Rooms (14 page)

Katie crawled across the floor and opened the closet door. This was mostly empty: his only suit and nice dress shirt, which his mother had insisted he bring, hung forlornly on an otherwise empty rack. Katie backed into the closet, put a finger to her lips, and then closed the door. Metal hangers clinked together faintly.

“Trenton?” Minna said again. “Today?”

Trenton crossed to the door, feeling a slight thrill in his stomach: there was a girl, a pretty girl, hiding in his closet. At Andover, girls snuck into boys’ rooms all the time—but never his room.

“What is it?” he said, opening the door, hoping he wasn’t blushing.

Minna was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, cinched tight around her face, which made her look even thinner than usual. “Look, I’m sorry about yelling earlier, okay?” she said, not looking at him.

“Okay,” Trenton said. He almost preferred when Minna was a bitch, because then he didn’t have to remember how close they had once been. “Is that it?”

She turned her eyes to him. “I asked Danny—my friend, the cop, remember?—about that woman who died. Here.” She passed him a piece of paper, folded in half. “He e-mailed me the details. So if we see him again, be sure to thank him.”

Trenton unfolded the piece of paper. It was a short e-mail, subject: SANDRA WILKINSON. Trenton felt dizzy. Sandra. The ghost had said something about a Sandra, and a stolen letter.

That means he couldn’t have invented it. He couldn’t have made her up.

Sandra Wilkinson, aged 41, was found at home on the morning of March 14, 1993 by Joe Connelly, roofer. Single shot to the face, removed two of her teeth. There were no prints on the gun but her own, but the door was open and there were signs someone had been with her the night before. Inquest returned inconclusive verdict.

Then, after several spaces:

This is the kind of thing you wanted, right? Looking forward to seeing you. Danny.

“Happy now?” Minna asked.

His hands were shaking. He folded up the piece of paper and put it in his back pocket. He was surprised to feel that there was already something folded up there and then remembered, with a jolt, his suicide note. “What about the girl—the disappearance. Have they found her yet?”

Minna had already started to turn away.

“No. No, they haven’t found her,” Minna said. “She’s probably hacked up to pieces and buried in a well somewhere.”

“That’s disgusting,” Trenton said loudly.

Minna shrugged. “Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry. “You asked.”

Trenton closed the door and locked it. His heart was beating very fast. He was remembering, then, the time their new kitten had gone missing and they’d found it after a week, fur matted, frozen stiff with cold, at the bottom of the old well.

His closet door opened, and Katie crawled out.

“It smells like my grandma’s bathroom in there,” she said. She stood up, slapping the back of her jeans.

“You can go now,” Trenton said. He was tired, and he was sure she was making fun of him.
I wouldn’t have stopped you
wasn’t the same as
I wanted to
. Maybe she’d come all the way here
just
to make fun of him.

“Don’t be like that,” she said. She came close to him, and it seemed as if she might say something else. Instead, she reached out, snatched the piece of paper from his hand, and started to read. “Cool,” she said. “So someone was murdered in your house?”

“Maybe,” Trenton said, taking the paper back. “It was never proven.”

“The good crimes never are,” she said, as if she had some great knowledge of it. He’d liked her better last night, in the darkness on the porch, underneath a black tarp sky that made everything seem small. She had seemed more real to him then. “Hey, you know what we should do?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “A séance.”

“A what?” Trenton said, although he’d heard. He couldn’t help it; he thought how nice it was to hear her say
we
.

“You know, a séance. Ouija board and candles and all that. We’ll call up the ghost, make her tell us who did it.”

As she said the word
ghost,
Trenton thought he heard an echo voice in the walls, in the room and floor, a response too faint to make out. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” he said.

“It’s a great idea. Come on, let’s.” She took a step closer to him. Her eyes were the exact color of good weed—like something you could fall inside to get high. “
Please
. You and me. Tomorrow night?” She made her eyes big, and even though he knew it was the kind of trick girls did, it worked: he felt his body responding, felt a sudden ache through his fingers, like they wanted to touch her all on their own.

He took a step away from her. “I’m babysitting my niece tomorrow,” he said. He was glad for the excuse—and also a bit disappointed.

Katie shrugged. “Can she keep a secret?”

Trenton felt himself relenting. “As well as any six-year-old.” He added: “She goes to bed early.”

Katie smiled. “So we’ll be alone,” she said. She stared at him for a second, and her smile faltered. “Hey, Trenton?”

“What?”

“I really am sorry. About the party last night. It’s complicated, with me.” She touched her fingers to her lips and then brought them to his cheek.

Trenton jerked away instinctively. He hated people touching his face.

“See you tomorrow,” she said, and then she climbed out the way she had come, through the window.

ALICE

N
ext to the bookshelf in the Blue Room is a place in the wall gouged at various heights: three foot ten, four feet three, four foot four.

This is where Trenton marked his growth, year by year, picking and chiseling with the Swiss army knife Richard bought him for his fifth birthday—briefly confiscated by his mother, who thought he was too young, but then commandeered by Minna from Caroline’s underwear drawer and returned to Trenton, as a bribe, to keep him from telling when he caught her smoking from the bedroom window.

This is how we grow: not up, but out, like trees—swelling to encompass all these stories, the promises and lies and bribes and habits.

Even now—
especially
now—it is hard to say what is true.

One thing I do know: it was Thomas’s idea to run away.

I ran away once when I was a little girl. That was the year I got a suitcase for Christmas, after I’d begged my parents for a briefcase like the kind my father took with him to work. I loved my father’s briefcase, with its dark velvet interior and recessed compartments, and places for his pipe, his eyeglasses, and his papers. It was as clean, as ordered, as regular as my father himself.

My suitcase was small and powder blue, with brass latches and a fleecy soft interior and little pockets for putting in whatever I liked. It wasn’t my father’s briefcase, but I liked it even better, especially the small lock that kept it closed and the accompanying key, which I wore like a necklace. Inside, I kept my prized possessions: three silver barrettes; a snow globe my grandparents had brought me from New York City, featuring a tiny bridge and even the miniature figure of a girl standing on it who looked just like me; a small china doll named Amelia, missing one arm, which I’d rescued from the trash after my older sister got tired of her.

For months I carried that suitcase with me everywhere, even though my sisters ridiculed me endlessly about it. I even insisted on taking it to school, and my teacher, Mrs. Hornsby, let me keep it by my desk, instead of among the jumble of overcoats and rubber boots and mittens dripping snow by the radiators in the back.

One night, I came out from the bath and found my sisters in my bedroom. They’d broken the lock, just snapped it in half, opened the suitcase, and laid everything out on the rug. Their fingerprints were all over the snow globe. Poor Amelia was discarded facedown on the floor. They were laughing hysterically.

I lunged at Olivia, my middle sister, first. She’d had bad pneumonia as a kid and was weaker than Delilah. I managed to wrestle her to the ground before she kneed me in the stomach and Delilah hauled me backward. She pinned me and sat on my chest.

“You know why Mom and Dad bought you that stupid suitcase, don’t you?” Delilah leaned forward so that her hair tented around me. Her face, mean and gloating, was all I could see. “They want you to run away.”

“You’re a liar.” I was doing a bad job of trying not to cry.

“They told us so,” Delilah said. “They never wanted you in the first place.”

I spit at her. She slapped my face, hard, and finally I couldn’t swallow back the tears anymore, and I started to cry, huge heaving sobs that nearly made me throw up. Later, they must have felt badly; Olivia made me warm milk with honey and Delilah braided and pinned my hair so it would curl in the morning. But I didn’t forgive them.

I had my revenge. The next day, a Sunday, I snuck away through the crowd congregating after church and circled back around to the stairs that led into the basement, where the church held socials and doled out soup on Easter. It was colder than I’d expected, and darker. For hours I shivered alone, listening to the distant echo of voices, praying both that I wouldn’t be discovered and that I would.

Eventually, when I couldn’t feel my fingers and my toes had gone numb in my boots, I went home. The sun had set, and I remember the strangeness of the streets in the dark: the gray crust of snow over everything, the rutted sidewalks, the Christmas displays behind vividly lit windows.

I saw my sisters even before I pushed open the gate: both of them pressed face and palm to our front windows, the glass fogging with their breath, watching for me. Behind them, my father was pacing and my mother was sitting on our small cream-and-yellow-striped sofa, white-faced, with her hands in her lap.

Standing in the dark, knowing that I would go inside and everyone would fuss over me, was one of the happiest moments of my life. It was like staring into a snow globe and knowing I could shrink down and pass through the glass, that we would all remain forever suspended, safe, even as the world continued, dark and vast, outside our little boundary.

My sisters squeezed me until I thought my breath would run out. My mother cried and called me darling even as my father made me lie over his legs so he could spank me. I went to bed with a backside red as an apple, but my mother brought me soup so I wouldn’t catch pneumonia, and Olivia and Delilah piled in bed with me and read from my favorite book,
The Wind in the Willows
.

Thomas and I should have had an ending like that. We were to take his car to New York City, and from there a bus to Chicago, where Thomas had a cousin who would help us get set up. I imagined several jewel-colored rooms filled with books, a fire in the grate, and snow falling softly on dark streets outside our windows. I imagined lying with Thomas under a blanket filled with down, talking late into the night, waking up with the tips of our noses cold and the windows patterned with frost.

I imagined that we would be happy together, that together, we would be home.

CAROLINE

C
aroline had now learned how to make a lemon tart, and that you should never actually boil an egg. She couldn’t stop reading Adrienne’s blog, TheGoldenSpoon, and refreshing the page in the hopes that more pictures would appear.

And yesterday, due to some happy accident, a series of maneuvers that she would never be able to replicate, she had found a profile that listed a hometown and even a zip code; and then, from there, after paying the ridiculous sum of $14.95, she had a telephone number. She had stared at it, stunned, for a good five minutes. She almost wished she could tell Trenton, who was always accusing her of being hopeless at computers. Trenton and Richard were amazingly alike, for people who had spent hardly any time together.

Look what I did,
she wanted to say.

She told herself that she only wanted to hear the woman’s voice. Just once. She felt she would know then; she felt everything would become clear. Whether or not she was the one. Why Richard had done it. Why he’d done all the things he had done.

She picked up the phone and listened for a moment to the dial tone. How many times in her life had she reached Richard here, in this house, on that number? She always imagined their voices entangled somewhere in the wires when they spoke, caught up in a grid she didn’t fully understand, passing back and forth. Once the calls were disconnected, she imagined the echoes of old conversations would be trapped there, floating back and forth with no exit, like ghosts.

Caroline’s hands were shaking so much that she misdialed the number the first time, reached an Italian restaurant, and had to hang up and start over. The second time, she managed it.

The phone only rang once before it was snatched up. “Don’t tell me you’ve gotten on going
west,
” a woman said, her voice hurried, impatient, and lower than Caroline had expected from the photographs.

Caroline was seized with sudden panic. She had not expected the woman to pick up so soon—or even at all. She had not thought of what she would say. But she needed Adrienne to speak again. Was she the one? Caroline didn’t know, couldn’t decide.

Too many seconds had elapsed. “Hello?” Adrienne said—it was Adrienne, that Caroline knew—dragging out the last syllable already. “Are you still there?”

“Hello,” Caroline croaked out.

Instantly, Adrienne’s tone changed. “Who is this?” she said carefully.

Caroline didn’t answer. One second, two seconds.

“Who is this?” Adrienne repeated. “Hello?”

“Wrong number,” Caroline said and hung up. The blood was thundering in her ears, and the room was spinning. She tried to think herself down the phone line, into the kitchen—because she was sure Adrienne had answered in the kitchen, no doubt interrupted in the middle of making lemon soufflé or chicken soup from scratch—tried to imagine the mouth pressed to the phone, the hands with their neat nails, the jeans dusted with flour. Had she and Richard met in hotel rooms? Had he gone to visit her and sat with his shoes and socks off at her kitchen table, shirt unbuttoned, drinking wine, laughing, eating the food she had cooked him?

She didn’t know. Already, she could hardly remember Adrienne’s voice. She’d been too nervous.

She redialed, pressing the phone so tightly against her jaw it hurt. This time she would say nothing.

Adrienne picked up again almost immediately. “You did it again,” she said. This time, she sounded bored.

Despite her intention to say nothing, Caroline was so startled, she spoke up. “What?”

Adrienne cleared her throat. “You dialed the wrong number again. Who’re you trying to reach?”

Caroline couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She was listening so hard, she wished she could squeeze herself into the receiver and travel the line herself.

“Is this one of Bella’s friends? If this is one of Bella’s friends, I don’t care what your parents do, but in my house prank calls get you a good old-fashioned grounding.”

“It’s not . . . I don’t know Bella,” Caroline said.

There was a short pause. “Listen,” Adrienne said. Her voice had turned fearful. “Listen. Whoever you are. Don’t call back.”

Then Caroline was listening to the dial tone again.