Page 12 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“Rumors?” I stop midsip and look at him.

“Yeah, the... Oh, God,” Callum says, his face reddening. “He said he mentioned it to you, or I wouldn’t have...”

“What rumors? What are you talking about?”

“The whole thing with... I mean...teenagers are, you know, sort of terrible by definition...”

“Says the high school teacher,” I interrupt.

“Well, that is why I’m uniquely qualified to say that. They sometimes can be slightly dramatic, and their mushy brains are not fully developed quite yet, so all the significance of consequences for their actions—not always thought through. There was just a rumor about a senior, Mira Medford. People whispered about it a bit—that there was something between her and Henry.”

“What?” I say, feeling a fist of pain pushing on my chest. Could this be the reason for his complete change of personality?

“Anna, I’m sorry. Let me back up. I’m not close with Henry, right? We’ve had drinks a few times, talked in the teacher’s lounge. All the residents here were really pretty amazing at taking turns helping to take care of Lily, so I saw him in passing a few times when it was his turn to bring her a casserole by or something, but I know enough to know he’s not that guy. We have mice in the science lab, and one went missing, and all the freshman girls decided it was because I stay late and put mice up my butt for sexual pleasure. There are still drawings on the whiteboard when I come in some days of ‘sexy mice’ with boobs. I’m telling you, since I can’t take back ever putting that information about the rumor stuff into your brain, that’s how high school is.”

“Okay, point taken, but what exactly was said about him?”

“It’s not so much what was said—something about them having sex in the locker room after hours—it was that she transferred schools the next term, and he was laid off. It was the timing, not so much the dime-a-dozen rumor,” he says, and a high-pitched ringing fills my ears.

I swallow hard. The soft mumble of a baseball commentator emanates from the TV. A yippy dog’s bark can be heard from another unit, and everything feels dull and surreal suddenly.

“I mean, if you’re asking what was different or changed, I’m just saying that’s the only thing I heard, but I don’t think it’s anything to... It’s likely nothing.”

“Lily, that’s your wife?” I ask, because although I met her, the name’s not ringing a bell.

He gives a curt nod, and his face falls as he looks to the floor. “Yes.”

“So the residents organized ways to help take care her, do you feel like he was pretty close to a lot of the people here? I just... I guess that’s hard to picture, so...”

“Yeah, he seemed like...a very popular guy around here,” he speaks pensively and softly. “I mean, maybe he was just trying to stay distracted. I know the layoff hit him hard, but once he was around The Sycamores full-time during the day, I’d see him hanging out with everyone. He gave painting lessons to the pool ladies, manned the grill for the Friday night barbecues, threw the ball with the kids. He was that kind of guy. Well, you already know that.”

“I never knew any of that,” I mumble, astounded that he literally had another life here he never told me about.

“We had a health aide for a while,” he continues, “but we couldn’t really afford her, and Lily swore her jewelry was going missing, so when everyone started to chip in to take care of her, it was really something. Rosa brought tamales, David brought a kitten, which wasn’t actually helpful at all, but it’s the thought, I guess. Jackie painted her nails. Henry did that—started a rotation, I guess you could say, of the residents visiting, helping. It was really something,” he says, and his eyes gloss over as if remembering it might make him break down this very moment.

I nod as if this all makes sense to me, although none of it does. Henry’s character—the natural teacher and caretaker in him, the kindness—that part does, just not this apparent multifaceted existence he kept hidden from me.

After a few moments of silence, Callum places his beer on the coffee table, his shoulders drooping as if the weight of speaking about his late wife has exhausted him.

I feel like I should go, and I don’t really know what else to ask him because I’m still absorbing what he has said. “Well,” I say, standing and moving toward the door.

I don’t have an end to the sentence, and the silence hangs in the air until he echoes, “Well,” and follows me to the door.

“Thank you, for talking to me, I...”

“Yeah, anytime.”

“Can I give you my number, in case... I don’t know, you think of anything else that might help?”

“’Course.” He scribbles it on the back of a Chinese take-out menu, and I leave.

Outside, the crickets chatter in the heavy air, and I walk across the pool concrete toward my unit, thinking of Henry and how little I really knew him in the last months. I’m not the kind of person who blames myself about things outside of my control, but I do wonder if my obsession with wanting more than our life together was what changed us and sent him over the edge.

A conversation we had a few months ago comes in a flash of memory. It was a Saturday morning, and I went out for strawberry scones from Dicky’s. I picked up the mail on the way in and found him sitting on the floor in a beam of sunshine streaming through the window. He was playing with Sticky, the neighbor’s cat who found its way through our sliding glass doors every other day because he wouldn’t stop feeding it frozen fish sticks. He had a cup of coffee in hand and seemed happy.

But when I opened another rejection letter from a journal I submitted a story to, I soured the morning like I always seemed to do—obsessed with proving myself, with getting published—making something of myself above all else, even though he was happy just to be together and be a middle-class artist, getting by. He was doing what he loved every day, and we did okay, so what was there to complain about?

My chest tightens when I think about his contentment—his happiness that I had a knack for spoiling.

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