Rooms(19)

Minna was tired. Something kept twisting in her stomach, an alien pain; she should never have come back. She thought of calling Dr. Upshaw but knew it would just make her feel worse. She couldn’t even make it two days in the old house without cracking. Pathetic.

There had to be someone else she could call, but she couldn’t immediately think of anyone. She was half tempted to call Greg, Amy’s father, just so she’d have something to pin her anger to: nail it down, give it a name, the way she had enjoyed shoving thumbtacks into the corkboard map she’d had as a kid. Find Sweden.

But Greg was still at work, and she’d never get past his secretary. She was only allowed to call him between the hours of 7:00 and 8:00, when he was commuting back to his home in Westchester, back to his wife and his real kids, as he’d once slipped up and referred to them, and half the time he screened her phone calls, anyway. The checks still arrived regularly, though, thank God. She’d burned through four jobs in three years. Fired from two, laid off from two. She had less than two thousand dollars in her savings account.

Amy believed that her dad was a firefighter, a hero, and dead.

There was Alex, whom she’d been f*cking recently, and Ethan, who still wanted to f*ck her. But they never actually talked, not about real things. Some bullshitting over dinner, flirtation in the back of a cab, and maybe some back-and-forth in the morning, just so it didn’t feel too cheap.

She didn’t have female friends. For the most part, she didn’t trust other women, and other women certainly didn’t trust her. There had been Dana—Minna was still sorry about how that ended. Stupid. Dana’s boyfriend hadn’t even been good in bed. Kind of soggy and spongy and bland, like wet toast. She didn’t know why she had done it.

She never did.

She went downstairs to get her cell phone from the study, where she had left it, and found Trenton suctioned like a giant starfish to the carpet, dominating almost all the free space in the room, staring at the ceiling. He sat up on one elbow when she opened the door.

“What are you doing?” Minna was in the mood to get angry at someone.

“Listening,” Trenton said, and returned to his back. “Do you hear that?”

He’d probably gotten into their mom’s booze. Or maybe he was stoned. This might normally impress Minna—if Trenton had weed, it meant he actually had friends, or at least a friend, to buy it from—but today she felt nothing but a sharp surge of resentment.

Fucking Trenton. The house belonged to him now. And Trenton would go on believing their dad was some kind of misunderstood saint, and feeling superior to Minna for hating him. Maybe she should tell him about Adrienne Cadiou; she had found at least one card with Adrienne’s name on it from the stash Trenton had located earlier, and though the messages weren’t romantic, the fact that her father had kept them obviously was. She’d been hoping, after the reading of the will, that there might be some other explanation, like maybe her dad had mowed Adrienne down with his car and now she was paralyzed. Hush money.

Stupid.

She had stuffed all the cards and that disgusting lock of hair deep into a trash bag and taken it out immediately to the garage, as if it might contaminate the whole house.

“I don’t hear anything.” Minna stepped over him, nudging him in the ribs accidentally-deliberately with her foot. But he didn’t even flinch.

“I think—I think this house might be haunted,” Trenton said.

“Are you high?” Minna said. “Or just dumb?”

When Trenton blushed, even his pimples got darker. He sat up clumsily, and Minna remembered what the doctors had told her mom: that he would never have the same range of motion as before.

“Sorry,” Minna said. “Mom’s blotto. I’m a little stressed out.”

Trenton nodded, but he wouldn’t look at her. He picked at a spot on the carpet with his thumbnail. Minna, realizing that the ache had spread from her stomach into her whole body, sat in the chair the lawyer, Dennis, had vacated. The chairs were still arranged in a little circle, like the room had recently hosted a group therapy session.

After a long minute of silence, in which Minna ran an inventory of everything that hurt, from her shoulders to her knuckles to the small, calloused little toe of her right foot, Trenton looked up.

“So you don’t believe,” Trenton said.

“Believe in what?” Minna said.

Trenton looked embarrassed. “Ghosts.”

Minna couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “What is this about, Trenton?”

“We don’t know,” he said, and then she knew he wasn’t joking. “Nobody knows. You said yourself someone was murdered here.”

“That’s just a story I heard,” Minna said. “I don’t know if it’s true. And I never said she was murdered.”

“And Dad—” Trenton began.

“Dad died at Presbyterian Medical,” Minna said.

It was like Trenton hadn’t heard. “But he could be,” Trenton insisted. “He could be, I don’t know, stuck somehow—”

A sharp pain went straight through Minna’s head, like a flash going off. “If he’s stuck anywhere, it’s somewhere hotter than this,” she said, and then regretted it.

Sometimes, it felt as though the words came out of her mouth without looping in her brain first. Trenton looked so pathetic, and she had a sudden memory of little Trenton, baby Trenton, before his bones had distended his body and made it gawky and puppetlike. She remembered him crawling into her lap, accidentally putting his knee in the soft space between her ribs, just below the two mosquito-bite boobs newly formed, wrapping a fat fist around her hair, saying “Mama.” And Minna, nearly thirteen years old, had not corrected him.