Rock Paper Scissors

Trapped in darkness in the wine crypt, Amelia thinks she hears someone whispering her name. Adam opens the trap door, calling instructions down to her. She has an asthma attack and asks Adam to bring down her inhaler. As she waits, she remembers that many of those who raised her were smokers. “Not all of my foster parents were child friendly” (82).

Amelia takes a matchbox from her pocket and lights three matches as she tries to find the staircase. Again, she thinks she hears someone calling her name.

Adam has difficulty finding Amelia’s inhaler. He locates it, walks down the steps to hand it to her, and hears her using it. The power comes back on: “There must be a generator, I say, but Amelia doesn’t answer. Instead she just clings to me and I wrap my arms around her. We stay like that for a long time and I feel oddly protective of her. What I should feel is guilt, but I don’t” (84).

Adam suggests that they take a bottle of wine and go to bed. Along the steps to the chapel’s upper level, they pass a line of black-and-white photos depicting a family chronology—but some are missing. On the upper level, they see four doors that are identical except that one is marked “DANGER KEEP OUT” (86). Two of the other three doors are locked. Behind the third door is a bed with linens exactly like theirs. This astounds Amelia, though Adam shrugs it off as coincidence. Amelia comments, “It all feels so…unauthentic, as if we’re in a film of our lives, and someone just dressed the set with cheap replicas of the originals” (88).

Adam makes a romantic overture. Amelia responds by taking her lingerie from her bag and going to the restroom. She tells Adam to wait for her. Amelia gains confidence about the possibility of making love, only to discover when she opens the door that the bedroom is empty.

Assuming Amelia will procrastinate in the bathroom, Adam decides to investigate what’s behind the door marked “DANGER KEEP OUT.” Taking a candle to light the way, Adam discovers the stairs to the belltower, which is beautiful but in perilous disrepair. The 360-degree view of the clear night sky compels him to take his phone from his pocket for a photo. He says:

As I look up at the night sky, it seems almost inconceivable to me that something so magical is always there. We’re all too busy looking down to remember to look at the stars. It makes me sad when I think about all the things I might have already missed out on in life, but I plan to change that (91).

Adam recalls how he saw Amelia hide his phone before the trip but didn’t tell her he retrieved it. In describing Amelia’s recent strange behavior, Adam relates that she purchased a life insurance policy on his behalf and had him sign it when he was inebriated. While Adam saw no need for the policy, he agreed “because my wife is one of those women who is difficult to say no to” (92). Adam thinks that Amelia has an unusual preoccupation with death and wonders what she’s up to: “My wife is planning something, I’m sure of it. I just don’t know what” (92). Adam believes that, from his youth, people always tried to change him—his mother, girlfriends, and now Amelia. Adam confides that Amelia isn’t perfect. She has cheated on him, he says, admitting too that he has cheated on her.

Saying, like Adam, that she tends to ignore rules, Amelia climbs the stairs to the belltower. The two huddle together beneath a blanket, drinking wine, atop the chapel. Adam points out the constellation Cassiopeia, named for a queen “whose vanity and arrogance led to her downfall” (96). Amelia remembers looking at nostalgic paraphernalia recently, including the wedding vows they wrote to each other. She says, “promises lose their value when broken or chipped, like dusty, forgotten antiques. The sad truth about our present always punctuates my happy memories of our past with full stops” (96-97).

She realizes that Adam is drunk. When she rises, he holds onto her, making her bump into the large church bell. Multitudes of bats fly out of the tower. Amelia is paralyzed by the surging bats while Adam stumbles backward, reaching for her. She grabs his arm as the low retaining wall collapses. Instead of thanking her, Adam gives her a fearsome look.

Adam narrates this chapter from inside his dream. It starts with the two leaving the chapel angrily that night. It’s completely dark and raining heavily. Adam broods about the failure of their relationship: “[I]t’s impossible not to know how unhappy we both are” (100).

Adam sees a woman in a red kimono crossing the road in front of them and yells for Amelia to slow down. The car strikes the woman, who soars through the air.

Recognizing that Adam is having a nightmare, Amelia tries to wake him. He’s like a fearful child, and she comforts him. Adam has long had variations of this “woman in red” dream. As in the past, at first he doesn’t realize who Amelia is: “[S]ometimes he thinks I’m someone else” (103). Amelia believes that his dreams, which can’t be stopped, reflect memories that Adam resists:

His dreams have a habit of haunting him, regardless of whether he’s asleep or awake. His mind isn’t panning for gold; it’s searching for something much darker. Tiny nuggets of buried regrets sometimes slip through the gaps, but the heaviest of memories tend to sink rather than rise to the surface (103).

Per their custom, Amelia writes down all Adam remembers about the dream. Amelia reveals that the dream is based on reality. When he was 13, Adam’s mother, wearing a red kimono, died in front of him when struck by a hit-and-run driver. His inability to remember faces prevented him from describing the driver. The accident occurred while his mother was walking the dog, a chore that Adam neglected. Amelia says that Adam’s mother always wore the red kimono when she was expecting one of her many male visitors.

While Adam falls back to sleep, Amelia must take a sleeping pill. Not long after, she awakens to a noise below them in the chapel.

Late at night, Robin marches out of the cottage, through the snow, to the chapel. Feeney reveals that Robin took measures to prevent people from knowing where she lives. Robin believes she can never leave the cottage and that “visitors won’t be able to leave when they want to either, not that they know that yet. It’s impossible not to feel a tiny bit sorry for them” (108).

Feeney hints that Robin knows things about the accident that Adam doesn’t. She also knows that, as a boy, he had nightmares about the woman in red. Robin has a key and lets herself into the chapel.

Chapter 25 is a roller coaster of emotion—from the bitterness of waiting for Adam to show up at the doctor’s office, to his supreme joy in learning that Robin is pregnant, to the sudden loss of the pregnancy. This rapid-fire ride of highs and lows distracts from the previous chapter’s revelation that Robin has secretly entered the chapel in the middle of the night.

The chapter’s title, Linen, plays on the medical aspect of what Robin writes about—tests, doctor visits, and disappointment—in that every in-depth medical examination implies undressing and putting on linens in the doctor’s office, as Robin describes poignantly. Ironically, linen also foreshadows the funeral pall, which refers to her loss of the baby. Also, her trust and reliance on Adam had died. They had no children, and the child she carried was unlikely to survive. Robin connects linen and family secrets in two ways: Her medical tests caused her to reveal everything about herself, and she had to talk about her personal business in front of a cabby, which she calls washing her “dirty linen.”

This chapter is her fourth anniversary letter to Adam. It contains a series of emotional tone shifts. She voices powerful bitterness that Adam didn’t show up at the doctor’s office to find out if she was pregnant because he was meeting with a movie producer who was interested in the Rock Paper Scissors screenplay. She describes the hardships they endured while trying to conceive and her extreme disappointment that she’s alone to hear the verdict from “Dr. Doom.”

She was astonished to discover that she was pregnant. Angry at Adam, she didn’t tell him at first. However, she remarks that he seemed to know she was: “It felt as if you’d already known I was pregnant. You believed in me, even when I wasn’t able to believe in myself” (116). For their fourth anniversary, Adam gave her a linen cushion inscribed, “SHE BELIEVED SHE COULD, SO SHE DID” (116). Their celebration ended when they saw that she was bleeding. Hours later, after doctors confirmed that she lost the pregnancy, she discarded the cushion and wrote the letter to Adam.

Clearly hearing footsteps climbing the stairs to their bedroom, Amelia tries the light switch, which doesn’t work. She gets out of bed and locks herself in the bathroom. Feeling trapped, she takes her Gillette Venus razor and backs up to the wall. Someone tries to open the door—and then pounds on it. Adam calls her name. She opens the door to find him holding a candle.

Adam tells her that he heard a noise downstairs too but, checking all the doors, found the chapel completely locked. The electric generator and plumbing don’t work. They decide to leave in the morning. Adam holds her close when they return to bed. Amelia thinks, “If nothing else, the trip has already brought us closer together” (123).

Adam waits for Amelia’s second sleeping pill to take effect and slips out of bed to “get back to what I was doing downstairs” (124). Adam expresses a cynical view of marriage, comparing belief in it to belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Falling out of love with his wife, he ventures, is a natural progression:

Nobody should promise to love somebody forever, the most any sane individual should do is promise to try. What if the person you married becomes unrecognizable ten years later? People change and promises—even the ones we try to keep—sometimes get broken (125).

Adam acknowledges that he cut the power twice, first before realizing that a generator would restore it and, second, to accomplish what he’s planning.

This chapter is the fifth anniversary letter to Adam. His wife discusses her lengthy period of grieving as she gave up trying to have a child. She details how she and Adam argued over his long meeting with a star named October O’Brien who was interested in his original screenplay. Adam bends their argument to make it seem as if his wife is uninterested in his career because hers is stagnant. She writes:

The thought of you not being proud of me was utterly devastating hurt. A lot. I know you think I could be doing more with my life, but it wasn’t but it isn’t all my fault. When the person you love is too many bright ideas, they can completely eclipse yours. And I still do. Love you. I spent my ambition on your dreams instead of my own (129-30).

She takes the day off to celebrate their anniversary. Adam announces that he must meet with his agent to ask about the screenplay. He gives his wife two gifts. One is a small, leafless magnolia tree he planted in the front yard. The other is a single ticket to a play she wanted to see with him. She notes that he anticipated working or would have gotten two tickets.

A smoke alarm causes the play to be canceled. She arrives home to find Adam drinking wine with October and describes her as being exquisitely beautiful and perfectly mannered. October explains that she came home with Adam to help prepare an anniversary meal for his wife. October completely charms her. When October leaves, Adam calls his wife his MIP, or “Most Important Person” (134).

Robin hid in the chapel library while Adam came downstairs twice. Feeney reveals that Robin used to live in the chapel and could still, though she doesn’t like to spend any more time there than necessary. Feeney writes, “The visitors would want to get out too if they knew the truth about where they were staying, but people see what they want to see” (136).

Playing with her shadow in the moonlight coming through the library window, Robin folds her hands to create a rock, paper, and scissors. Finding an old lipstick container in her pocket, she dabs some on her lips. The red lipstick makes her remember the first time she wore it and how she was injured.

Having overheard Amelia an Adam discuss leaving in the morning, Robin grows angry that they think they can stay for free. She decides that they will not leave in the morning: “After what she has seen and heard, Robin is fairly sure that at least one of them will never leave this place again” (138).

Amelia wakes Adam before sunrise, telling him that their dog, Bob, is missing. As they go downstairs to search for him, Amelia notices that Adam intentionally misses every squeaky step in the staircase. Bob is nowhere on the lower level. Adam insists that he locked the doors. He opens the chapel doors to look outside. The snow cover is so dense that they fear Bob couldn’t survive outdoors. Going back inside, they decide to check the wine crypt. Adam produces his cell phone, which he pretended he didn’t have the previous day. Amelia observes, “The reason why a person lies is almost always more interesting than the lie itself. My husband shouldn’t tell them; he isn’t very good at it” (141).