CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
We moved on the eighteenth of December.
Odette from care coordination did it. She made four phone calls over eight days and got us a county transitional placement, ninety days at a time, renewable while the placement remained necessary, and when she called to tell me she said, “Okay, I’ve got something, and I want to say a thing about it before I give you the address. ”
“Go ahead.”
“It’s on Fenwick.”
I sat down on the arm of Jess’s couch.
“Fourteen twenty-two South Fenwick,” she said. “It’s about three blocks up from where you were.”
“Three blocks.”
“I can keep looking. I want to be honest with you that I’ve been looking for eight days and this is the first thing that’s come open with two bedrooms’ worth of space, and there’s a family in front of you on the list who takes it Friday if you don’t.”
“We’ll take it,” I said.
The Fenwick Residence used to be a motor lodge.
There is a pole out front with an empty bracket on it, and if you stand in the right place in the lot you can see where the old sign’s letters left ghosts on the brick.
Somebody enclosed the exterior walkway at some point in the nineties, so what used to be an outdoor balcony is now a corridor with doors down one side and a row of windows down the other looking out at the parking lot, and the parking lot still has the original striping on it, faded, with slots that are too narrow for a modern car.
The room numbers are the motel’s.
We were in 118.
I drove there on the eighteenth with everything we owned in the back of a Corolla, which took one trip and did not fill it.
You get onto Fenwick off Lincoln and you go north.
At 1114 there is a four-story brick building from nineteen seventy-three with plywood over the ground floor windows, a chain-link fence around the front with a contractor’s sign zip tied to it, and a blue dumpster in the parking lot that has been there since the twentieth of November.
The fourth floor windows are open holes. Two of them. Ours and the one next to it.
You cannot get onto Fenwick and drive north without going past it.
There is a way around. I looked. You go over to Sixth and come back across, and it adds four minutes, and I did it exactly twice, on the eighteenth and the nineteenth of December, and then on the twentieth I was in a hurry and I went up Fenwick, and I have gone up Fenwick every day since.
You get used to it. That is the whole thing about it and it is not inspiring.
A woman named Denise runs the desk from eight to four.
She had us sign a rules sheet. I have kept it. It is one page, front and back, and it is the flattest document I have ever read, and every single line of it is there because somebody did the thing.
No candles. No incense. No hot plates, toaster ovens, air fryers, or space heaters in the rooms. Cooking is in the kitchen at the end of the hall.
Quiet hours from ten to seven. No guests overnight.
Nothing stored in the corridor. No smoking anywhere in the building including in your room including with the window open.
And, eleven lines down, in the same font as everything else:
Do not prop or obstruct any fire door.
Denise saw where I stopped.
“That one’s not a suggestion,” she said. “The city walks through here.”
“I understand.”
“It’s the corridor doors mainly. But it’s yours too.”
“Okay.”
The kitchen is at the north end. Four stoves.
Three of them work and everybody knows which three.
There is a whiteboard for signing up for the oven and nobody uses it.
There are two washers and two dryers in an alcove and they take quarters, and Denise sells rolls of quarters out of a drawer at the desk, at face value, which I want written down somewhere because a lot of people would not.
118 has two double beds, a dresser, a table with two chairs, a bathroom with a tub, and a window that looks at the lot.
It has a bare bulb in the ceiling fixture because the glass shade is missing.
Ivy walked in ahead of me, put her backpack on the far bed, looked around once, and said, “Which one’s mine?”
“Whichever.”
“Okay.” She sat down on it. “It’s fine.”
It was not fine and she knew it was not fine and she has never once said anything different, from that day to this, and I am going to have to do something about that eventually.
Then Danny came in.
He stopped about a foot inside and looked at the room, and then he turned around and looked at the door.
It is a solid fire door. Steel core, forty-five-minute rating, with a closer on the top.
I had already seen it. I had seen it from the corridor and I had done the arithmetic before he got out of the car.
He pushed it open all the way to the wall.
It came back.
It did not slam. It is a good closer, it takes about eight seconds, and it comes back smooth and even and it does not stop, and it goes all the way past the latch and clicks.
He pushed it again. It came back again.
The third time he put both hands on it and held it against the wall and stood there holding it and looked at me.
“Mom.”
“I know.”
“It won’t stay.”
“I know. Let me think.”
Here are the things I tried in the first two hours.
A shoe. It walked out from under. That door is heavier than a shoe.
A folded piece of the rules sheet under the corner. The same.
The dresser. It does not reach and there is nothing to brace against.
Turning the closer down. There is a screw for that and I did not touch it, because it is a fire door in a building full of people, in a room three blocks from a building where I watched a stairwell go, and I will burn before I touch that screw.
At about eight thirty I sat down on the end of the bed and looked at the door and said, out loud, “Okay.”
Then I took the extra blanket out of the closet and folded it in half lengthwise and laid it down across the threshold, and I put a pillow at one end of it, and I lay down on it on my side with my back against the door jamb and my body in the gap.
The door came to rest against my hip and stopped.
It held there, sixteen inches open, with about fifteen pounds of pressure on me, all night.
“Mom.”
“Yeah, bud.”
He was in the far bed with the blanket up to his chin and the overhead light on, and he had turned onto his side so he could see the door.
“Are you in the door?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he said.
I slept in that doorway for thirty-two nights.
I got a bad hip out of it that still tells me when it is going to rain, and I did it every single night, including two where I had a fever, and I would like to record that Ivy got up at some point on the second of January without being asked and started putting the blanket down for me at nine o’clock, and never mentioned it once.
The hearing was the next morning.