Footsteps on the Stairs

I knew this scene.

That was the worst part, even worse than the light. When my mother's thumb touched the flashlight icon and the hallway lit up around us like a stage, I did not feel surprise. I felt a flat, deep, familiar sinking, like the drop you feel in an elevator when the cable lets go a half second before you expect. There it is, I thought. There we are again.

I tried to stop her. I want that on the record, even if the only record is this one. I said "No," and it came out as a breath, and I put my arm up, and I could not make myself finish the motion. My mother's face in the glow of the screen was so tired and so kind and so entirely, stubbornly good that if I had knocked the phone out of her hand I think something in her would have broken. I had already watched that happen once. I let my arm fall.

So I stood against the wall and watched her walk down the hall in her one fuzzy slipper and her one thin one, knocking on doors.

I counted her knocks. Three at 1705. Three at 1706. I counted the seconds between them, and the seconds of silence after, and the dull reflexive hope in her voice when she said Mr. Petrakis? The beam of her phone jittered across the carpet and the sailboat and the fire extinguisher. Everything it touched looked small and shabby and safe. I thought, as I always think, about how a hallway can look exactly the same before and after.

And when she turned and shone the light at the stairwell door, I was already counting the next thing.

One.

The crack was open an inch. It had been open since before we left the apartment. I had known that from the sound, the faint wheeze of air through the gap that told me the pressure in the stairwell was different from the pressure in the hall. It meant that somebody had propped the door with a wedge, or a rolled towel, or the toe of a boot. It meant they had been standing on the other side of it, listening to my mother's slippers on the carpet.

Two.

The penlight came on.

It was a thin, hard bar of white, swinging out of the black like the beam of a lighthouse. I watched it travel the length of the hallway. I watched it land on my mother's face. I watched it blink twice.

Three.

I grabbed her.

I don't remember deciding to. My hands closed on the front of her cardigan and I hauled, and she was heavier than I'd thought, and for a terrible half-second she resisted, staring at the light like a deer in a road. "Mom," I said, and my voice came out in a hiss, "inside. Now."

I got her through the door. I don't know how. She stumbled over the sill and I shoved her into the apartment and slammed the heavy steel behind us as softly as I could, which is not softly at all. The sound of it echoed through the dead air like a dropped dish. I threw the top bolt. I threw the second. I fumbled for the third, the loud one, and my hand shook so badly that the spring clacked like a bone.

The chain went on last. Its links rattled in the slot, and every rattle was a scream.

"June, what—what was that? Who was—"

"Chair."

"What?"

"The kitchen chair. Get the kitchen chair."

She stared at me. In the dark I could see the white shape of her face, the slack mouth, the wild eyes. She'd gone pale all the way to her lips. My mother is not stupid. She is one of the cleverest people I know. But I had spent the last six minutes dragging her through a series of impossible facts, and now I was ordering her around, and something in her had given way. She was looking at me as if I had changed shape.

"I'll get it," I said. I ran. The kitchen was five steps away. The wooden chair from the little table was in my hands before I could think, its legs scraping on the tile with a long ugly screech that made me clench my teeth. I carried it back, tilted it under the knob, and kicked the back legs into the baseboard until they gripped. It wasn't much. I knew it wasn't. I knew exactly how much it was worth.

We stood there, in the entryway, with our shoulders touching, listening.

…

I've been asked what I remember, and the honest answer is: all of it.

I don't mean that I recall it the way you recall a movie you've watched. I mean that it sits inside me like a second skeleton. It has a shape. The smell of it, the sound, the color of the air. I remember the weight of the smoke on my chest and the grit of the bathroom tile on my cheek. I remember the exact angle of the light under the door. I remember a voice, deep and amused, saying a sentence that I have never once been able to un-hear. I remember my mother saying my name.

I don't remember dying. I think that is the only mercy in it. There's a place in the memory where it goes smooth, like a record that has run off its last groove, and then it starts again at 3:07 with a hand around my wrist that I realize is mine.

I knew what would come next. I knew it like I know the alphabet.

First, the footsteps.

They came out of the stairwell at the end of the hall. We heard them clearly through the door, because the building was so quiet that they were the loudest thing in the world. They were not the footsteps of a resident. They were not hurried or heavy, the way a person walks when he's lost his keys at three in the morning. They were soft. A step. A pause. A step. The slow, patient, testing tread of someone moving through a place he is not sure is empty, and who would be pleased to find out that it isn't.

"Mom," I whispered. "Don't speak."

She nodded. She'd put a hand over her own mouth. I could feel her breath against my shoulder, a hot, fast, shallow rhythm, the breath of a swimmer who has been held under.

The footsteps stopped outside 1705.

I held my breath. I knew that he was standing in front of the mat that said Welcome Friends, with the paper pumpkin that Isabel Hernandez had colored for Mr. Petrakis hanging from the knob. I knew that he was reading the number. The step came again. Another pause. And then, with a small oily squeak that I'd have known in my sleep, a hinge, a latch, the sound of a door that was never locked being opened by a person who had a key to it.

My mother made a sound.

It was tiny. It was a whimper, no louder than the creak of a floorboard. I turned and clapped my hand over her mouth. Her eyes flew wide. I shook my head, hard, once. She sagged against me.

They were never going to answer, I thought. Not Mr. Petrakis. Not the twins. I didn't know, then, what had been done to them. I would learn it later, from a detective with kind tired eyes, in a room with an ugly clock. I only knew that the door of 1705 was opening, and that the man opening it was not afraid of waking anybody.

The footsteps went in. They stayed in, for the length of a long breath. Then they came out, and moved on, and I heard the door at 1706 give way to the same quiet hand.

And then I smelled it.

It came under our door, a thin ribbon of air that crawled along the floor and curled round my ankles. It was not smoke. Not yet. It was sweet. It was a thick, syrupy, fermenting sweetness, like orange candy that had been left in a hot car all summer, until it softened and went to rot. I had smelled it before. I would never smell it again without my stomach turning. It was the smell of a man who ate hard candy to cover the sickness in his chest.

From the hall came a cough.

It was a deep, wet, rattling cough, the cough of a man whose lungs were full of gravel. It came in a series, six or seven spasms, and then a long hawking gasp, and then a dry laugh that seemed to be at his own expense. My mother's whole body went rigid against mine. I had her wrist. I could feel her pulse, a hard stuttering thing, like a trapped bird.

The coughing stopped. The footsteps came toward our door.

One. Two. Three.

They stopped.

Even through the steel, I could feel him standing there. I could feel the heat of him, the sweet orange stench pressing through the crack at the bottom of the door, the weight of a large body leaning in to listen. I stared at the chain. I stared at the little brass links, the three bolts, the chair wedged under the handle, and I thought how ridiculous it all was, how childish, a nest of sticks against a storm.

A knuckle struck the door.

Three taps. Unhurried. Polite.

"Ms. Ostrander?"

The voice was male, deep, friendly, a little bored. It was the voice of a man reading a name off a clipboard. I had heard it before. It went through me like a splinter.

"Ms. Ostrander, it's building management. Sorry to wake you. We've got a problem with the wiring on the seventeenth floor, and we're doing a quick check of every unit. It'll only take a minute."

My mother drew in a breath.

I shook my head at her, once, with everything I had. Don't. Don't answer. Don't say anything. But I could see it in her face, the flicker, the tiny automatic shift of a woman whose body had been trained for twenty years to respond when someone used her name. The part of her that was a teacher, a daughter, a good neighbor, a person who said yes, of course, one moment, could not stop itself.

I put my hand over her mouth again, too late.

"Management," she said, behind my fingers, in a whisper so low I might have imagined it, "doesn't knock door to door at three in the morning."

I closed my eyes.

I had heard it before. The sentence, the pitch of her voice, the exact catch on the word three. It was the same. Every syllable, every breath, the way her voice thinned and cracked on morning. I stood in the dark with my palm pressed against my mother's lips, and I listened to her say the thing she had already said, in the order she had already said it, as if I were hearing a tape rewound and played again for the first time in a different room.

It doesn't matter, I thought, sick and cold to the bottom of my stomach. It doesn't matter what I do. We end up here every time.

Outside, the man laughed.

It wasn't a bad laugh. That was the horror of it. It was warm, and surprised, and easy. It was the laugh of a man who has been playing a game with a clumsy partner and has just heard the thing he was waiting for. It rang in the corridor, and the hall carried it, and I heard it go all the way down to the elevators and come back.

"Ms. Ostrander," he said. There was no pretending in it anymore. There was only a thin, kind, terrible patience. "I like you. I really do. I'm going to ask you one more time to come out, and I'd like you to take a good, long think about it. Because if you won't come out—" He paused. I heard the flick of a lighter. A tiny steel click, and then the rasp of a flint wheel, and a faint, fierce hiss like a snake. "If you won't come out, the smoke will bring you out."