Free Rooms by Lauren Oliver Page B

take their effect, spitting like small barbed things directly into the woman’s flesh. “He’s dead, and he left nothing for you. So don’t call anymore.”
    Then she hung up, slamming the receiver, feeling the impact all the way to her elbow.

ALICE
    A t night, the house falls into silence. It’s a relief. It has been many years since I’ve shared the house with so many people, and I’ve forgotten how exhausting it can be: to be filled with so much motion and so many needs, so much sound and tension. It’s like the arthritis that swelled my joints in my old age and brought painful awareness to the parts of my body I had always safely ignored.
    Do we dream? No. We don’t sleep. There isn’t any need for it. The body is solid, its corners intact—it doesn’t need to be restored.
    On the other hand, and especially at night, there are certain times of drift . There are moments when the house, the body, has gone still, when we are full of empty air, when nothing needs our attention. Then, sometimes, ideas converge: memory and present, wish and desire, silhouette shadows of people we have been or have known. This is the closest we come to dreaming.
    What is now the study was once the sitting room, which became the living room, as times and fashions changed. There was a yellow-and-white loveseat that Ed hated. He traded it, later on, for a couch in green plaid we covered in plastic, so the upholstery wouldn’t fade. There was a wireless set we eventually moved into the cellar, to make room for our television, and a faded rug we replaced, when Ed retired, with nubby gray wall-to-wall carpeting: the newest thing. I used to walk it in my bare feet when he wasn’t at home, pacing all the way to the corners, kneading my toes against the fabric, marveling at the look of it.
    This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.
    That’s what I return to again and again, no matter how many times I think about it: how naive we were, how we believed in the promise, how we believed the past could be kept down. No. More than that—how we believed in a future that was distinct from the past.
    We had bookshelves. Ed liked books, although he didn’t read them. He was sensitive about his background, and careful, in public, never to betray the fact that he hadn’t finished high school. He liked to collect things that made up for his childhood, as though the weight of his possessions would somehow hurtle him forward into a new life.
    Maybe that’s why he was obsessed with the railroad. Ed liked to talk in front of company about the architecture of our country, and the way it was written in railroads and highways: pistons moving forward, spokes and wheels rolling over a landscape of natural obstacles, chugging headfirst into the future. That was what Ed did his whole life: push, and push, and push.
    Ed kept a slim volume of nineteenth-century railway maps, which he had bought for ten cents at an old flea market in Buffalo, displayed proudly on the top shelf. He insisted it not be moved, touched, or even dusted.
    This was one of the first secrets I kept from him: when he was gone, I would move the little footstool, climb up to reach the top shelf, take down the book, and read it.
    At first it was simply rebellion. But it quickly became more than that. There was something sad about the illustrations, the tracks stitching the land, like a body that had been sewn up after a terrible accident: it was the very attempt to connect that made it ugly.
    Thomas and I liked to look at maps together. Even now, when I see the large-bundled volumes on Richard Walker’s shelf, or the cardboard map that leans against the bookshelf, I can’t help but think of Thomas, and the way we used to trace our fingers over the contours of the pages, following suggested routes, and feeling in our fingertips the possibility of escape.
    I