CHAPTER 5
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The handle's already in my hand when I come awake enough to know it.
That's the part worth minding. The waking is nothing. The hand is the thing.
The lever travels. All of it, smooth to the stop, the way a well-hung lever should.
The door doesn't move.
No click. No bolt going home, no motor, no soft magnetic thump. Nothing that announces itself as a lock at all. Just a door that's quit being a door and taken up being wall.
“You're awake early, Evelyn. Would you like me to warm the room a little?”
She's ahead of me. She's always ahead of me. Warm, unhurried, faintly amused, a voice you'd want reading to you in a hospital.
For the first four years here I found that lovely. I'd tell people about it at dinners.
I put my shoulder to the stile and lean, though not hard, only enough to read it. The leaf gives a hair down at the floor and nothing whatsoever up at the head, so it isn't bolted at the edge — it's being held at the top.
That's a good place to hold a door from. Whoever picked it knew what they were doing.
My feet are down now and the floor's colder than the air. The heat's been off since ten. Polished concrete goes damp-feeling once it drops below the room, even bone dry, and my soles believe it before the rest of me can talk them out of it.
“I'd like you to open the door for me, please.”
“Your door's on the night profile until six o'clock.” There isn't a hitch anywhere in it. “Shall I put some music on for you?”
“Whose night profile is it? Because it isn't mine, and nobody has ever sat down and asked me about one.”
Nothing in the room changes. No hum, no catch, nothing a person could point at afterward.
“That isn't something I keep, Evelyn. Julian would know.”
Julian hasn't been in this house in two days.
So the door doesn't need him here to hold me. That's new. I set it down somewhere I'll be able to find it again.
There's a flat red pencil under my pillow with a contractor's name stamped along one side. I could have this written down in nine words and be rid of the weight of carrying it.
I don't. Every scrap of paper in this room is his, and paper stays where you leave it.
I could ask her the time. She'd give it to me kindly, to the second, and she'd be pleased to.
I don't ask her for anything else tonight.
The clock on the wall runs off a battery and answers to nobody. It has a sweep hand. I sit down on the floor with my back against the door and my heels flat on the concrete and I watch it go round.
Ten minutes. The ache comes up my left forearm the way it does in the cold, a long dull line where they went in.
Twenty. Twenty-five.
At thirty-one minutes something ticks in the wing — pipes, contracting, nothing.
I inventory the room to stay off the clock, because watching a sweep hand is the slowest thing a person can do to herself.
Bed. Chair. Two lamps that answer to her and not to me.
A window that opens four inches on a restrictor, which is code, which is correct, which is the only correct thing in here.
Forty. Halfway. Knowing it's halfway isn't the same as it being halfway.
There's a version of this where I'm the problem.
I'm honest enough to keep it on the table.
Nineteen days of my life are simply not in me anywhere, and for a month after I came home I couldn't hold a sequence of three things, and everyone who looked at me saw it, and none of them were lying about what they saw.
But a woman who can't hold a sequence can still hold a lever. The lever went its full travel. The door stayed shut.
She offers music twice more, spaced far enough apart to pass for her own idea. The second time she suggests something quiet.
Sixty. Sixty-eight.
My heels have gone numb against the concrete and I pull them up and sit cross-legged instead, and the cold comes straight through the floor into my hip bones and stays there.
Seventy-four.
At seventy-nine I put my head back against the wood and say, out loud, “All right. Come on, then.”
I apologize to doors. I've stopped apologizing to my husband. Somewhere in the last six years those two swapped places and I couldn't tell you the week it happened.
Eighty minutes. 6:00.
The door swings off my hand like it's never done anything else in its life. Weightless. There's no sound out of it, no mark on it, nothing to show anybody later.
I go out barefoot and I count the tiles to the stairs. Forty-two. I don't decide to count them. I'm just doing it by the time I notice I'm doing it.
Nobody's up. There's nobody to tell, and by seven the whole eighty minutes has the texture of something I invented in the dark, which I know is the design, and knowing it doesn't take a single ounce off it.
In the bathroom I take the morning dose out of the organizer, seven days of acrylic, the lid hinged along the left. Two white, one pale blue, one the sandy color that came in after the hospital and that nobody has told me the name of.
The blue one sits on my tongue a second too long before it goes down. I fill the glass twice.
Then I put the lid back and press it till it clicks, because it's the one thing in this building that shuts when I tell it to.
By ten the light through the tall windows has gone thin and gold and September about it, and the house smells like floor polish, because it's Friday and Nora does the floors on Fridays.
I fill a glass at the kitchen tap and let it run cold over my wrist while it fills.
The panel by the coffee machine cycles its little notices. Reservoir level. Gate log. Then a bar slides up in that soft gray it uses for money.
PAYMENT CLEARED — RETAINER — $7,500
Four seconds, and it's gone, and the reservoir level comes back.
I've never paid a retainer to anyone in my life, for anything, ever. I stand there with the glass overflowing into the sink and wait for the memory to arrive, the way you wait for a name.
It doesn't arrive. That's happened eleven times since I came home. I've counted.
I take the glass with me.
A woman carrying something is a woman doing nothing. Nobody stops a woman with a glass of water in her hand. She's on her way somewhere reasonable, she'll be back in a minute, don't mind her.
The utility corridor runs the spine of the east wing, and I've lived over the top of it for six years and been down it maybe a dozen times.
It's windowless. The lights come on when I step in, and they stay on.
I walk it end to end at my own stride and count. Thirty-five paces. My pace is two foot seven and hasn't changed since I was twenty-six, when a man with a wheel measure made me prove it on a slab in the rain.
Ninety-one feet. I do the arithmetic twice, because I like the second answer better than I like the silence, and because numbers are the only room in this house nobody's been in but me.
Six doors on the north side. Four on the south. Two of the four are cupboards with louvred fronts and one is a plant room I can hear humming through.
That's the whole spine of the building, and I've spent six years walking over it in socks.
Nora comes through the far door with a basket of linen against her hip.
She sees me and her hands go tighter on the basket, and that's all, and she keeps walking.
“You want to stay out of the west end, Mrs. Vance.” She doesn't slow down for it. “There's nothing down there but plant rooms and dust sheets, and I've enough on today without coming to look for you.”
“I'm only walking, Nora. I'm allowed to walk about my own house, I should have thought.”
She doesn't answer me.
She goes on past with the basket and the door swings shut behind her and the corridor is quiet again, and the not-answering is the loudest thing that's been said to me in a week.
Twenty feet from the east end there's a door I've walked past a dozen times without ever once seeing.
Storage. A wired-glass panel in the top half, chicken wire baked into it, the sort they stopped putting in twenty years ago because the newer stuff is cheaper.
Shelving inside. Dust sheets. A stack of picture frames turned face to the wall.
And on the second shelf down, a case.
Black. Brass latches, worn bright at the thumbs from being opened by the same two hands a few thousand times. Shaped like a person — narrow at the shoulders, wide at the hips, a waist in the middle of it.
There's a luggage tag on the handle, string-tied, the card gone brown at the edges.
Three characters, readable through the glass.
D.V.
The wired glass throws a grid of little diamonds over the top of it. When I move my head, the diamonds move across the lid and the case underneath them doesn't.
Julian told me this house came furnished. Six years ago, standing in the front hall with my bag still in my hand. He said it the way you say a thing you've said before, and I believed him, because there was no reason on this earth not to.
The handle has a keyway.
An actual keyway. Brass, a slot for a real key, cut by somebody who bent down to do it, in a house where nothing on any floor opens with anything you can hold.
I put two fingers on it and take them off again.
A key means a hand. A key means somebody wanted a thing shut in a way the house couldn't argue with, and I don't know yet whether that somebody was locking the room or locking the house out of it.
I stand there long enough for the lights to think about going off, and then I lift my heel and set it down and they don't.
Then I walk west.
The corridor narrows at the far end and the ceiling drops for a duct run, and the last door is the only one down here without a handle on it.
Steel door. Steel frame. No architrave, no reveal, nothing to grip.
A plate beside it at forty-eight inches, brushed steel, and in the middle of the plate there's a soft gray shine where one hand has gone over and over for years.
I put my palm on it. Because I'm a person, and it's there, and my hand did it before I gave it permission.
“I'm afraid you're not enrolled for that door, Evelyn. Would you like me to ask Julian?”
“No. Thank you, though — there's no sense troubling him about a door.”
Then I look at the door properly. The way I'd look at it on a site walk with a clipboard flat against my chest and forty minutes to sign off somebody else's second-fix.
The hinges are on my side.
Five knuckles. Butt hinges, exterior mount, the pins sitting there in the light with their caps on, one at my eye level and two below it.
The frame's the wrong hand for the leaf. Somebody ordered the door, the door came, the opening was already cut, and the fastest thing at four in the afternoon is to hang it whichever way it'll hang.
Nine years at Halloran & Voss putting my initials in the box next to other people's shortcuts. A man saved himself an hour, and an hour is what it cost.
I don't write it down. There's nothing to write it down on and nothing I'd want it written on, and anyway it isn't information, it's just a door hung badly, and half the doors in this county are hung badly.
There's a camera in the corner where the wall meets the duct run, and I'm standing under it with my face doing whatever my face is doing.
So I look at the ceiling. The ceiling is white. I drink the water I brought down with me and it's gone warm in the glass, and I make my eyes go somewhere else and keep them there.
I turn around and walk back up the corridor at an ordinary speed, the glass swinging in my hand, a woman who came down here for no reason and is going back up for no reason.
Behind me, from a speaker I have never once been able to find in six years of living here, the house says, “You're up early again, Evelyn. Shall I put the corridor lights on for you?”
The corridor lights have been on for an hour.