The Flashlight

June went through the gap first.

She didn't ask. She slid out through the slit of open door in a single fluid motion, the way a cat goes through a half-open window, and then she was on the other side, standing in the hallway with her back flat against the wall and her sneakers still untied. I saw her silhouette for a moment against the lesser darkness of the corridor, one shoulder blade, one raised elbow. Then she turned her head and looked at me, and the whites of her eyes found mine.

Come.

She didn't say it. She just held up her hand, palm out, flat, the way a crossing guard does: wait. And then she curled the fingers inward and beckoned me with two of them. Slowly.

I stepped to the threshold.

I stood there, with one slipper on the carpet of the hallway and one on the doorsill of my own home, and for the first time in my life I understood what people mean when they say that a moment divides in two. Behind me was the apartment I'd rented with my first real freelance contract, with my mother's quilt on the bed and my daughter's drawings on the refrigerator. In front of me was the unlit corridor, its smell of old carpet and rubber and cold. I was standing exactly in the seam.

I took out my phone.

I hadn't meant to. My hand did it without consulting me, drawing the little rectangle out of my cardigan pocket and holding it up against my chest in the dark. The screen was dim to the point of invisibility. I thumbed the lock, and I looked down at the grid of icons, and my thumb settled on the one in the lower right-hand corner, the one shaped like a small white flashlight.

It was the oldest instinct I had.

Light is what you do. It's what every human being on Earth does when the power goes out, the first thing and the last. You find a candle, a match, a flashlight, a phone. You make a small circle of safety in the dark, and then you step outside it and tell your neighbors. That's what a neighbor is. My mother had taught me that when I was nine, during the great blackout of '03, when the whole eastern seaboard went dark and she sent me down the stairwell of our building with a hurricane lamp and a note pinned to my coat: Mrs. Delgado in 2C is diabetic and alone. Knock twice. Ask if she needs anything. I did it. Mrs. Delgado had cried and hugged me. I remember the smell of her cardigan, mothballs and talcum, and the feeling in my chest, lit and warm.

I thought about Mr. Petrakis.

He lived in 1705, twelve feet from where I stood, behind a single door and a thin wall. He was seventy-eight years old, with a heart that had been rebuilt in 2019, a leather pill organizer on his kitchen table, and a small, brave, ironic way of saying I'm fine, dear, don't fuss, that I had learned to listen under. If the power was out, if the building was dark, if the heat had stopped, his night would be a very particular kind of hard. A man with a bad heart does not do well in the cold. He might not wake up at all.

I thought about the Hernandez twins in 1706.

They were four years old. Isabel and Mateo. They had learned to count on our stairs and were extremely proud of it. They could say one, two, three, four and then jump the last stair with both feet. Their mother, Lucia, worked nights at the airport and left them with her husband, who slept like the dead. If the whole building was dark, if there was something in the hall, if their door was unlocked, if—

A good person would turn on the light.

That is a sentence I would turn over for months. I turned it over right there on the threshold, the phone cold in my fingers, and it seemed to me then to be the plainest moral arithmetic in the world. A single beam of white light, no brighter than a candle, to wake a sleeping hallway. Three knocks on a door. Are you all right? The power's out. Do you need anything? What kind of woman would hesitate? What kind of mother, who had been taught from the age of nine that darkness is when you knock, would stand in the doorway of her own apartment and let a seventy-eight-year-old man and two small children sleep?

I raised the phone an inch.

And I felt a tug on my sleeve.

June had come back. She had crossed the three feet of hallway between us, in perfect silence, and had her hand on my cardigan. Her face was lifted toward mine, and in the pale ghost of light from my dimmed screen I saw it clearly for the first time since she'd woken me.

It was the face of someone watching a car go off a cliff.

"If you wake them," she breathed, "they'll hear."

"Who will?"

"They'll hear the door open. They'll hear the knock. Mom, in this building, with no sound, with nobody awake, a knock is like a—" Her voice failed. She tried again. "It's like a flare. They'll know which door opened. They'll know where to go."

"June, there is a seventy-eight-year-old man in 1705 with a bad heart. There are two four-year-olds in 1706. People are sleeping in the dark, June."

"I know," she said.

The word came out of her small and cracked, and what was in it was not argument. It was grief. I had heard that tone from a woman at a hospital once, at the end of a long night, when she said I know to a doctor who had just told her what she already knew. June's lips trembled. Her chin trembled. I watched a tear break over her lashes and run down the side of her nose, and she didn't wipe it.

"I know, Mom," she said, and her voice shattered. "I know."

For a long moment neither of us moved. A faint draft stirred the hem of my pajamas. Somewhere, very far off, perhaps in the stairwell, perhaps in the walls, perhaps only in my head, I heard a sound that might have been a door closing slowly on a hydraulic arm, or the shuddering exhale of an old building, or a man clearing his throat.

I looked at my daughter's wet face.

I looked at the phone in my hand.

I thought about what I knew, and what I didn't. I knew that my child had been right about the power, the lock, the folder, the tin of cash, the hiss of the fire door. I knew that she had begged me, on her knees in the dark, not to go to the breaker box. I knew that she had counted every step. I knew that she was thirteen and that she was crying and that she was asking me to leave a seventy-eight-year-old man and two sleeping children in a dark corridor with whatever was waiting there. I knew that it was the worst request that anyone had ever made of me, and that she was making it with every cell of her body, and that she was not a girl who asked for things.

I didn't know why.

Why is the question I have always had to ask. I am constitutionally unable to begin a thing without it. And on that threshold, with the thing I most needed to know sitting like a stone in my chest, I understood for the first time that my daughter had no way to answer it that I would believe. If she said, I've seen this before, I would say, that isn't possible. If she said, I died here, I would think she was ill.

She hadn't said either one. She had simply put her small hand on my sleeve and asked me to take a thing on faith.

My mother used to say that love was a promise you kept even when you couldn't see the other side of it.

"Tell me one thing," I whispered. I stepped over the sill, finally, into the hallway, and drew the door behind me until it was a hand's width from closing. The corridor swallowed us. "One thing that will help me do this. Are they in there? Mr. Petrakis. The twins. Are they—"

"I don't know."

"You don't know if they're alive?"

"I don't know if they're awake." June's fingers found mine again, and I felt how cold they'd become. "I hope they're asleep. Mom, I hope so. I hope they sleep through all of it. That's the best thing that can happen to them tonight, that nobody wakes up." She wiped her face with the heel of her free hand, hard, almost angry. "I did the math. I tried to work out how many people I could get out. I tried every way I could think of. It was never enough."

I stared at her.

I did the math. She said it the way a student says it who has failed an exam more than once, and has gone back through her work line by line, looking for the place where the error is, and keeps arriving at the same bleak total. I opened my mouth to ask what she meant, and nothing came. There is a kind of sentence that tells you a great deal and refuses to tell you anything. That was one.

I thought of the folder in my pocket and the tin of cash. I thought of the fuzzy slipper on one foot and the thin one on the other, and how absurd I must look, a thirty-eight-year-old woman in a cardigan and mismatched shoes, standing in a dark corridor and debating the ethics of a flashlight. I thought of Mr. Petrakis, and his butterscotch candies, and his way of saying dear.

"If I do this," I said slowly, "and I'm wrong. If I walk away from them and I'm wrong."

"Then I'll carry it." Her voice was calm all at once, terribly calm, and that was the worst part. "I'm used to carrying it. You don't have to."

"That is not what a thirteen-year-old—"

"Mom." She looked up at me. "You asked what would help you decide. That's it. That's the only thing I have."

The phone was still in my hand. I could feel the faint warmth of the screen against my palm, the small plastic edge of the case digging into the web of my thumb. The flashlight icon sat under it like a drop of water on the verge of falling.

I have been asked since then, by detectives and by counselors and once, memorably, by a stranger at a gas station who recognized my face, what I would have done if I'd had perfect information. The answer is that I don't know, and that perfect information is exactly what no one has at 3:09 in the morning in the dark. All I had was a daughter who had never lied to me about anything that mattered, and the oldest rule in my body, and the knowledge that I would have to choose between them in the time it takes to draw a breath.

June tapped two fingers lightly against the inside of her own wrist, where a watch would be. She didn't have a watch. She was telling me the time. It was ten past three. In the faint light from the screen I saw that her lips were moving again, and this time I could read them: please, please, please.

Behind us, in the open doorway of 1704, the apartment I had loved stood with its bedroom door ajar, its quilt tumbled on the bed, its ceramic lamp unlit on the nightstand, and I had the sudden unbearable thought that I might never see it again.

…

WHAT DO YOU DO?

You are standing in the doorway of apartment 1704, at 3:09 in the morning, with a dead building at your back and an unlit corridor ahead. Your thumb is on the flashlight icon. Your thirteen-year-old daughter, whom you have never known to beg, is begging you with her eyes. Down the hall are a man with a failing heart and two children who cannot protect themselves.