The After-Room

by Maile Meloy; Illustrated by Ian Schoenherr

  “I’m so glad it was you,” Janie said. Telling the story had made her feel grateful for their escape, and less concerned about her parents’ egos.

  “Your magician is brave to play poker with that man,” Vili observed.

  “Doyle used to know what cards everyone had,” Janie said. “So he could always win.”

  “Which is cheating,” Vili said. “So I imagine his friend has built up some resentment, over time. If I’d known about your Rocco, I might not have brought you to Italy, of all places. But this is the only place I have film connections.”

  “Do you think Rocco has family here?” Janie asked.

  “The American crime syndicates are not closely linked to the Sicilian and Neapolitan families, I believe. They formed among immigrants on their own. But we might as well be watchful.”

  “Have you ever heard of anything like the After-room?” Janie asked.

  “Never,” Vili said. “I’m very interested.”

  They arrived at the base of the vast travertine staircase of the Piazza di Spagna. The Spanish Steps stretched up toward a church at the top with two square towers. Young people stretched out on the sun-warmed marble, enjoying the bright afternoon. Tourists idled around the fountain at the bottom.

  “I have an appointment to keep,” Vili said. “But you might look in at that house there. It’s where the poet John Keats died.”

  Janie had read the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in school—Beauty is truth, truth beauty—and some of the poet’s letters, which she had liked. “Okay,” she said, looking at the house at the base of the steps.

  “It’s a museum now,” Vili said. “I must be off.”

  “Wait!” Janie said. “Is it a secret that you’re here?”

  “I’ll drop your parents a note, to say that I happen to be in town.”

  “You won’t let them know that you nudged the movie a little?”

  Vili smiled. “Now, why would I tell them such a thing?”

  “Because beauty is truth, and truth beauty?”

  “Oh, not always,” Vili said. “The old urn was wrong about that.”

  Then he was gone, and Janie and Benjamin went into the Keats house. They climbed to the upper level, where they bought a ticket from an English girl not much older than they were. Letters and manuscripts were in glass cases, along with portraits of Shelley and Byron.

  In the poet’s little bedroom, a window looked out at the fountain below. Keats had been dying of tuberculosis here, coughing up blood and struggling to breathe, and Janie thought she could feel, in this room, how he had wanted to live, but also wanted to be out of pain. It was as if some part of him was still here.

  She studied a portrait of Fanny Brawne, the girl Keats hadn’t lived long enough to marry, and read the “Ode to a Nightingale” in an open book:

  Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

  I have been half in love with easeful Death,

  Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,

  To take into the air my quiet breath;

  Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

  To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

  While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

  In such an ecstasy!

  She thought about Benjamin and the After-room, and wondered if he was half in love with easeful death.

  “Look at this,” Benjamin said.

  He was standing by a biography framed on the wall. It was a chronology of Keats’s life, beginning with his birth on Halloween in 1795. She skimmed the first few lines. Keats had lost his father when he was only nine, and his mother to tuberculosis when he was fifteen. Janie couldn’t help thinking that Benjamin had lost his parents like that. Then it said that John Keats had become an apothecary’s apprentice at sixteen, in 1811.

  She turned to Benjamin. “Did you know that?”

  Benjamin shook his head. She saw the movement reflected in the glass, and thought someone was standing behind them, over Benjamin’s shoulder. She looked, but the room was empty. She turned back to the biography on the wall.

  “Do you feel something here?” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?” Benjamin asked.

  “Like maybe he hasn’t left?”

  “That’s the effect they’re going for,” Benjamin said, looking around at the books, the letters, the keepsake locks of hair, the room with its early nineteenth-century furniture. A white plaster death mask made from Keats’s face was mounted in a glass case on one wall. His eyes were closed, his face smooth, and it made her shudder.

  “There’s something here,” she whispered. She thought she saw movement again and whirled. Again, nothing was there.

  The English girl from the ticket desk popped her head in. “You two have any questions?”

  “Yes,” Janie said. “Has anyone ever said this place is haunted?”

  “Loads of people,” the girl said, laughing. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? It feels like he’s still here.”

  They went down the narrow staircase out of the house, then started to climb the weather-pocked travertine of the enormous Spanish Steps. The gloom and sadness of the house dispersed, but its windows still stared down at them. Janie was watching the windows for a sign of what she had seen, but someone thrust a flower at her—a little boy selling roses—and she almost stumbled. When she looked back at the building, it looked empty.

  At the top of the steps, they were crossing the street when a truck came around a corner, very fast. Janie reached for Benjamin’s sleeve to pull him back, but the fabric slipped out of her fingers. She heard the driver’s indignant shout, the roaring complaint of the engine. The truck hit a puddle and splashed mud.

  “Benjamin!” she cried into the noise.

  The truck barreled away down the narrow street. Benjamin was standing very still. The truck had missed him by an inch.

  “That truck could’ve killed you!” she said.

  He shook his head as if to wake himself. “I didn’t see it coming.”

  They both looked down at his mud-splattered clothes. The poem was still in Janie’s head: Now more than ever seems it rich to die. She caught both of Benjamin’s shoulders. “Listen to me,” she said. “Dying is not an option. Do you understand that?”

  He nodded, but his eyes were vacant and dazed.

  Chapter 23

  Termini Station

  Doyle had drunk the last drops of the filter, and he was on his own. Which meant he was not on his own. Other people’s minds came back with a vengeance, crowding his thoughts. He drank whiskey and went to bed with a pillow over his head, but nothing helped. The apartment walls were thin, and the neighbors’ dreams invaded his sleep.

  He also began to feel remorse, a sensation that had vanished with the filter but now came back, the Furies tearing at his chest with their long, sharp fingernails. He felt awful for criticizing his sister-in-law, for calling his brother fat, for driving his girlfriend away. For throwing the kids out of his apartment. He should’ve been nicer to the kids, if only out of self-interest! He might have cadged another bottle of the stuff.

  He wondered if Benjamin was all right. Doyle remembered being sixteen and doing stupid, dangerous things. Walking on train tracks, jumping off bridges into murky water. Clinging to the back of a moving car and sliding through the icy streets in winter. Had he stopped doing any of that because it wasn’t safe? No. So would Benjamin stop chasing his dead parents? No.

  He hadn’t meant to tell Joey Rocco about what the kid could do. He’d never been good at keeping his mouth shut. When he started losing at poker and owed Joey money, he got desperate, frantic. He’d been improvising, trying to find some way to offset his debt, and he just blurted it out.

  He figured Joey wouldn’t believe him, but the old gangster was interested. Turned out Joey had always been suspicious about Doyle
’s luck, and had him watched for signs of cheating, but found nothing. So he was ready to believe that there were ways of knowing things that didn’t have an easy explanation. It could be very useful, in his line of work, to talk to the dead. When Doyle told him Benjamin could talk to his dead father, Joey believed it right away.

  Joey the Haberdasher, ex-convict, was supposed to be retired, but someone like him could never actually retire. So he sent one of his goons to follow the kids home from school, which exasperated Doyle. You couldn’t be tailing kids in cars! It just spooked them. The whole Scott household vanished. Poof: They were gone.

  Doyle went to their house in Ann Arbor and jimmied the lock. There were signs that they’d packed up quickly and left. He rubbed a pencil over the pad of paper in the kitchen, and saw the indentations of the last thing written: an address in Rome.

  So now Doyle was standing outside the Termini railway station in the Eternal City, under the long cantilevered roof, waiting for some cousin of Joey Rocco’s to collect him. He had wanted to say no, to refuse to chase the kids across an ocean, but his nose was still tender, his eyes still bruised, and he was worried that Joey might send someone to break his kneecaps. Doyle liked his kneecaps. They were knobby and freckled and sprouted ginger hair, but he was attached to them.

  He hunched his shoulders against the drizzle of other people’s thoughts. Nothing was as vapid as people’s thoughts on their way to a train. They wanted a pack of gum, a drink, another look at that girl in the tight skirt. They wanted a calzone, a coffee, a seat facing forward, a newspaper. On and on. It didn’t matter that Doyle didn’t speak Italian, except a few vivid curse words. Everyone’s wanting came through bright and clear: amber liquid in a clear glass, an empty train seat, that smooth curve of skirt. It all flashed through Doyle’s mind as it flashed through the minds of the people walking past.

  Until he found a giant standing in front of him.

  Doyle, who was six feet four himself, followed the brown suit from the lapels up to the face. The man’s craggy nose had been broken more than twice, and his hair was thick as a wire brush. He held out a business card between fingers like Polish sausages.

  Doyle took the card, which read only Salvatore Rocco, then looked back up at the giant who’d delivered it—a bodyguard? He wasn’t sure. Because there was something remarkable about the giant. Doyle struggled to recognize it at first, but then he understood: No thoughts came off this guy at all. His mind was a perfect blank. He picked up Doyle’s suitcase and turned away.

  Doyle had to run a little to catch up, because the giant had such long legs. But the mental clamor around them dimmed. It was as if the giant’s silent mind cast a cool, calm shadow, like the shade from an umbrella. The other voices couldn’t get in, as long as the giant was close. Doyle took extra steps to stay in that quiet orbit, basking in the stillness and peace.

  Chapter 24

  A Disappearance

  Vili sent Janie’s parents a handwritten note, as he’d promised to do, and invited them to dinner at the trattoria down the street from their apartment. There were shiny knots of hot garlic bread in baskets on the table, and the place had a rich, warm smell of tomato sauce. Vili ordered for everyone in fluent Italian, and the owner, Angelo, seemed to approve of all his choices, and to find them interesting, a challenge.

  Benjamin had needed to change out of the clothes the truck had splattered with mud, so he was going to catch up, to join them in a few minutes. That made Janie nervous, but she told herself he would be fine. She tried not to look at the empty chair they had left for him, or to picture the truck barreling down the street.

  Her father leaned across the table to Vili. “So how did you know we were here?” he asked.

  “I read about it in the film news,” Vili said.

  Her father brightened. “Seriously?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “And you just happened to be in Rome?” her mother asked.

  “I like to be here whenever I can,” Vili said. “I keep a little flat near the Piazza Navona. And I know your director, Tony, a little bit.”

  Janie waited for her parents to object to this coincidence, but they didn’t. They were too pleased to have been in the film news. People—European aristocrats, no less—were reading about them! Janie wondered which magazines had stories about movies that hadn’t been made yet, mentioning writers who weren’t famous. Could Vili produce a printed story if they asked to see it?

  “That’s what I love about Italy,” her father said. “It’s small enough that everyone knows everyone, within a certain world. It’s charmant.”

  “That’s French,” Janie said.

  “I know it’s French!” he said. “I’m using a French word to express an Italian quality. Stendhal did it too, I think you’ll find.”

  Janie was about to say that French was Stendhal’s native language, so he expressed everything in it. Instead she told herself to stop correcting her father. It didn’t matter what words he used.

  Angelo brought a steaming bowl of ravioli to the table, and everyone oohed and aahed.

  “Did you throw a coin into the Trevi Fountain?” Janie’s mother asked while Vili dished the ravioli out.

  “No, we forgot,” Janie said.

  “Then you have to go back,” her father said.

  “We saw the house where Keats was living when he died. It’s a museum now.”

  “How romantic!” her mother said. “Is it pretty?”

  Janie nodded. “Vili, did you know Keats was an apothecary’s apprentice, at sixteen?”

  “Ah, yes, of course,” Vili said. “I’d forgotten.”

  “No kidding!” her father said.

  “Like Benjamin,” her mother said.

  Janie thought about their strange experience in the house. What had she seen? An imagined shadow, a strange reflection. She wondered where Benjamin was. How long could it take him to change?

  “We’re meeting the cast tomorrow,” her father said.

  “Mr. Clementi—I mean Tony—has a girl he wants for the princess,” her mother said. “And there’s some British actor for the boy, because he’s under contract and they need to use him. No one seems crazy about him.”

  “Maybe Pip could be in it,” Janie said.

  “Writers don’t get to make those decisions,” her mother said.

  “If you had a strong opinion,” Vili said, “I imagine you could voice it.”

  “Yeah, we could voice our way right back to Michigan,” her father said. “Just in time for summer school.”

  “You might find filmmaking different in Italy,” Vili said. “Things are more adaptable here.”

  “Well, I don’t want to chance it,” he said.

  “I wonder where Benjamin is,” Janie said. “Maybe I’ll run back and see.”

  “Not alone in the dark,” her father said.

  Janie rolled her eyes—the apartment was a block away—but her father missed it, because Angelo arrived with a plate of tiny fried fish, each no bigger than a string you’d tie around your finger as a reminder of something important.

  “Qué manera!” her father cried.

  Janie bit her tongue to keep from telling him that was Spanish.

  “I’ll walk her back,” Vili said, pushing away from the table. “No one can say I’m not getting enough food.”

  Janie’s parents, warmed by the meal and the excitement of their new job, didn’t object. Janie wondered if, on some deeply buried level, they knew that Vili was their benefactor, and were grateful to him. He held open the restaurant door for her.

  The night was cool, after the warm, bright restaurant, and the air felt good on Janie’s face as they walked back to the flat. “There was something I wanted to tell you, about the Keats house,” she said.

  “Yes?” Vili said.

  “Well, he seemed to still so
rt of be there.”

  “Who?”

  “Keats. Just faintly. I thought I saw him in a reflection. But maybe I was imagining it.”

  “Perhaps not,” Vili said. “Perhaps your experiments with this After-room have made you more—aware of another dimension.”

  “I’m afraid sometimes that Benjamin would rather be there than here,” she said. “He almost got hit by a truck today.”

  “Ah,” Vili said. “That would be a problem.”

  “And it’s so strange that Keats was an apothecary’s apprentice. I thought maybe that was why you’d sent us there.”

  “I wish I’d been so clever,” Vili said.

  They were inside the building, climbing the stairs. Janie opened the flat with her key, and it was dark inside. “Benjamin?” she called.

  Silence.

  She fumbled for a light switch in the unfamiliar apartment, and it revealed empty furniture. She ran to Benjamin’s room and flipped the light on there. His muddy clothes were hanging over a chair. She turned back to Vili in despair.

  “There’s a note,” Vili said. He took a slip of paper from the table in the main room, and Janie read it.

  Going to look at the ruins of the aqueduct, as a location. Not hungry. See you soon.

  —B.

  But something else caught her eye. There had been three oranges left in Tony’s welcome basket on the table. Now the basket was empty, and there were three bright oranges on the floor.

  Chapter 25

  Visitors

  When the Scotts went off to dinner, Benjamin started to take off his muddy clothes. His near miss by the truck had rattled him, although Janie’s frantic response had rattled him more. The truck hadn’t hit him, after all.

  He sat on the bed thinking about the strange presence at the poet’s house. What was the relation of that haunted feeling, the otherworldly sense that someone was there, to the After-room, where he knew his father was? Were dead people hanging around everywhere, and he’d just never noticed it before? He was able to communicate with his father because they’d both taken the mind-connection powder, before his father died. But Janie had felt the poet’s presence first, and she hadn’t taken the powder since last year. Keats had never taken any, unless he’d developed something like it in his time as an apothecary.