Frost

by Marianna Baer

  That day in Frost House, the fort collapsed.

  Afterward, I searched back through the semester, trying to find new facts to build with. But just as I was ready to nail one down, it would disintegrate in my hands.

  Information came to me slowly.

  All I grasped at first was that I’d nearly died from a combination of the pills I’d taken and carbon monoxide poisoning. I spent two nights in the hospital: a blur of confusion, the stink of vomit and disinfectant, throat scraped raw, tubes running in and out of my body, fragments of sleep cut short by needles, the claustrophobia of the oxygen chamber, doctors with charts, nurses with implements, and my parents sitting next to me with looks on their faces that said, How did this happen? as much as they said, “We love you.”

  Not that I blamed them for wondering. I was wondering the same thing.

  Everyone wanted an explanation. But how could I explain? So I kept most of what happened to myself, only saying enough to assure the hospital psychiatrist I wasn’t suicidal and didn’t need admission into the psych ward. When I took the pills, my thought process had supposedly been compromised by the carbon monoxide, so they believed I’d just been confused about how many pills I’d taken. I agreed to outpatient therapy.

  To my parents’ credit, they didn’t push. And they tried to do what they could. At one point, I woke to my mother standing next to my bed, a tentative smile on her face, hands behind her back.

  “I found something that might make you feel a bit better,” she said. She laid Cubby on my pillow. “Your old friend.”

  “Oh.” I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat as I turned my face away. “Thanks. But you can get rid of it.”

  Viv came for a quick visit the day after I was discharged.

  “What’s happened since I left?” I said. “I feel like I’ve been gone for years.”

  She told me about the chaos of that afternoon. Apparently, a crowd of students gathered outside the dorm and rumors spread across campus the minute the fire department and paramedics arrived, so many trucks that all of Highland Street was blocked off. Dean Shepherd moved them all out of Frost House—Viv and Abby to Dee Hall, Celeste to Revere Hall.

  “Celeste is still at school?” I said, shocked. I hadn’t dreamed that I’d told the dean about her, had I?

  Viv’s blank look reminded me she didn’t know the whole story. I gave her a condensed version: Celeste’s fear that Frost House was haunted, my meeting with the dean, David’s anger and his plan to save her—

  “Wait,” Viv interrupted. “What did David have to do with the carbon monoxide leak?”

  “He caused it,” I said. “By doing something to the furnace. That was his plan to get Celeste moved out.”

  Viv shook her head. “That’s impossible. The leak had been going on for a long time.”

  Now it was my turn to look blank.

  “The alarm nearest your room was screwed up,” she said. “It wasn’t calibrated right, or whatever. So it was only when the carbon monoxide reached upstairs that an alarm went off. You guys had been breathing it for … well, they don’t know how long. Hard to say with windows being opened, stuff like that. Didn’t anyone tell you this?”

  Did they? “I don’t know,” I said. “I just remember when they found out the carbon monoxide was from the furnace. The stuff at the hospital is kind of a big blur.”

  “They still don’t really know if it was from the furnace,” she said. “I don’t quite get it, but there was some problem and they couldn’t tell. But we all had to get tested for CO poisoning, and Celeste had to get oxygen therapy. David had nothing to do with it.”

  Until that moment, I’d thought David had left me in the dorm, knowing I would get sick from the carbon monoxide leak he’d caused. I hadn’t thought he’d wanted me dead—he wouldn’t have known that I’d shut myself up in the closet with my pills. But still … I’d used it as an excuse to believe I was better off without him. Better off without a guy who would ever do something like that.

  But now?

  Before this all happened, I think I would have forced myself to forget about it, to ignore the fact that I wanted to see him. Anything to avoid the risk of further rejection.

  Now, though, I realized that reaching out to David or not reaching out—it was going to hurt either way.

  I allowed myself to be a bit of a coward and send a message instead of call, so when he agreed to come visit, I couldn’t sense his tone of voice.

  The day he was coming, my body was so twitchy I felt like I was walking around with my finger stuck in a socket. I tried a deep-breathing technique my therapist taught me. A Valium would have worked better. I knew I shouldn’t think that way— didn’t want to think that way—but it was a hard habit to break.

  Finally, the doorbell buzzed.

  We stared at each other, awkward. His face was paler, drawn—more like his sister than ever. After a moment, I stepped forward and hugged him. My cheek pressed into the satiny puff of his down jacket. We stood like that, quiet, for a long time. I loved being this close to him, no matter what had happened.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Leena.”

  “Me too.”

  A muffled cough came from inside my dad’s room. We broke apart.

  “He’s giving us space,” I whispered. “I’ll introduce you later.”

  David nodded. “You look good,” he said, running his fingers down my hair. “Are you … okay?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Celeste is actually … She wanted to see you, too. She’s at the coffee place, on the corner. I’m supposed to call her when she can come, if that’s okay.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Viv told me she’s still at school. They let her stay?” I began leading him into the kitchen where I’d set out all our tea choices during my nervous morning.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Once everything came out, and they realized she was sick, you know, everyone decided she could stay. Thank God.”

  “Wait, so, she is sick?” I said, turning from the electric kettle, confused.

  “From the carbon monoxide.”

  “Right, but … that’s it? Nothing worse?”

  “No!” he said, resting a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew all this. It was the carbon monoxide making her sick. Haven’t you read what it can do? Insomnia, delusions, weird physical sensations. Along with Celeste’s imagination, and Whip’s story about the house. The perfect storm, I guess.”

  “So, that’s why she thought the house was haunted?” I asked.

  “The whole thing is pretty crazy. Here we were thinking Frost House was out to get her, and, in a way, it was.”

  “Wow. I didn’t realize she’d been affected so severely.” I tried to process this information while pouring hot water into our mugs. “Choose whichever tea you want,” I said, and then, after putting chamomile into my own mug, “What about the weird things that happened in our room, though? The vase, the nests … Carbon monoxide doesn’t explain any of that.”

  “Probably the cat,” he said with a slight shrug.

  “Really?”

  He stopped dunking his tea bag. “Are you still worried she did those things herself?”

  “No. I’m just … I don’t know. Confused,” I said. “I haven’t been able to figure any of this out. I mean, I knew that it caused my headaches and probably made me throw up, and made me tired and generally not feel well. But I don’t get … There’s a lot I don’t get.”

  “If I didn’t know better,” he said, nudging me, “I’d think you were trying to convince me that there was something weird going on in that house.”

  Before, I would have been the first one to buy into David’s theory. The first one to say that was what happened to me, too. That my thoughts had been altered, twisted by the unhealthy air I’d been breathing. But then I remember the pull I felt toward the closet, that very first day. And even before the first day we moved in
, the way I felt the first time I ever saw the house, that intense need to live there.

  And what had I seen that day last fall? What had I mistaken for smoke, as it drifted from the unusable chimney and danced into the sky?

  After sending David away to the coffee shop, Celeste and I sat on my dad’s balcony, even though it was cold outside. I think we both wanted as much fresh air as we could get. We sat quiet for a moment.

  “So,” I finally said. “This is fucked up.”

  Celeste looked at me and laughed, a real laugh. “Yeah,” she said. “It is.”

  “There are still so many things I don’t understand,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “How did you get the bruises?”

  She pulled up the fur-lined collar of her vintage coat. “I’d wake up, find them on me,” she said. “And I’d have strange memories of fighting something off. It seemed like I was awake when I did it.” She paused. “Who the hell knows? My shrink thinks they happened during my night terrors. That I’d thrash around so much I hurt myself.”

  “I saw you do that,” I said. “I guess it could have happened.”

  “Maybe.” We held eyes, though, and another conversation passed between us. One in which we agreed on the possibility that maybe she had been awake when she fought something off all those nights. I knew it then: Celeste was as confused as I was.

  “Something else,” I said. “Did you ever throw your beetle photo across the room?”

  “What?” she said. “No. When did that—?”

  “The same night you were burned in the tub. I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “That burn …” Celeste rubbed the spot where it had been. “I know which handle I turned that night. The water coming out of the faucet was cold.”

  “But the faucet was hot enough to burn you?”

  She nodded.

  “What does your shrink say about that?”

  She gave a half smile. “I’m waiting until a later session to break it to her.” After a moment she continued. “You know, you were right to tell Dean Shepherd what was happening. Thanks for doing that.”

  I felt a rush of shame, knowing that the main reason I had done it was that I didn’t want to lose Frost House. How could I have thought that I was so weak? How could I have been so convinced that Frost House was the only place I could ever be happy?

  I might need a long time to answer those questions. Now, I still had more for Celeste.

  “So that night at your parents’,” I said, “you had a whole story, about that woman who had lived in Frost House. Didn’t you wonder why she hadn’t done anything before? To other students? I’m assuming we would have heard if there were other people who had trouble in the dorm.”

  She tightened her silver-wool-with-sequins scarf around her neck.

  “I thought it was because we were the first girls to live there,” she said. “It was a woman who died; she’d had a baby girl taken away from her. I thought she wasn’t interested in boys.” Celeste stared off at a plane in the sky. “I couldn’t figure out what she wanted, aside from me leaving, though.”

  I didn’t say anything, just watched our healthy breaths puff white in the cold air and thought about Celeste’s theory, thought about my answer to her final question. And while thinking, I realized: I knew everything that had happened to Celeste this semester, but she didn’t know anything that had happened to me. Somehow, it didn’t seem right.

  Then I told her my version of the past months, including my theory of what Frost House had wanted:

  She had wanted Celeste to leave. But she had wanted me to stay.

  Forever.

  Chapter 42

  I DROVE OUT TO BARCROFT this morning. Later today I have a series of meetings with my teachers and Dean Shepherd. I’ve fallen too far behind to finish the semester in some classes, but we’re going to try and figure out if I can still get enough credits to graduate on time.

  I’m also having dinner with David. I don’t think either of us is sure what’s going on with our relationship—things have changed, obviously. But we’re taking slow steps, at least toward staying friends. Celeste and I still haven’t talked to him about what might have really happened in the dorm. We will, though. It’s too big a secret to keep from someone I want to be close to. I told Viv everything, and she immediately knew which possible story she wanted to believe. “I’m so sorry, Leen,” she said, giving me a hug. “I should have made us listen to Orin.”

  When I made plans to come out here today, I was explicitly told—by my therapist, my father, the dean—to stay away from Frost House. Right. Like that was going to happen.

  I parked in the gym lot and pushed my way through the bushes and tree branches, into the backyard. I didn’t want to walk in off the road, in case someone happened to see me. I’d heard from Viv that the whole Frost House thing had completely overshadowed any other campus gossip. And to think, all they knew was that we’d had carbon monoxide poisoning.

  I paused for a moment before going inside. The house appeared just as cozy and welcoming as the first time I saw it. Now, though, I knew what I was seeing was just the architecture, the outer shell; it didn’t mean anything about the type of house it was inside. If I could see the house as it really was, it would be dark and windowless. Uninhabitable.

  My heart jumped when I entered the common room. The light was dim and, at first glance, it seemed as if a tall figure stood there, waiting for me. But I quickly saw what it was. The couch had been moved into the middle of the room. The other furniture was stacked precariously on top of it—table on top of armchair. Maybe they were painting the walls again? Although I’d heard a rumor that they were talking about tearing the house down, so that didn’t make sense.

  I worked my way around the odd sculpture and down the hall. I ran my hand over the plaster wall, listened to the conversation between floorboards. Celeste’s door stood open. I pushed it farther with my index finger, but stayed in the hall as I looked in. Shadowy. Empty. Very empty, if that’s possible.

  I turned my back and crossed the hall. Bright sun filled my room, bright enough so that it obliterated the room’s faults—bumpy walls, gaps in the floorboards—instead of illuminating them. The mattress had been removed from my bed. Otherwise, all the furniture was still there.

  The door to the closet stood open a crack, the wood on the edge split and splintered where it had been broken when they got me out. I turned away and studied the bare tree branches outside.

  The heat wasn’t on in the house; a chill breeze leaked through the windowpanes. I could feel it even in my down coat. I pulled my hat over my ears and took a seat in the corner, as far out of the cold drafts as I could get without going in the closet. I spent the morning sitting there, going over the story in my mind, from start to finish. Trying again to piece together the truth of it. Knowing I probably never would have answers for some things, like a tattoo of a stained-glass window—the memory of my childhood and a house that I loved—that’s now almost invisible, as if someone wanted it erased.

  There is one thing I know to be true, though. No matter what voice said those horrible things to me, that last time in the closet—the voice of my own, darkest insecurities, or … something else—in the end, I didn’t listen. I wouldn’t still be here if I had.

  It was almost time for my meeting with Dean Shepherd. I hadn’t seen her since a short, confused visit at the hospital. I took a moment to breathe away the rush of nerves, then stood and stretched my chilled, stiff bones.

  Took a last look at this beautiful room.

  A breeze shivered across my face; I sensed movement. The closet door had blown open wider. I walked in slow, measured steps until I was close enough to run a fingertip along the splintered edge of the door, daring it to bite. Then, closing my eyes, I drew a deep, deep breath. The feeling flooded me. The same pull penetrated my body. It wrapped around me, strong as an undertow; it wanted me to come in. I wanted to go in. I wanted to go
inside and shut the door behind me.

  But I didn’t.

  Part of me is still there, I believe. In that way, Frost House will always be my home. But not the rest of me. I shut the closet door. And walked out.

  Acknowledgments

  Exuberant and heartfelt thanks:

  To my agent, Sara Crowe: for her enthusiasm and hard work, and for placing Frost in such good hands. To my editor, Kristin Daly Rens: for her insight, positivity, and patience, and for believing in me. To Sarah Hoy and Alison Donalty: for designing the most stunning cover imaginable. And to the rest of the team at Balzer + Bray: for caring about my book.

  To the Vermont College of Fine Arts faculty, especially my wise, witty, and deeply admired advisors—Cynthia Leitich Smith,

  Brent Hartinger, Sharon Darrow and Tim Wynne-Jones: for their generous help in building Frost House. It’s a much creepier place, thanks to them, and I mean that in the best way. To the students at VCFA, especially my wonderful classmates, the Cliff-Hangers: for their friendship and loyal support. To Galen Longstreth: for her warmth and encouragement. To Jill Santopolo: for all the advice and cheerleading, and for nudging Frost in the right direction. And to Jandy Nelson: for making me laugh, keeping me sane, and leading the way.

  To all of my amazing friends, especially those who helped me muddle through story issues while writing Frost—Stephanie Knowles, Signy Peck, and Samera Nasereddin. To Annie and Robert Del Principe, Julie and Chris Cummings, and Rachel, Bob (and Ava!) Prince: for making sure I have a life outside of the fictional one in my apartment. To Louise Williams: for astute critiques and invaluable guidance when I was starting out. To Sandra Gering: for being a fan of everything I’ve ever written, down to the last email. To Robin Spigel: for having way more faith in me than I have in myself. To Brandon Russell: for his spoons. And to the real girls of Frost House—Kate Donchi, Christina Henry De Tessan, Marlene Laro Joel, Amanda Lydon, and Christina Weaver Vest: for letting me sully the name of a place that held only good memories.