The Safe Room

by B. A. Shapiro

  “Couldn’t get much prettier.”

  “As a very wise white man once said, ‘Pretty is as pretty does.’”

  I figured Kiah must be really irked if she was quoting Forrest Gump. Maya Angelou was more her style. “Was he looking for Trina?”

  Kiah leaned against the doorjamb of her office. “I didn’t see anyone here looking for anyone.”

  Again I was surprised. Honesty was one of Kiah’s prime directives. “One hell of a fine-looking ghost.”

  She snorted in derision. “I don’t think this is the first time he’s been sniffing around.”

  “Has she seen him?” Trina’s probation agreement stipulated that she could not “consort” with known felons; if she were caught talking to Lionnel—a known felon at least a dozen times over—it could mean prison.

  “Not that I know of, but I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  “Trina’s been doing great. She’s clean, working hard, doing a terrific job for Gram.”

  “It’s not that simple, Lee.”

  “Maybe it is,” I insisted.

  Kiah didn’t answer.

  “Why don’t I talk to her and see if I can find out if any-thing’s going on?” I offered. “She’s at the house now. I can give it a try when I get back.”

  Kiah pursed her lips in her there’s-no-way-a-white-person-can-understand expression.

  That look always pissed me off. “If you don’t think anyone can break out of this, why do you bother?”

  “I didn’t say I don’t think anyone can break out,” Kiah corrected me stiffly. “I just said I had a bad feeling about Trina.” She walked into her office, picked up a folder from her desk and handed it to me. “Budget’s all set.” Then she smiled, apparently forgiving me for being white. “Good job.”

  I took the file, pleased, despite my annoyance. “Just let me do a final read-through, then I’ll give it to Joy to copy. After you sign the cover letter, she can drop the whole package at the post office on her way home.” I raised my hand for a high-five. “It’s out of here!”

  Kiah slapped my hand. “One down.”

  Great, I thought as I climbed the stairs to my office. I was going to be finished in an hour, and although I could find plenty to do here, I couldn’t in all good conscience leave Beth on her own for the afternoon. My budget was approved and my report finished, but all this good news meant was that I was going to have to go back down into that damn cellar.

  When I got home, there was a note from Beth propped up on the kitchen table. She had forgotten that her son Zach had a baseball game. She had to pick him up from school and drop him off at the field, but she’d be back by 3:30.

  I went into the west parlor, which Gram used as an office, and was pleased to see that Trina was there by herself. She was sitting at the large oak desk that had belonged to Elijah Harden, Ulysses’ son and my greatgrandfather. In the family lexicon, Elijah was “the Congressman” the way Stanton was “the Colonel.” I dropped into one of the worn leather wing chairs that faced the desk and stretched my legs out in front of me. “Hey,” I said casually, hoping I was setting the right tone for a girl-to-girl heart-to-heart.

  “Hey.” Trina didn’t look up from the long form she was filling out. Her braids fell in a ripple of ringlets around her face, and her velvety skin was pulled taut over her stunning cheekbones. She and Lionnel must have made one terrific looking couple.

  I was wondering if Lionnel was good in bed, but I asked, “Where’s Gram?”

  “Upstairs, I think.”

  “How’re you doing?”

  “Okay.”

  “Making a dent?”

  “I guess.” Trina glanced at the clock on the wall, then returned her gaze to the papers in front of her.

  “You think we’ll get everything done in time for the inspection?”

  Trina scratched her head with the back of her pen, still not meeting my eye. “Does anyone really care about all this paper?”

  “Probably not.”

  Trina’s eyes finally connected with mine, but her smile was fleeting.

  “Bureaucrats have to keep themselves employed.”

  She grunted.

  I cleared my throat. It was as if Trina sensed I wanted to talk to her about a touchy subject, and I didn’t know how to broach it without coming on as the righteous white person she sometimes thought I was. I wished I had never told Kiah I’d have this conversation.

  Trina tapped the edge of the desk with the pen.

  I rubbed the toe of my sneaker into the faded Oriental rug. “So everything’s cool?”

  She shrugged.

  “You’re almost there. Don’t let anything screw you up now.”

  Trina’s eyes clouded briefly with the resignation of old age, the hard-earned knowledge that things were what they were, not what we hoped them to be. She shook her head and spoke to me as if I were a not-too-bright child—and a white one at that. “You don’t always get to control the screw-ups. Lots of times, they get you no matter what.”

  “I want to help.”

  “I know you do, Lee,” she said softly. “But sometimes you just can’t.”

  I pushed myself out of the chair. “Any more of that fabulous chicken salad you made for lunch?”

  Trina startled, as if she hadn’t expected me to give up so easily. “Ah, no,” she said quickly. “It’s all gone.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll find something else.”

  I was in the kitchen when I heard it. I inched to the cellar stairs and leaned toward the sound. The scrape of metal against metal, or manacle against stone. Of falling dirt. I saw the man from my nightmare as clearly as I had seen him in the eerie glow of the fieldstones. I clutched the door handle so hard it dug into my palm. The man was real. And he was back.

  I forced myself to take a deep breath. It wasn’t the man. It was Beth or Michael or Gram. As I headed down the stairs, the shadows and the cobwebs and the musty, rank odor threw me back into the nightmare. The digging was closer, the sound more intense. I imagined I smelled sweat, and as I crossed the dirt floor to the door that led to the old cellar, I was filled with dread. Whatever lay on the other side was not going to be good. I wanted to turn and run, but I kept going. Nightmares weren’t real.

  I stepped into the old cellar and the shadow of a figure holding a shovel fell before my feet. I gasped, and for a moment my dream and reality blurred into one another. My lungs ached with the air I was forgetting to breathe out. It was all true: the tunnel, the shovel, the dirt, the man. Then my vision cleared. I blinked, and the air rushed from my mouth.

  I slumped against the rough-cut doorway in relief, watching my grandmother rhythmically fill the tunnel with dirt. Her back was to me, and she bent her knees as she lifted each shovel-load, just as Beth had instructed this morning. Sixty-nine and stubborn as hell. Gram had never planned to work with Trina. She had just been waiting until Beth and I weren’t around to get her hands on that shovel. She was incorrigible—and she was going to give herself a heart attack.

  Gram abruptly stopped digging and jerked the shovel toward her stomach. “What?” she said, her voice full of confusion. “What the hell …?” Her breathing became rapid and labored, and she tugged on the shovel as if someone were trying to take it from her.

  I was reminded of a mime I once saw fighting on the streets of New Orleans. He was alone on a corner, boxing with no one, throwing punches into the empty air, taking hits, but he was so good he made his invisible partner visible. In the same way, I could see the shape on the other side of Gram’s shovel.

  Gram’s eyes widened, and the horrified awe that was squeezing my heart pinched her face, distorting her features into a startled white mask. Her hands tightened on the handle, and her entire body shook as, for a second, her eyes connected with mine. And in that endless moment, I knew and didn’t want to know, understood and didn’t want to understand, that I was watching the man from my nightmare.

  I couldn’t actually see him, yet he was there: strong and powe
rful, angry. Against all laws of physics, all laws of nature, an invisible being was trying to wrest a shovel from my grandmother’s hands.

  “Gram!” I shouted. “Let go! Let him have it. Just let it go!”

  But she didn’t hear me, or chose not to listen, for she stumbled backward, pulling the shovel with her. The shovel yanked in answer, dragging her forward again. Gram let out a long gasp and her knees gave way. She crumpled in on herself, collapsing as if she had no bones, no strength.

  The shovel flew toward the tunnel as soon as Gram let go, then it too dropped, lifeless, to the dirt.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Jews do a much better job with death than the Presbyterians.

  When my father’s mother died, the entire extended family arrived within what seemed like minutes. Grandma Ray was buried within twenty-four hours (Jewish law has a stricture against embalming which necessitates immediate burial; this has the unintended but fortuitous consequence of getting the funeral over with as soon as possible), then everyone stuck around for a week eating and talking and generally helping each other over the initial hump of grief. But the Presbyterians are too tough and too New England to do anything that emotionally supportive. The Presbyterians must go it alone.

  Although I’d always felt a strong attachment to the liberal politics of my mother’s family, when it came to emotion, I was pure Jew. None of that stiff upper lip crap for me: Gram was dead and I was aching and hollow with grief, wishing more than anything that everyone hadn’t left me here alone. Gram died on Tuesday, was buried on Friday and now it was Saturday, time to pull that chin up and get back to the living. “Life goes on,” my mother reminded me before she left last night. “Don’t let it go on without you.” But the house felt so horribly vacant and wrong. The fact that it was filled with Gram’s papers and books and the faint smell of Chanel #5 made it all the emptier. I didn’t bother to wipe the tears away, the truth was that I hardly noticed them. Over the last few days, crying had become as natural as breathing.

  I was in the west parlor, sitting at the Congressman’s desk and staring at the mounds of paper piled before me. There were condolence notes mixed with bills and the paperwork for the Park Service. There was an unfinished letter Gram had been writing to her brother Joe, and a note she had scribbled to herself about a hair cut next Wednesday. I supposed I’d have to call and cancel it. I looked at her calendar; it was sprinkled with notations of doctors’ appointments and tennis matches and meetings with the Lexington Historical Society. I supposed I’d have to cancel all of those too. I was tired, exhausted actually, completely and totally wrung out. I didn’t have the strength to do all I was “supposed” to do.

  I flipped listlessly through the mail; some of it was for me, but most of it was addressed to Mrs. Clara Barrett or Mrs. Jonathan Barrett or Clara Harden Barrett. There were so many letters to write, people to contact, bureaucracies to inform. And I was so very tired. Beth had offered to go through Gram’s personal things while I had opted for the desk. I didn’t think I could bear the smell of her clothes. Her name showing through the little window of the electric bill was tough enough.

  “Your grandmother had a good life,” my mother had told me at the funeral, annoyed with my inability to control my grief with what she considered “the proper dignity.” “Almost seventy years,” she continued. “Gram went out the way she would have wanted: quick and painless, while she was still in good heath. You should be happy for her, instead of focusing on yourself.”

  I supposed my mother had a point, but Mom hadn’t seen the horror on Gram’s face as she wrestled over a shovel with no one. I hadn’t told anyone about the scene in the cellar. It was all I could do to keep from constantly reliving those unlivable moments, from once again thinking those unthinkable thoughts. When I failed, I was overwhelmed by a dazed, frightened awe at what it might mean.

  I stood and aimlessly wandered through the house. The air in the rooms seemed thinner, somehow less substantial, than it had been when Gram was alive. The dust lying on the furniture and bookshelves gave off an odor that evoked the relentless passage of time.

  I paused in the east parlor before a Chippendale table; carved leaves and berries and other complicated foliage adorned its raised lip, and its slender cabriole legs supported an oval tabletop covered with family photographs: old ones dating back to the Colonel’s time, pictures of Beth and me and our brothers as kids, a brand new photo of Adam and Mindy’s baby daughter. There was an extended family shot taken in 1915 in which everyone, including the small children, looked stern. I scrutinized the sulky faces of the women, wondering which one was Dotty Aunt Hortense, both fearful and hopeful I might detect something in her eyes that would shed light on what had happened in the cellar. But my great-aunts and nameless cousins just stared morosely back, frozen in time, their secrets as remote to me as their lives.

  I put down the family photo and picked up the sepia-tone of Sarah Harden that Gram had shown me the other day. I was again touched by the compassion and sorrow in her expression. What had happened to this woman to make her so sad? Could Beth have been right about the painful, untimely death of her young husband? Or had it been something else, something quite different? There was so much we would never—could never—know, and this not knowing had its own bittersweet poignancy. I returned Sarah’s picture to the table and headed back to the west parlor.

  I had just settled in behind Gram’s desk when I heard the kitchen door slam and the refrigerator door creak open. I jumped up. Gram was home.

  “It’s me!” Beth called. “You got any more Diet Coke?”

  I dropped back into the chair. “In the cabinet to the right of the stove,” I yelled back, surprised at the strength of my voice. “Bring me one, too.”

  Beth was as shook up as I, but she had Presbyterian stoicism on both sides of her family so her veneer was tougher and shinier than mine. Still, when she came through the door with two cans of warm Diet Coke, the eyes staring out from behind her impassive expression were dark and haunted. “No ice,” she said, dropping one can on the desk and popping the other open. She took a sip. “Tastes like shit.”

  I opened mine and tried it. “At least it’s warm shit.”

  “The only kind I’ll drink.” She sat down in the chair across from me, and we sipped our sodas in silence. There wasn’t much to say. And there was so much to say. It had occurred to me that, as Gram hadn’t finalized the deal with the Lexington Historical Society before she died, Beth would probably still inherit Harden House. I wondered what Beth and Russ would do with it, but I wasn’t curious enough to ask, even though a faraway, detached part of me knew I needed to be concerned about the disposition of the house in which I was living.

  “—call them on Monday?” Beth was saying.

  “Huh? Who’re you calling on Monday?”

  “I asked what you think we should do about the Park Service inspection,” Beth said, exasperated patience coating her words. “It’s scheduled for this Tuesday, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged.

  To my surprise, Beth burst into tears. “I can’t do this alone,” she sobbed. “It’s too scary and too hard, and I’m in no shape, no shape at all, not after everything that’s happened, I’m in no shape to handle it. I can’t, I just can’t. I, I need you to come back and help me get through this.”

  Beth’s tears seemed to reach me from a long way off, but they did reach me, and they reminded me of something. Of something someone had told me the other day. At the funeral. No, at the funeral lunch. I was standing in the east parlor and Michael was explaining something about the inspection. Uncle Joe was there. And Aunt Doris. “Trina,” I said. “Trina.”

  Beth looked up, confusion mingling with the fear and sadness in her eyes. She grabbed a tissue from the desk. “What are you talking about?” she mumbled into the tissue, then wiped her cheeks and blew her nose. “What does Trina have to do with anything?”

  “Trina called and postponed the inspection. Michael told her to.
The Park Service people said they’ll get in touch to reschedule.”

  Beth leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Thank God that guy’s got the hots for you,” she said. There were dark crescents of sleeplessness under her eyes, but she was beginning to sound more like herself.

  “He liked Gram a lot too,” I reminded her.

  She smirked at me.

  I smiled, maybe for the first time since I had found Gram in the cellar. Perhaps my mother had a point after all: life did march along no matter how much you wished it was still last week. And who would have guessed a week ago that it would be Michael’s mom who was still alive and Gram who was dead? I sighed. “Are you going to start going through the things in the bedroom?”

  Beth looked down at her hands.

  I noticed her nail polish was chipped—something she would never tolerate under normal circumstances—and the cuticle of her right thumb was all chewed up the way she used to do when she was a kid and was expecting a bad report card or had to tell her parents she’d cracked up the car. I was touched. “It really doesn’t have to be done right away,” I said. “Or,” I hesitated, “or I could help you with it if you want.”

  Beth shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “Let’s stick to our original plan. I’ll start in the bedroom and you try to get this mess under control.” She pressed her hands to the desk and pushed herself to a stand. She stared down at her fingernails as if seeing them for the first time, then headed toward the front stairs. “But I’m not going to stay around all that long today,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ve got to get a manicure.”

  I didn’t know if it was Beth or the Diet Coke that got me going, and I didn’t much care. It just felt good to be moving again, to be out of the fog. I opened all the mail and sorted it into piles: to be trashed, to be paid, to be sent to my mother, to be informed, to be dealt with in some other manner. Then I paid the bills and tried to bring some semblance of order to the Tubman Park materials. But it wasn’t easy. Even with Trina’s recent intervention, the papers were a mess.