Rooms(72)

They sat rigidly, in silence, until Minna returned with whiskey. She had to physically remove Adrienne’s empty water glass from her hand, as though Adrienne had forgotten how to move her fingers. Caroline watched her drink. She remembered, now, that she had seen pictures of Adrienne’s daughter: a girl with a wide, frank face, freckled and grinning, like a child you would see on a commercial for pancake mix. She’d had bright blue eyes, like Richard’s. Like Trenton’s.

She remembered, too, the phone call from the police the night of Trenton’s accident; the blind drive through the dark, when the sky had seemed like a lid that might suffocate her.

People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something—the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing—remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.

Caroline stood up. Adrienne froze, as if she expected Caroline to lean across the table and strike her. But Caroline wasn’t angry anymore—not at Richard, not at Adrienne. All at once, in one second, the past and its ruin of promises and disappointments had released its hold on her. She was filled with a golden warmth that made her limbs feel loose and light; it made her forget her swollen ankles and the fact that she was not drunk enough to ward off the beginnings of a hangover.

She didn’t have to forgive him—the idea came suddenly, like a deep breath of air after a long submerging. It was all over now. She didn’t have to forgive him, and she could love him and hate him at the same time, and it was all right.

She closed her eyes and felt, for a split second, a hand pass across her neck; and in that moment she had a vision of rooms like atoms, holding a universe of secrets; and she, Caroline, gripped in the small bounded nucleus of the past.

Now she was free.

She reached across the table to take Adrienne’s hand. “It’s not your fault,” she said.

“My sister,” Trenton whispered again. This time he spoke quietly and addressed the word to the walls.





SANDRA

“I always wanted a brother,” Eva says quietly. She pauses. “Mom would never tell me anything about my dad. She said I was born from a tube. But she was lying.”

“Now you know,” Alice says softly.

“I think . . . I think that’s all I wanted,” Eva says. “To know.” In the quiet, her mother continues sniffling into Caroline’s shoulder. “I wish she wouldn’t cry. It wasn’t her fault. I know it wasn’t.” Then: “I think I’m ready now.”

“Ready for what?” I say. But she doesn’t answer. For a second, I feel her trembling like a violin string, vibrating out a high note of fear and loss. “Ready for what?” I say, a little louder.

A sharp pain goes through me, a feeling like being socked in the stomach. Alice cries out. For a second, everything goes dark. When everything comes into focus again—the dining room, the bones of our staircases and the doors like jaws that open and close—I feel lighter, and emptier, too. Like I’ve just taken the world’s most epic dump.

“Eva?” Alice whispers. No answer.

She’s gone.

“Well.” I don’t know why I feel sad about it. But I do. I’m sad and sorry and jealous, all at once. “There you have it. Vivian and Eva. That’s two out of three missing children accounted for.”

“Stop, Sandra.” Alice’s voice is shaky, like she’s the victim, like I’m the bad guy.

“It’s too late, Alice,” I say. “There’s no use in pretending anymore.”

She sucks in a deep breath: a whistle through a teakettle. “What about you?” she asks.

“Not even for me.”

There’s a moment of silence. In that minute, I can practically feel our walls coming down, slowly down, pulled earthward by the pressures of gravity and decay.

Alice says, “Why did you tell me Martin shot you? For all these years, all our years together, you lied about it. Or did you really forget?”

“Does it matter?” I haven’t felt so tired since I was alive—too tired to keep the truth back, to stuff it into dark corners and keep it shored up behind heavy walls. It comes creeping out into the open, like a mouse sniffing around a darkened house. “You knew the truth all along. You were there.”

“I was there,” Alice agrees. “I was waiting for you to remember.”

“I remembered,” I say. It hurts to speak, to think, to remember. As if we’ve been planed and sawed down into splinters—as if everything is about to fall. “I just didn’t want it to be true.”

We’re quiet for a bit. Adrienne is still staring dull-eyed as an idiot. Trenton has torn her napkin to strips. All of them so clear and sharp, like individual cardboard cutouts. In that moment I’d trade places with any of them, just to have a beginning and an end.

“Why did you do it?” Alice asks quietly.

“I don’t know,” I say, although that’s not exactly true, either. I did it for a hundred reasons and for no reason at all. Because Martin told me I needed help and I knew it was his way of saying he was getting tired of me. Because I couldn’t stand to keep drinking and I couldn’t stand to stop. Because I was so tired that even sleeping didn’t help me at all.