sickness in my gut radiated out.
I lowered my arm.
Your body won’t let you leave. It knows what you need.
Another pill.
Maybe that would help. Something for energy. This house
always knew what I needed, from the beginning. Hadn’t it? I
slipped another in my mouth. My eyes shut. I lifted my arm again
and tried to reach up. Too tired. The alarm blared. He wouldn’t
really have done that, would he? Why would he do it now? I was
so confused.
Footsteps thudded nearby, shook the house.
“Leena?” A voice called from far, far away.
I tried to reach for the door. Gravity’s cold nails trapped my
arms on the floor. Tried again. Nothing. Now it wasn’t just trying
to move that was hard, it was trying to breathe. Bricks, walls
tumbled on top of me. Pressed me down. Down toward the earth.
Squeezing my chest.
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A surge ripped through me, vomited through my listless
body. The burn. The stink. I had to get out.
Out there are people who don’t want you, the walls
whispered. In here is where you belong.
Was that true? It felt true, inside my bones. My poor, tired
bones. Inside my poor, sick gut. But somehow . . .
“Leena?” The door trembled, the knob wiggled back and
forth. “Leena, are you in there?” The door wasn’t locked; still,
they couldn’t open it. I knew they wouldn’t be able to. Just like
David hadn’t been able to, that day so many weeks ago.
They don’t want you. None of them. Her voice filled the
space. Could they hear her, outside the door? Look what you’ve
let them do to you. There’s nowhere for you to go.
“That’s not how it is,” I said back. “Things happen. You can’t
stop things from happening.”
Yes, you can. In here.
My arm. Would. Not. Move.
I’ll protect you, she cooed. You can’t do it yourself. You’re too weak. That’s why you came in here. You knew it the first time you
saw the house. You knew you needed it.
“Someone’s out there. Looking for me.”
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You’ve never been strong enough, she said. If you were
strong, you wouldn’t have been with David. Admit it, Leena.
I’d tried not to be with him, but it hadn’t worked. That was
true. And now look.
Now you know he never loved you. And you’re too weak to
take the pain.
“He did love me.”
Weak, stupid Leena. I told you not to be with him. But you
couldn’t resist. You couldn’t stop yourself from needing.
“No. I chose. I wasn’t weak.” Shudders rippled through me.
Another surge of vomit.
It’s okay, Leena. I know. I know you aren’t strong enough. But
I love you anyway.
“Leena?” More thumping. “Are you okay? Leena, let us know
if you’re in there. Please. We don’t know if it’s a fire drill, or what,
but we have to get out. Why won’t you come out?”
Admit it, she hissed. You’ll never be okay. Not out there.
David was right. You’re the sick one.
“No,” I whispered.
This voice—Cubby, the closet, the walls—it wasn’t me.
Wasn’t from any place inside of me.
You ’re the sick one.
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Thumping. “Leena, please!”
Nothing emerged from my mouth because someone held my
tongue, pressed it back into my throat so I couldn’t speak,
couldn’t breathe. I began to gag. I tilted my gaze to the floor, to
my arms. Visualized raising them up. But I couldn’t. Only one
hand. One hand moved. Lifting it was like lifting the whole house.
I reached up with my last bit of energy, reached up with that one
hand and scratched at the door. My fingernails scraped against
the wood. Once, twice.
“Did you hear that?” someone outside said.
Scratched once more. All I had in me.
I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, except for the voice. Stay with
me, she cooed, over and over . I’m the only one who wants you.
After I reached the heaviest place, so heavy I thought my body
was being obliterated, I felt a release, a lightness. Like when
you’ve held your arms against a doorframe and then walk out and
they fly up. I flew up. Up and out and high and wide and all over
and circling and spreading. And no more containment. Just me,
energy, spreading into wood and plaster and brick and floating in
the air and filling the space. An angel after all. No more body
keeping me tied down. The body was still there, I just wasn’t in it.
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Chapter 41
SUN-STREAMS POURED IN from the arched window. Dust
particles shimmered in the pathway.
“Would it sound really weird,” I asked Viv, my eyes shifting
away from the light, “if I told you that part of me . . . part of me
didn’t come back?”
“Didn’t come back?” she said.
“You know, after the paramedics got to me.”
Viv reloaded the nail polish brush and stroked the pearly
white liquid over my left thumbnail. She’d come down to see me
at my dad’s condo. “Well, it kind of makes sense,” she said. “I
mean, we have this life-force energy, right? Who’s to say that
some of yours wasn’t released when your body thought it was the
end. Like a leak in an inflatable raft that’s then patched up. Right?
The air that escapes never comes back.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I just . . . I
feel like I left something behind. I never would have believed that,
before. I mean, it sounds so stupid. It’s the kind of kooky thinking
I’d have made fun of.”
The springs of the sofa bed creaked as Viv shifted her weight.
“I suppose,” she said, “a lot was different before.”
Before.
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Before, I knew so many things. About David and Celeste.
About myself. About real and unreal. I built a fort out of all of
these things I knew.
That day in Frost House, the fort collapsed.
Afterward, I searched back through the semester, trying to
find new facts to build with. But just as I was ready to nail one
down, it would disintegrate in my hands.
Information came to me slowly.
All I grasped at first was that I’d nearly died from a
combination of the pills I’d taken and carbon monoxide poisoning.
I spent two nights in the hospital: a blur of confusion, the stink of
vomit and disinfectant, throat scraped raw, tubes running in and
out of my body, fragments of sleep cut short by needles, the
claustrophobia of the oxygen chamber, doctors with charts,
nurses with implements, and my parents sitting next to me with
looks on their faces that said, How did this happen? as much as
they said, “We love you.”
Not that I blamed them for wondering. I was wondering the
same thing.
Everyone wanted an explanation. But how could I explain?
So I kept most of what happened to myself, only saying enough to
assure the hospital psychiatrist I wasn’t suicidal and didn’t need
admission into the psych ward. When I took the pills, my thought
process had supposedly been compromised by the carbon
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monoxide, so they believed I’d just been confused about how
many pills I’d taken. I agreed to outpatient therapy.
To my parents’ credit, they didn’t push. And they tried to do
what they could. At one point, I woke to my mother standing next
to my bed, a tentative smile on her face, hands behind her back.
“I found something that might make you feel a bit better,”
she said. She laid Cubby on my pillow. “Your old friend.”
“Oh.” I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat as I turned
my face away. “Thanks. But you can get rid of it.”
Viv came for a quick visit the day after I was discharged.
“What’s happened since I left?” I said. “I feel like I’ve been
gone for years.”
She told me about the chaos of that afternoon. Apparently, a
crowd of students gathered outside the dorm and rumors spread
across campus the minute the fire department and paramedics
arrived, so many trucks that all of Highland Street was blocked
off. Dean Shepherd moved them all out of Frost House—Viv and
Abby to Dee Hall, Celeste to Revere Hall.
“Celeste is still at school?” I said, shocked. I hadn’t dreamed
that I’d told the dean about her, had I?
Viv’s blank look reminded me she didn’t know the whole
story. I gave her a condensed version: Celeste’s fear that Frost
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House was haunted, my meeting with the dean, David’s anger and
his plan to save her—
“Wait,” Viv interrupted. “What did David have to do with the
carbon monoxide leak?”
“He caused it,” I said. “By doing something to the furnace.
That was his plan to get Celeste moved out.”
Viv shook her head. “That’s impossible. The leak had been
going on for a long time.”
Now it was my turn to look blank.
“The alarm nearest your room was screwed up,” she said. “It
wasn’t calibrated right, or whatever. So it was only when the
carbon monoxide reached upstairs that an alarm went off. You
guys had been breathing it for . . . well, they don’t know how long.
Hard to say with windows being opened, stuff like that. Didn’t
anyone tell you this?”
Did they? “I don’t know,” I said. “I just remember when they
found out the carbon monoxide was from the furnace. The stuff
at the hospital is kind of a big blur.”
“They still don’t really know if it was from the furnace,” she
said. “I don’t quite get it, but there was some problem and they
couldn’t tell. But we all had to get tested for CO poisoning, and
Celeste had to get oxygen therapy. David had nothing to do with
it.”
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Until that moment, I’d thought David had left me in the
dorm, knowing I would get sick from the carbon monoxide leak
he’d caused. I hadn’t thought he’d wanted me dead—he wouldn’t
have known that I’d shut myself up in the closet with my pills. But
still . . . I’d used it as an excuse to believe I was better off without
him. Better off without a guy who would ever do something like
that.
But now?
Before this all happened, I think I would have forced myself
to forget about it, to ignore the fact that I wanted to see him.
Anything to avoid the risk of further rejection.
Now, though, I realized that reaching out to David or not
reaching out—it was going to hurt either way.
I allowed myself to be a bit of a coward and send a message
instead of call, so when he agreed to come visit, I couldn’t sense
his tone of voice.
The day he was coming, my body was so twitchy I felt like I
was walking around with my finger stuck in a socket. I tried a
deep-breathing technique my therapist taught me. A Valium
would have worked better. I knew I shouldn’t think that way—
didn’t want to think that way—but it was a hard habit to break.
Finally, the doorbell buzzed.
We stared at each other, awkward. His face was paler,
drawn—more like his sister than ever. After a moment, I stepped
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forward and hugged him. My cheek pressed into the satiny puff of
his down jacket. We stood like that, quiet, for a long time. I loved
being this close to him, no matter what had happened.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Leena.”
“Me too.”
A muffled cough came from inside my dad’s room. We broke
apart.
“He’s giving us space,” I whispered. “I’ll introduce you later.”
David nodded. “You look good,” he said, running his fingers
down my hair. “Are you . . . okay?”
“Pretty much.”
“So.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Celeste is
actually . . . She wanted to see you, too. She’s at the coffee place,
on the corner. I’m supposed to call her when she can come, if
that’s okay.”
“Of course,” I said. “Viv told me she’s still at school. They let
her stay?” I began leading him into the kitchen where I’d set out
all our tea choices during my nervous morning.
“Yeah,” he said. “Once everything came out, and they
realized she was sick, you know, everyone decided she could stay.
Thank God.”
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“Wait, so, she is sick?” I said, turning from the electric kettle,
confused.
“From the carbon monoxide.”
“Right, but . . . that’s it? Nothing worse?”
“No!” he said, resting a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, I
thought you knew all this. It was the carbon monoxide making her
sick. Haven’t you read what it can do? Insomnia, delusions, weird
physical sensations. Along with Celeste’s imagination, and Whip’s
story about the house. The perfect storm, I guess.”
“So, that’s why she thought the house was haunted?” I
asked.
“The whole thing is pretty crazy. Here we were thinking Frost
House was out to get her, and, in a way, it was.”
“Wow. I didn’t realize she’d been affected so severely.” I
tried to process this information while pouring hot water into our
mugs. “Choose whichever tea you want,” I said, and then, after
putting chamomile into my own mug, “What about the weird
things that happened in our room, though? The vase, the
nests . . . Carbon monoxide doesn’t explain any of that.”
“Probably the cat,” he said with a slight shrug.
“Really?”
He stopped dunking his tea bag. “Are you still worried she
