Rooms (5 page)

ALICE

H
ow do ghosts see?

We didn’t always; it had to be relearned.

Dying is a matter of being reborn. In the beginning there was darkness and confusion. We learned gropingly. We felt our way into this new body, the way that infants do. Images began to emerge. The light began to creep in.

Now I see better than I did when I was alive. I never liked to wear my glasses, and by the time I was thirty, I couldn’t see from one side of the parlor to the other without squinting.

Now everything is perfectly clear. We do more than see. We detect the smallest vibrations, minuscule shifts in the currents, minor disturbances, molecules shifting. We are invisible fingers: we play endlessly over the surface of things.

Only memory remains slippery and elusive.
Memories won’t keep faith with you. They’ll go sliding away into the ravenous void of nonbeing.

Memories must be staked to the back of something, swaddled in objects, wrapped around table legs.

Trenton is so motionless in the armchair, if it weren’t for the way he occasionally reaches up to finger a pimple on his face, he might be dead. Amy sits at his feet with an enormous, leather-bound book on her lap. I recognize it as
The Raven Heliotrope
.

Minna was the one who found it, discovering the typewritten pages loosely stacked and stashed in an old crawlspace. She read it so many times she could recite whole passages from memory. When she was ten, she went crazy trying to figure out the writer’s identity—the manuscript was anonymous—and Richard Walker, in one of his spells of good humor, had it bound, and even called in literary experts and a Harvard professor, who judged from the language and imagery that the book might date from the mid-nineteenth century.

This was endlessly amusing to me. I know for a fact that
The Raven Heliotrope
was completed between 1944 and 1947. I wrote it.

“Mommy!” Amy cries out suddenly, excitedly. “I’m at the part with the bamboo forest. Do you want me to read it to you?”

Amy’s mention of the bamboo forest sends a small thrill through me. That was one of the passages I was proudest of: Penelope and the Innocents get attacked by a vicious band of Nihilis and are only saved by the sudden appearance of magical bamboo, which grows up around them, impaling the Nihilis army.

“Sure, honey.” Minna dabs her forehead with the inside of her forearm.

Amy moves her finger across the picture of Penelope riding a horse. “Then Penelope went riding away . . . and there were Nihilis and they were ugly and they liked blood.”

“You’re a terrible writer,” Sandra says neutrally. Believe it or not, I had actually managed to forget her existence for an hour, the way you do a shadow’s.

“She’s not reading,” I snap. “She’s making it up.”

“Bamboo,” Sandra says. “Bamboo! You might have at least used rosebushes. Thorns that punctured the eyes, and all that.”

I don’t bother responding. It was Thomas who told me about bamboo—that it grows so quickly, and with such strength, it can go straight through a human body. We talked about how terrible the natural world could be.

Of course the bamboo is only doing what it must. Everything obeys its own inner laws. Everything is greedy, and moving toward a version of light.

“Penelope made a wish and then a forest grew up . . . ” Amy says, after putting her finger, arbitrarily, in the center of the page. She trails off. She’s butchering it. The forest doesn’t grow because Penelope wished it. The forest grows out of the blood of the Innocents.

Minna scoots past the desk and pulls apart the curtains. She must be looking out at the driveway. I no longer know what the driveway looks like. Sandra told me it was paved. But I can still picture the hills—at this time of year, the poplars and the cottonwoods should be blossoming, and the daffodils will be pushing up, and the air will smell sweet as the sap begins to run: a painful smell, which brings back memories of other springs and other cycles, a continuity that exists beyond and apart from us.

“Who is it?” Amy pushes the book off her lap. “Is it Nana? Is she back?”

“It’s not Nana,” Minna says, frowning. “I don’t know who it is.” She sighs. “Stay here with Uncle Trenton, okay, sweetie? Trenton, can you watch her? Don’t touch anything, Amybear.”

Minna goes out into the front hall: a dim place that always smells like old shoes. No one uses the front entrance except for delivery people and the various groups that go door-to-door, petitioning for a clean water act or advocating for Mr. So-and-So for governor.

The man on the front porch is wearing a too-big suit and holding a briefcase that looks like a theatrical prop. He seems vaguely familiar. After he introduces himself as Dennis Carey, Richard Walker’s lawyer, I realize I must have seen him before.

“Well, I guess you better come in,” Minna says, and opens the door wider to admit him.

For a moment I’m swept away by a wedge of light that cuts into us, penetrates the layers of air and dust that have accumulated in the hall. Then Minna closes the door.

“You could have told us you were coming,” she says, sticking her hands in her back pockets so he can’t avoid looking at her breasts.

“Here comes trouble,” Sandra says, obviously pleased. She loves a good spectator sport.

His eyes tick down and careen back up to her face. “I called,” Dennis says, shifting his briefcase to his left hand. “I spoke to Caroline . . . ?”

Minna laughs. “No wonder I wasn’t expecting you,” she says. “Caroline isn’t here.”

“Not here?” Dennis tugs at his collar. He’s probably in his forties and not completely unattractive, although he has too much stomach and too little hair.

I feel a brief flash of fear. Minna is like a spider, huge and hungry.

“My mom tends to be forgetful,” Minna says, and pushes past Dennis, shouldering too close, so her body brushes against his. “You want something to drink?”

Dennis transforms his nervous cough into a laugh. “Better not,” he says. He’s uncomfortable, as he should be, without knowing why. “I’m still on the clock. I made the appointment with Caroline . . . ”

Minna waves a hand. “Appointments have never stopped my mother from drinking. What do you say? Whiskey? Wine? Vodka? We’re absolutely drowning in vodka . . . ”

“I shouldn’t,” Dennis says, but I can feel him beginning to relent.

“You might as well relax.” Minna takes another step toward him. “Who knows how long we’ll be waiting for the others . . . ” She steps forward again, so they are standing less than a foot apart.

All the threads are pulled tight in that instant. Even I am swept along. The air vibrates like a plucked violin string.

Then Amy bursts out of the study.

“Nana’s back, Mommy!” She barrels down the hall, half sliding on bunched-up socks.

Just like that, the threads are cut. Dennis and Minna instinctively step away from each other.

“Honey, be careful!” Minna reaches out and catches Amy by the shoulders, forcing her to slow down.

“Who are
you
?” Amy says, looking up at Dennis.

“Don’t be rude, Amy,” Minna says.

Dennis laughs. “I’m Dennis,” he says, leaning down and offering his hand, solemnly, for Amy to shake. Instead she ducks around Minna’s leg, peeking at him from between Minna’s thighs.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Minna says. “Say hi to Mr. Carey, Amy.”

“Hi,” Amy whispers.

Dennis straightens up again. “Is she yours?”

Minna nods. She won’t meet his eyes. I wonder whether she’s embarrassed about the fact that their moment was interrupted, or about the fact that it happened at all.

“She’s very pretty,” Dennis says.

“Say thank you, Amy,” Minna says sharply.

Amy says nothing.

The kitchen door opens.

“In here, Mom,” Minna says, before Caroline can ask.

Caroline comes into the hall a moment later. In her large gray cashmere jumpsuit, she looks like an overgrown dust mite. And yet there—underneath it, underneath
her
—I can’t help but see another Caroline: thin and beautiful, with the same wide, lost eyes, drifting from room to room. Even then, she was like dust—blown from place to place.

“The service here—” she starts to say, and then, seeing Dennis, stops. “Oh God. You must be Mr. Carey. I’d completely forgotten—”

“It’s no problem,” Dennis says, starting forward. He goes to shake her hand; she extends her hand limply and allows it to be engulfed. “I wasn’t waiting long.”

“You don’t
look
like a lawyer,” Caroline says, and she laughs as though she has made a joke. “Surely you’re too young.”

“A lawyer?” Trenton has skulked into the hall, too, and stands with his shoulders hunched practically to his ears.

Minna says offhandedly, “I never could stand lawyers.”

Dennis clearly doesn’t know who to address. He again adjusts the collar of his shirt. His neck is thin, and his Adam’s apple prominent, as though he has swallowed a peach pit at some point in his life and it has been lodged there ever since. “I was lucky enough to work with Mr. Walker in the later years of his life,” he says.

Caroline claps her hands. Her eyes are very bright. “I suppose we might as well get started,” she says. “No point in delaying the inevitable.”

“Get started on what?” Trenton asks.

Caroline looks from Trenton to Minna in her old, bewildered way, as though both of them have just materialized from nowhere. “Mr. Carey is here to read your father’s will,” she says. She turns a smile back to Dennis. “Let’s go into the study, shall we? It’s so much cozier in there. I’ll just nip into the kitchen for a glass of wine. I have a feeling I’m going to need it.”

SANDRA

I
n my day, the study was the den. It wasn’t as big then as Richard Walker made it during the Great Renovation of 1994, when we got cracked open like an egg, scrambled and remade, puffed up into a soufflé of useless rooms and spiral staircases and “breakfast nooks” and window seats.

My favorite place: in the armchair, feet up, cigarette burning in the ashtray and a drink in my hand, the deep purple walls pulsing in the light from the TV, like being at the center of a heart. Bay windows belly out over the back lawn, and in the distance stands a shaggy dark line of trees, thick as a group of sheepdogs.

Minna looks as if she needs a cigarette. Caroline, too. They’re gaping at each other like two trout on ice at the grocery store. Even Trenton has straightened up.

Minna is the one to speak first. “
Trenton?
Why the hell would he leave the house to
Trenton
?”

“Probably because I’m the only one of us who didn’t hate him,” Trenton says. He shakes a bit of hair from his eyes. When he’s not slouching and sulking and playing with his zits, he’s not so bad looking. He’s got a little of his father in him—straight nose, nice chin.

“Don’t be Victorian, Trenton,” Minna says. “I didn’t hate him.”

I’m feeling especially nice about Minna today. I can’t help it if I’m a little aglow, a little warm and fuzzy, as though all the lights are on at once. She knows about me! She remembers. I’d bet my last dollar that means other people remember me, too. Everyone likes to be recognized and appreciated. Those were
my
brains on the study wall,
thankyouverymuch
.

I’m glad that Martin at least had the decency to kill me in the study.

“He can’t possibly leave the house to Trenton,” Caroline cuts in shrilly. “For God’s sake—Trenton’s only fifteen.”

“Sixteen,” Trenton corrects her.

“Exactly,” Caroline says. “He’s a minor.”

“The property will be held in trust until Trenton turns eighteen,” Dennis says. Over the course of the hour his skin has gone a mottled pink color, like he’s just washed up in too-hard, too-hot water.

“In trust?” Caroline parrots. “In trust to who?”

Dennis jerks his head to the left, some kind of nervous tic. With his scrawny neck, and his paunch, he reminds me a little of one of those mechanical birds we used to perch at the edge of a bowl: dipping, dipping. “Mr. Walker appointed several trustees,” he says, “myself included.”

Caroline throws up her hands and settles back in her chair. “I see. So it’s a scam.”

“Mom,” Minna says.

“It’s one of those—what do you call them—pyramid schemes.”

“My mother isn’t a finance person,” Minna says to Dennis.

“Don’t speak about me as though I’m not here, Minna.”

Trenton has lost interest already and slumps backward. “Forget it,” he says. “I don’t want it, anyway.”

Caroline looks at Dennis as though to say,
See?

“I’m afraid that isn’t how these things work,” Dennis says.

Up until now, the will has been as boring as laundry. Everything exactly as expected and all aboveboard. Richard is a whole lot nicer dead than he was alive, I’ll tell you that. A whopping half a million for both children and another to Amy, and the contents of the house to Caroline, to sell if she wants. That should bring in a nice little bundle.

“I’m telling you, I don’t care what you do with it,” Trenton insists. “Sell it. Turn it into a hotel. Burn the whole thing down, like Minna said.”

Alice makes a strangled sound. She’s been wound up tighter than a nun’s asshole since the Walkers came home.

She’s afraid. She knows the truth will come out now.
Everything
will come up, like after the floods of ’79 when whole sheets of mud slid up to the porch, battered the windows, uprooted trees, turned up rotten hats and stinking shoes and even a forty-year-old turtle with the face of an old man. Brought Maggie, Alice’s daughter, to my door, too.

Remember that: remember that about Alice, when you’re tempted to believe everything she tells you; when she says that I’m full of shit, that I’m paranoid, that I’ve rewritten the past. Her own child—her
only
child—didn’t know her at all. She told me so herself.

“Minna!” Caroline pretends to look shocked.

Minna waves a hand. “I wasn’t serious.”

Dennis clears his throat. He’s obviously in way over his head. He probably spends most of his time rezoning decks and settling divorces. He’s getting plowed by the Walkers. “I’m afraid that’s not quite how it works,” he repeats again. “And you won’t actually have the power to decide on a course of action—”

“Until I’m eighteen, I know,” Trenton cuts him off.

“Look, are we done yet?” Minna asks, starting to stand. “I should check on Amy.”

“Not quite,” Dennis says, and he jerks his head to the left again as he fingers his collar. “Mr. Walker made several other provisions—”

“Of course he did,” Caroline says. “He lived to be a pain. I don’t know why I thought it would be different once he was dead.”

Dennis presses on: “He requested, first, that his ashes be buried, not scattered. And he would like to be interred somewhere on the property.”

“We knew that,” Minna says. “He always said he wanted to stay here. Wouldn’t be dragged out come death, hell, or high water.”

“There’s another thing,” Dennis starts, and then stops. “A fairly large bequest . . . ” He shuffles the papers in his hands and clears his throat. His skin is just getting pinker. It looks like he’s sprouting a rash. For a moment he stands sputtering, opening and closing his mouth. Then he turns to Caroline. “Maybe it would be better if we discussed it alone?”

Caroline stares. “I don’t care,” she says. “What did he do? Leave half his money to a dog pound or something?”

“He hated dogs,” Trenton says.

Dennis places the papers next to him on the desk and rearranges them so their corners match up. Minna has sat down again. He deliberately avoids her stare. For a moment, the room is still.

This is going to be good.

“Mr. Walker has left a sum of money to an Adrienne Cadiou,” he says.

Minna and Caroline exchange a momentary glance, no more than a flicker of their eyes.

Minna says, “Trenton, can you go check on Amy?” Her voice is high.

“Who’s Adrienne?” he asks.

“Please, Trenton.” She looks at him, eyes dark, the same way she always did.
Don’t put the candlesticks there.
It works. He stands up—which is to say, he slurps his way off the chair and oozes out of the room.

Time ticks by: seconds, minutes.

“Do you know her?” Dennis asks.

Caroline is sitting, stiff as a wood plank. She stares at the empty glass she is holding. Absolut vodka, mixed with a little seltzer. No lemon. I would have put lemon in it.

“No,” she says shortly.

“I’m sorry, Mom.” Minna reaches out and tries to place a hand on her mother’s knee. Caroline jerks away.

“We haven’t been married for ten years,” she says. “It’s only to be expected, isn’t it? Even when we were married . . . ” She trails off.

“I don’t remember an Adrienne. Do you?” I say to Alice.

“No,” she whispers back. I don’t know why she’s bothering to keep her voice down.

“There was an Agnes,” I say. “Terrible name.”

“Be quiet, Sandra.”

“And an Anna . . .”

“I said, be quiet.”

Minna stands up abruptly and leaves the room. Caroline is staring out the window. For a second, I feel sorry for her. Caroline gets a bad rap. But she does her best.

“Have you contacted her?” she asks. She still doesn’t look at Dennis.

“He gave an address,” he says. “We’ve written. Evidently, she lives in Toronto . . . ?”

If he’s hoping for a response, he doesn’t get it. Caroline doesn’t move. She continues staring out the window.

“How much?” she asks.

Dennis jerks his head to the left again, like he wasn’t expecting her to ask. “What?”

“How much did he leave her?” Now Caroline does turn her eyes to him, eyes as big and blue as a child’s drawing of a sky.

“A million,” Dennis says quietly.

Caroline closes her eyes, and then opens them again. “More than he left his own children” is all she says. Then she stands up, unsteadily, bumping the chair as she makes her way to the door.

I’ll tell you the nicest thing my dad ever did for me: croaked before he could drain away all his cash and left me a bundle to buy a place of my own. Made sure I’d never have to come crawling back to Georgia.

It’s funny. I have only one really clear memory of my parents. Alpharetta, 1957 or 1958: before my mom and dad split, before my father’s weekends with his good pal Alan. Early summertime, June bugs clinging to the screen doors, the smell of freesia, cow dung, grass clippings, petrol.

They were having a dinner party, and I remember the preparations: cream cheese balls rolled in chopped walnuts; Jell-O salad in the shape of a fish; cubes of yellow cheese beaded with condensation, toothpicks standing proudly like flags from their ranks. I remember helping my mother iron limp white napkins and getting in trouble because my fingers were dirty and left smudges. I remember my dad standing in front of the bathroom mirror, shirtless, moving a razor over his jaw.

I wasn’t allowed inside to play so I spent the evening in the backyard. The air was full of fireflies, and when I’d tired of watching, I ran around trying to catch them.

“You know what they are, don’t you?”

I turned around, surprised by my mother’s voice. Standing on the cement patio, backlit by the kitchen light, her face was unreadable. She held a lit cigarette but she wasn’t smoking it. She looked thin and frail, like a kind of bird.

When I didn’t answer, she came down the steps into the grass. “Fireflies,” she repeated. “You know what they are?”

“Bugs,” I said.

When she took a drag, I could see she was smiling a little. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring out into space.

“They’re spirits,” she said, in a low voice. “Souls. When a heart breaks, a firefly is born.” She reached out a hand as though to catch one, then let her hand drop and took another drag of her cigarette. “They fly forever, sending out secret signals to their lost loves. See? Watch.”

We sat very still. I held my breath. In the darkness, the fireflies flared suddenly and then went out, making random patterns in the air. It was the first time my mother had ever told me a story that wasn’t out of the Bible; the first time, too, I ever felt sorry for her, or for any grown-up.

“That’s what a broken heart looks like,” she said, and stood up. “Like a haunting.” She turned to go inside, but at the last second she looked back at me. “It isn’t worth it, Sandra. Remember that.”

Well. I wish I had. Things might have turned out a whole lot different with me and Martin. And who knows. My brains might have stayed where they belonged.