Rooms (7 page)
Authors: Lauren Oliver
W
ho is she?
There have been no deaths in the house since Sandra’s, and that was in 1987. There have been no deaths on the property, either, not since the incident with the kitten and the old well.
Now a girl! Unfathomable.
She might easily tell us. But she chooses to remain silent. Since yesterday she has not said a single word beyond “It’s cold.” How old is she? I should say: how old
was
she? Twelve? Fifteen? No matter what I ask her, she refuses to be drawn out. And suddenly I find that I’m remembering things I haven’t thought about for ages. Lost children, cowering in the dark. Little Annie Hayes, who disappeared from her parents’ farm. I even remember the date the search party was assembled: March 6, 1942. A Tuesday.
Strange, the things that stick.
A
my wasn’t allowed to go in the basement. Mommy said it was dark and Amy would be scared. But she knew that Mommy was the one who was scared.
Amy thought she might find a doll down there. Once she had found a doll in the basement of her nana’s house. It had a wide white face and curls of brown hair and floppy arms and legs but a hard body. She had kept it for a while, but then Mommy made her throw it out after one of the arms got torn off by Brewster, the dog that lived across the street. Amy wanted to perform surgery, but Mommy said
no
people will think we’re poor I’ll buy you a real doll for Christ’s sake.
Then she said:
Sorry.
Amy liked her new doll, but not as much as the one she had found.
She wondered if Penelope from
The Raven Heliotrope
had ever had a mom, maybe the kind of mom who didn’t let her do certain things. Amy thought the basement might look a little like the Caves of Werth, which were filled with treasure.
Uncle Trenton was no fun anymore and wouldn’t read to her. Mommy said Uncle Trenton was dead and then they went to the hospital to see him and he was white and he wouldn’t get up or talk. But then he did get up, but he still didn’t talk very much.
Amy was glad they had come to Grandpa’s house. She wished she could talk to Grandpa in the Garden of Forever and ask whether all the people from the book were there.
The house was full of white fluff stuff. Mommy said cottonseed. Amy collected it all and placed it in a cup in her room.
It looked just like snow.
L
ike the world’s worst case of constipation: that’s what the basement is like. Like stopped-up bowels and a fat case of gas.
It’s even worse now that we’ve got an intruder. Small as she is, she doesn’t belong. It feels like I’m trying to get my stomach around a whole Thanksgiving turkey. I wish I could digest her and spit her right back out where she came from.
The new ghost likes the basement, God knows why. Rolled-up carpets, dismantled televisions and old radios, cartons and cartons of books, and the old boiler: it’s all down there. The piano like a kidney stone we can never quite manage to piss out. Burned-out lights and Christmas ornaments. The Walkers have been home for three days now, and even Minna hasn’t braved the basement.
And of all places—out of all the dozens of rooms in the house—the basement is where Trenton’s got it in his head to kill himself.
My question is: Where’d he get the rope?
I knew a hanger once. Christina Duboise: everyone called her Cissy. She was over six feet tall and so skinny her ribs and cheekbones looked like they were trying to bust out of her skin. I liked Cissy. She was two years older, but we were friends. She was pretty much my
only
friend in school. Everyone ignored me because of where I lived and how I had a fag for a father. I don’t blame them, really. I would have hated me, too, if I’d been someone else.
It took me a long time to realize that Cissy was only nice to me because she had no friends, either. In some ways she was even more hard up than I was, even though her stepdad owned three sporting-goods stores and was probably the richest person in town. No one knew anything about her real dad, but I had the idea he’d died tragically when Cissy was young, probably because she
seemed
tragic—big eyed and stoop shouldered, like she was always waiting for disaster to strike. I found out later it wasn’t true, that her dad lived a few counties over with a new wife and a new daughter, and I was never sure why I’d always imagined him getting flattened by an oncoming train or slowly wasting to bones in a hospital bed.
Her mom seemed like she belonged in Hollywood: thin and blond with a smile so big I always worried her mouth would split open. She wore about a half pound of makeup and had a habit of wearing high heels everywhere as though she was expecting to be photographed. I knew she didn’t like me, but I didn’t give two shakes of a rat’s ass for her, either.
Cissy lived in a nice big house in the white part of town. Everything her parents owned—the carpets, the sofas, the dining room chairs, the curtains—was white, like they wanted to be sure there could be no mistake about whose side they were on. You had to take your shoes off in the house. I’d never even heard of that before I met Cissy. Every time Cissy went home she had the desperate look of a dog trying not to piss on someone’s carpet, and you could just tell she was dead afraid she might spill or smudge something.
They had a housekeeper, an old black woman who came daily to clean and cook. Her name was Zulime, and she had moved from Louisiana and still talked with a heavy Creole accent and, Cissy claimed, practiced voodoo on the side. Her hands were like bits of gnarled wood. I remember how she slathered me in mud one time when my arms were blown up like balloons from poison oak. It worked, too.
Sometimes Cissy came around every day, and on weekends I’d find her leaning against the front door, squinting in the sun, looking like an oversized grasshopper. For weeks she’d trail me like a dog on a scent, babbling about this and that, making plans, daring me to knock on Billy Iversen’s door and give him a kiss or to skinny-dip in the creek. (That one I did and came out with a leech practically sucking off my nipple; I had to burn it off with a cigarette.)
Then she would disappear. She’d skip school for days at a time and wouldn’t come to the phone when I called. Her mom would turn me away at the door with a voice like sugar in the throat of a vulture: “Cissy’s not feeling well, sweetie. I’ll have her give you a call when her strength’s up.” I’ll always remember: her long red fingernails on the door, a Virginia Slim smoking in a crystal ashtray behind her, and Zulime moving silently along with the vacuum, refusing to meet my eye.
The summer after freshman year was when Cissy first showed me her spiders. It was June, still those early days of summer when the flowers were in riot and the clouds puffed up and full of themselves, before the heat caused everything to wilt and droop. By the end of the summer, all of Georgia was like a bad watercolor: melting pavement, melting tires sizzling on the streets, and even the sun crawling its way up the sky in agony, as if it couldn’t stand the effort.
Cissy said she wanted to show me something down by the old train tracks and I was hoping she’d scored some beer or found a cache of money like Dirk Lamb had the summer before, a whole sack of old coins stashed underneath some rotting floorboards of an abandoned house.
Instead she took me to the Barnaby Estate, an old wreck beyond the swamp that was supposed to be haunted, leaning so far to the left it looked like a drunk trying to keep on his feet. I hadn’t been there since the time when I was seven or eight, and this girl Carol Ann dared me to cross the swamp and put my hand on the front door for a full five seconds. I did it, too. I remember the suck of my shoes in the mud and the smell of wood rot and an old icebox on the porch, brown with rust. I stood there with my palm on the wood frame, fear vibrating through me, imagining I heard the creak, creak of footsteps inside the house . . . imagining I saw a ghost moving like a shadow beyond the screen . . .
And then I did see a shadow—a grinning shadow, with teeth like carved ivory.
Before I had time to scream, Old Joe Higgins, resident crazy, stepped into the light: trouserless, grinning, his dick wagging between his legs like a pale fish.
After that I didn’t believe in ghosts anymore.
So when Cissy took me back there I wasn’t scared, just disappointed and maybe a little curious. She led me down into the basement. I had to duck and Cissy was practically doubled over. A little sunlight came trickling in from a broken window high in the wall, and I saw she’d stocked the place with flashlights, an old beach chair, and some moldy-looking books stacked on a rotting shelf. And jars. Dozens of jars, plus glass terrariums like they had at pet shops for the lizards and snakes. At first I thought they were empty.
She switched on a flashlight and did a sweep. Then I saw beyond all those thin panes of glass: spiders, some of them as small as a speck, some of them bigger than the palm of my hand. I’ve never been squeamish about bugs, but it turned my stomach.
“What the hell is this?” I said.
“Spiders,” she said calmly, as though I couldn’t tell.
“But . . . what for?” Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought the darkness was full of glittering eyes. She kept doing the back-and-forth with her flashlight, and I saw knitted clouds; webs sewn tightly against the glass; small dark blurry shapes, bound in pale thread. I wondered whether she hand-fed them.
“I like spiders.” She shrugged and clicked off the flashlight. She seemed disappointed, like she’d been expecting me to cheer. I was relieved when she turned back toward the stairs and I could follow her up and out into the sun. “Spiders are
prophetic,
don’t you think?”
That was another thing about Cissy. Even though, like me, she thought school was a load of bull and was nearly flunking her classes, she was smart. She was a reader, too, and always using words I didn’t know.
“Spiders are nasty,” I said.
We sat outside looking out at the swamp. I smoked a cigarette, and Cissy had three in a row. She smoked like she wished she could eat the cigarette instead.
“There’s something else I want to show you,” she said, after a while. She transferred her cigarette to the corner of her mouth and started unbuttoning her blouse, squinting a little. I thought maybe it was some lesbian thing, like she was going to show me her tits and ask me to rub them. I’d never heard her talk about a guy, never seen her primp or fix her hair or worry about whether she would get a date to such-and-such dance. She knew she wouldn’t, anyway. She was too tall, too skinny, and too weird.
She was wearing a white cotton bra, I remember, and her tits were small and pointy and proud, like the stiff-backed peaks of whipped cream. It wasn’t until she inched her blouse down her shoulders that I realized I’d never seen her without her clothes on. Never in a bathing suit, never changing in the locker rooms before gym class, never even on the rare occasion we had a sleepover. She always went into the bathroom and came out in her pajamas.
Her spine was so pronounced it reminded me of sketches I’d seen of certain dinosaurs. She leaned forward, hugging her knees, still puffing away on her cigarette with no hands, and I saw her back and arms were blotchy with fat bruises, blue and black and purple as a twilight sky, and ragged red holes like where she’d been burned with a cigarette.
“What happened?” I said, or something idiotic like that. Funny how in really serious moments people always say the stupidest things.
“My stepdad,” she said, straightening up again and almost immediately shrugging her blouse back on over her shoulders. She seemed like she was going to say more, but then she stopped herself.
It was clear enough what she meant. Her stepdad had done this to her—twisted butts out into her skin, paddled her with a belt or a switch or maybe just one of his big, meaty hands. I thought of the local TV advertisements that showed his face, big and red as a balloon, smiling in front of a room full of baseball mitts and footballs, and felt like spitting.
“Why doesn’t your mom do something?” I said.
Cissy ground her cigarette out carefully in the gravel. “My mom hates me,” she said matter-of-factly.
“That’s not true,” I said. Another stupid thing. How the hell could I know? All I knew about the woman was she smoked Virginia Slims and wore high heels to the store.
Cissy didn’t say anything, just lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, closing her eyes against the sun. Wreaths of smoke went up around her hair, and I thought of the webs I’d just seen inside, the way they obscured the glass, made it difficult to see.
I kept pressing it. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m not going to
do
anything,” she said, keeping her eyes closed. “I just . . . I felt like showing you. That’s all.”
“Why don’t you split?”
She opened her eyes and looked at me.
“Run away,” I continued. “Just pack up and leave. I’d go with you. We’re old enough. There’s nothing for us here, anyway. New York or Chicago. Las Vegas even. Leave everything behind.” It wasn’t just talk. I’d been planning my escape for years. I figured as soon as I could get together cash for a train ticket and first month’s rent, I’d be out. That’s pretty much what I did, too. Left three months shy of graduation and spent my eighteenth birthday crashing with a bunch of junkies in a freezing tenement on Grand Street watching a guy even younger than I was puking up his guts in the single working toilet.
Cissy smiled. She looked old: her skin stretched as tight as a corpse’s, already crisscrossed with faint lines. “You can’t leave it behind,” she said. “It doesn’t work like that.” She stood up. “It’s like the spiders,” she said, and even though I didn’t know what she meant, I let it drop.
I was angry at her, I’ll admit it. She wasn’t a great friend but she was my only friend, and she wouldn’t stand up for herself or do anything.
I wasn’t the one who let the friendship drop. After that day with the spiders, Cissy acted like nothing had happened, and I was happy enough to pretend with her. But something had changed. She was never the most talkative, but when I saw her after that, she was even quieter than usual, more prone to long stretches of silence and to disappearing for days at a time. There were fewer dares, and more cigarettes. I couldn’t help but feel like she was judging me for something I’d done.
Or something I hadn’t done.
By junior year she was hardly coming to school and I’d got my first boyfriend—a dipshit named Barry, but he had a Chevrolet Impala and a decent laugh and a nice way of touching my lower back when we were walking—and Cissy and I barely saw each other until we didn’t see each other at all.
One time I passed her when we were driving in Barry’s Chevrolet; she was walking on the side of the road away from town, away from her house, toward nothing I could think of: just swampland and crowded forest, fat mosquitoes and wild hogs as big as heifers. Maybe on her way to get more spiders. Our eyes met for a second, and on impulse I raised a hand to wave. Maybe she was going to wave back—but Barry had just finished his beer and chucked the can, and instead she flinched and had to sidestep to avoid getting hit. I reamed him out for that one.
The last time I saw her was just before Christmas, 1969. I came home and found her standing on the porch, leaning against the door with her long legs crossed at the ankles, just exactly like she had so many times before. In her coat she looked even skinnier, like she was being swallowed by the fabric.
“Hey,” she said, peeling away from the door, like it hadn’t been almost a year since we’d actually hung out. “I wanted to give this back.”
She was holding a red sweater of mine. I’d loaned it to her once when we’d been caught in a downpour and then forgotten about it. It was ugly as shit, a gift from my mother’s mother, who I saw once a year.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, taking it from her. Even standing right next to her it was like there was a big barrier between us, hard as an elbow.
She didn’t seem uncomfortable, though. “It’s yours,” she said.
For a second we just stood there. It was cold for Georgia, near freezing, and the sky was low and white-gray, the same color as Cissy’s skin. Her eyes looked like two bits of chipped ice, and she looked like she’d aged a hundred years since I’d last seen her. Her hair was fine and cut real short, and I could see patches of her scalp.
