Landing 12

June's hand clapped over my mouth so fast I felt my teeth click.

She had spun toward me in the dark, and she was suddenly a foot taller, standing on the lower step so that her chest was against mine and her face was right at my chin. I smelled strawberry shampoo and cold sweat. Her palm was flat against my lips, hard, and her other arm was locked around my waist. She was pushing me backward. I let her. I took one step up, then another, until my shoulder blades met the wall of the landing, and there was concrete behind me and my daughter's whole thin body pressing me against it.

Clink.

It was a little closer.

"Don't breathe," said June's lips against my ear. They didn't make a sound. I felt the shape of the words in the muscles of her mouth. "Not through your mouth. Through your nose. Slow."

I nodded under her hand. She let go.

We stood with our backs to the wall and our bodies flat, in the corner of the landing where the two flights met, in the blackest part of the shaft. I held my breath until my chest ached, and then I let it out as slowly as I could through my nose, a long thin silent thread. I could hear June doing the same. We were as still as two statues. I felt the cold of the concrete pass through my cardigan and my nightshirt and into my bones.

And the footsteps came up out of the dark.

I knew at once that they weren't the footsteps of a resident. I could tell from the first five seconds. People who live in a building and are coming up a staircase in a blackout make a certain kind of noise: hurried, hesitant, scuffing, with a muttered curse at each unexpected step. They hold the railing. They call out, hello? Is somebody there? They are afraid, and their fear makes them loud.

These weren't loud. They were slow and even and light, the footsteps of a man who weighs two hundred pounds and has spent a lifetime learning to put his feet down so softly that no one hears. Each step came down with a muffled, deliberate scuff. Then a pause. Then the next. They had the patient, ugly rhythm of a hunter's tread, a thing I have only ever heard in movies, and which I would not have believed possible in the stairwell of a seventeen-story apartment building on the east side of Cleveland.

Step. Pause. Step.

A man who was looking for something.

I became aware of a smell.

It was faint. It wavered at the edge of the air, coming and going as the draft in the stairwell shifted, and I told myself that it was my imagination. But it wasn't. It was the thing I'd smelled in my bedroom with the window cracked, a sharp chemical note, and with it, rising up the shaft like heat, something sweeter. Cloying. A syrupy, gone-off sugar, like orange candy that had melted in a hot pocket and been sucked on anyway. It crept up the steps toward us, and I felt my stomach roll.

Beside me, June's whole body went tight.

She knew that smell. I felt it pass through her like a current.

The footsteps came to the landing below ours. I heard them reach the turn. Heard the hard, gritty scrape of a boot on cement, the faint creak of leather, the sound of a man shifting his weight to look up the next flight. I could have reached down and touched him. Eight steps and a half-landing, no more. If either of us breathed too deeply, if I let the slipper slip off my heel, if the quarter June had dropped upstairs came rolling down the shaft like a bell—

The man coughed.

It was an awful sound. It was the cough of a lifelong smoker, a long wet scraping cough that started low in the chest and rose through the throat like a saw through green wood. He leaned against the railing, and I heard the iron groan under his weight. He coughed again, six, seven, eight times, a violent spasm that echoed from the top of the shaft to the bottom, and then he drew a long ragged whistling breath through his teeth and spat on the floor.

"Christ," he muttered. The voice was low and hoarse. "Hate this part."

Clink, went his ring on the rail.

And from somewhere above, from seventeen floors of dark and the long cold throat of the stairwell, a second sound came, thin and tinny and half-eaten with static. It was a radio. A small handheld, turned very low, in a hand I couldn't see, and the voice that came through it was clipped and calm.

"Unit on seventeen is open," it said. "Door's been left ajar. Nobody inside."

I stopped breathing altogether.

"Copy," said the man on the stairs. His voice dropped, almost to a murmur. I heard him fish something from a pocket, the crackle of foil, and then the click of a hard candy against his teeth. The sweet smell burst across the dark like a bad perfume. "Didn't see anyone coming down. Floors nine through twelve are clean."

"Keep it that way." The radio hissed. A pause. A second voice, a different one, deeper and unhurried, with a quiet, tired authority. "Don't turn on any lights, Lyle. If somebody wakes up, it's trouble."

"Yeah, yeah."

Lyle.

The name went into me like a nail.

I had never heard it before. I would hear it again. I would hear it in a police station and in a courtroom and, on the worst nights, in my sleep, in the dry sweet cough of a man with a bad chest. I stored it right then, in the clerk part of my brain, with the neat habit of a woman who has spent her life writing things on the board so that they won't be forgotten. Lyle. Cough. Candy. Radio. The unit on seventeen is open.

The unit on seventeen.

It took a moment for the meaning to arrive.

The only apartment on the seventeenth floor with its door left ajar was mine. I had closed it behind me by inches, so as not to wake the building, and I hadn't been able to lock it. I'd thought of it as a small price. I thought now of the bed, the ceramic lamp, my mother's quilt. I thought of the green folder in my pocket and the tin of cash and my daughter's rabbit sitting on the end of her bed where it had sat for eleven years. A stranger was walking through my home with a radio.

I felt the blood go cold in my veins, from my scalp to my heels.

Don't touch it, I thought. Don't turn on the light. Don't turn on the light. My daughter's voice, from the bedroom, over and over. If I had flipped the switch. If I had stepped into the hall with the flashlight. They would have seen it from the stairwell, from the street, from the dark sedan idling at the front of the building with its headlights off. They would have known which door.

I understood, in that moment, with the same cold, dismal clarity that you feel when you realize you've been added wrong all the way down a column of figures, that my daughter had saved my life three times in the last half hour, and that I had not once, in all that time, believed her.

"What about the car?" Lyle said. "The mother's. Did anyone look?"

"Gray Corolla, level B of the garage. Hood's cold." A burst of static. "They didn't drive. Wherever they are, they're on foot."

"So they're in the building."

"Or they're on the stairs." The voice paused, and I could hear, behind the static, the faint sound of someone breathing through his nose, slowly, thoughtfully. "I want every landing checked from the bottom up. Move slow. Listen. She's got a kid with her, and a kid can't hold her breath as long as you can."

I closed my eyes. Beside me, I felt June's fingernails sink into the back of my hand.

"Yeah, yeah," said Lyle. "Slow. I got it. I've been doing slow since before you were shaving." He hawked and spat again. Somewhere below him, a second set of footsteps, lighter, faster, hit the lower flights and stopped. A whisper. Lyle's grunt. "Kid's got a nose on her, they say. The old lady's girl."

"Whose?"

"Never mind."

I did not understand. I filed it, the way I'd filed everything else, like a clerk sorting evidence that she hopes will one day add up. The old lady's girl. An old lady. A girl. A woman who had a girl. I thought of my mother, who had been dead for two years, who had never in her life raised her voice or owned anything more dangerous than a pair of pinking shears. I thought of her tidy handwriting and her habit of tearing the junk mail into confetti before she put it in the trash. I could not make the sentence mean anything.

"Where are they?" the man called Lyle said again, to the dark, to the radio, to no one. "The people from seventeen. You'd think they'd have come down by now."

"They're asleep," said the radio. "Everybody on the floor is asleep. Wait for it."

"Yeah." The cough again. A shuffle. And then, to my horror, the steps began to climb.

Step. The turn. Step. The first stair of the flight that led up to our landing. The sweet smell thickened. I could feel the heat of him now, a faint ripple of warmth on the air, the animal presence of a large body moving through the cold. I pressed my spine against the wall. I felt June's hand slide into mine and grip, hard, with a strength that I could feel in the bones of my fingers.

Step. Another. Seven stairs between us. Six.

I stared at nothing. I couldn't see my own hand. I tried to think of something, anything, a plan, a prayer. All I could find in my mind was the face of the girl beside me, as it had been when she was two years old, asleep in the crook of my arm in a rocking chair, with a damp curl stuck to her forehead.

Step. Five.

And then I felt June move.

She didn't pull me. She didn't speak. She lifted her free hand, slowly, so slowly that I felt the air stir against my cheek, and she touched my face. Two fingers on my jaw. And she turned my head, an inch at a time, to the left.

There was a door there.

I hadn't seen it. I could not have. We were standing in the corner of the twelfth-floor landing, where the two flights met, and set into the concrete wall a foot from my shoulder was a gray steel door, identical to the one on seventeen. It had a push bar and a little wire-glass window, black as a pupil. A faint stenciled number glimmered above it, white on green. 12.

June's fingers pointed at it.

I felt her lips at my ear, a breath, no sound, a warmth.

I looked at the door. I looked at the dark hallway that lay beyond it, and the unknown rooms of strangers, and the long corridor that I had never walked. And then I looked at my daughter. In the faint gray that came from nowhere, the shine of her eyes, I saw her nod.

Yes, said the nod.

Now.