Amy comes to the door, sniffling. She stops when she sees her mother in bed. “What are you doing?” She wrinkles her nose. I wonder if she can smell it.
“Headache, precious,” Minna says, with an exaggerated sigh. “I was taking a nap.”
“I want to nap, too.” Amy bounds toward the bed.
Minna shoots out one hand. With the other, she keeps the sheets at her chin. “Don’t come in here,” she says, too sharply. Then, in a normal way, “I might have germs.”
Trenton comes in after Amy. He leans—or rather, collapses—against the doorway. “What’s up with you?” he says.
Minna flashes him a dirty look. “Migraine.” She reaches out and touches Amy’s chin. “Princess? How about you wait downstairs so I can talk to Uncle Trenton, okay?”
“I want to nap,” Amy insists.
“Come on, Amy.” Trenton takes a step forward and puts a hand on Amy’s shoulder, drawing her away from the bed. “I’ll meet you downstairs, okay? It will only take a second.”
“What the hell?” Now that Amy is gone, Minna doesn’t bother controlling her anger. “I thought you were going for more boxes.”
“Forgot my wallet.” Trenton shrugs. “We got all the way to Oakbridge, and—”
“Jesus Christ, Trenton,” Minna explodes. “What the hell is wrong with you? I ask you to do one goddamn thing—”
“What’s wrong with me?” Trenton backs out of the room. “It was a mistake. You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.”
“Don’t you dare call me a bitch.” If Minna were not stuck in bed, naked, I’m pretty sure she would get out of bed and slap him. She lies stiff, white-faced, for several long minutes, until she hears Trenton pound downstairs again, until she hears the front door open and then slam. She keeps her sheets at her chin. She leans her head against the headboard. Otherwise, she is frozen.
“Can I come out now?” Chris’s voice is muffled.
“Yes,” she answers.
He wriggles out from the bed and stands again. This time, he doesn’t bother cupping. His Thing has returned, now, to its normal, shriveled state, and again I think of an animal that has retracted, burrowed away to nurture its hunger.
“Phew.” Chris sits heavily on the bed. “I had no idea you had a kid. God, that could have been awkward. Well, all’s well that ends—”
“Get out.” Minna closes her eyes.
Chris starts. “Hey,” he says softly, after a long pause. He reaches out and touches her face. She doesn’t withdraw. She doesn’t open her eyes. “Hey. Look, I’m sorry about that. But I thought you wanted to have a good time. That’s what you said, right? And we were just getting started . . . ”
“Please leave now,” Minna says simply. “The kitchen door should be open. Or you can leave through the hall. It’s up to you.”
For a moment, Chris watches her. Then he stands abruptly, searches the floor for his shirt, and angrily wrestles on his pants.
“Crazy,” he says. Just as he did during intercourse, he lets out a volley of curses, a string of half-muttered words: “Fucking insane. I just came here . . . and I had no idea . . . you were the one who wanted . . . That’s fucked up, you know?”
Minna says nothing.
When he has laced up his shoes, and cinched his belt, he stands, staring down at Minna. She must sense it. Still, she doesn’t open her eyes.
“Fucked,” he says, one last time, and then bursts out of the room, and down the stairs, and out the door, leaving his small black folio, full of urn styles, sitting on the hall console. I think he may remember and come back for it, but he doesn’t.
For a long time, Minna lies there. I can’t help but remember the way her father sat for a whole day after Caroline had taken the children, while the milk curdled in his coffee.
“Good-bye,” she says finally, into the empty room.
Then she pushes off the sheets and stands, and goes into the bathroom, and turns on the shower.
I wanted Amy to trip. I wished for it. I willed my way up through the stairs. And then she tripped.
First, the lightbulb in the basement. And now Amy.
I’m working my way back: into a real body, into feeling.
Touching, pushing, blowing.
Power.
I wasn’t always as helpless as I am now. When I first died, when I found myself here, in this house, I could still feel my old body—hands, legs, arms. And I could still go blundering, occasionally and blindly, and find that I had accidentally upset a vase or rattled a table or bumped against the washing machine and turned it on. The Killigans were in the house then, and they used to joke about it: the house is haunted, they’d say at dinner parties. I swear, just the other day, the TV turned on by itself.
It’s like the men who came home from the war missing limbs. Afterward, for a long time, there were the agonizing itches in long-lost toes, the cramps in amputated calves. Ed lost his left pinkie finger to an artillery blast, and until the day he died he claimed he could feel a hangnail there. One time, I came downstairs in the middle of the night and found him, half drunk, hacking away at the air with nail scissors. Phantom limb syndrome, they called it.
When your whole body is gone, it’s the same thing, just on a larger scale—phantom body syndrome. You feel it, you sense it, and somehow this keeps you grounded in the physical world and allows you to knock elbows with the TV and bump shins against chairs.
But as time went on, as I learned to see by touch, and hear by echo, as air does, and smell the ways walls do, by absorption, the old body receded further and further into the past, and so did my ability to affect things in the physical world.
Is that why Trenton can see her? The girl, Vivian—if it is Vivian—is still so new. She hasn’t forgotten how to be alive.
That’s the trick: to remember the old body as closely as possible, to feel my way back into it. The narrowness, the needs; the exhaustion and hunger; the pains and the explosions of pleasure. If there’s any hope of escaping, I must.
The bed in the Yellow Room isn’t so very different from the bed we bought for Maggie once she had outgrown the cradle—from Woolworths, of course, delivered to us sheathed in plastic by men as solemn-faced as pallbearers. For the first six months after we moved her from the cradle, Maggie would wake up screaming. I would climb into bed with her and gradually she would calm down, while I whispered into her hair and kept one arm locked tightly around her waist, to show her I was there.
I remember: the frantic fluttering heartbeat winging through her back, against my breasts and rib cage.
I remember: her sputtering, sniffling breaths, the feel of sweat seeping through her pajamas, and the smell of raspberries in her hair.
I remember the ramrod terror, too, when I heard her crying—the fear that she would never calm down, the fear that I could never pull her back from that black dream-space, the yawning nightmare mouth. Even after she calmed down, the fear would keep me awake: this fragile shell-person, this strange miracle of bones and blood, so easily ruptured and broken.
I wanted to absorb her back inside of me. I would have taken off my skin like a snake and folded her away, to be my secret again.
But she grew, and grew, and grew; and our bodies took us farther from each other. Did she remember those nights? Did she remember how I used to hold her, and rock her to sleep, and sing lullabies into her hair?
Probably not. Most likely, those memories were swallowed up in the long, tangled dream of childhood, swept back into the darkness that used to surround us, thick as syrup, when we slept side by side.
I’ve had to come to terms with that.
But who knows? It’s possible. It’s possible that underneath the layers and layers of resentments and fights, of distance and criticism, some memory of those early days was preserved, in some rarely used place, the way that a body stores memory of motion and rhythm. Perhaps, later in her life, she was able to excavate the feel of my arms around her, the repetition of my voice saying I love you,
I love you. Perhaps it brought some comfort to her.
The body restoreth, and the body taketh away.
I remember:
Ed’s fist; an explosion of pain, like a sudden burst of color.
I remember:
A mosquito bite on my knee; scratching until I bled.
I remember:
Thomas’s chin bumping lightly, once, against mine, the first time we kissed.
SANDRA
What does Alice remember about the turtle?
We’ve never talked about it. We’ve never even talked about how Maggie and I were buds for one afternoon. Tit for tat. God knows there’s plenty Alice has never discussed with me. If secrets were stuffing, the woman would be done up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
For example: the suitcase in the bedroom wall.
The funny thing is it never would have come out if Martin hadn’t made that idiotic comment about Jimi Hendrix.
It was January 1987. Martin and I were lying in bed, drinking wine, watching the snow come down. Snow was falling soundlessly outside, piling in heavy drifts against the doors and windows, softening the fields and wrapping the world in silence. In all the years I was up north, I never got tired of watching the snow.
We’d been at it for a few hours—the drinking, I mean—and were already pretty wound up when the Doors came on and Martin said, out of nowhere: “I don’t see what the big deal about Hendrix is. I think Krieger’s just as good.”
We started going back and forth, and I got up to pour a drink, and just because I was distracted and busy calling Martin an idiot, I tripped over the lip of the carpet and wound up on the floor.
Instead of helping me up, he said, “Don’t you see, Sandra? Don’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?” And he looked at me like I was some smelly, homeless beggar—like he wanted to turn away but was too polite.
I kicked him out before he had time to put his pants back on. The sight of him hop-skip-jumping over the gravel on the driveway, barefoot and ass shining like a moon, almost made it worth it.
That was when I put my foot in it. Literally. Back in the bedroom, furious, I sank my foot halfway through the wall before I realized what I’d done—and realized, too, that instead of support beams and drywall I’d kicked straight through to a narrow rectangular laundry chute made of hollow pressed tin. And there was something inside it: a large box, I thought at the time, wedged in at an angle.
I had to rip my wall open even more to get it out. It was a small leather suitcase, layered with dirt. I was hoping for something scandalous, a skull or a pile of stolen jewels, and I have to say I was pretty disappointed when I opened it to find a brown tweed jacket, a single black sock, a St. Aquinas University pin, and a length of pink ribbon, like a child’s hair thing.
To this day, Alice won’t tell me why she hid the suitcase, or when. Of course I have my theories. But I don’t press. When you’re up each other’s asses all day long, you really have to draw the line somewhere.
For three months the suitcase sat in my bedroom, in front of the hole in the wall, safe on its mound of plaster. I didn’t think of trying to return it. I didn’t know who to return it to. I knew it wasn’t the Killigans’—one look at the peach wallpaper, and I knew Mrs. Killigan would never let that piece-of-shit luggage in the house. I vaguely remembered an old lady and a daughter who lived in the house way back in the day, but so what? Mind your business, that’s my motto, or at least it was before everybody else started traipsing their business across my rooms.
All that changed after the rains. For weeks in May the skies opened up, bringing a glut, a gut-spilling onslaught of rain, vomiting leaves onto the windows and driving surfs of mud down the hill and onto the porch and pushing a tunneling rush of water from Lackawanna Creek into the basement. For days the water rose in the house, creeping up toward the staircase, floating cans of paint and revealing little drowned frogs, bloated, pale, belly-up.
I remembered sitting with the little creased bible on my knees in Sunday school, listening to stories about the Flood, and thought for the first time that maybe there was something to it. But finally the weather broke. The sky turned clear as summer bluebells, and the sun sat high and fat, smug as a cat, curled up on a drift of clouds.
The rains brought everything up. The lawn was a trash heap, a beach littered with the dead. The mudslides had unearthed men’s shoes and washboards, eyeless dolls and socks stiff with mud, lost mittens and old Coca-Cola bottles and hats reeking of mildew.
And on my front porch, unblinking, mouth open like it had been calling for help: a goddamn turtle. A strangely human face, puckered and tragic. It was a big sucker, too, the size of a dinner plate. And the words: bright red, barely chipped, obviously painted painstakingly by a child on the turtle’s dark, patterned shell.
Please return to Maggie Lundell.
Like I said: everything comes up in the end.
TRENTON
This time, Trenton did not smoke weed, but just lay very, very still—so still his lungs ached from the effort of controlling them. He had left the window open in his bedroom, then partially lowered the blinds, trying to replicate the quality of the light in the greenhouse.
He wanted to see her again, but he was afraid, too.
“Hello,” he whispered.
He thought he heard a snicker, or an echo of a snicker. The voices were still there—sporadic, often indecipherable, like footsteps that stop as soon as you pause to listen.
Was it her?
The memorial for his father was in just six days and Trenton had not anticipated being alive to see it. But the ghost had changed things. He could not—he would not—kill himself until he knew the truth about her.
He lay there, listening to a fly buzz somewhere, watching bits of cottonseed float in through the half-open window on long fingers of sun. He was tired and hungover. He’d drunk too much at Katie’s stupid party.
He should never have gone. Trenton had thought it would be a high school thing, and everyone would know one another, and he would feel out of place. Instead it was just a bunch of random people floating between the kitchen and the basement. He wondered where Katie picked her friends: they looked like refugees, or people who might work in a shitty dollar-for-a-pound thrift store, if they worked at all. Trenton was positive he recognized one of the boys from the butcher counter at Mick’s Deli. Even Katie hadn’t seemed to know anyone very well. Several times, she had confused a girl’s name, calling her Megan instead of Melissa. And when Trenton had asked how she knew everybody, she had responded vaguely that she liked having people around, which of course wasn’t an answer to his question at all.
Katie took him out to the back porch and sat so close to him their thighs touched all the way from hip to knee. She was impressed that he could name a few constellations—thanks to an astronomy elective at Andover he’d taken for the easy A—and together they’d counted the fireflies floating through the dark.
“I used to pretend that fireflies were fairies,” Katie had said, her voice a little thick. “I’d imagine I was a fairy cursed to live in human form, and someday I’d transform back.” She turned to him. Her breath smelled sweet, like raspberry vodka. “Do you ever wish you were someone else?”
And he had answered truthfully, “All the time.”
But then Marcus had showed up with more alcohol. Marcus. What a sleazeball name. He looked like a sleazeball, too, with a goatee thin as a rat’s tail and dirty jeans and a tattoo on the back of his hand of a girl in a bikini using his pointer finger as a stripper pole. He must have been at least twenty-five.
Trenton had been so close to kissing Katie.
He was just starting to doze off when he felt it—a change in the atmosphere. His lungs tightened in his chest and he was temporarily paralyzed, as he had been the moment he’d first woken in the hospital, encased in plaster, unable to move or even cry out, because of the tubes in his throat.
He kept his eyes closed, afraid that if he opened them, it would p
rove to be just his imagination. Or she would get scared. He squeezed them together so he wouldn’t cheat, feeling his heart beat deep in his chest, and found himself praying that this was real. That she was real. That he wasn’t crazy.
Trenton felt her sit down on the bed. The mattress didn’t sink, the headboard didn’t groan, but he felt it nonetheless: a change next to him, as though a sudden wind had sprung up. Now he didn’t know whether to open his eyes or not.
Don’t go away, he thought. Don’t go away. But he was terrified. He could no longer feel his fingers or toes.
The thought occurred to him: maybe she was coming for him, to take him over to the other side. And he remembered the moments after the accident, and the feeling of soft shadowed hands all over.
“Are you asleep?” Her voice, too, was like wind across the sheets.
“No,” Trenton said, and he forced himself to open his eyes.
He tried not to scream. Or maybe he tried to scream and couldn’t. The desire was there, a hard pressure in his chest and throat and terror deep in his guts; but he kept breathing, in-out in-out, and made no sound.
Once, in seventh grade, Trenton had come down with a bad migraine just before basketball tryouts. Standing on the court, he’d seen holes in the boys charging at him, holes in the floor, great swirling pits of darkness in the air and ceiling. He’d spectacularly missed a free throw before puking right in the middle of the gym. But nothing was worse than the holes.
That’s what this was like: parts of her were there, and parts of her weren’t, but he couldn’t exactly tell which was which because the holes, the dark spaces, seemed always to be moving, eating up first her jaw or the left part of her cheek, then her shoulder and elbow or half her chest or a leg. The more he looked, the worse it became—dizzying, immobilizing, like entering a house after staring directly at the sun and fumbling blindly for familiar shapes.
“Who are you?” she said.