The Empty Room

by Lauren B. Davis

The way may meet, but mingle never.

  She was a middle-aged woman, alone, more alone than she had ever been before. She understood Lori could no longer be depended upon. Lori was locked in her own life now. A text message was the modern version of the butler who stood guard over the Victorian doorway. Madam is indisposed. Madam is not home at present. What could one infer except Madam does not want to be bothered with one. Jake done. Dead to her. And she to him most likely. He was a narcissist who simply didn’t understand why she wouldn’t go away now that he was done with her. Another inconvenience. She was an inconvenience to her once-friends. She used to have an address book full of names and numbers. No more.

  Colleen put the key in the lock to her door and the sound of metal against metal grated loudly in her ears. It might be a prison door. A jail cell. She once dreamed that she was locked in a cell for life. A cot. A wooden chair. A desk in front of a window that looked out over rolling fields and forest beyond. A shelf of books. In the dream she had been utterly content. She had been at peace. There was no door in the cell. No one could get at her. That was the way she felt: that she was safe at last and able to sit and read and think without anyone disturbing her. She could have that in real life, couldn’t she? She could make for herself a simple nun’s cell; live the life of the contemplative, with Thomas Merton and the Benedictine Order as her guides.

  Colleen walked in and closed the door behind her. The silence she had felt in the afternoon, silence like a bell jar, slipped over her and she found it hard to breathe.

  She wanted a drink, but wanting it flushed her with shame. She had sobered up enough while seeing her mother for a glimpse of objectivity to slip in under the fairy-built fortifications. She had spent the day running from one catastrophe to another and bouncing like a little silver pinball to the bottle in between. Lose job. Drink. Feel lonely. Drink. Bumble job interview. Drink. Jake. Drink. Mum. Drink.

  Drink was the only constant.

  She wanted alcohol so badly now that her teeth hurt, her fingers ached to hold it, her mouth shrivelled up in anticipation of the revivifying potion.

  Call Helen. The idea appeared like a St. Bernard with a flagon of brandy round its shaggy neck. Yes, her neighbour, Helen. It wasn’t late, just coming up to nine o’clock. Helen was a night owl. She would be up and, as always, longing for company and someone to deliver supplies. That was one of the downsides of the panic attacks and agoraphobia Helen suffered—although it saved her from having to deal with the heartless masses, it meant she couldn’t pop out to the shops for a loaf of bread or a bottle of wine.

  Colleen didn’t bother to take off her coat before calling.

  “Yes? Who is this?” It was Helen’s way of answering the phone, for she was always on the defensive against robo-calls, survey takers or scam artists.

  “It’s Colleen, Helen. How are you?”

  “My arthritis has been terrible. I couldn’t even open a jar of raspberry jam this morning. You should see my thumb; it’s swollen like an apricot. I’m watching that Idol program with the singing kids. What are you doing?”

  “I was wondering if I could come over. It’s been just an awful day and I could use a friendly ear.”

  “I don’t think I’ve got anything to drink in the house.”

  “I could bring a bottle of wine.”

  “Do you have any bread? Can’t even make a sandwich.”

  “Yes, probably.”

  “Come on over, then.”

  Colleen found a frozen loaf of sourdough in the freezer, only slightly iced over. She picked up one of the two remaining bottles. The one she left behind in the door was already half gone. She realized she’d have to go to the liquor store again tomorrow. Or she could use the home delivery service from The Beer Store. She hadn’t done that in a while. She could get a case of wine then … What was she thinking? She wouldn’t buy any more. When this was gone, that was it.

  She promised.

  Helen lived in a basement apartment in one of the houses along Davisville. Colleen walked up the ill-lit shared driveway to the door at the side of the house and rang the bell. After several minutes the curtain over the glass moved aside and Helen looked out at her and then craned her neck, peering up and down the driveway, before letting Colleen in.

  “Come on in, sweetie. You look like something the dog’s been dragging round the yard.”

  Stairs led down to the apartment and Colleen followed Helen’s broad back. Helen walked with a wide-legged rocking motion. She held onto both the wall and the railing for support. She wore a velveteen track suit with the word Juicy written across her buttocks in gold letters. At the base of the stairs she turned and looked at Colleen.

  “Oh, good, you got the bread, I see.”

  Colleen handed it to her, along with the bottle of wine. Helen walked across the tile floor, on which a white and blue carpet delineated a seating area containing a grey overstuffed sofa and chair, a wooden and glass coffee table and a large television on a wooden stand. A British man was telling a crying young girl that her singing sounded like a cat having its tail run through a cheese grater. Colleen spotted two centipedes—one by the television stand and another by the pot containing a plastic palm tree. Photos of sunsets and sunrises graced the walls. Pot lights on the ceiling and a single floor lamp gave off a cold, hard light and made the salmon colour on the walls look sickly. The small but fully equipped kitchen stood at the end of the room. Beyond that was a hallway leading to the toilet and bedroom. The sole window was at the front of the living area, shoulder high. In the daylight the only things visible were some bayberry bushes. To herself, Colleen called Helen the Mole Woman.

  “So, what’s up with you?” Helen uncorked the wine. “Another terrible awful day from the sounds of it. You do have a lot of those, don’t you.”

  “Where do I start?” Colleen took her coat off and tossed it over the railing leading up to the door. She chuckled, trying to make her voice sound light. “The nursing home called to tell me my mother was in a coma—no, no, it’s okay, some mix-up, she had a fall but—”

  “A stake through the heart couldn’t kill her, right?” Helen snorted, and waddled back to Colleen.

  Colleen took the glass and sat in the fluffy chair. Helen flopped down on the couch and put her slippered feet up on the coffee table. She pointed the remote control at the television and turned down the sound.

  Colleen said, “I’m not so sure that’s true anymore. She’s bound to wear out sometime. I just got back from the hospital.”

  “How grim.”

  Helen’s hair was the same colour as the upholstery on the sofa, and her skin was almost the same shade as the walls. Colleen had the feeling Helen had been down here so long that she was becoming her apartment. She imagined coming to see her one day and finding nothing more than an extra, equally overstuffed armchair.

  “It was, and weird. She was actually sort of nice for a few minutes.”

  “Good drugs.” Helen raised her glass. “Here’s to your mother, may she die in peace.”

  The first time Colleen met Helen, at the grocery store nearly a dozen years ago, when the woman still ventured outside regularly, Colleen was taken aback by her blunt humour, but as time passed she found it refreshing. Helen was quite likely to say the very thing you were thinking but did not dare give voice to.

  Colleen looked at the wine in her glass. It twinkled golden. It was impossible to resist, even if she wanted to. Her shrivelled tongue sang the praises of angels when the wine floated across her taste buds.

  “To Mum,” she said.

  “When are you finally going to get it through your head your mother can’t hurt you anymore? You’re not seven any longer, Colleen. She only has whatever power you give her. What did she do this time that was so bad?”

  “It’s not just my mother. So many things happened today. In the morning I lost my job, in the afternoon I figured out Lori isn’t really my friend anymore, and then later I found out Jake’s getting married and is ab
out to be a daddy.” She tried to smile, raised her glass again and said, “L’chaim.”

  “Maybe you should sleep in tomorrow.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “Jesus, what did you do to piss off God?”

  “I have no idea.” Colleen sniffed. It smelled pretty ripe in the apartment. Kind of stinky, actually.

  “I’ll start backward,” Helen said. “Who’s Jake marrying?”

  Helen knew all about Jake, of course, and had told Colleen a million times to stop thinking about him and move on. He was, Helen said, nothing but a fallback position, a just-in-case-nothing-else-worked-out card up her sleeve, and that was a cheat to both of them. He hadn’t worked out the first time—had cheated on her for God’s sake—and people don’t change, Helen insisted. Men doubly so.

  “His receptionist.”

  Helen threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, perfect. And I suppose she’s twelve.”

  “Maybe thirteen.”

  Helen laughed again. “Well, let’s hope that’s the last you’ll see of him, although I know his type. He’ll get bored of bottles and diapers in a few months and he’ll be scrounging around out there somewhere. You’re better off—at last, at last!” There was something bright and sharp in Helen’s eyes.

  “I know you’re right. Wasn’t it Ambrose Bierce who called love ‘a temporary insanity curable by marriage’?” said Colleen. She paused. “So why does it still hurt?”

  “That man’s rejected you in one way or another so many times. You’ve kept each other on the string all these years. You’re both nuts. Well, he’s finally cut the string. You have to make sure it stays cut.”

  “I slammed the door in his face.” She smiled, just a little.

  “Good for you. About time. There should be more door slamming in this world.”

  That smell. The apartment smelled odder even than usual. Mouldy, perhaps, the damp—but with something thicker, sweeter beneath. Colleen’s nostrils flared. Was it Helen? Her hair didn’t look clean, and there were stains of some sort on her clothing.

  “So, your mother’s not dying, at least not today.”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  Helen drank some wine and sighed. “She can’t hold on much longer. The old bitch is an antiquity.”

  “True.” Something pierced Colleen’s heart. How strange that although she felt she had every right to complain about her mother, she reared up when anyone else did. Her mother might be an ogre, but she was Colleen’s ogre. “It’s a pretty sad life she’s had. The only thing worse than being around her is being her.”

  “Fuck that. We all have sad lives,” said Helen.

  How tart Helen sounded tonight. Still, what she said was true. Here she was, alone, middle-aged, jobless, nearly friendless (did Helen even really count?), selfish (yes, add that), half sauced all day, in a centipede-infested basement apartment that smelled of old lady—what was that smell?—drinking cheap wine on a Monday night. One day soon she might be Helen; she might morph into Helen as Kafka’s Gregor morphed into a cockroach. She shuddered and drank a large gulp of wine. It tasted like copper pennies on her tongue. Oh no, not that. It happened more and more frequently these days. She’d get to a certain point in her drinking when she should be flying on gossamer wings, only to find the potion had turned rancid and bitter somehow, and no matter how much she drank, she couldn’t get liftoff. Not tonight, she prayed, good fairy, don’t turn on me tonight.

  “It doesn’t have to be that way, does it? We’re not just all locked into suffering, are we? No matter what the French say.”

  Helen chuckled. “Ah, oui, les French, who believe all life is tragic and if you don’t understand that, you’re an idiot. I respect them for it. I think I have a French soul.”

  “I’ve decided mine may be Russian.” Pretty little Russian fairy, wearing that fetching wolf-fur hat, waiting for her back in her apartment. “They believe in suffering as well. Tolstoy and all that.” This was the best sort of conversation to have with Helen—something philosophical. God, that smell again. Colleen held the wineglass under her nose, pretending to inhale the bouquet.

  “You’d never make a Russian.”

  “Why not?”

  “All that queuing for bread. You have no patience.”

  This was also true, but Colleen didn’t like Helen saying it. She scanned the room. The cheap carpet, cheap furniture. Those hideous porcelain ducks forever flying along the wall leading to the bedroom. All those photos of sunsets and sunrises Helen would never see because she never left the basement.

  “Perhaps you have too much patience,” she said.

  “I think you’re right. I put up with entirely too much. You’re lucky,” said Helen. “You don’t have to worry about money at least. I’m existing on scraps. Thank God for Old Age Security or I’d be out on the street.”

  “What do you mean I don’t have to worry about money?”

  “You’ve got your mother’s money.”

  “That’s for her care.”

  “Don’t play noble with me. She owes you, Colleen, and you know it. She’s in the nursing home and that’s mostly paid for by the province. You only have to pay, what, a couple of hundred a month?”

  “Nearly a thousand.” Colleen kept a finger under her nose. How could Helen not notice that smell? Maybe something had rotted. Surely that was it. Colleen came over once a week and took Helen’s garbage out to the street for her. She couldn’t remember if she’d been by last week, or if it was the week before. She’d have to take it out tonight. This was unbearable.

  “You sold her condo, so you’ve got a few hundred thousand in the bank,” Helen was saying, “and she’s not going to live much longer. You’ve got more than enough to live on yourself until your pension kicks in.”

  Pension. That wasn’t for years and years yet. How old did Helen think she was?

  “Don’t look at me like that; it’ll be upon you before you know it. A girl can live on it, if you don’t squander your inheritance and if you don’t drink it all up in the first year.”

  “Very funny,” said Colleen. Her glass was empty. She got up and poured herself another. Why not, it was her bottle, after all. But this visit wasn’t going as planned. She glanced at Helen, who was watching the television—a shampoo commercial—even though the sound was off.

  Helen had shown her a photo album once, all these pictures of Helen as a young woman—slender and like something out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Helen on horseback. Helen with several handsome young men, one in a U.S. Marine uniform. Helen in the garden. Helen and some girlfriends in London, Paris and Rome. The photos stopped abruptly when Helen was in her late thirties. There had been some tragedy of which Helen refused to speak. And now … this. A basement apartment. A cat. Her only contact with the outside world through delivery people and Colleen, and a niece named Janet who came by once in a blue moon.

  Colleen carried the bottle back and set it on the coffee table. “You want some more?”

  “Half glass.”

  Colleen filled Helen’s glass. “Helen, I don’t mean to be rude, but—” And then a terrible thought. “Where’s Minoche?”

  “Now you ask. I’m surprised.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Why?”

  Colleen put her glass down. “You don’t know? Well, was it today, yesterday, the day before? I’m sorry, but something smells pretty awful in here.”

  Helen’s features screwed up tight, the way they did when Colleen suggested she try walking outside for just a minute, just down to the edge of the driveway, just halfway down the driveway. “I didn’t ask you to come over,” she said.

  “I’m not criticizing you.”

  “Yes, you are. You think I’m dirty. You think I’m a crazy old lady who never bathes and eats cat food and one day you’ll come in here and find my swollen body lying on the bathroom floor.”

  Helen stood, picked up the wine bottle and tromped to th
e kitchen area. She wore slippers with no backs and the sight of her cracked, thickly callused yellow feet was stomach turning.

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t say anything like that. But you can’t tell me you don’t smell that, whatever the hell it is?”

  “I don’t smell anything unusual.” Helen poured herself another half glass of wine and knocked it back in one gulp before slamming the cork back in the bottle with the heel of her hand. She put it in the refrigerator.

  Fuck her, thought Colleen. That’s my bottle of wine. She thinks I’m leaving it here, she’s crazy. “I’m going to use the bathroom.”

  Colleen walked down the hall and, just as she feared, the smell got worse the nearer she got to the bedroom. She had never been in Helen’s bedroom and didn’t want to go there now. She wanted to go home. This was what always happened: she felt locked in the apartment, alone while all the rest of the world was at a party to which she wasn’t invited, but when she did go out, conversations twisted round like snakes eating their own tails and she got panicky and wanted to be alone again. Is that how the agoraphobia started for Helen?

  The wine wasn’t working. She felt lightheaded, but there had been none of the chattiness, none of the lubricated conversation she so craved. Instead she felt thick-tongued, and her head hurt, right at the base of her skull, and the pain radiated up over her head to behind her right eye. Maybe whatever was causing that smell was toxic.

  In the bathroom the kitty-litter box stood between the toilet and the bathtub. It was full of feces, and clumped with dried urine, the fumes positively wavering in the air above it, acrid and sharp. That might have contributed to what Colleen smelled in the living room, but it wasn’t the smell; in fact it masked it somewhat. Colleen peed and washed her hands, letting the cold water run over her wrists. Her head pounded, and she patted water onto her temples and the back of her neck.

  When she came out of the bathroom she turned right and headed for the bedroom despite her apprehension; whatever the smell was, it emanated from there. The bedroom was tiny and painted yellow. A double bed with a white and grey coverlet was pushed into the corner and pink curtains hung from a small window high on the wall. Another curtain, this one a yellow shower curtain, hung in front of a closet. The smell was thickest here. There was no doubt: whatever it was, was in here. Minoche wasn’t anywhere to be seen—unless she was under the bed. Colleen bent down and looked, her heart in her throat. A fair amount of dust and one sock, but no cat.