Rooms(32)

Caroline definitely did not remember that. “When?”

“I was fifteen, Ma.”

“But . . . ” What Caroline did remember was a young Minna, her hair coiled and pinned neatly to her head, her long, slender fingers skating over the keys like a shadow passing over water. She didn’t know why Minna had stopped playing. “But you were going to go to Juilliard. And Mr. Hansley said . . . ”

“Don’t,” Minna said sharply.

“Mr. Handsy?” Trenton said.

“Hansley,” Caroline correct him, before she realized that he’d been making a joke. Then she had another memory, less pleasant: coming into the piano room on a hot summer day with a pitcher of lemonade, and Mr. Hansley scooting quickly away from Minna. Hansley smiling, fiddling nervously with his glasses, talking too fast. Minna silent, staring at the keys, refusing to make eye contact.

Gripping the banister, Caroline began to climb, forcing Minna to squeeze herself against one wall so that she could pass. When Minna shifted, Amy ducked around her and barreled past Caroline.

“Amy!” Minna reached for her and then stared, exasperated, at her mother. “See what you did?” she said.

But Caroline didn’t care. She was glad to have caused Minna some minor irritation. Minna chose not to remember all the things Caroline had done for her: the calamine lotion Caroline had applied to Minna’s bug bites; the Band-Aids she’d put on Minna’s cuts; the scrambled egg soup she’d made for Minna whenever she was sick.

She didn’t remember that Caroline had tried to buffer her from the worst of Richard’s moods—his rages, definitely, but also his indifference, which seemed to fix onto an object just as strongly as his anger. Caroline could still remember thirteen-year-old Minna curled up under her blanket, shivering, blue-lipped, after Richard forgot to pick her up from a dance lesson and she’d been forced to wait for an hour and a half in the rain.

“It would be better if he hated us,” she’d said. “But he just doesn’t care.”

“He does,” Caroline had said. But even then she had felt uneasy; Minna had hit on something that for years Caroline had tried to deny. That was why she had left Richard, ultimately: she’d realized that he had loved her only because she belonged to him.

The short climb had left Caroline winded, and she paused just before the final step, trying to catch her breath. Her feet were so swollen she could see the skin swelling around the contours of her flats. She rested her head against the wall, which was cool. Her heart was going wild in her chest. Recently she had been imagining, more and more, that it would simply stop.

“Careful of the glass,” Minna was saying below. She had followed Amy down into the basement. “Don’t touch that. It’s rusty.”

“What is it?” Amy said.

“Who knows. Garbage. Trenton, a little help, please?”

“What the hell do you want me to do?”

“Don’t curse in front of Amy,” Minna said.

Caroline could feel their voices through the wall. She lifted her head. She was so tired. She didn’t know how she would make it up the last step.

“In The Raven Heliotrope,” Amy was saying, in a high, pleading voice, “the Caves of Werth are filled with treasure. Can we play pretend, Mommy?”

Caroline spoke up before Minna could answer. “There’s no treasure down there, Amy,” she said. Her voice was unexpectedly loud. “Just garbage, like Mommy said.”

She hauled herself up the final step and went to the kitchen to get a drink.





ALICE

“Are you proud of yourself?” Sandra asks.

“What do you mean?”

“You did that,” Sandra says. The new ghost whimpers—a low, animal sound. “Congratulations on a nice little show.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, even though of course I do.

She means the lightbulb—the explosion. And I am proud. I’m ecstatic. It has been many, many years—decades—since I’ve felt that kind of power.

And it gives me hope.

I’ve only seen one bad fire. I was seven or eight when a conflagration spread through our neighborhood in Boston and leaped across several houses before attacking St. John the Divine and the funeral parlor next to it; by morning, the houses were gone and the church was blackened with smoke and ash. The air stunk like melted glass and something chemical I couldn’t name, and volunteers were enlisted to bring coffins out of the wreckage. My sisters and I went down to watch the action, and in particular, to see the bodies come out: coffins covered in a layer of silt and ash, bodies bundled in tarpaulin and half burned away, bits of hair and fingernail.

The fingernails keep growing, my sister Delilah told me. The hair, too.

Someday you’ll be dead like that, my sister Olivia said. You’ll be nothing but bone and fingernail, and no one will miss you.

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.

Sandra doesn’t know about my plan for the fire. How could I tell her? If I’m right, it will be the end of us. That’s the whole point. In fiction, ghosts remain because of some entanglement with the living world, something they must do, resolve, or achieve.

I assure you that isn’t the case for me. The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I’m a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon.