Amy starts to cry.
“Look.” Danny leans in close to Minna. “I don’t like this any more than you do. But your mother just fired a gun at someone. And we have a complaint about her on file already. I don’t want to have to cuff her. If she’ll just come with me quietly—”
“Screw you, Danny.”
“Don’t make this worse.” Danny moves Minna forcibly out of the way. “Caroline Walker, you’re under arrest for aggravated assault—”
“My fault.”
The two words, spoken quietly from the doorway, make even Danny go silent.
The woman clears her throat and tries again: “It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”
“Who are you?” Trenton says.
Her big eyes keep traveling over everyone, like insects refusing to settle. “My name is Adrienne,” she says. “Adrienne Cadiou.”
PART X
THE DINING ROOM
CAROLINE
“Drink,” Minna said, refilling Caroline’s coffee.
“I don’t want any.” Caroline took her coffee with sugar, cream, and preferably a nip of something stronger. This coffee was black and very strong; Caroline had already forced down a cup, while Danny and Minna watched her with identical expressions of concern, as if she were a child and they were the overattentive parents. Between them was a vast array of used cups and plates smeared with mustard, platters still piled with sandwiches arranged on wilted lettuce leaves.
“Just drink it,” Minna said. Caroline was too tired to argue. She was still drunk, but not drunk enough. The gun in her hand, the sudden, blinding fury that had gripped her, the sound of screaming—it was achieving reality, floating out from the dream-fog in which it had been comfortably encased.
Minna had gotten rid of all the other guests, thank God, and they’d convinced Danny to delay Caroline’s arrest, at least until after they had buried Richard’s ashes. Caroline couldn’t have faced a crowd. She couldn’t bear to see her former neighbors and so-called friends staring at her, whispering, the hiss of their insinuations about Richard and the woman.
The Woman.
Adrienne was sitting on the far side of the dining room. She hadn’t moved or spoken since she had announced her name, except to ask for some water. Caroline should have ordered her out of the house. She should have commanded it. Instead, she was forced to sit and watch Minna try to appease her, offering her cookies or a glass of wine, speaking in the voice she reserved for when Amy was sad or injured: a voice meant to say Please, please, don’t be angry at my mother. She’s harmless, she’s drunk, she didn’t mean to.
But Caroline had meant to.
“So you’re telling me”—Danny and Minna were conversing in low voices, but not so low Caroline couldn’t hear them; they probably thought she was too drunk to understand—“that this is a different Adrienne Cadiou? That she’s not the one your mom’s been calling?”
“She’s not the one,” Caroline said. It was the first time she’d spoken to Danny since he’d attempted to place her in handcuffs, and he turned to her in surprise. She deliberately avoided looking at him.
This was, in fact, the last and final insult: Adrienne was not the Adrienne Caroline had expected. Caroline wished she’d read more about this Adrienne. She remembered only an article she’d barely skimmed—a hit-and-run, a drunk driver. Now she fought vainly to recall details. She had the sense that it would make her feel more secure, less like she was drowning in open air, as if by knowing a person you could avoid being hurt by them. You might at least anticipate which way the blow would fall.
Suddenly, Adrienne turned to Danny and Minna, who were still standing by the windows, silhouetted in light. “Can we have some privacy, please?”
Neither Danny nor Minna moved. But it was as though Adrienne believed they had. Now she turned and spoke directly to Caroline, pleading with her almost. What had she come for—forgiveness? Understanding? Caroline wouldn’t give her any.
“I didn’t ask for any money,” Adrienne said abruptly. “I haven’t spoken to Richard in ten years. He never answered any of my e-mails. I’d stopped calling a long time ago.” Now that she had started speaking, it was as if she couldn’t stop. She was trembling like someone in the grips of a bad fever. “It’s blood money. I don’t want it.”
“I don’t understand,” Caroline said coldly. She was playing the part of the queen. Adrienne was the penitent. Except that the part felt wrong. Caroline was the one who felt like begging—for Adrienne to go away, for Danny and Trenton to go away, too, for everyone to leave her in peace. She wanted to curl up in her bedroom—the bedroom that had been hers and Richard’s—and drink until the world started to soften and forgive.
“My daughter, Eva.” Adrienne’s voice broke on the name. “She was . . . his.”
For a moment there was silence. Minna turned away, rubbing her forehead. Caroline heard the seconds ticking forward, and then remembered that the big grandfather clock in the hall had been wrapped up and shipped off to the auction house, along with everything else of value.
She was seized by a sense of the absurdity of the scene: the big dining room table and the litter of food and plates and glasses; the narrow wedge of sunlight shining between the curtains; and Danny stuffed into his ridiculous uniform, like a sausage in a too-small casing.
The kitchen door slammed, and Trenton came into the dining room, stamping dirt from his sneakers. “We’re burying Dad under the weeping willow,” he said. Then, seeing Adrienne, he froze in the doorway. “Sorry. I thought she was . . . ” He trailed off before he could say gone.
When Adrienne turned to Trenton, her expression was full of such open hunger that Caroline’s stomach rolled. “How old are you?” she asked.
His eyes ticked temporarily to Caroline, as though requesting her permission to answer. “Sixteen,” he said.
“Eva would have been thirteen in July,” Adrienne said. A smile flickered over her face, but her eyes remained empty, huge, like open wounds. “She wanted—she wanted to go to Six Flags for her birthday.”
Trenton stiffened, as if a current had gone through him.
Caroline said. “Is she . . . ?” She couldn’t bring herself to say dead.
“I called Richard from the hospital. I don’t know why. We only met once. It was a mistake. We both knew it.” Adrienne’s voice cracked again. Caroline felt like spitting at her. She, Caroline, was the one who should have been crying. All this time, this other person, this phantom-child, had been running parallel to Caroline’s life, waiting to destroy it. “Still, I sent him pictures. Letters. A cutting of hair.” She didn’t stop herself from crying this time; she picked up a napkin Caroline was sure was dirty and wiped away the tears when they came. “My poor Eva. The doctors told me she would never make it. I—I thought Richard could make it untrue.” Adrienne’s face was white, like the center of a very hot flame. “But Richard was dead. Someone answered. ‘Don’t call back,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. He’s dead and he left you nothing.’ ”
Minna inhaled sharply. Trenton pulled a chair out from the table, letting it scrape on the floor, and sat down heavily.
“They were going to bury her,” Adrienne said, her expression wild, begging. “They were speaking her favorite psalm. The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . . I couldn’t watch. I couldn’t bear it. I was in Buffalo before I knew where I was going—before I knew I was coming here.” She was shaking so hard that the ice cubes rattled in her glass. “It was my fault. All my fault. I was driving—I should have seen the other car. I should have known . . . I should have saved her.”
“Holy shit,” Trenton whispered. “My sister.”
“Minna,” Caroline said sharply. “Get Adrienne something to drink.”
They sat rigidly, in silence, until Minna returned with whiskey. She had to physically remove Adrienne’s empty water glass from her hand, as though Adrienne had forgotten how to move her fingers. Caroline watched her drink. She rememb
ered, now, that she had seen pictures of Adrienne’s daughter: a girl with a wide, frank face, freckled and grinning, like a child you would see on a commercial for pancake mix. She’d had bright blue eyes, like Richard’s. Like Trenton’s.
She remembered, too, the phone call from the police the night of Trenton’s accident; the blind drive through the dark, when the sky had seemed like a lid that might suffocate her.
People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something—the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing—remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.
Caroline stood up. Adrienne froze, as if she expected Caroline to lean across the table and strike her. But Caroline wasn’t angry anymore—not at Richard, not at Adrienne. All at once, in one second, the past and its ruin of promises and disappointments had released its hold on her. She was filled with a golden warmth that made her limbs feel loose and light; it made her forget her swollen ankles and the fact that she was not drunk enough to ward off the beginnings of a hangover.
She didn’t have to forgive him—the idea came suddenly, like a deep breath of air after a long submerging. It was all over now. She didn’t have to forgive him, and she could love him and hate him at the same time, and it was all right.
She closed her eyes and felt, for a split second, a hand pass across her neck; and in that moment she had a vision of rooms like atoms, holding a universe of secrets; and she, Caroline, gripped in the small bounded nucleus of the past.
Now she was free.
She reached across the table to take Adrienne’s hand. “It’s not your fault,” she said.
“My sister,” Trenton whispered again. This time he spoke quietly and addressed the word to the walls.
SANDRA
“I always wanted a brother,” Eva says quietly. She pauses. “Mom would never tell me anything about my dad. She said I was born from a tube. But she was lying.”
“Now you know,” Alice says softly.
“I think . . . I think that’s all I wanted,” Eva says. “To know.” In the quiet, her mother continues sniffling into Caroline’s shoulder. “I wish she wouldn’t cry. It wasn’t her fault. I know it wasn’t.” Then: “I think I’m ready now.”
“Ready for what?” I say. But she doesn’t answer. For a second, I feel her trembling like a violin string, vibrating out a high note of fear and loss. “Ready for what?” I say, a little louder.
A sharp pain goes through me, a feeling like being socked in the stomach. Alice cries out. For a second, everything goes dark. When everything comes into focus again—the dining room, the bones of our staircases and the doors like jaws that open and close—I feel lighter, and emptier, too. Like I’ve just taken the world’s most epic dump.
“Eva?” Alice whispers. No answer.
She’s gone.
“Well.” I don’t know why I feel sad about it. But I do. I’m sad and sorry and jealous, all at once. “There you have it. Vivian and Eva. That’s two out of three missing children accounted for.”
“Stop, Sandra.” Alice’s voice is shaky, like she’s the victim, like I’m the bad guy.
“It’s too late, Alice,” I say. “There’s no use in pretending anymore.”
She sucks in a deep breath: a whistle through a teakettle. “What about you?” she asks.
“Not even for me.”
There’s a moment of silence. In that minute, I can practically feel our walls coming down, slowly down, pulled earthward by the pressures of gravity and decay.
Alice says, “Why did you tell me Martin shot you? For all these years, all our years together, you lied about it. Or did you really forget?”
“Does it matter?” I haven’t felt so tired since I was alive—too tired to keep the truth back, to stuff it into dark corners and keep it shored up behind heavy walls. It comes creeping out into the open, like a mouse sniffing around a darkened house. “You knew the truth all along. You were there.”
“I was there,” Alice agrees. “I was waiting for you to remember.”
“I remembered,” I say. It hurts to speak, to think, to remember. As if we’ve been planed and sawed down into splinters—as if everything is about to fall. “I just didn’t want it to be true.”
We’re quiet for a bit. Adrienne is still staring dull-eyed as an idiot. Trenton has torn her napkin to strips. All of them so clear and sharp, like individual cardboard cutouts. In that moment I’d trade places with any of them, just to have a beginning and an end.
“Why did you do it?” Alice asks quietly.
“I don’t know,” I say, although that’s not exactly true, either. I did it for a hundred reasons and for no reason at all. Because Martin told me I needed help and I knew it was his way of saying he was getting tired of me. Because I couldn’t stand to keep drinking and I couldn’t stand to stop. Because I was so tired that even sleeping didn’t help me at all.
But mostly because I was lonely. It was like living at the bottom of a pit. There was only one way out. “They’re digging,” Alice says. She’s gotten her voice under control. “Under the willow tree.”
“I told you,” I say. No point in lying anymore. I blamed Martin for not loving me, until the blame and what happened became the same story.
Everything comes up in the end.
TRENTON
A sister. Trenton had—or used to have—a sister. He wished he’d known earlier.
He was alone in the dining room. The woman, Adrienne, had gone to wash her face in the bathroom. The ugly cop, who had skin just as bad as Trenton’s, was waiting outside in Adrienne’s car. Everyone agreed she was in no state to drive; there was talk of getting her a place to stay the night, until a relative could come and get her. Caroline had gone to change her clothes, and Danny was waiting outside her bedroom door, like Caroline might shimmy down the drainpipe and make a break for it. Trenton thought Danny was enjoying himself, even if he was pretending to be sad and apologetic. He probably didn’t get to arrest people very often.
Poor, lonely Eva. Trenton had always wanted a younger sister—had dreamed of it, especially after Minna moved out and went off to college and left Trenton alone with his mother. He would not have tortured her, as some older brothers did, or locked her in the bathroom after he’d used it or put her in headlocks until she screamed for mercy.
He would have showed her how to catch toads by making a cup of his hands, as Minna had done with him when he was very small. He would have taken her to the creek behind Mulaney’s so they could root out newts together, shrieking over a sudden flash of orange belly; he would have told her stories at night, saving the scary ones for when she was older.
Adrienne emerged from the bathroom. Her shirt clung to her shoulders where it was damp. Trenton got quickly and clumsily to his feet. He hadn’t expected to see her; he had assumed she would go out the way she came in, through the hall. But of course she didn’t know the house.
He felt embarrassed in her presence—embarrassed that he got to live, when he had wanted to die; that her daughter had died, when she had wanted to live. He wanted to say he was sorry, but the words felt insufficient. What would that mean, coming from him? From anyone?
Instead, they stood there in silence. Trenton was aware of the slow drag of time, the air in the house stifling, thick with funeral smells.
Adrienne spoke first. “You have her eyes,” she said. “Beautiful eyes.”
Trenton didn’t know how to respond. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked her.
She smiled, but it was the saddest smile he’d ever seen. Trenton remembered the first time he had seen Eva’s ghost in the greenhouse—the dry rustle of her voice, like autumn leaves tumbling over a barren riverbed. He was as sad now as he had been then—sadder, even, than he had ever been for his father.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Am I?”
“You will,
” he said, although he didn’t really know. He felt a subtle shift, as if the air had suddenly begun rotating in the other direction. This was why people lied: sometimes, it was only the stories that mattered.
After Adrienne had gone, Trenton stood for a while in the quiet, listening hard to the familiar sounds of the floors creaking and the house settling minutely on its foundations—listening, too, for a voice, a whisper, a word of forgiveness, maybe. But there was nothing.
He cleared his throat. He knew his mother and sister couldn’t hear him, but he still felt embarrassed speaking out loud. “Eva?” he said, and then, a little louder, “Eva?”
There was only silence. He wondered whether she was upset at him, because he hadn’t gone through with killing himself. But no. The silence was dull and complete—not even the faintest rustle or whisper or creak. The ghosts were gone, or he had stopped hearing them. He wondered if it had been like a virus, and he had gotten it out of his system when he puked.
Was it because he had refused them? Because at the last moment, he had refused to cross over?
“I’m sorry, Eva,” he said. “I let you down.” He hated to think of the ghosts trapped in the walls, with no one to listen or hear.
But the problem with death was that you could never get tired of it and go home. No one would ever come and put a jacket around your shoulders, as Detective Rogers had done with Vivian, and put you in the backseat of a warm car and send you back to being alive. If only bodies were like rooms, and people could pass in and out of them at will.
He wondered whether Minna was almost finished digging. The hole didn’t have to be very deep to bury an urn. He moved to the window to check, but his view was obstructed. There was a white work van parked in the driveway. Connelly Roofing was stenciled in black on its side. Connelly. The name seemed familiar somehow.
“Hello?” a man called out. Before Trenton could go to the door, he heard it open; heavy footsteps came down the hall.
“Can I help you?” Trenton said, when the man passed into view. He was old—at least sixty—and dressed in gray work pants and a T-shirt saggy as a loose skin. But his shoulders were wide and his arms still roped with muscle.
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