SANDRA
Trenton, Minna, and Caroline are locked in separate bathrooms. And not one of them is even taking a piss.
Trenton’s shaking out pills into his palm again, like maybe the number magically doubled in the past two hours. Caroline dials and hangs up. Dials and hangs up.
And Minna is in the bathroom with the FedEx man.
It reminds me of an old nursery rhyme I used to like: The king was in his counting house, counting out his money; the queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey. The maid was in the garden, hanging up the clothes . . .
I always thought it was kind of a fun story. All those people, busy with different work, happy—except for the poor maid, who gets her nose pecked off by a blackbird.
But really, they’re all just shut up in different rooms, trying to keep busy so they won’t notice they’re alone. Just like the Walkers in their big old house, everyone locked up behind closed doors and only speaking to each other through the walls.
Everyone waiting for a blackbird. Or for the roof to collapse.
Yes, Minna says. Yes. Yes.
ALICE
“Close your eyes, Vivian,” I say—an automatic command, and a stupid one, since I know she can’t. Minna’s backside, bare, is cupped in the sink; the FedEx man’s fleshy fingers are squeezing her skin. I wish I could give her a sharp poke. But I don’t have that kind of control. Not yet.
“My name isn’t Vivian,” the new ghost says. “And I know what sex is.”
“Newbie,” Sandra says. “Tell Alice to stop being a prude.”
“I’m not a prude.” I’m tired of Sandra’s abuse. Tired of Minna’s feet kicking in the air, and the sight of the FedEx man’s navy blue pants. Tired of all the Walkers, and the constant buzzing presence of their needs and smells and voices and aliveness—a sensation like mosquitoes zapped to death in our light fixtures, ants running over our cabinets, termites chewing us slowly, from the inside out.
I came so close to release. Never, in all the years of my death, have I been closer than I was in those few minutes, with the flames spreading, building warmth through our body, and the smoke like a gentle hand, pushing away memory, pushing away thought.
“Everyone needs a little action sometimes. You know, they used to treat women for hysteria by setting them up with vibrators. A little orgasm now and again . . . ”
“Ew,” Vivian says.
If only the fire had spread. “It amazes me,” I say, “that your stupidity only seems to increase with time.” I say to Vivian, “Tell Sandra that her stupidity—”
“I’m not Vivian.”
“Did you ever have a vibrator?” Sandra says to me, obviously enjoying herself. Minna slips; the FedEx man grunts and adjusts his grip. Her face is strained, rigid, like someone in the rictus of death. “It might have helped, you know. It might have shaken you loose, given you a little kick. Maybe then you wouldn’t be such a sourpuss all the time.”
“I had a husband.” Minna is moaning now, a low, guttural sound. Her mouth forms a single word, again and again. Please. Please. Please. I think of Ed, and of Thomas, and of mornings when the nausea was a fist, punching up my breakfast, doubling me over the toilet.
“Right,” Sandra scoffs. “A husband. A lampshade! Don’t pretend you loved him.”
“I would be more inclined to listen to you,” I say, “if you’d had a lasting relationship with anyone—with anything—other than a bottle. How long was it before someone found your body? Was it two days? Or three?”
For a moment, Sandra is silent. In the quiet, Minna gasps, and the FedEx man grunts, and pushes, and says any second now.
“It was three days,” Sandra says quietly. “And you’re right, Alice. You’re absolutely right. You had a husband. You had a daughter. You had a lover, too, before Maggie was born. Thomas, wasn’t it?” Her voice is very low, very deliberate, and somehow I can sense what’s coming, and I want to say don’t; please, don’t; but these words don’t come, either.
And so she says it, still in that same lullaby voice, the question we have sworn, by silent agreement, that she would never ask—in the bathroom the FedEx man begins to howl, and Minna squeezes her eyes shut and digs her nails into his back and says don’t, no, don’t.
“What happened to his child, Alice?”
Rooms. Rooms I have loved in, walked in, remembered, mourned:
The narrow tiles of our bathroom floor in Boston, and steam rising from the bathtub, and my mother’s arms, bare to the elbow.
My childhood bedroom, and the dolls clustered on the narrow shelf above my bed, and playing mommy to each of them in turn.
The coat hanger and the pills; the bathroom floor spotted with blood; cottonseed drifting through the open window and settling like snow in the sink.