Rooms(3)

“It smells,” Trenton says.

Minna takes the coffee cup from the table and moves it to the sink. She turns on the faucet, letting the flow of water break up the surface of mold and run it down the drain. She moves in electric bursts, like miniature explosions. When she was little, it was the same way. She was on the floor. Then, suddenly, she was kneeling on the countertop; then she was striking her palm—bang!—against the window.

Now she leans over and strikes the window, hard, with her palm, just the way she used to. The catch releases; the window shoots upward. The smell of Outside comes sweeping into the room. It is like a shiver, or the touch of someone’s hand.

“Did you see that?” she asks Trenton. “The trick still works.”

Trenton shrugs and puts his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt. I can’t believe that this awkward, gummy, sullen thing is beautiful, tragic Trenton, who liked to lie in the sunshine on the wooden floor of the dining room, like a cat—curled against me, cheek to cheek, the closest I have come to an embrace since I was alive.

I used to imagine, sometimes, that he could feel me hugging him back.

“Mommy.” Amy has been straining onto her tiptoes, exploring the countertop with her fingers. Now she tugs on the hem of Minna’s shirt. “Is Grandpa here?”

Minna kneels so she is eye level with her daughter. “We talked about that, sweetpea. Remember?”

Amy shakes her head. “I want to say hi to Grandpa.”

“Grandpa’s gone, Amy,” Trenton says. Minna shoots him a murderous look. She places her hands on Amy’s shoulders.

She speaks in a lullaby voice. “Remember the chapter in The Raven Heliotrope, where Princess Penelope gives up her life to save the Order of the Innocents?”

“Oh, God.” Trenton rolls his eyes. “You’re reading her that crap?”

“Did you hear that, Alice?” Sandra says to me. “Crap. No wonder it was never published.”

“I never tried to get it published,” I say, and then regret it. She’s only trying to goad me into an argument.

“Shut up, Trenton,” Minna snaps at him. Then she continues, in a soft voice: “And remember Penelope has to go away to the Garden of Forever?”

Amy nods. “To live in a flower.”

Minna kisses her forehead. “Grandpa’s in the Garden of Forever.”

Trenton snorts. Minna ignores him, stands up, and switches off the faucet. It’s a relief. We’re very sensitive to sound now. The noise of the water is thunderous. Water running through the pipes is an uncomfortable feeling, and it still fills me with anxiety, the way I used to feel when I had to go to the bathroom and was made to laugh: a fear of leaking.

“But will he come back?” Amy asks.

“What?” Minna turns around. For a moment I see that underneath the impeccable makeup, she is just as tired as anybody else.

“In Part Two, Penelope comes back,” Amy says. “Penelope wakes up. And then Prince Thomas joins forces with Sven and saves everybody.”

Minna stares at her blankly for a second. It’s Trenton who answers.

“Grandpa’s not coming back, Amybear,” Trenton says. “He’s going to stay in the garden.”

“As long as the old grout stays away from here,” Sandra says.

Of course she isn’t really worried that he’ll return. It’s just the two of us. It will no doubt always be the two of us, and the spiny staircases, and the ticking furnace, like a mechanical heart, and the mice, nibbling at our corners.

Unless I can find a way to light the fire.





MINNA

Minna hadn’t been back to Coral River in a decade. She hadn’t stepped inside the old house in even longer than that, since she’d spent the last six months of high school living with her mom and Trenton in a two-bedroom condo in Lackawanna, although in reality she’d spent most of that time staying with her first boyfriend, Toadie.

She hadn’t wanted to come back at all. She didn’t give a shit about the old place other than what it might sell for, had no use for memory lane and digging up a past that she’d deliberately left behind. But her shrink had encouraged it—recommended it, even.

“You can’t keep running, Minna,” she’d said. “You have to face your demons at some point.”

Minna liked her therapist, and trusted her, but she felt superior to her, too. Dr. Upshaw had a wide, comfortable sprawl of a body, like a human sofa. Minna sometimes imagined Dr. Upshaw having sex with her husband, lying there almost motionless, fat sticky thighs sagging on the bed, saying, “I think you’re onto something, David,” in her low, encouraging voice.

“Why?” Minna had answered, trying to make a joke.

“Because you’re not happy,” Dr. Upshaw had answered, and then Minna had remembered that Dr. Upshaw had no sense of humor.

She was right, though; Minna wasn’t happy and hadn’t been in as long as she could remember. The last guy she’d dated—she counted it as dating, since they’d gone to dinner a few times before screwing back at his place, her skirt hitched up, underwear pulled down to her knees, both of them pretending it was spontaneity rather than laziness—had turned to her once and said, “Do you ever laugh?” That was their last date. Minna had been less offended than she was irritated; she hadn’t known she was so transparent.