Back Bedroom

The Habit

Chapter 24: Back Bedroom

They arrived on the twenty-third at 3:06 in the afternoon with an overnight bag, a backpack, a grocery sack full of wrapped presents, and the concentrated weather system that accompanies a child who has been in a car for five hours and is holding her best behavior together with both hands.

Lila made it to the porch before the first question.

"Can I see the room?"

"Hello to you too," Renee said.

"Hello. Can I see the room?"

Noel took the backpack from her because it looked heavier than her spine deserved and led them down the hallway.

The back bedroom had been Ruth's. Then, for three years, it had been the room where nothing happened unless storing happened to count. The bed remained the same iron-frame full she had slept in. The quilt on top was different, borrowed from the hall linen shelf because the original carried too much of Ruth's specific scent even four years later to give away to guests in good conscience.

Lila walked in, turned a full circle, and said, "This is a proper room."

"As opposed to?"

"Hotels. Hotels are pretending."

Renee set the grocery sack on the dresser and looked around with the careful attention of a guest reading the emotional temperature of a space before stepping fully inside it.

"You didn't have to do all this," she said.

"I know."

The room answered only in the ordinary language of old houses: a little settling at dusk, a draft at the window, the complaint of floorboards under weight.

Lila put both hands on the quilt.

"Who used to sleep here?"

Children ask chronology as if adults owe it to them in simple sequence.

"My mother," Noel said.

"Is she dead?"

"Yes."

Lila nodded. Not solemnly. Practically. Death, to seven-year-olds, often arrives still partially categorized with weather and school policy as an important thing the adults know more about.

"Okay," she said. "Can I put my marker bag in the bottom drawer?"

"Yes."

Once they were settled, Noel set water to boil for spaghetti and stood at the stove while the house relearned their sounds. Renee in the bathroom cabinet looking for towels she had already been shown. Lila singing something tuneless to herself in the back bedroom while unzipping pockets and re-zipping them. The front door opening as Edna arrived without knocking because Christmas Eve food, in her theology, required a forty-eight-hour start time.

She came in carrying a foil pan and one sentence.

"I made dressing."

Lila peered around Noel's elbow.

"Are you Edna?"

"I am."

"Mama said you feed people on sight."

Edna considered her.

"Your mother has represented me fairly."

By evening the kitchen counter held dressing, two pies, spaghetti sauce, a bag of rolls from Food City, and the marbles, which Noel had taken out of the closet because Lila found them while looking for extra blankets and gasped with the full-body astonishment adults spend good money trying to recover.

"These are for tomorrow," he said.

"Tomorrow is very far away."

"It's fifteen hours."

"Exactly."

After dinner Lila made him show her the coffee can. He did. Not the note. Not yet. But the marbles. She lined the old ones up beside the new ones and said, with complete certainty, "You can tell which ones were important because they're scratched."

Noel looked at the row of glass on the table.

"Maybe."

When the house finally went quiet, he walked to the back bedroom and saw the line of light under the door from the lamp he had moved in there. He stood in the hall listening to Renee murmur something low, then Lila's answering voice already thick with sleep.

The room no longer felt preserved.

It felt used.

At the table he wrote:

Left the lamp on in Ruth's old room after Renee and Lila went to sleep, and the sight of it did not feel like trespass. The room has spent four years belonging to the dead. Tonight it belonged to a child arguing with pajamas and then falling asleep mid-sentence.

He closed the notebook and stood a while longer in the hall.

The light under the door stayed steady.