“I’m not Vivian.”
“Did you ever have a vibrator?” Sandra says to me, obviously enjoying herself. Minna slips; the FedEx man grunts and adjusts his grip. Her face is strained, rigid, like someone in the rictus of death. “It might have helped, you know. It might have shaken you loose, given you a little kick. Maybe then you wouldn’t be such a sourpuss all the time.”
“I had a husband.” Minna is moaning now, a low, guttural sound. Her mouth forms a single word, again and again. Please. Please. Please. I think of Ed, and of Thomas, and of mornings when the nausea was a fist, punching up my breakfast, doubling me over the toilet.
“Right,” Sandra scoffs. “A husband. A lampshade! Don’t pretend you loved him.”
“I would be more inclined to listen to you,” I say, “if you’d had a lasting relationship with anyone—with anything—other than a bottle. How long was it before someone found your body? Was it two days? Or three?”
For a moment, Sandra is silent. In the quiet, Minna gasps, and the FedEx man grunts, and pushes, and says any second now.
“It was three days,” Sandra says quietly. “And you’re right, Alice. You’re absolutely right. You had a husband. You had a daughter. You had a lover, too, before Maggie was born. Thomas, wasn’t it?” Her voice is very low, very deliberate, and somehow I can sense what’s coming, and I want to say don’t; please, don’t; but these words don’t come, either.
And so she says it, still in that same lullaby voice, the question we have sworn, by silent agreement, that she would never ask—in the bathroom the FedEx man begins to howl, and Minna squeezes her eyes shut and digs her nails into his back and says don’t, no, don’t.
“What happened to his child, Alice?”
Rooms. Rooms I have loved in, walked in, remembered, mourned:
The narrow tiles of our bathroom floor in Boston, and steam rising from the bathtub, and my mother’s arms, bare to the elbow.
My childhood bedroom, and the dolls clustered on the narrow shelf above my bed, and playing mommy to each of them in turn.
The coat hanger and the pills; the bathroom floor spotted with blood; cottonseed drifting through the open window and settling like snow in the sink.
PART VIII
THE LIVING ROOM
MINNA
Normally Minna felt calmer after sex, empty, like the world after a blizzard—almost as if she didn’t exist at all. But tonight she was full of a deep ache. He had been awful—Gary, Jerry, whatever his name was—but they were all awful, and she knew the ache wasn’t physical. It was in her teeth and hair and breathing. It was the ache of something breaking apart, the covering of ice that she depended on, the layers of snow that kept her true self buried deep underground, warm, protected.
Toadie, Danny, still hadn’t called her back. She must have left him fifteen messages by now, apologizing, then joking, then apologizing again. Nothing. She couldn’t have said why it was so important. She was plagued by the continuous sense that she had forgotten something, had failed to do something critical. She triple-checked the arrangements for the memorial service. She imagined she heard Amy shouting, worried she’d forgotten to make her lunch, or give her a bath or her vitamins. Minna signed on to check her bank accounts twice a day, worried that her emergency savings had evaporated—not that she had much of anything to begin with. She set down her sunglasses and instantly forgot where she put them. She turned her phone on and off, and even had her mother send her a text to make sure her messages were working.
But the nagging feeling persisted. Something was wrong. Something was missing.
She’d been taking too much Valium—she was nearly out. She shook one of the remaining pills into her palm and swallowed it down with a sip of red wine. Vintage Bordeaux. The good stuff. The house was stocked: trays of cold cuts, carefully wrapped under thin films of plastic; bottles of gin and whiskey and vodka, arranged in neat rows in the dining room; platters of crescent-shaped cookies and sweaty-looking cubes of cheese; tinfoil trays of lasagna.
And cards—cards addressed in handwriting Minna didn’t recognize, sent from people she didn’t know, all bearing the same combination of words, sorry, and loss, and grieving, all words that seemed by now to her foreign and meaningless, almost inappropriate. She wanted it over and done. She wanted to get home. She thought she would fire Dr. Upshaw, her therapist, or break up with her, or whatever you did with shrinks.
There had been no healing, no demons laid to rest. There had been two bad f**ks, a failed kiss, and a fire.
She felt no closer to her father, and even further from her mom and brother.
It was after eleven p.m. by the time Minna finished organizing the flower arrangements, mopping the floors, counting folding chairs, setting up the guest book, and threading a chain across the stairs to prevent guests from accessing the upper floors. She checked in on Amy for the fifth time—she was asleep, bundled in a sleeping bag on the floor of the now-empty study, her hair, still wet from her bath, scattered over the pillow. She’d been thrilled when Minna had told her they would have to camp downstairs for a bit. The upstairs bedrooms still reeked of smoke, and leaks came through the ceilings, where blackened holes and cracks as thick as a finger had appeared.
Trenton had set up in the basement—Minna didn’t know how he could stand it, and knew he was only proving a point, to get as far from Minna and their mom as possible. So much the better. She didn’t trust him. There was something different about him since the accident, a look, a way of speaking, a desperateness she couldn’t identify, and it was only getting worse. Her mom wouldn’t see it. She never did. But he needed help.
They all needed help.
She went through the house, shutting off lights. Downstairs, she heard the muffled sounds of explosions—Trenton was probably playing that video game he liked, the one where you got points for shooting librarians and policemen. She closed the basement door firmly without bothering to call down to him, and the sounds of gunfire were silenced.
The smell of smoke was still following her. She kept imagining flames behind every closed door, smoke billowing down the staircase.
She wouldn’t take another Valium. Not yet, when she had so few left.
In the living room, she switched on a lamp and almost screamed. Her mom was sitting in an armchair in the corner, totally still, in front of a bottle of Jameson.
“Jesus Christ, Mom.” Her heart was racing. “What are you doing?” She registered that her mom had been sitting in the dark, apparently for a long time. Her eyes were very red. When Caroline brought a cigarette to her lips, Minna saw she was shaking. “You don’t even smoke.”