Rooms (13 page)

Ed’s fist; an explosion of pain, like a sudden burst of color.

I remember:

A mosquito bite on my knee; scratching until I bled.

I remember:

Thomas’s chin bumping lightly, once, against mine, the first time we kissed.

SANDRA

W
hat does Alice remember about the turtle?

We’ve never talked about it. We’ve never even talked about how Maggie and I were buds for one afternoon. Tit for tat. God knows there’s plenty Alice has never discussed with me. If secrets were stuffing, the woman would be done up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

For example: the suitcase in the bedroom wall.

The funny thing is it never would have come out if Martin hadn’t made that idiotic comment about Jimi Hendrix.

It was January 1987. Martin and I were lying in bed, drinking wine, watching the snow come down. Snow was falling soundlessly outside, piling in heavy drifts against the doors and windows, softening the fields and wrapping the world in silence. In all the years I was up north, I never got tired of watching the snow.

We’d been at it for a few hours—the drinking, I mean—and were already pretty wound up when the Doors came on and Martin said, out of nowhere: “I don’t see what the big deal about Hendrix is. I think Krieger’s just as good.”

We started going back and forth, and I got up to pour a drink, and just because I was distracted and busy calling Martin an idiot, I tripped over the lip of the carpet and wound up on the floor.

Instead of helping me up, he said, “Don’t you see, Sandra? Don’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?” And he looked at me like I was some smelly, homeless beggar—like he wanted to turn away but was too polite.

I kicked him out before he had time to put his pants back on. The sight of him hop-skip-jumping over the gravel on the driveway, barefoot and ass shining like a moon, almost made it worth it.

That was when I put my foot in it. Literally. Back in the bedroom, furious, I sank my foot halfway through the wall before I realized what I’d done—and realized, too, that instead of support beams and drywall I’d kicked straight through to a narrow rectangular laundry chute made of hollow pressed tin. And there was something inside it: a large box, I thought at the time, wedged in at an angle.

I had to rip my wall open even more to get it out. It was a small leather suitcase, layered with dirt. I was hoping for something scandalous, a skull or a pile of stolen jewels, and I have to say I was pretty disappointed when I opened it to find a brown tweed jacket, a single black sock, a St. Aquinas University pin, and a length of pink ribbon, like a child’s hair thing.

To this day, Alice won’t tell me why she hid the suitcase, or when. Of course I have my theories. But I don’t press. When you’re up each other’s asses all day long, you really have to draw the line somewhere.

For three months the suitcase sat in my bedroom, in front of the hole in the wall, safe on its mound of plaster. I didn’t think of trying to return it. I didn’t know who to return it to. I knew it wasn’t the Killigans’—one look at the peach wallpaper, and I knew Mrs. Killigan would never let that piece-of-shit luggage in the house. I vaguely remembered an old lady and a daughter who lived in the house way back in the day, but so what? Mind your business, that’s my motto, or at least it was before everybody else started traipsing their business across my rooms.

All that changed after the rains. For weeks in May the skies opened up, bringing a glut, a gut-spilling onslaught of rain, vomiting leaves onto the windows and driving surfs of mud down the hill and onto the porch and pushing a tunneling rush of water from Lackawanna Creek into the basement. For days the water rose in the house, creeping up toward the staircase, floating cans of paint and revealing little drowned frogs, bloated, pale, belly-up.

I remembered sitting with the little creased bible on my knees in Sunday school, listening to stories about the Flood, and thought for the first time that maybe there was something to it. But finally the weather broke. The sky turned clear as summer bluebells, and the sun sat high and fat, smug as a cat, curled up on a drift of clouds.

The rains brought everything up. The lawn was a trash heap, a beach littered with the dead. The mudslides had unearthed men’s shoes and washboards, eyeless dolls and socks stiff with mud, lost mittens and old Coca-Cola bottles and hats reeking of mildew.

And on my front porch, unblinking, mouth open like it had been calling for help: a goddamn turtle. A strangely human face, puckered and tragic. It was a big sucker, too, the size of a dinner plate. And the words: bright red, barely chipped, obviously painted painstakingly by a child on the turtle’s dark, patterned shell.

Please return to Maggie Lundell.

Like I said: everything comes up in the end.

TRENTON

T
his time, Trenton did not smoke weed, but just lay very, very still—so still his lungs ached from the effort of controlling them. He had left the window open in his bedroom, then partially lowered the blinds, trying to replicate the quality of the light in the greenhouse.

He wanted to see her again, but he was afraid, too.

“Hello,” he whispered.

He thought he heard a snicker, or an echo of a snicker. The voices were still there—sporadic, often indecipherable, like footsteps that stop as soon as you pause to listen.

Was it her?

The memorial for his father was in just six days and Trenton had not anticipated being alive to see it. But the ghost had changed things. He could not—he
would
not—kill himself until he knew the truth about her.

He lay there, listening to a fly buzz somewhere, watching bits of cottonseed float in through the half-open window on long fingers of sun. He was tired and hungover. He’d drunk too much at Katie’s stupid party.

He should never have gone. Trenton had thought it would be a high school thing, and everyone would know one another, and he would feel out of place. Instead it was just a bunch of random people floating between the kitchen and the basement. He wondered where Katie picked her friends: they looked like refugees, or people who might work in a shitty dollar-for-a-pound thrift store, if they worked at all. Trenton was positive he recognized one of the boys from the butcher counter at Mick’s Deli. Even Katie hadn’t seemed to know anyone very well. Several times, she had confused a girl’s name, calling her Megan instead of Melissa. And when Trenton had asked how she knew everybody, she had responded vaguely that she liked having people around, which of course wasn’t an answer to his question at all.

Katie took him out to the back porch and sat so close to him their thighs touched all the way from hip to knee. She was impressed that he could name a few constellations—thanks to an astronomy elective at Andover he’d taken for the easy A—and together they’d counted the fireflies floating through the dark.

“I used to pretend that fireflies were fairies,” Katie had said, her voice a little thick. “I’d imagine I was a fairy cursed to live in human form, and someday I’d transform back.” She turned to him. Her breath smelled sweet, like raspberry vodka. “Do you ever wish you were someone else?”

And he had answered truthfully, “All the time.”

But then Marcus had showed up with more alcohol. Marcus. What a sleazeball name. He looked like a sleazeball, too, with a goatee thin as a rat’s tail and dirty jeans and a tattoo on the back of his hand of a girl in a bikini using his pointer finger as a stripper pole. He must have been at least twenty-five.

Trenton had been so close to kissing Katie.

He was just starting to doze off when he felt it—a change in the atmosphere. His lungs tightened in his chest and he was temporarily paralyzed, as he had been the moment he’d first woken in the hospital, encased in plaster, unable to move or even cry out, because of the tubes in his throat.

He kept his eyes closed, afraid that if he opened them, it would prove to be just his imagination. Or she would get scared. He squeezed them together so he wouldn’t cheat, feeling his heart beat deep in his chest, and found himself praying that this was real. That she was real. That he wasn’t crazy.

Trenton felt her sit down on the bed. The mattress didn’t sink, the headboard didn’t groan, but he felt it nonetheless: a change next to him, as though a sudden wind had sprung up. Now he didn’t know whether to open his eyes or not.

Don’t go away,
he thought.
Don’t go away.
But he was terrified. He could no longer feel his fingers or toes.

The thought occurred to him: maybe she was coming for him, to take him over to the other side. And he remembered the moments after the accident, and the feeling of soft shadowed hands all over.

“Are you asleep?” Her voice, too, was like wind across the sheets.

“No,” Trenton said, and he forced himself to open his eyes.

He tried not to scream. Or maybe he tried to scream and couldn’t. The desire was there, a hard pressure in his chest and throat and terror deep in his guts; but he kept breathing, in-out in-out, and made no sound.

Once, in seventh grade, Trenton had come down with a bad migraine just before basketball tryouts. Standing on the court, he’d seen holes in the boys charging at him, holes in the floor, great swirling pits of darkness in the air and ceiling. He’d spectacularly missed a free throw before puking right in the middle of the gym. But nothing was worse than the holes.

That’s what this was like: parts of her were there, and parts of her weren’t, but he couldn’t exactly tell which was which because the holes, the dark spaces, seemed always to be moving, eating up first her jaw or the left part of her cheek, then her shoulder and elbow or half her chest or a leg. The more he looked, the worse it became—dizzying, immobilizing, like entering a house after staring directly at the sun and fumbling blindly for familiar shapes.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I’m Trenton,” he said. “I live here.” It was far better when Trenton didn’t look at her directly. He scooted up on his elbows, leaning back against the headboard, and stared instead at the wall, where he could see the faint outlines of posters he’d had tacked there when he was a boy—places where the sun had bleached more or less, and small nicks in the wall from the thumbtacks. In his peripheral vision, she seemed far more solid. “Who’re
you
?” he said, although he thought he knew.

“I’m nobody anymore, am I?” she whispered. Then: “The others told me I was dead. They told me to get used to it.”

“The others?” Trenton said. His throat was dry.

“They’re always fighting,” she said simply.

For a minute, there was silence. Trenton was waiting for the girl to ask him for help—to avenge her death, or something. Wasn’t that why ghosts hung around? But she said nothing. Would anyone believe him? No. Of course not. He wasn’t even sure
he
believed him. Maybe he was imagining this whole thing, hallucinating. Maybe he’d finally cracked.

Or maybe the accident
had
killed him, and the past four months had been one weird dream, and he’d been dead the whole time, and he was only just discovering it. There was a movie like that.

“What’s your name?” Trenton asked.

“Does it matter?” she said. Then: “Why am I here? What
is
this place?” Her voice broke and she began to cry. The holes became even deeper and darker. He quickly looked away. “I miss my mom,” she said.

Trenton felt the sharp wrench of sadness again, an emotion so strong it seemed to bring his stomach to his throat. He wished he could reach out and put a hand on her shoulder. But she would break apart, he was sure of it. And he wouldn’t be able to handle it—if his hand passed through her. He might throw up.

“You were killed.” He swallowed. Jesus. It was hard to break the news of someone’s death. He sympathized, a little, with the nurse who had called his mom with the news of Richard’s death, even though she’d been a bitch about it. “A long time ago. You were shot here, in the house—”

“That’s her,” she said. “One of the others. Sandra.
She
got shot. Some guy stole a letter from her . . . ” She flickered briefly and Trenton thought she might vanish. But then she was back: a small dark curve in his peripheral vision. “The others don’t like me very much.”

Trenton closed his eyes and opened them again. The voices he’d been hearing . . . he must be hearing all of them. The ghosts. One of them had been killed in the house,
his
house. But there were others . . .

It was crazy. He hadn’t even believed in ghosts, at least not until the accident.

The thought returned to him: maybe he was already dead. And even though this was what he had wanted, and been planning for, he felt sick.

“Do you remember anything?” he said.

There was a pause. Trenton shivered. He felt as if a wind had come in through the window and tickled the back of his neck, before realizing that the ghost had shifted, that they had briefly touched.

“I remember Ida,” she said. “She lived next door. But there was something wrong with her bones. They grew all crooked. She always wanted me to play cards, but I didn’t like to. Does that make me a bad person?” Before Trenton could answer, she went on, “And the church—we lived down the street from the church. The bells drove Mom crazy. But I liked them. Especially at Christmas, when they played the hymns.” She fell silent again.

“I meant about what happened,” he said, because he had to say something, to take control, to keep her from crying again. He had to do something to fight the feeling that
he
was about to cry.

And he suddenly remembered what Minna had said about the cops; they’d come looking for a girl who’d disappeared. He felt a tingling in his spine. It might be her. It must be.

She hesitated. “I remember a car,” she said quietly. “It was raining. I think—I think I screamed.” She broke off. Trenton could feel her tense, gather together; she was suddenly as still as the sky just before a storm. “Someone’s coming.”

“Wait,” Trenton said, but it was too late.

There was a loud bang, then a grating noise outside Trenton’s window. He cried out as a large red blob came into view. Next to him, the ghost disappeared. She simply evaporated, like a mirage when you approach too close; one second she was a brushstroke of shadow, and then even that was gone.

It was Katie, wearing a hat far too hot for the weather. She got an arm over the windowsill. She was red-faced from the climb.

“What the fuck?” Trenton crossed over to her and grabbed the back of her jacket—his jacket, he realized, which he’d left at her house last night—too angry even to be impressed by the fact she’d managed to drag the ladder all the way from the greenhouse.

“A little help?” she panted.

He hauled and she pulled, and finally she managed to get her legs over the windowsill. Then she snaked herself headfirst into his room, banging her knees on the floor. Trenton almost asked if she was okay, then decided against it.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he said, backing away from her so that there was at least ten feet between them.

She sat back on her heels, whipping off her hat, which was too large. Underneath, her hair was wispy and obviously unwashed. Trenton wished he didn’t think she looked cute.

She unzipped her jacket—his jacket. “What’s it look like I’m doing?” She tossed the jacket on his bed. “Return service. You don’t have to thank me.”

“Thank you,” Trenton said.

“You’re welcome.”

She stood up, wincing as she bent and unbent a knee. Underneath the jacket, she was wearing a T-shirt with a faded rainbow logo, so small and tight he could see the silhouette of her bra straps when she turned around. It was the same thing she’d been wearing last night, and Trenton wondered whether she’d been to sleep yet. He thought of that guy, Marcus, and the stupid tattoo—pictured that hand working its way across Katie’s thighs—and then tried really hard to think about something, anything, else.

“So these are your digs, huh?” she said, walking the small room, forcing him to step aside and around her.

“We have a front door, you know,” Trenton said. Every time she came close, he smelled her: the same mix of lemon, Marlboros, chemicals. He
felt
her, too. He could feel the warmth of her skin but also the blood flowing underneath it, the pulse working beneath her skin, her lungs expanding, all those countless valves shutting and opening. She was so alive, it frightened him. He didn’t feel half so alive as she seemed.

“I like to make an entrance.” Katie said it lightly, but she wasn’t smiling. She seemed anxious—hopped up, maybe. “Besides, I’m allergic to parents. Your parents are home, aren’t they?”

Trenton decided not to correct her use of the word
parents
by pointing out, once again, that his father was dead. “My sister is,” he said.

“Same thing.” She spun around in a circle, still scanning the walls, as though trying to learn some secret from them. Trenton was suddenly embarrassed that his father had never removed the cluster of sports decals from one corner of the room. But Katie didn’t comment on them. “So why’d you pull an Irish exit last night?”

“A what?”

“You left without saying good-bye.”

“You looked like you were busy,” Trenton said, before he could stop himself.

She turned to him at last. Her eyes were bright. “You’re mad about Marcus.”

“I’m not
mad,
” he said, crossing his arms, then realizing it seemed like he was trying too hard to look casual and dropping them again. “Why would I be mad? I don’t care what you do. I don’t even
know
you.”

“Okay.” Katie exhaled. She sat down on his bed and drew her knees up to her chest without asking whether she should take off her shoes. Trenton noticed the way the bed sagged under her weight. He wondered whether, even now, the ghost was watching. Weirdly, he felt guilty. “I just thought you might be upset, because . . . ” Katie trailed off.

“Because why?”

She looked up at him from underneath the heavy fringe of her bangs. “Well, because it kind of seemed like you wanted to kiss me last night.”

Trenton wanted to laugh, but his face was frozen. A high whine, like the noise of a cornered animal, worked its way out of the back of his throat.

“I wouldn’t have stopped you,” she said quietly, so quietly it was practically a whisper, and Trenton thought he might have misheard. He couldn’t think of a response. He could do nothing but stare. Then he heard footsteps coming down the hall toward his room.

Instantly, Katie rocketed off the bed.

“Trenton?” Minna’s voice came through the door. “It’s me. Let me in.”

Katie dropped to her knees, as though thinking of trying to crawl under the bed, where Trenton had shoved his suitcase and a load of dirty socks. She drew back.

“What are you doing?” he whispered, and then said, louder, “One second.”