The Door Ajar

It had been a month ago, on a Sunday afternoon in the first cold week of the year, that Tomas knocked on the study door.

He remembered it perfectly, because he had rehearsed the sentence for three days. He had stood in the garage with the car engine ticking and practiced it in front of the dusty mirror on the wall, speaking aloud, in the careful English that he used with his employers, Eric, forgive me, I need to ask you a favor, until the words had lost their meaning in his mouth and become just sounds. He was fifty-eight years old. He had been a cook for thirty-six of those years, in a navy galley, in a hospital, in the canteen of a law firm, and he had asked for money perhaps four times in his life, and each time he had felt the words come up out of his chest like something being pulled from a well.

The study was at the end of the upstairs hall. The door was shut. He stood before it with his cap in his hands, in his clean shirt, and listened to the silence, and then knocked twice, lightly, with one knuckle.

There was a sound of a chair. A pause. Then the door opened a hand's width, and Eric looked out.

"Tomas."

"Eric. Forgive me. I need to ask a favor."

He saw Eric's face before the door was fully open: a long, smooth, courteous face, with the glasses glinting. It wore the expression it always wore, one of grave attention. "Of course," said Eric. "Come in. Close the door."

Tomas stepped inside.

It was a small room, and a cold one, though a radiator was ticking under the window. He had been in it only once before, when he first came to live in the house, and what he remembered was a desk, a lamp, a bookcase of dull gray binders, and an air of great order. The desk stood against the wall opposite the door. The monitor on it was turned away from him at an angle. Eric did not hurry to switch it off, and Tomas, who had come to talk about money, did not look at it.

He said what he had come to say. It took him three minutes, and he said it badly. He explained about Mia, and the tuition, and the term, and the ticket, which he would like to buy if it could be arranged, and how he would pay it back in installments out of his wages, a hundred and fifty each month, no, two hundred, whatever Eric thought fair. He heard his own voice going up and thin. He looked at the floor, and then at the lamp.

"Of course," said Eric, at once. "Family is family."

"I will pay every cent."

"I know you will. I'll write it down in a book. Pay when you can." He smiled. It was a good smile, wide and warm, the smile of the Fourth of July picnic, and Tomas felt the knot in his chest let go all at once, and nearly wept. "You are a good father, Tomas. Mia is lucky."

"Thank you. I do not know how to..."

"Don't. Please. Wait here a moment, I'll write the check."

He turned toward the desk. And Tomas, standing in the middle of the floor with his cap in his hands and the weight lifted off him, glanced up without thinking, and for the length of a breath his eyes passed over the screen.

He saw a black page. He saw a white mask, round and blank, with narrow slits for eyes.

He did not understand what he was looking at. It was only a picture. He turned his eyes away at once, politely, with a cook's sense of delicacy, and they fell on the carpet. And then Eric said, "I'll be a moment," in a different voice, soft and distracted, and walked to the corner of the room where the checkbook lay in a drawer.

The look on Eric's face as he went by was one that Tomas had never seen.

It was a look of deep, slow, private satisfaction, like that of a man who is warm after a long cold walk. His eyes were half closed. His lips were parted. He seemed to be listening to something, a music far away, and the corners of his mouth had lifted in a smile that was quite unlike the smile he wore in the house. It was not warm. It was not cruel either. It was only entirely at ease, with nothing to hide it, the face of a person who is alone.

"Take your time," said Tomas, in a small voice. He did not know why he said it.

…

He took the check. He thanked Eric, three times, and Eric put a hand on his shoulder and told him not to mention it. He went out into the hall. He closed the door softly behind him, as a good guest does, and stood on the landing with the slip of paper in his fingers, giddy with relief.

And then he realized that he had left his cap.

He turned back. He put his hand on the knob, and found that the latch had not caught, and the door swung inward a few inches under the pressure of his palm. He stopped. He meant only to say, Excuse me, my cap, and he drew breath to say it.

Through the gap he could see the corner of the desk, and the lamp, and half of the screen, and a man in a chair.

He did not say anything.

He stood quite still on the landing, in the dim hall, with his hand on the door. He saw the back of Eric's neck. He saw the line of one shoulder. He saw the pale blue light of the monitor on the man's glasses, and he understood, in the way that one understands a thing without being told, that what was going on in that room was not meant for anyone to see. It was a private act, of the most private kind, the kind that a man does with the door shut and the lights low and his own mind for company. He understood only that. He did not know what was on the screen. He did not know what the man was reading, or looking at, or why his shoulders moved in that slow quickening rhythm. He knew only that a brother-in-law had no business to be standing there.

A hot wave of shame went over him from his collar to his scalp.

He drew back. He pulled the door closed with infinite care, so slowly that the latch made no sound, and he went down the stairs on the sides of his feet, holding his breath, with his heart going like a drum. In the kitchen he sat down at the table and put his face in his hands, and when Luna came in from the yard with the laundry basket and asked with her eyebrows whether he was ill, he shook his head and said by hand that it was nothing. He sat there for an hour.

He never told anyone. He did not tell Luna. How would he have said it? I saw your husband alone with himself. It was a thing that could not be spoken in any language. And besides, what did it mean? A man alone in a room. A lonely man. He told himself that every man had his weakness, and that it was a mercy to forget what you were not meant to see.

He had left his cap. In the morning it was on the hook by the back door, where someone had hung it, brushed and clean.

…

He ran the whole way home.

He had not run in twenty years. The bus was too slow, and the stop was a block and a half from the gate, and by the time he reached the corner of Maple and Eighth he was gasping and soaked, with a pain under his ribs and the apron still folded in his fist, because he had forgotten to leave it at the canteen. It was a few minutes after one. The house stood in its patch of lawn with its curtains drawn, neat and gray and quiet, and he pushed open the back door and stood in the kitchen with the sweat running into his eyes.

Luna was at the sink.

She turned. She saw him, and her hands went still in the water. He crossed the floor in three steps and took her by the shoulders. He had not planned what he would say, and he said it badly, in signs that were fast and broken and wrong, his big hands stumbling over one another.

A picture. A mask. A white one. On a boy's telephone. At the firm.

Tomas, slow.

The mask. Eric's mask. I saw it in his room.

She looked at him with her large dark patient eyes. A line had formed between her brows.

What is it? she signed.

A group. Some kind of group, on the computer. The name is Exterminators. His fingers shook. It was the same. The same picture. I saw it on his screen, a month ago, when I borrowed the money. I did not know what it was. And today at the canteen a boy had it on his phone, and he said it was a story, a game, he said people there... He could not go on. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

Luna took her hands out of the water, and dried them slowly on her apron, one finger at a time.

Tomas, she said.

Yes.

My husband is a good man.

It was not a question. She signed it very clearly, with her chin up, and in her face there was a stiffness that he had never seen before, a hard white brightness, like a pane of ice. She looked at him a long moment. He gave you the money. He gave you a ticket to see your daughter. He has fed you and sheltered you for six years, and he has never once said a word about it.

I know.

It is a picture on a screen. A mask. There are thousands of masks. She was signing faster now, the fingers sharp. You are tired. You ran. You are frightened of something and you do not know what. You will go on your trip, and you will see Mia, and you will come home, and everything will be as it was.

Luna.

Please. Her hands fell. Please, Tomas.

He stared at her. And for the first time in his life, with a shock that went through him like cold water, he saw that his sister was afraid. Not of the mask. Not of the picture. It was a deeper fear, the old fear of a creature that has stood too long on thin ice, and that knows it, and has decided not to look down.

There was a faint stir in the floor, and both of them turned.

Adam stood on the fourth stair.

He had come down without a sound, in his school clothes, with his bag in his hand. Tomas did not know how long he had been there. The boy did not speak. His face was pale and smooth, and his straight dark brows were drawn very slightly together, and he looked from his mother to his uncle and back again, with that flat clear unreadable gaze, as if he were adding a column of figures.

Then he turned and went up the stairs, one at a time, and a door closed.

…

At half past nine that night Eric came down the hall with his briefcase.

He wore the gray overcoat and the dark scarf, and the clean white shirt that Luna had ironed. His hair was combed. He had shaved a second time, and his cheeks shone faintly in the light of the hall lamp. He paused at the front door with his hand on the knob, and turned his head, and found Tomas sitting at the end of the dim kitchen with a glass of water in front of him that he had not drunk.

"Tomas," he said, in his low, even, gentle voice. "Still up?"

"I am packing."

"Of course. The flight's early." Eric smiled. "Have a safe trip. Give Mia my regards. And do remember what we said about the loan. It's a small matter, but I like these things kept in order."

"I will remember."

"Good man. Good night."

The door opened on the cold and closed behind him. Tomas heard the car start in the drive. He rose, slowly, and went to the window, and drew back the curtain with one finger, and watched the red taillights go down Maple Street, grow small, and turn the corner at the end, and vanish. The street lay empty. A dog was barking somewhere. His hands, he noticed, had gone as cold as stones.

He did not go up to pack.

He sat down again in the dark kitchen and put his hand in his pocket, and found the little square of paper, soft now from handling. He drew it out and flattened it on the table. The letters were big and clear and neat, in a young man's careless ink. THE QUIET ROOM. Under it was an address of letters and dots. Under that, one word.

Welcome.

He crushed it in his fist. He sat there, with the paper in his hand, for a long time. Then he opened his fingers, one at a time, and smoothed the little scrap flat, and folded it in half, and in half again, until it was no larger than a coin, and put it in his wallet, behind the photograph of his daughter.