The hallway smelled cold and stale. There was a slash of black tape across the threshold where I’d seen him and scratches on the hardwood from the Brillo pad I’d used to scrape up flecks of dried blood.
Tina rubbed her arms. “Let’s start by putting on the heat.”
* * *
We pushed the couches in the rec room against the wall and I vacuumed while Tina held up the cord. We laid out the sleeping bags in the shape of a sunburst, then pushed the couches up to the border, creating a wall around the girls who would sleep in the outermost ring. We found cake mix in the cupboards—Tina suggested a sheet cake cut into squares instead of cupcakes. Ruth had made her one once, after she mentioned it was something they did in Texas. Plus, it would come together faster than cupcakes, and we had a lot more work to do.
I had scheduled the new mattresses to arrive on Saturday, back when I thought I’d be returning from Colorado late Friday night. They’d been dumped unceremoniously by the back door; a rodent had chewed through one of the boxes while I was away. At least it hadn’t rained.
But before we could take them upstairs, we had to dispose of the soiled mattresses from Eileen and Jill’s room. We got the first one down the back staircase in a spectacular tumble, and I wiped my brow. “I’m gonna turn off the heat.”
Tina nodded. Please.
We filled a bucket with hot soapy water and spent nearly two hours scrubbing at the blood that had congealed in the crevices of the bedframe. We took the cake out of the oven and jiggled it; it needed another twenty minutes. We got one new mattress upstairs and took the cake out again. This time it was ready. We let it cool on the counter while we loaded the other mattress onto our backs and huffed and puffed up the stairs. We made up the beds with the fresh linens, frosted the cake, and hung new curtains in room ten. I looked at the clock and could not believe when I saw it was four in the afternoon. My skin felt slick, and the back of my shirt was stiff with sweat that had dried, then gotten wet and dried again.
“Do you mind,” I asked Tina haltingly, “just hanging around while I shower?” I could not imagine doing it alone.
“Not at all,” she said.
“I’ll be quick,” I promised.
“Take the time you need.”
In the bathroom, I stood before Denise’s cubbyhole. Denise was a beauty junkie who always had the latest shampoo or hand lotion in her shower caddy. I took it into one of the stalls with me. She would hate for any of that to go to waste.
I turned on the shower as hot as it would go, and then I stood under the spray far too long, working Denise’s shampoo into my hair, lathering my knees and underarms with Denise’s shaving cream. It was something called Crazylegs, and I loved it so much I became a convert. When Johnson & Johnson discontinued it in 1986, it felt like another death.
* * *
I returned from the shower, pink skin wrapped in a bath towel, to find Tina sitting at my desk, paging through one of Denise’s old Cosmopolitans and scratching at her scalp. It was the first time I had ever seen her without something covering her head. I cleared my throat noisily to announce my arrival. Surely she hadn’t meant for me to see her without her hat of the day.
But Tina hardly glanced at me before she went back to turning the pages in the magazine. “Ruth found a cure for her acne in one of these things.” She ran her finger left to right, under the small print for a shampoo advertisement. “I think her stress eased considerably once she got out from under her mother’s roof, and that helped her skin clear up faster than any pill could. Still,” she said, sighing, “can’t hurt to keep an eye out for some miracle treatment, since no doctor in the world can figure out why it won’t grow back.” She was speaking about the twin bald patches on either side of her head, like she’d recently had a pair of devil horns surgically removed.
“What happened?” I asked, going over to my bureau and pulling open the drawer where I kept my undergarments. An unkind thought popped into my head—should I ask Tina to leave while I get dressed? The woman who had stayed and helped me ready The House, who’d stood guard while I showered, who was sitting there completely unarmed and exposed to me. Like some sort of bigot exposure therapy, I dropped my towel and went about my business the way I would with any other woman in the room.
“I pulled it out, actually,” Tina said. “The day Ruth didn’t come home. I was so out of my mind I just grabbed my hair in my fists, and I pulled so hard it came out at the roots.” She licked the pad of her thumb and flipped the page of the shampoo ad defeatedly. “One doctor said I traumatized the follicle. That it will grow again when it feels safe enough.” She laughed roughly at that word. Safe.