Frost

by Marianna Baer

  “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate … your appreciation.” Really? That’s the best you could do?

  Now he looked at me and smiled. “And I appreciate your appreciation of my appreciation.”

  “That’s so sweet.” I put a hand on my heart. “I appreciate your appreciation of my appreciation of your appreciation.”

  We laughed—holding eyes. As I stared, something moved behind him. I looked just in time to see the photo he’d hung fall right off the wall, onto the bed. It landed with a clatter as the Plexiglas jostled in the frame.

  David turned. “Oops,” he said.

  Because we’d smoothed over the tension between us, I allowed myself a little dig. “I think, maybe, it’s better if you leave the home-improvement projects to me.”

  After David left, I couldn’t settle down to homework quite yet—the conversation had been too intense and now I had too much on my mind. I decided to see if there was anything I could do to fix Celeste’s closet door. She kept having trouble opening it, and I didn’t know if it was a problem with the knob, or if the wood was swelling.

  I tried the handle and the door opened smoothly. I turned the knob back and forth, looked at the movement of the latch. It seemed fine. I shut the door and opened it again, seeing if the wood stuck. It didn’t. I couldn’t tell what the problem was. I leaned my back against the doorframe, shut my eyes, and breathed in. My skin tingled. Then the emotion—that sense of contentment, safety—penetrated my cells. It’s weird, how scents can be so powerful. My mother once told me that smells are key to selling a house. Freshly baked bread, cinnamon, and coffee are best, she’d said.

  The day I came home from school in eighth grade and our own house smelled of baking bread, I wanted to vomit. Instead, I ran upstairs, to the one place the smell couldn’t reach.

  Wait a minute.

  I breathed in again.

  The attic.

  That was it, wasn’t it? My attic fort in our house in Cambridge. That’s what the closet smell reminded me of. I slid down to the floor and folded my legs into my body. I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to make the connection.

  Our house was a fixer-upper; my parents had always planned on turning the spacious attic into a living space. But, in the meantime, it had been a curious kid’s heaven—full of my parents’ and even my grandparents’ histories in junk and paper: love letters, old school report cards, yearbooks, clothing, toys….

  If the whole attic was my kingdom, my fort was my castle. It was hidden behind a rusty file cabinet and a coatrack where someone’s ancient furs hung in plastic bags, just a simple pine frame, covered by an old sheet, with pillows and a few stuffed animals inside. An older cousin had helped me build it, and I’d sworn her to secrecy. What was the point in having somewhere to disappear to if other people knew where I went?

  I squeezed my knees closer to my chest now, remembering the day the Dumpster had arrived, the week we’d moved out. “Okay if I trash the wood from your old playhouse, Bean?” my dad had said. Turned out, my parents had known about it the whole time. One of the many things I’d become disillusioned about.

  “We’ve grown apart,” my mother said when she’d told me they were splitting up. “All we have in common are you and the house, Leenie.”

  Well, yes. Wasn’t that their life?

  We were a trio, after all. A unit. Whenever we played the “what building would you be?” game, I’d tell them that Mom was the downstairs floor of our house, I was the middle floor, and Dad was the top, not separate buildings at all. They let me believe I was right.

  It was obvious why I’d thought that. I’d lived in that house from the time I was born, and fixing it up was my parents’ passion. Why had they bothered if they knew we were just going to sell it to strangers?

  After the divorce, they both moved to condos: my mother to an all-glass, modern monstrosity in LA, where she was originally from, and my dad to a supposedly “luxury” one-bedroom on the outskirts of Cambridge with hear-through walls and hollow doors. I was reading Catcher in the Rye the first time I saw my dad’s place. I decided his condo was the architectural equivalent of Holden’s phonies. I couldn’t believe my dad, of all people, was living there. He said it was temporary; that was three years ago.

  Now, I ran my hand lightly across Celeste’s clothes. Was David trying to bring his sister back to a less messy time, by being so protective of her? Maybe they’d had an idyllic childhood, with a father who wasn’t sick yet. Maybe David’s vigilance was an attempt at keeping Celeste safe from the ugliness of reality.

  Maybe he was trying to build her a fort.

  When I emerged from my closet reverie, I took a moment to rehang Celeste’s photo. I wasn’t quite sure why it had fallen to begin with—there was actually nothing wrong with the way David had installed the nail. To be safe, I took the nail out and hammered it in again, at a bit of a steeper angle. After resting the frame on it, I studied the image for a moment. Even though it was disturbing, there was something compelling about it. Still, I didn’t understand how Celeste could want to look at a picture of herself in which she appeared dead. I hoped—for both of their sakes— that David was just a worrier. That he didn’t need to protect his sister from anything.

  Later, after dinner, I was in the bedroom going over my notes for my first, short English paper when Celeste appeared in the doorway. “I’ve never been so over-caffeinated in my life,” she announced, then hopped in and collapsed next to me on my bed, letting her crutches fall on the floor.

  “Where’ve you been?” I asked.

  “The Mean Bean. The guy there is madly in love with me.” She handed me a crumpled, white paper bag. “He gave me two free iced latte refills and three of those dark chocolate biscotti. Now I’m supposed to meet people at open mic at Graham House and I’m all juiced up. And I’m going to have to pee every five minutes. You want to come? I might sing. If they’re lucky.”

  “You sing?” I opened the bag and broke off a piece of cookie.

  “No. But I pretend I can.”

  “Tempting,” I said, smiling. “I think I’ll stay here, though.” I was about to turn back to my notes when I remembered. “Hey. Don’t you notice anything?”

  It took her a moment. “The shades, you mean?”

  “Yeah. What do you think?”

  “They look okay,” she said. “But can’t people see right through them? They’re just paper.”

  “No,” I said. “Maybe at most someone could see fuzzy silhouettes.”

  I went back to studying as Celeste got up and began putting together an outfit to wear to the open-mic thing. When she’d finally settled on a dark red dress with black net tights, I noticed her looking around at the windows. I thought I saw her shiver slightly, before she grabbed her crutches and her clothes and headed to change in the bathroom.

  That night was only one week into the semester. I don’t think I ever saw her undress in the bedroom again.

  Chapter 10

  THE SHADES DIDN’T DO A VERY GOOD job of helping Celeste sleep, either. With the windows open, they flapped and crackled in the wind. Or so she said. With the windows closed, the air in the room was stagnant and stifling. Also, moonlight filtered in through the rice paper. So, despite my best efforts, after three or so weeks at school, Celeste hadn’t gotten a good night of sleep yet, and I heard about it. Often.

  Every time someone came to me for peer counseling and had complaints about their roommate—which was a lot of what us counselors dealt with at the beginning of the year—I wished I could offer my own stories, so we could commiserate.

  During one of my sessions, a redheaded freshman was especially upset. She sat in the chair across from mine, crying,trying to explain to me all of the ways in which she was unhappy.

  “Is the roommate situation what’s bothering you the most?” I asked when she seemed to have finished her initial, somewhat rambling explanation.

  “Uh-huh.” She blew her nose into the tissue I’d given her.
“Are people ever allowed to switch?”

  “Only in extraordinary circumstances,” I said. “Having a roommate is like living with your sister. She might not be your best friend, but you have to make it work.”

  “But I liked living with my sister,” the girl said in a tone verging on a whine. “I wish I still were.”

  “Why did you come to Barcroft?” I asked. Maybe this wasn’t so much about her actual roommate.

  “My dad wanted me to. He went here. I … I guess I didn’t really not want to come. But I would’ve rather stayed with them. I want to be home.” She crossed her arms and stared out the window. Beyond our reflections in the glass, the new addition to the library glowed in the night, like an enormous, geometric ice sculpture. I could see two people inside gazing back in our direction. For a moment, I thought one was David.

  Since spending that morning together installing the shades, he and I had started hanging out a bit—walking to classes, sitting on the steps before the bell, sometimes having a meal at Commons. He’d left a series of notes in my mailbox: The Principles of Spoon Theory. I smiled, thinking of them, forgetting for a moment the girl was waiting for me to say something.

  “Well, look at it this way,” I said. “You have to change your frame of mind so that from now on, Barcroft is home. When you go visit your parents, you need to think of it that way—as visiting. Otherwise when you’re here, you’ll always feel like you’re away, which is kind of an ungrounded way to feel. Right?”

  She nodded and sniffled. I offered her the tissue box again.

  “So, if you went into Boston next weekend and met someone, and they asked where you lived, you’d say, ‘Barcroft,’ you know? Instead of … ?”

  “Greenwich.”

  “Right. Greenwich. So, to feel like you’re in a comfortable, happy home, you need to develop a better relationship with your roommate. Should we write down some ways you might like to talk to her?”

  Another nod.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get this all worked out.”

  At nine thirty, I locked the door to the counseling offices behind me and headed to the dorm, enjoying the unmistakable crispness of Massachusetts fall that had blown in this week. I’d looked for Frost House’s working fireplace this afternoon, thinking we could start using it soon, and had been surprised to find that it was all bricked up and obviously had been for years. What had I seen that day last fall, when I was deciding whether or not to call the dean? Not smoke from the chimney, sadly.

  But fireplace or no, I did still have that lovely, deep, claw-foot tub. As I walked up the porch steps, trying to convince myself that I could concentrate on my homework in a bubble bath, my phone rang. Abby.

  “Are you on your way back here?” she said.

  102

  “Opening the door now.”

  “Good,” she said, and hung up.

  No one was in the common room; somehow, though, the air still snapped with tension, like it was warning me to be on my guard. Voices echoed from down the hall.

  Celeste, Abby, and Viv stood in my bedroom, in various postures of hostility—arms crossed or on hips, chins thrust out, feet planted wide. Shards of familiar glossy white-and-green ceramic lay on the floor at their feet, with dried Chinese lantern flowers scattered among the pieces. My stomach plummeted.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Celeste is accusing me of breaking her vase,” Abby said.

  “Why? What happened?” I asked Celeste.

  “She doesn’t know,” Abby answered before Celeste could speak.

  “Jesus.” Celeste briefly raised her eyes to the ceiling then looked at me. “I came back from the studio and found Annie standing here with the vase in pieces on the floor. Now she’s trying to say David did it? What am I, stupid?”

  “I guess so,” Abby said. “Because it’s Abby. Not Annie.”

  “Okay, Abby, but you were in here?” I said. For an ugly moment, I remembered the rip in Celeste’s skirt and Abby’s comments about hoping Celeste would move out…. But no, there was no way she’d do something this mean.

  Abby held her hands up in front of her. “It was broken when I got here. I swear. I was just borrowing the hoodie.” She was wearing a navy-blue sweatshirt of mine that she loved.

  “Abby did tell me she was going down to borrow the hoodie,” Viv added. “And I didn’t hear the sound of something breaking.”

  “David is here all the time,” Abby said. “Bringing her laundry and stuff.”

  “Why the hell—” Celeste began.

  “I know David’s around a lot,” I said, “but I’m sure he wouldn’t have knocked it over and just left it on the floor. And it’s not like he’s here when Celeste isn’t.”

  “So what are you saying?” Abby asked.

  “Nothing.” I tried to keep my voice even. “Just that accusing David isn’t helping.”

  “Well, I didn’t do it,” she huffed.

  “Then who did?” Celeste said.

  “We’ve got some strong cross breezes in here,” I said, glancing around at the windows, many of which were open. “You’re always complaining about them, Celeste. Maybe the vase tipped on its own.”

  “Right.” She used the tip of a crutch to send one of the dried flowers skittering across the room. “You know, I didn’t ask to live here. To break up your little party. So I don’t see why we can’t just live and let live.”

  Abby sputtered. “We can! You’re the one who accused me of doing this.”

  “Okay!” I said. “Enough!” I dumped my bag on my bed and turned to Celeste. “If Abby says she didn’t do it, she didn’t do it.” I turned to Abby. “David wouldn’t have done it.” Then to all of them, “Do you guys realize how lucky we are? Instead of being in some big, impersonal dorm, we have this beautiful little house. But if you guys are going to act like this, it’s just … well, it’s going to suck. Am I right?”

  I made eye contact with each of them. They nodded unenthusiastically.

  “Good,” I said. Even though I was annoyed, I didn’t want to leave it on this note. “And did you all get my message about what I’m going to cook for the first Sunday dinner? Did it sound okay?”

  More nodding. I seemed to be inspiring a lot of that tonight.

  “I love your lasagna,” Viv said.

  “Okay. Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I have a butt load of homework that I haven’t even started.”

  After Viv and Abby disappeared upstairs, I squatted and collected the shards; reaching the floor was tricky for Celeste with her cast. No matter how the vase had broken, I didn’t blame her for being upset. But couldn’t she have accepted Abby’s explanation of what happened? It was as if she was trying to make things more difficult here. I handed her the pieces in a plastic bag and, after a mumbled thanks, she headed across the hall to the little room. I swept up the flowers and dumped them in the trash.

  When I finally stretched out on the bed, exhausted, my head sank into the pillow so heavily I thought I might never be able to lift it up. For a few moments, I let the room work its magic, tempting me into falling asleep right then, without even taking my clothes off. But I was already stressed out enough by my classes. No way could I afford to skip a night of homework. I had a good three hours or so ahead of me. I dragged myself up and started getting stuff out of my bag. As I rooted around the bottom for a pen, my hand came across something I didn’t recognize. I pulled it out, and saw the envelope that David had given me a few weeks ago. Damn.

  I knocked on the door to our little study room and then went in.

  Celeste sat reading A Room of One’s Own. (God, if only …) The pieces of the vase were spread out in front of her on her desk. She looked up at me.

  “I know it was your grandmother’s,” I said. “Do you want me to try to fix it? I have Gorilla Glue.”

  “It’s in way too many pieces.” She put down her book. “It was in the middle of the room, Leena. Not right near the dresser, where
it would have fallen.”

  “Maybe it bounced once, before it broke.” I’d seen mugs and glasses do that, instead of smashing at first impact.

  She picked up one of the larger shards and ran her finger around the uneven edge.

  “I want to keep our rooms locked,” she said. “From now on.”

  I bit the insides of my cheeks. Locking the door in such a small house seemed so aggressively unfriendly. Viv and Abby and I had always gone in and out of one another’s rooms, borrowing clothes, books, whatever….

  “I know you’re upset,” I said. “But I wish you’d trust me about Abby.”

  Celeste was quiet for a moment as she pressed the shard into her fingertip, turning the flesh white. “There’s something else,” she finally said. “The other day, when I was taking a bath, there was this … knocking.”

  “On the door?” I said.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I thought so, at first. I thought it was you, so I said I’d be out in a bit. But the knocking didn’t stop. Then I realized it was on the wall—not the door. The wall between the bathroom and my closet. Like this.” She rapped the desk three times. Waited a second. Rapped four times, then once. An erratic rhythm.

  My heart began thumping a little harder, as if responding to her loud beats on the wood. “What was it?” I asked. “A noise in a pipe?”

  “No,” she said. “Someone was doing it. On purpose.”

  “What? Who?” Was she saying Abby had done this?

  “I don’t know,” she snapped. “It takes me forever to get out of the tub with my cast. I finally hauled my ass out and made it over there, and whoever had been there was gone.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would someone do that?”

  “To mess with me. Freak me out.”

  Okay, she was freaking me out. “Who would want to mess with you?”

  “I just told you, I don’t know.” Her jaw tightened. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t even want to tell you. But now, with the vase … I’m sure it’s the same person. That’s why I want to lock the doors.”