Solid Walls

Chapter Twenty-Two

When Chloe finally blinked awake, the sun was already falling below the trees outside the motel window. Nell sat at the table across the room, sipping tea and reading a young adult fantasy novel. She didn't look up as Chloe rolled over and stretched.

"Wow, I really needed that." She looked around to see open suitcases and takeout boxes still strewn across the room. "I thought you'd be packed by now."

"Come have some tea," Nell said.

Chloe eyed her suspiciously, their last conversation coming back to her muddled mind. "I don't want to get into it again, Nell..."

"Neither do I," Nell said. She closed her book and set it aside. "Please sit."

Chloe got up and crossed the room. She sat down across from Nell and closed her hands around the mug in front of her, keeping her eyes on the steaming tea.

"Chloe," Nell said. "Why do you think we work well together?"

"We work well together?" Chloe said. "News to me."

"Stop deflecting."

"Oh, now who's a fan of the psychobabble?"

"We work well together," Nell said. "Because we look at the world completely differently. I study walls and roofs and doorways—"

"And history and civil engineering and architectural philosophy..." Chloe muttered.

"Yes, but all that's just window dressing. When it comes down to it, architecture is just what happens when you nail one board on top of another to keep the rain out. It's concrete. You can see it and touch it. Whereas you study the endlessly changing, reacting, very intangible human mind."

"Yes, and that's made me more able to see things from different perspectives and acknowledge multiple theories for what happens in the world. Are you saying that's a bad thing?"

"Of course it's not a bad thing. The problem is there's no practical end to it. You study something whose very existence poses a million questions, every one of a trillion contradictory answers to which could be just as valid as another. You're hardwired to look at a person and see their multitudes—their traumas and relationships and hopes and dreams—whereas when I look at someone I see only who they are in this single moment, just like I see a wall or a doorway. Because to me, for my purposes, that's all that really matters."

"I'm almost certain you were going to have a point to all this—"

"My point is, no matter how much evidence you get, if you don't like where the data is leading, you're always searching for the alternative explanation. I'm not saying you're wrong all the time, or even most of the time. Our work over the past year has proved that people's minds do play tricks on them and their reactions to spaces are absolutely affected by unconscious factors. I wouldn't be writing this book with you if I didn't believe that. But sometimes, Chloe, just sometimes, the simple answer is the right one."

"And the simple answer in this case is?"

"Willa is telling the truth."

Chloe stared at her across the table. "Of course she's telling what she perceives to be the truth, or what she's been conditioned by her family or environment to think is the truth—"

"That's not what I mean, Chloe. I mean her story could just be a factual account of external events. Maybe, in this one case, a scared girl is just a scared girl. And a haunted house is just a haunted house."

"Nell, that's just not possible..."

"Hear me out. What if the house picks people who are hardest on themselves, who live in their own heads too much. And if that person is unlucky enough to set foot in that room at the very center, to linger there too long, it wants them to stay. Not out of evil, necessarily. Maybe it thinks it's protecting them, or—"

"Listen to yourself, Nell. I know buildings can have character and rooms can be filled with energy from their occupants, but you're talking about the house like it's a living thing. Like what they all think happened could have really happened."

"Maybe it did."

"So what are you saying? If Willa leaves that room...?"

"She could turn to dust."

Chloe tried to laugh, but it came out as a strangled, almost weeping noise. "Do you hear yourself, Nell? We're rational people. We're serious academics. We're not this crazy, we are not crazy—"

"This isn't about what happened to you, Chloe."

Chloe pressed her hands against her temples. "Jesus, this again?"

"Chloe, I know you've coped with what happened in your childhood home by studying psychology and rationalizing it all away, but this isn't that. Whether or not you really saw what you think you saw when you were growing up, you were able to get out. Willa doesn't have that luxury. She can't escape. She has to accept her reality for what it is."

"How can you say that? How can you tell a child, how can you tell anyone, that they just have to accept everything for what it is? What if it sucks? Oh, you just have to accept that, that's your life, it'll never get better, no big deal..."

"That's not what I mean, and you know it," Nell said. "What I mean is, maybe when she finally stops trying so hard to figure out why her world is the way it is, stops struggling to put a name to it and find the perfect cure for it and just accepts that it's real, she'll finally be able to change it."

Chloe opened her mouth to snap out another contradiction but paused. She looked hard at Nell's face, searching for insincerity, any hint that she was being made fun of, any hesitation or weakness she could latch onto to make her point heard. But all she saw were those clear, steady eyes that could always articulate so much more than any argument or speech. She saw her friend, worried about her and asking her to listen. She sighed and spun her mug around on the table.

"Look," she said. "Even if I concede that what you're saying could be true—which I'm not—it doesn't matter anymore. We can't go back to the house. We may as well check out now and go home."

"We made a promise to Willa," Nell said. "We shouldn't leave her with nothing, not if there's even the smallest chance what we've learned can help her."

"But we haven't learned anything yet, not really. We were close to something, maybe, starting to put some pieces together...but we don't know enough yet to understand what's really going on in that house. And how are we supposed to find out more if they won't let us back? Even if Talia agreed to sneak us in behind her husband's back like before, tomorrow's Saturday, so Rick will actually be around."

Nell sipped her tea and nodded. "True. But we may not have to go back to the house right away."

"What do you mean?"

"I did some poking around on the internet while you were asleep. Made some calls."

Chloe raised her eyebrows.

"What do you say we stick around town just one more day?"