Part 4
Part 4 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
The stairwell smelled like other people’s dinners and old paint. Somebody on two had a TV going, a game show, the kind with a wheel.
I stood outside 3B for a long time.
I want to be honest about what I was thinking, because later everybody assumed I’d been thinking about my mother, and I wasn’t. I was thinking about a man in an apartment my dead mother had been paying for, a man with no name on any document, a man who took the trash out at three in the morning so nobody would see him, and I was thinking about the fact that I had told nobody where I was. Not Tom. Not the office. Nobody.
I had the key in my hand. I didn’t use it.
I knocked.
Nothing happened, and the relief that went through me was enormous and shameful, and I turned to go.
Then the floor moved.
That’s the only way I know how to say it. On the other side of that door somebody shifted their weight and a board went under them, one single sound, and everything in me stopped.
I put my hand flat on the door.
“Hello,” I said.
Nothing.
“My name is Claire. I think, I think my mother rents this apartment.”
A sound like a breath being let out slow and controlled, the way you do it when you’ve been holding it too long and you don’t want the other person to hear.
He was standing right there. Six inches away, on the other side of an inch and a half of hollow core door, close enough that I could hear him breathe, and he had been standing right there the entire time I was on the landing.
“Please,” I said. “I’m not here about the rent. I just need to know who you are.”
And then, quiet, in a voice that was not a stranger’s voice, in a voice that had a shape I knew the way you know the shape of your own name being called across a parking lot:
“You’re late.”