Driving home, I lost control on the ice and went headfirst into a fence and some idiot cop barely out of puberty threw me in the tank overnight for being drunk. The cell was white and empty and smelled like piss, but in the morning when the sun came up on the walls, it was almost pretty.
When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference.
Don’t think I felt sorry for myself. The way I figure it, life’s the sum total of all our small mistakes, little tragedies, bad choices. Addition on top of addition. They pile up and pile up until the cost of keeping up appearances is too high and the weight is just too much.
Then: collapse.
Alice says we got to let go. Maybe she’s right.
If you want the plain truth, it wasn’t the gun that killed me. What I mean is: it wasn’t the gun that killed me first.
When I was six, I started having a dream about a long white hallway full of closed doors. It looked like a hospital, except there were no doctors and no nurses, no people at all. Just a long stretch of closed locked doors.
Sometimes it was quiet. Sometimes I could hear people talking inside the locked rooms, voices muffled by the walls. Sometimes there was even music playing. And I knew if I could just find the right door, it would open for me, and I’d pass through into my house, into my room, with the big bay windows where a decade later a spider would sit spinning for Cissy, and the view of the front yard and the big sky and the birds pecking worms out of my mom’s garden.
But I never could. Find it, I mean. All the doors stayed locked.
The dreams stopped after a while, when I got a little older and got into boys and dope and music and beer. But I’ll tell you something. For a while, I thought Martin was going to be the door.
When his wife found out and he said he was ending things with me, I think I went a little crazy. After thirty years, the dreams came back. Even when I woke up, the dream was there: a long hallway of locked rooms, and people laughing inside of them.
The gun was just the go-between. It was the loneliness that got me in the end.
AMY
Amy was supposed to be sleeping but she couldn’t sleep and there were noises in the attic besides. She couldn’t sleep because Uncle Trenton was a bad reader and he’d rushed through her favorite part of The Raven Heliotrope and he hadn’t given her a good-night kiss plus he’d tucked her in too tight, which made her feel like a giant burrito.
And he smelled weird. Like the kind of clear juice Nana drank, and also a little bit like the big store where Mommy bought her perfumes.
She knew why Uncle Trenton was in a bad mood. It was because of the body in the ground. She’d heard Nana talking about it with Mommy when they were getting ready to leave. I don’t see what all the fuss is about, Mommy said. She’s six feet under by now and everybody knows it. They should be looking for her with dogs and a shovel. And Nana said, Imagine her poor parents.
Amy was playing in the corner and they didn’t bother to be quiet because they thought she didn’t understand—but she did. Six feet under was where you went when you were dead like Grandpa or like Penelope in The Raven Heliotrope.
Amy wondered whether the girl who was six feet under who was upsetting Trenton would come back, like Penelope had in the book. Innocents don’t really die, so after she was buried six feet under beneath a tree, the tree started weeping and its tears spilled on the ground and Penelope woke up. And so she lived happily ever after and the tree was named a weeping willow like the kind they had outside in the front yard. Maybe that’s where the girl who was upsetting Trenton was buried.
Amy was thirsty. She would ask Trenton for a glass of water and he couldn’t be mad because everyone knew that without water you would die. Her feet felt strange on the floor, like they were full of tiny shivers. Mommy would tell her to put on socks but Mommy wasn’t here and it was just Amy and Trenton and maybe the girl six feet under.
In the hall, the noises in the attic were even louder, and Amy knew they weren’t just mice or creaks but footsteps and voices. The trapdoor in the ceiling was open, and the stairs were lolling out like a wide wood tongue, and there was light spilling onto the carpet and shadows moving back and forth.
“What about your sister?” someone was saying, and it was not Trenton but the girl.
“She’s out to dinner with my mom.”
“I meant your younger sister.”
“I told you, she’s my niece. And she’s asleep.”
They were talking about her, and Amy felt proud. She wanted to know what a dead girl looked like because she’d always wondered whether Penelope had bugs in her hair when she woke up and kissed Prince Thomas and he was just too nice to say anything.
“Where do you want the candles?” the dead girl was saying when Amy put her foot onto the first stair.