Marianna Baer - Frost

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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.”

“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 happy?

I might need a long time to answer those questions. Now, I still had more for Celeste.

“So that night at your parents’,” I said, “you had a whole story, about that woman who had lived in Frost House. Didn’t you wonder why she hadn’t done anything before? To other students? I’m assuming we would have heard if there were other people who had trouble in the dorm.”

She tightened her silver-wool-with-sequins scarf around her neck.

“I thought it was because we were the first girls to live there,” she said. “It was a woman who died; she’d had a baby girl taken away from her. I thought she wasn’t interested in boys.” Celeste stared off at a plane in the sky. “I couldn’t figure out what she wanted, aside from me leaving, though.”

I didn’t say anything, just watched our healthy breaths puff white in the cold air and thought about Celeste’s theory, thought about my answer to her final question. And while thinking, I realized: I knew everything that had happened to Celeste this semester, but she didn’t know anything that had happened to me. Somehow, it didn’t seem right.

Then I told her my version of the past months, including my theory of what Frost House had wanted:

She had wanted Celeste to leave. But she had wanted me to stay.

Forever.

I DROVE OUT TO BARCROFT this morning. Later today I have a series of meetings with my teachers and Dean Shepherd. I’ve fallen too far behind to finish the semester in some classes, but we’re going to try and figure out if I can still get enough credits to graduate on time.

I’m also having dinner with David. I don’t think either of us is sure what’s going on with our relationship—things have changed, obviously. But we’re taking slow steps, at least toward staying friends. Celeste and I still haven’t talked to him about what might have really happened in the dorm. We will, though. It’s too big a secret to keep from someone I want to be close to. I told Viv everything, and she immediately knew which possible story she wanted to believe. “I’m so sorry, Leen,” she said, giving me a hug. “I should have made us listen to Orin.”

When I made plans to come out here today, I was explicitly told—by my therapist, my father, the dean—to stay away from Frost House. Right. Like that was going to happen.

I parked in the gym lot and pushed my way through the bushes and tree branches, into the backyard. I didn’t want to walk in off the road, in case someone happened to see me. I’d heard from Viv that the whole Frost House thing had completely overshadowed any other campus gossip. And to think, all they knew was that we’d had carbon monoxide poisoning.