If I think about the tunnel for too long, the Psychologist walks into the scene, with his electrodes and his Plácido Domingo records, and wrecks everything. These two people don’t belong together, I try to tell my memory, my unconscious mind, but it never listens and I have to put my mother’s photo away. I stay on my back and press my stomach, searching for the source of those distressing waves, and listen to the pipes in the Mansion groan.
The liquid from the eyedropper is not at all like guzzling Robitussin in the bathroom of the Stop & Shop. It makes the laws of gravity disappear. It makes my brain a blue jellyfish. It doesn’t blur the world, but vanishes it. I understand what those girls in Mission Hill meant when they talked about thinking they were going to dream forever, if that kind of absence can be called a dream.
In the Mansion, on my lesser days, I think I want to dream forever too.
*
In our room, on the second floor, Marcus and I come up with our own games to play.
A new version of hide-and-go-seek: we hide Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea around the bedroom and close our eyes and guess where it is. Before we guess we are supposed to relax our thoughts, to not think about where the object might be but feel it. We are supposed to find its energy and follow that current with our mind. Does it feel hidden under the mattress? Does it feel hidden in a corner? Does it feel hidden in a person’s hands? Does it feel sweaty? Does it feel hidden outside the window? Does it feel cold? I guess right 50 percent of the time, because there are only so many places to hide the book.
Once I pretend my mother is hiding somewhere in our room. I shut my eyes and try to feel her energy. Is she under the sheet? Standing in the corner? Behind the door? Is she sitting in the windowsill, admiring the shapes of the trees? Is she underwater or on land? Is she anywhere near me?
*
The next time I’m in the tunnel, I hear the twins.
At first, everything is the same, dark and strange and cold, but then instead of the singing, Christopher is there, or his voice is there, and telling me all about the origins of my name. Old French and Latin, popularized by Puritans in the seventeenth century. They believed it meant to be “joyful in the Lord.”
“Are you joyful in the Lord?” It sounds like he’s speaking from the bottom of a stairwell, his voice tinny and small.
I stop. I can’t go forward or back. The path around me is disintegrating again.
Where are you? I want to ask. What’s it like there?
“Everything was okay at first,” Sam says, and I wonder how I asked the question without asking the question. “But now.” He stops and I know he’s waiting for his brother to finish his sentence, like he used to in the Hospital.
“But now,” Christopher says, “we are just so bored.”
31.
The grand obituary, that is another game. We play it in bed at night, when we should be sleeping. We don’t share it with Darcie and Nelson. Here are the rules: we make up a name. This is the person who is getting the obituary. We go back and forth, adding detail after detail, until we have made the grandest obituary imaginable.
“Erica Hall,” I begin.
“Of Dover, Massachusetts,” Marcus says.
“At one hundred and thirteen years of age.”
“Passed away peacefully in her sleep, in a room overlooking the sea.”
“She battled no diseases. She felt very satisfied with life.”
“She felt she got plenty of time.”
“She is survived by three daughters and nine grandchildren.”
“She was the mayor of Dover and during her tenure she did everything right.”
“She put Dover on the map. Dover would not be Dover without Erica Hall.”
“She fed the homeless.”
“She believed in God.”
“She was a champion tennis player.”
“She traveled the world. To Africa, even.”
“She will live inside the hearts of all Doverians forever.”
I think about an obituary I once read in the newspaper, written by a woman who knew she was dying, so instead of leaving it to someone else, she wrote out her own, to be published after she was gone. In the obituary, she talked about how for a long time she was angry about dying, since she was only fifty and never smoked and it all seemed too soon, but by the time she wrote her obituary she wasn’t angry anymore. All she wanted was to share what she had learned about life.
I still remember the last lesson on her list: death will always take us by surprise.
In this game, Marcus and I are not allowed to use our own names. We will never be the recipients of a grand obituary.
My mother might.
*
The next time we’re all in the basement together, Darcie goes into the tunnel first. Marcus and I are sitting on the floor, our backs against the wall. I’m anxious for my turn to take the drops. I rest my head on Marcus’s shoulder. I roll my tongue around in my mouth. A lump of nausea grows in my stomach. We don’t hear Darcie moving in the tunnel, don’t hear the door opening, and even though there are no clocks in the Mansion, no way to be certain about the time, we start to feel sure she’s been gone for many hours.
We crack open the metal door. It feels wrong to enter the tunnel clothed and clear-headed, to go against Darcie’s rituals. To interrupt whatever it is she might be doing. The light from the basement illuminates the opening of the tunnel and I can see little black bugs squirming on the floor. We lean inside. We call Darcie’s name. There are no echoes; the tunnel swallows the sound of us.
We slam the door. We hear footsteps above and shoot up the dusty staircase. I’m thinking we’re going to have to tell Nelson that Darcie is no longer in the tunnel, that she has vanished into that unfindable place or maybe her mother’s voice has eaten her or maybe she’s had too much Grievous Bodily Harm and is collapsed by the wall with the stones hanging out like loose teeth and we were just too chickenshit to go in there and find her.
Nelson is in the living room, wearing his goggles. He is kneeling in front of the fireplace, trying to get a fire going. After it catches, he picks up a pair of tongs and uses them to push a beaker into the heat.
He isn’t the only one in the living room. Darcie is there too, fully dressed, her wings on her back.