Rooms

by Lauren Oliver

  There was no response. Minna thought at first the line was dead, but then she heard a rustle, the unmistakable sound of someone breathing. She was suddenly on high alert. Instinctively, she angled her back to Trenton, clutching the receiver. Outside the window, the yellow coneflowers were waving in the grass.

  “Hello?” she said. And again: “Hello?”

  “Who is it?” Trenton said, from the floor.

  Nothing but the sound of breathing. Minna felt the up-and-down roll of nausea. It had been here, on this spot, that her father had held her all those years ago and shown her the snow, which fell like a secret between them. Now he was dead and she was getting old.

  “Hello?” she repeated one more time. The wave of nausea had brought with it a sudden crystallization of anger. And she knew. Knew it was a woman on the phone—knew it was that woman. Adrienne.

  “Who is it?” Trenton said again.

  Minna ignored him. She gripped the phone so tightly her knuckles ached.

  “Listen,” she said, and swallowed, wishing her throat weren’t so dry. “Listen,” she tried again. “Don’t call here anymore.”

  “Who is it?” Trenton grunted a little, sitting up.

  “He’s dead,” Minna said. Was it her imagination, or did the woman suck in a breath? She wished she could tunnel down the wires and watch the words take their effect, spitting like small barbed things directly into the woman’s flesh. “He’s dead, and he left nothing for you. So don’t call anymore.”

  Then she hung up, slamming the receiver, feeling the impact all the way to her elbow.

  ALICE

  At night, the house falls into silence. It’s a relief. It has been many years since I’ve shared the house with so many people, and I’ve forgotten how exhausting it can be: to be filled with so much motion and so many needs, so much sound and tension. It’s like the arthritis that swelled my joints in my old age and brought painful awareness to the parts of my body I had always safely ignored.

  Do we dream? No. We don’t sleep. There isn’t any need for it. The body is solid, its corners intact—it doesn’t need to be restored.

  On the other hand, and especially at night, there are certain times of drift. There are moments when the house, the body, has gone still, when we are full of empty air, when nothing needs our attention. Then, sometimes, ideas converge: memory and present, wish and desire, silhouette shadows of people we have been or have known. This is the closest we come to dreaming.

  What is now the study was once the sitting room, which became the living room, as times and fashions changed. There was a yellow-and-white loveseat that Ed hated. He traded it, later on, for a couch in green plaid we covered in plastic, so the upholstery wouldn’t fade. There was a wireless set we eventually moved into the cellar, to make room for our television, and a faded rug we replaced, when Ed retired, with nubby gray wall-to-wall carpeting: the newest thing. I used to walk it in my bare feet when he wasn’t at home, pacing all the way to the corners, kneading my toes against the fabric, marveling at the look of it.

  This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.

  That’s what I return to again and again, no matter how many times I think about it: how naive we were, how we believed in the promise, how we believed the past could be kept down. No. More than that—how we believed in a future that was distinct from the past.

  We had bookshelves. Ed liked books, although he didn’t read them. He was sensitive about his background, and careful, in public, never to betray the fact that he hadn’t finished high school. He liked to collect things that made up for his childhood, as though the weight of his possessions would somehow hurtle him forward into a new life.

  Maybe that’s why he was obsessed with the railroad. Ed liked to talk in front of company about the architecture of our country, and the way it was written in railroads and highways: pistons moving forward, spokes and wheels rolling over a landscape of natural obstacles, chugging headfirst into the future. That was what Ed did his whole life: push, and push, and push.

  Ed kept a slim volume of nineteenth-century railway maps, which he had bought for ten cents at an old flea market in Buffalo, displayed proudly on the top shelf. He insisted it not be moved, touched, or even dusted.

  This was one of the first secrets I kept from him: when he was gone, I would move the little footstool, climb up to reach the top shelf, take down the book, and read it.

  At first it was simply rebellion. But it quickly became more than that. There was something sad about the illustrations, the tracks stitching the land, like a body that had been sewn up after a terrible accident: it was the very attempt to connect that made it ugly.

  Thomas and I liked to look at maps together. Even now, when I see the large-bundled volumes on Richard Walker’s shelf, or the cardboard map that leans against the bookshelf, I can’t help but think of Thomas, and the way we used to trace our fingers over the contours of the pages, following suggested routes, and feeling in our fingertips the possibility of escape.

  I suppose, in some sense, wills are like maps: they are the imprint we leave, the places our affections have been entrenched; the work we have done; the money we have burrowed away; the furrows and the paths that lead back to spaces we have gone, and marked, and loved.

  I left everything I had—which wasn’t very much—to Maggie. In the end, my map was a dry place, a single road tethering me to my only child. In the end, my map was lonely.

  I know that that’s how it seemed to others. I know what I looked like: a devoted wife, despite everything, and then a cautious, solitary widow; a mother, perhaps too strict, perhaps too careful in her loving. A dry, dusty, throwaway woman, like many others: a woman made to fade, and dry out, and die shaking in her hollow skin.

  This is the map I left. I know this. I knew it even before I became old.

  And yet there were times when I felt my life full of such richness, such fullness, I couldn’t express it, couldn’t speak or breathe a word because I feared the disruption—even a single breath could ruin it, like wind over a pond. I didn’t want even a ripple.

  There were times when, exhausted, I held Maggie, in the dark, to my breast, and her tiny hands clutched at the air, and nobody in the world might have been awake but us. And then the small rosebud mouth, so needy, would find its object, and every mistake and blemish in my life was absolved: there was only giving, there was only the rhythm of life restored: the small pull against my breast, regular and ingrained, like a second heartbeat.

  There were times with Ed—in between the storms, in between the distance—when for a miraculous moment, we seemed to wash up on a shore together, and for that moment (an hour, a day, a week), everything that had happened seemed like the long, littered road on the way to happiness. There was a picnic in Saratoga; there was the Fourth of July in Maine, when he surprised me with the ice cream cone.

  There was watching Maggie waddle across the kitchen; there was the box turtle she found, and named, and insisted on attempting to keep in a cardboard box filled with long grass and nubby pebbles. Norman. She named it Norman.

  There was the Christmas when Ed filled the house with tiny, winking lights and insisted I come downstairs with my eyes covered; there was snow piled deep and quiet in the woods, and sun turning slender cones of ice to diamond.

  These are my secrets: roads branching, endlessly branching, each turn leading to a hundred others. When Sandra first came, I was tempted to share, to explain. But now I know: certain stories must remain mine, so that there is a me to remain.

  Thomas wasn’t mentioned in my will. How could he be? He was by then a phantom.

  It’s funny—I knew him a little less than two years. Even in living terms, that hardly amounts to anything. And in time that is not-living, in the endless, chalky sweep of eternity, which wears years to sand and blows everything back, dustlike, into void, it is nothing.

/>   But that’s the beauty of life: time is yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon.

  For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second’s breath, you get to stand up to infinity.

  But eventually, and always, infinity wins.

  Sandra is talking to herself, going on about the morning and the will in particular. She’s still delighted by the mystery of Adrienne Cadiou. I wish she would be quiet; the Walkers have exhausted me, left me with a shivery sense of discomfort, like a body gripped with fever.

  “New bet,” Sandra says. “What are the chances that Minna will bed that—?”

  Just then, something moves. A disturbance—a rippling feeling, a passage through spaces, like coming up to the surface when you’ve been submerged and holding your breath. For a second there is only confusion: a rush of sounds; a blur of brightness, painful and unexpected.

  I think of penetration: Ed and the sound of the hyena; Thomas exhaling; a high belly, full with strangeness.

  “What in the devil . . . ” Sandra’s voice is high, strained. She feels it, too. “What is that?”

  And then I know, all at once, what is happening. It has happened to me before, many years ago, when Sandra first arrived.

  Now comes the nausea, and a sense of swinging; then the world breaking apart, as it did when I was small and would spin and spin until I fell backward, watching everything dissolve into color.

  Just like that, there it is. A third presence.

  Another ghost.

  The nausea subsides, leaving me gasping. Sandra lets out a mangled cry. For once in the history of her death, Sandra is struck dumb. I have a brief moment of panic: Richard Walker has, after all, come back.

  But then it speaks.

  “It’s dark,” she says simply. Her voice is faint, barely audible. She must be young. She is small; she takes up hardly any space. A child.

  “God help us,” Sandra says.

  PART III

  THE BASEMENT

  ALICE

  Who is she?

  There have been no deaths in the house since Sandra’s, and that was in 1987. There have been no deaths on the property, either, not since the incident with the kitten and the old well.

  Now a girl! Unfathomable.

  She might easily tell us. But she chooses to remain silent. Since yesterday she has not said a single word beyond “It’s cold.” How old is she? I should say: how old was she? Twelve? Fifteen? No matter what I ask her, she refuses to be drawn out. And suddenly I find that I’m remembering things I haven’t thought about for ages. Lost children, cowering in the dark. Little Annie Hayes, who disappeared from her parents’ farm. I even remember the date the search party was assembled: March 6, 1942. A Tuesday.

  Strange, the things that stick.

  AMY

  Amy wasn’t allowed to go in the basement. Mommy said it was dark and Amy would be scared. But she knew that Mommy was the one who was scared.

  Amy thought she might find a doll down there. Once she had found a doll in the basement of her nana’s house. It had a wide white face and curls of brown hair and floppy arms and legs but a hard body. She had kept it for a while, but then Mommy made her throw it out after one of the arms got torn off by Brewster, the dog that lived across the street. Amy wanted to perform surgery, but Mommy said no people will think we’re poor I’ll buy you a real doll for Christ’s sake. Then she said: Sorry.

  Amy liked her new doll, but not as much as the one she had found.

  She wondered if Penelope from The Raven Heliotrope had ever had a mom, maybe the kind of mom who didn’t let her do certain things. Amy thought the basement might look a little like the Caves of Werth, which were filled with treasure.

  Uncle Trenton was no fun anymore and wouldn’t read to her. Mommy said Uncle Trenton was dead and then they went to the hospital to see him and he was white and he wouldn’t get up or talk. But then he did get up, but he still didn’t talk very much.

  Amy was glad they had come to Grandpa’s house. She wished she could talk to Grandpa in the Garden of Forever and ask whether all the people from the book were there.

  The house was full of white fluff stuff. Mommy said cottonseed. Amy collected it all and placed it in a cup in her room.

  It looked just like snow.

  SANDRA

  Like the world’s worst case of constipation: that’s what the basement is like. Like stopped-up bowels and a fat case of gas.

  It’s even worse now that we’ve got an intruder. Small as she is, she doesn’t belong. It feels like I’m trying to get my stomach around a whole Thanksgiving turkey. I wish I could digest her and spit her right back out where she came from.

  The new ghost likes the basement, God knows why. Rolled-up carpets, dismantled televisions and old radios, cartons and cartons of books, and the old boiler: it’s all down there. The piano like a kidney stone we can never quite manage to piss out. Burned-out lights and Christmas ornaments. The Walkers have been home for three days now, and even Minna hasn’t braved the basement.

  And of all places—out of all the dozens of rooms in the house—the basement is where Trenton’s got it in his head to kill himself.

  My question is: Where’d he get the rope?

  I knew a hanger once. Christina Duboise: everyone called her Cissy. She was over six feet tall and so skinny her ribs and cheekbones looked like they were trying to bust out of her skin. I liked Cissy. She was two years older, but we were friends. She was pretty much my only friend in school. Everyone ignored me because of where I lived and how I had a fag for a father. I don’t blame them, really. I would have hated me, too, if I’d been someone else.

  It took me a long time to realize that Cissy was only nice to me because she had no friends, either. In some ways she was even more hard up than I was, even though her stepdad owned three sporting-goods stores and was probably the richest person in town. No one knew anything about her real dad, but I had the idea he’d died tragically when Cissy was young, probably because she seemed tragic—big eyed and stoop shouldered, like she was always waiting for disaster to strike. I found out later it wasn’t true, that her dad lived a few counties over with a new wife and a new daughter, and I was never sure why I’d always imagined him getting flattened by an oncoming train or slowly wasting to bones in a hospital bed.

  Her mom seemed like she belonged in Hollywood: thin and blond with a smile so big I always worried her mouth would split open. She wore about a half pound of makeup and had a habit of wearing high heels everywhere as though she was expecting to be photographed. I knew she didn’t like me, but I didn’t give two shakes of a rat’s ass for her, either.

  Cissy lived in a nice big house in the white part of town. Everything her parents owned—the carpets, the sofas, the dining room chairs, the curtains—was white, like they wanted to be sure there could be no mistake about whose side they were on. You had to take your shoes off in the house. I’d never even heard of that before I met Cissy. Every time Cissy went home she had the desperate look of a dog trying not to piss on someone’s carpet, and you could just tell she was dead afraid she might spill or smudge something.

  They had a housekeeper, an old black woman who came daily to clean and cook. Her name was Zulime, and she had moved from Louisiana and still talked with a heavy Creole accent and, Cissy claimed, practiced voodoo on the side. Her hands were like bits of gnarled wood. I remember how she slathered me in mud one time when my arms were blown up like balloons from poison oak. It worked, too.

  Sometimes Cissy came around every day, and on weekends I’d find her leaning against the front door, squinting in the sun, looking like an oversized grasshopper. For weeks she’d trail me like a dog on a scent, babbling about this and that, making plans, daring me to knock on Billy Iversen’s door and give him a kiss or to skin
ny-dip in the creek. (That one I did and came out with a leech practically sucking off my nipple; I had to burn it off with a cigarette.)

  Then she would disappear. She’d skip school for days at a time and wouldn’t come to the phone when I called. Her mom would turn me away at the door with a voice like sugar in the throat of a vulture: “Cissy’s not feeling well, sweetie. I’ll have her give you a call when her strength’s up.” I’ll always remember: her long red fingernails on the door, a Virginia Slim smoking in a crystal ashtray behind her, and Zulime moving silently along with the vacuum, refusing to meet my eye.

  The summer after freshman year was when Cissy first showed me her spiders. It was June, still those early days of summer when the flowers were in riot and the clouds puffed up and full of themselves, before the heat caused everything to wilt and droop. By the end of the summer, all of Georgia was like a bad watercolor: melting pavement, melting tires sizzling on the streets, and even the sun crawling its way up the sky in agony, as if it couldn’t stand the effort.

  Cissy said she wanted to show me something down by the old train tracks and I was hoping she’d scored some beer or found a cache of money like Dirk Lamb had the summer before, a whole sack of old coins stashed underneath some rotting floorboards of an abandoned house.

  Instead she took me to the Barnaby Estate, an old wreck beyond the swamp that was supposed to be haunted, leaning so far to the left it looked like a drunk trying to keep on his feet. I hadn’t been there since the time when I was seven or eight, and this girl Carol Ann dared me to cross the swamp and put my hand on the front door for a full five seconds. I did it, too. I remember the suck of my shoes in the mud and the smell of wood rot and an old icebox on the porch, brown with rust. I stood there with my palm on the wood frame, fear vibrating through me, imagining I heard the creak, creak of footsteps inside the house . . . imagining I saw a ghost moving like a shadow beyond the screen . . .

  And then I did see a shadow—a grinning shadow, with teeth like carved ivory.