Rooms

by Lauren Oliver

  Trenton has lost interest already and slumps backward. “Forget it,” he says. “I don’t want it, anyway.”

  Caroline looks at Dennis as though to say, See?

  “I’m afraid that isn’t how these things work,” Dennis says.

  Up until now, the will has been as boring as laundry. Everything exactly as expected and all aboveboard. Richard is a whole lot nicer dead than he was alive, I’ll tell you that. A whopping half a million for both children and another to Amy, and the contents of the house to Caroline, to sell if she wants. That should bring in a nice little bundle.

  “I’m telling you, I don’t care what you do with it,” Trenton insists. “Sell it. Turn it into a hotel. Burn the whole thing down, like Minna said.”

  Alice makes a strangled sound. She’s been wound up tighter than a nun’s asshole since the Walkers came home.

  She’s afraid. She knows the truth will come out now. Everything will come up, like after the floods of ’79 when whole sheets of mud slid up to the porch, battered the windows, uprooted trees, turned up rotten hats and stinking shoes and even a forty-year-old turtle with the face of an old man. Brought Maggie, Alice’s daughter, to my door, too.

  Remember that: remember that about Alice, when you’re tempted to believe everything she tells you; when she says that I’m full of shit, that I’m paranoid, that I’ve rewritten the past. Her own child—her only child—didn’t know her at all. She told me so herself.

  “Minna!” Caroline pretends to look shocked.

  Minna waves a hand. “I wasn’t serious.”

  Dennis clears his throat. He’s obviously in way over his head. He probably spends most of his time rezoning decks and settling divorces. He’s getting plowed by the Walkers. “I’m afraid that’s not quite how it works,” he repeats again. “And you won’t actually have the power to decide on a course of action—”

  “Until I’m eighteen, I know,” Trenton cuts him off.

  “Look, are we done yet?” Minna asks, starting to stand. “I should check on Amy.”

  “Not quite,” Dennis says, and he jerks his head to the left again as he fingers his collar. “Mr. Walker made several other provisions—”

  “Of course he did,” Caroline says. “He lived to be a pain. I don’t know why I thought it would be different once he was dead.”

  Dennis presses on: “He requested, first, that his ashes be buried, not scattered. And he would like to be interred somewhere on the property.”

  “We knew that,” Minna says. “He always said he wanted to stay here. Wouldn’t be dragged out come death, hell, or high water.”

  “There’s another thing,” Dennis starts, and then stops. “A fairly large bequest . . . ” He shuffles the papers in his hands and clears his throat. His skin is just getting pinker. It looks like he’s sprouting a rash. For a moment he stands sputtering, opening and closing his mouth. Then he turns to Caroline. “Maybe it would be better if we discussed it alone?”

  Caroline stares. “I don’t care,” she says. “What did he do? Leave half his money to a dog pound or something?”

  “He hated dogs,” Trenton says.

  Dennis places the papers next to him on the desk and rearranges them so their corners match up. Minna has sat down again. He deliberately avoids her stare. For a moment, the room is still.

  This is going to be good.

  “Mr. Walker has left a sum of money to an Adrienne Cadiou,” he says.

  Minna and Caroline exchange a momentary glance, no more than a flicker of their eyes.

  Minna says, “Trenton, can you go check on Amy?” Her voice is high.

  “Who’s Adrienne?” he asks.

  “Please, Trenton.” She looks at him, eyes dark, the same way she always did. Don’t put the candlesticks there. It works. He stands up—which is to say, he slurps his way off the chair and oozes out of the room.

  Time ticks by: seconds, minutes.

  “Do you know her?” Dennis asks.

  Caroline is sitting, stiff as a wood plank. She stares at the empty glass she is holding. Absolut vodka, mixed with a little seltzer. No lemon. I would have put lemon in it.

  “No,” she says shortly.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” Minna reaches out and tries to place a hand on her mother’s knee. Caroline jerks away.

  “We haven’t been married for ten years,” she says. “It’s only to be expected, isn’t it? Even when we were married . . . ” She trails off.

  “I don’t remember an Adrienne. Do you?” I say to Alice.

  “No,” she whispers back. I don’t know why she’s bothering to keep her voice down.

  “There was an Agnes,” I say. “Terrible name.”

  “Be quiet, Sandra.”

  “And an Anna . . .”

  “I said, be quiet.”

  Minna stands up abruptly and leaves the room. Caroline is staring out the window. For a second, I feel sorry for her. Caroline gets a bad rap. But she does her best.

  “Have you contacted her?” she asks. She still doesn’t look at Dennis.

  “He gave an address,” he says. “We’ve written. Evidently, she lives in Toronto . . . ?”

  If he’s hoping for a response, he doesn’t get it. Caroline doesn’t move. She continues staring out the window.

  “How much?” she asks.

  Dennis jerks his head to the left again, like he wasn’t expecting her to ask. “What?”

  “How much did he leave her?” Now Caroline does turn her eyes to him, eyes as big and blue as a child’s drawing of a sky.

  “A million,” Dennis says quietly.

  Caroline closes her eyes, and then opens them again. “More than he left his own children” is all she says. Then she stands up, unsteadily, bumping the chair as she makes her way to the door.

  I’ll tell you the nicest thing my dad ever did for me: croaked before he could drain away all his cash and left me a bundle to buy a place of my own. Made sure I’d never have to come crawling back to Georgia.

  It’s funny. I have only one really clear memory of my parents. Alpharetta, 1957 or 1958: before my mom and dad split, before my father’s weekends with his good pal Alan. Early summertime, June bugs clinging to the screen doors, the smell of freesia, cow dung, grass clippings, petrol.

  They were having a dinner party, and I remember the preparations: cream cheese balls rolled in chopped walnuts; Jell-O salad in the shape of a fish; cubes of yellow cheese beaded with condensation, toothpicks standing proudly like flags from their ranks. I remember helping my mother iron limp white napkins and getting in trouble because my fingers were dirty and left smudges. I remember my dad standing in front of the bathroom mirror, shirtless, moving a razor over his jaw.

  I wasn’t allowed inside to play so I spent the evening in the backyard. The air was full of fireflies, and when I’d tired of watching, I ran around trying to catch them.

  “You know what they are, don’t you?”

  I turned around, surprised by my mother’s voice. Standing on the cement patio, backlit by the kitchen light, her face was unreadable. She held a lit cigarette but she wasn’t smoking it. She looked thin and frail, like a kind of bird.

  When I didn’t answer, she came down the steps into the grass. “Fireflies,” she repeated. “You know what they are?”

  “Bugs,” I said.

  When she took a drag, I could see she was smiling a little. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring out into space.

  “They’re spirits,” she said, in a low voice. “Souls. When a heart breaks, a firefly is born.” She reached out a hand as though to catch one, then let her hand drop and took another drag of her cigarette. “They fly forever, sending out secret signals to their lost loves. See? Watch.”

  We sat very still. I held my breath. In the darkness, the fireflies flared suddenly and then went out, making random patterns in the air. It was the first time my mother had ever told me a story that wasn’t out of the Bible; the first time, too, I ever felt sorry for her, or
for any grown-up.

  “That’s what a broken heart looks like,” she said, and stood up. “Like a haunting.” She turned to go inside, but at the last second she looked back at me. “It isn’t worth it, Sandra. Remember that.”

  Well. I wish I had. Things might have turned out a whole lot different with me and Martin. And who knows. My brains might have stayed where they belonged.

  MINNA

  It took Minna forty-five minutes to get Caroline into bed after she polished off three-quarters of a bottle of vodka in under an hour. Caroline’s face was swollen and streaked with makeup, and there was a little dried vomit on her lower lip.

  Minna rolled her mother over, onto her side, pushing against the warm fat flesh of her thighs and stomach, thinking of a documentary she’d seen once where a half-dozen men had strapped a beached whale with hooks and ropes and pulleys and tried to haul it back to the water. She wished she could sink a hook straight into her mother’s fat ass and heave. At some point, Caroline had taken off her pants, and Minna was disgusted by the sight of her cheap nylon underwear, full seated and worn thin in places, clinging desperately to her thighs like lichen to the side of a rock.

  Minna was tired. Something kept twisting in her stomach, an alien pain; she should never have come back. She thought of calling Dr. Upshaw but knew it would just make her feel worse. She couldn’t even make it two days in the old house without cracking. Pathetic.

  There had to be someone else she could call, but she couldn’t immediately think of anyone. She was half tempted to call Greg, Amy’s father, just so she’d have something to pin her anger to: nail it down, give it a name, the way she had enjoyed shoving thumbtacks into the corkboard map she’d had as a kid. Find Sweden.

  But Greg was still at work, and she’d never get past his secretary. She was only allowed to call him between the hours of 7:00 and 8:00, when he was commuting back to his home in Westchester, back to his wife and his real kids, as he’d once slipped up and referred to them, and half the time he screened her phone calls, anyway. The checks still arrived regularly, though, thank God. She’d burned through four jobs in three years. Fired from two, laid off from two. She had less than two thousand dollars in her savings account.

  Amy believed that her dad was a firefighter, a hero, and dead.

  There was Alex, whom she’d been fucking recently, and Ethan, who still wanted to fuck her. But they never actually talked, not about real things. Some bullshitting over dinner, flirtation in the back of a cab, and maybe some back-and-forth in the morning, just so it didn’t feel too cheap.

  She didn’t have female friends. For the most part, she didn’t trust other women, and other women certainly didn’t trust her. There had been Dana—Minna was still sorry about how that ended. Stupid. Dana’s boyfriend hadn’t even been good in bed. Kind of soggy and spongy and bland, like wet toast. She didn’t know why she had done it.

  She never did.

  She went downstairs to get her cell phone from the study, where she had left it, and found Trenton suctioned like a giant starfish to the carpet, dominating almost all the free space in the room, staring at the ceiling. He sat up on one elbow when she opened the door.

  “What are you doing?” Minna was in the mood to get angry at someone.

  “Listening,” Trenton said, and returned to his back. “Do you hear that?”

  He’d probably gotten into their mom’s booze. Or maybe he was stoned. This might normally impress Minna—if Trenton had weed, it meant he actually had friends, or at least a friend, to buy it from—but today she felt nothing but a sharp surge of resentment.

  Fucking Trenton. The house belonged to him now. And Trenton would go on believing their dad was some kind of misunderstood saint, and feeling superior to Minna for hating him. Maybe she should tell him about Adrienne Cadiou; she had found at least one card with Adrienne’s name on it from the stash Trenton had located earlier, and though the messages weren’t romantic, the fact that her father had kept them obviously was. She’d been hoping, after the reading of the will, that there might be some other explanation, like maybe her dad had mowed Adrienne down with his car and now she was paralyzed. Hush money.

  Stupid.

  She had stuffed all the cards and that disgusting lock of hair deep into a trash bag and taken it out immediately to the garage, as if it might contaminate the whole house.

  “I don’t hear anything.” Minna stepped over him, nudging him in the ribs accidentally-deliberately with her foot. But he didn’t even flinch.

  “I think—I think this house might be haunted,” Trenton said.

  “Are you high?” Minna said. “Or just dumb?”

  When Trenton blushed, even his pimples got darker. He sat up clumsily, and Minna remembered what the doctors had told her mom: that he would never have the same range of motion as before.

  “Sorry,” Minna said. “Mom’s blotto. I’m a little stressed out.”

  Trenton nodded, but he wouldn’t look at her. He picked at a spot on the carpet with his thumbnail. Minna, realizing that the ache had spread from her stomach into her whole body, sat in the chair the lawyer, Dennis, had vacated. The chairs were still arranged in a little circle, like the room had recently hosted a group therapy session.

  After a long minute of silence, in which Minna ran an inventory of everything that hurt, from her shoulders to her knuckles to the small, calloused little toe of her right foot, Trenton looked up.

  “So you don’t believe,” Trenton said.

  “Believe in what?” Minna said.

  Trenton looked embarrassed. “Ghosts.”

  Minna couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “What is this about, Trenton?”

  “We don’t know,” he said, and then she knew he wasn’t joking. “Nobody knows. You said yourself someone was murdered here.”

  “That’s just a story I heard,” Minna said. “I don’t know if it’s true. And I never said she was murdered.”

  “And Dad—” Trenton began.

  “Dad died at Presbyterian Medical,” Minna said.

  It was like Trenton hadn’t heard. “But he could be,” Trenton insisted. “He could be, I don’t know, stuck somehow—”

  A sharp pain went straight through Minna’s head, like a flash going off. “If he’s stuck anywhere, it’s somewhere hotter than this,” she said, and then regretted it.

  Sometimes, it felt as though the words came out of her mouth without looping in her brain first. Trenton looked so pathetic, and she had a sudden memory of little Trenton, baby Trenton, before his bones had distended his body and made it gawky and puppetlike. She remembered him crawling into her lap, accidentally putting his knee in the soft space between her ribs, just below the two mosquito-bite boobs newly formed, wrapping a fat fist around her hair, saying “Mama.” And Minna, nearly thirteen years old, had not corrected him.

  “You hated him, didn’t you?” Trenton looked up at her. His eyes were still the same as they had been then: a blue that was startling against his other features, like coming across a lake in the middle of an expanse of concrete.

  Minna pulled her right foot into her lap and began to knead it with her fist. “I didn’t hate him,” she said.

  “You didn’t love him, though,” Trenton said.

  “I’m not sure,” Minna said. “Probably not.”

  She didn’t know anymore whether she had ever loved her father. She must have. When they lived in California, he had taught her to swim—remembered the feel of his rough warm hands around her waist as she paddled through the water, the sting of chlorine, the high sun and the vivid grass, and dim, watery sounds of her mother calling to them to be careful.

  She had been furious when they first moved to Coral River, midautumn, after the leaves had already gone down, when the whole place was nothing but grays and browns, mud and smear. She’d hated it: the colorlessness. The sky crowded by trees. The trees themselves, huddling in their long shadows, letting off the smell of death—so different from the improbable-lo
oking palm tree with its perky crown of leaves, a practical-joke tree, like something designed specifically to make people smile.

  The trees in Coral River didn’t make people smile.

  And the wind and the fingers of cold that reached past the window frames and thumbed up through the floorboards, the bubbling and hiss of the radiators and the banging of the rusty pipes—all of it was strange and ugly and old.

  Then one night, her father had shaken her awake—it must have been two, three in the morning—his face so close she could feel the tickle of his beard, so close his smile was like a half-moon. “Wake up, Min,” he said. “You gotta see this.”

  He had picked her up even though she was already too big, just so her bare feet would not touch the cold floor, and he’d carried her downstairs and into his study. He’d held her at the window, where the cold came through the glass and lodged straight into her heart, like a razorblade.

  “Look,” he whispered. “Snow.”

  She had never seen snow before, except in TV shows and movies. It had looked to her like the stars were flaking out of the sky. It had looked like thousands of fireflies in the moonlight; like breathlessness, like time stopping, like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

  Then, she had loved him.

  It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time.

  When the phone rang, she jumped; she’d forgotten there was a house phone, and for one confused moment she thought she was hearing an alarm.

  “Are you going to get that?” Trenton said, watching her, and making no attempt to get up.

  It took her a minute to locate the working phone since there were a dozen telephones from different eras crowded on a shelf next to the desk. Finally, on the fourth ring, she found it. It was only when she went to pick up the phone that she realized her hands were shaking.

  “Walker,” she said past the tightness in her chest.