“What?”
“The invite? To your place?”
Slowly, it comes back to me. The morning after my arrest. Standing in his doorway. The sadness in his face. The pity as he looked down on me, into my eyes. And please thank Nora for me. It can’t be easy, sleeping alone. . . . The way I’d felt. Like something more trouble than it’s worth. The words had spilled out. I wish you guys would come up and visit me sometime. I have a big house. Lots of room. I’d like to return the favor.
It feels like so long ago. “Great!” I say it with a cheer that sounds more forced than Luke’s. “When?”
We settle on next Wednesday. Luke tells me that he isn’t shooting that day or the following, and he’s pretty sure Nora can take those days off too. “We’ll get there in time for The Bachelor,” he says.
As he speaks, I walk down the hallway to my one spare bedroom, Emily’s old room. The shut door. I try to remember the last time I opened it. Then I do.
Luke is talking about how great it will be to get out of the city and I’m saying how wonderful it will be to have him and Nora see my place and it feels like we’re both reciting lines from a script, neither one of us very convincingly.
“Cam,” he says finally.
“Yes?”
“You think I’m keeping something from you, don’t you?”
I frown. “Well, I—”
“You know me too well.”
“Well . . . what are you keeping from me?”
“I’ll tell you when we get to your place,” he says. “It’s good news, I promise.”
“Okay . . .”
“We can’t keep secrets from each other, can we?” His voice is so warm, like arms wrapped around me. Or heated seats in a Mercedes S-Class. “Not even good ones.”
I wince. “You have my heart.” It’s a bad pun and one I use with him a lot. It also happens to be true.
“I know I do,” Luke says. “See you soon.”
When we finally hang up, I put my hand on Emily’s doorknob. I don’t want to open it, but I have to—the couch downstairs doesn’t pull out, and so this is my one guest room. I have to get it ready.
To give myself strength, I remember Wendy and me, side by side, pushing the car into the lake.
I am capable. I am capable. I am capable.
I turn the knob, push open Emily’s door, and switch the light on. The last time I was in here, it was daylight, and with the sun streaming in, the dust motes were so thick in the air, they looked like a solid path to the sky. I had dusted then. Cleaned the whole room. But that was more than a year ago. I haven’t been in since.
In one of the support groups I tried going to following Emily’s death, a lot of the parents spoke of their children’s bedrooms, how they’d closed them off for years and turned them into time capsules, the teenage posters still on the wall, baby clothes hanging from puffy pink satin hangers, stuffed animals lined up on the bed, endlessly waiting for their owners’ returns.
You’d think I’d be one of those parents—a time-capsule creator. But I’m not. Emily’s room holds nothing of hers. Nothing at all of anyone’s, save for a full-sized mattress on a box spring at the center of the room—the last piece of furniture I bought for this house, if you can call a mattress furniture. I ordered it after Emily’s death but before the trial, to replace the old one.
A year ago, when I came into this room and dusted it, my goal had been to turn it into something else—a guest room/office space that would be wholly mine and memory-free. I had all sorts of decor ideas. I’d bought potted plants, a mid-century floor lamp, and some framed pulp fiction covers I’d found at a yard sale. I planned to move my desk out of the bedroom and into this one, order some build-it-yourself bookshelves for the window-facing wall, maybe even paint the walls a new color—robin’s-egg blue, I was thinking. But I never even got as far as making the bed.