Rooms

by Lauren Oliver

  Yogurt and blueberries; margarine and brussels sprouts.

  I remember:

  A copper pot: a wedding gift from my mother, presented to me covertly, so my father wouldn’t see. (“God help you,” she said, her last words to me.)

  A large saucepan, of blackened cast iron: a welt swelling on my thumb, shiny red and taut, like the head of a newborn.

  The window: open above the stove; the smell of chicken fat and oil. Blue columbine clung to the windowsill; the shadows outside were long and lavender.

  One shadow was longer than the rest and grew more quickly: this was Ed coming home.

  This is how it always was, how it would be for almost every day in the thirty-four years of our marriage, except for the years when Ed was away in the war. The shadows grew on the hill; the kitchen was hot and smelled, when money was good, like cooked meat, and when it was not, like old bacon fat and potatoes. One shadow grew longer than the others, like a slowly spreading stain, until it seeped into the doorway and became a man.

  “What’s for dinner?” Ed would say, if he was in a good mood, as he shrugged off his coat and sat down to unlace his shoes before wiping them carefully with the stiff-bristled brush he kept by the kitchen door.

  If he wasn’t in a good mood, if he’d been drinking, he would say: “What the hell have you been brewing in here?”

  But in the beginning it was always good. We had our own house, and the freedom to do what we wanted. After Ed’s first day at the Woolworths in Coral River (we furnished half our house with things from there—half on discount, the rest on credit—smells of wool and furniture polish; so many objects crammed together in memory, jostling for space), I gathered handfuls of Jacob’s ladder and leaves from the yard—burnt-edged and brittle, like ancient lace—and arranged them in the old stone hearth, which by then had been cold for twenty years.

  “What’s for dinner?” Ed asked, as he shrugged off his jacket. Ed Lundell was the most handsome man I had ever seen, and every time I looked at him, I could think only of my plainness and how lucky I was that he had chosen me. He had ink-black hair, a strong jaw, and walnut-colored eyes.

  “Chicken,” I answered. It was a joy to say the word. This was life, and being an adult: to respond this way to one’s husband about dinner. I was twenty and believed we would always be happy.

  We ate. We must have. I remember that Ed talked very little about the store, and a lot about the railroad. That was a favorite topic of his in those days. There were rumors that a train line would soon be laid between Boston and Buffalo, cutting within a mile of Coral River. It had been Ed’s big reason for buying the house, which was, at the time, remote: it was a two-mile walk to and from the bus that carried him the remaining two miles into Coral River, and at least a mile jaunt to its nearest neighbor.

  Once the train line came, Ed assured me, there would be houses cropping up and down the hills like mushrooms after a rainstorm, a forest of bleached white skeleton-houses, shingled siding, modern plumbing. We’d be the pioneers. He wouldn’t be surprised if the rail company offered to buy us out for three times what we’d paid or more—he’d heard of such things happening.

  In the end, the line never came; and the house remained as remote as ever—even more remote when Mr. Donovan, our closest neighbor, died in the war and his widow had to move in with a sister in Boston. That was when Ed began to lose his interest in progress, stopped saving up for the newest vacuum cleaner models, stopped exclaiming over the advertisements for electric kettles and televisions.

  That was also when there weren’t so many good days anymore.

  But that was all down the road. We had years to get through first—a war, winters of cold and hunger, Maggie’s birth, long, bitter seasons of silence. We couldn’t have known that the railroad wouldn’t come. We were kids and didn’t know anything.

  I overcooked the chicken. I remember that. The skin was rubbery but Ed was too hungry to notice, and he finished his plate and asked for seconds, and I was so glad. I kissed him on his beautiful forehead when I got up to make him another plate.

  At the end of the meal he noticed the leaves and the Jacob’s ladder in the hearth. He pushed away from the table.

  “What is that trash?” he asked, standing up abruptly.

  “Leaves and flowers from the yard,” I said. “I thought they would look pretty.”

  He frowned. “Clean it up,” he said, belched loudly, and left the room.

  It was the first time in our married life that I felt like crying. But I didn’t. I thought of my parents, and how pleased they would be to know I was unhappy—we warned her, they would say—and instead I went straight to the stone fireplace and began picking out the leaves, one by one. The hearth was coated with a fine layer of ancient ash, like a soft, gray snow, and by the time I was finished, it streaked my skin to the elbow. I couldn’t bring myself to throw the flowers and the leaves in the garbage; instead, I gathered them in my arms and took them out into the yard, released them to the wind, and let them scatter over the hills, where the purple shadows had dimmed to uniform darkness. I had a sudden, desperate urge to run; but instead I stood still, frozen, while the wind picked up and the bats began to race across the moon, until Ed called out to me to come inside.

  I went inside.

  I remember:

  The metal bed frame, knocking, knocking, knocking against the wall; the sound of a coyote screaming in the night.

  You see? Even now, I can follow the memory thread down. The past stirs under the ashes and pokes its petals from the dust.

  Once everyone is asleep—Minna in the Yellow Room, with one arm looped around Amy’s waist, their hair intermingling on the pillows; Trenton in the Blue Room, lying on his back, arms flat at his sides, as though he has been felled by a blow; and Caroline in the Daisy Room, because at the last minute she expressed a horror of sleeping in the master suite, which looks identical to the way it did during the years of her marriage; and even Sandra, although awake, of course, has gone silent and still, so that her presence is nearly imperceptible—I can’t stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death.

  It isn’t an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we’ve nested in the walls like bacteria. We’ve taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing—we’ve made it our own.

  Or maybe it’s life that is the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleansing, a cure.

  In the morning, Minna gets up early to pick up large boxes from the hardware store downtown. By the time the others are waking, she has assembled a dozen of them and lined them up neatly like a series of cardboard coffins, ready to enfold the remains of Richard Walker’s earthly existence.

  And so the cleansing begins.

  PART II

  THE STUDY

  SANDRA

  “Monstrous,” Minna says. “Absolutely monstrous. It looks like a vulva.”

  I’ll say this about Minna: she may be as deep as a puddle but she is funny. And she’s right. The lamp on Richard Walker’s desk is meant to look like a rose—all droops and loops of pink and white fabric, with tiny electric lights budding in between—but the effect is more like a fat lady peeling back her skirt.

  “Minna.” Caroline presses her fingers against her temples. It’s 9:30 a.m. and she’s on her first drink. She won’t be over the hump until her second or third.

  “A drooping vulva,” Minna adds. She shakes her head and returns to wrapping up Richard’s collection of clocks. “Who would buy something like that?”

  “Your father.”

  “What did he think he would do with all of it?” Minna says, making a face. “It’s like a trash heap in here. Like one of those hoarder shows.”

  “Your father wasn’t a hoarder,” Caroline says. “He was a collector. Be careful, Minna. Some of those clocks are valuable.”

  “Junk,” Minna says, as she nestles a paperweight on top of a folded afghan, in yet another box. The boxes are
slowly sprouting all over the house. “And more junk.”

  “I’ve talked to Dani Sutherland,” Caroline says, keeping one hand on her temples and taking a sip from a plastic cup with the other. Screwdriver. Two parts vodka, one part orange juice.

  Minna gives her mother a blank look.

  “You don’t remember Dani Sutherland? Her son, Hank, used to babysit? Oh, well. Dani does realty now. She’s worried about the market. Says it might take two or three years to really get the price we want. We might get lucky, though, with a buyer from the city. I guess we’ll have to see.”

  Minna rips off a bit of packing tape with her teeth. “Maybe we shouldn’t sell,” she says. “At least not right away.”

  “Of course we’re going to sell.” When Caroline frowns, her face looks like a collapsed pudding.

  “It’s not only your decision,” Minna says.

  “Yes, it is,” Caroline says. “It’s my house now. I call the shots.”

  Minna stares at her. “Trenton was right,” she says. “You really don’t care—about Dad and the house and all of it.”

  “Please, Minna. Don’t be so childish. Of course I care. But I’m also broke. And you need the money just as much as I do.” Caroline takes a sip that nearly empties her cup. Now it makes sense: the ugly luggage, all that expensive clothing showing its age, cashmere spotted with holes.

  Minna starts assembling another box, wielding the tape aggressively, as if trussing a live animal. “You should have married that guy—what was his name?—the one from the cosmetics family. Henry something.”

  “Harry Fairfield,” Caroline says.

  “Then you would have been set.”

  “He had sweaty palms.” Caroline sighs. “Besides, you can’t fall in love with someone just because he has buckets of money.”

  Minna snorts. “Isn’t that why you fell in love with Dad?”

  “Minna. No. Of course not.” Caroline’s either shocked or doing a good job of pretending to be.

  “He was ten years older,” Minna says.

  “He was sophisticated.” Caroline’s voice gets quiet, and for the first time she releases her death grip on her forehead. “I loved your father. I did. He was just . . . ”

  “An asshole?”

  That’s the understatement of the century.

  “Difficult,” Caroline says, scowling down at her drink. It’s nearly empty: pulp clings to the sides of the cup.

  Minna opens the top drawer and makes a noise of disapproval. “Papers. Envelopes. Postcards. No order. No system.” She slams the drawer shut and moves on to the next one, then inhales sharply. “I didn’t know Dad kept a gun.”

  “A gun?” Caroline repeats.

  Minna lifts up a pistol slowly, holding it with two fingers, as if it’s a dirty sock.

  “Don’t point that thing at me, Minna.”

  “I’m not pointing it.”

  “Put it away, please, before you hurt yourself.”

  Minna rolls her eyes and replaces the gun in the drawer. “It’ll take weeks to go through all this stuff.”

  Caroline stares at her cup for a minute. Then she looks up. “Do you have any happy memories here?”

  “No.” Then, a pause: “Some. I remember you used to let me bowl in the hallway upstairs. Remember that? You set up pins and everything. And when it rained, we watched movies in your bed.”

  “The Wizard of Oz was your favorite,” Caroline says. “You were always praying for a tornado.”

  “And I remember Trenton learning how to walk. Then he wouldn’t stop following me. Jesus, it drove me crazy.”

  Alice stirs; I hope she won’t start sniveling. You should have seen her when Caroline brought Trenton back from the hospital: a patchy red blob with a single tuft of hair growing from the center of his forehead, one of the ugliest babies I’ve ever seen. And the smells! Diapers, spittle, puke. Horrible.

  But Alice just went to pieces. I’d catch her when she thought I was distracted, drawn close around his crib, singing nonsense songs and whispering to him as though he could hear.

  “Do you remember the Christmas parties we used to have? Your father would sing. And you and Trenton always argued about who got to hang the angel. I remember you played the piano so beautifully . . . ”

  “I hated the piano,” Minna says loudly—so loudly Caroline blinks.

  “Did you?” she says. “But you were so good. Everyone said you would go to Juilliard.” She tries to shake the last remaining drops of liquid onto her tongue.

  Minna glares at her. “Are you serious? You really have no fucking idea, do you? About anything.”

  Caroline widens her eyes. “I don’t know why you’re being so hostile, Minna,” she says. “We’re just having a conversation.”

  Minna stares. “Have another drink, Ma,” she says finally, then slams down a plate so hard it cracks in two, and storms out of the room.

  TRENTON

  Trenton was disappointed by the gun Minna had found. He’d been expecting something sleek and black. He’d pictured tucking it into his waistband, swaggering around with it for a bit, getting the feel. He’d pictured the kind of gun that would make you think twice about messing with someone—guns evened the score, turned losers into big shots.

  This gun was old, first of all, and it was heavy. He couldn’t even fit it into his waistband, and if he did, he thought he’d probably blow his balls off accidentally. It looked more like something you would see at a museum than at the scene of a crime. Plus he didn’t know if it was loaded, and he wasn’t sure how to check.

  He’d seen a gun only once before, at the disastrous party last winter that had earned him his nickname. It had been, without doubt, the worst night of his life. Most people probably thought the accident had been the worst night of his life, but for Trenton, that had been a kind of liberation.

  Everything afterward—the pain and the pills and the metal rods holding his shins together and the wire in his jaw and the shitty power shakes that tasted like sand sipped through a straw—had been awful. But in the moment of the accident, the sheer blazing terror of it and the certainty, just then, that he would die, he’d found a kind of peace he’d never known, or at least hadn’t felt in years.

  This is it, he had thought, just before the scream of metal on metal and the sparks and then the darkness. And he was, purely and simply, relieved. No more failing, no more fucking up, no more loneliness like a constant pressure on his bladder that he couldn’t piss or sleep or drink away.

  And then he’d woken up. He had never thought about suicide before. But lying in the hospital, it had occurred to him that suicide was the only possible solution. Clean. Elegant. Brave, even.

  Suicide, he decided, had integrity.

  He supposed he could just shove the barrel of the gun in his mouth and fire, but Russian roulette lacked integrity. If you were going to kill yourself, you had to know, in advance, that it was going to work. Chance was for idiots.

  That’s what Derrick Richards had suggested at the party: that they all play Russian roulette. Trenton had kept his mouth shut, like he did at every party, hoping that if he stayed quiet, no one would notice that he didn’t belong. Derrick was dumb enough to do it and his friends were dumb enough to follow along. Fortunately Derrick was so drunk he’d stumbled backward and sent a bullet straight through the window, and after that someone had taken the gun away and everyone had moved on to strip poker, even though it was December and flakes of snow were swirling in through the shattered window.

  From upstairs, Trenton thought he heard laughter, faintly, and shoved the gun quickly into his dad’s desk drawer, where he had found it, where Minna had casually mentioned it would be—almost like she knew what he was planning and was encouraging it. Well. Why wouldn’t she? Nothing was worse than being a disgusting pock-faced freak with a sister who looked like Minna. He was sure she suspected him of being a virgin.

  If only she knew the truth: that he’d never even been kissed. At least not in a way that
counted.

  The laughter stopped. Maybe he was hallucinating. Last night, before falling asleep, he thought he’d heard whispers, voices in the creaking of the floorboards, the sighing of a woman. He would have blamed it on the painkillers, but he’d stopped taking them. He was saving them up, just in case.

  He opened the drawer and removed the gun once again. It was heavy. What the hell had his dad used it for? What had his dad used any of this stuff for? Pencil sharpeners in weird shapes, antique toys, old radios. Craziness.

  He was suddenly aware that the whole house had gone silent. His mom had left, he knew, probably to go buy more booze. Minna had gone to the kitchen to make Amy lunch.

  He could do it. Right here. Right now. Could bite down on the metal, taste iron on his tongue, say boom, and head toward that place of calm again, where he wasn’t such a nothing. Where he was nothing.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to lift the gun to his mouth. He kept thinking of stupid Derrick Richards and his salmon-colored pants pooled at his ankles, comfortable as anything, his pale chest exposed, already curling with a man’s worth of hair, his fleshy thighs splayed like two fat white fish, losing hand after hand in strip poker and not caring. And Trenton, who wasn’t even playing, sitting stiff as an arrow, mortified, desperate that no one move or even breathe in his direction, because Angie Salazar was sitting on his right (he’d never even thought she was hot) and down to her bra and underwear, and every time she moved to take a card the fat swell of her boobs moved with her, and he could see where her butt was compressed by the chair, and imagine the heat of her thighs pressed together, and he had such a raging boner he thought he might die or, worse, explode right there in front of everyone. Bang.