Rooms(34)

Almost without realizing it, he sat up and extended a hand to her, the way he would have done with a stray animal.

There was a loud crack, then the sound of splintering glass. Trenton ducked, cursing. His first thought was that another lightbulb had exploded, but then he remembered there were no lightbulbs in the greenhouse.

“Shit!” Minna’s voice, muffled through the thick glass walls, came to him; then she was shoving into the greenhouse from the garden, using her shoulder. That door had obviously remained unused for years and was practically rusted shut.

“What the hell?” Trenton was shaking, furious. The girl—the ghost, he thought, and then knew that it was true—was gone. Where she had been was nothing more than a narrow rectangle of light, and dust mites revolving slowly. He felt an unaccountable sense of loss.

“Oh.” Minna had finally managed to get the door open and entered, red-faced, pushing her hat back from her forehead. “Hey. I didn’t get you, did I? That f*cking thing fires to the left.”

“Get me?” Only then did Trenton understand what the cracking noise had been, just as he noticed a bullet wedged into the wooden shelf two inches from his left knee. Distantly, he heard his mom calling for them, her voice high-pitched, hysterical.

He was so angry he could hardly speak. “What the hell, Minna?” He was screaming; even he was surprised to hear it. “What the f*ck were you thinking? You could have killed me.”

“I said I was sorry,” Minna said, even though she hadn’t. She plunked down a pistol; Trenton recognized it as the one from his father’s desk, and he was even angrier that she had figured out how to load it. “It wasn’t my fault, anyway. I’m telling you, that thing—”

“Pulls to the left. Yeah. You said.” Trenton’s head was pounding. He hadn’t imagined it. He knew he hadn’t. Minna said someone had been murdered in the house. Had he really just seen her?

“I was trying to get that goddamn coyote.” Minna was still wearing the thermal shirt she liked to sleep in.

“What?” When Trenton tried to stand, he realized how stoned he was. He got a rush of black to his head.

Minna wasn’t looking at him, thank God. “It’s the size of a frigging pony. It was sniffing around the house this morning. I was worried Amy would try and pet the damn thing.”

Caroline burst through the door that connected the greenhouse to the pantry, wearing nothing but a thin bathrobe, open, over her nightgown. For one horrifying second, Trenton had a perfect view of his mom’s breasts, each shaped like the flap on an envelope, swinging loosely beneath the thin silk. He looked away quickly. “What happened? I thought I heard a shot.”

“There was a coyote,” Minna started to explain, but Caroline cut her off.

“A coyote? What about the police? Did you call them?”

Trenton looked up sharply. “The what?”

Minna stared. “What are you talking about?”

Caroline had obviously just gotten out of bed. The sheets had left faint creases, small webs, across her chest and cheek. “The police,” she said. “There’s a squad car coming up the drive.”





CAROLINE

“I don’t want them in the house,” Caroline said. “Don’t let them come into the house.” She knew she sounded hysterical but couldn’t help it.

She felt a panic attack coming on. That happened to her sometimes. Her mouth would go dry and she couldn’t breathe and her heart would beat like a dry moth in her throat, and she would know, absolutely know, that she was dying.

There had been streaks of blood in the toilet this morning—her lungs, maybe, or her liver. Ever since the doctor had lectured her about the possibility of cirrhosis, she had imagined her liver like a dying fish, gasping in the middle of a toxic oil spill.

She needed a drink. But she couldn’t drink with the police in the house. She still remembered the cop who had arrested her after she’d rear-ended that stupid woman, the way he’d hauled her roughly to the car, not caring that she was sick, not caring that Trenton was in the backseat. And the cop who’d called to tell her about Trenton’s accident—a woman, that time. He might not make it, she’d said casually, like a grocery store clerk explaining that a coupon was no longer valid.

Minna stared. “Why not?”

“I just don’t. Make them go away.” She heard the sound of car doors closing, and voices, muffled, from outside. “They have no right. We didn’t do anything. They can’t come poking around.”

“What are you afraid of? They’ll turn up a dead body?” Minna said.

Caroline couldn’t tell her daughter that she had a sense that the police were here about the woman—Adrienne, to whom Richard had left all that money. She couldn’t stand to hear the woman’s name spoken out loud again.

Late last night, Caroline had taken Minna’s laptop into her room and spent hours clicking through links and search bars, looking for pictures, articles, anything related to an Adrienne Cadiou in Toronto. The weight of the darkness, the weak blue light—it had made her feel comforted, somehow, like being in a bubble.

And yet at the same time, she was terrified Minna or Trenton would wake up and find her, and every time the house moved or the radiators hissed, she froze, hands hovering over the keyboard. She wondered if this was how Richard had felt reading porn, or watching it, later, on their shared computer. But no. He had not been embarrassed. Sometimes he even left the videos up, so that when she sat down to type an e-mail—painstakingly, with many errors, because she had never been a fast typer—she was surprised by the sudden vision of labias as pink as orchid blooms, or breasts like Minna’s were now, hard as bowls. She suspected he did it deliberately, to punish her.