Twelve Rooms with a View. Theresa Rebeck

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       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.

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