Bathroom Lock

My mother has a face she makes when she has decided something, and I have seen it perhaps six times in my life.

It is a very still face. The softness goes out of it. Her mouth flattens, and her eyes go dark and level and slightly narrowed, the way they did when she told the landlord that the broken window latch was his responsibility, not ours, and that she would be happy to discuss it in writing. It is the face of a woman who was a good teacher not because she was soft but because underneath the softness she was made of something hard.

She made that face now, kneeling in the smoke with the first screw hanging out of the wall.

"June," she said. "Look at me."

I looked.

"I want you to listen to every word, because I'm only going to say it once." Her voice was low and even. It was the voice she used when she read the safety instructions on an airplane, in the days when we still flew, to calm a nervous child in the next seat. She reached into her cardigan and drew out the fat green folder, the one with our papers in it, and the tea tin of cash, and my phone, which I had left on the bed and which she must have picked up on the way out. She pushed them into my arms one at a time, the way you load a pack onto a hiker.

"Take these. Don't let go of them. Whatever happens, they're yours."

"Mom—"

"There's a bathroom with a lock. It's the one room that has a lock and no window. You're going to go in there and you're going to lock it and sit in the bathtub, in the bottom, below the level of the smoke. You'll put your wet towel over your face. You'll stay there."

"No."

"Whatever you hear," said my mother, "you stay inside."

"No."

I had known it was coming. I had known it since the moment I said last time and watched her eyes change. But knowing a thing is coming and having it come are different, and it hit me like a hand across the mouth. I dropped the folder. It hit the tile with a flat slap and spilled its cargo of passports and cards across the floor.

"Don't do this," I said. "Please. Please, Mom. It's the same. It's exactly the same. If you put me in the bathroom and go out there, you'll—" I couldn't finish. My throat locked. I clamped both hands around her arm and held on, the way I had at three in the morning, the way I would have held on to a ledge. "Let's go out the window. Let's go out to the neighbors' balcony. Let's go out the door. Anything. Just not this. I can't watch you do this again."

She stared at me.

For a second I thought I had broken through. I saw something shift behind her eyes. It was the tiny crack of a thing recognized, again, and the sharp clean intelligence of a woman who sorts the evidence for a living. I saw her take the word and hold it up to the light.

Then the door shuddered under another blow, and the chain screamed, and the second screw began to tear.

She bent, and she gathered up the passports and the cards, and the tea tin, and she shoved them back into my hands and folded my fingers around them with both of hers.

"I don't understand," she whispered. "I don't understand any of it, baby. But I understand that I'm your mother." She pulled me against her. For a moment I smelled everything: the lavender on her cardigan, the sweat, the sharp stink of smoke in her hair, the warm bread-and-paper smell that has been the smell of safety to me since before I could talk. "I'm going to keep them out here as long as I can. And you are going to stay alive. That's the only thing I care about. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Say it."

"I'll stay alive."

She kissed my forehead, hard, a dry, fierce, scorching kiss, the kind you give a child you're sending into a war. Then she pushed me toward the bathroom, and I went, because there was nothing in me left to do anything else.

…

The bathroom at 1704 is the size of a closet. It has a white tub with a rust stain beneath the faucet, a sink with a crack in the bowl, a toilet with a wobbly seat, and a lock on the door that is a thin brass slide-bolt, the sort you'd put on a garden gate. I had stood in front of that lock every night of my life, brushing my teeth, never once thinking about it. Now I put my fingers on it and slid it across, and the metal went home with a click so soft, so inadequate, that I almost laughed.

I got into the tub.

It was cold and slick against the backs of my knees. I pulled my knees up to my chest. I laid the wet towel across my nose and mouth, and the folder and the tin in my lap, and I sat in the bottom of the tub with my sneakers drumming silently against the enamel and listened.

I'd done this before. I knew every note.

My mother's footsteps, going away from me: five, six, seven. The sound of her stopping in the entry, bracing. The chain. That drawn-out metallic groan, a chain pulled to its limit, the screws coming out of the wall one at a time like teeth. And then, with a crash that rattled the whole bathroom and sent a cascade of plaster dust down from the vent, the door.

It went in all at once. I heard it hit the wall. I heard the chair spin across the floor, and the grunt of a heavy man pitched forward by his own momentum, and the soft, almost gentle sound of boots on tile. Three sets of them. Maybe four. A flashlight clicked on. I couldn't see it, but I felt it, a change in the quality of the dark, a pale line of light that crept in under the bathroom door and slid along the grout like a slow white snake.

"Ms. Ostrander," said the voice. "There you are."

My mother didn't answer. I pictured her standing in the middle of the entryway with her hands at her sides, her face doing the thing it did, the flat dark level thing. I pictured her small in front of them, in her cardigan and her mismatched shoes. I pressed the towel hard against my mouth.

"We don't want to hurt you." The voice was patient. It had settled into a comfortable rhythm, the way a doctor's does when he has delivered a diagnosis many times. "I want you to understand that. Nobody here wants to hurt you, or anybody else. But you've been poking around where you shouldn't. A long time ago, and then again, I think, recently. You know who I mean."

"I don't," said my mother. Her voice was steady. It was shaking at the bottom, but it was steady on top, and I loved her so much in that second that my eyes burned. "I have no idea who you are or what you want. Get out of my home."

A laugh. Soft. Wet.

"Search it," said the voice.

They moved through the apartment like a slow machine. I heard it room by room, like a blind person reading a face. The closet doors in the bedroom, folding back one at a time. The mattress thrown off its frame and landing with a flat whump. The dresser drawers pulled and upended, the rattle of coat hangers, the muffled tumble of a hundred small objects I knew by name: my mother's earrings, her jewelry box, the shoebox of birthday cards, my stuffed rabbit. A man was coughing, in long, ripping spasms, and between the spasms I heard the sound of something being torn, a seam, a lining. "Nothing," said a deeper voice, bored. "No box. No keys."

"Where is it?" said the first man.

"Where is what?"

Smack.

It was a flat, small, appalling sound, a hand on a face, and it landed in my chest like a stone. I flinched so hard that my head cracked against the tile. I heard my mother draw in a breath through her teeth, a sharp hiss of pain, and I heard her say, in a low furious voice, "Don't you touch me."

"The box, Ms. Ostrander. Your mother's box. And the key. And whatever else she left you."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't lie to me, honey. It doesn't suit you."

Smack. Again.

I opened my mouth. I will not pretend that I didn't. The scream was in me already, shaped like my mother's name, and it climbed my throat like a hot coal. But I'd read her face in the hall, and heard her say you stay inside, and the part of me that had survived a whole first life by learning what each choice cost put my teeth in the towel and bit down until I tasted cotton and blood.

I took out my notebook.

I don't know why. It was in my coat pocket, the little spiral one with the sticker on the cover, and my hand found it by itself. I pulled it out and flipped to the last page in the dark, and I took the stub of pencil from the spiral and set the point against the paper. The tub was cold under me. My fingers were shaking so hard I could barely make a mark. But I wrote. I wrote in capitals so that I could read it by feel, pressing hard, the way I'd press a note into a window:

3:07 — DON'T TURN ON THE LIGHT. DON'T KNOCK ON ANYONE'S DOOR.

I don't know who it was for. Myself, maybe, if there were any such thing as a third time. My mother, in some other world where she could still read my handwriting. A stranger. Anyone who picked it up. It was the only way I knew to say I tried.

Outside, someone was scraping a chair across the tile.

"Ms. Ostrander," said the voice, almost kindly, "I'm going to ask you where the girl is."

I stopped writing.

"What girl?" said my mother.

"Don't insult us."

"I live alone."

"There are two toothbrushes in the bathroom. A child's coat on the hook by the door. A stuffed rabbit in the bed, and a pair of sneakers missing from the rack." There was a pause, filled with that slow, sweet, rotten-orange breath. "Where is she?"

"She's at her father's," said my mother. It was so smooth, so fluent, that for a moment I believed it myself. "In Portland. She's been there for a week."

"Funny. The neighbors didn't mention it."

"The neighbors—"

"The neighbors are sleeping," said the voice, with a gentle regret. And I heard what was under it, the thing that pulled my skin tight across my bones. It wasn't a threat. It was a statement of fact. The way you say the milk is in the refrigerator.

I pressed my forehead to my knees.

"Don't come out, June!" my mother screamed.

It was so loud that the walls rang. It was a scream of pure terror and pure command, the voice of a woman throwing herself over a cliff to be the last thing a child heard. It was meant to be a wall. It was meant to be a bolt on a door. And I knew with the certainty of every cell in my body that she had screamed it because she had just realized, with horror, that she had been too slow, and that I was in the bathroom, and that they were looking at the lock.

There was a thud. A grunt. The sound of a body hitting the floor.

"The kid's here too," somebody said.

My phone buzzed against my thigh.

I nearly screamed. It was a tiny thing, a silent vibration, a shiver through the denim of my pocket, so out of place that for a second I couldn't make sense of it. I clawed it out of the folder. The screen lit up in my hands, a rectangle of cold blue in the black: 3:07. And below it, in the little label field: Word of the night. I had set it to repeat every five minutes after the first one, so that I could never sleep through it again, and now it had found me crouched in a bathtub with a pencil in my fist, and it was telling me, in white digits, the time at which this had all begun.

I stared at it.

I couldn't remember the word I had meant to learn.

The footsteps stopped outside the bathroom door. I heard boots, two pairs, heavy and unhurried, and the sweet, nauseating smell rolled under the door in a wave, and the beam of the flashlight shone across the bottom of the frame, and I felt the whole weight of the wood press toward me in the dark. I held the phone against my chest. I held my breath.

The brass slide-bolt trembled in its housing, and then the door of the bathroom was kicked.