Rooms

by Lauren Oliver

  When he finally couldn’t take it any longer, when it was too much, he’d gotten up stiffly, bowlegged as a sailor, holding his cup in front of his crotch, and hurtled into the bathroom. He’d slammed the door shut and locked it—at least, he thought he had, but in his desperation to get his pants down and release the explosion that had been building inside of him like some awful time bomb ticking away to social humiliation—well, he hadn’t double-checked. And so when Lanie Buck had stumbled into the bathroom less than a minute later because she had to puke, the whole party had caught Trenton mid flagrante delicto, if you could be in flagrante delicto by yourself—head back, pants around his ankles, cock in his hand, eyes closed, and practically crying with the sheer, tremendous relief of it.

  Splooge. Derrick had led the chant, and everybody had picked up on it. Splooge. Splooge. Splooge.

  He hadn’t even buckled his belt before fleeing. As he walked back to campus, the snow stinging his cheeks like new tears, he’d known that he was finished at Andover.

  Sometimes he fantasized about killing Derrick, instead of himself. But he knew he’d never have the guts for it.

  There was a footstep outside, in the hall. Before Trenton had time to put away the gun, Minna pushed open the door, carrying yet another box.

  “Oh,” she said. “Did you decide to help after all?”

  Trenton had successfully avoided helping for most of the morning, claiming that his leg was acting up. He was pretty sure Minna knew he was faking, but she wouldn’t say anything; besides, she had no right, after what she had done.

  That was life, Trenton thought: people knew your secrets, but if you had shit on them, too, they couldn’t rat you out. So everything evened out, piled under one huge shit sandwich.

  Minna dropped the box, which was empty, and nudged it with a foot to turn it right side up. “You found Dad’s dirty little secret, I see. One of them, anyway.”

  Now that she had acknowledged the gun, he felt he could safely return it to the drawer. He was relieved when it was out of his hands, and he opened a few drawers casually, so Minna might think he’d just been rooting around in the study, idly curious, when he’d happened on the gun. “I was just looking at it,” he said.

  “You weren’t planning on shooting anyone?” she said.

  “Not today,” Trenton said. He wasn’t sure if he was making a joke or not.

  “I might shoot Mom,” Minna said matter-of-factly. Some of her hair had fallen out of her ponytail and she brushed it back with a wrist. “We haven’t even made a dent in this room, have we?”

  In one of the lower desk drawers, Trenton found a half-dozen cards, stuffed haphazardly on top of some ink cartridges. He opened one and jerked back in his chair. “Ew.”

  “Ew what?”

  “Hair.” He held up a small brown curl, held together by a faded blue elastic. There was no signature on the card. No message, either. Just the words that had been printed: Thinking of you.

  Minna stood up quickly, snatched the card and the lock of hair from him, and tossed it back in the drawer. “Don’t touch Dad’s stuff,” she said.

  “I thought I was supposed to be helping,” he said.

  “Well, you’re not.” She slammed the drawer closed with a shin. She stood for a minute, massaging her temples, and Trenton thought viciously that she would probably look just like his mom in a few years.

  “I’m getting old,” she said, as if she knew what he’d been thinking. Then Trenton felt guilty.

  “You’re twenty-seven.”

  “Twenty-eight next month.” She moved another box—this one full of books—from the chair opposite the desk onto the floor and sat down with a small groan and closed her eyes. She said, “Someone died in here, you know.”

  Trenton felt the tiniest flicker of interest. “What do you mean?”

  “Someone was shot. In here. Years ago, before Dad bought the house. There were brains splattered all over the wall.” She opened her eyes. “I remember Mom and Dad talking about it when we first moved in.”

  It was the first interesting thing Trenton had ever heard about the house. “How come you didn’t tell me before?”

  Minna shrugged. “You were so little. And then I must have forgot.”

  Trenton turned this piece of information over in his mind and found that it gave him a little bit of pleasure. “Like . . . a murder?” That word, too, was pleasurable: a distraction, a temporary lifting away from the everyday. Like being just a little drunk.

  “I don’t know the whole story,” Minna said. She seemed to lose interest in the conversation. She started picking out dirt from underneath her nails.

  In the quiet, Trenton heard it again. A voice. Not quite a voice, though. More like a shape: a solidity and pattern to the normal creakings and stirrings of the house. It was the way he’d felt as a kid listening to the wind through the trees, thinking he could make sense out of it. But this wasn’t just his imagination.

  There were words there, he was sure of it.

  “Do you . . . do you hear that?” he ventured to Minna.

  “Hear what?” Minna looked up. “Did Amy shout?”

  Trenton shook his head.

  Minna tilted her head, listening. She shrugged again. “Nada.”

  Trenton swallowed. His throat felt dry. Maybe something had gone haywire in his head after the accident. Like a popped fuse or something. Because directly after Minna had spoken, he heard the word, uttered clearly in the silence.

  The word was: Idiot.

  ALICE

  How do ghosts see?

  We didn’t always; it had to be relearned.

  Dying is a matter of being reborn. In the beginning there was darkness and confusion. We learned gropingly. We felt our way into this new body, the way that infants do. Images began to emerge. The light began to creep in.

  Now I see better than I did when I was alive. I never liked to wear my glasses, and by the time I was thirty, I couldn’t see from one side of the parlor to the other without squinting.

  Now everything is perfectly clear. We do more than see. We detect the smallest vibrations, minuscule shifts in the currents, minor disturbances, molecules shifting. We are invisible fingers: we play endlessly over the surface of things.

  Only memory remains slippery and elusive. Memories won’t keep faith with you. They’ll go sliding away into the ravenous void of nonbeing.

  Memories must be staked to the back of something, swaddled in objects, wrapped around table legs.

  Trenton is so motionless in the armchair, if it weren’t for the way he occasionally reaches up to finger a pimple on his face, he might be dead. Amy sits at his feet with an enormous, leather-bound book on her lap. I recognize it as The Raven Heliotrope.

  Minna was the one who found it, discovering the typewritten pages loosely stacked and stashed in an old crawlspace. She read it so many times she could recite whole passages from memory. When she was ten, she went crazy trying to figure out the writer’s identity—the manuscript was anonymous—and Richard Walker, in one of his spells of good humor, had it bound, and even called in literary experts and a Harvard professor, who judged from the language and imagery that the book might date from the mid-nineteenth century.

  This was endlessly amusing to me. I know for a fact that The Raven Heliotrope was completed between 1944 and 1947. I wrote it.

  “Mommy!” Amy cries out suddenly, excitedly. “I’m at the part with the bamboo forest. Do you want me to read it to you?”

  Amy’s mention of the bamboo forest sends a small thrill through me. That was one of the passages I was proudest of: Penelope and the Innocents get attacked by a vicious band of Nihilis and are only saved by the sudden appearance of magical bamboo, which grows up around them, impaling the Nihilis army.

  “Sure, honey.” Minna dabs her forehead with the inside of her forearm.

  Amy moves her finger across the picture of Penelope riding a horse. “Then Penelope went riding away . . . and there were Nihilis and they w
ere ugly and they liked blood.”

  “You’re a terrible writer,” Sandra says neutrally. Believe it or not, I had actually managed to forget her existence for an hour, the way you do a shadow’s.

  “She’s not reading,” I snap. “She’s making it up.”

  “Bamboo,” Sandra says. “Bamboo! You might have at least used rosebushes. Thorns that punctured the eyes, and all that.”

  I don’t bother responding. It was Thomas who told me about bamboo—that it grows so quickly, and with such strength, it can go straight through a human body. We talked about how terrible the natural world could be.

  Of course the bamboo is only doing what it must. Everything obeys its own inner laws. Everything is greedy, and moving toward a version of light.

  “Penelope made a wish and then a forest grew up . . . ” Amy says, after putting her finger, arbitrarily, in the center of the page. She trails off. She’s butchering it. The forest doesn’t grow because Penelope wished it. The forest grows out of the blood of the Innocents.

  Minna scoots past the desk and pulls apart the curtains. She must be looking out at the driveway. I no longer know what the driveway looks like. Sandra told me it was paved. But I can still picture the hills—at this time of year, the poplars and the cottonwoods should be blossoming, and the daffodils will be pushing up, and the air will smell sweet as the sap begins to run: a painful smell, which brings back memories of other springs and other cycles, a continuity that exists beyond and apart from us.

  “Who is it?” Amy pushes the book off her lap. “Is it Nana? Is she back?”

  “It’s not Nana,” Minna says, frowning. “I don’t know who it is.” She sighs. “Stay here with Uncle Trenton, okay, sweetie? Trenton, can you watch her? Don’t touch anything, Amybear.”

  Minna goes out into the front hall: a dim place that always smells like old shoes. No one uses the front entrance except for delivery people and the various groups that go door-to-door, petitioning for a clean water act or advocating for Mr. So-and-So for governor.

  The man on the front porch is wearing a too-big suit and holding a briefcase that looks like a theatrical prop. He seems vaguely familiar. After he introduces himself as Dennis Carey, Richard Walker’s lawyer, I realize I must have seen him before.

  “Well, I guess you better come in,” Minna says, and opens the door wider to admit him.

  For a moment I’m swept away by a wedge of light that cuts into us, penetrates the layers of air and dust that have accumulated in the hall. Then Minna closes the door.

  “You could have told us you were coming,” she says, sticking her hands in her back pockets so he can’t avoid looking at her breasts.

  “Here comes trouble,” Sandra says, obviously pleased. She loves a good spectator sport.

  His eyes tick down and careen back up to her face. “I called,” Dennis says, shifting his briefcase to his left hand. “I spoke to Caroline . . . ?”

  Minna laughs. “No wonder I wasn’t expecting you,” she says. “Caroline isn’t here.”

  “Not here?” Dennis tugs at his collar. He’s probably in his forties and not completely unattractive, although he has too much stomach and too little hair.

  I feel a brief flash of fear. Minna is like a spider, huge and hungry.

  “My mom tends to be forgetful,” Minna says, and pushes past Dennis, shouldering too close, so her body brushes against his. “You want something to drink?”

  Dennis transforms his nervous cough into a laugh. “Better not,” he says. He’s uncomfortable, as he should be, without knowing why. “I’m still on the clock. I made the appointment with Caroline . . . ”

  Minna waves a hand. “Appointments have never stopped my mother from drinking. What do you say? Whiskey? Wine? Vodka? We’re absolutely drowning in vodka . . . ”

  “I shouldn’t,” Dennis says, but I can feel him beginning to relent.

  “You might as well relax.” Minna takes another step toward him. “Who knows how long we’ll be waiting for the others . . . ” She steps forward again, so they are standing less than a foot apart.

  All the threads are pulled tight in that instant. Even I am swept along. The air vibrates like a plucked violin string.

  Then Amy bursts out of the study.

  “Nana’s back, Mommy!” She barrels down the hall, half sliding on bunched-up socks.

  Just like that, the threads are cut. Dennis and Minna instinctively step away from each other.

  “Honey, be careful!” Minna reaches out and catches Amy by the shoulders, forcing her to slow down.

  “Who are you?” Amy says, looking up at Dennis.

  “Don’t be rude, Amy,” Minna says.

  Dennis laughs. “I’m Dennis,” he says, leaning down and offering his hand, solemnly, for Amy to shake. Instead she ducks around Minna’s leg, peeking at him from between Minna’s thighs.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Minna says. “Say hi to Mr. Carey, Amy.”

  “Hi,” Amy whispers.

  Dennis straightens up again. “Is she yours?”

  Minna nods. She won’t meet his eyes. I wonder whether she’s embarrassed about the fact that their moment was interrupted, or about the fact that it happened at all.

  “She’s very pretty,” Dennis says.

  “Say thank you, Amy,” Minna says sharply.

  Amy says nothing.

  The kitchen door opens.

  “In here, Mom,” Minna says, before Caroline can ask.

  Caroline comes into the hall a moment later. In her large gray cashmere jumpsuit, she looks like an overgrown dust mite. And yet there—underneath it, underneath her—I can’t help but see another Caroline: thin and beautiful, with the same wide, lost eyes, drifting from room to room. Even then, she was like dust—blown from place to place.

  “The service here—” she starts to say, and then, seeing Dennis, stops. “Oh God. You must be Mr. Carey. I’d completely forgotten—”

  “It’s no problem,” Dennis says, starting forward. He goes to shake her hand; she extends her hand limply and allows it to be engulfed. “I wasn’t waiting long.”

  “You don’t look like a lawyer,” Caroline says, and she laughs as though she has made a joke. “Surely you’re too young.”

  “A lawyer?” Trenton has skulked into the hall, too, and stands with his shoulders hunched practically to his ears.

  Minna says offhandedly, “I never could stand lawyers.”

  Dennis clearly doesn’t know who to address. He again adjusts the collar of his shirt. His neck is thin, and his Adam’s apple prominent, as though he has swallowed a peach pit at some point in his life and it has been lodged there ever since. “I was lucky enough to work with Mr. Walker in the later years of his life,” he says.

  Caroline claps her hands. Her eyes are very bright. “I suppose we might as well get started,” she says. “No point in delaying the inevitable.”

  “Get started on what?” Trenton asks.

  Caroline looks from Trenton to Minna in her old, bewildered way, as though both of them have just materialized from nowhere. “Mr. Carey is here to read your father’s will,” she says. She turns a smile back to Dennis. “Let’s go into the study, shall we? It’s so much cozier in there. I’ll just nip into the kitchen for a glass of wine. I have a feeling I’m going to need it.”

  SANDRA

  In my day, the study was the den. It wasn’t as big then as Richard Walker made it during the Great Renovation of 1994, when we got cracked open like an egg, scrambled and remade, puffed up into a soufflé of useless rooms and spiral staircases and “breakfast nooks” and window seats.

  My favorite place: in the armchair, feet up, cigarette burning in the ashtray and a drink in my hand, the deep purple walls pulsing in the light from the TV, like being at the center of a heart. Bay windows belly out over the back lawn, and in the distance stands a shaggy dark line of trees, thick as a group of sheepdogs.

  Minna looks as if she needs a cigarette. Caroline, too. They’re gaping at e
ach other like two trout on ice at the grocery store. Even Trenton has straightened up.

  Minna is the one to speak first. “Trenton? Why the hell would he leave the house to Trenton?”

  “Probably because I’m the only one of us who didn’t hate him,” Trenton says. He shakes a bit of hair from his eyes. When he’s not slouching and sulking and playing with his zits, he’s not so bad looking. He’s got a little of his father in him—straight nose, nice chin.

  “Don’t be Victorian, Trenton,” Minna says. “I didn’t hate him.”

  I’m feeling especially nice about Minna today. I can’t help it if I’m a little aglow, a little warm and fuzzy, as though all the lights are on at once. She knows about me! She remembers. I’d bet my last dollar that means other people remember me, too. Everyone likes to be recognized and appreciated. Those were my brains on the study wall, thankyouverymuch.

  I’m glad that Martin at least had the decency to kill me in the study.

  “He can’t possibly leave the house to Trenton,” Caroline cuts in shrilly. “For God’s sake—Trenton’s only fifteen.”

  “Sixteen,” Trenton corrects her.

  “Exactly,” Caroline says. “He’s a minor.”

  “The property will be held in trust until Trenton turns eighteen,” Dennis says. Over the course of the hour his skin has gone a mottled pink color, like he’s just washed up in too-hard, too-hot water.

  “In trust?” Caroline parrots. “In trust to who?”

  Dennis jerks his head to the left, some kind of nervous tic. With his scrawny neck, and his paunch, he reminds me a little of one of those mechanical birds we used to perch at the edge of a bowl: dipping, dipping. “Mr. Walker appointed several trustees,” he says, “myself included.”

  Caroline throws up her hands and settles back in her chair. “I see. So it’s a scam.”

  “Mom,” Minna says.

  “It’s one of those—what do you call them—pyramid schemes.”

  “My mother isn’t a finance person,” Minna says to Dennis.

  “Don’t speak about me as though I’m not here, Minna.”