A Normal Thing to Do

I turned on the flashlight.

I want to be clear that I did it without anger and without defiance. I did it the way you take a breath. My thumb pressed the little white icon, and a cone of hard blue-white light sprang out of the phone and hit the opposite wall of the hallway, and the whole world jumped into being.

"No—" said June.

It was barely a sound. It came out of her like air out of a punctured tire, and in the sudden brightness I saw her face go slack with horror, her arm half-lifted as if she might knock the phone out of my hand and could not make herself do it. Then she let her arm fall to her side. She closed her eyes. She said nothing more.

I swung the beam down the corridor, and the first thing I felt was foolish.

It was only a hallway. It was the same stained gray-green carpet, scuffed to the weave in the center where thirty years of feet had passed. It was the same row of beige doors with their little brass numerals, 1701 through 1710, the same fire extinguisher in its glass case, the same crooked framed print of a sailboat that someone had hung by the elevator in 1998 and no one had ever taken down. The light slid over each of these things and showed them exactly as they were. Ordinary. Shabby. Familiar. A place where I had said good morning to a thousand people.

There was nobody there.

I stood for a moment with the light in my fist, and did what a normal person does. I tried to call for help.

My thumb found the green phone icon and punched in the three digits, and I held the phone to my ear, and listened to nothing. Then three short, descending tones, the kind that mean a call has failed, and a message that came up on the screen in neat gray letters: Call Failed. I looked at the corner of the display. Where there should have been four bars, there was a single faint sliver that blinked, thought it over, and went out. No Service. Four hundred feet from a hospital, in a building that had stood on this ridge since 1971, I couldn't reach the one number every American child is taught by the age of five.

I walked to the elevator bank and pressed the call button. It had no light and made no sound. I pressed it again, harder, with my whole thumb. Nothing. I put the flat of my hand on the steel doors of the elevator, and they were cold, absolutely still, with none of the faint trembling you feel through the metal when the car is waiting. The elevator wasn't stuck. It wasn't running. It was a coffin standing on end.

"It's the whole building," I said. I was whispering again. "The elevator, the lights, the exit signs. And the phone."

"I know," said June, behind me.

"Honey, that isn't an outage. A power cut doesn't kill the cell tower."

"I know."

She said it a third time, with a small shiver in it. I turned and shone the light on her. She had her hand up, shielding her eyes, and her shoulders were hunched. She looked about nine years old.

I had braced for a figure at the end of the hall. I had braced for the gleam of a face or the shape of a shoulder. I'd been so certain, in the black bedroom, with my daughter's nails in my wrist, that the hallway would give me something to scream about. And instead I saw a vacant, dingy, empty corridor, with a dead water stain on the ceiling tile and a child's lost mitten on the carpet outside 1708.

"See?" I said. My voice came out too loud and I lowered it. "See, honey? There's no one."

June didn't answer. She stood with her back against the wall and her eyes shut and her lips pressed tightly together, as if she were holding something in her mouth that she was afraid to drop.

I should say that I was not thoughtless. I want to put that on the record, because I have gone back and read my own account of that night with a copyeditor's eye, and it can sound as if I simply ignored my daughter. I didn't. I took her fear seriously. I just also took seriously a number of other things, which were: a seventy-eight-year-old man, two four-year-olds, forty years of lived experience, and the voice of my mother in my head. When the lights go out, you knock.

I walked to 1705.

It was twelve feet. I crossed it in six steps, in two mismatched slippers, with the light held low and angled toward the floor so that it wouldn't shine under anyone's door. I was already compromising. I was already half-listening to June. I stopped in front of the door where the brass numerals gleamed in my beam. The doormat said, in faded cursive, Welcome Friends. Someone had hung a little paper pumpkin from the knob in October, with a smile drawn on it in marker. I recognized the handwriting. It was Isabel's. She had colored it for Mr. Petrakis, and he had pinned it to his door with great ceremony and hadn't taken it down.

I knocked three times.

Not loudly. A knock, a pause, a knock, a pause, a knock, the way you knock on the door of someone you don't want to frighten. I'd done it for Mrs. Delgado twenty-nine years ago and it had worked then.

"Mr. Petrakis?" I said, in the low steady voice that had calmed a hundred panicked sixteen-year-olds in the hour before the SAT. "It's Maren from next door. The power's out. Are you okay in there?"

Silence.

I waited. I tilted my head and listened for the creak of a bedspring, the shuffle of slippers, the cough. Nothing came. Not even the squeaky wheeze of the old man's oxygen concentrator, which I knew he kept beside his bed at night, and which should have been running on its battery backup and clicking over in the dead air like a metronome.

"Mr. Petrakis?" I knocked again. "Sorry to wake you. I just want to make sure you've got a blanket. It's very cold."

Nothing.

My stomach turned over once, slowly. It wasn't the silence on its own. It was the silence arriving at the end of a sequence of silences, a clean, even, unbroken line of them, each one adding to the last. An old man with a bad heart in a cold dark apartment does not sleep through a woman knocking at his door. He wakes up. He calls out, even if it's only who is it? He is afraid, and the fear makes him light a sleeper.

I tried to talk myself out of it. He's a deep sleeper, I thought. He takes pills. I was aware, as I thought it, of how thin the explanation was. It was the same flimsy argument I'd made to myself the night Marcus told me about his father's car, he's a normal kid, it's nothing, and I felt the same cold weight settle behind my ribs, a feeling I had hoped never to feel again.

I made myself think it all the way through. Mr. Petrakis wasn't answering. Neither was anyone else. The whole floor was dead quiet, no voices, no steps, no complaints about the heat. And I had the choice of reading that as a coincidence, or a conspiracy of sleep, or the thing that June had been saying with every muscle of her small tense body since 3:07.

Cover it up, said a small clean voice in my head. Cover the light. Get in the apartment. Do what she asks.

But the old man.

"One more," I said to myself. "One more door."

I moved to 1706, to the Hernandez apartment, and my beam fell on a sheet of construction paper taped at child height beside the doorframe. The twins had drawn a sun on it, a yellow one with a face, with radiating lines in crayon that went off the edge of the page. Underneath, in a parent's block capitals: HERNANDEZ FAMILY — WE ♥ OUR NEIGHBORS. I felt something tighten in my throat.

I knocked. Three times, softly. "Lucia? Raúl? It's Maren, from 1704. The power's out. Is everyone okay?"

I leaned in. I put my ear against the painted wood, so near that I could feel the faint cold of the metal.

Nothing.

No small voices. No cartoon-printed pillow thumped to the floor. Not even the breathing of the very young, which I have always been able to hear through walls, a soft rhythmic wheeze, like a kitten. I held my own breath so that I could hear better. A long second passed. Then another.

And I understood something with the sick clarity of a wrong answer finally marked in red.

I had expected, when I turned on the light, to feel like the adult in the room. I had expected to feel the large, clean, sensible rightness of a woman doing the normal thing, the thing that all of society has agreed is correct. And instead I felt like a child who has run into a dark room shouting hello and suddenly realized she was alone.

I stepped back from the Hernandez door.

I turned. The beam of my light swung back across the hallway, over the sailboat print and the extinguisher and the carpet, and June was in the beam. She had opened her eyes. She was staring at me with a look that I will carry to my grave: not accusation, not even fear. It was pity. It was the look of a person who has already watched the worst thing happen and has resigned herself to watching it again.

"I'm sorry," I said. My voice was very small. "I'm sorry, June. I just—"

"I know," she said. "It's a normal thing to do."

She wasn't looking at me. She wasn't looking at the doors, either. She was looking over my shoulder, down the corridor, toward the far end, where a heavy gray metal door stood in the wall beside the elevator bank.

The stairwell door. It was a fire door, the kind that is supposed to be shut at all times, with a push bar and a pane of wire-reinforced glass at head height. I had walked past it ten thousand times and never once seen it open. It was always closed, because fire code requires it. It was closed in my memory as clearly as my own front door.

It was open now. Just a crack. An inch, perhaps two. A thin vertical slot of denser darkness, like a mouth slightly parted, with the cold breath of the stairwell coming through it and moving the hairs on my arms.

My light had not been pointed at it. The beam was on June's chest.

I lifted the phone, and I turned the cone of white light toward the door, slowly, as one lifts a camera to a bird one doesn't want to startle. It swept over the carpet and up the wall and found the gray steel, the push bar, the inch-wide crack, the black beyond it. And June, behind me, stopped breathing. I heard it. I heard her stop, the way you can hear a clock stop in a quiet room.

"Mom," she whispered, as if the word were a stone she was setting down very carefully on a very thin sheet of ice. "Turn it off."

I stood there. I couldn't have said how many seconds passed. I was looking at the crack in the stairwell door, at the pure black gap in the gray, and thinking, quite clearly, that I had been a fool.

And then, in the black, in the slot between the door and the frame, a light came on.

It was small. It was thin and focused and hard, a narrow bright bar no wider than a pencil. It wasn't a phone. It was a penlight, or a tactical flashlight turned to its lowest setting, and it swung out of the dark and across the hallway in a slow, deliberate arc, over the carpet, over the wall, up the length of the corridor, until it landed on my face.

It rested there, exactly as mine rested on the door. For a moment, we were two lights looking at each other across forty feet of silence.

Then it blinked, twice, as if in greeting.