If the doctor had her estranged husband, or her children, he would drink, too.
“Nothing.” Trenton was standing in the middle of the vast cluttered space, looking guilty about something. “I was just—cleaning up.”
It was obviously a lie. Trenton hadn’t helped at all in the three days since they’d been back in Coral River. Caroline realized that he’d probably been looking at pornography. He must have found his father’s collection.
Several months after Trenton’s birth, Caroline had gone looking for Minna’s old stroller in the basement and found a stack of magazines, stashed unself-consciously in a trunk that also contained several baby items and the hat Caroline had bought Richard on their honeymoon. She’d sat on the ground for hours, unable to look away, unable to stop turning the pages—the way she’d heard that a bad electric shock caused you to hold on.
“What was that awful noise?” she said. “Did you break something?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Trenton said. “The lightbulb just . . . exploded.”
“The wiring in this house was always screwy,” Minna said. Caroline turned and saw she had come halfway down the stairs. Amy was trying to get around her, and Minna shuffled side to side, like a hockey player protecting a goal.
Of course. Minna was taking Trenton’s side. Anyone could see he’d been fiddling around where he wasn’t supposed to—maybe he thought he had the right, now that the house was his. Caroline felt a rush of anger that replaced the fear and obliterated it.
The house had been a constant point of contention in her marriage. She had not initially wanted to move from their sprawling, sunny home in California, on its small trim lawn on a small trim street in a nice gated community not far from the ocean. She had liked the guardhouse, where an ever-rotating cast of polite young Mexicans stood watch and checked names against a list—as though each time she returned home, she was accessing an exclusive party.
And then Richard had decided he wanted to be back in New York, close to where he had grown up. He had dragged her across the country and installed her in a vast, dark, drafty house, plagued by mice and termites, erratically heated, prone to leaks and pipe freezes and toilets backing up onto the floor.
Caroline had declared war, first on him; she had refused to sleep with him for two months. When she realized that her tactics only amused him, and that he was getting it elsewhere, anyway, she declared war instead on the house. She ripped out wallpaper and replaced it with patterns of her choosing. She scrubbed the cabinets, rearranged the furniture, shopped, and shopped some more. She put lights everywhere, as many as twelve in a room. She’d never been good with her hands and never before cared to do work herself; in California, there had always been gardeners, and decorators to match the cushions with the couch, and Caroline had to do nothing but approve it all. She was surprised to find she had taste. She could get things done.
She spent a spring building up a garden—her very first—carting soil and fertilizer and new bulbs, small as presents, weeding and trimming and rooting oxalis from the soil, cursing the blue Veronica that wouldn’t bloom, and sweating into the soil beds.
And slowly, without her noticing, she had begun to love the house. She loved the way her bedroom filled up with light in the mornings, like a glass filling with rich cream. She loved the smell of the gardens after a rainstorm, and the smell of the woods in the autumn, rich and full and deeper, somehow, than anything she’d ever known in California. She even loved the creaking floorboards, and the pipes that shuddered and banged, as though they had a voice.
She loved the first freeze, which patterned the windows with lace, and making coffee in the kitchen wearing thick socks; she loved the cottonwood trees and their fluff, drifting through the weak spring light.
But she had continued to pretend to hate it. She had pretended, still, that Richard had brought her there against her will, because it gave her power over him. She had pretended that she was happy to leave him and move to Long Island with Trenton, even though it broke her heart. She had lorded it over Richard, the fact that he had made her unhappy for years and years, even though she was happy; at least, the house had made her happy.
But Richard won in the end. Maybe he’d thought the house would be a burden on her. During one of their last communications, he’d apologized at last.
“I should never have moved you from California,” he’d said, sounding small and old. “You always hated it here. I should have been a better listener.”
She had almost told him then. She had almost said No, you’re wrong. I miss Coral River. I’ve missed it every day. But it was too late to give up the lie, which she had clung to for so long, which had become as much a part of their relationship as either of the children.
And now he was dead, and he would never know, and the house belonged to Trenton.
Had Richard done it to punish her, because she hadn’t come back? Or had he really thought she wouldn’t want it?
“You shouldn’t be down here,” she said. Her headache was getting worse. “You shouldn’t be messing around.”
“I told you, I was cleaning up, okay?” Trenton said, drawing out the last word so it suggested vast indifference. The anger came in short, sharp pulses now and seemed concentrated directly behind Caroline’s eyelids. She, Caroline, had been slaving away since she’d arrived in Coral River. And Trenton, as usual, had sulked and brooded and made everyone’s lives miserable, made enjoyment impossible, like a fly in a bowl of soup.
If anything, he’d gotten worse since the accident. He sat for hours in front of his computer, doing God knows what (more porn, probably). He answered her questions in monosyllables, was cagey about Andover, and complained about having to return there.
“This afternoon I want you to help Minna,” Caroline said. Every so often she remembered that as his mother, she could tell Trenton what to do. Most days he seemed like some far-off constellation, ever present but mysteriously out of her orbit. “I want to see you packing boxes. I don’t want to hear a single complaint. And clean up that glass.”
“I told you, it wasn’t my—”
“Just do it,” she said, cutting him off.
Trenton mumbled something that Caroline couldn’t hear. But she didn’t care. She was done; she had handled Trenton, and now she could go upstairs and sit down, take the weight off her feet, have a drink in peace.
She was irrationally angry with Richard for dying and leaving her alone. Even though they had been separated for ten years, and divorced for four, he’d been a constant in her life. His phone calls, his moods, his pleas for her to return; he had grounded her.
Minna was still standing on the stairs, and Caroline couldn’t move around her.
“Oh my God.” Minna’s eyes were fixed on the far side of the basement. “Oh my God. Are you kidding me? He fucking kept it?”
“Minna!” Caroline said. Amy put her hands over her ears and began to hum.
Minna obviously didn’t hear. She moved down several steps, still fighting to keep Amy behind her. Caroline realized she was looking at the piano.
“It doesn’t even play anymore,” Minna said.
Caroline was losing patience for the basement, and for her children. “How do you know?” she said.
“Minna whacked it with a baseball bat,” Trenton said. “You don’t remember?”
Caroline definitely did not remember that. “When?”
“I was fifteen, Ma.”
“But . . . ” What Caroline did remember was a young Minna, her hair coiled and pinned neatly to her head, her long, slender fingers skating over the keys like a shadow passing over water. She didn’t know why Minna had stopped playing. “But you were going to go to Juilliard. And Mr. Hansley said . . . ”
“Don’t,” Minna said sharply.
“Mr. Handsy?” Trenton said.
“Hansley,” Caroline correct him, before she realized that he’d been making a joke. Then she had another memory, less pleasant: coming into the piano room on
a hot summer day with a pitcher of lemonade, and Mr. Hansley scooting quickly away from Minna. Hansley smiling, fiddling nervously with his glasses, talking too fast. Minna silent, staring at the keys, refusing to make eye contact.
Gripping the banister, Caroline began to climb, forcing Minna to squeeze herself against one wall so that she could pass. When Minna shifted, Amy ducked around her and barreled past Caroline.
“Amy!” Minna reached for her and then stared, exasperated, at her mother. “See what you did?” she said.
But Caroline didn’t care. She was glad to have caused Minna some minor irritation. Minna chose not to remember all the things Caroline had done for her: the calamine lotion Caroline had applied to Minna’s bug bites; the Band-Aids she’d put on Minna’s cuts; the scrambled egg soup she’d made for Minna whenever she was sick.
She didn’t remember that Caroline had tried to buffer her from the worst of Richard’s moods—his rages, definitely, but also his indifference, which seemed to fix onto an object just as strongly as his anger. Caroline could still remember thirteen-year-old Minna curled up under her blanket, shivering, blue-lipped, after Richard forgot to pick her up from a dance lesson and she’d been forced to wait for an hour and a half in the rain.
“It would be better if he hated us,” she’d said. “But he just doesn’t care.”
“He does,” Caroline had said. But even then she had felt uneasy; Minna had hit on something that for years Caroline had tried to deny. That was why she had left Richard, ultimately: she’d realized that he had loved her only because she belonged to him.
The short climb had left Caroline winded, and she paused just before the final step, trying to catch her breath. Her feet were so swollen she could see the skin swelling around the contours of her flats. She rested her head against the wall, which was cool. Her heart was going wild in her chest. Recently she had been imagining, more and more, that it would simply stop.
“Careful of the glass,” Minna was saying below. She had followed Amy down into the basement. “Don’t touch that. It’s rusty.”
“What is it?” Amy said.
“Who knows. Garbage. Trenton, a little help, please?”
“What the hell do you want me to do?”
“Don’t curse in front of Amy,” Minna said.
Caroline could feel their voices through the wall. She lifted her head. She was so tired. She didn’t know how she would make it up the last step.
“In The Raven Heliotrope,” Amy was saying, in a high, pleading voice, “the Caves of Werth are filled with treasure. Can we play pretend, Mommy?”
Caroline spoke up before Minna could answer. “There’s no treasure down there, Amy,” she said. Her voice was unexpectedly loud. “Just garbage, like Mommy said.”
She hauled herself up the final step and went to the kitchen to get a drink.
ALICE
“Are you proud of yourself?” Sandra asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You did that,” Sandra says. The new ghost whimpers—a low, animal sound. “Congratulations on a nice little show.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, even though of course I do.
She means the lightbulb—the explosion. And I am proud. I’m ecstatic. It has been many, many years—decades—since I’ve felt that kind of power.
And it gives me hope.
I’ve only seen one bad fire. I was seven or eight when a conflagration spread through our neighborhood in Boston and leaped across several houses before attacking St. John the Divine and the funeral parlor next to it; by morning, the houses were gone and the church was blackened with smoke and ash. The air stunk like melted glass and something chemical I couldn’t name, and volunteers were enlisted to bring coffins out of the wreckage. My sisters and I went down to watch the action, and in particular, to see the bodies come out: coffins covered in a layer of silt and ash, bodies bundled in tarpaulin and half burned away, bits of hair and fingernail.
The fingernails keep growing, my sister Delilah told me. The hair, too.
Someday you’ll be dead like that, my sister Olivia said. You’ll be nothing but bone and fingernail, and no one will miss you.
Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.
Sandra doesn’t know about my plan for the fire. How could I tell her? If I’m right, it will be the end of us. That’s the whole point. In fiction, ghosts remain because of some entanglement with the living world, something they must do, resolve, or achieve.
I assure you that isn’t the case for me. The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I’m a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon.
There was Maggie. But even she might be dead by now. I like to think I would have known, would have felt it, but I know that’s fantasy. Maggie was a stranger to me in her adult life, a stiff-backed, short-haired woman with tastes and habits I hardly recognized. Tofu, she told me, the last time I visited her in San Francisco, when she served me a plate of vegetables and brown rice and some lumpy, milk-white substance that reminded me of curdled fat. I’m a vegan now.
Amazing, isn’t it? That hearts that once beat in sync could be so perfectly and forever separated. That’s the whole process of life, I think: a long, slow process of separation. It can be cured only by the reabsorption into everything, into the single heartbeat of time.
It’s my time to go home.
PART IV
THE GREENHOUSE
TRENTON
Trenton hadn’t been inside the greenhouse in years and was startled by the bird: as soon as Trenton closed the pantry door it rose, flapping, to the sky, so close that Trenton could feel the air shredded beneath its big, black wings.
Several of the glass panes in the roof were missing—shattered, Trenton assumed, or blown away during the last big storm. A rusted ladder was still leaning against the exterior wall, as if someone had abruptly decided the repairs weren’t worth it. There was a covering of fine green grass embedded in the dirt, so his footsteps made a crunching sound.
The greenhouse he remembered was a jungle, a riot of flowers as big as a child’s head, trembling with moisture, humid and exotic and totally off-limits. He remembered the emerald light, the alien-looking orchids, the summer roses climbing trellises all winter long.
There was no longer anything green in the greenhouse, except for a dozen fake plants—squat Christmas trees with plastic bristles, fabric lilies, improbable plastic orchids, and even a miniature palm tree—crammed into one corner of the rectangular space. What plants did remain were dry, brown, and brittle.
It was Saturday, 10 a.m., and Trenton was, for all intents and purposes, alone in the house. Amy was in the den, all the way on the other side of the house. His mom was still sleeping. She’d gotten drunk in her room last night, doing whatever the hell she did, and would probably stay up there until at least noon. And from his bedroom window he’d spotted Minna skirting the edge of the woods, a felt cap pulled low over her ears even though it was already probably sixty degrees, wearing an old pair of waders.
Getting up onto the shelf was difficult; the old wood groaned underneath him as though it might collapse under his weight. But he managed. When he stretched out on his back, he was mostly concealed by the fake planters and the intersection of their manufactured leaves, and thus invisible from both the pantry side and the door that led out toward the lawn.
He had one joint left from the stash he’d bought from an older guy who worked at the Multiplex in Melville, Long Island. He sparked up, took three hits in quick succession, and stamped out the end of the joint so he could save it for later. He lay back, feeling a delicious heaviness in his legs and arms, a sudden wave of calm.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Katie and the party. He was dreading it. He shouldn’t go. He would have an awful time. Most of Katie’s friends p
robably knew one another. They would stare at him and whisper behind his back.
But a small part of him was eager to see her again. Did that mean he wasn’t ready to die?
No. The plan was the plan, and he would still go through with it.
The sun was weak and the sky above Trenton was full of scudding clouds, breaking apart and re-forming. Like a kaleidoscope. His thoughts, too, broke apart and re-formed.
Light flickered. Shadows skated across the shelves, and Trenton shivered. He thought about the accident. He had memories, fragmented and strange, of a hundred shadowlike hands carrying him down a dark tunnel.
And then he felt it. Or heard it. He didn’t know which but he knew: someone had just entered the greenhouse. He sat up, suddenly alert, his mind sharpening.
Trenton’s throat closed so tight he couldn’t even scream.
She was there. And yet she was not there. A thing, an unmistakable presence. He knew it was a girl—or a woman—because of the way it moved, shifting in the sun, watching him from behind a shadow of hair.
It didn’t occur to him that he was just high, and seeing things. He’d smoked plenty of times before—weed was the only thing that helped him float through his months at Andover—and once had even seen a bathroom wall pulsating in and out.
But never anything like this. She was real. He felt it, too, in the stiff terror that seized him, the desperate desire to cry out, and the dryness of his mouth.
The longer he looked, the more she materialized: shoulder blades cut from shadow and green eyes flashing like dark leaves. Hair teeth mouth, breasts small as two bare flower buds.
Go away, Trenton tried to say, but couldn’t. He felt like he was back in the hospital again, paralyzed, arms and legs useless and unresponsive. Leave me alone.