TRENTON
Trenton hadn’t thought that it would be so quiet. Whenever he’d pictured his suicide—which he had, many times, although he especially liked picturing the parts that came after: Minna thudding to her knees beside his body and wailing; the police swarming the house and filling the rooms with crisscrossed police tape; Caroline bloated with grief; everyone at school humbled, shaken, and girls crying in the halls, hugging themselves—he’d always imagined an accompanying soundtrack.
Now, as he fumbled and sweated in the basement and tried to figure out the fucking knot, he wished he’d thought to bring down his iPod dock. But maybe it was more tragic, more authentic, in silence. Like that old quote about the world ending with a whimper, not a bang.
Still, the silence was getting to him, because in the silence, he could hear.
Whispers. Mutters and coughs and the occasional hacking laugh, like a smoker was caught somewhere behind the walls.
Sometimes he thought he heard his name. Trenton. A bare, faint rustle, but definitely a word. Other times he heard, with sudden clarity, whole phrases, as though someone had turned up the volume in his mind. For example, he had very clearly heard a woman say: I tried talking to her already. Why don’t you try talking to her? Then the voice faded abruptly, as if whoever had spoken had passed out of earshot.
He’d spent an hour last night on his laptop, signing in again and again to the shitty Wi-Fi, researching different mental disorders. He was a little too young for schizophrenia but not that young; he thought it was probably that. Good thing he was never going back to school. Or he’d be Schizo Splooge.
He’d decided, finally, on a rope. He was still curious about the gun he’d found in his dad’s study, but he didn’t even know how to tell if it was loaded. Plus he kept thinking about what Minna had said, about the woman whose brains got splattered on the study wall.
That was the second possibility: that he wasn’t crazy. That the house was haunted. But ghosts didn’t exist, everyone knew that. Which meant that the fact he was even considering it was crazy.
Back to square one.
It was Thursday, almost twenty-four hours since he’d found out his dad had left him the house, and the first time he’d been alone since they arrived back in Coral River. His mom, who still could hardly look at him—not that she ever really looked at him—had gone with Minna and Amy to do something involving his dad’s body, which Trenton did not really want to think about. He didn’t like the idea of cremation, although he disliked the idea of burial more. Stuck forever in a box.
He guessed his body would probably be burned. He wondered whether his mom would try and get a two-for-one deal. His dad wanted his ashes buried on the property. Trenton couldn’t think of a single place he’d like to be buried. Not Eastchester, Long Island, for sure.
Maybe up here, in Coral River. He had only been six when his parents separated and Caroline moved downstate, but in some ways he’d always thought of it as home. Even though his dad never invited them up to Coral River—even though Trenton had forgotten where the cups were kept, and whether the downstairs bathroom was the first or second door on the right of the hallway, and that the study was painted a deep hunter green—other memories remained, totally vivid.
He remembered struggling behind Minna through deep snow, and breaking up ice on the creek with the blunt end of a blackened stick. He remembered summer days when he went screaming through the fields to startle the birds, and how Minna showed him how to catch toads by making a cup with his hands. He remembered: the kitchen warm and smelling like rosemary; his mother’s favorite tablecloth spotted with red wine; early spring evenings on the back porch, bundled in a blanket, raw wind on his face, and candles dancing in small conical holders.
So. Definitely here. With his dad.
He was having trouble getting the rope to knot. He’d looked this up online, too, but most of the instructions seemed to be written for people who already knew a lot about ropes. Like mariners, or people in the army. His hands were shaking a little, which wasn’t helping.
Finally he got it. Now he just had to tie off the rope to one of the pipes overhead. The back of his neck had started to sweat. He could practically feel another pimple growing there. He wondered how long it would be before Minna and his mom came back—they’d been gone at least an hour and a half. He’d heard the phone ring at some point. Maybe they were trying to reach him on the house line.
A small part of him was stalling. He thought that if he were interrupted or miraculously discovered, maybe it would be a sign that he shouldn’t do it.
But nobody came.
He found a dirty stepstool crammed in among the clutter of boxes, old trunks, and discarded furniture; he positioned it directly under one of the sturdier-looking pipes. It took him a while to maneuver onto its seat. He’d never been athletic—he’d been practically forced off his Little League team in fifth grade—and the accident had fucked with his balance. Something to do with damage to his inner ear because of all the shards of glass. He was lucky, his doctor had told him, that he wasn’t deaf.
“I’ll bet . . . won’t go through with it . . .” He heard suddenly, the words fading in and out, like a bad radio frequency.
He removed the note from his back pocket, which he had written out carefully before thinking he should have typed it, since no one could ever read his handwriting.
The voice came in again, sharp and clear, as if it was speaking directly into his mind: “He wrote a note! Little Shakespeare. Let’s hope he has better luck than . . . ” It faded out again.
“Shut up,” he said. Then again, a little louder. “Shut up.”
His heart was beating dry and frantic, high in his throat, like a moth’s wings.
It was weird. He had hardly felt anything in six months, except for a brief, gut-tearing desire to puke when his mom had come into the basement, where he’d been playing World of Warcraft, and announced that his father was dead. Since the accident he could barely even jerk off—although he did anyway, approaching it with grim determination, like a soldier in front of the firing squad, bracing for the inevitable explosion.
After two fumbling tries, he managed to sling the rope over the rusted pipe. He realized belatedly that he should have fixed the rope to the ceiling before making the noose, and he felt briefly annoyed with himself for screwing up something as simple, as elemental, as suicide. He should have used the gun after all—or better yet, just swallowed some pills. But that had seemed like a cop-out, somehow, even more than the act of suicide itself. An overdose was something that could be mistaken for an accident. He was hoping that his final act would mean something. That it would make Derrick Richards sit up and say, Jesus. I never knew Splooge had it in him.
Upstairs, the front door opened and closed with a loud bang. Trenton slipped. For a teetering second he was both falling and imagining that he had fallen—imagining his damaged ankle hitting the ground and snapping like a twig, imagining lying prostrate on his back underneath the noose until someone came and found him. He reached out and grabbed hold of an old wooden wardrobe, managing to right himself at the last second.
The basement door opened and Trenton’s heart stopped. It had to be Minna. He yanked the rope down from the ceiling pipe and thudded clumsily to the ground, feeling the impact of the short jump all the way to his teeth. He sat down on the stool just as an unfamiliar pair of sneakers came into view, pounding down the stairs.
“Oh!” The girl stopped short, still halfway up the stairs. Trenton felt the blood rush to his face.
She was pretty. Even with her face flaming red (which it was—at least she was embarrassed, too) and her hair cropped short and dyed some weird artificial black that was practically purple, she was pretty. She didn’t have a single pimple anywhere on her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think . . . well, I didn’t think anyone was home.”
Trenton was doing his best to look casual, but he was also aware that he was sitting in the middle of a dark, dingy basement, under a single functioning lightbulb, holding a noose in his hands.
For a second the girl looked like she was going to bolt. But then she came two more steps down toward the basement. “Are you a Walker?”