Rooms

by Lauren Oliver

  Upstairs, the front door opened and closed with a loud bang. Trenton slipped. For a teetering second he was both falling and imagining that he had fallen—imagining his damaged ankle hitting the ground and snapping like a twig, imagining lying prostrate on his back underneath the noose until someone came and found him. He reached out and grabbed hold of an old wooden wardrobe, managing to right himself at the last second.

  The basement door opened and Trenton’s heart stopped. It had to be Minna. He yanked the rope down from the ceiling pipe and thudded clumsily to the ground, feeling the impact of the short jump all the way to his teeth. He sat down on the stool just as an unfamiliar pair of sneakers came into view, pounding down the stairs.

  “Oh!” The girl stopped short, still halfway up the stairs. Trenton felt the blood rush to his face.

  She was pretty. Even with her face flaming red (which it was—at least she was embarrassed, too) and her hair cropped short and dyed some weird artificial black that was practically purple, she was pretty. She didn’t have a single pimple anywhere on her face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think . . . well, I didn’t think anyone was home.”

  Trenton was doing his best to look casual, but he was also aware that he was sitting in the middle of a dark, dingy basement, under a single functioning lightbulb, holding a noose in his hands.

  For a second the girl looked like she was going to bolt. But then she came two more steps down toward the basement. “Are you a Walker?”

  Her smile was big and friendly and full of teeth that weren’t very straight. It had been a long time since a girl had smiled at him. “How did you—?” he started to ask.

  “It says so on the mailbox.” She put her hands on the banisters and swung herself down the last few steps, landing neatly on the basement floor. She was no longer blushing. Trenton still felt like his skin might melt off at any second.

  “Christ,” she said. “You guys ever clean down here?”

  Trenton finally thought of something to say. “Um . . . who are you?” His voice was a croak. He cleared his throat.

  “Katie,” she said, as though that answered his question. She waded right into the piles of old furniture and books and rolled-up carpets. While she had her back to him, Trenton coiled the rope quickly and stuffed it in between two cardboard boxes, hoping she wouldn’t see it.

  “I’m Trenton,” he said, even though she hadn’t asked.

  “Cool.” Katie bent down to scoop up a soccer ball and toss it to him. “You play?” Trenton was temporarily distracted by her butt, which was not so round as Angie Salazar’s but pretty close, and by the small hole in her jeans, which revealed that she was wearing cute red underwear beneath them. He barely managed to catch the ball.

  “No,” he said. Then he blurted, “I can’t play anymore. I was in a car accident.”

  “An accident, huh?” She was looking at him the way Dr. Sawicki, the shrink he’d been forced to see after his parents had finalized their divorce, had looked at him when he said he was doing fine—as if he were lying and she knew it, and he knew it, but she was too polite to point it out directly. Except Dr. Sawicki had normal brown eyes, nice eyes, like the eyes of a cow. Katie’s eyes were hazel, practically yellow. More like a cat’s.

  Trenton wanted to ask her where she had come from, and what she was doing there, but he couldn’t find his voice. Katie turned away from him again.

  “Look, Tristan—”

  “Trenton.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said.” She nudged a roll of wrapping paper out of the way with the toe of a beat-up green Converse sneaker. “I didn’t mean to barge in on you. I can see you’re busy. Sitting on stools, playing with ropes. I get it.” So she had noticed. Trenton felt a rush of humiliation so strong it was almost like anger. She was laughing at him. “So I’ll just, you know, say good-bye and see you later—”

  “Wait,” Trenton said. His voice sounded very loud, and the girl—Katie—paused at the foot of the stairs.

  “Wait.” Trenton licked his lips, which felt very dry. “Why did you come? If you didn’t think there’d be anyone home, why’d you come?”

  Katie hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Fritz,” she said, making a face. Her two front teeth overlapped a bit, and one of her incisors was very, very pointed. It gave her a lopsided look that was almost reassuring. “My cat. He got out.”

  “What does he look like?” Trenton said.

  Katie blinked. “Like a cat,” she said. She turned to go and then stopped, pivoting slowly back around to face him, seemingly struck by an idea. “Wait a second . . . Richard Walker . . . I saw something about a funeral.”

  The word funeral sent an unpleasant vibration through Trenton’s chest. “He’s my dad,” he said, and then quickly corrected. “Was.”

  “Shit. I’m really sorry.” She was staring at him in that way again—like she was trying to decode him.

  “Thanks,” Trenton said shortly, crossing his arms. He turned away, slightly, letting his hair swing forward; he was aware that he had a particularly angry pimple on his left cheek, and he didn’t want her to see it. “We weren’t that close,” he added, so she wouldn’t feel sorry for him. “We’re just here for the funeral. And to clean up.” He paused. “The house is mine now.” Immediately, he didn’t know why he’d said it.

  “Oh, yeah? That’s pretty sweet.”

  Trenton jerked his head up to look at her and she blushed. “I mean—sorry. Sorry for your loss,” she said. “That’s what you’re supposed to say, right?” She shook her head, and her short spiky hair shook with her, like alien antennae. “I’m the worst at this stuff.”

  “It’s all right,” Trenton said. He was relieved, actually, that she wasn’t pretending to be sad and solemn and knowledgeable. Like Debbie Castigliane, his mom’s next-door neighbor, who’d come over bearing a tray of take-out lasagna like it was myrrh, sitting wide-eyed in the kitchen and patting Caroline’s hand, and all the time counting the vodka bottles in the trash, feeding on the grief like a human mosquito.

  “I mean, here I am, just running off at the mouth and you’re in the middle of some big family tragedy . . . ” Katie was still talking, still moving around the room, poking things.

  Trenton had a sudden memory of the time when he was eleven and his dad had come out to the island. They’d met at Walt Whitman Mall and stopped in front of the Macy’s for a bit and watched a woman with a tight red apron and a smile as white as plastic demonstrate the latest advances in nonstick pans at a big booth. She flipped and slid and swirled and all the time, she never stopped talking or smiling. His dad had bought a complete set of eight pans.

  Katie reminded him a little of the woman with the pans. It was dizzying to watch her, even harder to keep up with what she was saying.

  “Hey.” She bent forward and, before Trenton could stop her, snatched up the rope from where he’d stashed it. “What’s with the noose? You weren’t about to kill yourself, were you?”

  “What? No.” Trenton realized, too late, that the note to Minna was still sitting out.

  “Come on, ’fess up. You were.”

  Trenton felt a flicker of irritation. “Even if I was, do you think I would tell you?”

  “I don’t see why not. Can’t see what difference it would make.” While she was looking down at the rope, studying it, Trenton quickly shoved the note to Minna in his back pocket. “Hey—you know what you could do with this?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Autoasphyxiation.” She reached up and coiled the rope once around her neck. As Trenton took a quick step back, horrified by the look of it, he stumbled on a box and had to sit down to avoid falling. Katie laughed again and unwrapped the rope from her neck. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of it. People choking themselves while they . . . Oh, man. There I go again. Sorry. God forgot to give me an off switch.” She reached out and punched him in the arm. “You don’t mind if I keep it, right?”

  This was why
he never talked to girls: it was like following a maze where the walls were always shifting. “Keep what?”

  She rolled her eyes. “The rope. I mean, you weren’t using it, right?” Her eyes flashed on his again—eyes that held a challenge—and he looked away. “Didn’t think so. Besides, if you wanted to off yourself, you could do a lot better than hanging. I mean, if you break your neck, that’s all right. Otherwise you could be swinging there for ages. You know how many suicides end up clawing their fingernails to shreds, trying to take off the noose?” He didn’t think she really wanted an answer so he didn’t give her one. She plunged on, “So you sure you don’t mind if I keep it?”

  Trenton did mind, kind of. But he didn’t see how he could say no, and what she’d said about suicides clawing their fingernails to bits had turned his stomach. He would probably have screwed it up with a rope, anyway. He shook his head.

  “Awesome.” Katie smiled, showing off her crooked teeth. He wondered, just for a second, what it would be like to kiss her and whether she’d taste like cigarettes. “Hey, listen. You gonna be sticking around for a while? I’m having a few friends over on Saturday. You should come.”

  Trenton couldn’t tell whether she really meant it. “Thanks,” he said carefully. “But I’m not really . . . I mean, parties aren’t really my thing.”

  “It’ll be fun, I promise.” For a second, she looked much younger.

  “What about your parents?” Trenton said, and then he immediately hated himself.

  “My parents are away,” Katie said. “They don’t care what I do, anyway.” Trenton nearly contradicted her but realized it might be the truth. “It’s the big-ass farmhouse at the end of County Lane 8. Only house on the road. You can’t miss it. Just go around to the back.”

  “I haven’t said I would come,” Trenton pointed out.

  “You’ll come,” she said. “There’s nothing else to do.” She smiled; she knew she had him. “Just don’t tell anyone. The cops are insane around here. You are old enough to drink, right? You’re not like, fifteen?”

  “I’m seventeen,” Trenton lied. He’d be seventeen in a few months.

  Katie waved a hand. “Close enough. I’ll be eighteen next month. So . . . Saturday?”

  “Yeah.” Trenton could feel himself relenting. “Yeah, okay.”

  “Great. Eight or nine or any time after.” Katie took a step toward the stairs, and Trenton had to call her back.

  “I’ll let you know about Fritz,” he said.

  “What?” She had the rope coiled around her wrist.

  “Fritz,” he said. “If I see him, I’ll let you know.”

  She smiled wide again. “Careful,” she said. “He bites.”

  Then she turned and darted up the stairs.

  ALICE

  In my day, people knew how to keep secrets. They minded their mouths and their manners.

  If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I remember my mother repeating that like a mantra—remember the taste of the words, like curls of soap and an ache in my jaw—remember my mother’s hands wrapped thickly around my neck, and the light of the bathroom, bright as a halo.

  I learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles.

  We kept our secrets for confession. For the priests.

  The new ghost is praying. She is whispering to herself, repeating Psalm 23, over and over: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

  I never told anyone, not even Father Donovan, about Thomas.

  He died very young. Aneurysm: a burst bubble in the brain. I read about the funeral in the local paper. It had been fifteen years since we’d last spoken, but I went and sat in the very last pew. I’d told Ed that I was going to the store and had to change into my good black dress, and a pair of heeled black shoes, in the woods that stretched along the road to Coral River, planting my stockinged feet in the soft dirt, feeling the wind touch my armpits as I wrestled the dress over my head.

  I hardly remember the memorial, the speeches, the wreaths of flowers. I do remember his widow: pale and pretty, though heavy around the jaws; dark-eyed with grief, sitting in the first pew with her children. With Thomas’s children. Ian and Joseph.

  Halfway through the service, a woman next to me whispered, quite loudly: “Who was it who died? I can’t hear.” And I realized she had only come to watch, that she hadn’t known Thomas at all.

  I left early. I couldn’t bear it. The church smelled like a basement, like things locked up and forgotten. And perhaps they should be.

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  Trenton hasn’t moved since the girl—Katie—left. He sinks down on a sealed cardboard box as though exhausted by the exchange.

  Go away, I want to tell him. Leave, and never come back. I want them out. All of them. Even Trenton, who isn’t Trenton anymore, but some horrible version of a boy, twisted and deformed like in some Frankenstein story. Playing with ropes and guns, whispering to us in the darkness.

  I don’t care what Sandra says. It’s obvious he can hear us.

  “I knew he’d never go through with it,” Sandra says. “That boy’s got the balls of a bunny rabbit. What does he have to be unhappy about, anyway? He’s—what?—sixteen? Seventeen? He just came into money, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Money never solved anything,” I say.

  “Spoken like a true rich kid,” Sandra says, even though she knows I turned my back on my family to marry Ed.

  “He maketh me to lie in green pastures,” the new ghost whispers.

  “For Christ’s sake, I’m begging you,” Sandra says to her. “You’ll drive me up the wall.”

  “What about you?” I say. I don’t know where the anger comes from but it’s there, immediate and overpowering. I’m sick of Sandra, sick of the way she acts and has always acted—as though everything, all of life, is there to be shrugged off, shaved away, ridiculed and minimized. She’s like a person looking through the wrong end of a telescope, complaining that everything looks small. “What did you have to be so unhappy about?”

  Sandra says shortly, “That’s different.”

  “He leadeth me beside still waters.”

  “You drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol.” I know I’m overstepping my bounds. “You lost your job—”

  “That’s enough,” Sandra says. Then, to the new ghost, “Will you kindly shut the hell up?”

  But the new ghost keeps going. “Though I walk through the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . . ”

  Now I can’t stop. Part of me knows that I’m not really angry with Sandra. I’m angry with Trenton, and Minna, and Caroline, and even Richard. I’m angry with the whole stumbling, fumbling world, which we’re forced to watch, a sick repetition of the same tired hungers and needs. I’m thinking of Richard’s body, bundled in white; and Sandra’s face half spread across the walls; and Trenton standing beneath a rope. I’m thinking of bodies hauled up from the funeral parlor next to St. John the Divine when I was a kid, and the smell of smoke and skin in the air, and how there will never be an end to it.

  “You lost your friends,” I say. “You nearly lost your house. And what about the man—Martin? If you hadn’t died in time—”

  “I said, that’s enough.”

  I feel a spark of anger, a quick flash, like a match striking. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.

  Trenton cries out, and everything goes dark.

  CAROLINE

  Caroline heard glass breaking, and a short cry, as soon as she walked into the house. The sound cut through the “muffling”: that’s what the awful woman at Sunrise Center had called the effect of alcohol on Caroline’s brain, the time she had been forced to go to a rehab center after accidentally tapping another car on the way home from a dinner. No one had even been hurt, but the other woman, who’d had a baby in the car, had been hysterical about it and insisted on calling the police.

  Muffling—the wom
an at Sunrise had said it as though Caroline should be ashamed. But afterward, whenever she’d had a couple, Caroline always imagined her brain nestled in a kind of hand-knitted mitten, warm and protected.

  But now the muffling split apart, and for a short second everything was sharp and painful.

  “Trenton,” she said, turning to Minna, feeling a sudden panic. “That’s Trenton.” She turned blindly in the hall; she didn’t know where the sound had come from. “Trenton? Are you okay? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” His voice was faint. She still couldn’t tell where he was. She had always hated that about the house: how it sucked up sound and voices and footsteps, as though they were all being absorbed, slowly but surely, into the walls.

  “Where are you?” she cried out, still unable to quell the panic. Her chest felt as though it had collapsed, as though a big fist had reached out and punched backward in time, back to that awful night of Trenton’s accident—the two-hour drive through the dark; the dingy hospital and the ugly woman who’d barred her from going into the operating room, staring at her as though she was some species of insect; the long wait without anything at all to drink.

  “He’s in the basement, Ma. Stop shouting.” Minna opened the basement door with a foot, as though it was the door to a public restroom and she was worried about germs on the handle. Amy made a rush for the stairs, and Minna grabbed her arm.

  “What did I tell you, Amy?” she said. “You don’t go down there. Not unless Mommy takes you.”

  Amy began to wail.

  Caroline moved past both of them and angled her body so she could squeeze down the narrow staircase. Her head was pounding. “What are you doing?” she said, moving carefully down the stairs. Each step sent a small tremor of pain through her body: ankles, knees, hips. The doctor had said she should lose some weight. Cut out the booze. She had nodded and said oh, yes, absolutely, as she had done so many times with Richard, when she had no intention of listening.