Dark Rooms

by Lili Anolik

  “I needed the money too, but pretty much. I knew you were heading off to college. Still, I figured I could learn about you from your uncle, get close to you through him. I had no idea you were actually working at Fargas Bonds. God”—I start to laugh—“it must have been so weird for you, Nica’s sister showing up at the office out of the blue. I can’t imagine what was running through your mind when you saw me.”

  “No, you can’t,” he says, and laughs back, a sharp staccato sound that ends almost as quickly as it begins.

  “That you’d taken deferred admission was just a lucky break for me. I mean, there’s only so much I could’ve found out from Max.”

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t?”

  “Spent a lot of time staking out your dorm at UConn, I guess.”

  Again we lapse into silence, and again he’s the one who breaks it. “If you’re telling me all this, it means you don’t believe I did it.”

  It’s not until he says it that I realize it’s true. “No, I don’t.”

  “But I just gave you motive and opportunity. And you saw I had means earlier.”

  I brush a blade of grass off my knee. “I know.”

  “So why?”

  “Because I think you’re delicate.” And when he laughs, shakes his head, I say, “Not delicate as in effeminate. Delicate as in, like, sensitive.”

  We’re looking at each other, and then we’re not looking at each other, as if we’re suddenly shy of what we might see in the other’s face. A minute or so later, he says, “So, who else is on the suspect list?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Short list.”

  “Yeah, well, the police were pretty convinced it was someone she knew. And I know everyone she knew, except for you.”

  “Why were they so convinced it was someone she knew?”

  “There was something about the entrance wound, the shape of it or something. There was other stuff, too. I just don’t remember any of it.”

  Damon chews on his lip, thinks. “And maybe because she wasn’t shot in the back, so she wasn’t running away.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “I mean, probably, yeah. Makes sense.”

  “Were there defensive wounds?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She didn’t fight her killer then.” Damon chews his lip some more. “So what’s the plan here, Grace? You’re going to keep trying to figure this out all on your own, something even the professionals couldn’t do, nobody in your corner, not your parents, not your friends? If you actually find the guilty person, what then? Go to the cops?”

  I shrug, too dispirited to reply. He’s not saying anything to me that I haven’t said to myself, but hearing the words out loud for the first time makes me hear them differently. The whole thing—what I’m attempting to do—just sounds so implausible, so ridiculous, a joke, basically. Imagine going to Detective Ortiz with a page of unsigned homoerotic verse torn out of a student magazine, a bit of graffiti on a urinal wall, and demanding that he reopen the case. I’d get laughed out of the station. I realize suddenly what I’d been hoping for when I confessed the truth to Damon: that he’d offer to help. Now, though, I can’t fathom him offering. Who’d voluntarily get mixed up in something as harebrained and half-assed as what I’ve got going on? Sitting there, I feel the way I did that day in the boys’ bathroom in Burroughs, just as low, just as useless.

  “Why isn’t Jamie on the list?” Damon says.

  I look up, surprised we’re still having this conversation. “Jamie?”

  “Nica definitely knew him, right?”

  “Technically he is on the list,” I say, careful of my tone, not wanting to sound emotional or like I have my back up. “He has to be. He’s the ex. But by the time Nica was killed they’d already been over for a while. Why would he go berserk two months after the breakup?”

  “He could have found out about me. Knowing Nica was with another guy would’ve set him off, wouldn’t it?”

  Thinking about how upset Jamie was when he thought Nica was seeing Mr. Tierney, I nod. “Okay, but how would’ve he found out? Nobody knew about the relationship besides you and Nica.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” Damon says.

  “Did she?”

  “She said she didn’t. But that’s not the only way he could have found out. Someone might have seen us together, at Talcott Park maybe, and said something to him. I mean, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well?”

  A long beat. “Yes, it’s possible he killed her,” I finally concede. And it is possible. Of course it’s possible. What it isn’t, however, is imaginable. I just can’t see Jamie ever intentionally hurting Nica.

  A memory edges its way into my brain.

  A year ago. Nica, Jamie, and I went to a party at Trinity thrown by Owen Fitz, a friend of Jamie’s who’d graduated from Chandler the previous spring. Nica and Jamie had picked me up in the little alley behind Burroughs. As soon as I’d opened the car door, I could tell they’d been fighting by the stiff-jointed way they were sitting, their pointed-straight-ahead eyes. And the ride passed in tense silence. At last we arrived at the address in South Green, an off-campus town house. It seemed so quiet and still, almost asleep—windows shut, shades drawn, lights out—that I wondered if we’d gotten the night wrong, or if somehow the party had been canceled and no one’d told us.

  Jamie parked at the end of the street. Nica was out of the car before it fully stopped. She started for the town house, walking fast, not waiting for me and Jamie to catch up. I watched her climb the steps to the door, throw it open. Smoke and stink and heat and noise all tangled together tumbled through. In front of her was a scene broken up hellishly into slices and flashes: a dim room, a band, guys and girls jumping up and down, mashing into each other, a giant strobe light illuminating their sweaty faces one moment, banishing them to darkness the next. Without hesitating or looking back, Nica crossed the threshold, disappeared into the lurching mob.

  I glanced over at Jamie, expecting him to chase after her or maybe to turn around, walk back to his car, leave us stranded, too disgusted to stay another minute. But he just gave me a sleepy-eyed shrug, like, let her go.

  He and I ended up sitting on the moldy couch someone had dragged out onto the back porch—the only semiquiet spot in the house—talking, mostly about him and Nica. It sounded like he’d had it with her. She was too selfish, he said, too moody, too this, too that. As he continued to tick off the toos, I stopped paying attention to his words, started paying attention to the mouth the words were coming out of: the sensitive well-shaped lips, the even white teeth, and, behind them, the tongue, soft and supple and cotton-candy pink.

  And then all of a sudden he wasn’t talking anymore. I started to panic as I realized that he’d reached the bottom of his list, was expecting a response from me. “Oh,” he said, “and I skipped one. Wild. She’s also too wild.”

  Seizing on the remark, I said, “Is too wild a bad thing?”

  “No, not always. There’s a good kind of too wild. It’s—” He leaned into me, then pulled back again. “Wow, I almost forgot who I was talking to,” he said, laughing and shaking his head. “You do not need to hear that.”

  I gave him a curt smile. “Okay, then you do not need to tell me.”

  “No, I really don’t. I will tell you, though, that your sister is that kind of too wild. Is definitely that kind of too wild.”

  All right, I thought, I get it. She’s good at sex. “So what’s the bad kind of too wild?”

  “That’s a tough one,” he said. “I guess, I’d say a girl who’s the bad kind of too wild doesn’t think the rules apply to her. She likes to have her fun. More than likes to have her fun, has to have fun. And she can sometimes cross the line from wild to out of control. All that definitely describes Nica, too.” He sighed and drained the rest of his beer.

  Trying to match his seriousness, I said, “Well, if you’re going to get the good kind of too wild, I suppose you have
to be prepared to accept the bad kind of too wild along with it.”

  “You’ve got to take the good with the bad?” He grinned. “Whoa, Grace, that’s pretty profound.” He reached over, curving an arm around my shoulder, and flicked my opposite earlobe with his index finger. “No, honestly, I’m a little blown away right now by how deep you are.”

  “Quit it,” I said, and slapped at his finger. But really, of course, I was thrilled to have him touch me. And when I didn’t shake off his arm, he pulled on me, just slightly, drawing me into him. Our bodies fit together so perfectly. Or maybe he just knew how to make them fit because Nica’s and mine were so similar. Feeling the rise and fall of his chest against my side, I was almost too breathless to speak. But I forced myself to. “And anyway,” I said, “you’re the one going out with her, not me. I’m just trying to make sense of it for you.”

  “Actually, technically we’re not going out at the moment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She said she wants to go on a break. Told me right before we came to get you. She thinks I’m too possessive. Wants to see other people. Whatever. Believe it or not, I’m actually sort of okay with it this time.”

  I felt lightheaded, like I’d stood up too quickly, though I was still sitting down. “Or not,” I said. “I’m going to go with, or not.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, come on, Jamie. You two are always going on a break. They never last for more than a day or two. Sometimes not even that.”

  “It’s different this time. I mean, I accept the fact that I’m more into her than she is to me.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if it was or wasn’t. It was true that Nica treated Jamie in a casual, offhand way, very different from the way he treated her. But I didn’t know if that was because she cared less, or because she had to act like that to balance him out. After all, the relationship couldn’t work—not even some of the time—if they were both hung up and jealous.

  “It is true, and, like I said, I accept it. But she keeps pushing me and pushing me. And you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, right? If you want to have any self-respect whatsoever?” He took a deep breath, then let it out. “Next time, Grace, I’m going for a nice girl, I swear.”

  “Like a nice girl would ever interest you.”

  “She might,” he said defensively. “It would depend on the girl.”

  “I’m not blaming you. It’s not as if it’s your fault. People don’t get to pick who they’re attracted to.”

  “Maybe not, but they can change.”

  When I heard this, my heart started beating faster. I looked at his hand dangling casually off my shoulder: if he flexed his fingers, they’d be touching my breast. He looked at his hand, too. Suddenly, everything got quiet.

  “God,” I said, “I feel weird. I must be drunk.” Lie. I hadn’t so much as sipped the beer he’d given me. I closed my eyes. I could feel him watching me, though, through my lids. It seemed at that moment that he might kiss me, and whether he would or not depended on my meeting his gaze. I delayed opening my eyes, tried to make up my mind, decide if I was willing to risk it—risk being right about his intentions, risk being wrong about his intentions, risk taking a guy who belonged to Nica, on a break or not on a break—when a beery voice yelled out, “Amory!”

  Immediately Jamie and I moved apart.

  A guy in a lemon sorbet–colored polo, the shirt untucked and flopping down over dirty khakis, flew through the sliding back door. He jumped on the couch, inserting himself between me and Jamie, and started humping Jamie’s leg. “Dude, you made it!” Owen Fitz, the host.

  Ten seconds later, Owen had dragged Jamie off to play Quarters and I was left alone. Not knowing what else to do, I went back inside the house. The scene didn’t strike me as hell-like anymore, just weirdly lit and extremely loud. I stood on the outskirts of the crowd, clutching my beer, trying to appear bored and indifferent rather than awkward and at loose ends. Occasionally I’d scan the room for Nica and Jamie, not because I was really looking for them but to have something to do.

  Then I heard the sound of my name. I turned. Coming toward me was Ellie Rocca, a former tennis teammate at Chandler, now a freshman at Trinity. Ellie was a nice girl, quiet, on the mousy side, and looking totally out of place among the shriekers and grinders. Seeing me, she acted happy out of all proportion to what she could possibly have been feeling. Her outsized happiness was probably at seeing a familiar face. I know that’s what mine was at. We hugged, and she introduced me to her friends, also nice, quiet, mousy, and out-of-place-looking. My people, I realized, with a depressing thud. The Margrets and Lydies and Francines, even though their names were Lindsay and Allie and Ashley. The ones I belonged with, and the ones I’d certainly find myself with and only with at Williams next year without Nica around to mooch off socially.

  The night passed.

  When the party began to die down at around two, I went off in search of Nica and Jamie. I had this idea in the back of my head: I’d run into Jamie first, and together we’d go looking for my sister. It would take a while but eventually we’d find her. She’d be sitting on some college guy’s lap, tipsy, sure, though by no stretch a drunken wreck, her speech a little slurry but her decision-making abilities more or less intact, more or less A-OK. Initially Jamie would be livid, ready to storm off, let her fend for herself. Then I’d talk softly to him, remind him that abandoning her wouldn’t be right, and that they were, after all, on a break and thus free to sit on whomever’s lap they chose. At last I’d bring him around, and we’d try to convince Nica to come home with us. She’d refuse, tell us to mind our own business, to get lost, basically. Finally Jamie and I would walk to his car, knowing we’d done everything we could, and that you couldn’t live people’s lives for them. Then we’d drive off, just the two of us.

  This fantasy fell apart pretty much right away, though, because I couldn’t find Jamie. Nica either. Not in the living room, which was almost completely cleared out now, the shades up, the strobe still going. Not in the kitchen where Owen and a girl in police boots and black leather hot pants were arguing over how long to zap an ecstasy-soaked joint in the microwave. Not on the back porch where a bunch of guys were using a Big Mac container as a hacky sack. Finally, I wandered over to the front door, opened it, stepping outside to check for Jamie’s car.

  And then, all of a sudden, there they were. Nica was standing next to a barbecue pit and Jamie was in front of her, kneeling on the ground. Her face was blocked from view by the curtain of her hair, but I could tell from the angle of her neck that she was looking down at him. One hand was holding a cigarette, the other was being held by his. He was pressing the palm of it to his cheek. They were entirely dressed, weren’t even doing PG stuff, and were in plain sight, not only of me but of the whole street. Still, I understood that I was seeing something I shouldn’t be. I didn’t stop watching, though. I couldn’t. Jamie’s face, flashingly illuminated by the strobe in the window, transfixed me. In the sleazy light it looked otherworldly in its beauty, near angelic, the expression on it rapt and so, so tender—astonishingly tender, meltingly tender—as if he wanted to dissolve right then and there, be absorbed into Nica’s body. I wished her face was visible to me, too. If I could see its expression, something would be revealed to me, I just knew it, some always-hidden thing: her feelings about him, how deep they ran. As deep as his for her?

  And then she turned.

  Our sight lines locked and we froze, not so much as blinking. Then, slowly, Nica brought her cigarette hand from her hip, to her mouth. Parting her lips, she released from deep inside her throat a perfect smoke ring. The ring floated dreamily upward, and just as it was about to drift into shapelessness, she thrust her finger through its center, popping it. This gesture—playful and childish but, at the same time, not playful or childish at all, a dig at both my virginity and my presumption, a put-down and a warning in one—was more wounding than any smirk or mean remark. And afte
r she made it, she turned away from me.

  I stood there for another second or two before creeping back into the house.

  The ride home was uncomfortable. Not because of Nica. She was totally at ease, calling Jamie Slim Jim, resting her feet in his lap as he drove; and, now that I’d been bested so completely, she was even able to be nice to me, passing me her Mounds bar after she’d picked all the chocolate off it—an old ritual of ours. And, oddly, it wasn’t because of me, either. I, too, was totally at ease. I’d stepped out of line, gotten above myself, and had been justly slapped down. It was Jamie who was uncomfortable. He kept asking me questions, scanning my face anxiously in the rearview mirror. I think he was afraid I was disgusted with him, judged him a hypocrite for getting back together with Nica after he swore he was through. But I wasn’t disgusted. Far from it. I was impressed. The image of him on his knees at her feet would be with me, I knew, till the day I died. It would be what I’d picture every time I heard the words romance or passion, that phrase of purest corn, true love, believing in it like believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, though secretly I did believe in it, believed in it with all my heart.

  Long story short: I can’t see Jamie feeling about Nica the way he did and then turning around, firing a bullet into her gut, leaving her body splayed in the dirt for birds to shit on, worms to eat.

  Damon’s looking at me in a way that lets me know he’s said something and is waiting for my reaction. Shaking off my reverie, I say, “I’m sorry. What was that?”

  “I said, you guess it’s possible that Jamie killed Nica?”

  “Damon, I’m agreeing with you. What are you getting so hot under the collar for?”

  “Because you’re agreeing but not really. I don’t know why you need so much convincing. Your dad thought he did it.”

  “My dad wasn’t thinking straight when he talked to that reporter—obviously. Because Jamie has an alibi.”