realized that Damon had got there just in time, that I wasn't going to die. The fact of the matter was, in spite of knowing the truth about how the baby was conceived, understanding the havoc having it would wreak on my life, I still thought of it as Nica's, a part of her alive inside of me, and would never have been able to do anything to hurt it, not
deliberately. And when I think about the miscarriage even now, six months later, I feel a wave of sadness that just fells me, or a wave of guilt for not feeling sad enough that fells me every bit as hard in a different way. So I try not to think about it, try to put it out of my mind. I know now that there are some things thinking doesn't help.

Damon ended up needing to see a doctor, too. Running from the hospital to Jamie's dorm to my house (my phone had indeed cut out mid-message, but he'd heard enough of it, enough to rip off his brace, bolt from Max's room without a word of explanation), he retore his ACL. The second was a more serious tear. He had to go back in for surgery, and his athletic future looks less certain than ever. He's hopeful, though, and never skips his rehab exercises.

I know because apart from those seventy-two hours I was on psychiatric hold, I've been with him all day, every day pretty much. Not only are we working together at Fargas Bonds, we're also basically living together. I'm with him at his grandmother's house five, six nights a week. Though he's the person I'm closest to, there's a lot we don't talk about: the past, Nica or the baby, or how we really met, the marriage proposal he left on my voice mail, what would have happened if he hadn't barreled into Nica's room that night and forced his finger down my throat. The future either. We're both going to school in the fall, and whether or not we'll remain a couple once I head to western Massachusetts, he to northeastern Connecticut, I have no idea. I try to stay in the present, not get ahead of myself. My sense is that he does the same.

Other than my living situation, it's amazing how little's changed. I ended up not telling anyone besides Damon that Nica got shot by accident that night. And I didn't even tell him about her hand, its possible twitch in Mom's photographs. I'm doing Manny a wrong, I suppose, letting him continue to take the rap for a crime he didn't commit, but that's just how it is. Best thing about being six feet under, no one can hurt you anymore. Dead's dead, in Nica's words.

Dad's still at the house, SAT tutoring in the afternoons, bartending in the evenings. I make sure to have dinner with him once a week, though the weirdness between us hasn't gone away. Maybe it would have a chance to if I told him everything I found out about our family, about Nica, but I haven't yet and I probably never will. He still seems like a man holding himself together with frayed bits of string. One more hard truth and he might fall apart for good. Besides, he knows as much as he wants to, is my feeling. I'm not going to force him to know any more.

Following a touch-and-go first few weeks, Max went on to make a complete recovery. He does, however, tend to get tired quicker. Plus he has Renee hawk-eyeing him, telling him to take it easy or else. I think it was a smart move partnering up with Carmichael, who'll be joining Fargas Bonds full-time this summer.

After our conversation in Ruben's car, I didn't see Jamie for weeks. He vanished, basically. Another stint in rehab, I assume but don't know for sure. What I do know for sure: he turned back up at Chandler in late November, just in time for the U.S. Junior Open. He made it all the way to the finals, his best finish ever. Around Christmas he started dating a girl named Maryanne Hutchinson. Maryanne is a senior, serious, partial to Fair Isle sweaters and patterned flats, a member of the Christian Fellowship. Not his kind of girl at all except that, apparently, she is. He plays guitar at the school's Bible study meetings, I hear. He'll be attending Princeton in the fall.

I'm 99.9 percent convinced that the Shep waiting for me in my house that night was a hallucination brought about by drugs, grief, exhaustion, and more drugs. If the tiniest bit of doubt lingers, it's because I never got the chance to ask Shep whether it was him or not. While I was in the hospital, he disappeared, same as Jamie. Only he disappeared permanently. Maybe Jamie told him the cat was out of the bag as far as the dealing was concerned. Or maybe he just got itchy feet, decided it was time to move on. Either way, he's gone.

I run into Maddie every now and then, usually at the Chandler tennis courts. We aren't making each other friendship bracelets or anything, but we aren't hostile to each other either. I get my information about Jamie from her. About Ruben, too, even though she broke up with him and he's no longer living in Hartford, flunked out of Trinity before midterms, setting some kind of new school record. She chopped off her hair over Martin Luther King weekend. Is wearing it now in a punked-out pixie shag, shaved in back and up the sides. I told her that I liked the cut, that it made her look like Jean Seberg. She didn't know who Jean Seberg was, but seemed pleased by the comparison anyway.

Discord continues to reign between Messrs. Wallace and Tierney. Mr. Tierney, apparently unwilling to share so much as a roof with his former best bud, lobbied the administration for Shep's position as Endicott dorm head before it had even been deemed officially vacant. His request was granted and he now lives in the cottage. Mr. Mills and Mrs. Bowles-Mills are still married, so I assume he's managed to keep his mouth shut. As for the affair between Mr. Wallace and Mrs. Bowles-Mills, I don't know if it's going on anymore or not. If it is, they're discreet about it.

The guidance counselor hired to replace Shep, a Ms. Lynch, is young but already professional seeming. She posts a new inspirational message on her office door every day. Stuff like “We Work Best When We Work Together” and “Dare to Dream.” Her fiancé is a junior professor at St. Joseph's College, and they live on its campus rather than Chandler's.

Ms. Lynch wasn't the school's only new addition. Over the course of the year, the counseling and psychology staff was also beefed up. I'm sure after what happened with Nica and Manny the administration was eager to assuage parental anxieties, prove that it was capable of safeguarding its charges' emotional health as well as physical. Whatever the reasoning, it was a good idea. In spite of being located in a city,
Chandler is isolated, its atmosphere tending toward the overheated, its inhabitants—not just the students, the faculty, too—uncommonly prone to hysteria and distortion, the result, no doubt, of being thrown back on themselves and each other so much. Consequently, outside voices are more than welcome; they're necessary.

When it became clear that Shep was gone for good, the Outdoor Club was quietly disbanded. As far as I know, there are no plans to re-form it.

And finally there's my mother. Her show was held in Chelsea in November as scheduled. It made a big splash, so big that some of the droplets even landed on us here in Hartford. Early on in its run, a group of radical feminists got wind of the content of the photographs. Protests were staged, signs held aloft that read
WOMEN CAN BE MISOGYNISTS TOO
and
CHILD PORNOGRAPHY IS NOT ART.
The front of the gallery was doused in a bucket of red paint. There was even an attempt to get Aurora arrested on charges of lewd exhibition. Of course all this publicity only served to make the show—and Mom, a virtual unknown—a huge success. Galleries in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Chicago are now apparently clamoring to display her work. And there was an article in last month's
Artforum
on photography as taxidermy, a whole paragraph of which was devoted to her.

I've heard from her a couple of times. Or rather my voice mail has. She's living in New York now, has a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village with a spectacular view of a brick wall, she says. She says other things, too. That I should come to the city for the weekend, stay with her, for example. Or fly with her to Paris next month where she's been commissioned for a group show. I have yet to call her back. The truth is, I'm afraid to. Just the sound of her recorded voice produces a violent rush of need in me. A need to slap her. To spit on her. To gouge out her eyeballs with my fingernails. To throw myself in her arms. I don't want to know what seeing her in the flesh will do and I don't want to find out.

Still, I can't bring myself to delete the messages.