Rooms(48)

Instantly, Adrienne’s tone changed. “Who is this?” she said carefully.

Caroline didn’t answer. One second, two seconds.

“Who is this?” Adrienne repeated. “Hello?”

“Wrong number,” Caroline said and hung up. The blood was thundering in her ears, and the room was spinning. She tried to think herself down the phone line, into the kitchen—because she was sure Adrienne had answered in the kitchen, no doubt interrupted in the middle of making lemon soufflé or chicken soup from scratch—tried to imagine the mouth pressed to the phone, the hands with their neat nails, the jeans dusted with flour. Had she and Richard met in hotel rooms? Had he gone to visit her and sat with his shoes and socks off at her kitchen table, shirt unbuttoned, drinking wine, laughing, eating the food she had cooked him?

She didn’t know. Already, she could hardly remember Adrienne’s voice. She’d been too nervous.

She redialed, pressing the phone so tightly against her jaw it hurt. This time she would say nothing.

Adrienne picked up again almost immediately. “You did it again,” she said. This time, she sounded bored.

Despite her intention to say nothing, Caroline was so startled, she spoke up. “What?”

Adrienne cleared her throat. “You dialed the wrong number again. Who’re you trying to reach?”

Caroline couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She was listening so hard, she wished she could squeeze herself into the receiver and travel the line herself.

“Is this one of Bella’s friends? If this is one of Bella’s friends, I don’t care what your parents do, but in my house prank calls get you a good old-fashioned grounding.”

“It’s not . . . I don’t know Bella,” Caroline said.

There was a short pause. “Listen,” Adrienne said. Her voice had turned fearful. “Listen. Whoever you are. Don’t call back.”

Then Caroline was listening to the dial tone again.





SANDRA

It took me nearly two weeks to track Maggie down. Back then, there was no e-this and online search—just columns of identical names, and lots of dialing and dead ends and finger cramps.

At last, I got her. She was a low-voiced woman who paused before every sentence as if she was debating whether to speak at all. Even when she picked up the phone, she paused, and I counted several seconds of heavy breathing. By the time she said hello, I was about to hang up.

Why did I call her? Why did I think it was important?

Up and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly you’ve run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then it’s oops, sorry, turn’s over.

“Are you Maggie Lundell?” I said. “From Coral River?”

“Not anymore” is what she said. Then: “How did you find me?”

“I found a turtle with your name on it,” I answered.

There was another pause. And then a sound like she was overcome with the hiccups. It took me a moment to realize she was laughing.

“I’ll be damned,” she said. “I knew he would come back.”

Maggie arrived two weeks later. How could I have known it wasn’t a good idea? That even then, Alice was waiting, watching, twitching in the walls like an overgrown cockroach?

It was a day that made me glad I’d left New York and the Lower East Side and its crusty people, with faces like moth-eaten cloth. Here it was all bluebells and honeysuckle, climbing roses and birds chasing each other across the sky—a place where nothing bad could happen.

A bit of golden dust unwinding like smoke in the sky announced her; then a wide, boxy maroon Mazda came bumping up the drive. The owner matched the car: wide and squat, with a square jaw and a thatch of bright red hair, cut short. I pinned her for queer right away.

She moved slowly, deliberately, the same way she spoke. It was only eleven a.m., but when I asked her if she wanted a soda or something to drink, she said, “Got any gin?” I liked her right away.

We sat on the deck and bullshitted for a few hours—she told me about the way the house had changed, and about the turtle she’d named Norman, and how she suspected her mother had deliberately turned him out of the house, and I told her about how I’d ended up in the middle of Buttshit, Nowhere, USA, and how glad I was. She was interested in the New York scene. She’d been living in San Francisco for three decades but had grown tired, she said, of all the “faghags.” She’d followed a job to Philadelphia after she found her last girlfriend cheating with her ex-husband—“an engineer,” she said, as if disgusted.

I didn’t blame her. I’d been with an engineer once in my life, and every time we were screwing around I felt like I was some kind of mechanical model he was trying to deconstruct or decode. Pull a wire here, twist a nob, oops, that’s not working, how about pressing this button? It’s like he expected me to start beeping and flashing a green light.

She did installation art and worked in TV production to make ends meet.

As we got deeper into the bottle, she started pausing less, talking a little freer, telling me about some of the stuff she did—trash cans inverted and made into toilets, that kind of stuff, but I’ve never been much of an art lover, and I certainly don’t know why someone would pay fifty grand for a piece of rusted metal, but whatever floats your boat. She told me, too, about the commercial work: regional stuff, mostly, although I had seen one of her TV advertisements for toilet bowl cleaner and thought it was very well done.