Rooms(56)

She hadn’t cried at all since her dad died and didn’t intend to. But seeing the evidence of the fire, the birds an occasional black blot against the sun, she felt an incredible, an immeasurable grief. Amy was safe. She knew that. The doctor had told her she would be fine—no asthma even. But Minna couldn’t stop thinking about what could have happened, what had almost happened, how close they had come.

Unimaginable tragedy. She’d heard that expression, somewhere, in an article about a mother who lost her child in an accident. But Minna could imagine it, in vivid detail, and she had been ever since Trenton called her, breathless, half senseless, two nights earlier. Fire, fire. That’s all she remembered hearing, and the sharp cry of sirens in the background. Fire.

When Amy had grabbed the phone and started to sob, Minna’s knees nearly gave out. She’d always thought that was just an expression, but it wasn’t. She actually felt her legs simply stop working, like they’d been vaporized.

Still, the fear stayed with her. She’d had a dream the night before they were all on a roller-coaster ride, hurtling through the darkness, and sparks kept grinding out from under the wheels. She hated it when her subconscious churned out such obvious metaphors.

She couldn’t even masturbate. She’d tried yesterday, in bed, in the shower, even in the study, now empty of everything but furniture, thinking that might be the problem, the source of the horrible tenseness inside of her, a swollen feeling, like she was filling slowly with steam. But she couldn’t even get close. Pleasure came in a short initial wave and then petered out. She worked her own hand so hard against her body that she was left feeling raw, with a headache from gritting her teeth.

“You okay?” Toadie said. He put a hand on her arm, so his fingers grazed the inside of her elbow. She tried to pretend it excited her and turned to him, forcing a smile.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you. For helping.”

“You know I could never say no to you,” he said. He had little webbed lines by his eyes when he smiled now. He was a lot larger. But otherwise he looked just the same.

Two weeks ago she wouldn’t have said she’d been in love with Toadie in high school—prom weekend she’d ended up f*cking his friend Peter Contadino in the bathroom—but now she was beginning to think that maybe he was the only person she had ever truly loved. She was remembering all the good times: the gentleness of his touch, as if he was always afraid she might shatter; staying up on his roof to watch the sun touch everything in turn, making each house, valley, and hill real again, like God bringing nameless things out of the dark. While her parents were negotiating the terms of their separation—which was just as complex and entangled as their marriage—Minna had practically moved into Danny’s house, sleeping most nights on the pull-out sofa in his basement. She remembered how she had once woken in the middle of the night to find him sleeping next to her, shirtless, one hot arm slung around her waist, his chest pressed to her back. Thinking he finally wanted to have sex, she reached for him. But he stopped her. “You were crying in your sleep,” he’d whispered, and for a moment she was rigid with embarrassment, with fear. He had stroked her hair until she fell asleep, as if she were a child; and they had never mentioned it again.

“You got a roof guy?” Danny asked, passing her a pair of latex gloves. “I got a roof guy, if you need one.”

That was, Minna thought, the essence of Toadie. He had a roof guy. Some things never changed. She didn’t know whether it was comforting or depressing.

Maybe she could be in love with Danny again. Maybe that was it. She could fix whatever was broken, get married, learn how to fold socks and make casseroles or whatever normal wives did. She tried to imagine living with Danny, staying with him, but could call up nothing but an image of his bedroom when they were teenagers—the rumpled NY Rangers sheets and plastic blinds, the mason jar full of sea glass he’d had on his windowsill since he was a kid.

Just like she couldn’t really picture screwing him. She’d decided she would screw him, she should; it was only right. Like old times, except in the old times they’d never done more than kiss and fumble around. But he wasn’t gay. He was recently separated; he had a daughter a little older than Amy. So that was okay; he could obviously get it up.

But she just couldn’t picture it. Whenever she tried, she imagined only a blur of flesh, and an amalgam of various men and places and bedrooms: pink fleshy stomachs and sweating hands and the sounds of panting.

“What happened, anyway?” Danny moved away from her. “It looks like something . . . exploded.” He craned his neck to look at the hole in the roof. “Nice view, at least.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Trenton wouldn’t give me a straight answer.” She felt it again, the steam pressure of anger with nowhere to go.

(I was with a friend, Trenton had said, and Minna had said, What friend? You have no friends. And he’d shut up and stared at her, wounded and reproachful, as if she’d done something wrong.

After a minute, he’d blurted, It was a séance.

And she had felt a fist in her chest, in her throat, everywhere. How long had it been building up? She couldn’t keep track. A séance, she repeated, and he looked away. For what? For that stupid ghost story?

It’s real, he said, his voice getting high-pitched. It’s real, Minna.