Chapter Four
For the first two weeks of November, Lina kept away from Ren’s door and from Ren himself when possible, to avoid being tempted into any further questionable behavior on her own part. He struck up conversations with her sometimes, but they qualified as small talk and tended not to last more than two minutes. Instead, she catered to her elderly patients, took walks in the rain with her black umbrella, and sat at the piano in the living room, where she frowned at sheet music and plinked out notes. If she ended up playing the melody line of a certain Chopin waltz rather often, then it was her one indulgence, and until someone commented on it she would keep doing it whenever she pleased.
The house, too, was quiet. Nothing jumped out of its place; no unseen hands touched her. She almost believed it had been her imagination—the cold breath, the shove on the shoulder. These things had other explanations.
She awakened one morning to deep silence. It was dark outside. Her clock read 4:51. She burrowed down against her pillow to go back to sleep, but a sense of small, busy movement caught her eye. Tiny shadows like moths whisked across her window blinds. She pushed back her blankets, went to the blinds, and parted them with two fingers. A childlike thrill warmed her stomach. It was snowing! The maple drooped under a film of white, the grass and front path had gathered a patchy layer of slush, and the black spikes of the iron fence stood out against the snow-dusted street. The garden lights lining the walk twinkled like elfin mushroom lamps in Christmas Land.
She pulled the cord to raise the blinds. As she stood admiring the view, hugging herself against the chill (the radiators had not yet started up this morning), a figure walked into the yard from around the side of the house, leaving a dotted trail of footprints. Her heart jumped in fear—an intruder?—and then, upon recognizing him, shifted into a different and happier drumming.
In his usual white shirt and black trousers, with snowflakes sticking to his dark hair, Ren stopped at the fence and looked out at the street. He shivered and rocked up and down on his toes—Lina wondered in amusement why he hadn’t worn a coat—and tipped his head back to let the flakes fall on his face. They were large and wet, so he soon lowered his head again, shaking his head like a spritzed cat and dabbing his face with his sleeve. Lina grinned. She considered opening the window and calling to him, but didn’t want to wake anyone up.
He turned toward the house. Lina waved at him. He held still for a long moment, the puzzlement on his face barely visible in the snow-light as he stared at her from three floors below. Then a smile broke like dawn over his features, and he waved. Lina attacked the brass clasp on the window and tried to open it. It was stuck and would not budge. She made him a helpless gesture. He stood grinning, watching her, arms folded tight in the cold. She held up her palm to tell him to wait, and dashed away from the window. She stuffed her bare feet into rubber galoshes and flung a wool blanket over her flannel nightgown.
Something thudded against the windowpane, startling her into a shriek. From a round impact mark of water and ice crystals, gray slush slid down the glass. She returned to the window to waggle a finger at him. He continued to grin, massaging his snow-chilled hands. Then she flung her door open and darted along the hallway, down the staircase, and out the front door.
She emerged into cold air and a confusion of falling flakes. Her breath made white clouds around her. Ren stood on the walk, illuminated from below by the garden lights. His damp hair curled against his temples, and his white shirt was turning transparent at the shoulders as the snow melted into it. He still shivered and hugged himself, but smiled as if perfectly happy.
“What are you doing out here at five a.m., you crazy man?” Lina hurried out to him and flung half her blanket around him before thinking twice.
He clutched the blanket to hold it in place. “I saw it was snowing.” He sounded surprised, as if it should have been obvious. “Besides, you’re out here too. Who’s crazy now?”
“I only came to ask you what you were doing.” Lina laughed, giddy that they were sharing a blanket in the snow at five o’clock in the morning, that their shoulders were touching, that he smelled like clean skin and bubble gum and damp cotton.
“You gave me a bit of a scare up there.” He nodded to her window.
“Why?” She imagined a pale-clad figure standing there, and began to see his point. “Oh. I looked ghostly?”
“I thought so, for a second.”
“Mrs. Clairmont said that room used to be Julia’s. The one who killed herself.”
“I heard. Probably what gave me the idea.” Then he tossed his head to dash a snowflake off his cheek, shaking off the gloomy fancy at the same time. “But you don’t look a thing like her,” he added playfully.
Lina looked down at herself. His observation was all too true. Not only was she an ordinary brunette rather than a fetching blond, she also wasn’t dressed to flatter at the moment. Her washed-out nightgown, which she’d owned for eight years, hung to her shins, covering the tops of her brown rubber galoshes. She wasn’t wearing makeup and hadn’t brushed her hair before running downstairs, which had clearly indicated a lapse in sanity. “No,” she said. “Unfortunately I don’t look like her.”
Ren tilted his head in a shrug. “Just as well. She’s not my type.”
Whether or not it was honest, it lifted Lina’s spirits. Despite the icy damp she felt comfortable and warm.
“I came out to shovel the front walk,” he added. “This will probably melt soon, but just in case anyone goes out early…”
“Will you let me get you a coat first?”
He smiled down at her, eyes bright from the fairy-lights at their feet. “How about this, nurse lady? I’ll get my own coat, and some gloves too, and you put on some proper outdoor clothes and meet me back here.”
* * *
On Thanksgiving night, Lina slipped into the guest room that used to be her bedroom and shut the door. She leaned her back against it and took a deep breath, savoring the darkness and the quiet. She didn’t fear ghosts here, in this 1960s craftsman house in Tacoma, and never had. In fact, she might welcome them. They would have to be an improvement on the living.
Through the walls drifted the muffled noises of her mother and her mother’s boyfriend singing “Blue Christmas” on a karaoke machine. Lina’s brother heckled them. Her aunt and uncle hooted with laughter. Lina could practically smell the sherry from here. She’d had some as well, but not enough to feel like making an ass of herself.
Her family still didn’t know the real reason she had left Everglade Hospital. She had meant to tell them, but couldn’t bear the thought of what it would do to their image of her: the nurse in immaculate scrubs, the girl who did her family proud by rising from the depths of Tacoma to the heights of Pill Hill. She gave them the same story she had told Marla and Alan at her interview, and to her dismay it had made her family even more impressed with her. They were still impressed now, two months along, and had made her the subject of one of their many Thanksgiving toasts.
“But I’m taking a pay cut,” she pointed out. Didn’t matter. They thought it was great, her working with old people and getting to live in a mansion! And by the way, this cyst on her brother’s chin (“Mom, don’t grab my face!”), what should he do about that?
The worst, though, had been when her brother had piped up, “Hey, I know this guy who dated this chick who worked at a hospital near your old one, and he said some nurse gave a patient the wrong drug—like, she messed it up and gave him a lethal injection. Same exact stuff they use for the guys on Death Row. Chlorine, or fluorine, something like that.”
Lina stared at the stem of her sherry glass. “Potassium chloride.”
“That’s it! Were you there when that happened?”
She nodded. She hoped she wouldn’t vomit.
“God!” her mom said. “Why would they even keep that stuff in a hospital?”
Lina swallowed until her throat felt less dry. “Well…in small doses, it’s good for treating low blood potassium, but if you took too much by mistake…” She didn’t want to go on. She prayed for a distraction.
She got one, at least. “Good thing you left, then,” her mom’s boyfriend said, and laughed heartily. “You know what? I’m thinking of quitting my job too.”
The others veered into a discussion of whether or not the guy should give up his job managing an apartment building in Tukwila, and Lina had excused herself.
Now, though she no longer felt sick, she wondered if it would be unethical to make up an excuse to leave early and drive back to Seattle. She had agreed to be here until Sunday, a span of time that stretched before her like a ten-year prison sentence. She longed for the calming prattle of Mrs. B, the placid notes of the grand piano, the comforting background sounds of the kitchen staff clinking pans.
Most of all she missed Ren. That day in the snow, it wasn’t as if their friendship had bloomed into love. They hadn’t kissed or arranged a date or wrestled playfully in the slush or anything. But they had talked about so many things, both the fun and the deep—books, websites, urban legends, bizarre medical conditions—that she considered him one of her best friends now.
So maybe one of these days she’d actually find out his age. That could be useful to know before kissing him.
Before she could change her mind she dove onto the bed and snatched the cordless phone from the night table. Without bothering to switch on a lamp, she punched in the string of numbers on the lighted keypad and settled onto her back as it rang.
Someone answered. “Hello?” Ren’s smooth voice caused Lina’s breath to catch. She had dialed the house’s main line, not his room, but apparently she struck lucky.
“Hi.” Lina ran her palm down her sweater, smoothing her too-full stomach. “It’s Lina. Just calling to say Happy Thanksgiving. You know, check up on everyone.”
“Well, hello, nurse lady. Making sure no one got food poisoning from the stuffing?”
She grinned. “Yeah. More or less.”
“We’re all fine so far.” Behind him she heard the murmur of multiple voices, the contented purr of a dinner party. “How about you?” he asked. “How’s Thanksgiving going?”
“Well…the food was all right.”
“It was better than ‘all right’ here. We made quite a spread. You can feast on the leftovers when you come back.”
“I bet you make a mean cranberry sauce.”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“You know, we have a cook. How come you seem to make half the meals?”
“Because I like to,” he said. “I get a little better each year.”
“Must be satisfying. Maybe I should’ve gone to culinary school instead of rushing into nursing.”
“Here, wait, let me shut this door.” There was a pause, then a drop-off of the background chatter on his side. “There. Now I can hear better.”
She pictured him leaning on one of the leather-covered armchairs in the small room near the front stairs, with the television standing quiet behind him. Was he in the dark too? Were the lamps on, or was there only the street-light cut into stripes by the wooden blinds?
“So you rushed into nursing, did you?” he asked.
“I had tunnel vision about it. Let’s put it that way.” She switched the receiver to her left ear and held her right arm up above her, viewing it in the faint light. “I burned my arm pretty bad when I was twelve. I was in the hospital a couple days. There was this great nurse, an older lady, who really impressed me. I decided that was what I was going to do, and I stuck to it.”
“It’s a much nobler calling than making food.”
“I don’t know about that. Especially your food.”
He chuckled. “Well, thank you.”
“I wish I’d stayed there with you…guys.” Lina almost forgot to add the last word.
“Is it that bad?”
“Let’s see.” She wriggled her shoulder blades deeper into the bedspread. “I get to the house yesterday, and my brother’s sitting on the front step and says, ‘I have a major hangover, don’t talk too loud.’”
“A hangover on a Wednesday? Must be a college student.”
“He’s thirty. He just has friends who throw a lot of parties. Then we get here and I meet Mom’s newest boyfriend. My parents got divorced when I was eighteen.” A part of her mind was scolding her for babbling, but something—his reassuring voice, or the warm darkness, or the sherry—loosened her tongue.
“Complicated modern families,” he said.
“I’d never met this guy till tonight. She’s had about ten boyfriends since splitting up with my dad. Nobody worth keeping. Now everyone’s singing karaoke, after Mom spent most of dinner harassing my brother and me about how we’re never going to give her grandchildren at this rate.”
“I’ve never tried karaoke,” Ren mused.
“It does not go well with turkey. Trust me.”
He laughed. “You’re unusually forthcoming with opinions tonight.”
“I’ve had alcohol. Mom’s boyfriend mixes a stiff martini. Then there was wine with dinner, and sherry afterward.”
“Now who’s the hard partier?”
She smirked. Her eyes followed the outlines of objects in the room, lit up by the blue-green glow of the clock on the headboard. “Ren, why aren’t you with your family this weekend?”
She heard a squeak of leather as if he was settling into an armchair. “Well, my parents have been dead for years…”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. And I’m not really close to my other relatives. We don’t see each other anymore.”
“No siblings?”
“I have a younger sister, but…she’s got good people looking after her.” Ren emitted a breath that might have been a panicked laugh. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It doesn’t matter.”
“How much younger is your sister?”
Silence for a few seconds. “Ten years.”
“So she’s…twelve?” Lina guessed.
Even longer silence. “Yeah. Twelve.”
Lina closed her eyes. Finally. An age, and an age every bit as young as she had feared. “When I was a senior in high school, you were in second grade,” she said, then flinched, for she had clearly betrayed she was calculating his age, not his sister’s.
“I have an old soul. As they say.”
Her hand fell back onto the pillow. “I wish I’d stayed there,” she said again.
“We would’ve been happy to—” His words broke into a splutter. Lina heard a thump and a ruffle.
“What was that?”
“A magazine just flew at me.” He sounded more put-upon than disturbed.
Lina sat up. “By itself?”
“Yeah. It was there on the coffee table, then it was knocking me in the chest.”
“Which magazine?” Lina didn’t realize it was a funny question until Ren laughed.
“ Reader’s Digest . Though I know you were expecting The Satanic Monthly .”
“I just meant, if it were a big, heavy magazine it would hurt more.”
“It’s small,” he said. “But solid. Okay, I’ve had enough of the house behaving like this.”
“Yeah.” She switched on the nightstand lamp and squinted against the brightness. “That’s one thing I don’t miss right now. It just flew at you? Really? There’s no way it could have been knocked toward you by something falling over?”
“It was lying flat, with nothing near it. I was looking straight at it when it happened. But it’s nothing new. Forget it.”
“Something shoved me on the staircase,” Lina said. She hadn’t told anyone, but now she wanted to. “On Halloween. Shoved me hard.”
“Oh? Sure you want to come back?”
She smiled with one side of her mouth. “Hey, at least there’s no karaoke.”
“Well, it’ll be good to see you. Now I think I want to get out of this room.”
“I should get back too. They’ll be wondering why it’s taking me so long to change my shoes.”
“Then I’ll see you Sunday?”
“Sunday.”
* * *
On Sunday night, back at the house, she stood on the third-floor fire escape and watched clouds scud past the stars. She pulled her overcoat tighter around herself and breathed the wet air. Traffic and wind blended into a soft background rush. Rooftops and fences and lighted windows formed a mosaic before her; some houses already sported Christmas lights, sparkling in dotted lines along rain gutters.
Lina wasn’t on call until the night shift. Mrs. B rested in her room, listening to a book on CD. Marla and Alan were watching a movie in their quarters. And Ren…Ren was cleaning the kitchen. Or organizing boxes of decorations in the basement. Or polishing the hardwood floor of the dining room. He had been busy all day, only allowing half a minute to smile at her and say a few words over the breakfast bar. Lina shouldn’t have been dissatisfied. What did she expect, a hug? He was busy. Everyone was busy this time of year.
She wanted to tell him the horrifying stories of Christmas shopping with her mother and brother, or at least discuss the poltergeist incident further. But when she introduced that topic, as his mop moved between them, he didn’t seem interested in pursuing it.
Perhaps the real question was, why did the friendship of this one young man matter so much to her? He was too young, too evasive, and anyway she probably was just trying to get back at Brent—not that she wanted him back, and not that he ever would come back anyway. Yet every time she tried to push her thoughts elsewhere, somewhere more responsible and independent, they bounded back to Ren like a helium balloon to a ceiling. Did her method of getting on with life after the disaster with Mr. Ambaum necessarily involve finding a new man and being loved by him despite what she had done—even though Ren didn’t know what she had done? Was that it?
As if her thoughts summoned Ren, he appeared below her now: a gleam of white snagging her eye downward through the rungs of the fire escape. He exited through the back door, from the pantry. Lina moved forward and gripped the cold railing. He unlocked the gate in the tall fence and opened it. Lina’s lips parted to call his name, but then he stepped out into the alley and…vanished.
A startled, confused sound escaped her mouth. She leaned over the railing, peering at where he should have been. Yes, it was dark down there, but she had a clear view over the fence into the alley, and she should have been able to see his white shirt.
“Ren?” Her voice sounded timorous and lonely in the quiet night. Nobody answered her. She tried again. “Ren!”
If he were walking away, he should have appeared in one of those patches of streetlight, either up the alley or down. But he didn’t.
She must not have been seeing the whole picture from up here. There had to be an explanation. She dashed into the house and ran down, down, down the stairwell until she hit the ground floor. Out she burst into the night and tugged open the gate in the fence. She stepped out into the alley and looked up and down. “Ren?” she called again, weaker this time.
A chilly breeze touched her face. Nothing more.
She went back inside. She walked past the breakfast bar (he wasn’t in the kitchen), through the dining room and parlor (not there either), and across the foyer to the living room. She stopped short. He knelt next to the fireplace, lifting a garland of artificial pine boughs out of a cardboard box.
“Were you…” She wasn’t sure how to go on.
He looked over his shoulder. “Hi. Was I what?”
“Outside? Just now? Behind the house?” She entered the room. “I was on the fire escape and I saw you come out the back door. Then you…kind of disappeared.”
“I’ve been in here. Decorating.” He frowned at her. “Sure it wasn’t someone else?”
“There’s not really anyone else in the house who looks like you,” she said, but now she was uncertain. “You weren’t out there, about five minutes ago? You didn’t go into the alley?”
He shook his head, separating the garland from a string of white lights tangled around it. “I’ve had no reason to go out in the alley tonight.”
She paced a few steps and leaned against the mantelpiece. “But I saw you.” Even to herself, her voice sounded frail. Suddenly she had it. She drew a quick breath. “The ghost.”
He paused. “Ghost?”
“What if I saw the ghost? The houseboy—you look like him, right? Because it did look like you, and vanished right into thin air.” She stopped when she saw the expression on his face. “Okay, I know. It’s a stretch.”
“You’ve had a stressful weekend.”
“Oh,” she groaned, having thought of a new possibility. “Those spiders. Hobo spiders. The hallucinations—oh, no, I probably got bit in my sleep or something.”
“Any other symptoms?” He had freed the garland from its companions and stood to attach it to the mantel.
“I don’t think so, but…okay, you know what? I’m going to bed. And then, tomorrow, I’m making an appointment to get my eyes checked.”
He chuckled. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But I don’t see things. I’m not that kind of person.”
“Then maybe I did go out there, and I forgot about it.”
“Yeah, and then you somehow evaporated. Never mind. Goodnight, Ren.” She stepped over the box and walked across the room.
In her room, Lina locked her door, undressed, and examined every inch of her skin for spider bites. It took fifteen minutes and the use of a hand mirror. She didn’t find anything, but was aware a spider bite might be hard to spot. Frustrated with herself for hallucinating, or with Ren for lying, or with someone else for tricking her eyes, she put on her old flannel nightgown and went to bed.
* * *
It only took a few days for her mood to recover, though. The alley illusion was the kind of thing you forgot and shrugged off. The farther she got from the event, the less of an event it seemed. He probably only slipped out for a smoke and didn’t want the household nurse to scold him for it. Anyway, what counted was that he was talking to her again. All their conversations, as December arrived and advanced, were the kind of conversations you had with friends—bantering, teasing, some honest concerns.
One Tuesday evening, after Ren had changed a smoke-alarm battery on the third floor, he showed Lina how to get onto the roof. He climbed the white-painted ladder set into the wall a few yards from her bedroom door and pushed open the trapdoor in the ceiling. Beckoning to her and telling her not to be afraid, he ascended into the darkness. Lina followed, holding her breath against the thick dust she was sure would cloud around her. But the attic crawlspace was fairly clean—or at least the wooden beams were, which were what she and Ren walked on.
“This way.” Ren had become a voice and a flashlight, five feet ahead of her. He shone the light down onto the beam for her until she got close enough to clutch another ladder, this one rough-hewn. Then he turned the light to the roof and found a latch. With a twist and a push, a square of wood cracked open. Cold, fresh wind and a splatter of mist washed onto Lina’s face. “Up we go,” Ren said, and scuttled to the top like a squirrel.
He reached a hand down. Lina clasped it, thinking how she had not held his hand since they danced on Halloween. In a few lumbering heaves, clinging to the dusty rungs on the way, she emerged onto the roof. Once she had gotten her footing, he let her go. She thought of the ghostly staircase shove on Halloween, and wanted to grab his hand again, imagining how deadly such a shove would be up here. But he climbed out of reach, striding to the peak, so she stood and collected her courage, looking around.
Drizzle blew through her hair. She scraped a shoe against the shingles, feeling the reassuring traction of the grains. Even after a score of wet days and nights, it was not slippery.
“Huh,” she said. “It’s not as steep as it looks from the street.”
“You walk by that ladder every day and you never came up here till now,” he chided.
“Well, I thought it was steep.” She smiled.
“Everyone should get on the roof of their house sometime.” He beckoned with a tilt of his head. “Come see.”
Lina approached him, stepping carefully, not looking toward the ground. She reached the top and stopped to admire the dark shimmer of Lake Washington, which she hadn’t realized was visible from here. Its edge was wreathed with lights, and a sparkling line—the floating bridge—cut straight across it. “Wow,” she breathed.
Ren took her shoulders and turned her to face the city. From up here she could see more than just one piece of skyscraper. A handful of others pushed their shining tips into view, and the blue edge of the Space Needle’s saucer peeked above a hill. “Someday,” Ren said, close to her ear—and for a moment she thought he was being serious—“all this will be yours.”
They broke into laughter. His hands squeezed her shoulders and let go.