Theresa Rebeck - Twelve Rooms with a View

Alison was not. She kept pawing at the wall. “Is this all the light? There has to be another light switch somewhere,” she said, sounding all worried.

“Here, I’ve got one,” said Lucy, throwing a switch in the kitchen. It didn’t really do much because the kitchen was a whole separate room with a big fat wall in front of it, so then there was just a little doorway-sized window of light that didn’t actually make it very far into the living room, or parlour, whatever you wanted to call this giant space.

“Oh that’s a big help,” said Alison.

“Wow, this kitchen is a mess. You should see this!” yelled Lucy. “Oh God, there’s something growing in here.”

“That’s not funny,” Alison snapped.

“No kidding,” Lucy called back, banging things around in there in a kind of sudden, alarming frenzy. “No kidding, there’s something growing—ick, it’s moving! It’s moving! No wait—never mind, never mind.”

“I am in no mood, Lucy! This is ridiculous. Daniel! Where are you? Tina, where did you go? Where is everybody! Could we all stay in one place please? Daniel. ” Alison suddenly sounded like a total nut. It’s something that happens to her, she just gets more and more worked up, and she truly doesn’t know how to stop it once it gets going. No one is quite sure why Daniel married her, as he’s pretty good looking and seriously could have done a lot better. Not that Alison is mean or stupid; she’s just sort of high strung in a way that is definitely trying. Anyway, right about now was when that apartment literally started to drive her crazy. She kept slapping the wall, looking for another light switch, and Daniel was just ignoring how scared she was; he was heading all the way across that gigantic room into the gloom on the other side, where that one chair sat, next to a big hole in the wall. Well, it wasn’t a hole; it was a hallway. But from where we all stood it looked like a hole, and the sloping black shadow that used to be Daniel was about to disappear right down it.

“Daniel, just wait, could you wait please?” Alison yelled, completely panicked now. “I cannot see where you are going!”

“It’s fine, Alison,” he said, sounding like a bastard, just before he disappeared.

“Daniel, WAIT!” she yelled, almost crying now.

“Here, Alison,” I said, and I pulled open one of the blinds.

And then we were all showered with light. This incredible gold and red light shot through the window and hit every wall in that room, making everything glow and move; the sun was going down so the light was cutting through the branches of the bare trees, which were shifting in the wind. So that big old room went from being all weird and dreary to being something else altogether, and it skipped everything in between.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yes, thank you, that’s much better,” Alison nodded, looking around, still anxious as shit. “Although that isn’t going to be much help when the sun is gone.”

“Is it going somewhere?” I asked.

“It’s going down , and then what will you do? Because that chandelier gives off no light whatsoever, it’s worse than useless, all the way up there. You’d think they’d have had some area lamps in a room this size.”

“You’d think they’d have had some furniture in a room this size,” I observed.

“Okay, I don’t know what that stuff is, that’s growing in the kitchen,” Lucy announced, barging into the giant empty parlour, now filled with the light of the dying day. “But it’s kind of disgusting in there. We’re going to have this whole place professionally cleaned before we put it on the market, and even that might not be enough, it might be, oh God, who knows what that stuff is. And it’s everywhere. On the counters, in the closets. Who knows what’s in the refrigerator. I was afraid to look.”

“There’s really something growing?” I asked. Her dire pronouncements were having the opposite effect on me; the worse she made it sound the more I wanted to see it. I slid over to the doorway just to take a peek.

“Is it mold?” Alison asked, her level of panic starting to rev up again. “Because that could ruin everything. This place will be useless, worse than useless, if there’s mold. It costs millions to get rid of that stuff.”

“It doesn’t cost millions ,” Lucy countered.

“A serious mold problem in an exclusive building, that’s millions.”

“You’ve never had any kind of mold problem in any building, Alison. You don’t know anything about it,” Lucy informed her.

“I know that if the rest of the building finds out, they could sue us,” Alison shot back. “We would be the responsible parties, if mold in this apartment made anybody in the building sick. It could be making us sick, right now.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Lucy said, looking at me and rolling her eyes. Seriously, everybody rolls their eyes at Alison behind her back, even if she might be right. She’s just so irredeemably uptight.

“Holy shit,” I said, finally getting a good look at the kitchen.

“What, is it bad? It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“No, no, it’s not that bad,” I lied. The whole kitchen was green. Or, at least, most of it. “And I don’t think it’s mold. I think it’s moss.”

“Moss doesn’t grow inside apartments,” Alison hissed. “We have to go now. We have to leave immediately, it will make us all sick. It’s probably what killed Mom, truth be told.”

“Mom died of a heart attack,” I reminded her.

“We have to leave now, before we all get sick. Daniel. We have to go. ”

“There’s another apartment back here!” Daniel yelled.

“What?” said Lucy, heading after him into the black hallway.

“There’s a whole second apartment, like another kitchen and another living room or parlour—there’s like six bedrooms and two dining rooms!” he yelled.

“How can there be two dining rooms?” Lucy muttered. And then she disappeared. I looked at Alison, who was standing very still, her arms down at her sides. I completely did not want to contribute any extra fuel to the coming conflagration. But I did want to see the rest of that apartment.

“It’ll be okay, Alison,” I said. “It’s not mold. It’s moss! And Mom died of a heart attack. Let’s go see the rest of this place. It sounds awesome.” Realizing that I sounded like an utter fool now, I bolted.

But the place was awesome. The hallway was dark and twisty, and there were rooms everywhere, which all hooked onto other rooms and then hooked back to that twisty hallway further down. Seriously, you sort of never knew where you were, and then you were someplace you had gone through six rooms ago, but you didn’t know how you got back there at all. And while some of those rooms were as empty and lonely as that giant room at the front of the apartment, some of the others were cozy and interesting; one was painted a weird shade of pink that I had never seen before, with no furniture but with framed pictures of flowers all over the walls, except for one wall that had like the most gigantic mirror on it that you have ever seen in your life. No kidding, you thought that room was six times as big as it was because of that mirror and then you also jumped because as soon as you walked in you thought someone else was there with you but it wasn’t someone else, it was just you. Another room had little bitty beds that were like only six inches off the ground, and there were these old crazy solar system stickers stuck on the ceiling. One of the walls had a giant sunset painted on it, someone had actually painted a picture of the sun setting over the ocean, right on the wall itself. One room was painted dark purple, and there were stars on that ceiling too, and a little bitty chandelier that had glass moons and suns hanging from it. There was no furniture in that room either.