Black Tape

The scissors were in my right coat pocket, where they had been since I was ten, and my hand was already around them before I'd decided to reach.

I think people imagine that in moments like that the mind goes still, and clear, and cold, like the surface of a lake. It doesn't. Mine went loud. There were boots in the shaft above us, coming down in a clatter I could feel in my molars, and a rasping breath, and my mother's gasping beside me, and a high thin whine in my ears like a kettle about to boil. And inside all that noise there was one small steady voice, my own, reading aloud from a list.

Tape. Cut it. Two cuts. Left of the bar, then right.

I had done it before. I knew how many layers. I knew that if I tried to peel it, the thing would take forever, that the adhesive was the cheap kind that tore at the edges and stuck to your fingers. I knew that the way to beat it was to ignore the spiral and go straight across, through the thickest part, with the blades open as wide as they would go, sawing at the place where the tape had been laid over itself like the skin of an onion.

I dropped to my knees.

The scissors were a three-dollar pair. I had bought them at a craft store on a Saturday when I was ten, with my own money, because the ones in the kitchen drawer were too big for a child's hand, and I'd scratched my name in the handle with a compass point because Corinne had told me that if you didn't mark things in a house with other people, they got lost. They were meant for washi tape and construction paper. They'd never been meant for this. I spread the blades, set the lower one against the black wrapping at the edge of the bar, and cut.

It resisted. It made a soft ripping sound, like a zipper. The first layer parted. The second. I felt the blades grind through the third and catch on something hard, and I twisted my wrist and yanked, and the scissors bit through with a small wet snick. The tape sprang away from the metal in a long curl.

"Hurry," whispered my mother.

"I am."

Second cut. On the other side of the bar, where the tape had been wound round the lock plate. It was thicker there, laid on in a double band, and I could feel in my hands that I was going too slowly. Somewhere above us, three floors up, a boot hit a landing and a voice swore. The rail trembled under my fingers. I jammed my thumb into the handle of the scissors and put my whole weight behind them, and the tape gave all at once with a crack, and the free end flapped loose against the door.

I stood. I put my shoulder against the steel, the way I'd seen it done in movies, and I drove forward.

It didn't open.

I hit it again, harder. A bruise bloomed instantly in the meat of my shoulder, and something in the door gave a grudging shudder. My mother was beside me then, pushing, her slippered feet skidding on the concrete, her whole body behind the bar. We hit the door together. It flew out from under us with a bang like a gunshot, and the two of us tumbled over the threshold into the lobby of Cedar Terrace in a heap of tangled arms and legs.

…

It was a big room, for a building that had never been grand.

The lobby of Cedar Terrace is a long rectangle of cracked white terrazzo, with a row of brass mailboxes along one wall and a wide front desk of dark laminate where the building's night guard sat from ten until six. A wilting ficus stood by the elevators. A bulletin board near the door held a half-dozen curling notices: LOST CAT, REMINDER: NO BIKES IN HALLWAYS, NEW TRASH SCHEDULE. The mailbox bank gleamed dully, its little brass doors reflecting a faint gray light that came in through the glass front entrance, forty feet away.

I got to my feet. My knees were shaking. My mother lay on the cold terrazzo for a second, gasping, with one hand pressed to her side.

"June," she said. "Are you hurt?"

"No. Get up."

"I'm up."

I looked at the desk.

There was no one behind it. The guard's chair was pushed back at an angle, as if he had risen suddenly to answer a summons, and on the laminate in front of it stood a paper cup of coffee with a wisp of steam still curling from the lid. A small TV bolted to the wall above it was dead and dark. The brass desk lamp, the hand-bell, the sign-in clipboard, all were exactly where they should have been. The only thing wrong with the picture was that the man who belonged in it wasn't there.

Mr. Abernathy, I thought. Where did you go?

I had no answer. In the first life I hadn't gotten this far.

"Where's the guard?" said my mother. She had risen and was standing in the middle of the lobby, turning slowly, taking it in with a teacher's eyes. "He should be at his desk. Jim's always at his desk."

"I don't know."

"Do you—do you think—"

"Mom, the door."

The front doors of Cedar Terrace are a pair of tall glass panels in aluminum frames, with a heavy deadbolt that locks from the inside with a key, and that key is not on a chain or a hook. It's supposed to be kept in the security desk. I ran to them anyway, because I had to see. I grabbed the push bars and heaved. The doors rattled in their frames and didn't budge. Through the glass the circular driveway lay empty and black. Beyond it, the parking lot, and the hill, and the long dark glimmer of the city.

The dark sedan wasn't there. A faint oil stain on the asphalt showed where it had been.

It moves at 3:20. It goes around the back.

I turned from the doors, my heart pounding. I could hear the footsteps now, faint, from deep in the stairwell behind us, and I measured them without wanting to: three floors, maybe four. A minute. Perhaps less.

I ran to the desk.

I went around it, behind the laminate, and I jerked open the middle drawer. It was where I had known it would be. A jumble of rubber bands, pens, a stapler, a roll of mints, and in the back, hanging from a bent paper clip, a thick steel ring of keys, thirty or forty of them, all jangling together like a handful of spare change. I grabbed it. It was heavy and cold. It was the one thing in the world that I wanted to hold.

"June," said my mother. She had come up behind me, close, and her whisper was a shaking thread. "How do you know the key is here?"

I didn't answer.

I did not have a lie that was good enough. I stood behind the guard's desk with the ring in my hands, with the cold of the steel burning into my palms, and I looked at my mother over the top of the counter. She was a small, bedraggled woman in a torn cardigan and mismatched shoes. Her hair had come down. A thread of blood ran from a scrape at her temple, where she'd hit the doorframe. She was looking at me with an expression that I had seen once before, in a hospital waiting room, on the face of a woman waiting to hear what the doctor had to say.

"Later," I said. "Please."

She closed her mouth.

…

There were thirty-three keys on the ring. I counted them in the dark by touch, flicking each one over with my thumbnail. They were mostly the same shape. Dull brass, a couple of steel ones, the long skeleton type for the roof, a pair with plastic tags in faded green. A few had numbers stamped on the head. Most had nothing.

The one I needed was brass. It had a black rubber collar. It had a notch in the bow, just a little scratch, where somebody had once tried to cut it down. I found it by feel on the third pass and my fingers closed around it. I ran across the lobby to the glass doors and crouched at the lock.

The slot was a small round hole in a steel plate, at waist height, with a wedge of brass around it. It was exactly where it had been the first time. I fitted the key to the hole.

It wouldn't go in.

I pushed. It slid in a quarter inch and stopped. I turned it, and it turned a degree, and jammed. I pulled it out and looked at it. It was the right key. It had to be the right key. I had watched it once, the other time, in the hand of a man who had come in and out through those doors in his uniform with a cup of coffee, and I'd seen the black collar, and the notch. I put it in again. It stuck. My hands were shaking so badly that the metal chattered against the plate.

"June."

"I know."

"June, they're coming."

"I know."

I could hear them. The stairwell door at the other end of the lobby, the one we had come through, had swung almost shut on its spring, but through the crack I could hear the long hurtling thunder of boots on steel, three men, maybe four, and a voice shouting, a floor above, no more than two, "Down! Down! They're in the lobby!"

My mother's hand closed on my shoulder.

"Let me try."

"No. It's—you have to hold it level. It sticks if you go in crooked. You have to—" My voice cracked. Calm down. Calm down, June. I closed my eyes. I breathed in through my nose. I remembered the guard's hand, the big square hand with the black hair on the knuckles. He'd always held the key flat, with the notch up, and given it a little sideways wiggle, and pushed.

I opened my eyes. I turned the key over. Notch up.

I slid it in.

It went in all the way, with a small satisfying click. I felt the tumblers turn under my fingers like water finding its level. I gave the key a little sideways wiggle, the way he had, and I turned.

The lock released with a clean metallic thunk.

I threw my whole weight on the push bar, and the glass door swung out into the night.

…

The cold hit me like a hand.

It was a true November cold, with a damp edge, the kind that comes off Lake Erie after dark and finds its way into your coat. It rushed into my face and into my lungs and ran down the inside of my collar. It smelled of wet asphalt and frozen leaves. It smelled of outside. I stood on the threshold with the key still gripped in my fist, breathing in great ragged gulps, and the strangest thing happened: my eyes filled up. I hadn't known how much I wanted to be on the other side of that door until I was.

My mother stepped past me onto the pavement. She turned in a slow circle.

The world was black. The streetlights along Cedar Drive, which should have lit the entire hill with their orange halos, were out. The lights in the neighboring buildings, the two other towers of the complex, the little strip mall across the road, the gas station on the corner, all were out. The parking lot lay beneath us like a field of black glass. No traffic lights. No headlights on the hill. No glow from a window anywhere. The sky was a heavy ceiling of cloud, and the faint reddish-gray color of it told me that the whole east side of the city had gone dark in the space of a few minutes, and that nobody had come to see why.

In the distance, a long way off, beyond the ridge, I could see one thing. A thin, moving thread of white light, tiny, like a strand of pearls. Headlights, on the interstate, sliding silently along the horizon, going somewhere, carrying people who did not yet know.

Behind us, in the lobby, the long gray stairwell door gave a single dull bang as something heavy struck it from the other side, and I knew that we had perhaps ten seconds of the dark and the cold left to spend.

I looked at the thread of white lights on the horizon, small and far and moving, and I thought: that's where the people are.

"Run," I said.