"Are you my mother?" she asked back.
"No, I"m the person who wants to know if that"s all you"re going to eat," I told her.
She smiled to herself like she thought that was amusing in a minor way, then she looked at the ceiling. "Yeah, this is all I"m going to eat."
All of this eating and not eating was going on around the kitchen table, which was apparently a real treat for everyone, whether they were eating or not.
"We"re not allowed to eat in the kitchen," said one of the middle kids, whose name I couldn"t remember.
"Your mom didn"t tell me that," I told her.
"I"m telling you. We eat in the dining room."
"I want to eat in the kitchen, it"s easier," I said.
"You don"t get to decide," she informed me.
"Sure I do; I"m in charge."
"You"re not old enough to be in charge," she insisted.
"Don"t you think it"s boring to eat in the dining room all the time?" I asked.
"It"s the way we do things," she told me.
"It is boring," Jennifer announced from her corner. "This is better."
"How old are you, anyway?" asked Louise, the eldest, who had been helping me feed Katherine and the baby with a sort of effortless ease.
"I"m thirty-two."
This made everyone stare. The two monstrous middle kids, Jennifer, Louise, Katherine, even the baby, seemed startled to hear that I was so old. I was startled myself.
"You"re in your thirties?" said one of the monsters.
"You don"t look that old," said the other one.
"It"s just because I"m short," I told her. "If you stretched me out a little, I would look older."
"You would look taller maybe," Jennifer corrected me. The two monsters thought this was a riot and started giggling hilariously, burying their heads in each other like little animals. That made Katherine start laughing too. Then Louise started laughing, just because everyone else was. The baby looked bewildered. For a second, Jennifer"s mood lifted, and she actually smiled, like she really liked having gotten the whole room to laugh, even inadvertently.
"Thirty-two, that"s bizarre. That"s like old," said Louise.
"Yeah, I"m pretty near death," I admitted. This made the monsters laugh even harder, and things were pleasant for about ten minutes, until I told them that they would not be allowed to have chocolate ice cream and watch television unless they ate their dinner and finished their homework. They started whining and yelling again, and then Jennifer sighed and told them to f.u.c.k off, which pretty much put an end to all the fun. The monsters went back to their room, where they argued with each other over nothing for another hour or so. The baby fell asleep in her high chair, then woke up screaming while I wiped her off, and Katherine started crying because no one was paying attention to her. The kitchen looked like a disaster because I didn"t have time to clean up before Louise announced that Katherine and the baby really needed to have baths and be in bed before eight, and she couldn"t help me because she had so much homework to do.
For a moment I wondered how much people got paid for this, because I had not nailed Mrs. White down on the details of the babysitting plan before she fled the apartment in her hot little sea green suit. But I really had no time to think about that missed opportunity. I gave the baby a bath and then Katherine, who then proceeded to prance around the apartment naked and screaming while I tried to put the baby to sleep. Louise said I shouldn"t have let her fall asleep in her high chair even for a minute because now she would not go down for hours. The two monsters suddenly came out into the hallway, declaring that they were hungry for dinner but didn"t want the cold food that was congealing on plates in the kitchen; they wanted the leftover Chinese carry-out they had had earlier in the week with some different babysitter who, they insisted, had shoved it all in the back of the refrigerator. Louise told them that Anna had tossed the leftover Chinese food when she came in that morning, which started another unfortunate round of whining. I wanted to smack Louise, who really seemed to be constantly full of bad news, but then she sighed and told me to go read to Katherine, that she would put Bee to bed. I didn"t know what she was talking about until she reached for the baby, whom she called Bee instead of Barbie, and that made me like her, even more than the offer of help. Then Jennifer appeared out of nowhere and said, "I"ll feed them," propelling the two hungry monsters toward the kitchen.
That left me to lead the naked Katherine back to her little yellow room, find her some pajamas, and look through a pile of books with her. This was extremely pleasant after all the chaos. Katherine carefully and quietly picked up one book after another and considered which ones she wanted read. The books all had brilliantly colored pictures of talking animals and princesses and elves and happy families with small but significant problems, all of which got worked out by everybody being kind to each other. Seriously, the pictures in these books were so pretty and the people in the stories so decent and sensible that you wondered how we all ended up being such a.s.sholes in real life.
After about twenty minutes of lying in bed and paging through peaceful and lovely picture books, I was quite frankly drifting off when Katherine whispered, "There"s the ghost."
Because I was only half awake, I thought she was talking about the story we were reading. I shook my head slightly to clear the fog and considered the picture we were looking at, confused. The story had to do with a talking teddy bear who was left in a large department store by mistake, then had a series of charming misadventures before the little girl who owned him came back and found him. "What ghost, there"s no ghost," I said.
"Listen, listen," Katherine said, worried. She put her small hand up in the air, like the ghost was in the room with us and might flee if I kept talking. We had turned off the overhead light and were reading by the bedside lamp, so the room was dark. I put my arm around her and looked up to listen, meaning to take just a moment before telling her there were no ghosts in her room, only night and shadows.
And then I heard the ghost. I tensed up a little, so Katherine knew she was right. "See?" she said.
She was right. There was a kind of whisper in the walls. It was a female ghost, and she was upset, talking fast in a different language in her other world, which seemed to be sort of adjacent to this one, or maybe in a slightly skewed dimension. It sounded truly spooky, like a river of dead words with nowhere to go, trapped in the air all around us, some past catastrophe frozen between places where things moved. It was definitely a ghost. Katherine looked at me with solemn confidence. She knew that I knew she was right.
"That"s not a ghost," I said. "Come on, that"s just some person who lives in the building."
"Then why is she on our floor? We are the only people who live on this floor, and that"s not us."
"It"s somebody on some other floor."
"Shhhhhh," she said. "She"s crying." Sure enough, the ghost had stopped her mournful complaints and now was sobbing, long pain-wracked moans that clung to the insides of the walls.
"That is not a ghost," I repeated. I sat up to go look for it and caught sight of Jennifer in the doorway.
"You hear the ghost?" she whispered. She glided into the room and joined us on the bed.
"That"s not a ghost!" I said, with so little confidence that they both looked at me triumphantly.
"Shhhhhh," whispered Katherine. "If you talk too loud, it goes away."
"I"m not going to be loud," I said, whispering as well. "I"m just going to go listen." I left them on the bed and got down on my hands and knees so I could crawl silently through the wool pile of the carpet and get to the wall without the ghost knowing I was closing in on her. She was talking again, a fast, anxious complaint, like she knew she was trapped forever and simply couldn"t make peace with it. Katherine sat up on the bed, clearly worried that something was going to happen to me. She leaned into Jennifer, who put her arm around the kid in a gesture of such careless affection it wounded me to the core.
"Come back, come back," Katherine whispered, waving her hands at me like I was doing something way too dangerous and had to be ushered back to the one safe spot in the room-the bed-or the ghost would get me. I didn"t answer right away, I just put my ear up against the wall. The murmuring river of grief got louder; there was no question that the ghost was inside the wall. "Oh," Katherine said, really worried. "Come back!"
"Does the closet go all the way over here?" I asked, still in a whisper. "How big is that closet?"
"We"ve checked out the closet. The ghost is not in the closet," Jennifer said.
"Yeah, I know, I just want to check out something else," I murmured. I crawled over to the closet door, reached up for the k.n.o.b, and carefully swung it open.
"No!" said Katherine, in a terrified little wail.
"There"s no ghost in the closet, Katherine, we already went through this, the ghost doesn"t live in your closet," Jennifer told her. I was not so sure. The ghost"s voice was distinctively louder there, and it seemed to inhabit the closet s.p.a.ce with more authority. The walls were holding on to the sound and carrying it into the room, but the sound did seem to come from the closet. I put my ear to the floor and listened. The ghost was in the floor. I tapped quietly on the floor with my index finger. The ghost fell silent.
"Hey," I said. "Hey, who are you? Are you okay?" There was another moment of silence, then the sound of air, some things b.u.mping, and the sound of a door closing. Then nothing. I turned back to Jennifer and Katherine, who were watching from the bed as I talked to the floor.
"You scared her away," Katherine reprimanded me. She was clearly not pleased with my behavior.
"I did scare her away, isn"t that what you"re supposed to do with ghosts? Most of them are not quite so cooperative." I reached up, flicked on the closet light switch, and started shoving around all the shoes and kids" costumes and stuffed animals that were thrown w.i.l.l.y-nilly around the floor.
"What are you doing?" asked Jennifer.
"I don"t know, I"m just looking to see if there"s a trap door or something," I said. "It doesn"t make any sense. This room is right above my apartment, right? Would she be in my apartment?"
"You said you didn"t have this room," Jennifer noted.
"No, I have this room, I just don"t have this view," I explained.
"So the ghost is in your apartment?"
"It"s not a ghost, sweetheart, it"s a person. That"s a person who"s downstairs, and she"s upset, and it sounds like she"s in my apartment, but she can"t be," I explained.
"You said you didn"t have this room," Jennifer repeated, mostly to herself. She was ignoring me now as she dropped off the bed, got on all fours, and started shoving the stuffed animals out of the closet and into the room. The closet floor was also carpeted with yellow wool. Jennifer started peeling back its edges.
"What are you doing?" said Katherine, excited.
"I"m looking for the trapdoor."
"There"s no trapdoor," I said. "I was making that up."
"There might be," Jennifer said. "There"s clearly something down there. And you say it"s not part of your apartment."
"I don"t know if it"s part of my apartment or not, Jennifer, but you can"t just rip up the carpet in here, your mother will kill me."
"She won"t even notice," Jennifer muttered. By this time Katherine had crawled off the bed and was helping her pull up the carpet.
"What on earth are you doing?" said Louise, from the doorway.
"We"re looking for the trapdoor," said Katherine, quite matter-of-fact. Louise looked at me as if I were completely insane.
"You told them it would be okay to take the carpet up? Mom is going to flip out," she stated.
"I didn"t tell them it was okay. We just heard something in the wall, so we were trying to find out where the sound came from. It"s okay, Jennifer. Katherine, get back in bed, please. We"re fine. The ghost is gone."
"The ghost?" said Louise, raising her eyes to heaven as if someone might glance down and agree with her a.s.sessment of this whole mess, which was not good. "You know my parents are not going to be happy to hear that you"re telling her ghost stories, it"s not part of our religion."
"I didn"t tell her a ghost story, she heard the ghost in the wall. We all did. Come on, sweetie, you have to get back in bed now." I leaned over and grabbed Katherine before she could crawl farther away from me, swinging her into my arms and plopping her on the bed in one swift move that left her giggling. Louise continued to watch with disapproval, but I was not letting her get to me. "Come on, Jennifer, Katherine has go to bed. There"s nothing there, I was kidding."
Jennifer looked up at me, and for the first time I saw her smile, a big, happy, excited grin. "Then what"s this?" she said.
14.
IT DIDN"T LOOK LIKE MUCH, BUT THERE WAS NO QUESTION THAT she had found something: a perfect square, about three feet by three feet, that had been cut out of the wall and then dropped back in, tightly fitting the hole from which it had been cut. Then it had been painted over, and a laminated picture of Noah and the ark taped over that. It was pretty well hidden, but there it was, right in the wall.
"Wow," said Katherine. "How do you open it?"
"It doesn"t open, Katherine," Louise said. "It"s not a door, it"s just a hole, left over from the crawl s.p.a.ce for the workers who built the building. After they finished, they made a plug and sealed it up. They were all sealed up ages ago." Not content to have made such a deflating statement, Louise droned on, "This is an old building and it has its quirks, but there"s nothing more to it than that. This isn"t one of your storybooks. I don"t know why you"re encouraging her, Jennifer, you"re not a child. And isn"t it past her bedtime?" This she directed to me with a kind of pointed superiority. Those nuns are doing a good job with this one, I thought. Louise moved to the closet and flicked off the light with a quick impatient gesture, then stood in the shadows with her hands on her hips. "Mom really wants the little kids to get to bed on time."
Jennifer stood up and glided into the hallway, then, quiet as a ghost herself, disappeared behind the door to her own room. Sanity regained its footing. One by one my charges went to sleep, and at half past twelve their parents returned, paid me a surprising amount of money, and sent me back downstairs to my own life.
I let myself in to my apartment with all my multiple keys. Lucy was long gone, of course; the place was deserted. There was no sign of the guy from the city page of the Times, if in fact he had shown his face and prowled around and invaded the empty corners of my enormous empty apartment. And compared to the Whites"-so cluttered with children and toys and furniture and uneaten dinners and coats and shoes and arguments over nothing-my apartment seemed especially enormous and empty. Feeling both exhausted and spooked, I went into each room and turned on all the lights everywhere, as if that would populate the vacant s.p.a.ces. But a lot of the bulbs were dead, and the ones that worked put out only the shadow of an actual glow. The effect was so painfully lackl.u.s.ter and grim it made everything worse, and I started to panic. As I looked around that empty apartment, I honestly didn"t know how I was supposed to go on. After spending the night with six messy and unfinished girls who hadn"t yet made a single disastrous life-altering mistake, I was not in the mood to spend any time alone with shadows. Besides, I was now somewhat convinced that there was a ghost in my apartment.
It occurred to me that I could at least replace a few of those bulbs. I remembered seeing some dusty packets of lightbulbs somewhere during my early searches, so I went looking again, poking around in a few closets in the empty bedrooms and some of the many bathrooms. There I found only some empty plastic bags and a couple of old sheets, so I went to check out the laundry room, where the light was marginally better than anywhere else in the apartment, and started looking through the plywood closets nailed to the wall above and alongside the washer-dryer. In the first one I found more old plastic bags shoved in a corner next to a dozen or so crisply folded paper bags. Then a packet of bright blue sponges shriveled together like frightened old ladies, still in their shrink wrap, and behind that an unused toilet plunger, also still wrapped. The sponges and plunger were covered with dust, as was an old red plastic bottle of liquid Tide, my mother"s detergent of choice. Behind that were three different kinds of stain remover, two flashlights with no batteries in them, and behind that, neatly folded and stacked, a pile of old sheets and pillowcases so worn and drained of color that you honestly wouldn"t know they existed if you weren"t bent on emptying the whole sorry cabinet just to see if there were any lightbulbs back there.
The other two cabinets yielded similarly dispiriting prizes: a half-empty bottle of Windex, a container of tarnish remover, more withered sponges, tile cleanser from the past century. It was truly dreary to find so many different household cleansers covered with so much dust, and I was starting to feel pretty sure that these plywood cubicles were never going to yield any lightbulbs, but I was so wired I just kept looking without really caring what I found. A floor-to-ceiling closet that had been shoved into the corner next to the dryer was full of dusty mops and a couple of broomsticks with bent yellow plastic bristles on the end. There was a folded metal footstool that was so rusted you couldn"t open it anymore and more old plastic bags crumpled together in such a dirty and disgusting heap that I was vaguely afraid something horrible might crawl out if I moved even one. I kicked the pile cautiously a couple of times and nothing scurried out, so I reached in with both arms and started to paw it all aside, pulling the mess out into the room along with the ancient brooms and mops and the dusty cleansers that I had dumped in the middle of the floor. And then, because I had taken all the stuff out of it, the closet lost its balance and almost fell on my head, because it wasn"t really fastened to the wall. So I had to catch it and wriggle out from underneath it and somehow keep it from braining me.
And I found that I had been right all along; the layout of my apartment and the Whites" did not line up. There was another room, and that cheap little plywood closet had been shoved right up against its door. There was the extra room, right underneath Katherine"s, and somehow a ghost had gotten into it.
15.
IT TOOK ME A WHOLE DAY TO GET UP THE NERVE TO GO IN. THE room was quite dark, and the light switch on the wall, like so many of the others in that apartment, was completely useless. Eventually I found a flashlight that worked, and this is what I found: sixty-seven ancient cardboard boxes, taped shut and stacked neatly on top of one another. Six oil paintings in dusty, broken wood frames. Six ornate oak dining-room chairs with turned legs and an orange-and-yellow-vinyl folded-up baby"s high chair. An old bed frame, a giant wingback easy chair with torn pink upholstery fabric. An eight-foot-long solid oak Stickley dining-room table leaning up against the wall with the legs removed. In a far corner, stuffed between the last two rows of boxes, a cracked black garment bag with three floor-length evening gowns.
This is what was in the boxes: six Waterford crystal tumblers, three with chips. Two dozen plastic jars filled with two dozen different colors of dried-up poster paint. Four pairs of battered gym shoes, two pairs of low black pumps, one pair of bright gold four-inch spike heels, and sixteen pairs of cowboy boots. A dark gray-and-black hand-knit Fair Isle sweater. Four Indian-print cotton scarves, three silk scarves, seven wool scarves, and one scarflike shawl with Tibetan coins st.i.tched around one edge. Four shoe boxes filled with dangly silver earrings, tangled-up bracelets, and inexpensive sparkly necklaces. Another shoe box full of Mardi Gras beads. A box of red, blue, yellow, black, and white Lego blocks. Another box full of Tinker Toys and Matchbox cars, along with about sixty pieces of orange plastic Matchbox car track. Two boxes of old phonograph alb.u.ms, by bands and girl singers I"d never heard of, except for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Two broken plastic light sabers and three plastic swords. A whole box of hats-a bowler, four fedoras, a Robin Hood hat, a really well-made French beret, an equally well-made wool cap from Ireland. Five leather gloves, none with a mate. Six pairs of worn jeans, a bunch of T-shirts, eight Indian-print skirts, four pairs of eyegla.s.ses. Dishes. Gla.s.sware. A shoe box full of expensive flatware. Two table lamps with strangely carved bases and even stranger Dr. Seusslike lampshades. Two broken laptop computers. Three unspeakably beautiful gla.s.s vases with a swirled gold and blue finish. A funny cookie jar in the shape of a fat man carrying a suitcase. Two half-size bone china mugs with pictures of dogs on them. A box full of china mugs from different countries all over the world. A dozen Halloween costumes, including three pirates of different sizes. A hand-knit blanket with six holes in it and an enormous patchwork quilt that looked big enough to cover three beds. An old Minolta SLR camera, three boxes full of dusty negatives, and seventeen photo alb.u.ms filled with pictures.
That was not, in fact, everything; that"s just what I managed to get through in three or four days. Every morning I got up, made myself a cup of coffee and some ramen noodles, watched ten or fifteen minutes of the morning news, then got my flashlight and let myself back into that hidden room and looked around. There was no overhead light and only one dim window hidden by all the detritus in the far corner, so whenever I found a box that looked like it might have something interesting in it-which was, in fact, all of them-I would shove it across the floor to the laundry room, and there I would unload it, examining each separate piece before adding it to the pile on top of the dryer. On the second day of this, I rigged up an improvised light source by running a long orange extension cord back to the plug in the laundry room and firing up a couple of portable electric photographer"s lamps from my new favorite hardware store. The lamps gave off a fierce and uncompromising light, which was finally too unnerving to be tolerated. So I went on dragging each box into the light of the laundry room and squeezing the lives that had been hidden away there back into the apartment they had once inhabited.
My timing for this new hobby was good, as Lucy had decided to give me a little break from her clever maneuverings, because she did know that she had completely p.i.s.sed me off about that injunction thing. Then, after several days of peace and quiet, she started to slowly reappear. First Alison called my cell phone, leaving a tight little birdlike message about wanting to see how I was and speculating that maybe she and Daniel could drop by with some carry-out so I wouldn"t be all alone over here. I didn"t call back, so she called again and left a message virtually identical to the first one, which I was a hundred percent sure she left only because Lucy told her to. When I didn"t return that call either, Daniel phoned and said he was worried about me and that he and Alison were coming by later that day. I knew everyone was acting on Lucy"s orders. So I called Alison back and got her voice mail and left a short cheerful message about how I was fine and everything was fine and they shouldn"t come over. So then Daniel left another message about wanting to talk to me, which I didn"t respond to, and then Lucy left a message saying Daniel and Alison were coming over and she had heard that I told them they couldn"t, which was not okay because even though I was staying there that didn"t mean I could control access to the apartment. The apartment belonged to all three of us, and I could not say that they couldn"t come over. So then I left a message on Lucy"s voice mail saying I didn"t think I owned the apartment, and my understanding was that n.o.body knew who really owned the apartment until the courts made a ruling, but that this was not a good time for me and I didn"t want anyone to come over right now because I had some things I was doing. At which point Lucy called back and left a message saying that she and Daniel and Alison would come over that evening at six.
Which would have been fine-I was planning on letting them in, for Chrissake-but Lucy got herself so worked up over my arrogance that she decided she"d better come over early and yell at me some more. So she showed up in the middle of the day, well before I was expecting to have to let anybody in. And she couldn"t get in, because I had locked it from the inside with my slide bolt and the two chain guards.
Honestly, I had not predicted that Lucy would get so offended by my defiance that she would just arrive, which was why I was all the way in the back of the apartment, crawling around in the secret room, looking through boxes with a flashlight and trying to determine which one to go through next. I had already gone through six boxes that day, and I had not yet thought about packing it all up and hiding it away again, so flatware and shoes and fifty-year-old Halloween costumes were strewn all over the laundry room. I had just found the first box of photo alb.u.ms when my cell phone, which I kept clipped to my belt loop, started to buzz. I looked down, saw that it was Lucy, and decided not to answer. After about three minutes it buzzed again, and I ignored it again, figuring I had already gotten one s.h.i.tty message from her and that was plenty. I mean, why listen to her snipe at me on the phone when I could just wait and get it in person? So I was truly immersed in my studies when the phone buzzed a third time. I decided to finally answer it.
"Yes, what, Lucy?" I said, annoyed as h.e.l.l.
"I am out in the hall, let me in," she demanded.
"Wait, you"re what?"
"I"m in the hall at the front door and I can"t get in. I told you to take those extra locks off the door, we don"t need them. I"m not going to talk to you about this while I"m standing out in the hallway. Just let me in. Right now." She was calm but furious.
"You said you were coming at six," I said.
"I don"t have to get your permission to come over, Tina!" she said. "And I am not kidding around! You have to come and let me in immediately!"
Lucy is so good at bossing people around that sometimes I actually do whatever she"s told me to do before I"ve even decided to do it. So I had squeezed through the doorway of the secret room and out into the laundry area before I paused to consider what would happen if I let her in. I kicked aside a pile of sweaters I had unearthed, which were now strewn all over the floor. One of them, a rather small olive green pullover, had a lot of charming cables all over it, and one of the rows of cable was all screwed up-it went one way and then the other, and then it twisted around and kind of collapsed into a knot, and then it came out the other side and held steady for the rest of its journey up the sleeve. Right then I realized that the sweater was handmade and that the mother of those two boys had knitted it, that she was a knitter.
"Tina, where are you?" Lucy snapped, because I hadn"t said anything while I considered the hapless cable on the sleeve of the little sweater on the floor.
"You have to come back," I said.
"Open the door, Tina," Lucy said, surprised.