Dark Rooms (6 page)

I began fumbling along the wall with my hand. At last I found the light switch. My heart fluttered in my chest, a giggle slipped from my mouth, and thinking to myself,
What fun,
I flipped it. Immediately all activity stopped. Everyone looked up, dazed and blinking. I waited for the laughter that would follow as soon as their vision adjusted. But nobody laughed. Nobody even moved. They stared up at me, eyes all the way open, as if someone had put a cold fingertip to the backs of their necks. And then Maddie uttered a small cry, brought her hand to her mouth. I placed my palm on the banister, started down the stairs.

“Happy Independence Day, Slim Jim,” I sang out. Nica called Jamie Slim Jim, Nica and no one else.

Jamie stood there, plastic beer cup in his hand, his face pale under its tan and covered in sweat. He swallowed, or tried to, the muscles knotting in his throat. I watched Ruben go up to him, say something, but he pushed Ruben aside, moved swiftly to the stairs, his eyes never leaving mine. “What the fuck do you think you're doing?” His voice was harsh, strange. I could see the whites on all four sides of his eyes. Sexy, sleepy, stoned Jamie—mad.

I was unable to speak, only to look.

He dropped his cup, grabbed my arm. I could feel the pressure of each individual finger digging into my flesh. “I said, what do you think you're doing?”

I was frightened, but I knew instinctively that I couldn't show it. I had to bluff, make him back off. I blinked several times in rapid succession, jammed down the corners of my mouth. And then, in the coolest tone I could manage, I said, “You're breaking my arm. Let go.”

To my surprise he did. To my even greater surprise I saw that beneath his anger was fear. And in that instant I understood how disturbed what I'd done really was, how sick, how fucked up. Jamie was scared of me,
me
. I brushed past him, walked over to the kegs, drew myself a cup. I drank it down as everybody watched. I drew myself another. Drank that one down, too.

After a bit, someone hit the light switch, plunging the downstairs back into darkness. Then a different someone turned up the volume on the stereo. And, slowly, the party started up again.

I should have left at that point. I'd gone to make a scene, I'd made a scene. Mission accomplished. I stayed, though. I'm not sure why. Maybe to punish myself. Sticking around certainly caused me misery. I'd been banished in spirit if not fact from the party, and wandering through it I felt beyond isolated, near wild with loneliness. It was almost as if I was wearing Nica's magnetism the same way I was wearing her clothes, only I'd put it on inside out: I repelled people. I'd take one step toward them, they'd take two back from me. Or maybe I stayed in the hopes I could make Jamie forgive me.

The self-consciousness I was feeling was unbearable. What I needed to do was get away from myself, and the beer wouldn't let me. Not fast enough, anyway. I found a bottle with a couple inches of vodka in it sitting, abandoned, on the piano stool. I gagged as I tipped its contents down my throat, swallowing as quickly as the suction allowed. It was like drinking gasoline. But I did it, again and again,
until the bottle was empty. And soon it was as if the different parts and functions of my brain were scrambled and mashed together so that hearing was jumbled up with seeing and seeing with tasting and tasting with smelling and my thoughts were mixed up with all this, too, so that I couldn't tell what went where.

My cheeks and neck and lips were hot, burning up. I considered losing the wig. I didn't, though. Remembering Mr. Amory's liquor cabinet, I decided to cool down with another drink instead. I was having a tough time walking, so I made my way to the back of the house by holding on to the furniture, one hand over the other. But even being careful, I tripped—on a curled edge of carpet, I think, or maybe my own feet—and went crashing into the row of chairs. Distantly I observed the blood from the gash in my knee pooling in my shoe, the funny angle my wrist was bent at. Finally I picked myself up, climbed the stairs, reached the study. That's when I passed the French doors and saw Nica.

A few minutes later I was bleeding all over my reflection in the pool, gauzy with pain and confusion.

A light came on.

A voice called my name.

Who did the voice belong to? I don't know. The scene ends there in my memory. A movie stopped mid-reel.

I woke up the next morning. It wasn't quite dawn yet, the air suffused with the dull glow that comes just before first light. I reached groggily for my swivel-neck lamp, grasping at empty space until I realized that my lamp wasn't there because I wasn't home. Bolting upright, I flung my gaze around the room that wasn't mine. Nothing offered the barest hint as to where I was. And for a few bug-eyed seconds I wondered if I was dead. Then I remembered. I was at Jamie's. I remembered other things, too.

Slowly I eased myself back down onto the pillow, became very still. To move even a muscle was to stir up another hideous memory from the night before. They arrived anyway, though, in wave after scalding wave. Finally, all the waves had broken over me, and I lay there cringing in shame.

But I couldn't cringe for long because something was tugging at my attention, impatient and demanding a response: pain. I was in a lot of it. My hand, in particular, the one I'd used to break my spill over the chairs. I held it up to my eyes. It looked like a rubber glove filled with water, not a knuckle in sight. I touched my face. It felt soft, shapeless, pummeled. There was a ridged scab above my eyebrow, and a lump as big as a walnut above that, and my upper lip was twice its normal size. The shoulder that had hit the ground first ached. So did the hipbone. So did the knee.

Was all this damage the result of my drugged-out, boozed-up attempt to pass through a door without opening it first, falling seven or eight feet (the way the Amorys' house was built into the hill, the second story at the back was only half a story high), or had something happened after, something during the period my memory went so disturbingly blank? At the same time I posed this question, it dawned on me where exactly I was: the spare bedroom, directly down the hall from Jamie's. It was one of last year's hookup rooms. This year's, too, judging from the stiffness of the sheets beneath me. Suddenly I felt a fear so big it filled my head, the room, the entire house. Had I lost my virginity? And then I felt a fear so big it filled everything, had no bounds at all. Or had my virginity been taken from me? All at once I was sick, barely having time to turn my face to the trash can next to the bed before an acid liquid was spewing out my mouth, my nose, dripping down my chin.

When I was emptied out, I reached for the unopened bottle of Evian on the nightstand. I drank, desperately thirsty. The water calmed me down. Someone, I realized, had left it for me. The trash
can, too. A sexual predator worrying about his victim waking up dehydrated or making a mess on the rug? I hadn't been raped. And everything I was wearing the night before I was still wearing now except for the wig. I hadn't had sex either.

That I'd put myself in the position where such things were possible, though, was appalling, borderline grotesque. No more prescription drugs mixed with alcohol for me. No more prescription drugs period. This time I'd escaped with a few cuts and bruises, a minor sprain. Nasty injuries, to be sure, and painful, but nothing that wouldn't heal. I'd gotten lucky.

Two months later I found out just how lucky. I'd already been at Williams for a week. Not for classes, which hadn't begun yet, but for preseason, to try out for the tennis team. I'd won three out of five of my challenge matches and the coach had pulled me aside, told me she'd be taking me on as an alternate. She couldn't, she'd said, allow me to officially join up, though, until I underwent a full physical. School policy.

Making the Williams tennis team as a walk-on was the first sign that the dark days were behind me, that quitting the benzos cold turkey had been worth the pain and trauma, the shakes and cramps and nights without sleep. My life, it seemed, was turning around, was going back, at least a little bit, to the way it was before Nica died. I'd wanted to tell Dad the good news in person. I'd also wanted to visit the Chandler Health Center, open year-round, though at reduced hours during summer break, which it still was for another week, to see Dr. Simons, my doctor since I was a kid. So I'd jumped in my car and headed down to Hartford for the day.

That afternoon, Dr. Simons informed me I was pregnant. Eight weeks was his rough estimation.

I'm vomiting before I'm awake, my eyes still closed when my stomach seizes and acid floods my throat. I jackknife, lurching forward to open the door of my car but don't quite make it in time, and a pale brown mixture of Diet Coke and low-sodium Saltines splatters out of me in a series of long convulsions. After the last one, I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, sit all the way up.

I hadn't intended to fall asleep. The house I'd been watching had gone dark just after eleven, which meant I was free to go. My lids, though, were heavy, getting heavier, so I put away my mom's old camera, the one with the telephoto lens, doubling for me at the moment as a pair of binoculars, and crawled in the back. As I stretched out, my hand brushed the sleeve of a jacket: Nica's, thin, dark blue denim, button-flap pockets. Immediately I recoiled. She'd left it there the day before she died. The way she'd tossed it, it still seemed to retain her shape. And I didn't want to touch it, make it flat, or jostle it so that the scent of her, caught in its folds, escaped. As I moved back to the
front of the car, reclined the passenger seat, I told myself I'd just close my eyes for fifteen minutes then drive home. That's the last thought I remember having.

I lower the windows and get out of the car. The street I'm on is crowded with single-story houses set back among scraggly shrubs, the plaster statues of Our Lady in the front yards chipped and faded: a run-down neighborhood in a borderline part of town. The day's going to be a hot one. I reach through the window for the Diet Coke can in the cup holder, swish the liquid around my mouth before swallowing, slowly and carefully, in distinct shifts, hoping my stomach won't notice. Then I walk to the rear of the car, pop the trunk. The pack of paper towels is under a tennis hopper.

I use nearly an entire roll cleaning the passenger-side door.

It's too early for traffic and I make it home in under ten minutes. I haven't even stepped all the way inside the front door when the smell hits me: a kind of stale fustiness, a combination of dust and old furniture, of meals cooked and eaten, of frayed carpeting. If sadness has a scent, this is it. Dad would've gotten back from work just a couple hours ago, is probably in bed now, asleep. I move quietly as I go upstairs, shower and change, slip a book in my bag so I'll have something to read later.

Before heading out the door again, I walk into the kitchen, as dark as the rest of the house. I open the refrigerator, the sudden bright light making me blink. On the bottom shelf, in front of a carton of milk, its use-by date several days past, is an aluminum container with a clear plastic top: linguine in red clam sauce. Dad must've swung by that all-night Italian place near the Amtrak station on his way home. My stomach begins to churn again, and I have to close my eyes, keep myself from imagining the smell of the congealed Parmesan, the glistening
noodles, the gynecological-looking bits of gray shellfish coated in pureed tomato.

Blindly, I reach for the milk. Next, I take the box of Raisin Bran out of the cabinet. I pour a few flakes into a bowl, wet them with a splash of expired milk, then drop the bowl inside the sink. Dad's pretty checked out these days. I doubt it would register with him that I've stopped eating breakfast, and if it did register with him, I doubt even more that it would register why. Still, it never hurts to be careful.

I'm about to get back in my car. Then I think better of it. If I smell throw-up I probably will. While I'm standing there, hand on the latch, I catch sight of the dashboard clock. It's already past eight. Immediately I let go of the latch, start walking. If I don't hurry, I'll be late to my first day of work.

Chandler Academy of Hartford, Connecticut, was established in 1886 when an Episcopal clergyman, Reverend Peabody Chandler of the Boston Chandlers, converted the ancestral summer home in the Sheldon/Charter Oak section of the city into an academy whose mission was to “take the wayward sons of distinguished New England families and mold the disposition of their minds and morals so that they might become good Christian gentlemen.” In 1971 the minds and morals of the daughters of distinguished families became eligible for molding, as well. The wayward part stayed the same, though. And for a school that's primarily boarding, Chandler, with its two-strikes policy, is tolerant of rule-breakers. Consequently, each fall it winds up with a high number of students who've either been rejected from or given the boot by its stricter rivals.