“Ongoing.” He shuffled over, still squatting, and began sorting and bagging, sorting and bagging. It was nice to watch his fingers work. He’d always had nice hands, and long thin fingers that seemed to belong to someone different. “Her parents are back from Africa, so we should have more luck soon.” Minna could tell he enjoyed talking as if he belonged to the investigation, as if it were his. All men liked to feel important. Her father had demanded it, insisted on it, squeezed it out of every interaction and conversation like someone wringing water from a towel. “It’s no accident she came up here. Her parents spent two summers in this area when she was a little girl. Who knows. Maybe she kept in touch with some people. Maybe a boy.”
“How long has it been now? Two weeks?” Minna didn’t know why, but she suddenly had a vicious urge for him to say it: she was dead, she was obviously dead. “You don’t really think she’s still alive, do you?”
He didn’t answer, and he didn’t look at her, either. There was a long moment of silence. “I remember your dad, you know,” he said abruptly. “What’d he do again? Paper, right?”
“Cardboard, mostly,” she said. “Cardstock, cereal boxes, things like that. But he sold the company ages ago.”
“He was a nice guy,” Danny said.
“He was an asshole,” Minna said.
He acted as if he hadn’t heard her. “I remember sophomore year we were all hanging out in the living room. Your parents were upstairs. And we were being so careful to hide our beers . . . O’Malley was putting the empties in the trunk of his car. Then your dad came down and we freaked. We thought he was going to be mad. But he poured out some scotch and gave us all a try.” He laughed again. “He just wanted to be part of the fun.”
“He wanted to show off his scotch,” Minna said. Everything she saw, everything she was turning over was trash. They would need more bags. Danny was moving too slowly.
“I thought it was nice. He let us sleep over. Like, fifteen kids in the living room. I remember the Miller twins didn’t want to crash, so he drove them home. It was probably two in the morning and freezing cold. Remember that?”
“No,” Minna answered honestly. She tried to picture her dad starting up the car, breath condensing, wearing his old down jacket over his striped pajamas, maybe an old pair of waders he’d grabbed before starting out the door. Breaking off ice from the windshield in the middle of the night, hands chapped, the wind blowing hard pellets of snow over the yard. So he could drive her friends home. She didn’t like to think about it; it made her feel she had missed something critical, something elemental, about him.
“I remember how he showed up at my mom’s house every day for, like, two weeks after your parents split and you were crashing with us most of the time. You wouldn’t talk to him. But he kept showing up.”
She wished she could tell him to shut up. Her hands were shaking.
“And how proud he was at graduation. He must have taken a million pictures. Look for the most beautiful girl in the room, and that’s my daughter.”
She didn’t remember any of it. She felt a sudden wrench of grief. She realized, horrifyingly, she was on the verge of tears.
“Do you think—” Her voice broke a little and she swallowed. “Do you think some people aren’t meant to be happy?” She didn’t even know what she was going to ask before the words were spoken.
Danny shuffled a little closer. They were still squatting, both of them, among the drift of ashes. It would have been funny if it didn’t feel so awful.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey. Look at me.” She managed to. His eyes were nice and brown and unremarkable, like the rest of him—one hundred percent normal. He might be the only normal person she knew.
“You’re going to be happy, Minniemouse,” he said, his old nickname for her; then he put one hand on her cheek and brushed away the dampness with his thumb, which was calloused and comfortable feeling.
Suddenly she could imagine it, and she knew that this was the answer; and she was kissing him, hard, pushing her tongue onto his, trying to get deeper, to push into him, to find the softness of that big black space where she could disappear.
“Wait,” he said, pulling away, gasping a little.
“No.” She grabbed his face, straddled him, pushed her breasts against him. Down, she wanted to go down, into a place of quiet and breathlessness and heartbeats, into a place where she was alone and at peace.
“Wait. Wait.” This time he put both hands on her shoulders and pushed her backward. He wiped his mouth with his hand, like she was contaminated, and Minna saw pity in his eyes and felt suddenly cold. “Stop.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Her voice sounded like a stranger’s, or like a voice heard from far away: small, strangled. “Are you gay or something?”
“I’m married, Minna.” He was still looking at her in that pitying way, like she was a child and he was breaking the news about a dead kitten.
“You said you were separated.”
“Minna . . . ” He sighed and rubbed his forehead, where he was going bald. “That’s not how things work.”
She stood up and felt the floor seesaw underneath her. She wanted to crush him, to humiliate him, to let him know how little she cared about him. She wanted to reach inside him and find what was soft and twist, and twist. “It’s okay. Everyone thought you were gay in high school, too.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Anger. Minna felt triumphant.
But instead of yelling, he simply stood up. “See you later, Minna,” he said, in a tired voice, and made for the stairs.
“That’s why I fucked Peter Contadino,” she burst out. She wasn’t thinking straight. It was like being drunk, like falling into a long tunnel of unconsciousness. “At prom. Because you wouldn’t. Because everyone said you were gay.”
He paused at the top of the stairs. His spine went rigid. Now he would turn around. Now he would come back, yell at her, look at her.
But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything at all. Minna’s whole world teetered on the edge of a long second. Then Danny continued downstairs, leaving Minna alone.
AMY
Secrets were for grown-ups. That’s what Uncle Trenton said. And Amy had a secret now, and that meant she was all grown up like Uncle Trenton and like Mommy.
The secret was about the dead girl, who had a name, which was Katie. But Amy couldn’t tell anyone about the dead girl, not her name or anything else about her, like the fact that she smelled like flowers and not dirt.
“Remember, Amy,” Uncle Trenton had said. “I’m counting on you. This is big-girl stuff.”
Amy promised because she liked the dead girl and didn’t want to get her in trouble. The dead girl had carried Amy away from the fire and had stood holding hands with her outside while they listened to the scream scream of fire engines in the distance and Trenton shouted on the phone, and when Amy’s socks got all wet with dew, the dead girl helped her take them off and even took off her own shoes and socks, too, so they could have bare feet together.
“Shhh,” she said, when the trucks were so close Amy could see the trees lit up red and white and blue from all the sirens. The dead girl smiled and pressed a finger to Amy’s lips, and the finger tasted a little like smoke. “I was never here.”
Amy watched her disappear into the darkness, holding her shoes in one hand.
PART VII
THE BATHROOMS
ALICE
It has been four days since the fire, and since Sandra first decided on the silent treatment. Even though I’ve spent decades trying unsuccessfully to get her to shut up, now that she has, I find that I miss her conversation.
I went through the same thing when Ed died. I’d longed for his death, prayed for it, fantasized about it the way some people do about tropical vacations. One time, after a bad storm, we were confined to the house for four straight days; we both must have gone a little crazy. Ed was taking shots from our bedroom window at the crows huddled on the bare branches of the sycamor
e tree across the field, and missing every time but one; later he fell asleep, whiskey-drunk, with his arm still around the shotgun. In the middle of the night I got out of bed and stood above him, staring at that barrel gleaming sharp as a promise, staring at the shadowed blot of his head, thinking, I could do it. I could really do it. I stood there for what felt like hours, until my arms ached, until my toes were numb with cold. Then he rolled over and his face moved into the square of moonlight on his pillow and I drew back, ashamed of myself, horrified.
Then it happened. March 22, 1972. I was making coffee and three fried eggs and bacon; Maggie was living in San Francisco by then. Ed was upstairs, shaving. We’d had a bad fight the night before. He’d come home late, drunk. I’d shoved my fingers down my throat to be sick so he wouldn’t force himself on me.
I heard a heavy thud, like a sack of new dough dropping. I found him on the bathroom floor with his trousers off and a razor in his hand, and a small bit of toilet paper clinging to his chin, where he’d nicked himself and tried to stop the bleeding. He died even before he reached the hospital.
The doctors told me later it was a heart attack. It happened that way sometimes, they told me. Too much drinking, too much fat in his diet, too much stress. We’re all just a collection of wires pulled tight, charged beyond capacity—a tangle of plugs and valves, waiting for a surge to take down the whole system.
He hadn’t even finished his shave. When I came into the bathroom, I saw there was still hair stubbling the right side of his face. And after I called the doctor, I don’t know what got into me, but I sat there and finished for him. I sat on the ground and pulled his head into my lap and finished so he could have his last good shave. He liked a good shave.
I hadn’t expected to miss him. I’d expected only relief. And I was relieved, more than I could say or express—sometimes I’d find myself laughing, and I had to be very careful at the funeral and in front of neighbors to seem sad, when sometimes all I wanted to do was sing. At night I walked the house in the dark and touched all the things that belonged to me: the sofa he would never sit on again, the chairs he would never knock over, all the dishes he would never throw.
But sometimes I woke from the middle of a dream and found myself reaching for him or rolling over toward the place his warmth should have been. The house was so quiet, so still, I listened unconsciously for the sound of his footsteps, the door slamming, the roar of his voice or his laughter from the living room. For months I expected him to call out to me to bring him a beer, hurry up already, where’s dinner. For months I threw burned bacon into the trash thinking of Ed, thinking of how foul a mood he would be in, before remembering that he wasn’t coming down to breakfast. I had carried the weight of him for so long that without it I felt dizzy. I guess it’s the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they’re strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.
I didn’t really, deep down, believe he was dead. At least, I didn’t believe he was gone forever. I was constantly waiting for him to come back, and dreading it, too, and even the dread was like grief.
Ed liked to smoke his pipe in the bathroom. He’d grown up in rural Virginia and shared an outhouse with five brothers; I think the bathroom might have been his favorite room in the house. Sometimes he’d flush two, three times in a row. He liked the sound of it, he said. And even in deep winter he’d crack open a window and sit there with his pants around his ankles, puffing on his pipe, so over time the wallpaper went yellow with it.
Two months after he died, I woke up in the middle of the night and I knew: he’d come back. I could smell his pipe. The smoke was seeping into the bedroom, clinging to the weave of the sheets. And I knew I had only to push open the bathroom door and I’d see him, his pale thighs and knees like doorknobs, his nightshirt wrinkled and the wispy tufts of his hair sticking straight up, like the feathers of a baby bird. Go back to bed, Alice, he’d say. Can’t you leave a man in peace for even five minutes?
But there was nothing: nothing but the toilet, and the bath, and the old yellow wallpaper, and the window, closed. And it was then, in that moment, that I really understood that I was alone and I would be alone.
I sat that night on the toilet seat. I leaned my forehead against the wallpaper. The smell of his pipe was so strong, I could nearly taste it. I stayed there until morning.
TRENTON
Trenton was nearly out of time.
Seeing the ghost, and learning about the woman whose brains had gone splat in the den, had made Trenton temporarily reconsider his plan to die. For a few short days he’d felt that he had a purpose; there was a mystery for him, layered underneath the visible world, like a gift nestled inside folds and folds of tissue paper. He’d felt that everything was connected: coming back to Coral River, meeting Katie, and the ghost. Or ghosts. Whoever they were.
Katie had been . . . what? A friend? A kind-of friend? He didn’t know.
Now Katie was gone. Vanished. The day after the fire, while Caroline, Minna, and Amy were at the doctor, making sure Amy wouldn’t be asthmatic or psychologically scarred for life, or whatever Minna was worried about, Trenton had once again walked the mile and a half to Katie’s house, as he had for the party, and found all the doors locked, the house dark, the driveway empty—as if no one had ever lived there at all. He had rung the doorbell anyway and pounded on the door so loudly that a group of birds had startled up from the field and gone cawing together into the sky, like a shadow breaking apart and re-forming.
It occurred to him he hadn’t even gotten her number, though she had gotten his at her party. Write your number on my arm, she’d said, uncapping a blue marker with her teeth and pulling up her sleeve. He’d been so happy he nearly got his own number wrong.
But no matter how much he stared at his phone and willed it to ring—or locked it up in a drawer and told himself he didn’t care either way—his phone stayed quiet. Maybe, he thought, Katie had never even existed; she could have been a figment of his imagination.
Except that Amy remembered her. He’d had to swear Amy to secrecy, so she wouldn’t tell. Katie couldn’t get in trouble; she told him so herself.
Minna and his mom were treating him like he was a psych case, like he might go on a shooting rampage if they said the wrong thing. Minna thought there was something wrong with his brain—he’d heard her say so to their mom. She thought he’d started the fire, maybe even deliberately. He wasn’t allowed to be alone with Amy anymore. She hadn’t said so explicitly, but any time he went to check on Amy or play a game, Minna suddenly materialized, eyes sharp and worried, and whisked Amy away for a meal or a nap or a walk.
Maybe he had started the fire. Maybe it was all his fault. Maybe he was really, truly crazy.
His father’s memorial service was tomorrow. The ghosts didn’t leave him alone, even for a second, anymore.
“I wish they wouldn’t fight so much.” She was sitting in the bathtub, or maybe not sitting. It was hard to tell, since she didn’t have a clear silhouette. She was just a shadow on the tiles, shifting in the sun. “My mom and my stepdad were always fighting. Then he left. My real dad left, too, before I was born. I never even knew him.” Then: “I wish they’d just stop.”
She talked to him this way, in sudden bursts, half nonsensical, about people he didn’t know and places he had never seen, brief and jumbled outpourings of old memories and whispered complaints. He still had trouble figuring out how old she was. Sometimes she seemed as old as he was and sometimes just a kid. She had told him she was sixteen; based on what he knew about girls of that age, which admittedly wasn’t much, he guessed that she was younger.
She hadn’t told him her name, either. Sometimes she claimed to be the missing girl, Vivian. But when he had called her by that name, she had suddenly burst into tears—breaking apart in waves, like a pattern of broken sunlight across a wall—and sobbed that no one knew who she really was, no one would ever know her again, she was dead and she w
ould be forgotten. It made Trenton want to die and strangle her and hold her all at once.
The other voices were still going, too.
“For a newbie, you got a lot of opinions.”
“Leave her alone, Sandra. She’s a child.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“You can’t avoid me forever.”
“Hey. Newbie. Tell Alice to buzz off.”
“Shut up, all of you!” Trenton didn’t realize he’d spoken out loud until there was a sudden silence. He had been trying to count. Now he had to start over.
There was a knocking on the bathroom door. “Trenton?” his mom called out. “Trenton, are you all right?”
“Fine.” He shook all the pills back into his palm and began a recount.
“You’ve been in there a long time,” she said.
“I have to dump,” he replied.
He heard his mom sigh. “Language,” she said, and moved off.
The ghost went on as though nothing had happened. “I’m not a child,” she continued. “My birthday’s in July. My mom said we could go anywhere I wanted. I asked to go to Six Flags.” She was quiet for a moment. “Do you think . . . do you think my mom misses me?”
“Please,” Trenton said. His head was going to burst; the voices were like insects burrowing through his brain. “Please.” He didn’t want to care but he couldn’t help it; the world was fucked.
Nine. He had nine pills so far.
“That isn’t enough to kill you,” the ghost said. She was suddenly next to him. He hated that, how quickly she could move. And her touch was like a shiver, like something going wrong in his stomach. “You’ll just throw up.”
“How do you know that?” He was annoyed because she was right. He’d looked online and realized he needed at least twenty, to be safe. But he couldn’t take too many from Minna at a time.