Dark Rooms

by Lili Anolik

She turned up a palm, meaning, he guessed, he could do what he liked. Not wanting to but feeling obligated, he changed directions.

  Fifteen minutes later he was pulling onto a patch of gravelly dirt—empty, thank God—at the foot of a small hill, atop which sat the antique water tower. He looked at it through the windshield. It was one of the first steel water towers built in the United States, and over eighty feet tall. Nica didn’t seem to notice it, though. Didn’t seem to notice anything.

  Damon’s edginess was increasing by the second, and he was about to flip the car into reverse, get the hell out of there. Who cared if she didn’t want to go home? That’s where he was taking her. And the sooner he did, the sooner he could start trying to forget this weird shitty night ever happened. He was just reaching for the gearshift when she turned to him and said, gesturing to the tower, “Want to climb it?”

  She was kidding. Had to be. Only the thing was, he knew she wasn’t. Half hopefully, though, he kidded back. “Why do you think I brought you here?”

  Without another word, she opened her door, started up the hill. He watched for a couple seconds, blinking, then followed. Moments later they were at the base of the tower, standing in front of a ladder, narrow and rickety, that went all the way up to the top, seemingly all the way up to the stars. He glanced over at her, his eyes already dry and burning from the wind. Her hair, pure black and alive-looking, whipped around her face and throat. He could see the outline of her breasts, the sharp little nipples in her tight-fitting shirt. She was grinning at him. And with a sick-sinking sensation, he realized they were actually going to do this.

  “Me first, okay?” she said.

  When he offered no objection, she began to climb. She was as quick as a spider. And if she felt fear, she didn’t take it seriously. Or could be she didn’t have that emotion, was born without it, like people born without a sense of smell or all ten fingers or a conscience. He was barely able to keep up. And as he moved higher, each rung brittle-feeling in his palms, gritty with rust, he thought more and more about what a single false step would mean: a snapped neck or, worse, a snapped leg, and the end of his baseball scholarship.

  At about fifty feet up, a bar broke off when Nica grasped it. Damon heard the break first, then saw it, then saw it again, the same thing happening with the bar above. He felt his knees sag for a second in relief: they could go down now and without any loss of honor. But Nica, to his amazement, to his horror, to his utter, utter disbelief, wasn’t going down; she was going sideways, away from the ladder over to the bare face of the tower, which was grooved and crosshatched. He realized that she meant to use these indentations as handholds and footholds. As she hung there, positioning herself, he called out to her, but either his voice got torn to pieces by the wind and didn’t reach her, or it did reach her and she was ignoring it.

  He descended slowly, cautiously, no longer caring that he’d been out-toughed and out-cooled by a girl. So grateful was he to feel solid earth under his feet he almost dropped to his knees and kissed it. Instead he looked up. Nica had started climbing again. She wasn’t moving as fast as before, but she was moving, was only twenty-five feet from the top now.

  Then twenty.

  Then fifteen.

  As she made her painstaking way up those final ten, he was willing her ascension, never taking his eyes off her, not for a second, because to do so would have meant there was nothing between her and certain death but her nerve and grip. He could feel his face contorting, his teeth actually heating up from grinding together so hard. At last she was straightening her forearms, swinging her leg over the steel edge, as casually as if she were hopping the short fence behind the Gordon T. Pierpoint Boathouse. She turned around and waved to him.

  Watching her come down was tense, but nowhere near as tense as watching her go up had been. When she was almost to the ground, she said, “Catch.” He’d no sooner stuck out his arms than she’d fallen into them, not even looking behind her as she released her hold on the ladder.

  He pulled her tight to his chest. Now that she was safe, anger came at him as hard and hot as an inside fastball. He couldn’t tell what he wanted to do to her more: kiss her or hit her. And she seemed to know just what he was thinking, those slanting eyes moving over his face in a lazy, insinuating way, that full mouth twisting into a smirk, mocking his fear.

  She let him do both. Or, rather, she did both to him, stretching her neck suddenly, giving him a kiss that was like a punch to the face, bending his head back till it hurt. As he returned the kiss, shaking from it or the wind, he felt, for the first time in his life, that he’d come up against someone whose will was stronger than his own, someone he couldn’t break, who could break him, and probably would. And the crazy thing was, the prospect didn’t frighten him, it thrilled him. Actually, it frightened him, too, but even that was part of the thrill. Bring it on, he thought. Whatever it was, he wanted it, all of it. He could hardly wait.

  Damon’s face is pale and drawn-looking, as if the work of memory has drained the life right out of him. Drained it out of him, but breathed it back into Nica. With the story he’s just told, he’s performed a miracle, a resurrection. And listening to him I feel something beyond exhilaration, exultation almost.

  “Anyway,” he says, and sighs, letting his head drop.

  I start talking quickly, excitedly. “I actually have this vague recollection of Dad leaving the house early one morning to deal with tow-truck guys. It was before Nica died, only I’m not sure how much before. A month? A couple of months? Dad was back by breakfast so—” I stop, interrupted by the sound of air sucked through teeth and a muttered, “Jesus.” Glancing down, I see my hand uncurling in my lap, revealing my palm, bloody and flayed. I must’ve done it with my nails when Nica was on the side of that water tower and I was willing her to the top the same way Damon was. I look at the crescent-shaped divots. I know rather than feel that they hurt.

  Damon picks up my palm. Brow furrowed, he runs the tip of his index finger lightly across its surface. The pain comes alive at his touch—a sharp, stinging sensation. Something else comes alive at his touch, too, though, something like pain in its urgency and clamorousness, yet not pain. It’s rolling powerfully through my body. I don’t understand what it is and then I do: desire, a word used in those books they sell at the checkout counters in supermarkets; a word that pants and heaves and throbs; a ridiculous word, hysterical and overblown; a word having nothing whatever to do with me, except that apparently it does. Afraid he’ll register the racing of my pulse, put together what it means, I snatch back my hand.

  He starts, his jaw dropping in surprise.

  “You were tickling me,” I say, turning my face away.

  “Sorry.”

  I close my eyes. Draw oxygen, nice and slow until the feeling passes. “So,” I say, when I trust my voice to hold steady, “that’s how you and Nica got together.”

  “Yep, that’s how.”

  “Why did she want to keep the relationship a secret?”

  “She said it was because of Jamie. If he knew she was with someone else, it would hurt him. She wanted to wait till more time had passed, give him a chance to get over her before we, you know, went public.”

  “But you didn’t believe her?”

  “No, I did. But he was only part of the reason.”

  “What was the other part?”

  He hesitates.

  “What?” I say.

  “Your mom.”

  I wasn’t expecting this answer, and a weird kind of panicky dread flares up inside me when I hear it. Trying to sound loose, casual, I say, “What makes you think that? Did Nica say something?”

  “Not directly, no. But she was obsessed with the idea that your mom was watching her.”

  So relieved I start to laugh, “Yeah, well, that’s because she was. My mom’s a photographer. Nica was her subject.”

  He nods, but the nod is noncommittal.

  “What? You don’t think that was it?”

  “I
do,” he says, “but it went beyond that. Nica was convinced she was being watched when we were alone. I mean, really alone, parked in my car in some faraway spot, or in my room late at night. She’d be nervous, jumping up, wrapping herself in her jacket, the jean one, the one you’re wearing now, and looking out the window every few minutes. ‘She’s out there. I can feel her. I can feel her eyes on me.’ That’s what she’d say.”

  So Damon did recognize the jacket. “That sounds extreme,” I say, “but Nica’s situation was extreme. If she felt like Mom was constantly following her around with a camera, that’s because Mom was. She was practically the only thing Mom ever photographed.”

  “Yeah, she told me. Pretty messed up.”

  I’m a little offended, which surprises me. “It wasn’t so bad,” I say.

  “Having no privacy?”

  “Nica wasn’t powerless, Damon. They had an arrangement. Any picture Mom took, she had to show Nica, and if Nica wanted it trashed, Mom had to trash it. That was the deal. And, God, it wasn’t as if Nica was shy about showing her body. She liked the attention.”

  “Good thing since she was going to get it, like it or not.”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” I say again.

  He just shakes his head.

  Eager to drop the subject because it’s obvious to me now that there’s no way that he—that any outsider—can understand how it was in our family, I say, “I’m just trying to explain why Nica was freaked out about Mom watching her.”

  “I didn’t say she was freaked out. I said she was obsessed.”

  “Spare me, okay? Tomato, tomahto.”

  “No, not tomato, tomahto. They’re two different terms and they mean two different things. If you’re freaked out by something you don’t want anything to do with it, just want to get away from it. If you’re obsessed with something, your reaction is more”—he looks at me, then looks away—“complicated.”

  The panicky dread is flaring inside me again, and I know that he’s going to tell me something I don’t want to hear if I keep pushing. I do, anyway. “What are you trying to say?”

  He turns to me and I’m startled by the ferocity in his eyes. “I’m saying that Nica hated the thought of your mom always watching her, but loved it, too. I’m saying that when she pressed her face against the window of my car or my bedroom, she was relieved to see that your mom wasn’t out there, but she was disappointed, too. Maybe more disappointed than relieved.” He’s silent for a moment, then says softly, “I think we should stop talking about this.”

  “I don’t want to stop.”

  “Grace, what I’ve told you has obviously upset you.”

  “What? No it hasn’t.”

  “You should see your face.”

  I glance into the rearview mirror. I look more than upset. I look crazed—eyes bulging, mouth twitching, skin splotched with pink and red. Taking a second to smooth out my expression, breathe, I say in an even voice, “I just want to understand why you think what you think. You’re telling me you’re positive Nica wanted to be spied on by my mom, took some kind of sick pleasure in it or whatever—why? Because she looked out the window a couple times? That seems like pretty thin evidence to me.”

  He sighs. “I have other reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the wildness that was nonstop, never-ending, twenty-four seven. It’s like she was always trying to show off for somebody, some invisible person she was terrified of boring. Who if not your mom?”

  “How do you know it wasn’t you she was showing off for?”

  He makes a dismissive snorting noise. “I just know, okay?”

  His tone annoys me—so sure of itself. I make a dismissive snorting noise of my own. The look he gives me is a hot one. I give it right back.

  And then, spreading his hands, the knuckles already swollen to the size of gumballs, he says, “I know because I didn’t like all the wildness. I was always trying to get her to calm down, not act up. And, besides, I wasn’t someone she cared about impressing. I don’t think she even knew who I was. Not really. She just had some idea about me in her head.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Your mom thought Jamie was perfect, the perfect guy, the perfect boyfriend. And then I come along, his exact opposite. If Jamie was everything your mom loved, then I must be everything your mom hated, so Nica made up her mind then and there that she was going to love me. I think that’s why she started calling me Demon. You know about the nickname, right? It’s not news to you?”

  I nod without meeting his eye.

  “You know how I got it?”

  “For punching some guy’s lights out during a baseball game, right?”

  His mouth twitches in irritation. “There was a little more to it than that. I didn’t punch him for fun. I punched him because he kept calling me wetback, the other guys on the team wetbacks. Finally I lost it. The dumb asshole didn’t even know that a wetback’s a Mexican.”

  “I never heard that part of the story.”

  “Yeah, well, Chandler wanted it hushed up. Thought it was embarrassing—racism in the supposedly ultraliberal Independent School Conference. That’s why I only got suspended from the team for two weeks. My point is, Nica liked the nickname because she liked to think of me as violent and thuggish. It’s how she saw me. Really”—his voice turning bitter—“it’s the reason she was with me.”

  I start to protest, and then I flash back to the Chandler tennis courts, Damon walking by, Nica giving him that assessing look, then pronouncing him rough trade. The words die in my throat.

  Damon resumes after a pause, still bitter-sounding: “Sometimes I think she was just one of those spoiled little girls with a nice, safe life that she tangles up with craziness because she’s bored. That would be fine except she tangles up your life, too, and you’re fighting for safe and boring. Safe and boring sounds great to you. But she doesn’t give a shit. Climb up the side of a water tower in the middle of the night? Sure. Why not? Jump on the tiger’s back. Throw your body on the grenade. Anything for a kick, right? Well, I was the kick of the moment. But my moment was passing. I didn’t want to go to the edge with her. Worse, I wanted to pull her back. So I was really no fun and—”

  That teakettle wailing sound is back in my ears. The way he’s talking about Nica—I can’t listen to it. I won’t listen to it. I fumble for the door handle, get out of the car, start walking.

  A few seconds later, the passenger-side door opens, and Damon calls my name. But I keep going, my eyes on my feet moving along the cracked, uneven sidewalk. Soon I hear his step behind me, right on my heels. And then his breath is on my neck, and one of his hands is closing roughly around my wrist. He jerks me back.

  Eyes dark, blazing queerly, he says, “You’re the one who wanted to talk about this. Not me. You.”

  I wrench free of his grasp, tears burning my eyes. The house we’re standing in front of has one of those inflatable kids’ swimming pools on its patchy front lawn, the inevitable Our Lady statue. I can see a television light glowing bluely in a downstairs window.

  When Damon speaks again, his tone is softer, gentler. “Grace, it’s not like I thought the wildness was all there was to your sister. I knew it was just what she was choosing to show me. And, you have to remember, I was in love, so not exactly levelheaded and reasonable.”

  “But you said—”

  “I know what I said. None of that mattered, though. I loved her so much I felt like I was out of my mind. Why do you think I let her talk me into those stupid his and her tattoos? I was a basket case when she broke up with me. Fucking beside myself.”

  “She broke up with you?” I say the words slowly, wanting to make sure I’m hearing them right.

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  The note of excitement in my voice must catch his attention because he gives me a funny look. “The night she died.”

  “Damon, why?”

  “Can we sit? My leg’s killing me.”
<
br />   We move to the edge of the lawn, drop down on the grass. He stretches his leg out in front of him, massaging his knee through the hole in the brace. I try to curb my impatience, wait until he’s ready to start talking. I’m about to burst when, at last, he says, “The answer to your question is, I don’t know. I picked her up at school that night. We drove to Talcott Park, like we’d done a dozen times before. It was warm out. I brought a blanket. And we were, you know, together. Everything was good, I thought. Then she got a call.”

  A call. Yes, yes, I’d known there’d been a call only I’d forgotten I’d known. The police had learned about it from Nica’s phone records—learned, at least, that it was made if not who made it. They’d told my mom and dad and me a Chandler pay phone was the source, which didn’t narrow things down a whole lot since Chandler was basically Nica’s entire world. A nonclue. Though maybe not.

  “From who?” I ask, trying to downplay my eagerness.

  Damon lifts his hands, turns them over, the palms empty, no answers in them.

  Disappointed, I say, “Well, what did they talk about?”

  “There was no talk. Not on her end, anyway. She said, ‘Hello,’ then listened, then said, ‘Okay,’ once, maybe twice, then hung up.”

  “And then?”

  “And then she dumped me, told me to take her back to school, which I did.”

  “I wonder who called her.”

  “What does it matter who called her? The important question is, who killed her? And we know the answer to that one.”

  “Not,” I say, “exactly.”

  He stares at me, totally lost. Finally he says, “What?”

  I lay it out for him. Except for me being pregnant, which isn’t relevant to Nica’s murder, I tell him everything: about Manny Flores and the poem in The Rag; about the tattoo I spotted in Nica’s armpit, the answering one I spotted in his; about using my staff password to log onto Chandler’s online directory and seeing Max’s name in his emergency contact information, Googling “Fargas Bonds” and finding the ad on Craig’s List.

  When I’m finished, Damon’s silent for a long time. Then he says, “So that’s why you took the job? To learn about me? Because I might have been the one who”—pausing, then skipping the verb altogether—“Nica?”