Frost - Marianna Baer

I’d have made fun of.”

The springs of the sofa bed creaked as Viv shifted her weight.

“I suppose,” she said, “a lot was different before.”

Before.

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Before, I knew so many things. About David and Celeste.

About myself. About real and unreal. I built a fort out of all of

these things I knew.

That day in Frost House, the fort collapsed.

Afterward, I searched back through the semester, trying to

find new facts to build with. But just as I was ready to nail one

down, it would disintegrate in my hands.

Information came to me slowly.

All I grasped at first was that I’d nearly died from a

combination of the pills I’d taken and carbon monoxide poisoning.

I spent two nights in the hospital: a blur of confusion, the stink of

vomit and disinfectant, throat scraped raw, tubes running in and

out of my body, fragments of sleep cut short by needles, the

claustrophobia of the oxygen chamber, doctors with charts,

nurses with implements, and my parents sitting next to me with

looks on their faces that said, How did this happen? as much as

they said, “We love you.”

Not that I blamed them for wondering. I was wondering the

same thing.

Everyone wanted an explanation. But how could I explain?

So I kept most of what happened to myself, only saying enough to

assure the hospital psychiatrist I wasn’t suicidal and didn’t need

admission into the psych ward. When I took the pills, my thought

process had supposedly been compromised by the carbon

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monoxide, so they believed I’d just been confused about how

many pills I’d taken. I agreed to outpatient therapy.

To my parents’ credit, they didn’t push. And they tried to do

what they could. At one point, I woke to my mother standing next

to my bed, a tentative smile on her face, hands behind her back.

“I found something that might make you feel a bit better,”

she said. She laid Cubby on my pillow. “Your old friend.”

“Oh.” I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat as I turned

my face away. “Thanks. But you can get rid of it.”

Viv came for a quick visit the day after I was discharged.

“What’s happened since I left?” I said. “I feel like I’ve been

gone for years.”

She told me about the chaos of that afternoon. Apparently, a

crowd of students gathered outside the dorm and rumors spread

across campus the minute the fire department and paramedics

arrived, so many trucks that all of Highland Street was blocked

off. Dean Shepherd moved them all out of Frost House—Viv and

Abby to Dee Hall, Celeste to Revere Hall.

“Celeste is still at school?” I said, shocked. I hadn’t dreamed

that I’d told the dean about her, had I?

Viv’s blank look reminded me she didn’t know the whole

story. I gave her a condensed version: Celeste’s fear that Frost

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House was haunted, my meeting with the dean, David’s anger and

his plan to save her—

“Wait,” Viv interrupted. “What did David have to do with the

carbon monoxide leak?”

“He caused it,” I said. “By doing something to the furnace.

That was his plan to get Celeste moved out.”

Viv shook her head. “That’s impossible. The leak had been

going on for a long time.”

Now it was my turn to look blank.

“The alarm nearest your room was screwed up,” she said. “It

wasn’t calibrated right, or whatever. So it was only when the

carbon monoxide reached upstairs that an alarm went off. You

guys had been breathing it for . . . well, they don’t know how long.

Hard to say with windows being opened, stuff like that. Didn’t

anyone tell you this?”

Did they? “I don’t know,” I said. “I just remember when they

found out the carbon monoxide was from the furnace. The stuff

at the hospital is kind of a big blur.”

“They still don’t really know if it was from the furnace,” she

said. “I don’t quite get it, but there was some problem and they

couldn’t tell. But we all had to get tested for CO poisoning, and

Celeste had to get oxygen therapy. David had nothing to do with

it.”

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Until that moment, I’d thought David had left me in the

dorm, knowing I would get sick from the carbon monoxide leak

he’d caused. I hadn’t thought he’d wanted me dead—he wouldn’t

have known that I’d shut myself up in the closet with my pills. But

still . . . I’d used it as an excuse to believe I was better off without

him. Better off without a guy who would ever do something like

that.

But now?

Before this all happened, I think I would have forced myself

to forget about it, to ignore the fact that I wanted to see him.

Anything to avoid the risk of further rejection.

Now, though, I realized that reaching out to David or not

reaching out—it was going to hurt either way.

I allowed myself to be a bit of a coward and send a message

instead of call, so when he agreed to come visit, I couldn’t sense

his tone of voice.

The day he was coming, my body was so twitchy I felt like I

was walking around with my finger stuck in a socket. I tried a

deep-breathing technique my therapist taught me. A Valium

would have worked better. I knew I shouldn’t think that way—

didn’t want to think that way—but it was a hard habit to break.

Finally, the doorbell buzzed.

We stared at each other, awkward. His face was paler,

drawn—more like his sister than ever. After a moment, I stepped

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forward and hugged him. My cheek pressed into the satiny puff of

his down jacket. We stood like that, quiet, for a long time. I loved

being this close to him, no matter what had happened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Leena.”

“Me too.”

A muffled cough came from inside my dad’s room. We broke

apart.

“He’s giving us space,” I whispered. “I’ll introduce you later.”

David nodded. “You look good,” he said, running his fingers

down my hair. “Are you . . . okay?”

“Pretty much.”

“So.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Celeste is

actually . . . She wanted to see you, too. She’s at the coffee place,

on the corner. I’m supposed to call her when she can come, if

that’s okay.”

“Of course,” I said. “Viv told me she’s still at school. They let

her stay?” I began leading him into the kitchen where I’d set out

all our tea choices during my nervous morning.

“Yeah,” he said. “Once everything came out, and they

realized she was sick, you know, everyone decided she could stay.

Thank God.”

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“Wait, so, she is sick?” I said, turning from the electric kettle,

confused.

“From the carbon monoxide.”

“Right, but . . . that’s it? Nothing worse?”

“No!” he said, resting a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, I

thought you knew all this. It was the carbon monoxide making her

sick. Haven’t you read what it can do? Insomnia, delusions, weird

physical sensations. Along with Celeste’s imagination, and Whip’s

story about the house. The perfect storm, I guess.”

“So, that’s why she thought the house was haunted?” I

asked.

“The whole thing is pretty crazy. Here we were thinking Frost

House was out to get her, and, in a way, it was.”

“Wow. I didn’t realize she’d been affected so severely.” I

tried to process this information while pouring hot water into our

mugs. “Choose whichever tea you want,” I said, and then, after

putting chamomile into my own mug, “What about the weird

things that happened in our room, though? The vase, the

nests . . . Carbon monoxide doesn’t explain any of that.”

“Probably the cat,” he said with a slight shrug.

“Really?”

He stopped dunking his tea bag. “Are you still worried she

did those things herself?”

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“No. I’m just . . . I don’t know. Confused,” I said. “I haven’t

been able to figure any of this out. I mean, I knew that it caused

my headaches and probably made me throw up, and made me

tired and generally not feel well. But I don’t get . . . There’s a lot I

don’t get.”

“If I didn’t know better,” he said, nudging me, “I’d think you

were trying to convince me that there was something weird going

on in that house.”

Before, I would have been the first one to buy into David’s

theory. The first one to say that was what happened to me, too.

That my thoughts had been altered, twisted by the unhealthy air

I’d been breathing. But then I remember the pull I felt toward the

closet, that very first day. And even before the first day we moved

in, the way I felt the first time I ever saw the house, that intense

need to live there.

And what had I seen that day last fall? What had I mistaken

for smoke, as it drifted from the unusable chimney and danced

into the sky?

After sending David away to the coffee shop, Celeste and I

sat on my dad’s balcony, even though it was cold outside. I think

we both wanted as much fresh air as we could get. We sat quiet

for a moment.

“So,” I finally said. “This is fucked up.”

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Celeste looked at me and laughed, a real laugh. “Yeah,” she

said. “It is.”

“There are still so many things I don’t understand,” I said.

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“How did you get the bruises?”

She pulled up the fur-lined collar of her vintage coat. “I’d

wake up, find them on me,” she said. “And I’d have strange

memories of fighting something off. It seemed like I was awake

when I did it.” She paused. “Who the hell knows? My shrink

thinks they happened during my night terrors. That I’d thrash

around so much I hurt myself.”

“I saw you do that,” I said. “I guess it could have happened.”

“Maybe.” We held eyes, though, and another conversation

passed between us. One in which we agreed on the possibility

that maybe she had been awake when she fought something off

all those nights. I knew it then: Celeste was as confused as I was.

“Something else,” I said. “Did you ever throw your beetle

photo across the room?”

“What?” she said. “No. When did that—?”

“The same night you were burned in the tub. I didn’t want to

tell you.”

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“That burn . . .” Celeste rubbed the spot where it had been.

“I know which handle I turned that night. The water coming out of

the faucet was cold.”

“But the faucet was hot enough to burn you?”

She nodded.

“What does your shrink say about that?”

She gave a half smile. “I’m waiting until a later session to

break it to her.” After a moment she continued. “You know, you

were right to tell Dean Shepherd what was happening. Thanks for

doing that.”

I felt a rush of shame, knowing that the main reason I had

done it was that I didn’t want to lose Frost House. How could I

have thought that I was so weak? How could I have been so

convinced that Frost House was the only place I could ever be