“Close the door,” he called over his shoulder as he disappeared inside.
Abby followed and closed the street door as best she could, but it was so warped by humidity and layers of old paint that it barely fit in its frame. Then she followed Riley into the dim interior.
Old Charleston houses were everything you didn’t want in a coastal home: they were big, they were uninsulated, and they were made of wood. They cost a fortune to maintain, but if you owned one you cared more about living south of Broad than you did about money. Besides, shabby chic was the order of the day. Every downtown house’s exterior looked exactly the same: neatly painted white columns, shining coats of fresh paint on the exterior walls, glossy black shutters pinned back from the windows, scrolled wrought-iron fences and gates enclosing microscopic front yards. But every interior, hidden from public view, was its own secret study in decay. Ceilings sagged, walls cracked, paint blistered, plaster peeled, sometimes down to the lath, but the owners just shrugged and walked around the holes in their floors, or ate in the kitchen if the dining room ceiling had collapsed. Families of humans coexisted peacefully with families of raccoons living in the walls, and when fires were lit for the first time in winter, the pigeons living in the chimneys asphyxiated and dropped down the flues in swirls of sooty feathers. The help constantly swept the floors to pick up the flakes of lead paint that rained from the ceilings. Plaster dust showered onto plates at dinner parties when someone walked across the floor upstairs. Doors couldn’t be opened because the keys had been lost years ago or the locks had rusted shut. The right kind of people endured these inconveniences without complaint because, if they didn’t, it was a sure sign they had no business owning a real Charleston house after all.
Abby entered the dark front hall, just as Riley’s broad back disappeared toward the kitchen. She stepped over a rolled-up carpet and followed him into the dining room. A hole in the ceiling over the mahogany table showed the raw cedar joists holding up the second floor, and the china and crystal in its breakfront rattled and chimed as she walked across the uneven floor. Then she was pushing through the swinging doors and entering the bright back kitchen.
The light hurt her eyes. This was the one renovated part of the house, along with a rear addition that had central air. Riley was sitting at the sleek white island, eating a banana and a jar of peanut butter with a knife. A copy of Hustler was open on the counter in front of him.
“What?” he asked.
“Spoons,” Abby said. She clanked open the overloaded drawer next to the buzzing refrigerator, yanked it past the point where it stuck, and grabbed two mismatched spoons. She threw them in the bag with the Frusen Gl?djé, then slammed the drawer closed with her hip.
“Don’t be long,” Riley said, studying his Hustler with peanut-
butter-sticky fingers. “I’m not supposed to let anyone see her.”
“When’s your mom coming back?” Abby asked.
Riley shrugged and turned another page, revealing a woman in too much makeup displaying her vagina. Abby went out of her way not to look. She walked past Beau’s pillow, where the Irish setter looked up at her, shivering, and headed up the servants’ stairs at the back of the house, balancing her bag and the flowers, the spoons clinking against each other as she went.
The stairs were steep, dark, and narrow; a long-ago fire had caused smoke damage that scaled the avocado-green walls. Abby emerged in the high-ceilinged upstairs hall and walked toward the front of the house, the wood floors creaking all the way; finally, she pushed open the massive door to Margaret’s room.
The curtains were shut, the room was dark, and it was dank with the humid smell of sickness.
“Margaret?” Abby called into the shadows.
The bed was an enormous pile of blankets and tangled sheets, slept in but empty, glowing white in the dimness. Abby picked her way toward the bathroom, where a nightlight was burning, and then jumped when the bedsheets spoke:
“M’Riley?”
Abby froze.
“Margaret?” she asked.
“Abby?” Margaret sounded as surprised as she could muster with her weak voice.
“I brought Frusen Gl?djé,” Abby said, holding up the bag in the darkness, hoping that Margaret could see her from wherever she was. “And spoons. We have one mission: to eat all this ice cream.” Then she told a merciful lie, one she hoped would put Margaret in a receptive mood: “Wallace asked me to bring you flowers. They’re carnations, of course, which is exactly what he would pick.”
“Why’re y’here?” Margaret moaned, and the sheets thrashed.
“Because you’ve been out of school for weeks.” Abby walked over to the bed and reached under the tasseled shade of a bedside lamp. “And even though you’re mad at me, you’re still my friend.”
She clicked on the light and immediately wished she hadn’t.
“Oh,” Abby said. When she couldn’t think of anything else to say, she said it again. “Oh.”
Margaret was a yellowed bone buried in dirty sheets. A withered thing, lying weak and helpless, eyes E.T.-sized, face gaunt. Her hair was as colorless as her eyes, and it was thin and started high on her forehead; Abby could see too much scalp. Thick foam was caked in the corners of Margaret’s mouth. She blinked in the light, and greasy tears slid from her eyes.
“Wallace didn’t . . . give you anything,” Margaret rasped. “Quit being . . . so fucking nice . . . all the time . . .”
When Margaret spoke, Abby saw a gray fuzz coating her tongue. She looked away, trying to focus on something—anything—else.
“I got poisoned . . . ,” Margaret rasped. Then she dragged a skeleton’s claw from beneath the blanket, the bones barely covered with skin, fingernails growing into calcified talons as her cuticles retreated. “Someone . . . poisoned me . . .”
In Abby’s mind, the pieces slot-machined into place. She set down the carnations and took one of Margaret’s ice-cold hands.
“Was it the German milkshake?” she asked.
Margaret gagged and Abby saw every tendon in her cheeks flex.
“Don’t talk . . . ,” Margaret gasped as her throat spasmed.
“. . . about food . . .”
“But you have to eat,” Abby said. “You look like an Ethiopian.”
Margaret’s watery eyes focused on the plastic capsule of Frusen Gl?djé. Her tongue snaked out and slid over chapped lips. Her shoulders hunched, her skull lifted, and for a second it looked like she was going to sit up, but then she flopped her enormous, fragile head back down onto her pillows. Fecal air puffed out from beneath the pile of blankets.
“They want it to . . . pass through my system,” Margaret said. “But I’m . . . hungry . . .”
“And here I am with Frusen Gl?djé,” Abby said, smiling. “It was meant to be. Just a spoonful.”
Margaret was too weak to nod, so Abby went to the vanity and dragged the frilly white piano bench to the side of the bed and sat down. She cracked the top of the plastic pint and then peeled back the white film, setting it faceup on the bedside table. Instantly, the cold, snowy smell of ice cream filled the sweaty room.
Margaret’s lips slid up to reveal her teeth. They looked huge compared to the rest of her sunken face, and Abby realized she was trying to smile.
“Good?” Abby asked.
“Lemme jus’ . . . smell it first,” Margaret said.
Abby held the ice cream underneath Margaret’s skull nose and watched as she closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep. Margaret’s nostrils flexed slowly as she got stoned on the scent of frozen, whipped sugar. None for Abby, though. Even though her mouth was watering, she didn’t think she could keep anything down in this room.