Dark Rooms

by Lili Anolik

  We stay locked in our positions, our faces inches apart. As time passes, I can feel the silence begin to harden around us like plaster. And then the ash hanging from the tip of her cigarette drops into the hollow at the base of my throat. “Oww! Jesus! Watch it!” I say, scrambling to sit up, holding my shirt away from my skin.

  “Sorry,” she says, sounding anything but. She sits back on the bed, resting her spine against one of the posts. Her cigarette has died between her lips. She goes to her pocket for a fresh one and her zebra-striped Bic. I watch as she snicks the lighter, holds it to her mouth. Her face is smooth now, all traces of emotion gone, and when her eyes meet mine, they’re steely-cool and faintly disdainful. I wouldn’t have thought anything could be worse than her anger but I was wrong.

  “Why are you acting like this?” When she doesn’t answer, I say, half joking, “This is because I borrowed your jacket without asking, isn’t it?”

  “You don’t understand anything. You never have, you never will.”

  I wait a beat, then I say, “I understand you.” In the motionless dark air of her bedroom, it sounds like a profound statement. I mean it to sound profound. It is profound, should change everything between us, rock our relationship to the very foundations. And I wait eagerly for her to respond. But she doesn’t appear to have heard me, is staring out the window, smoking.

  “Nica,” I say, “I’m telling you, I understand you now.”

  Still nothing. It’s as if my words are taking a wrong turn somewhere between my lips and her ears. And then she flicks her cigarette to the floor, turns to me, and my heart lifts for a second because I think I’ve finally reached her. Letting her lids go heavy, she holds her hand in front of her nipple, and, slowly, deliberately, flaps it back and forth.

  I explode. “Titty hard-on? Are you kidding me?”

  “Why not? It’s what you deserve.”

  “I don’t see that.”

  Nica gives a snort of contempt, then goes back to staring out the window.

  For a moment I lose my feeling of conviction, as if everything I’m doing makes no sense: I’ve come to the wrong place to say the wrong words to the wrong person. But I push past my doubts. Say, “You were all I thought about for a long time. Even when I wasn’t thinking about you I was thinking about you. Then something happened that made me know I needed to put my thinking into action. Who really killed you? I believed that was the mystery I was trying to solve. It wasn’t, though. You were the mystery I was trying to solve.”

  “So you solved the mystery, Grace. Big deal. You solved the mystery and it solved nothing.”

  I look at her. Her face is still turned toward the window, the white line of her jawbone stark against the blackness of the room. “Knowing who you are isn’t nothing.”

  She says nothing back, just shakes her head.

  I can’t help myself. I begin to cry. As I swipe at the tears leaking from my eyes, angry and ashamed, she turns and watches me with clinical interest.

  “It isn’t nothing,” I say again.

  For a while she’s quiet. And then she says, “I never wanted this.”

  “This what?”

  “You, here.”

  “What did you want?”

  “I wanted you to forget about me, move on with your life. Who cares whether or not you knew who I really was before I died? Who cares why I died, or how? I was dead, and dead’s dead. No fixing it, no changing it. So no matter what you learned, how good your detective work was, it would finally be useless, bullshit. You should have seen that right off, let it all alone.”

  I’m paying careful attention to her voice as she delivers this speech, am listening for a false note. If she hits one, I don’t hear it. Still, though, I don’t believe her. I think this is just something she’s said to herself so many times it’s become truth to her. I need to find a way to crack her surface, break through. And, before I have a chance to stop myself, I start talking, the words just pouring out of my mouth:

  “You’re telling me you wanted me to forget everything. As if that was possible. But let’s just pretend for a second that it was. I don’t think that’s really what you wanted. Of course I was wrong before when I thought your death and my pregnancy were connected. Obviously I was wrong. It goes without saying I was wrong. At the same time, though, I wasn’t wrong at all. The night of Jamie’s party, when I dressed in your clothes, wore that wig, I wasn’t just out of my mind with grief and pills like I’d always thought. I was doing something deliberate—unconscious, okay, yes, admittedly, but still deliberate. I was trying to seduce your ghost into the present, bring you back one last time, make everybody—Jamie, Maddie, Ruben, and most especially me—see you again. What happened instead, though, was you seduced me into the past. And it wasn’t only me you seduced. It was Damon, too. You went to bed with him, I woke up with his baby growing in me. Really, how could I have been the one to lure him into that room when I didn’t even know who he was to you? When I can’t remember the act? Not the beginning of it. Not the middle of it. Not the end of it. Nothing. It was as if I wasn’t there while it was happening, was outside my body. Which is exactly where I was because you were inside me. And if we—we, Nica, we—didn’t trick him into doing what he did, I would have gone on to Williams and on with my life, though always with one eye over my shoulder and on the past since in the back of my mind there would have been this niggling doubt, this feeling that I’d let you down somehow, screwed it all up. But I did try to seduce you, which got you to seduce me, which got me pregnant. And because I got pregnant, I returned to Chandler, and because I returned to Chandler, I found out the truth about you and what happened to you. And in one sense—the practical sense, the logical sense, the rational sense—you’re right, the knowledge is useless and couldn’t matter less. But in another sense—the emotional sense, the psychic sense, the deeper, darker, truer sense—it’s the only thing that matters. And you know this as well as I do, even if you want to pretend you don’t.”

  I have no breath left by the time I finish talking and my voice is raw. I’ve just given words to everything that my imagination and my obsession have taught me. Part of what I said came from half-formed thoughts that have been floating around in my head, and the rest took shape in my mouth as I spoke. Maybe the darkness helped. And having Nica right there in front of me. It’s all conjecture, obviously, and of the wildest kind. Still, though, I know it’s true.

  She’s looking at me, her face flushed, her eyes bright, feverish. “You don’t have to stay here,” she says. Her voice is taut, urgent. “It isn’t too late. Not if you fight.”

  “I’m done fighting. And I’m not leaving. Not without you.”

  “You know I can’t. You still can, though. At least you can try. Try, Grace, try.”

  “No.”

  “If our situations were reversed, I’d leave you behind.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would! In a second I would! So fast it would make your head spin I would!”

  I just shake my head.

  Nica slumps against the bedpost. Then she turns away, eyes closed. When she turns back, her eyes are open and they’re as hard and flat as nail heads. Suddenly she’s up on her knees, leaning forward and into me. “Do you think you’re doing me a favor? Jesus Christ, I had to take a bullet to the stomach to get away from you once. Do you think I want you hanging around me again, a tagalong for all eternity? Don’t you have any pride? Any self-respect? Can’t you see when you’re not wanted?” Tears are streaming down her cheeks now, and her voice has risen almost to a scream. She starts beating on my chest with her fists. “I’m telling you to go! Get out of my sight! Leave!”

  I let her hit me, don’t try to ward off any of the blows. “I’m not leaving you again,” I say. “Not if I can help it. Not ever.”

  I mean it and she knows I mean it. I can see the resignation in her eyes as she pushes off me, goes back to the bedpost.

  At first I’m relieved that she’s giving up. But t
hen I look at her face as she plays with the fringe on her cutoffs, see the sadness there, and my heart feels like it’s breaking apart in my chest. I reach out for her hand. She lets me take it, but her fingers are limp in mine. And even though we’re touching, there’s something so distant in her expression and in the silence between us that I’m frightened. “Nica?” I say.

  Her eyes, bleak and shutdown, turn to me.

  “I know you think what I’m doing is stupid. Maybe it is stupid. But I love you more than I love anyone. And there’s no place I’d rather be.”

  I don’t know till that moment that I’m going to say these words, and I think I’m just saying them to get that sad look off her face. As soon as they’re out of my mouth, though, I realize they’re true.

  She realizes it, too, her eyes widening and clearing, her tears stopping, her breath catching in her throat. And then her fingers shift in my hand, curling around the side. It’s a movement toward drawing me closer, faint but definite. I feel as if I’ve crossed every boundary that exists—between past and future, living and dead, world and underworld—to reach this point, this moment.

  I must blink because without seeing her come toward me, she’s suddenly got me by the shoulders, her fingers clutching, squeezing, grasping, making me wince. She presses her mouth to mine, so hard I can feel the teeth under the flesh, and under the teeth the bones of her skull. Her tongue splits my lips, keeps going, not just into my mouth, down my throat. I try to move back but her grip only tightens. Her tongue is probing, deeper and deeper. I start to gag on it, to choke. It’s impossible to breathe.

  I blink again and Damon’s face fills my eyes. Only for an instant, though. I twist away as everything inside me floods out in a hot, wet gush. It comes and it comes until there’s nothing left, just saliva, then just air. I fall back on the bed, my stomach empty but still contracting, my brain spongy and strange. I stare at the ceiling, try to sync myself with where I am and what is happening.

  And then Damon’s voice says, “I found these at the bottom of the stairs.”

  I look. He’s sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed. He’s holding Ruben’s baggie with a hand covered in throw up. Seeing the pills makes me remember something. Quickly I turn to the floor on the other side of the bed. No Shep.

  “Is this all you took?” Damon says. When I don’t answer, he shakes the baggie to get my attention.

  I turn back to him, pull the trazodone bottle out of my pocket.

  Rolling to his feet slowly, like he’s tired or in pain, he flips on the lamp and takes the bottle from my hand. “Jesus, and you washed it all down with vodka?”

  I look at him dazedly, uncomprehendingly, then at the bottle of Smirnoff Silver, what Dad drinks when the Jim Beam’s gone, tucked under his arm.

  His manner suddenly brisk, Damon says, “Get up. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “Where is he?” I say, croak, really, my throat torn up from the violence of the vomiting.

  “Let’s go. Give me your keys. Now. We need to make sure all that poison’s out of you.”

  “Damon, where’s Shep?”

  “Shep?”

  “Mr. Howell, okay? Mr. Howell.” There’s a hysterical rise in my voice. “He didn’t do this to me. I did it to myself. He was just trying to help. He didn’t know anything. All he was doing was sitting with me.” I’m near tears. “Did you hurt him?”

  Damon looks at me for a long moment before shaking his head.

  “Then where did he go?”

  Damon places his non-throw-up-covered hand on my arm. “Come on,” he says gently.

  I push him away. He’s lying. He hurt Shep. Or if he didn’t, he must’ve threatened to, or yelled, scared Shep off somehow. Shep couldn’t have gone far, though. I crane my neck, straining to catch a glimpse of him. Had he slipped into the bathroom? The hallway? Or was he hiding somewhere? Behind the bookcase maybe? In the closet?

  And that’s when I see the fleece, folded neatly at the foot of the bed.

  I’m still looking at it when Damon says, “You were by yourself, Grace. You were all alone.”

  Epilogue

  That kiss Nica gave me wasn’t just a kiss of life, it was a kiss of death, too.

  I passed out on the way to the hospital. And even though Damon had already induced vomiting, they jammed a tube down my esophagus, pumped my stomach anyway. I’d overdosed not only on trazodone, as it turned out, but on Xanax, as well. (Ruben’s supplier, I guess, hadn’t been fucking with him after all. At least not that time.) And when I woke up, a doctor with gray skin and stubble, eyes razor-slits of exhaustion, asked me if I knew I was pregnant, then told me I wasn’t anymore. I cried and cried, my tears a mixture of relief and disappointment, the same mixture I’d felt in Nica’s bedroom once I’d realized that Damon had got there just in time, that I wasn’t going to die. The fact of the matter was, in spite of knowing the truth about how the baby was conceived, understanding the havoc having it would wreak on my life, I still thought of it as Nica’s, a part of her alive inside of me, and would never have been able to do anything to hurt it, not deliberately. And when I think about the miscarriage even now, six months later, I feel a wave of sadness that just fells me, or a wave of guilt for not feeling sad enough that fells me every bit as hard in a different way. So I try not to think about it, try to put it out of my mind. I know now that there are some things thinking doesn’t help.

  Damon ended up needing to see a doctor, too. Running from the hospital to Jamie’s dorm to my house (my phone had indeed cut out mid-message, but he’d heard enough of it, enough to rip off his brace, bolt from Max’s room without a word of explanation), he retore his ACL. The second was a more serious tear. He had to go back in for surgery, and his athletic future looks less certain than ever. He’s hopeful, though, and never skips his rehab exercises.

  I know because apart from those seventy-two hours I was on psychiatric hold, I’ve been with him all day, every day pretty much. Not only are we working together at Fargas Bonds, we’re also basically living together. I’m with him at his grandmother’s house five, six nights a week. Though he’s the person I’m closest to, there’s a lot we don’t talk about: the past, Nica or the baby, or how we really met, the marriage proposal he left on my voice mail, what would have happened if he hadn’t barreled into Nica’s room that night and forced his finger down my throat. The future either. We’re both going to school in the fall, and whether or not we’ll remain a couple once I head to western Massachusetts, he to northeastern Connecticut, I have no idea. I try to stay in the present, not get ahead of myself. My sense is that he does the same.

  Other than my living situation, it’s amazing how little’s changed. I ended up not telling anyone besides Damon that Nica got shot by accident that night. And I didn’t even tell him about her hand, its possible twitch in Mom’s photographs. I’m doing Manny a wrong, I suppose, letting him continue to take the rap for a crime he didn’t commit, but that’s just how it is. Best thing about being six feet under, no one can hurt you anymore. Dead’s dead, in Nica’s words.

  Dad’s still at the house, SAT tutoring in the afternoons, bartending in the evenings. I make sure to have dinner with him once a week, though the weirdness between us hasn’t gone away. Maybe it would have a chance to if I told him everything I found out about our family, about Nica, but I haven’t yet and I probably never will. He still seems like a man holding himself together with frayed bits of string. One more hard truth and he might fall apart for good. Besides, he knows as much as he wants to, is my feeling. I’m not going to force him to know any more.

  Following a touch-and-go first few weeks, Max went on to make a complete recovery. He does, however, tend to get tired quicker. Plus he has Renee hawk-eyeing him, telling him to take it easy or else. I think it was a smart move partnering up with Carmichael, who’ll be joining Fargas Bonds full-time this summer.

  After our conversation in Ruben’s car, I didn’t see Jamie for weeks. He vanished, basicall
y. Another stint in rehab, I assume but don’t know for sure. What I do know for sure: he turned back up at Chandler in late November, just in time for the U.S. Junior Open. He made it all the way to the finals, his best finish ever. Around Christmas he started dating a girl named Maryanne Hutchinson. Maryanne is a senior, serious, partial to Fair Isle sweaters and patterned flats, a member of the Christian Fellowship. Not his kind of girl at all except that, apparently, she is. He plays guitar at the school’s Bible study meetings, I hear. He’ll be attending Princeton in the fall.

  I’m 99.9 percent convinced that the Shep waiting for me in my house that night was a hallucination brought about by drugs, grief, exhaustion, and more drugs. If the tiniest bit of doubt lingers, it’s because I never got the chance to ask Shep whether it was him or not. While I was in the hospital, he disappeared, same as Jamie. Only he disappeared permanently. Maybe Jamie told him the cat was out of the bag as far as the dealing was concerned. Or maybe he just got itchy feet, decided it was time to move on. Either way, he’s gone.

  I run into Maddie every now and then, usually at the Chandler tennis courts. We aren’t making each other friendship bracelets or anything, but we aren’t hostile to each other either. I get my information about Jamie from her. About Ruben, too, even though she broke up with him and he’s no longer living in Hartford, flunked out of Trinity before midterms, setting some kind of new school record. She chopped off her hair over Martin Luther King weekend. Is wearing it now in a punked-out pixie shag, shaved in back and up the sides. I told her that I liked the cut, that it made her look like Jean Seberg. She didn’t know who Jean Seberg was, but seemed pleased by the comparison anyway.

  Discord continues to reign between Messrs. Wallace and Tierney. Mr. Tierney, apparently unwilling to share so much as a roof with his former best bud, lobbied the administration for Shep’s position as Endicott dorm head before it had even been deemed officially vacant. His request was granted and he now lives in the cottage. Mr. Mills and Mrs. Bowles-Mills are still married, so I assume he’s managed to keep his mouth shut. As for the affair between Mr. Wallace and Mrs. Bowles-Mills, I don’t know if it’s going on anymore or not. If it is, they’re discreet about it.