Dark Rooms

by Lili Anolik

  I look at him, confused. Why is he bringing up Nica? What unfinished business? A sense of familial responsibility on whose behalf? And then confusion gives way to fear. Could he be referring to her murder, solved but not solved right? Did he know I was investigating it? The thought that he might pushes me to my feet. I’m not ready to explain myself to him. “I’ve got to go,” I mumble, afraid that he’ll try to stop me or say something else upsetting.

  “Oh, no. Don’t leave.”

  “I’ll catch Maddie another time.”

  “But she’ll be back any minute. She has to be. Can’t run up and down the field in designer ankle boots. If you don’t want to wait, I’ll let you go first. Just promise me you won’t let her stick a piece of gum over the keyhole. She used to do that when Nica came by.”

  I stand there, staring at him, my mind struggling to construct a scenario, other than the obvious one, in which Nica and Maddie would engage in an activity behind closed doors that he would wish to observe but would not be allowed to. My mind fails. Still, I want it spelled out for me: “Are you telling me that Nica and Maddie were—” leaving a blank for him to fill.

  “Fucking. Well, not fucking fucking. Probably just using their fingers,” he says, idly sniffing his. “Or their tongues, maybe. No big thing. All women are lesbians. It’s true. Studies have been done. Oh, wow.” He turns his face up to the ceiling. “Boy, are we a couple of dodos. A pair of real shit-for-brains.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It’s Wednesday. Game day. Maddie’s not coming back to her room to change. She’s probably on a bus, halfway to some hayseed town in New Hampshire where . . .”

  As he continues to talk, I feel my eyes blink, my ears close off, my brain tunnel back six months to tennis preseason.

  Mr. Schaeffer was giving us a demonstration in Houghton Gymnasium on proper bicep curl technique when Nica and Maddie showed up late for the third day in a row, hips bumping, faces flushed from running. He dropped his barbell to the floor, ordered the two them into his office, sent the rest of us out to the courts to do groundstroke drills. I stayed behind, though, lingering over an untied sneaker, and watched through the door, which he’d left open. Nica and Maddie were standing in front of his desk, gazes lowered penitently, while he ranted and raved. And then his phone rang. He turned around to get it, and as he did I saw Nica lean over, reach up under Maddie’s shirt, place her index finger squarely on Maddie’s sternum. As Mr. Schaeffer barked single-word answers into the receiver, she dragged the finger slowly down, circling Maddie’s belly button not once but twice before slipping inside. He hung up, and she smoothly took back her hand. He resumed his harangue.

  I didn’t know then that Nica and Maddie were lovers. The possibility never even occurred to me. Why should it have? Maddie had been with Ruben since her sophomore year, and Nica was so boy crazy. And, besides, Nica’s gesture—touching Maddie’s stomach—was hardly sexual. Except, of course, that it was. There was intimacy in it, possession, too. There was also Maddie’s pleasured shiver in response to it. And I must have noticed these things, registered their implications, if only unconsciously, otherwise why would this nonevent have lodged itself in my memory?

  Ruben, I realize, is no longer speaking. I look at him.

  “So you have nothing to say back?” he says. “Deafening silence? That’s all I’m going to get for my juicy revelation?” He laughs. “Same old kooky Grace.”

  “Same old kooky Grace,” I echo shakily.

  He takes a final messy sip of Yoo-hoo, screws the cap back on the empty bottle. “Okay, I’m out of here. Unless, of course, you want to give it another shot?”

  I shake my head, not knowing what he’s talking about, but knowing I don’t want to give him another anything.

  “Sigh,” he says, “oh well.” And then he rolls to his feet, takes a pen from behind his ear. “You got a piece of paper on you?”

  “Sorry.”

  “A napkin? A tissue? A Kotex pad?”

  When I say sorry again, he looks a little exasperated. After scratching thoughtfully at a sideburn, he tears off a swatch of the brown paper bag his food came in. Scribbling on it, he says, “My address at Trinity. In case, you know, the insomnia comes back. My office hours are the same.”

  He tries to hand the scrap to me but I won’t take it, so he balls it up, drops it in my bag. “Smell you later, Gracie,” he says, starting off down the hall, leaving the chicken bones and Yoo-hoo bottle behind. His miniature Etch-A-Sketch falls out of his sweatshirt pocket. He bends over, cat-quick, to retrieve it, his wide-hipped body weirdly limber and graceful. And then, without so much as a look back, he disappears around the corner.

  A minute later I’m walking out of Archibald House. My cell rings. Damon. Too excited now to be self-conscious, I answer right away. “I’m sorry I’m missing work again, and I know I should’ve called, but—”

  “Grace?” he says. Something’s wrong. I can hear it in his voice.

  My stomach plunges. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “It’s Max. He just had a heart attack.”

  Chapter 13

  I’m nervous. It’s Friday, early evening. I’m on my way to pick up Damon. It’ll be the first time I’ve laid eyes on him in three days. The first time I’ve spoken to him, other than through text or e-mail, in nearly as many. Fargas Bonds has been closed until further notice. Not closed as in shut down. Max has almost half a million dollars’ worth of paper out there. No new paper is being written, though. And Damon and a colleague of Max’s, an older guy named Carmichael, are handling the outstanding cases. Otherwise, Damon’s spending every waking moment at Max’s side. I’d offered to swing by the hospital, pick him up there, but he’d told me, no, that he wanted to go to his grandmother’s first. Understandable, I think, as I turn onto his street. He’s probably seen about as much of her lately as he has of me, is eager to check in, make sure she’s okay.

  He’s sitting on the curb in front of the house, looking at his cell when I pull up. He puts the phone away and gets in the car. As I drive, I watch him out of the corner of my eye. He seems, not surprisingly, preoccupied. And we pass most of the trip in silence, sympathetic on my end, but still, silence.

  About a mile from Chandler, I say, “How’s Max?” And then, quickly, “If you don’t want to talk about him, you don’t have to.”

  “No, I can talk about him. He’s all right. Hanging in there, I guess. They did an echocardiogram on him yesterday and it showed a clot in his left ventricle.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Well, it’s not good. The clot could break off at any time, cause a stroke.”

  “Are they doing anything to make that not happen?”

  “Sure, yeah. Lots of things,” Damon says.

  And I listen to him as he goes on to talk about beta-blockers and anticoagulants, statin therapy versus ACE inhibitors. His voice is calm and matter-of-fact, but I can hear the fear underneath, fear that’s turning all his thoughts into questions: What if Max doesn’t get better? What will happen to the business? To his grandmother? To him?

  I want to say something, audition several sentences in my head, but they all sound stupid and stilted and trite—useless. And, before I know it, another silence has formed over us, like ice over water, thickening by the second.

  Damon is the one to break it: “What is it we’re going to tonight? If you told me, I forgot.”

  “No, I didn’t tell you. I figured if I did, you might not come.”

  A tired smile. “Smart thinking.”

  “It’s the Outdoor Club meeting. It’s at Shep’s place.”

  “Shep? You mean Mr. Howell?”

  “Yeah, Mr. Howell. And we’re going because he asked me to go and I owe him one, but also because I’ve been wanting to sort of bump into Maddie and I’m pretty sure she’ll be there.”

  Puzzled, Damon says, “Maddie lives on campus. How hard can it be to bump into her?”

  “Harder than you might think. And tim
e’s running out.”

  “On what? Nica’s already dead, Grace.”

  “I know that,” I say, flustered. “I know she’s dead. I just—I don’t want this to drag on forever. I want resolution.” Forcing out a laugh, “Predictably selfish, I know.”

  He sighs. “That’s not selfish. That’s normal. Okay, so what do you want to bump into Maddie for?”

  “If anyone knows the story behind Nica and Jamie’s breakup, it would be her.”

  “That’s right. She and Nica were close, weren’t they?”

  “Um, yeah,” I say, taking a left into Chandler’s employee parking lot. “Yeah, they were.”

  I find a space at the back. After switching off the engine, I tell Damon about my visit to Archibald House. It doesn’t take long, and when I finish, I glance over at him. He’s staring out the window. He touches the side of his face with his hand and I can see emotion there, intense yet unreadable. It occurs to me that he might be upset, feel I was holding out on him. Quickly I add, “I wasn’t sitting on this. It’s just, we’ve had a tough time connecting and this isn’t exactly the kind of thing you can leave in a voice mail.”

  He’s silent for several seconds. Then he nods, vaguely at first then emphatically. “No, no, of course not,” he says.

  It’s not just his words that tell me I’m wrong about why he’s emotional, it’s his manner—distracted, like his attention’s fixed on a conversation he’s having with himself rather than the one he’s having with me—as well. Is he emotional then because he regards what Nica did as cheating? “For what it’s worth,” I say, “I don’t think Maddie and Nica were together when you and Nica were. At least not the whole time.”

  “Why?” he says, and this time it’s his tone—curious, but not burningly so—that tells me I’m wrong.

  “Because I was with Nica on her last day, and she was trying to duck Maddie.”

  “You don’t think she’s the one who hurt Nica, do you?”

  “Maddie? Like physically hurt her? Like killed her? Definitely not.” I start to laugh. “If she had killed my sister she’d be nicer to me, don’t you think? Out of guilt if nothing else. Instead she’s meaner than ever. Besides, she was at a house party that night. A sophomore from Simsbury—Davy Something—was throwing it. People saw her there. She got hammered, crashed on the couch. The police took statements and everything. In fact, she didn’t make it back to Chandler till after breakfast. She’d have gotten busted except who was going to notice that morning?” After a pause. “I have done some investigating on my own, you know.” After another pause. “And, anyway, how would someone like Maddie get her hands on a gun?”

  “What about Ruben?”

  Surprised, I say, “What reason would Ruben have for wanting Nica dead?”

  Damon, just as surprised, “Jealousy. What else? She’d moved in on his girl. And he’s a dealer. Dealers are known to carry.”

  I shake my head.

  “Why not?”

  “First of all, Ruben’s not a dealer, not a real one.”

  “What is he then? A fake one?”

  “No, he’s not a fake one. Of course he’s not a fake one. What I mean is that he’s not a professional one. He doesn’t deal because he needs the money. He deals so he has easy access to drugs. It’s more of, like, a hobby for him. And no way is he going after people who are late on payments, threatening to blow their brains out. He just doesn’t care enough. Plus, he’s lazy. Second of all, he was in New York when it happened, at a nephew’s bar mitzvah. He was on an Amtrak as soon as school ended on Friday.”

  “Did you see him on the train?”

  “Personally? No?” I’m getting annoyed because Damon seems to be misunderstanding everything I say on purpose.

  “Did a camera catch him boarding the train or getting off the train?”

  “What? I don’t know. I do know that the police checked him out and that he came back clean, which is good enough for me. And, besides, he wasn’t jealous of Nica. The impression I got was that he was into what she and Maddie were doing. Like super into it. If he had negative feelings toward anyone, it was toward Maddie for not being more, you know, inclusive.”

  When Damon doesn’t say anything back, I look at him. I can’t see his eyes because his gaze is aimed at his lap, but I can see the way every muscle in his face is drawing tight. And when he finally speaks, he has to clear his throat first, like it’s closing up with feeling. “Okay, fine,” he says. “Ruben didn’t do it. Just do me a favor and stay away from him. If you have to talk to him again, tell me and I’ll go with you.”

  “You think I need protection from Ruben?” I start to laugh again. “You obviously don’t know him.”

  “I know him. Know him enough. Know he’s a dealer and a scumbag.”

  “Yeah, he is, both those things. But he’s harmless, basically. A bark that’s worse than his bite.”

  “You think his sleaziness is all on the outside. You think because he acts like a clown he’s not dangerous.”

  “I can handle him.”

  Damon snorts. “Right. Until you can’t.”

  Damon’s behavior—so hostile, so aggressive—is confusing me, angering me, too. What makes him think he knows my friends better than I do? That he can tell me who to associate with? Give me orders? And all of a sudden we’re both breathing loud enough to hear and are glaring at each other.

  He looks away first, dropping his head in his hands, rubbing his thumbs against his closed lids so hard his eyeballs squeak in their sockets. When he raises his head, his face has lost its tautness, is drained and pale. “You look different,” he says.

  “I shouldn’t. I haven’t changed anything.” My voice is stiff, inflectionless: mad.

  “It’s your hair, how you’re wearing it.”

  “It’s in a ponytail. It’s in a ponytail most of the time.”

  “Oh,” he says softly.

  Relenting a bit, “I took a shower right before I came to get you. I put my hair back when it was still wet. It probably looks a little darker than normal, is all.”

  “Well, I like it.”

  “You look good, too,” I say, and only as I’m saying it do I realize I’m being truthful, not just polite. He isn’t dressed in his usual style. Is wearing a light blue Oxford shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, pants that aren’t jeans. A shirt and pants that he put on to go out with me, I think. And suddenly I understand: he stopped at his grandmother’s not to check in on her but to clean up for me.

  Our eyes meet, and something private passes between us, too private maybe because our eyes immediately bounce apart, and we both laugh nervously.

  “Well,” I say, reaching down, unlatching my door, “we should probably get going. It’s already quarter past eight.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Let’s do it.”

  The Outdoor Club meeting is being held at the Endicott House cottage, where Shep, the dorm’s head, lives. As Damon and I near it, the nerves I buried at the start of the evening begin to surface. What if Maddie’s a no-show? Or shows but refuses to talk to me? Then I’ll have hit a dead end, the final one as far as I can see. There are no other avenues left to try, and I don’t know how I’ll move forward. When Damon reaches for the door, I put my hand over his, stilling it. He looks at me for a long moment, then nods, telling me with his eyes that I can do this. I nod back.

  He turns the knob and we enter.

  I’ve never been inside the cottage before but have always been curious. The setup is basic: a large room with a small kitchen in it. At the far end is a hallway, and on the right, a door, behind which is, I assume, the bedroom and bathroom. Furniture and decoration is minimal—a picnic table, an India-print tapestry covering one wall, potted plants lining the windowsills, a couple hanging from the ceiling. A lot of earth tones. A lot of beanbag.

  The atmosphere is partylike in a wholesome, low-key, no-alcohol kind of way. On the table part of the picnic table is one platter of sliced vegetables, another of chocolate chip coo
kies. On the bench part of the picnic table is a tub filled with ice and soda cans, plates and napkins beside it. In the background some sort of music is playing—tribal-sounding, vaguely percussive, like two sticks being knocked together.

  Shep is behind the kitchen counter spreading hummus on toasted pita wedges. He must’ve been in a hurry when he pulled his hair into a ponytail because it’s not tugged all the way through the rubber band, is half in a bun. He raises his head to reach for the sesame oil, catches me looking at him. Smiling broadly, he waves his knife, sending drops of mashed chickpea flying. I hold up my hand, breaking eye contact as I do so he doesn’t take it as an invitation to come over, start talking.

  My gaze resumes its scan of the room. The crowd, composed of twenty-five or so students, is skewed to male, though only slightly; skewed to cool, more than slightly; and skewed to boarder, overwhelmingly. I home in on it, looking for Maddie. See Jamie first. No surprise since whenever I’m in a room, I seem to know instinctively where he is, a prickly warmth spreading along whichever portion of my body is turned his way. He’s collapsed in one of the beanbag chairs, soda in hand, long limbs elegantly splayed. Maddie is standing above him, Ruben beside her.

  Jamie must feel me looking at him because his head rotates. Our eyes touch. He blinks, waves me over. As he does, Damon whispers, “I’ll see you later.”

  Maddie tracks my progress, her gaze first going flat, then brightening with glittery dislike. She’s wearing her long hair in a painful-looking ballerina bun, the coil wound so tight her eyes are pulled up at the corners, bobby pins securing any stray wisps, tamping them down. Her lipstick, a fuchsia-tinged pink several shades too vivid for her complexion, washes her out; her cardigan, a pearly pink several shades too muted for her complexion, does the same. When I get close, she makes a big show of turning away. And I’m looking at her in profile, all nose and chin, as she slips her hand into Ruben’s.

  “Let’s go, you,” she says to him, her voice girlish, kittenish. Weird coming out of her.