Rooms(49)

The afternoon lengthened and sharpened, too, like a microscope had been adjusted; the sun, the drinks, the coolness of the house every time I went inside to pee. I told Maggie about where I worked, the Rivers Center for Psychiatric Development, and about the kooks and the weirdos my boss researched: phobics, neurotics, psychotics, freaks of all shapes and sizes.

“It’s the liars I’d be most interested in,” she said. “What do they call it? Compulsive liars.”

“What about them?”

She stared out over the back lawn; sloping down toward the woods, it dropped suddenly into shadow where the sycamores and the oaks began. “Aren’t we all, in a way? Liars, I mean. Unable to help it.”

“Not me,” I said. “I’ve always been a straight shooter. What you see is what you get.”

“But that’s the whole point.” Her voice had softened as she got drunker. She wasn’t slurring, exactly, but where before she spoke in short staccato, now her voice was all melody. For a quick second, I thought of Georgia, and even missed it—the tip of a hat, the drawl of the postman saying hey there, little lady. “We don’t know we’re lying,” she went on. “Not about ourselves, anyway. Everything we see, everything we remember—it’s all just made up, isn’t it?”

A fly was drowning spectacularly in her half-empty glass. She went to take a sip, grimaced, and then fished the insect out with an unsteady finger.

“Looks pretty damn real to me,” I said and laughed.

We’d finished most of the bottle of gin before I got around to showing her the suitcase. I was sorry almost as soon as I did, because just like that the good times were over, and I realized—with the kind of bottlenecked clarity only a solid afternoon of drinking brings—that she was very, very drunk. Later that night, I would come upstairs and see her passed out in my bedroom, clothes on, spread-eagle, mouth open in a puddle of drool.

She was quiet as she examined the objects one by one, like she was puzzling over a crossword. I started getting impatient and made a joke about it, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

I started thinking about food, and whether I should eat something and risk killing my buzz, or whether I should just open the whiskey, which I didn’t particularly want to share. Would she notice if I refilled my glass in the kitchen? Was she too drunk to notice?

“This isn’t my father’s jacket,” she said abruptly. Her eyes were red and her mouth wet, like a wound in the center of her face. “It’s too small. Not his style, either.”

I was bored already—wishing now that I had asked her to leave, so I could open the whiskey and drink it in peace, while the shadows swallowed up the hill.

“I never really knew her,” Maggie said. A little bubble of spit had formed at the corner of her mouth.

“Who?” I asked automatically.

“My mother,” she said. “My father, either.” She was quiet for a bit, and I thought this might be a good time to excuse myself, take a pee, sneak some whiskey into my glass. She wouldn’t even notice.

But then she blurted out: “Did you know your parents?”

I knew what she meant, but I didn’t think it was the right time to tell her: about my dad playing tug-of-war with his buddy’s privates, about my mom babbling to Jesus in nonsense words behind the chipped white doors of the Holy Light Pentecostal Church, and bleaching the walls until plants withered in their vases and cats asphyxiated on our doorstep.

So I just said, “Parents are a bitch.”

That’s more or less how I’ve always felt about it, anyway. Parents teach you a lot of things, but the most important thing they teach you is this: how people will f*ck you up in the future. If they’re any good, they teach you to get used to it.

“She never said she loved me,” Maggie said. She didn’t bother to try and wipe her nose or eyes, just sat there with her thick arms useless in her lap, one hand still wrapped around her drink. “Never once.”

Something in my stomach tightened, like she’d sunk a fishing hook just below my belly button and started to pull. I never could stand the sight of crying—hadn’t cried myself since I was a little girl and Mom walloped me ten times over the head with the King James Bible after she heard me tell my cousin Richie Rodgers to “go to hell.”

And maybe it was because I was thinking of that—the old home in Georgia, and Richie, and what had happened to him—but when Maggie looked up at me, eyes big and pathetic and desperate as an animal’s, I had a sudden memory of this time when I was twelve and my uncle Ronnie took me hunting. Richie was there, too: by then fourteen, with a face like an open sore and teeth too large for his mouth and a laugh like a donkey getting kicked.

Ronnie and I split off from Richie—I don’t remember why—and halfway through the afternoon we came across a deer, and Ronnie fired like an idiot, too far to the right. Still, the deer ran for a good half a mile before collapsing. By the time we got to it, it was gasping, kicking in pain, eyes rolling up to the sky. And I remember it fixed on me for a second and I could practically hear it: kill me, it was saying. Please kill me. Ronnie was shooting with shells the size of a thumb and I knew that inside the deer, a hundred sharp-toothed pellets had exploded like shrapnel, burrowing into its organs.

I grabbed Ronnie’s shotgun and fired three times straight into the deer’s head, until it didn’t even look like a deer anymore and I knew it could feel nothing.