“The snow,” he said.
I opened my eyes. “You can’t hear snow.”
“You can,” he said. He still had his eyes closed. He looked like a different person when he wasn’t smiling. Older. Tired. A stranger. “Shhh.”
I closed my eyes again, just to humor him.
But the weird thing is after a minute or two, I thought I could hear it. Not sound, but the opposite of sound. It was the slow accumulation of silence, the sticky, heavy drift of nothing, like watching shadows grow and turn to dark, or like this time I was a kid and saw a solar eclipse, watched a black disk float over the sun and saw all the light get swallowed up in an instant. Now I was hearing all the sounds of the world get swallowed up.
When I opened my eyes, Martin was smiling again. “The sound of snow,” he said.
After that, it became like our thing. Even when he wasn’t around, I used to go up there sometimes, because it reminded me of him. I even started to get used to the smell, like an old person’s laundry basket, and the spiders spinning silently in their corners. Cissy would have liked it in the attic.
Alice told me later she used to hang around in the attic, too. She had a whole rig up there, a desk and everything. First she was pretending to write because it gave her an excuse to keep away from her husband, and he was too lazy and usually too drunk, so she says, to climb the stairs. But then, after a while, she started really writing, and she churned out The Raven Heliotrope, three hundred pages in two years.
It was peaceful up there.
Then, a week before the big wham-o blam-o, brains on the wall, the roof collapsed. It had been another frigid turd of a winter, and for months the snow, fine as sifted flour, had been piling up quietly, so I hardly noticed.
I wasn’t home. I’d gone looking for Martin. It had been a rough winter on me. We’d been at it, me and Martin; I got canned from my job for no good reason; and on top of everything else, I got the news from my doctor: cancer. A knot on my lung, tight as a web, lit up like a Christmas tree on the scan.
I needed to tell Martin. I called him at home, which was forbidden, and I’ll never forget what it felt like when she picked up the phone: like standing out in the cold and seeing warm lights off in the distance and knowing you’d never make it.
“Hello?” she said, half laughing; and I heard his voice, too, in the background, like he’d just finished telling a joke. There were other voices too, overlapping, and a song playing in the background. Something with a violin.
I knew where he lived. He was careful but not careful enough, and it was no big secret. He knew I wouldn’t show up there unannounced, but that’s just what I did. I drove all the way to Buffalo through the funnel of snow and parked right in front of his house, which was bigger than I’d imagined and prettier, like a big cupcake covered in white icing. I could see him moving in the living room, passing out drinks to his guests. And I could see her, too: blond and small as an insect, touching his face, his arm; rearranging the chairs, opening the window to let out the smoke; and every time she moved it was like she was saying, I belong here. I belong here.
At the last second I lost my nerve so I just sat there. I had a bottle of Smirnoff to keep me warm, and I sat until it was finished and the guests had all gone home, spilling out into the darkness and cold, still laughing, waving scarves like people in old movies leaving on a ship. Martin and his wife stood waving at the door, transformed by the warm light behind them into a single shape.
Driving home, I lost control on the ice and went headfirst into a fence and some idiot cop barely out of puberty threw me in the tank overnight for being drunk. The cell was white and empty and smelled like piss, but in the morning when the sun came up on the walls, it was almost pretty.
When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference.
Don’t think I felt sorry for myself. The way I figure it, life’s the sum total of all our small mistakes, little tragedies, bad choices. Addition on top of addition. They pile up and pile up until the cost of keeping up appearances is too high and the weight is just too much.
Then: collapse.
Alice says we got to let go. Maybe she’s right.
If you want the plain truth, it wasn’t the gun that killed me. What I mean is: it wasn’t the gun that killed me first.
When I was six, I started having a dream about a long white hallway full of closed doors. It looked like a hospital, except there were no doctors and no nurses, no people at all. Just a long stretch of closed locked doors.
Sometimes it was quiet. Sometimes I could hear people talking inside the locked rooms, voices muffled by the walls. Sometimes there was even music playing. And I knew if I could just find the right door, it would open for me, and I’d pass through into my house, into my room, with the big bay windows where a decade later a spider would sit spinning for Cissy, and the view of the front yard and the big sky and the birds pecking worms out of my mom’s garden.
But I never could. Find it, I mean. All the doors stayed locked.
The dreams stopped after a while, when I got a little older and got into boys and dope and music and beer. But I’ll tell you something. For a while, I thought Martin was going to be the door.
When his wife found out and he said he was ending things with me, I think I went a little crazy. After thirty years, the dreams came back. Even when I woke up, the dream was there: a long hallway of locked rooms, and people laughing inside of them.
The gun was just the go-between. It was the loneliness that got me in the end.
AMY
Amy was supposed to be sleeping but she couldn’t sleep and there were noises in the attic besides. She couldn’t sleep because Uncle Trenton was a bad reader and he’d rushed through her favorite part of The Raven Heliotrope and he hadn’t given her a good-night kiss plus he’d tucked her in too tight, which made her feel like a giant burrito.
And he smelled weird. Like the kind of clear juice Nana drank, and also a little bit like the big store where Mommy bought her perfumes.
She knew why Uncle Trenton was in a bad mood. It was because of the body in the ground. She’d heard Nana talking about it with Mommy when they were getting ready to leave. I don’t see what all the fuss is about, Mommy said. She’s six feet under by now and everybody knows it. They should be looking for her with dogs and a shovel. And Nana said, Imagine her poor parents.
Amy was playing in the corner and they didn’t bother to be quiet because they thought she didn’t understand—but she did. Six feet under was where you went when you were dead like Grandpa or like Penelope in The Raven Heliotrope.
Amy wondered whether the girl who was six feet under who was upsetting Trenton would come back, like Penelope had in the book. Innocents don’t really die, so after she was buried six feet under beneath a tree, the tree started weeping and its tears spilled on the ground and Penelope woke up. And so she lived happily ever after and the tree was named a weeping willow like the kind they had outside in the front yard. Maybe that’s where the girl who was upsetting Trenton was buried.
Amy was thirsty. She would ask Trenton for a glass of water and he couldn’t be mad because everyone knew that without water you would die. Her feet felt strange on the floor, like they were full of tiny shivers. Mommy would tell her to put on socks but Mommy wasn’t here and it was just Amy and Trenton and maybe the girl six feet under.
In the hall, the noises in the attic were even louder, and Amy knew they weren’t just mice or creaks but footsteps and voices. The trapdoor in the ceiling was open, and the stairs were lolling out like a wide wood tongue, and there was light spilling onto the carpet and shadows moving back and forth.
“What about your sister?” someone was saying, and it was not Trenton but the girl.
“She’s out to dinner with my mom.”
“I meant your younger sister.”
“I told you, she’s my niece. And she’s asleep.”
They were talking about her, and Amy felt proud. She wanted to know what a dead girl looked like because she’d always wondered whether Penelope had bugs in her hair when she woke up and kissed Prince Thomas and he was just too nice to say anything.
“Where do you want the candles?” the dead girl was saying when Amy put her foot onto the first stair.
TRENTON
Trenton had been hoping Katie wouldn’t show—or even better, that she would show but forget about the séance idea. No such luck. He’d just managed to put Amy to bed when he heard the faintest tapping from downstairs, like Katie was using her fingernails to knock.
“I don’t think candles are such a good idea,” he said, squatting down and trying to fit his arms around a huge oak bureau that Katie insisted he move.
“Of course we need candles,” she said. She had two packages of tall white pillar candles and she was busy tearing at the plastic with her teeth. She looked like a deranged gerbil. The roof was so low they were bent nearly double. “I stole these just for you.”
“You stole them?” Trenton said.
She shrugged. “I’m broke.” She managed to get the first package open. She spit out a small square of plastic and shook a candle into her hand. “Voilà,” she said, brandishing it.
He was worried the séance wouldn’t work, and he was worried it would. He was worried that Katie would see the ghost and freak out, and also that he would freak out but Katie wouldn’t see her so she wouldn’t understand why he was freaking out. There were so many different things to worry about, he was having trouble keeping them straight in his head.
Trenton strained against the bureau and managed to move it about half an inch. Christ. The thing felt like it was made of molten lead.
“Put your back into it,” Katie said.
“You could help,” he pointed out.
“I am helping.” She was setting up the candles, arranging them in a circle in the middle of the floor, which they had cleared of boxes and trunks by stacking everything together in teetering piles, leaving only a narrow pathway to the stairs. When she was finished, Katie unrolled the blanket, which she’d carried up from the living room. (“It’s a séance,” he’d said, “not a picnic.” And she’d looked at him, head tilted to the side, fingering the side of her nostril where he could still see twin holes that must once have been nose rings, and said, “Ghosts don’t know the difference. For them a séance is a picnic. What the fuck else do they do all day?” He was halfway tempted to answer: I’ll ask.)
It was cold in the attic, and Trenton had the sudden feeling of a finger running lightly down his neck. Watched. That’s what it was. It was the sensation of dark eyes on him, concealed, hidden behind the jumble of stacked boxes and furniture. And now it occurred to him, of course, that that’s what ghosts did all day—was all they could do.
They watched.
He jammed his fists into the front pocket of his sweatshirt.
“You okay?” Katie asked. She shrugged off her sweatshirt—which was pink, and patterned with grinning skulls—and Trenton looked away quickly, so he wouldn’t be caught staring at her too-small tank top underneath, and the stripe of tan stomach above her jeans.
“Yeah,” Trenton said. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“That’s the spirit.” She rolled her eyes, then sat down on the blanket and crossed her legs. When she leaned forward, he could see her cleavage. She patted the spot in front of her. “Park it.”
Trenton hadn’t thought about how difficult it would be for him to sit cross-legged. He sat down first sideways, with his legs pointed outward to the candles like the second hand in a giant clock. He bent one knee but couldn’t get the other to work. He was too stiff. It had been a long time since he’d done his PT.
The whole time, Katie observed him in silence. “What happened to you?” she asked finally.
Trenton had to settle for leaving one leg extended. “I was in an accident,” he said. “A car accident.”
“You said.” Katie narrowed her eyes. “Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“What?” Trenton stared at her. “No. No, of course not.”
“You can tell me,” Katie said. Her expression hadn’t changed.
“I wasn’t even driving,” he said, and immediately felt that old pain, a sharp pull of regret that he hadn’t died, that the warm soft hands hadn’t carried him off into the darkness, that instead he had woken up with his broken body straightened out and immobilized and pinned to a hospital bed like an insect pinned to soft cotton. “My friend was driving.”
“Was your friend trying to kill you?” she asked, unsmiling.
Trenton couldn’t help it. He laughed. The idea of Robbie Abramowicz, who weighed like three hundred pounds and was the only kid at Andover less popular than Trenton was, trying to kill anything was funny. “I hope not. He’s my only friend at school.” He was embarrassed, immediately, to have said it.
But Katie didn’t seem to notice. “I was in an accident once,” she said. Abruptly, she spun around and pulled up her shirt. Trenton tried to say something but only managed to gargle. He could see the small, regular knobs of her spine, and a blue butterfly tattoo—a fake—peeling away on her lower back. Running up the length of her back, like a second spine, was a narrow cord of scar tissue, thick as a child’s finger. “One time when I was little my parents took me to the zoo,” she said. “I wanted to see the tigers. I was so small I slipped right into the pen when they weren’t looking.”
“Really?” Trenton was relieved when she hitched down her shirt.
“No.” She turned around to face him again. “Spinal birth defect. I had, like, five surgeries before I was two.”
He stared at her. “Do you make everything into a story?”
“Yes,” she said simply. For a second, Katie looked just like she had the night of the party, like the girl who had counted fireflies and asked him to point out the North Star. “That way, I can make up my own endings.”
Then she lunged forward and for a second Trenton’s heart stopped and he thought, She’s going to kiss me.
But she just sat up on her hands and knees and reached behind him and started lighting the candles with a lighter. She was so close to him. She was wearing a T-shirt, and the way she was bending over he could see the curves of her breasts, full and soft-looking, like they’d fit perfectly in his hand, and one strap of a faded yellow bra. He had to look away because he was starting to get hard. But even so, he could smell her; and when she moved, she bumped his shoulder, and he wanted to take her face in his and inhale her and taste her tongue in his mouth. She was probably a great kisser.
Trenton was more than a little hard, now, and he shifted and thought of dead things, and old ghosts, and poor, shivery girls, full of holes, trapped behind walls.
Katie finished lighting the circle of candles. “Maestro,” she said, slipping her lighter back into her pocket. “Lights off.”
Even sitting, Trenton managed to reach the frayed cord that controlled the only light in the attic: a bare, wire-encased bulb, like something you would find in a prison. With the lights off, Katie’s face looked very different, full of strange planes and angles, lit up imperfectly in the candlelight. Dark shadows climbed the walls, and Trenton thought of a lamp he’d had as a kid, which had sent images of zoo animals skating across his ceiling when it revolved. Sitting in the attic with Katie, surrounded by candles, was a little like sitting in the middle of the lamp.
“All right.” Katie inhaled deeply and closed her eyes. Trenton kept his eyes open, watching her. For several seconds, she said nothing. She looked thinner in the darkness, and younger, too. Her eyelashes were very long, resting on her cheeks.
She opened her eyes again. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
She made a little gesture of impatience. “You have to talk to them. You have to cal
l them out.”
“This was your idea,” Trenton said, who could think of nothing he wanted to do less. He still had the sensation of being watched, and he imagined dark eyes growing in the corners like tumors. He wanted to go downstairs with Katie, sit on the couch, put in a movie. Maybe she’d sit right next to him, so their thighs would touch again.
“Trenton.” Katie looked at him as though she were a teacher, and he a disappointing student. “I can’t talk to them. They won’t listen to me.”
Trenton felt the small touch against his neck again, light as a breath, and shivered. “Why do you think they’ll listen to me?” he said.
Katie leaned forward. Trenton could see small points of candlelight reflecting in her eyes. “You almost died,” she said. “You were one of them for a while. Haven’t you ever seen a movie about ghosts?”
He knew she was kidding, but he couldn’t even fake a smile.
Was Katie right? He had almost died, and now he could speak with the dead. Trenton thought of those moments after Robbie had swerved and for one second the guardrail, and the trees beyond it, were lit up like a still photograph—the feeling of dark hands and of warmth and also of silence, like a kite detached from its string, suspended in still air.
He’d been a ghost. For a few seconds, he’d been a ghost.
Katie must have interpreted his silence for resistance. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll do it. Give me your hands. And close your eyes. No cheating.”
Trenton wiped off his hands quickly on the back of his jeans before allowing her to take them, in case his palms were sweaty. He pretended to close his eyes but tried to look, a little, from under his lashes.
“No cheating,” Katie repeated, and so he really closed them.
“Spirits of this house,” she said, making her voice deep and loud. Trenton opened his eyes; he was sure he’d heard a stifled giggle. But Katie squeezed his hands urgently, so he closed them again.