Rooms(38)

It was then—in the car, as he explained about the pen and why he wasn’t at war, when he had to tilt his left ear toward me so that I could give him directions to the house and twice made the wrong turn, anyway—that I began to love him.

Do you think that’s unrealistic? That this, too, is a story I made up after the fact? To justify and excuse, perhaps—to make sense of everything that came after? Maybe. But it happens—every day, for someone.

Take little Annie Hayes, for example. Two days after the search, it was discovered that she’d been hiding in the cellar of the local pharmacist. His eight-year-old son, Richard Kelly, had been sneaking her chestnuts and milk from the kitchen all week, and they were plotting to run away together. A month earlier, he’d given her free ice cream at the counter of his father’s shop, and she had decided it was love.

Both children were whipped, of course. But Annie did, finally, grow up to marry the pharmacist’s son, and in the spring of ’52, when I had not spoken to Thomas in nearly a decade, I threw handfuls of rice at the new Mrs. Annie Kelly and tilted my face up to the sun to watch it scatter.





SANDRA

Memory is as thick as mud. It rises up, it overwhelms. It sucks you down and freezes you where you stand.

Thrash and kick and gnash your teeth. There’s no escaping it.

Down.

In Georgia, the mud was thick and dark as oil.

Down.

I remember my dad scraping his shoes on the rusted shoe box he inherited from his father, who I met only once, and who had chins like fat rolls of sausage; and my mother, vibrating like a plucked string, hitting high notes of rage, whenever he forgot and tracked mud across the floor.

And further down:

My friend Cissy’s housekeeper, Zulime, smearing cold mud on my arms swollen with poison oak, telling me to hush, now.

The flood of 1987, and the wash of water and silt thundering down the lawn from the river, and the poor turtle on the front porch.

Down and down, until all that’s left is the memory of ghosts.

Trenton’s been slinking around outside, spying, because the cops aren’t gone three minutes before he sticks his head back into the greenhouse. Caroline has gone inside, probably reloading on the sauce. Minna is just standing there, leaning against the shelves, eyes closed, birds twittering through the broken ceiling, sunlight slanting hard as knives.

“What did they want?” Trenton says, trying to act casual.

“Some girl disappeared,” Minna says, without opening her eyes, “from Boston.”

Trenton’s a little less wound up than he was before. His face isn’t so cigarette-ash gray. “Boston? So what’re they doing out here?”

“I don’t know.” She straightens up. “Hey—do you remember Danny Topornycky? Toadie?” Minna waits for Trenton to respond, which he doesn’t. “Forget it. You were too young.”

“What about him?” Trenton says.

“Nothing. He’s a cop now, that’s all. We just ran into him.” She picks at her thumbnail with her teeth. “I always really liked Danny.”

“Don’t,” Trenton says, shoving his hands in his pockets and making for the pantry door.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just don’t.” Then he stops, suddenly, and pivots. “Wait. He’s a cop?”

“Yeah. So?” It’s Minna’s turn to play sullen.

Trenton licks his lips, which are dry, full of flaking skin. “You . . . you have to do me a favor.”

“Do I?” But then: “What is it?”

“That person . . . ” he says. “The person who was shot in the house . . . ?”

Minna rolls her eyes. “That’s just a story, Trenton. I don’t even know if it—”

“Just find out, will you?” he says. “Just find out when, and, and . . . who. I’m just . . . curious, okay? Just ask him. For me.”

Minna sighs. “All right,” she says. “I’ll ask. But that was years and years ago. He may not know.”

“He saw her,” Alice whispers, awed. “I told you. He saw her.”

“But he thinks she’s me,” I say. That gives me a nice, long laugh.

Martin better be ready.

I wonder whether he still fiddles with his watch when he’s nervous, whether he still wears socks to his knees, whether his laugh still sounds the same: like a quick explosion.

I wonder whether he kept the letters. Probably burned or shredded them. He knew what I could do, what I would do, if I’d had the chance. He’d fed me nothing but lie after lie until I was choking on them, like one of those geese that gets cream shoved down its throat.

I wonder whether he still does his shopping at Gristedes, and whether it even still exists.

I first met Martin over the watermelons. That’s not one of those expressions, either, that means something dirty even though it doesn’t sound like it. I used to like going to the grocery store, even when I didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

I liked the way the vegetables were all laid out like jewelry in a velvet-lined case: cabbages tucked neatly next to shiny red peppers next to cucumbers next to lettuce, all of it misted over, regular, with a fine spray of water. Sometimes on hot days I’d go to the store just to bend down and put my face over the lettuce and inhale, let the water hit the back of my neck and shoulders, and pretend I was nothing but a cabbage, or a flower in a greenhouse—with nothing to do but be cared for.