by Katrina Leno
“Whoa, whoa, Jane—calm down, calm down. It’s okay. You’re okay.”
A familiar voice. A man’s voice. A friend’s voice.
She opened her eyes.
And everything was fuzzy at first, but then it slowly came into focus.
Will.
It was Will.
Hi, Will.
Her head hurt. She closed her eyes again.
One second, Will.
She tried to say something, but it just came out as a moan.
“Take your time,” Will said. “No rush. Just breathe for a minute.”
So she wasn’t buried? She wasn’t in the dirt. She tried to feel her mouth, to make sure it was clear, to make sure she could breathe, but she overshot it and hit herself in the head.
“Ow,” she said.
“Just relax,” Will said.
“The piano isn’t right,” she whispered.
But no. That had come out wrong. He wouldn’t understand her. She tried again:
“Somebody is here. Be careful, Will. Be…”
Her room, ransacked.
The rose petals on the floor.
do books taste like roses?
Her eyes shot open again.
“Someone was in my room,” she said. “We need to call the police.”
“You saw someone in your room?”
“Look at it. Look at it, it’s trashed. She ruined it. How did she know? How did she know about the books?”
“How did who know? Who ruined it? Who ruined what?”
“Don’t you see it? The whole thing…”
“Jane, just take a deep breath. I’m not sure what you’re talking about. What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“My room. I want to get up.”
“Are you sure? Do you need another minute?”
“I’m fine. I want to get up.”
So he helped her up.
Her arms and legs felt wobbly and weird, like the feeling was still coming back into them. She let Will support her, leaning into him because she knew if she didn’t, she’d end up right back on the ground.
“You passed out,” he said. “Jane, you feel… You feel really warm. Are you sick?”
She hadn’t looked into her bedroom again. They were both in the doorway now; she pressed her back against the doorjamb for support.
“What are you doing here?” she asked suddenly.
“Susie left her phone,” Will explained. “I guess she got all the way to Alana’s and remembered we were supposed to go over to our grandparents’ house this morning. They live near Alana, so she didn’t want to have to drive all the way back here. She asked me to grab it on my way.”
“But how did she call you if she didn’t have her phone?”
“She used Alana’s phone,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“How did you get in here? You just came in?”
“Jane, I heard you screaming. The door was unlocked. Are you… accusing me of something here?”
“Sorry.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “I’m sorry. Thank you for coming in. I mean—you scared the shit out of me. But still. Thank you.” She opened her eyes and made herself smile. Will looked worried.
“You’re sure you didn’t hit your head? I tried to catch you, but…”
Jane tapped her temple. “I feel okay.”
“Is your mom…?”
“At the store.”
“Should we call her?”
“Let me just… think for a minute, okay?”
She straightened herself up a little. The feeling was returning to her fingers, to her toes. Her head didn’t feel so airy.
She still hadn’t looked at the room.
She put her hands on either side of her head, like blinders.
She knew what she’d see when she looked.
She could tell by the way Will was acting.
“I think you need to lie down,” he said gently.
She nodded.
She made herself turn her head.
She made herself look.
Not a thing was out of place. Not one pillow on the floor, not one torn curtain, not one open closet door.
She rubbed her forehead with the palm of her hand. She felt a wave of fatigue pass over her, a rush of light-headedness. Will put a hand on her arm.
“Jane? I think you should get in bed.”
She nodded and let him lead her over to it, crawled underneath the covers slowly, laid her head down on the pillow. He sat on the edge of the mattress.
“What happened?” he asked softly.
“The fever,” she said. “I think I’m… seeing things.”
He nodded. “You need some rest.”
“Her phone should be in the kitchen.”
“I’ll find it.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Don’t apologize.”
“You didn’t see… any rose petals. Right?”
“Rose petals? In here?”
She nodded.
“No rose petals. Nothing weird,” he assured her.
“Okay. Thanks, Will.”
“Text me later, okay?”
“I will.”
“Bye, Jane.”
She pulled the covers over her face as he stood up from the bed and left the room. Her head was on fire, pounding. She felt like she was on a boat, like the bed was gently rocking back and forth, tossed among huge rolling waves.
She uncovered her face and rolled onto her side, staring at the wall, willing herself into stillness.
She’d seen the room, torn apart and wrecked. Was it the fever? Was it making her hallucinate?
She’d seen the rose petals, dozens of them, arranged to spell out the words.…
What were the words?
She couldn’t remember. Something about books. Something about roses.
But there were no roses; there was nothing wrong.
She was sick. She was seeing things.
She rolled over again; she couldn’t get comfortable. She sat up in bed and hit her pillow, fluffing it, then arranged the covers around her.
And when she lay back down, when her head hit the pillow again…
A small puff of bright-red rose petals floated up around her.
Her fever broke on Sunday night but she stayed home from school on Monday, at Ruth’s insistence. She spent most of the weekend in bed, with Ruth bringing her soup and toast and endless glasses of water. She finally got up Monday afternoon to shower and change into fresh pajamas and venture outside of her bedroom for the first time in over forty-eight hours.
The house was quiet as she made her way slowly down the hallway, then step by step to the first floor. Her legs felt shaky and weak, like they didn’t quite belong to her. She wandered from room to room and finally found Ruth in Chester’s study, sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by little piles of paperwork.
“Is there some method to this madness?” Jane asked, looking down at her mother.
“The optimist in me says yes,” Ruth replied. “The pessimist in me says, why am I even bothering?”
“I think just toss it all. That’s your best option.”
“You may be right. How are you feeling?”
“Like a new woman.”
“Well, two days in bed will do wonders for a person.”
“What are you looking for, anyway?”
Ruth sighed and let her shoulders droop. “I don’t know. Honestly, honey, I don’t know. It started as something I thought I needed to do, look through my father’s things before I got rid of them, but now I think I’m just procrastinating.”
“I don’t think you’re going to find anything in here that you need.”
“You’re probably right.”
“So I’ll get some trash bags and we’ll clean this up, okay?”
“You’re not doing anything strenuous, young lady.”
“Mom, I’m fine. I’ve been lying down for two days; I need to do something.”
“All right
,” Ruth said, half-defeated and half-relieved. “Go get the bags.”
Jane went to the kitchen and grabbed the box of trash bags from the cabinet under the sink. She brought them back to the study.
“I’m gonna pee,” Ruth said. “Anything on the floor is fair game.”
“Got it.”
Ruth slipped out of the room, and Jane began scooping up piles of papers and dumping them in the first trash bag. She filled it quickly and opened up another. She stopped to look at a few of the papers and found useless receipts for old furniture, typed minutes from meetings held twenty years ago, and invoices for various jobs done at the house. None of it was important, and soon she had two trash bags full and the floor was cleared. She got out a third bag and pulled open a drawer of Chester’s desk. Ruth hadn’t been in here yet; it was overflowing with stuff.
Jane picked up a handful of receipts and deposited them all into the trash bag. Underneath them were some old greeting cards. She picked up one with a stuffed bear on the front. The bear’s fur was made of a velvety material and it held up a brightly colored banner that said THANK YOU! Jane ran her thumb over the bear’s fur before she opened the card. The neat handwriting on the inside said: Dear Grandpa, Thank you so much for my new dollhouse. I am so excited to play with it and I love the dolls and the furniture and—
“What’s that?”
Ruth, from the doorway. Jane jumped a mile.
“Jeez, Mom, you scared me.”
“What is that?” Ruth repeated, and before Jane could even blink, Ruth had crossed the room and snatched the card out of Jane’s hands.
Jane watched her mother’s lips move as Ruth read it to herself. Her hands were shaking a little. The card vibrated gently in her grasp.
“That’s not from me, is it?” Jane asked. “I mean, I don’t remember Grandpa ever giving me a dollhouse.”
“It’s from me,” Ruth said quickly. “The card is from me.”
“But it says Grandpa.”
“It was a joke. I called my father Grandpa.”
“Why?”
She only hesitated a moment. “I didn’t know my grandparents. All my friends had grandpas and grandmas, and they’d buy them presents and take them to get ice cream. So I asked my father if he could be my father and my grandpa.”
Ruth’s hands were still shaking, and she wouldn’t meet Jane’s eyes. She closed the card purposefully, then shut the drawer Jane had pulled it from.
“Thank you for helping me clean up,” she said. “But I really think you should still be resting. I need to go to the grocery store. What would you like for dinner?”
“Wait, so that’s your room? The room with the dollhouse?”
“What room with the dollhouse?” Ruth asked. Her voice was even and icy. She still wouldn’t look at Jane.
“The storage room. The room you thought was a storage room. There’s a dollhouse in it. But you said another room was your bedroom.”
“The storage room was my playroom. When I grew up, my mother filled it with boxes. I don’t know why it’s not a storage room anymore. I don’t know what she did with the boxes. She must have taken them to the dump.”
“But the room had a bed in it,” Jane insisted. “Why would your playroom have a bed in it?”
“Enough, Jane!” Ruth said sharply, finally meeting her daughter’s gaze. “Do you want a written history of every change of furniture in this house? I don’t know why there’s a bed in that room. It was never a bedroom. It was my playroom. Do you see how many beds there are in this house? Maybe my mother was obsessed with beds. Maybe she went so batty in her old age, living here without my father, that all she could think about was beds, okay? How the fuck am I supposed to know why she did the things she did? I barely knew the woman.”
Jane didn’t breathe. Ruth, on the other hand, breathed too much; her chest rose and fell rapidly. Her cheeks were spotted with red (like roses, said a voice in Jane’s head). As Jane watched, Ruth put her hands over her face and took a deep, steadying breath. When she let it out, she uncovered her face and said, “I’m going to get us food. I’ll be back soon. Come out of this room, please.”
So Jane followed Ruth out of the study, and Ruth took a key out of her pocket and locked the door behind them.
Jane didn’t speak. She didn’t know what to say. She just followed Ruth quietly into the foyer and watched as her mother slipped on her shoes and coat and walked out the front door.
Ruth had still been holding the card.
The card addressed to Grandpa.
A gust of cold evening air had squeezed in through the briefly open door, and it swirled around Jane as she stood motionless, thinking.
Why had Ruth reacted so bizarrely when Jane had seen the card? The change in her demeanor had been palpable, alarming.
Was that what grief did after it had a chance to cool? Did it turn into something like rage, something that festered underneath the skin and caused irrational bursts like the one Jane had just witnessed from her mother?
Rage was something Jane could understand.
The house creaked around her, a sound that Jane was now almost used to: the sound of settling.
Would a house like this ever be fully settled? Or would it ache and moan until the end of time, until all the newer, shoddier houses had fallen to ruins around it?
A flash of the earth with everything destroyed except this house, the last building standing, and Jane within it, trapped inside its walls, not really caring anymore whether she made it out or not.
She turned and looked into the mirror that hung above the entranceway table.
She looked pale. There were deep circles underneath her eyes. Her hair was loose and tangled. It had been a while since she’d gotten it cut. The ends were dry and split, and there was a sizable chunk of new growth that had started near the center of her forehead, a two- or three-inch piece of hair that curled more vigorously than the rest because it was so short. It fell to a stop just between her eyebrows. She would have to clip it out of her face later.
Something had happened in this house.
She wasn’t sure where the thought came from, when exactly it had been born, but it arrived now like a force, like a storm.
Something had happened in this house. Something wasn’t right here. Something had happened.
She went upstairs.
She walked to the end of the hallway, past the playroom with the bed in it, and opened the door to her grandparents’ bedroom.
She felt around on the wall for the light switch. She clicked it on and stepped inside the room.
It smelled like something in here.
Like roses.
But it wasn’t like the roses in the backyard; this was just a touch of fragrance, a delicate hint of flowers.
Jane crossed over to her grandmother’s vanity and saw a vintage glass perfume bottle, the kind with an atomizer. She picked it up and sniffed. Rose water. Emilia must have made her own rose water from the plants in the garden. All these years later and it was still strong enough to give off a perfume.
There was a door against the right wall that led into a master bathroom. An empty soap dish. An empty toothbrush holder. An empty towel rack. The toilet bowl lid was closed.
Jane found herself fixating on the empty toothbrush holder.
When had Emilia’s toothbrush been thrown away?
Someone must have come through and cleaned the house. Had the nurse who’d found her grandmother’s body taken the time to throw away the toothbrush, take out the trash, put all unnecessary clutter into drawers?
Had Ruth thrown away Greer’s toothbrush?
Had she picked it out of the ceramic toothbrush holder and dropped it into the trash can?
And what about his shampoo, his razor, his shaving cream?
Had she thrown everything out, one by one?
A few days after Greer died, Jane had woken in the middle of the night, one or two in the morning, and noticed the hall light was on. The crack underneath h
er door was illuminated with the pale yellow glow of it. She got out of bed and crossed her room, opening the door and peering out, blinking.
There were trash bags in the hallway, a handful of them all lined up in a row. As Jane stood there, her eyes adjusting to the light, Ruth came out of her own bedroom dragging another one, lining it up with the others. She pushed her hair away from her forehead, turned around, and—seeing Jane—jumped.
“You scared me,” she said. “Was I being too loud?”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Cleaning. I couldn’t sleep.”
Jane took a few steps into the hallway and peered into a trash bag. It was filled with Greer’s clothes, neatly folded and piled one on top of the other.
“Oh,” Jane said.
“You never think about these things,” Ruth whispered, and when Jane looked up, she saw that her mother had started crying again. Or—continued to cry—because in those first weeks after Greer’s death, had either of them really ever stopped crying?
“What are you going to do with them?”
“There’s a shelter,” Ruth said. “I found it online. They need donations.”
Jane removed the top item from the bag. It was an old sweatshirt, fraying around the collar and cuffs, the perfect faded gray. She brought it up to her nose; it still smelled like him, and her stomach twisted painfully, aching as she hugged it to her chest.
She had taken the sweatshirt, packed it with the clothes she brought to Maine, but she hadn’t yet worn it. She hadn’t even unfolded it, just removed it carefully from the box and placed it into her closet. She didn’t want to touch it too much. She didn’t want the smell to fade.
Now, in her grandparents’ bedroom, she crossed to the bureau and pulled open a drawer to reveal nothing inside. Empty. Another drawer—empty. All of them, empty.
Who had cleaned these out? What had they done with the things inside?
Jane felt tired suddenly, and a wave of sadness threatened to put her off her feet. She swayed a little, took a step back into the bedroom, and sat down on the edge of her grandparents’ bed.
Who had slept on what side?
How did people decide things like that, who slept where?
How had her parents decided what side of the bed they would each take?
Where did her mother sleep now?
Did she stay on the same side, or had she moved toward the middle, spreading out so she wouldn’t notice the empty space, so she wouldn’t feel the absence of Greer so distinctly?
