What are you afraid of, archetypes? She mocked herself. That’s mature.
She hurried down the carpeted hall, descended a flight of pitch-black stairs as quickly and silently as she could manage.
The second floor was as deserted as her own, a dark tube of locked doors. Blue light spilled from the open doorway of the laundry room. Robin swallowed and crossed the hall.
Inside, she reached along the wall and flicked on the light, grateful for the spluttering glare of the fluorescents. The washing machines were silent cubes, the dryers black, watching windows against the wall.
Robin walked past the line of washers to the lighted Coke machine, a cheery red in the monochromatic room. She reached into her skirt pocket, slid in quarters until a Coke can dropped into the tray with a sharp clunk.
Robin flinched, raw-nerved, at the sound.
Behind her there was a huge inhalation, like the rush of breath. Robin gasped, whirled—and stared at the generator, which had whooshed on behind her.
She ran all the way back to her room and slammed the door behind her, leaned against it, shaking, berating herself.
And wondered how she could possibly make it through three days.
The phone call came right after noon, just as she’d known it would.
When she picked up her phone, her mother was drunk, of course. Robin could almost smell it through the airwaves, sweet, stale whiskey. ‘Tis the season, though for Mom, any old season would do.
Robin had carefully explained, the last time she’d called and found her mother not too out of it, that she’d be staying at school over Thanksgiving. Her mother had seemed to absorb it at the time.
But somewhere along the line, something must have been lost, and her mother had missed the fact that Robin wasn’t going to be coming home. Now her voice was edged with hysteria.
Robin tried for calm. “I told you, Mom. I can’t leave. I have a huge exam next week. Practically everyone’s staying. We’ve having a big dinner here….”
She flinched and held the phone away from her face. Drunken rambling came from the earpiece.
She sank down on the window seat, looked down at a lone student, head bent against the rain as he crossed the deserted street. The wheedling and cajoling segued into recrimination, and then the crying jag. Robin rested her forehead against the cold glass. The words didn’t matter; she’d heard it before. It was all some dark, unfathomable mass, a vortex of chaos and confusion.
Her mother was screaming now—her father again, always her father. “You’re just like him. Lying, selfish bitch…”
Robin choked out, “I gotta go, Mom. I gotta go.” She punched off the phone and hurled it against the wall. It bounced under her desk and she backed away, swaying, sick.
Instantly, it began to ring again. She threw herself down on the floor, groped under her desk, found the phone next to the wallboard. She pushed down on the power button until the ringing stopped.
She sat back on her knees, hugging herself, feeling her mother’s energy like a bottomless whirlpool, taking her down, down.
It wasn’t him she was afraid of being like.
That was what she came from. That was what she was. Broken, defective, fatally abnormal. No wonder no one wanted to come near her.
It was all black, all nothingness.
The abyss.
Pure dark now. The rain gusted outside, the trees shivered in the wind. The Hall shuddered in its own kind of agony, impervious to the one human sound deep within it. But something in the dark corridors leaned forward…listening.
Robin was tightly curled in the window seat of her room, arms wrapped around her knees, sobs tearing through her. The blackness had descended again, leaving no room for anything else.
After a long while, she looked up, drew a shaky breath. Her chest hurt from crying, but now, suddenly, she was calm. Exhausted, but deeply calm.
She stood, swiped at her eyes with an overlong sleeve, and crossed unsteadily to Waverly’s bureau. She knelt on the brown carpet and opened the bottom drawer, pushing aside sweatshirts and petite tees in pastel colors—to find the bottle of Valium.
She shook it. More than enough.
And suddenly, she was clear.
CHAPTER FIVE
The wide main staircase descended into the murky gloom of the bottom floor, lighted only by red neon EXIT signs.
Robin stood at the top of the stairs with Waverly’s bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand, the bottle of pills in the other, looking down into the abyss.
She’d cracked the bottle in her room, even swallowed the first pill, washed down with whiskey—and immediately realized that not under any circumstances was she going to have Waverly be the one to find her. She could just hear the shrill screaming, the exaggerated hysteria. In the lounge, she could abandon herself to the infinitely more acceptable kindness of the first returning stranger.
She swayed slightly, brushing against the banister, but she didn’t feel drunk at all. A dreaminess had come over her. Now that she’d decided, everything seemed so easy, and simple. Not that she hadn’t thought of it before, but thinking wasn’t the same as deciding. Deciding was freedom.
She started down the stairs.
The shining floor below reflected the dark red lights, creating the strange impression that she was descending into a lake. In fact, she felt as if she were moving through water, a trancelike, not unpleasant feeling, a bit like having no body at all. There was a distant roaring in her ears, like a vacuum, like the sea. Down she went, and down. The roaring became more distinct, whispering, like a million formless voices overlapping. She wasn’t alone, she realized with crystal clarity. But the thought wasn’t frightening, not at all. They wanted her, the voices…They were welcoming, beckoning…
She stepped off the last stair—was jolted back to reality as her foot hit the floor. It was solid after all. And the voices were gone. She stood for a moment, then moved across the red streaks of light into the dark main hall, toward the high arched doorway of the lounge.
It was empty, a long, deep room with faded Victorian elegance; once a grand parlor, it was now used as a common living area. Robin paused in the archway and felt the heaviness of time emanating from the room. It was like a stage set waiting for the players, dark walnut paneling and tall arched windows, on one end a cluster of heavy scarred tables etched with decades of graffiti, in front of a wall of built-in bookshelves, on the other end a separate cluster of battered, sagging couches in front of an ornate fireplace, creating distinct lounging areas for studying and for TV. A dusty chandelier hung from the molded ceiling; a cloudy mirror cast rippled reflections over the hearth. A few lamps at the periphery of the room were on very low, lamps with hideous gold-painted plaster bases. They always seemed to be on, like night-lights, perhaps an attempt to keep drunk students from falling over themselves when they stumbled in late at night.
Robin walked unsteadily the length of the lounge, her shoes sinking deeply into the worn plum-colored carpet with cabbage roses. The room seemed immense to her, the walls distant shadows. She finally reached the other side and lowered herself into an overstuffed chair near the fireplace. The chair swallowed her, a comfortable paralysis.
The rain pounded outside; the wet night shone blue through the arched windows.
Robin stared into the gloomy depths of the unlighted hearth, uncapped the bottle of Jack, and took a deep slug. The whiskey raced through her like amber fire, a fierce, tingling burn. She blinked back tears and drank again.
She sank deeper into the chair, her body heavy and loose. She turned over her palm dreamily to look at the bottle of pills. They rattled dryly inside the orange plastic, a good few dozen. Freedom.