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“What a dump,” said Daniel.
“Could we not piss on this before we’ve even seen it, Daniel?” called Lucy, from the kitchen. But she said it friendly, not edgy. She was having a pretty good time, I think.
Alison was not. She kept pawing at the wall. “Is this all the light? There has to be another light switch somewhere,” she said, sounding all worried.
“Here, I’ve got one,” said Lucy, throwing a switch in the kitchen. It didn’t really do much because the kitchen was a whole separate room with a big fat wall in front of it, so then there was just a little doorway-sized window of light that didn’t actually make it very far into the living room, or parlour, whatever you wanted to call this giant space.
“Oh that’s a big help,” said Alison.
“Wow, this kitchen is a mess. You should see this!” yelled Lucy. “Oh God, there’s something growing in here.”
“That’s not funny,” Alison snapped.
“No kidding,” Lucy called back, banging things around in there in a kind of sudden, alarming frenzy. “No kidding, there’s something growing—ick, it’s moving! It’s moving! No wait—never mind, never mind.”
“I am in no mood, Lucy! This is ridiculous. Daniel! Where are you? Tina, where did you go? Where is everybody! Could we all stay in one place please? Daniel.” Alison suddenly sounded like a total nut. It’s something that happens to her, she just gets more and more worked up, and she truly doesn’t know how to stop it once it gets going. No one is quite sure why Daniel married her, as he’s pretty good looking and seriously could have done a lot better. Not that Alison is mean or stupid; she’s just sort of high strung in a way that is definitely trying. Anyway, right about now was when that apartment literally started to drive her crazy. She kept slapping the wall, looking for another light switch, and Daniel was just ignoring how scared she was; he was heading all the way across that gigantic room into the gloom on the other side, where that one chair sat, next to a big hole in the wall. Well, it wasn’t a hole; it was a hallway. But from where we all stood it looked like a hole, and the sloping black shadow that used to be Daniel was about to disappear right down it.
“Daniel, just wait, could you wait please?” Alison yelled, completely panicked now. “I cannot see where you are going!”
“It’s fine, Alison,” he said, sounding like a bastard, just before he disappeared.
“Daniel, WAIT!” she yelled, almost crying now.
“Here, Alison,” I said, and I pulled open one of the blinds.
And then we were all showered with light. This incredible gold and red light shot through the window and hit every wall in that room, making everything glow and move; the sun was going down so the light was cutting through the branches of the bare trees, which were shifting in the wind. So that big old room went from being all weird and dreary to being something else altogether, and it skipped everything in between.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes, thank you, that’s much better,” Alison nodded, looking around, still anxious as shit. “Although that isn’t going to be much help when the sun is gone.”
“Is it going somewhere?” I asked.
“It’s going down, and then what will you do? Because that chandelier gives off no light whatsoever, it’s worse than useless, all the way up there. You’d think they’d have had some area lamps in a room this size.”
“You’d think they’d have had some furniture in a room this size,” I observed.
“Okay, I don’t know what that stuff is, that’s growing in the kitchen,” Lucy announced, barging into the giant empty parlour, now filled with the light of the dying day. “But it’s kind of disgusting in there. We’re going to have this whole place professionally cleaned before we put it on the market, and even that might not be enough, it might be, oh God, who knows what that stuff is. And it’s everywhere. On the counters, in the closets. Who knows what’s in the refrigerator. I was afraid to look.”
“There’s really something growing?” I asked. Her dire pronouncements were having the opposite effect on me; the worse she made it sound the more I wanted to see it. I slid over to the doorway just to take a peek.
“Is it mold?” Alison asked, her level of panic starting to rev up again. “Because that could ruin everything. This place will be useless, worse than useless, if there’s mold. It costs millions to get rid of that stuff.”
“It doesn’t cost millions,” Lucy countered.
“A serious mold problem in an exclusive building, that’s millions.”
“You’ve never had any kind of mold problem in any building, Alison. You don’t know anything about it,” Lucy informed her.
“I know that if the rest of the building finds out, they could sue us,” Alison shot back. “We would be the responsible parties, if mold in this apartment made anybody in the building sick. It could be making us sick, right now.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Lucy said, looking at me and rolling her eyes. Seriously, everybody rolls their eyes at Alison behind her back, even if she might be right. She’s just so irredeemably uptight.
“Holy shit,” I said, finally getting a good look at the kitchen.
“What, is it bad? It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“No, no, it’s not that bad,” I lied. The whole kitchen was green. Or, at least, most of it. “And I don’t think it’s mold. I think it’s moss.”
“Moss doesn’t grow inside apartments,” Alison hissed. “We have to go now. We have to leave immediately, it will make us all sick. It’s probably what killed Mom, truth be told.”
“Mom died of a heart attack,” I reminded her.
“We have to leave now, before we all get sick. Daniel. We have to go.”
“There’s another apartment back here!” Daniel yelled.
“What?” said Lucy, heading after him into the black hallway.
“There’s a whole second apartment, like another kitchen and another living room or parlour—there’s like six bedrooms and two dining rooms!” he yelled.
“How can there be two dining rooms?” Lucy muttered. And then she disappeared. I looked at Alison, who was standing very still, her arms down at her sides. I completely did not want to contribute any extra fuel to the coming conflagration. But I did want to see the rest of that apartment.
“It’ll be okay, Alison,” I said. “It’s not mold. It’s moss! And Mom died of a heart attack. Let’s go see the rest of this place. It sounds awesome.” Realizing that I sounded like an utter fool now, I bolted.
But the place was awesome. The hallway was dark and twisty, and there were rooms everywhere, which all hooked onto other rooms and then hooked back to that twisty hallway further down. Seriously, you sort of never knew where you were, and then you were someplace you had gone through six rooms ago, but you didn’t know how you got back there at all. And while some of those rooms were as empty and lonely as that giant room at the front of the apartment, some of the others were cozy and interesting; one was painted a weird shade of pink that I had never seen before, with no furniture but with framed pictures of flowers all over the walls, except for one wall that had like the most gigantic mirror on it that you have ever seen in your life. No kidding, you thought that room was six times as big as it was because of that mirror and then you also jumped because as soon as you walked in you thought someone else was there with you but it wasn’t someone else, it was just you. Another room had little bitty beds that were like only six inches off the ground, and there were these old crazy solar system stickers stuck on the ceiling. One of the walls had a giant sunset painted on it, someone had actually painted a picture of the sun setting over the ocean, right on the wall itself. One room was painted dark purple, and there were stars on that ceiling too, and a little bitty chandelier that had glass moons and suns hanging from it. There was no furniture in that room either.
Twelve rooms is a lot of rooms. It’s something I had never thought about; twelve is such a low two-digit number it’s almost a one-digit number, and so you think in general that twelve of anything is frankly not all that many. But twelve rooms is actually so many, it seems almost to be the same as a hundred rooms. That apartment felt like it went on forever, before I got to the second kitchen and two dining rooms, which is where Lucy and Daniel had ended up and were figuring things out.
“This is where they lived,” Lucy observed, looking around.
She was right; it was the first thing you noticed. There was actual furniture in these rooms, a couple of chairs and a couch that stood across from a television set, and a coffee table with a clicker and some dirty plates on it. On one side of this room there was the so-called “second kitchen” but it was really more kind of a half-kitchen dinette sort of space. It had the smallest sink imaginable, a very skinny refrigerator and an old electric stove top and a tiny oven, all jammed right on top of each other. It was kind of doll-sized, frankly, but at least it wasn’t covered in moss. And then on the other side of this TV room/ kitchen area kind of thing, there was an archway through which you could see an old bed, with two little bedside tables, and a chair that someone had thrown some dirty clothes on. The bed wasn’t made.
“Jesus,” I said, and I sat down. Compared to the rest of that great apartment, this little TV/bedroom/kitchen space seemed stupidly ordinary. So of course this would be where they lived. They lived in the most amazing apartment ever, except they just holed up in the back of it, and pretended they lived in a sort of boring normal place like the rest of us. It was overwhelming. Alison, arriving behind me, took a step forward.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the coffee table. “Fish sticks. She was having fish sticks, when she died.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Lucy, and she reached over, grabbed the plate and turned back to the tiny kitchenette, where she proceeded to bang through the cabinet doors.
“What are you looking for now?” I sighed, laying down on the hideous couch. I could hardly keep my head up, at this point.
“It’s disgusting,” she snapped. “That’s just been sitting there for days. I can’t believe no one cleaned it up.”
“Who would clean it up?” I asked.
“Someone, I don’t know who. Who found her? Wasn’t it a neighbor? What did they do, just let the EMS people pick up the body and then just leave the place like this, just dishes and food left out in the open? It’s disgusting. It could attract bugs, or mice.” Lucy started looking under the teeny little sink for a garbage can. “Oh God, if there are mice I’m just going to kill myself,” she muttered. “It’s going to cost a fortune to take care of that mold issue; I do not want to have to deal with exterminators.”
“Relax,” Daniel told her, turning slowly and taking it all in with a kind of speculative grimace. “We won’t have to do a thing. What’d he say, eleven million? This place is worth more than that, as is. With mold and mice and fish sticks on dirty plates and a shitty economy. This place is worth a fortune. We won’t have to do a thing.”
“Oh, well,” said Alison, apparently having something approximating a philosophical moment. “She had a good life.”
“She had a shitty life,” I said.
“Look, there’s actually some things in the freezer,” Lucy announced, swinging open the refrigerator door, and moving on. “Some hamburgers and frozen vegetables. The ice cube maker seems to work…plenty of food. You’ll be all right at least for the next couple of days, then we’ll have to spring for some groceries I’m guessing, because you are, as usual, completely broke, is that the story?”
“That’s the story.” I shrugged. “Look, seriously, Lucy, maybe we should wait a day. For me to move in? So that we have time to like tell the building super and stuff, so they know I’m here?”
“There’s no reason you shouldn’t move in right now,” Lucy said. “You need a place to stay, my place is too small and so is Daniel and Alison’s. Where else are you going to go? By your own account you can hardly afford a hotel room.”
“This is—it’s just—”
“It’s our apartment. Why not stay here?”
There was a why not, obviously; there was a good reason to slow things down, but not one of us had any inclination to mention it. Even me. You split eleven million dollars three ways, even after taxes? Every single one of us suddenly has a whole new life. I’m fairly certain that was the sum total of all the thinking that was going on in that apartment when they handed the keys over to me, and told me to sit tight.
CHAPTER TWO
I can’t say that I was sorry to see them go when they finally left.
The first thing I did was take my boots off. Alison would have thrown a fit if she saw me do it. She had already managed to moan about how dirty the place was and who knows what was lurking in that crummy shag rug, like I think she thought there might be bed bugs or worms or slime from distant centuries just oozing through it all, waiting for some idiot’s bare foot to come in contact so it could spread fungal disaster into your system. She really has that kind of imagination; sometimes talking to her is like talking to someone who writes horror films for a living. But I didn’t care; my toes were so hot and tired by that point and I just felt like being flat on my feet before I started checking the place out. As it turns out the carpet was kind of dry and it seemed clean enough, just a little scratchy. It really was a pretty hideous color but I think that honestly is the worst that could be said about it.
By then the sun actually had gone away, as predicted, so I didn’t have a lot of light to explore the place with. I decided to just head back to the boring little area where Mom and Bill had more or less camped out, and then I slipped out of the one dark blue skirt I had brought for the funeral, pulled on the jeans I had stashed in my backpack, and took a look around. Lucy had already cased the refrigerator so I knew there were fish sticks. A little more casual probing in the cabinets yielded something like sixteen packets of ramen noodles; and then I noticed that on the teeny tiny counter there was half a bottle of wine, open and useless, next to three empties. The search continued, and sure enough, when I poked around the laundry room—which was right behind that little kitchenette—there was a pile of clothes on the floor which really looked like nothing until you nudged it with your foot and found that it was stacked on top of two mostly full cases of red wine. So I was feeling so good about that, I just kept looking, and wouldn’t you know, I hit the mother lode: Up in the freezer of that little refrigerator, back behind the ice cube machine, there was a huge bottle of vodka, with hardly a dent in it.
Knowing my mother I also knew that would not be the only bottle out there. She liked to have it in reach, so I was pretty sure I’d find something squirreled away in several other thinly disguised hiding places. By the looks of the two cases of pricey red wine, Bill was also a bit of a drinker himself, so for a second I did think, well, at least she finally hooked up with someone who could pay for the good stuff, as opposed to the truly undrinkable crap she was surviving on the rest of her life. Seriously, I felt a little better about their utterly inexplicable marriage when I saw all the bottles. Which I’m not saying drinking yourself into an early grave is a good thing? But on the other hand, I honestly don’t see much point in judging the dead.
Anyway, in the door of the refrigerator I also found a half a jar of ruby red grapefruit juice, which meant I could have an actual cocktail instead of trying to down the vodka straight or over melted ice. So I made myself a drink, put the water on to boil for the noodles and turned the television on for company. They only had basic cable so I found one of those stations that runs endless documentaries all the time and started to look around.
The bedroom was not really a bedroom, even though there was a bed in there. There were huge pocket doors which were clearly meant to shut the room off, but they had been left open for so long they were stuck on their rails. Another set of enormous pocket doors made up the entire wall on the other side of the room, but they were stuck closed and the bed was shoved up against them. Then there was a little cove that had been built into one wall, with fancy plasterwork up the sides and a crown at the top. That had a little dresser in it. Other than that there were no closets—just clothes everywhere on the floor—which in addition to the huge pocket doors made it clear that this room was not in fact ever meant to be a bedroom, and was more likely intended as a dining area. Daniel had said that there were two dining rooms but I don’t think there were two, I think this bedroom was really the dining room, and the room behind it with the television was supposed to be the original kitchen, and the servants would cook back there and then come in with the food, through the pocket doors, which presumably opened and closed at some previous point in history. Well, honestly, I had no idea what was supposed to be what in this crazy apartment in the other century when it was built. But that’s what I thought.
I also thought, I wonder where Mom’s perfume is? Because back in that sort of freaky half-bedroom-half-dining room you smelled it everywhere; it was in all the clothes and the blankets and the sheets, along with the red wine and the cigarettes and dirty laundry and mothballs. I kind of had it in my head that I might find that little black bottle and snag it before Lucy turned it into some big issue for no reason whatsoever. Seriously, you just never knew when she was going to get all twitchy and start making lists and arguing about everything, and Alison sometimes goes along with that shit just because in general it’s not really worth arguing with Lucy. Then the next thing you know, Lucy’s telling everybody that we have to put everything smaller than a paperback into a box and sell it all together because that’s the only way to be fair, and then she’s handing it over to some thrift store for ten dollars or something, not even enough to buy a pizza. It made no sense to me to let Lucy try something like that, so I started looking. I was pretty sure if I found that little bottle first I could stick it in my backpack and no one would ever know.
The first place I checked was the dresser in the alcove. It seemed to me that that was probably the only place where Mom might have put anything of value to her; the rest of the room really was nothing but piles of clothes, a chair, a couple of books on the floor, and the unmade bed. Besides, the dresser really did look like she might have been using it as a vanity; there was an old gilt mirror glued to the wall above it, with the feet of half a cherub hanging down from the top. The top of the dresser had a few things on it—a hairbrush, a comb, a couple of empty glasses with some dry little well of alcohol stuck to the bottom. Then there was a completely tarnished little round silver boxlike thing, with curlicues and a big French fleur-de-lis right on top that when you opened it there were a whole bunch of keys and an old wedding ring and three little bitty medals inside. One of them said CHEMISTRY on it. In addition to the round silver box there were a couple of really old photographs in really old frames of no one I knew, and then there were a couple photographs unframed, behind them, with the edges curling toward the middle. One of them was of me, when I was about fifteen and going on the first of many disastrous dates with Ed Featherstone. He was a mighty jerk, but at fifteen who knew? But seriously it is a bit of a shock to see yourself seventeen years ago, with your arms around someone who is now seventeen years older and who made a fortune on Wall Street back when everyone was doing that, got out while the getting was good and now owns lots of property in Connecticut. Whatever. I set aside the can of keys, which I thought might be useful for future exploration, and then I looked in the drawers.
The top drawer had her underwear in it, lots of sad bras and panties, several old pairs of neutral-colored support hose, and a quart bottle of good vodka. Then in the other drawer, just beneath it, was Bill’s underwear, gigantic pairs of white and light blue cotton briefs. I so did not want to go pawing through that stuff—I mean, really, I wanted to find that little bottle of perfume because I wanted to have it and honestly I didn’t think anyone else would want it, but I was quickly losing my nerve. I had never even met this nutty alcoholic; who knew what lurked in his underwear? Rather than just give up, I pulled the drawer all the way out of the dresser and upended it. There was nothing in there except all those huge pairs of underwear, and a wallet.
A wallet; there was a wallet, and the guy who owned it was dead, and everything he owned got left to my mom, who left everything she owned to me and my sisters. I figured that gave me some rights, so I sat on the floor and looked through it, and lo and behold there were three receipts from a liquor store, a couple more pictures of people I didn’t know, and a lot of money. A serious wad of money, the bills smooth and neatly pressed together, like they give it to you at the bank, if you are the sort of person that a bank will actually give money to. So I thought, Oh thank God, and I took it out to count it and those crispy new bills were all fifties and hundreds; Bill had seven hundred dollars in that wallet, which would I think be a significant windfall to pretty much anybody, but was a virtual miracle to a person of my limited means. I pocketed the cash.
When I leaned over to sort of half-scoop the now empty wallet and all that underwear back into the drawer I also happened to notice the no-man’s-land under the bed, which was crowded with boxes. These turned out to be really hard to get to, because they all were just a little bit too big for the space which meant they were really squashed in there. They also each weighed a ton, as I discovered, since they were full of used paperbacks, most of them mysteries. After about twenty minutes of dragging those boxes out of there I was ready to completely give up, until I got to the very last box, which was up by the headboard on the far side of the bed. That one was not full of books. It was full of junk, a crummy handbag, a little red change purse, two pairs of reading glasses, and an old cedar jewelry box filled with fake pearls and junky necklaces, another quart-sized bottle of vodka, nearly empty, and a tiny bottle of French perfume.
It looked just the way I remembered it, pitch black, and shaped like a heart. The ghost of the word Joy ran across one side, in elegant gold letters. And then of course, as much as I wanted it, it suddenly just seemed unbearably awful to me. That perfume started with her at the beginning of her past, when she thought that lots of glamorous things were in store for her. I know that’s why she was so careful with it; she was waiting for her life to be as exciting as that bottle of perfume, and the closest she ever got was a couple of cocktail parties with my father, who hardly ever had a job, and whose temper was the bane of her existence. I tipped the bottle to one side, trying to figure out how much perfume was still in there, after thirty-seven years. It was impossible to say.
It was not, of course, until this very moment that it occurred to me that I had left a pan full of water boiling this whole time on the stove top. Which I have done several times in the past, in different apartments, to more or less disastrous results, so I jolted myself out of this mournful and useless reverie and ran back to that lousy kitchenette, where I put more water on to boil, then made another cocktail, cooked up some noodles, had another drink, watched the end of a documentary about Egypt, and had a good cry. Then I thought about just passing out on that couch in front of the television set, which seemed like a really poor idea, because that is the sort of thing that leads one to think one might actually be an alcoholic like one’s mother which was a thought I didn’t particularly want to entertain that night. So then I stood up, definitely wobbly, but didn’t judge myself because Mom was dead and I was feeling hideous, and then I thought about climbing into her bed, and that was just not an option, so then I wandered back through that maze of rooms until I found the one with the stars and planets on the ceiling and the little beds on the floor, and one of those beds was made up with a couple of pillows and a kind of a kid’s coverlet that was dark blue with rocket ships all over it. And then I slid off my jeans and got under that cover and I cried a little more, and then I went to sleep.