“I saw a story like that on TV.” She paused. “It’s not fair,” she said. She was trembling. They weren’t touching anymore, but he could feel it—cold air, the hair on his arms standing up.
“No,” he said. He longed, suddenly, to touch her—this fragile, needy, broken child, to kiss the top of her head and pull her down into his lap, as he did with Amy when she was having a bad dream. But she wasn’t Amy, and she was only half a child. And, of course, he couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t even see her face clearly: just shifting patterns of light and shadow, a faint impression of hollow prettiness.
“When you die,” she said. “We’ll be friends, won’t we?” She hesitated, then said shyly, “We can be together all the time.”
He felt a sudden wave of panic. He hadn’t thought about it like that. He’d thought only of sleep, and of Minna sobbing and blaming herself; and the kids at Andover lighting candles in his name. What if death turned out to be just as awful and depressing as life? What if he was just as powerless?
“Don’t count on it,” Trenton said. “I’m not planning to stick around.” But he had trouble pouring the pills back into an empty bottle of calamine lotion, where he was hiding them, and dropped two. He had to get down on his hands and knees to retrieve them.
“You’ll stay,” she said. “You’ll stay, and then I’ll always have someone to talk to.”
She grew quiet, and Trenton felt her withdraw, saw her shadow-self shifting across the cold tiles, and the old shower curtain, spotted with mold. Soon, she wouldn’t even be a shadow. She would be nothing but a voice, telling stories no one could hear.
“I’m lonely,” she said, in a whisper.
He placed the bottle in the back of the medicine cabinet, which smelled like old Band-Aids and nail polish and the bubblegum scent of kids’ Tylenol. It comforted him. He thought of Katie leaning forward as she reached behind him to light a candle, her breast bumping his shoulder.
“Me, too,” he said.
SANDRA
Trenton, Minna, and Caroline are locked in separate bathrooms. And not one of them is even taking a piss.
Trenton’s shaking out pills into his palm again, like maybe the number magically doubled in the past two hours. Caroline dials and hangs up. Dials and hangs up.
And Minna is in the bathroom with the FedEx man.
It reminds me of an old nursery rhyme I used to like: The king was in his counting house, counting out his money; the queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey. The maid was in the garden, hanging up the clothes . . .
I always thought it was kind of a fun story. All those people, busy with different work, happy—except for the poor maid, who gets her nose pecked off by a blackbird.
But really, they’re all just shut up in different rooms, trying to keep busy so they won’t notice they’re alone. Just like the Walkers in their big old house, everyone locked up behind closed doors and only speaking to each other through the walls.
Everyone waiting for a blackbird. Or for the roof to collapse.
Yes, Minna says. Yes. Yes.
ALICE
“Close your eyes, Vivian,” I say—an automatic command, and a stupid one, since I know she can’t. Minna’s backside, bare, is cupped in the sink; the FedEx man’s fleshy fingers are squeezing her skin. I wish I could give her a sharp poke. But I don’t have that kind of control. Not yet.
“My name isn’t Vivian,” the new ghost says. “And I know what sex is.”
“Newbie,” Sandra says. “Tell Alice to stop being a prude.”
“I’m not a prude.” I’m tired of Sandra’s abuse. Tired of Minna’s feet kicking in the air, and the sight of the FedEx man’s navy blue pants. Tired of all the Walkers, and the constant buzzing presence of their needs and smells and voices and aliveness—a sensation like mosquitoes zapped to death in our light fixtures, ants running over our cabinets, termites chewing us slowly, from the inside out.
I came so close to release. Never, in all the years of my death, have I been closer than I was in those few minutes, with the flames spreading, building warmth through our body, and the smoke like a gentle hand, pushing away memory, pushing away thought.
“Everyone needs a little action sometimes. You know, they used to treat women for hysteria by setting them up with vibrators. A little orgasm now and again . . . ”
“Ew,” Vivian says.
If only the fire had spread. “It amazes me,” I say, “that your stupidity only seems to increase with time.” I say to Vivian, “Tell Sandra that her stupidity—”
“I’m not Vivian.”
“Did you ever have a vibrator?” Sandra says to me, obviously enjoying herself. Minna slips; the FedEx man grunts and adjusts his grip. Her face is strained, rigid, like someone in the rictus of death. “It might have helped, you know. It might have shaken you loose, given you a little kick. Maybe then you wouldn’t be such a sourpuss all the time.”
“I had a husband.” Minna is moaning now, a low, guttural sound. Her mouth forms a single word, again and again. Please. Please. Please. I think of Ed, and of Thomas, and of mornings when the nausea was a fist, punching up my breakfast, doubling me over the toilet.
“Right,” Sandra scoffs. “A husband. A lampshade! Don’t pretend you loved him.”
“I would be more inclined to listen to you,” I say, “if you’d had a lasting relationship with anyone—with anything—other than a bottle. How long was it before someone found your body? Was it two days? Or three?”
For a moment, Sandra is silent. In the quiet, Minna gasps, and the FedEx man grunts, and pushes, and says any second now.
“It was three days,” Sandra says quietly. “And you’re right, Alice. You’re absolutely right. You had a husband. You had a daughter. You had a lover, too, before Maggie was born. Thomas, wasn’t it?” Her voice is very low, very deliberate, and somehow I can sense what’s coming, and I want to say don’t; please, don’t; but these words don’t come, either.
And so she says it, still in that same lullaby voice, the question we have sworn, by silent agreement, that she would never ask—in the bathroom the FedEx man begins to howl, and Minna squeezes her eyes shut and digs her nails into his back and says don’t, no, don’t.
“What happened to his child, Alice?”
Rooms. Rooms I have loved in, walked in, remembered, mourned:
The narrow tiles of our bathroom floor in Boston, and steam rising from the bathtub, and my mother’s arms, bare to the elbow.
My childhood bedroom, and the dolls clustered on the narrow shelf above my bed, and playing mommy to each of them in turn.
The coat hanger and the pills; the bathroom floor spotted with blood; cottonseed drifting through the open window and settling like snow in the sink.
PART VIII
THE LIVING ROOM
MINNA
Normally Minna felt calmer after sex, empty, like the world after a blizzard—almost as if she didn’t exist at all. But tonight she was full of a deep ache. He had been awful—Gary, Jerry, whatever his name was—but they were all awful, and she knew the ache wasn’t physical. It was in her teeth and hair and breathing. It was the ache of something breaking apart, the covering of ice that she depended on, the layers of snow that kept her true self buried deep underground, warm, protected.
Toadie, Danny, still hadn’t called her back. She must have left him fifteen messages by now, apologizing, then joking, then apologizing again. Nothing. She couldn’t have said why it was so important. She was plagued by the continuous sense that she had forgotten something, had failed to do something critical. She triple-checked the arrangements for the memorial service. She imagined she heard Amy shouting, worried she’d forgotten to make her lunch, or give her a bath or her vitamins. Minna signed on to check her bank accounts twice a day, worried that her emergency savings had evaporated—not that she had much of anything to begin with. She set down her sunglasses and instantly forgot where she put them. She turned her phone on and off, and even had h
er mother send her a text to make sure her messages were working.
But the nagging feeling persisted. Something was wrong. Something was missing.
She’d been taking too much Valium—she was nearly out. She shook one of the remaining pills into her palm and swallowed it down with a sip of red wine. Vintage Bordeaux. The good stuff. The house was stocked: trays of cold cuts, carefully wrapped under thin films of plastic; bottles of gin and whiskey and vodka, arranged in neat rows in the dining room; platters of crescent-shaped cookies and sweaty-looking cubes of cheese; tinfoil trays of lasagna.
And cards—cards addressed in handwriting Minna didn’t recognize, sent from people she didn’t know, all bearing the same combination of words, sorry, and loss, and grieving, all words that seemed by now to her foreign and meaningless, almost inappropriate. She wanted it over and done. She wanted to get home. She thought she would fire Dr. Upshaw, her therapist, or break up with her, or whatever you did with shrinks.
There had been no healing, no demons laid to rest. There had been two bad fucks, a failed kiss, and a fire.
She felt no closer to her father, and even further from her mom and brother.
It was after eleven p.m. by the time Minna finished organizing the flower arrangements, mopping the floors, counting folding chairs, setting up the guest book, and threading a chain across the stairs to prevent guests from accessing the upper floors. She checked in on Amy for the fifth time—she was asleep, bundled in a sleeping bag on the floor of the now-empty study, her hair, still wet from her bath, scattered over the pillow. She’d been thrilled when Minna had told her they would have to camp downstairs for a bit. The upstairs bedrooms still reeked of smoke, and leaks came through the ceilings, where blackened holes and cracks as thick as a finger had appeared.
Trenton had set up in the basement—Minna didn’t know how he could stand it, and knew he was only proving a point, to get as far from Minna and their mom as possible. So much the better. She didn’t trust him. There was something different about him since the accident, a look, a way of speaking, a desperateness she couldn’t identify, and it was only getting worse. Her mom wouldn’t see it. She never did. But he needed help.
They all needed help.
She went through the house, shutting off lights. Downstairs, she heard the muffled sounds of explosions—Trenton was probably playing that video game he liked, the one where you got points for shooting librarians and policemen. She closed the basement door firmly without bothering to call down to him, and the sounds of gunfire were silenced.
The smell of smoke was still following her. She kept imagining flames behind every closed door, smoke billowing down the staircase.
She wouldn’t take another Valium. Not yet, when she had so few left.
In the living room, she switched on a lamp and almost screamed. Her mom was sitting in an armchair in the corner, totally still, in front of a bottle of Jameson.
“Jesus Christ, Mom.” Her heart was racing. “What are you doing?” She registered that her mom had been sitting in the dark, apparently for a long time. Her eyes were very red. When Caroline brought a cigarette to her lips, Minna saw she was shaking. “You don’t even smoke.”
“I smoke sometimes,” Caroline said, and she flicked her ashes inexpertly into a heavy crystal tumbler Minna had set out earlier for guests of the memorial, which was posed next to the bottle on a leather ottoman. Caroline had poured her whiskey into one of the tall water glasses, no ice.
“No, you don’t,” Minna said, crossing the room to haul open the window. No wonder she had smelled smoke. “And you don’t drink whiskey, either.” Her mother stuck to vodka—colorless, odorless, like a South American poison in an old murder mystery that kills before anyone realizes it’s been administered.
“Tonight calls for whiskey,” Caroline said and tipped a little more into her glass. “Do you want some?”
“No,” Minna said automatically. The wind smelled like wild heather and rain—a sweet smell that brought back a memory of getting caught in a downpour with her dad outside the supermarket; how they’d run together, laughing, sloshing through puddles that had sprung up in a moment, how the paper bags had gotten soaked through, collapsed, and they’d scattered groceries as they ran. She was tired. And she did want a drink. Badly. She turned away from the window. “Yes. I’ll get a glass.”
She returned to the dining room and took a tumbler from the sideboard—then, thinking better of it, she grabbed one of the tall glasses and used the tumbler instead for retrieving ice from the freezer. When she got back to the living room, her mom had lit another cigarette.
Minna sat down on the floor next to the ottoman. Her thighs ached, and her breasts from where Gary, or Jerry, had mauled them. But sitting cross-legged, barefoot, in front of her mom made her feel like a kid again and reminded her of childhood Christmases. There had been plenty of Christmases out in California, when they’d gone to church in sandals and T-shirts, opening presents while palm trees hailed them from outside. But nothing compared to the Christmases in Coral River, when the world was blotted out by white, and Trenton toddled through layers of discarded wrapping paper like an explorer fording a river.
The whiskey tasted awful, but left a good feeling in her stomach: a slow spread of warmth, a flushed feeling, like when someone really good-looking leaned in and touched your lower back. It had been a long time since she’d felt that way when a man touched her.
Maybe it had been forever.
They drank in silence for a bit. Minna’s head began to feel pleasant and clouded.
“I was thinking about your father,” Caroline said, out of nowhere. She was staring out the window. “I was thinking of what I would say tomorrow.”
“Tell the truth,” Minna says.
“How can I?” she said. “He was a cheater. And a liar. He was selfish.” She shook her head. “But there were times . . . I do think he loved us. He did love us, in his way. As much as he could. I’m sure of it.” Her voice broke.
Minna said nothing. She wasn’t sure of it and had never been. Her throat was tight, and it was difficult to get the whiskey down.
“He was so proud of you.” Caroline’s words were getting slurry. “You and Trenton. When the accident happened . . . I couldn’t even tell your father. He was already sick. It would have broken his heart.”
“I doubt it,” Minna said. She reached back through the cloud, through the fog, trying to resurrect memories of her father; but instead she kept picturing Mr. Hansley, and his wrinkled chino pants, and his soft voice whispering in her ear—“That’s it, Minna. Just like that. Beautiful,” as he rocked his erection against her back, and she sat stiff and terrified, moving nothing but her hands—playing Chopin’s Étude in C Major, Bach’s Concerto no. 7, as though she could escape up and out through the music.
Minna poured out more whiskey and was surprised to see they were already halfway through the bottle. She wanted to forget Mr. Hansley. She tried to press him back into the soft darkness of her mind, as she had tried then to ignore what was happening, to deny it—but he stayed, and his hardness stayed, resolute and undeniable, like an accusatory finger pointing at her, marking her.
Her father should have known. He should have protected her.
She had never once, in all her life, allowed herself to think the words—but they were there, suddenly, and she knew she was going to cry.
Caroline was still talking. “He called me every week, just to see how you were doing. You and Trenton. Sometimes he called every day.”
“Why didn’t he call me, then?” Minna turned to the window, too, fighting the squeeze in her throat, the sharp sudden pain behind her eyes. She took another long sip of whiskey. It didn’t taste so bad anymore. It eased the tightness in her throat, too.
“He probably knew you wouldn’t pick up,” Caroline said. “You’re busy. He knew that.”
The window showed an indistinct reflection of the lamp and Minna’s face, her eyes carved into black hollows. Out
side, beyond the screen, she could hear the low song of crickets in the grass. What the hell did they sing for, she wondered? Probably something to do with mating. But it sounded like mourning to her.
“I got fired, Mom,” Minna blurted out. She didn’t turn to look at her mom’s face. She couldn’t stand it. She closed her eyes quickly and listened to the cricket song, constant as a tide, in and out, rising up to meet the darkness; bringing darkness down into the song. “I was screwing the accounts manager. My boss found out. Against company policy.”
“Minna . . . ” Caroline started to say.
But Minna found she couldn’t stop, now that she had started to speak. The words, too, were like a tide, long suppressed, suddenly rolling out of her. “Remember when I worked at SKP? There it was the mail guy. And one of the interns.”
“Minna, you really don’t need to—”
“You want to know why Trenton hates me?” Minna turned, finally, to her mom. Caroline was framed perfectly by the lamplight, stiff-white, horrified, like an actress in a play. “Family weekend. Remember family weekend? I told you I ran into an old friend so you put Amy to bed. But I didn’t. I didn’t run into anybody. I—I went back to the dorms with one of the seniors. Conrad. He was only eighteen.” She looked down at her hands. Her cheeks were burning, but she was surprised when she saw tears appear suddenly on her palms. She didn’t know when she had started to cry.
“Trenton doesn’t hate you,” Caroline said.
Still the words were coming. And the tears, too. Minna couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. It must have been years. But it was like all that frozen stuff had finally cracked open, and now everything was running, pouring, bleeding out, like the ground during the first big thaw of the year. “I slept with Danny’s best friend at prom. In the bathroom. I slept with a taxi driver once, in college. He was taking me to a friend’s house for Christmas Eve, over break.” The crickets were still singing; the note was swelling higher, louder, like a wave about to break. Like the high notes at the end of Bach’s Solo for Cello in G Major: one of her favorite pieces of music. “And I hated piano. I hated Mr. Hansley. He used to—rub against me when I played. He made me put my hands on him. He made me put my hands all over him.”