Rooms(65)

“Where’s Trenton?” That was his mother’s voice. “Has anyone seen Trenton?”

He shook another pill into his palm. It was very blue. It looked like a breath mint, which struck him as funny. A deadly breath mint.

Was there anything he would miss? Anything at all? Would anyone miss him?

“I’m happy,” the new ghost said. At least, he thought she said it. He couldn’t tell, anymore. Her voice was an echo, like voices he had heard before but forgotten. “I’m happy you’re coming.”

He brought the pill to his mouth. He put it on his tongue. There was a faint vibration in his pants, and for a moment he thought he might be having some kind of predeath experience, a just-before-dying erection, a final humiliation; and then he realized that his phone was buzzing, and he had a message. He worked his phone out of his pocket clumsily with one hand, spitting the pill into his other, and placing it carefully on the edge of the kitchen sink.

He was dizzy. He leaned back against the wall, blinked, made the words come into focus.

The text was from an unknown number.

“Don’t read it,” the ghost said, speaking directly into the darkest corners of his mind, speaking like a footfall that isn’t heard, but felt or intuited. He could feel her, still, even though he couldn’t see her anymore. Even though every part of her was fading. “It doesn’t matter.”

It’s Katie, the words read. They kept blinking and re-forming, disappearing and reappearing, and he had to hold the phone very steady with both hands. Where are you? I’m coming. I need to explain.

“Please don’t leave me alone, Trenton,” the ghost said; but he was reading the text again and again, feeling the words in his fingers, already imagining the smell of menthol and tobacco and wildflowers, and his head was rising out of the shadows, and he didn’t hear her.

I’m at home, he typed back, very carefully, with very clumsy fingers. I’ll wait.

Then he took another long sip of his drink, and as the guests continued flowing into the living room for his father’s memorial, he ran the faucets, bent over the toilet, and let it all come up.





SANDRA

Richard Walker is a lot more popular dead than he was alive.

We haven’t hosted this many people in years. It’s like standing in an overcrowded elevator on your way to the forty-second floor. Someone’s always farting. Too much perfume, too much bad breath, too many murmured conversations and fake smiles, too much lipstick-on-teeth, and too many men trying to scratch their balls in their suits so no one will notice.

Most of the action is in the living room, where Caroline and Minna have set up rows of chairs in front of the fireplace, with an aisle in the middle like they’re preparing for a wedding. There’s no podium, no priest—just a small standing microphone that Minna rented, a half-dozen flower arrangements, and a huge cardboard poster of Richard Walker’s face, a professional shot he must have had taken for his company. He’s tan and smiling, leaning forward like he’s about to whisper the camera a secret.

“He looked so healthy then,” a woman says, shaking her head, as if it’s his fault he started aging and stopped looking so good.

“It’s terrible,” says another woman, sipping her gin and tonic.

“Is he in there?” says a young kid as he points to a small marble urn set up on the fireplace mantel, just behind the photo of Walker smiling.

“Only his body,” the kid’s mom says, as if that should give him comfort.

The kid keeps staring, fidgeting with his jacket. “How’d they fit him in there?” he asks finally.

The woman with the gin and tonic overhears and turns, smiling, with lipstick-coated teeth. “They burned him, sweetie,” she says.

The kid begins to cry.

When I was maybe five or six years old, a woman down the street, Mrs. Gernst, got flattened by a train. When I got older, I realized it probably wasn’t an accident—it was a late train, and she was so sick and swollen with age she could barely move, so what the hell was she doing crossing the tracks at midnight on a Tuesday?—but at the time my mom only said that God works in mysterious ways, a.k.a. God will make a pancake of a sick old woman who never did harm to anybody, so what do you think he’ll do to you if you don’t clean your room and brush your teeth and mind your gospel?

Somehow—don’t ask me how—they managed to stitch and cinch and stuff her, ice her down, stick her in a big wood coffin, and put her up on display, like one of the glazed carp my dad’s friend Billy had hanging on a wooden plaque on the wall of his living room.

That’s probably my earliest memory: the funeral of Mrs. Essie Gernst. It was the first time I’d ever seen a dead person. I remember playing rummy in the back of her living room with Billy Iverson and Patty Horn during the speeches and the service, and how the whole house smelled like a combination of my dad’s old socks and the kind of powder my mom put down in our drawers and cabinets to keep the ants away.

Billy told me if I kissed Mrs. Gernst on the mouth, she would wake up. I had to do lip-on-lip, he said, and then she’d sit up and throw her arms around me and give me all her fortune—because everyone knew that Mrs. Gernst had a lot of money that she didn’t spend.

What the hell did I know? It worked in all the fairy tales.

(Cissy and I once played Prince Charming and Snow White. We were drunk on apple brandy she’d unearthed from her parents’ liquor cabinet, lying out by the creek on a big patch of deep purple moss on one of those Georgia summer days like we were living inside of a painted egg: greens and blues and bright splashes of color; everything brighter and better than real life should ever be. I was sleepy from the heat and the brandy and the slow rotation of the minutes, like even the seconds were too hot to move at normal speed. Cissy sat up on an elbow and leaned over me.