Twelve Rooms with a View (33 page)

“You just pull it,” Katherine said, yawning. Which I did, about twenty times, twenty different ways. Nothing happened.

“Come on, Katherine, you have to show me how,” I repeated hopelessly.

“You push it,” she said this time, lying on the floor.

“Don’t go to sleep—I’m not kidding, I have to go home, you have to show me how to open it. Katherine, open it. Open it.” If she didn’t get the thing open, I realized, I was stuck there for good. I could sneak out the front door and take the elevator down to my own apartment, but it was locked from the inside, as I well knew. I needed to get back down the way I had come up.

“Come on, Katherine, you’ve got to open it for me. Katherine,” I hissed, shaking her shoulder. She looked at me, dopey with sleep. “Jennifer knows how to do it.” She yawned. “She’s the one who figured it out.”

I had known where Jennifer’s bedroom was when I babysat for the Whites, but in the middle of the night and with only the occasional night-light at floor level as my guide, getting back there wasn’t the simplest trick to navigate. I took two wrong turns, one of which landed me in the psychotically pink bedroom of the middle-school monsters, who were sacked out and snoring. The other wrong turn brought me perilously close to barging in on Mr. and Mrs. White themselves, but as I was about to carefully turn the knob on their bedroom door, I heard someone moving around, and then Mrs. White asked some sort of question and Mr. White answered. A light went on, and I nearly cursed aloud, but instead I just took a quick step backward and gave thanks to the crazy genius who invented wall-to-wall carpet. The Whites continued to mumble back and forth as I looked around, got my bearings, and turned back one more time, finally locating Jennifer’s bedroom at the far end of the next hallway.

Her room was both adorable and disturbing. Like Katherine’s, it was painted a glowing yellow and there were stuffed animals everywhere, but in the middle of the room was an enormous bed with a white canopy, and the carpet was a dark and terrifying red.

I crept silently across the blood red sea and knelt down next to the bed. Jennifer, quite frankly, looked like a sleeping princess. “Hey, Jennifer,” I whispered. “Wake up. Wake up.” She didn’t move, so I reached over and touched her shoulder. “Jennifer.”

“I’m
awake,”
she announced, completely annoyed. I was so startled that I jumped a little and almost tipped over.

“Well, why didn’t you say something?” I asked.

“What are you
doing
here?” she replied, with the authority of somebody who knows she has the better question. “It’s the middle of the
night.”

“Katherine opened the door to the crawl space and came down into my apartment,” I told her. Jennifer turned her head and smiled but still didn’t move. “When did you figure out how to open it?”

“A while ago,” she said, seemingly losing interest all of a sudden. “I was going to tell you about it. But then you never came back.”

“Well, I’m here now, and I closed it, but I can’t get it open again, you have to show me how to do it.”

“Why?”

“So I can get home!” I whispered. “Why do I have to explain this? What’s going to happen if your parents find me hanging out in your apartment in the middle of the night?”

“They’ll be pissed off,” she mused, barely interested in the question.

“Well, that’s not so good for me,” I said. “Come on, help me get home, please.”

She looked at me, and a little spark came into her eyes. “You were on television—everybody’s mad at you,” she informed me. “You’re in trouble.”

“What else is new.” I sighed. “I’m not kidding, Jennifer, you have to help me. Now, right now.”

“We’re all in trouble,” she observed, and looked up at the ceiling.

That’s when this improbable situation started to make some sense. She was just so nonreactive, as if neighbors routinely showed up at her bedside in the middle of the night. There was definitely a disconnect between event and reaction. And she had the peculiar nocturnal coherence of the chronic nonsleeper. “Katherine says you won’t get out of bed,” I noted. She continued to stare at the ceiling.

“I get out of bed. I go to school. I come home, and I get back in bed.”

“Your mom lets you do that?”

“My mom,” she stated, with an evil, sardonic edge. “My
mom?”

I wanted to pick her up and carry her home with me, but I knew that would not be an effective choice of action. “Jennifer,” I said. I let my hand creep up onto the covers and find her fingertips. “Sweetheart, you’re depressed. You need help.”

“What do you know,” she said.

A door opened and closed somewhere in the apartment. I looked over my shoulder just in time to see the hall light flip on, then shadows rippled across the floor where the light spilled in under the door. The doorknob started to turn. “Shit,” I whispered, and rolled under the bed just as the door swung open.

“Hey, are you awake?” the hideous Louise asked. When Jennifer didn’t answer, she asked again. “Jennifer,” she insisted. “Are you awake?”

“If I don’t answer, why would you ask again?” Jennifer said, reasonably. “Are you
trying
to wake me up?”

“I asked again because I knew you were awake,” Louise observed, unimpressed by Jennifer’s logic.

“Then why did you ask?”

“I heard voices. Who are you talking to?” Louise’s question was fluted with suspicion. All I could see from my hiding place was the tail end of a frilly pink-and-white-striped nightgown and her bare feet, which made their way into the room and stopped, then turned and moved out of my field of vision again. I heard a door swing open.

“What are you doing; are you looking in my
closet
?” Jennifer asked. I was pretty nervous down there under the bed, but honestly it felt better to hear her yell at her sister than to watch her lie there like she couldn’t bear to sit up and breathe.

“I heard
voices
, Jennifer; I know what I heard. There’s someone in here with you.” The feet were back in sight and the hem of the nightgown started to lower, as good old Louise, who was starting to seem like the teenage-girl version of the Stasi, was in fact bending over to look under the bed.

“Get
out
of here, you freak!” Jennifer snarled suddenly. Her feet appeared by the side of the bed as she inserted herself between me and certain discovery, actually shoving her older sister aside.

“Hey!” Louise snapped. “You are, you’re hiding something!”

“You are not the boss of me, Louise!” Jennifer informed her. “MOM!” Okay, this was a little further than I wanted Jennifer to go to protect me, but I was hardly calling the shots at this point. Besides, Mrs. White appeared in the room so quickly that it seemed likely she had heard the argument and was already on her way to check it out, so I don’t know that Jennifer put anything in motion that would not have happened anyway.

“What is going on in here! It’s the middle of the night!” Mrs. White announced.

“I heard her talking to someone,” Louise started.

“She is crazy! I was just in here sleeping!” Jennifer snapped.

“I heard someone, there’s someone in here with her,” the persistent Louise repeated, but the illogical nature of her statement undid her.

“That is ridiculous,” Mrs. White hissed. “Go back to your room, Louise! And both of you go back to sleep this minute! Honestly. Your father is going to be really angry if he has to come in here, and then we’ll all have to deal with it. Go to bed.” Her feet stayed in the doorway while she waited for Louise to sullenly drag herself back to her room, and then the door swung shut behind them both. After an excruciatingly long moment of silence, Jennifer’s blond hair swung down over the edge of the bed, and I saw her forehead and then her eyes and then the rest of her face make an appearance. She held her finger to her upside-down mouth.

Why is it that taking care of someone else makes you feel better? The listless despair had evaporated, and she was a different person; her eyes were alert with the delight of keeping my presence a secret, and then the prospect of getting me home without being discovered by the wearisome Louise was suddenly a fantastic adventure to be had. We waited in alert silence for a full fifteen minutes before she crept out into the hallway, passed by Louise’s closed door, passed back again, waited to see if she was awake and reactive, and, when she proved not to be, waved to me in the half light of the hallway to follow her. She led me with assurance through the maze of hallways to the back room of the sleeping apartment, where Katherine lay asleep on the floor, just as I had left her. While Jennifer closed the door, I picked Katherine up and put her back in her bed.

“So how do you get this thing open?” I whispered, tipping my head at that blasted piece of wood stuck in the wall.

“It’s really not very hard,” she said with a trace of her former arrogance. And sure enough, she squeezed her fingers into the side of it and yanked. It popped out as if she had ordered it to. The entire operation took maybe six seconds.

“Wow, that is pretty easy,” I exclaimed.

We both looked at the hidden staircase. I could hear the rats scrambling to stay out of the light.

“She wasn’t supposed to try it without me,” Jennifer noted, glancing back at the sleeping Katherine. “The little louse. So it does open into your place?” She leaned forward and tried to see into the darkness. The barest flicker of light seemed to touch the edge of that terrifying staircase from somewhere deep in my apartment, but that was all.

“There’s a storage room down there,” I explained. “Bill and my mom had shoved stuff in front of the door to the room.”

“So they like hid things in the room?”

“There’s a bunch of stuff in it,” I admitted, “stuff from a while ago, like they needed to put it someplace, so they piled it all back there, and pulled a big cupboard in front of the door and then forgot about it.”

“Like treasure?”

“Well, most of it’s junk.”

“But not all of it?”

I wish I could say that I was honest with this helpful and lovely young girl. I was not. “It’s just a bunch of boxes, Jennifer, just a lot of, you know, stuff people don’t want anymore.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I was the one who found the door—you wouldn’t even know it was there if it wasn’t for me. Why didn’t you just—call me or something?” She looked at me with such a simple sense of disappointment and betrayal that it took a moment to catch up.

“I couldn’t just phone you,” I explained. “Your mom would think it was weird.”

“So? You don’t mind people thinking you’re weird. Everyone think’s you’re weird. So what?”

“Come on, I have to go home, it’s the middle of the night, and I can’t get caught here! It’s like I’m breaking and entering. I could get arrested for this.”

“You get arrested all the time, you don’t care about being arrested,” she observed. “You said it on television.”

“I said that on like local-access television!” I noted with some exasperation. “Who watches that stuff?”

“Everyone in the building watched it tonight. Everybody knows about it. My mom was on the phone with the whole co-op board.”

This was not good news. “What did she say?” I asked, worried.

“People think your mom was a con lady, she made Mr. Drinan give her the apartment—the same stuff. Not that they cared about him, they didn’t like him to begin with, you know.”

“They didn’t like the Drinans?” This had never occurred to me.

“They were
Irish,”
Jennifer explained, as if this made everything clear. “I mean, they liked it that he could get things done because he was hooked up with lots of people around the city, but they didn’t want him to
live
here.”

“Why not? What sorts of things did he do?”

“Look, I don’t know, I just heard some stuff while she was on the phone.” Jennifer sighed. The spark was going out of her, you could see it happen even before I was halfway through the wall. She was sitting on the edge of Katherine’s bed, her shoulders hunched over like an old bag lady who didn’t remember how to hold herself up straight anymore.

“Listen,” I said. “You have to come to me. You have to sneak out and come down. To the apartment.”

“You mean like …”

“Katherine did it. You can do it. You just have to be careful. And while you’re at it, you have to find out if the co-op board is going to do anything like testify for the Drinans or against my mom or something.”

“You mean like
spy
on my
mother
?” Jennifer asked.

“No, no, it’s more like—yeah, actually, it’s like spying on your mother,” I agreed. Her eyes lit up, and she sat up for a moment, the wheels turning, as she considered how she was going to pull this off.

“Yeah,” she finally said, with a sort of internal calculating confidence. She was already working it out. “Yeah, I can do it.”

She needed a purpose; I gave her one. Her sly grin bounced back and released me into the darkness. I slipped my legs over the edge and scrambled onto that dark rat-infested staircase, feeling my way back down one foot at a time until I reached my own unknowable home.

T
HE MORNING FOLLOWING MY NOCTURNAL ADVENTURES
I
FOUND
myself completely entangled in about eight conflicting concerns. The biggest problem, as I saw it, was what to do with all the stuff stashed in the forgotten room. It seemed unlikely that the room would continue to be overlooked. When Lucy had invited those real estate agents over, they had just breezed through and offered general ideas about how much the place was worth. But now I felt pretty sure that the subsequent walk-throughs would be more thorough, and the original floor plan surely would alert people to the existence of that back room. And once they found it, all of Sophie’s stuff would be up for grabs. Including, perhaps, the pearls.

I called Lucy; it seemed the necessary first step.

“Hey,” I said, trying hard not to sound too phony in my friendliness. “It’s me! I just wanted to call and find out how you thought it went yesterday with the press conference. I thought it was pretty good.”

“Yes, people seemed to feel it was a success. You made quite a splash, as usual,” she said drily. “You probably didn’t need to share quite so much information about your colorful past, but I guess I’m not surprised that you did.”