AMY
Secrets were for grown-ups. That’s what Uncle Trenton said. And Amy had a secret now, and that meant she was all grown up like Uncle Trenton and like Mommy.
The secret was about the dead girl, who had a name, which was Katie. But Amy couldn’t tell anyone about the dead girl, not her name or anything else about her, like the fact that she smelled like flowers and not dirt.
“Remember, Amy,” Uncle Trenton had said. “I’m counting on you. This is big-girl stuff.”
Amy promised because she liked the dead girl and didn’t want to get her in trouble. The dead girl had carried Amy away from the fire and had stood holding hands with her outside while they listened to the scream scream of fire engines in the distance and Trenton shouted on the phone, and when Amy’s socks got all wet with dew, the dead girl helped her take them off and even took off her own shoes and socks, too, so they could have bare feet together.
“Shhh,” she said, when the trucks were so close Amy could see the trees lit up red and white and blue from all the sirens. The dead girl smiled and pressed a finger to Amy’s lips, and the finger tasted a little like smoke. “I was never here.”
Amy watched her disappear into the darkness, holding her shoes in one hand.
PART VII
THE BATHROOMS
ALICE
It has been four days since the fire, and since Sandra first decided on the silent treatment. Even though I’ve spent decades trying unsuccessfully to get her to shut up, now that she has, I find that I miss her conversation.
I went through the same thing when Ed died. I’d longed for his death, prayed for it, fantasized about it the way some people do about tropical vacations. One time, after a bad storm, we were confined to the house for four straight days; we both must have gone a little crazy. Ed was taking shots from our bedroom window at the crows huddled on the bare branches of the sycamore tree across the field, and missing every time but one; later he fell asleep, whiskey-drunk, with his arm still around the shotgun. In the middle of the night I got out of bed and stood above him, staring at that barrel gleaming sharp as a promise, staring at the shadowed blot of his head, thinking, I could do it. I could really do it. I stood there for what felt like hours, until my arms ached, until my toes were numb with cold. Then he rolled over and his face moved into the square of moonlight on his pillow and I drew back, ashamed of myself, horrified.
Then it happened. March 22, 1972. I was making coffee and three fried eggs and bacon; Maggie was living in San Francisco by then. Ed was upstairs, shaving. We’d had a bad fight the night before. He’d come home late, drunk. I’d shoved my fingers down my throat to be sick so he wouldn’t force himself on me.
I heard a heavy thud, like a sack of new dough dropping. I found him on the bathroom floor with his trousers off and a razor in his hand, and a small bit of toilet paper clinging to his chin, where he’d nicked himself and tried to stop the bleeding. He died even before he reached the hospital.
The doctors told me later it was a heart attack. It happened that way sometimes, they told me. Too much drinking, too much fat in his diet, too much stress. We’re all just a collection of wires pulled tight, charged beyond capacity—a tangle of plugs and valves, waiting for a surge to take down the whole system.
He hadn’t even finished his shave. When I came into the bathroom, I saw there was still hair stubbling the right side of his face. And after I called the doctor, I don’t know what got into me, but I sat there and finished for him. I sat on the ground and pulled his head into my lap and finished so he could have his last good shave. He liked a good shave.
I hadn’t expected to miss him. I’d expected only relief. And I was relieved, more than I could say or express—sometimes I’d find myself laughing, and I had to be very careful at the funeral and in front of neighbors to seem sad, when sometimes all I wanted to do was sing. At night I walked the house in the dark and touched all the things that belonged to me: the sofa he would never sit on again, the chairs he would never knock over, all the dishes he would never throw.
But sometimes I woke from the middle of a dream and found myself reaching for him or rolling over toward the place his warmth should have been. The house was so quiet, so still, I listened unconsciously for the sound of his footsteps, the door slamming, the roar of his voice or his laughter from the living room. For months I expected him to call out to me to bring him a beer, hurry up already, where’s dinner. For months I threw burned bacon into the trash thinking of Ed, thinking of how foul a mood he would be in, before remembering that he wasn’t coming down to breakfast. I had carried the weight of him for so long that without it I felt dizzy. I guess it’s the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they’re strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.
I didn’t really, deep down, believe he was dead. At least, I didn’t believe he was gone forever. I was constantly waiting for him to come back, and dreading it, too, and even the dread was like grief.
Ed liked to smoke his pipe in the bathroom. He’d grown up in rural Virginia and shared an outhouse with five brothers; I think the bathroom might have been his favorite room in the house. Sometimes he’d flush two, three times in a row. He liked the sound of it, he said. And even in deep winter he’d crack open a window and sit there with his pants around his ankles, puffing on his pipe, so over time the wallpaper went yellow with it.
Two months after he died, I woke up in the middle of the night and I knew: he’d come back. I could smell his pipe. The smoke was seeping into the bedroom, clinging to the weave of the sheets. And I knew I had only to push open the bathroom door and I’d see him, his pale thighs and knees like doorknobs, his nightshirt wrinkled and the wispy tufts of his hair sticking straight up, like the feathers of a baby bird. Go back to bed, Alice, he’d say. Can’t you leave a man in peace for even five minutes?
But there was nothing: nothing but the toilet, and the bath, and the old yellow wallpaper, and the window, closed. And it was then, in that moment, that I really understood that I was alone and I would be alone.
I sat that night on the toilet seat. I leaned my forehead against the wallpaper. The smell of his pipe was so strong, I could nearly taste it. I stayed there until morning.