Dark Rooms

Jamie stood there, plastic beer cup in his hand, his face pale under its tan and covered in sweat. He swallowed, or tried to, the muscles knotting in his throat. I watched Ruben go up to him, say something, but he pushed Ruben aside, moved swiftly to the stairs, his eyes never leaving mine. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” His voice was harsh, strange. I could see the whites on all four sides of his eyes. Sexy, sleepy, stoned Jamie—mad.

I was unable to speak, only to look.

He dropped his cup, grabbed my arm. I could feel the pressure of each individual finger digging into my flesh. “I said, what do you think you’re doing?”

I was frightened, but I knew instinctively that I couldn’t show it. I had to bluff, make him back off. I blinked several times in rapid succession, jammed down the corners of my mouth. And then, in the coolest tone I could manage, I said, “You’re breaking my arm. Let go.”

To my surprise he did. To my even greater surprise I saw that beneath his anger was fear. And in that instant I understood how disturbed what I’d done really was, how sick, how fucked up. Jamie was scared of me, me. I brushed past him, walked over to the kegs, drew myself a cup. I drank it down as everybody watched. I drew myself another. Drank that one down, too.

After a bit, someone hit the light switch, plunging the downstairs back into darkness. Then a different someone turned up the volume on the stereo. And, slowly, the party started up again.

I should have left at that point. I’d gone to make a scene, I’d made a scene. Mission accomplished. I stayed, though. I’m not sure why. Maybe to punish myself. Sticking around certainly caused me misery. I’d been banished in spirit if not fact from the party, and wandering through it I felt beyond isolated, near wild with loneliness. It was almost as if I was wearing Nica’s magnetism the same way I was wearing her clothes, only I’d put it on inside out: I repelled people. I’d take one step toward them, they’d take two back from me. Or maybe I stayed in the hopes I could make Jamie forgive me.

The self-consciousness I was feeling was unbearable. What I needed to do was get away from myself, and the beer wouldn’t let me. Not fast enough, anyway. I found a bottle with a couple inches of vodka in it sitting, abandoned, on the piano stool. I gagged as I tipped its contents down my throat, swallowing as quickly as the suction allowed. It was like drinking gasoline. But I did it, again and again, until the bottle was empty. And soon it was as if the different parts and functions of my brain were scrambled and mashed together so that hearing was jumbled up with seeing and seeing with tasting and tasting with smelling and my thoughts were mixed up with all this, too, so that I couldn’t tell what went where.

My cheeks and neck and lips were hot, burning up. I considered losing the wig. I didn’t, though. Remembering Mr. Amory’s liquor cabinet, I decided to cool down with another drink instead. I was having a tough time walking, so I made my way to the back of the house by holding on to the furniture, one hand over the other. But even being careful, I tripped—on a curled edge of carpet, I think, or maybe my own feet—and went crashing into the row of chairs. Distantly I observed the blood from the gash in my knee pooling in my shoe, the funny angle my wrist was bent at. Finally I picked myself up, climbed the stairs, reached the study. That’s when I passed the French doors and saw Nica.

A few minutes later I was bleeding all over my reflection in the pool, gauzy with pain and confusion.

A light came on.

A voice called my name.

Who did the voice belong to? I don’t know. The scene ends there in my memory. A movie stopped mid-reel.

I woke up the next morning. It wasn’t quite dawn yet, the air suffused with the dull glow that comes just before first light. I reached groggily for my swivel-neck lamp, grasping at empty space until I realized that my lamp wasn’t there because I wasn’t home. Bolting upright, I flung my gaze around the room that wasn’t mine. Nothing offered the barest hint as to where I was. And for a few bug-eyed seconds I wondered if I was dead. Then I remembered. I was at Jamie’s. I remembered other things, too.

Slowly I eased myself back down onto the pillow, became very still. To move even a muscle was to stir up another hideous memory from the night before. They arrived anyway, though, in wave after scalding wave. Finally, all the waves had broken over me, and I lay there cringing in shame.

But I couldn’t cringe for long because something was tugging at my attention, impatient and demanding a response: pain. I was in a lot of it. My hand, in particular, the one I’d used to break my spill over the chairs. I held it up to my eyes. It looked like a rubber glove filled with water, not a knuckle in sight. I touched my face. It felt soft, shapeless, pummeled. There was a ridged scab above my eyebrow, and a lump as big as a walnut above that, and my upper lip was twice its normal size. The shoulder that had hit the ground first ached. So did the hipbone. So did the knee.

Was all this damage the result of my drugged-out, boozed-up attempt to pass through a door without opening it first, falling seven or eight feet (the way the Amorys’ house was built into the hill, the second story at the back was only half a story high), or had something happened after, something during the period my memory went so disturbingly blank? At the same time I posed this question, it dawned on me where exactly I was: the spare bedroom, directly down the hall from Jamie’s. It was one of last year’s hookup rooms. This year’s, too, judging from the stiffness of the sheets beneath me. Suddenly I felt a fear so big it filled my head, the room, the entire house. Had I lost my virginity? And then I felt a fear so big it filled everything, had no bounds at all. Or had my virginity been taken from me? All at once I was sick, barely having time to turn my face to the trash can next to the bed before an acid liquid was spewing out my mouth, my nose, dripping down my chin.

When I was emptied out, I reached for the unopened bottle of Evian on the nightstand. I drank, desperately thirsty. The water calmed me down. Someone, I realized, had left it for me. The trash can, too. A sexual predator worrying about his victim waking up dehydrated or making a mess on the rug? I hadn’t been raped. And everything I was wearing the night before I was still wearing now except for the wig. I hadn’t had sex either.

That I’d put myself in the position where such things were possible, though, was appalling, borderline grotesque. No more prescription drugs mixed with alcohol for me. No more prescription drugs period. This time I’d escaped with a few cuts and bruises, a minor sprain. Nasty injuries, to be sure, and painful, but nothing that wouldn’t heal. I’d gotten lucky.

Two months later I found out just how lucky. I’d already been at Williams for a week. Not for classes, which hadn’t begun yet, but for preseason, to try out for the tennis team. I’d won three out of five of my challenge matches and the coach had pulled me aside, told me she’d be taking me on as an alternate. She couldn’t, she’d said, allow me to officially join up, though, until I underwent a full physical. School policy.

Making the Williams tennis team as a walk-on was the first sign that the dark days were behind me, that quitting the benzos cold turkey had been worth the pain and trauma, the shakes and cramps and nights without sleep. My life, it seemed, was turning around, was going back, at least a little bit, to the way it was before Nica died. I’d wanted to tell Dad the good news in person. I’d also wanted to visit the Chandler Health Center, open year-round, though at reduced hours during summer break, which it still was for a another week, to see Dr. Simons, my doctor since I was a kid. So I’d jumped in my car and headed down to Hartford for the day.

That afternoon, Dr. Simons informed me I was pregnant. Eight weeks was his rough estimation.

PART TWO (#ulink_b2fb7701-7627-5a2b-b5e3-9e9661a55f23)

Chapter Five (#ulink_44cd4f40-9026-5650-9593-c5c4a45e793a)

I’m vomiting before I’m awake, my eyes still closed when my stomach seizes and acid floods my throat. I jackknife, lurching forward to open the door of my car but don’t quite make it in time, and a pale brown mixture of Diet Coke and low-sodium Saltines splatters out of me in a series of long convulsions. After the last one, I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, sit all the way up.

I hadn’t intended to fall asleep. The house I’d been watching had gone dark just after eleven, which meant I was free to go. My lids, though, were heavy, getting heavier, so I put away my mom’s old camera, the one with the telephoto lens, doubling for me at the moment as a pair of binoculars, and crawled in the back. As I stretched out, my hand brushed the sleeve of a jacket: Nica’s, thin, dark blue denim, button-flap pockets. Immediately I recoiled. She’d left it there the day before she died. The way she’d tossed it, it still seemed to retain her shape. And I didn’t want to touch it, make it flat, or jostle it so that the scent of her, caught in its folds, escaped. As I moved back to the front of the car, reclined the passenger seat, I told myself I’d just close my eyes for fifteen minutes then drive home. That’s the last thought I remember having.

I lower the windows and get out of the car. The street I’m on is crowded with single-story houses set back among scraggly shrubs, the plaster statues of Our Lady in the front yards chipped and faded: a run-down neighborhood in a borderline part of town. The day’s going to be a hot one. I reach through the window for the Diet Coke can in the cup holder, swish the liquid around my mouth before swallowing, slowly and carefully, in distinct shifts, hoping my stomach won’t notice. Then I walk to the rear of the car, pop the trunk. The pack of paper towels is under a tennis hopper.

I use nearly an entire roll cleaning the passenger-side door.

It’s too early for traffic and I make it home in under ten minutes. I haven’t even stepped all the way inside the front door when the smell hits me: a kind of stale fustiness, a combination of dust and old furniture, of meals cooked and eaten, of frayed carpeting. If sadness has a scent, this is it. Dad would’ve gotten back from work just a couple hours ago, is probably in bed now, asleep. I move quietly as I go upstairs, shower and change, slip a book in my bag so I’ll have something to read later.

Before heading out the door again, I walk into the kitchen, as dark as the rest of the house. I open the refrigerator, the sudden bright light making me blink. On the bottom shelf, in front of a carton of milk, its use-by date several days past, is an aluminum container with a clear plastic top: linguine in red clam sauce. Dad must’ve swung by that all-night Italian place near the Amtrak station on his way home. My stomach begins to churn again, and I have to close my eyes, keep myself from imagining the smell of the congealed Parmesan, the glistening noodles, the gynecological-looking bits of gray shellfish coated in pureed tomato.

Blindly, I reach for the milk. Next, I take the box of Raisin Bran out of the cabinet. I pour a few flakes into a bowl, wet them with a splash of expired milk, then drop the bowl inside the sink. Dad’s pretty checked out these days. I doubt it would register with him that I’ve stopped eating breakfast, and if it did register with him, I doubt even more that it would register why. Still, it never hurts to be careful.

I’m about to get back in my car. Then I think better of it. If I smell vomit, I probably will. While I’m standing there, hand on the latch, I catch sight of the dashboard clock. It’s already past eight. Immediately I let go of the latch, start walking. If I don’t hurry, I’ll be late to my first day of work.

Chapter Six (#ulink_1279a566-ed6c-5b15-ba53-f818afc08dce)

Chandler Academy of Hartford, Connecticut, was established in 1886 when an Episcopal clergyman, Reverend Peabody Chandler of the Boston Chandlers, converted the ancestral summer home in the Sheldon/Charter Oak section of the city into an academy whose mission was to “take the wayward sons of distinguished New England families and mold the disposition of their minds and morals so that they might become good Christian gentlemen.” In 1971 the minds and morals of the daughters of distinguished families became eligible for molding, as well. The wayward part stayed the same, though. And for a school that’s primarily boarding, Chandler, with its two-strikes policy, is tolerant of rule-breakers. Consequently, each fall it winds up with a high number of students who’ve either been rejected from or given the boot by its stricter rivals.

If Chandler’s reputation is only a cut above so-so, its campus, which looks more like that of a college or a small university than a high school, is anything but. The central building, aptly named Great House, is red brick, impossibly old, and covered in ivy. Great House is set among a trio of shorter and only slightly less grand buildings: Noyes, de Forest, and Perkins. To their left is Burroughs Library, pillared, marbled, silent as dust; and to its right, Amory Chapel, its bell plundered from some bombed-out church in Europe by an enterprising alum at the end of World War I; and, a little farther on, Francis Abbot Science Center and Caroline Knox Abbot Theater. Stokes Dining Hall is south. The hockey rink and tennis courts and various athletic fields are east. So is Houghton Gymnasium and the Health and Counseling Center. And way east, so far east you can’t quite see it from campus, is Chandler’s boathouse, the Gordon T. Pierpoint, a stone’s throw from Trinity College’s boathouse, Bliss, on the banks of the Connecticut River. The dormitories—there are four of them, two for the boys, Endicott and Minot, two for the girls, Archibald and Amory—are west. They’re separated from the main campus by the graveyard, controversial real estate at Chandler even before Nica’s body was found there. The graveyard belongs to the City of Hartford, and technically school rules don’t apply to it, making it a sort of gray zone for boarders, a moral no-man’s-land. It’s the hub of what the administration refers to as “narcotics-related activity.” Is also the hub of alcohol-related activity. Sexual-related activity, too.

I start toward the quad, the air sharp with the smell of cut grass and lawn fertilizer, fresh paint. Campus is empty, all the students in chapel, extra-long this morning because it’s the first day of the new school year. Empty except for a lone figure, a hundred yards or so ahead. And though this person has her back to me, I recognize her instantly. It’s the walk, tight and clipped and harried: Mrs. Amory, Jamie’s mother. She’s looking primly chic in a tailored gray suit, the skirt, meant to be fitted, puckering slightly on her no-ass frame, her sheer-stockinged calves tensed and shadowed by high heels, black and wickedly pointed. She changes paths and I can see her in profile now. Her face, behind its dark glasses, is as hard and brittle as an eggshell. As plain as an eggshell, too.

I slow down, not wanting her to spot me, though there’s little danger of that, so intently is her gaze focused on the doors of Great House. It’s no surprise finding her on campus. She’s been in charge of the Parent Giving Association for as long as I can remember and does a fair amount of volunteer work at the school besides. Plus, she’s constantly ferrying Jamie to and from his squash lessons. Or at least was until the administration agreed to let him keep a car in the student parking lot for that purpose.

It wasn’t always from afar, though, that I saw Mrs. Amory. Once upon a time I saw her up close on a regular basis—in the days when Nica and Jamie were together, and the three of us would spend whole afternoons and evenings hanging out in his house. She made it perfectly clear that she wasn’t wild about having my sister and me around. Whenever she happened to open the door and we were on the other side, she’d draw back her thin lips in an even thinner smile, say, “Welcome,” in a tone intended to convey the opposite.

Sometimes Jamie would use his mom’s ice-cold mannerliness against her, maneuver her into asking us to stay for dinner. These meals were always weird and uncomfortable and never-ending. Mr. Amory, a handsome man, pretty, in fact, prettier by far than his not-so-pretty wife though not quite as pretty as his very pretty son, would pay excessive attention to Nica. From behind a pair of round, black-rimmed glasses, which somehow emphasized his good looks rather than obscured them, he’d watch her, stare openly. Then the questions would begin, too many of them with him hanging too eagerly on her replies. He’d invite her to borrow his cue if she and Jamie and I were going to play billiards, his desk if we were planning to study, his raft if it was warm enough for us to swim. Once he even invited her on a trip he and Jamie were taking to Maine the following weekend to hunt bobwhite quail. Mrs. Amory would observe these exchanges from the other end of the table with eyes that were coolly detached or coolly amused—coolly something. Then she’d start in on Nica with questions of her own, mostly falsely sympathetic ones about our mom, asking how she was doing, saying how difficult her job as a high school teacher must be, how difficult both my parents’ jobs were, putting up with ungrateful adolescents all day, what noble work it was and yet so unappreciated, and how she could never do it herself.

Though she barely noticed me—I don’t even think she knew my name, referred to me only as “dear”—I was the one she upset with these interrogations. They’d leave me shaking with anger and hurt. Nica, on the other hand, was totally unfazed. Would always answer politely, without sarcasm or hostility, never responding to the queries’ spiky subtext, staying right on the placid surface. Actually seemed to feel sorry for Mrs. Amory more than anything else. “It can’t be fun being her, Gracie,” Nica would say to me in the car afterward as she lit a cigarette, “uptight, everybody around her wanting to be someplace else, her husband especially.” Then Nica would do an impression of Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest that was very bad but made me laugh anyway. Usually she’d talk me into stopping at the McDonald’s on Albany Ave. on the ride home. We’d split a McFlurry or a hot fudge sundae. The eggnog shake, if it was near Christmas.

I watch Mrs. Amory’s straight-backed form until it’s out of sight, disappearing inside Great House. The dull thud of the closing doors releases me from my stupor, and I continue on my way. As the concrete path turns into marble in front of Burroughs Library, I stop, dig an elastic out of my bag. When I’ve finger-combed my hair into a ponytail, I pull open the glass doors, step through them.

I step through them again two minutes later, only from the opposite direction. A crisis has arisen—burst pipe, bungling maintenance man, leak above the rare books section—and when Ms. Sedgwick, the head librarian, has dealt with it, she’ll deal with me, she said. She said, too, that in the meantime I ought to go see Mary Ellen Lefcourt in Payroll, get started on my paperwork.

So I’m going.

I’m sitting in the Business Development Office on the second floor of Perkins, my I-9 and Direct Deposit Authorization forms neatly filled out and on the coffee table in front of me. Mrs. Lefcourt is still in her office with her nine o’clock, even though it’s nearly ten now. To kill time, I’m browsing through a copy of the Staff Handbook, learning all about the proper protocol for reporting falsification of expense vouchers, when I hear voices rise up in anger—one voice, actually, male, young-sounding—rise up and die down almost immediately.

I crane my neck to see where it came from and notice a door at the end of the short, offshoot-type hallway. The sign outside it reads GLEN FLYNN, DIRECTOR OF FACILITIES. A second later, Mr. Flynn himself appears, a nervous-looking guy with fidgety hands, a red bow tie. He closes the door behind him, but not all the way, hurries over to Mrs. Waugh, the office secretary, whispers something in her ear. She shakes her head disapprovingly, either at what he just told her or at him. With an anxious backward glance, he exits. I reimmerse myself in the Handbook, wait for Mrs. Waugh’s fingers to start tapping on the computer keyboard again. When they do, I close the Handbook, stand, begin walking toward the door like I’m in search of better light. Then, casually, I prop myself against the wall opposite.

The crack in the door is narrow. I can’t see much through it, and what I can see tells me what I already know: that the room is an office, and that the angry-voiced person is indeed male and young. He’s pacing back and forth, his gait lurching, wobbly. It takes me a second to put together that he’s drunk, and I wonder if when Mr. Flynn scurried off, it was to get campus security. A slice of his body is visible, but none of his head. I’m starting to think I’ll never get a good look at him when he pauses to bend over, peel the thick fabric of his jeans from the backs of his knees. And for a brief moment, I have an unobstructed view of his face. Damon Cruz.

Damon Cruz is a day student—at least, was. He graduated in June, same as me. The term “day student” at Chandler is a tricky one to get a handle on because it doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means, that is, a student who spends his days at Chandler, his nights elsewhere. Not only, anyway. It also means a student who is on scholarship. When Reverend Chandler was writing the school’s constitution, he included a clause stating that ten percent of the student body “must come from the community’s deserving poor.” At Chandler’s inception, “the community’s deserving poor” were, for the most part, the Polish immigrants or the children of the Polish immigrants who settled in droves in Sheldon/Charter Oak in the late nineteenth century to take jobs at the local factories, manufacturers of firearms and horseshoe nails principally. But demographics have shifted radically in the last couple of decades. Hartford is now a predominantly black city with the second-fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the nation. Another thing it comes second in: poverty. The area’s gone from working class—those factories shut their doors a long time ago—to under the underclass. So what was once a gap between the day students and the boarders is a gap no longer, it’s a chasm.

There are day students, however, who manage to cross it. These students usually fit a certain profile—male, excel at a sport, come off as dangerous but not outright scary. Sex appeal doesn’t hurt either. Damon could have been a crossover if he wanted. He was a star baseball player, a little standoffish, known to have a temper. His sophomore year, he punched a rival player in the face during a game, earning himself the nickname Demon and a two-week suspension from the team. (The incident received a fair amount of coverage, not just in the school paper but in the Hartford Courant as well. The suspension was originally for the rest of the season, then got dropped down, and there were people who felt the reduction was sending a bad message, was practically condoning hooliganism, according to one editorial.) He was good at school, too, which I knew because we were in AP calculus together for a week before a scheduling conflict forced me to switch to another section.

Apparently Damon didn’t want to cross over, though. Any time I saw him on campus he was hanging out with other day students or with guys on the baseball team, a team pretty much entirely composed of day students. I remember he was going to college, UConn, the Honors Program, a popular option with smart day students since it offered a first-rate education on the comparative cheap. Was awarded an athletic scholarship, too, I think. So what’s he doing back at his old high school, wasted before noon, picking a fight with some pencil-neck administrator?

I take a step toward the door, bring my eye flush against the crack. Damon’s no longer pacing, is standing in front of the window now. He’s placed his hands on the sill so that his weight’s resting on his spread fingers. When he leans forward to look out, the muscles in his arms jump. It’s tough for me to believe this guy’s my age. He seems so much older—a cold, confident, hard-nosed man: thick, jet-black hair combed straight back, features that are handsome in a crude way, body that’s more broad than tall, bulky through the shoulders and chest, narrow at the waist and hips.