5. Lena
LENA
“Okay, so it’s ugly,” Marisol says, unlocking the door with a key she absolutely should not have. “But look past the ugly.”
The place used to be a mattress store. You can still read the ghost of the lettering on the window where the vinyl came off, backward from in here, and there’s a sun-bleached rectangle on the floor where the display bed sat for however many years.
Fluorescent tubes, one of them flickering like it’s trying to send a message. Carpet the color of a bad decision.
But the window is enormous, and it faces east, and the light coming through it right now is gray and wet and still better than anything in Marisol’s apartment.
My eye goes up to the dropped ceiling anyway, because it can’t help itself, and I’d bet the deposit there’s something real above it.
Somebody deferred this building for a decade and it still hasn’t fallen down.
“Where’s the money coming from?” I say.
“There isn’t any money yet. It’s twelve hundred a month on a handshake because the guy’s been trying to rent it since his mother died and the block hasn’t turned.” Marisol drops her bag on the floor. “I told him you’d take it for three months and if you hate it he keeps the deposit.”
“Mari.”
“You needed somewhere to put things.” She says it like she’s talking about boxes. She isn’t talking about boxes.
“He also told me, unprompted, that the carpet is original,” she adds. “I said, sir, that is a threat, not a feature.”
That gets a laugh out of me, an actual one, the first since the ballroom, and it surprises us both.
Then my eyes go hot. That’s been happening at the smallest provocation lately, so I turn away and pretend to be interested in an electrical panel.
The rain’s picking up outside. It’s that flat gray Sunday-after-Sunday rain that makes the whole city look like it’s been left out.
Then a van pulls up out front and parks badly, half on the curb, and my stomach drops before my brain has caught up with why.
It’s Connor.
He gets out into the rain without a coat, in an old sweater and jeans I have never seen him wear outside our house, and my whole body reacts like a dog hearing a car in the driveway.
This awful lift, this leap, before the rest of me comes down on it hard.
I hate it. I stand there with my heart going and I hate it.
Marisol looks at me. “Did you?—”
“I told him where to bring my papers.” Which is true. He texted this morning asking where he could drop them, no argument in it, and I gave him this address because I was standing here at the time. It felt practical when I did it. It doesn’t feel practical now.
He comes to the glass and stops. He doesn’t try the handle. He waits until I come and open the door myself, and the rain’s coming off his hair and his sweater’s gone dark at the shoulders.
“I’ve got your things,” he says. “Where do you want them?”
Not can we talk. Not you look tired. Just that.
“By the window.”
So he carries them in. There are more boxes than I expected. A lot more. He does it all himself, back and forth in the rain, and neither of us says anything the whole time, except when Marisol holds the door and he says thank you and she says nothing back at all. For her that’s a thrown drink.
Last, he brings in a manila folder in a plastic bag, dry as a bone.
“Passport, birth certificate,” he says. “Everything. It’s all in there.” He sets it down on top of a box, very carefully, like it might slide. “I signed for all of it. There’s a card downtown with my name on it, so nobody in that family can ever say you took anything.”
My throat pulls tight, and I don’t let it get to my face.
“Thank you.”
“There’s a little more coming, things they had to copy. I didn’t want to wait on them.” He’s got water running down his temple and he doesn’t wipe it. “And these are all yours. The Bennett House boxes. They were in the storage room on Rowan Street under a plastic sheet.”
The floor gets a little strange under me. “For how long?”
“Since it closed.”
“They were in the building?” My voice comes out wrong. “I asked. When we mothballed it I asked what happened to the contents and somebody said it was handled.”
“I know,” he says. “I’m the somebody, probably.” He doesn’t say it for sympathy. He says it flat, with no angle in it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t look. I never once asked to see them.”
Marisol has gone somewhere else in the store, loudly, to give us room, and I wish she hadn’t.
I crouch down and open the nearest box because I need to be doing something with my hands, and the smell comes up out of it and takes my legs out from under me.
Dust and old paper and, underneath it, faint but there, lemon.
Whatever they cleaned that lobby with for as long as anyone worked there.
My grandmother in a chair by the desk with a cloth in her hand, telling me you can smell a well-run house before you see it.
Inside there are books and binders. Registration cards in rubber bands. And a guest book with a green spine gone soft at the corners, gold numbers stamped on the front, and I know what it is before I open it.
The first year.
The first page is my grandmother’s handwriting, big and looped and unembarrassed, and under the date she’s written first night—full house—Mr. and Mrs. R.
Smithers, room 12, anniversary—sent up the good glasses.
Then the guests themselves, in their own hands, all down the page.
Somebody drew a little dog in the margin.
Somebody wrote the radiator sings but so do I.
I make a sound I’m not proud of.
And then I’m crying, right there on the floor of a mattress store in borrowed sweatpants with my hair wet, hard and ugly, my whole face in it, my breath snagging at the top of every pull.
My hands won’t leave the book alone. I keep smoothing the open page flat like a bed I’m making, over and over, and I can’t stop doing that and I can’t stop the crying either, and somewhere in the middle of it my chest just gives, like a shelf coming off a wall.
It’s grief. It’s been waiting since the ballroom for somewhere soft to land.
“It’s the rain,” I say, into my sleeve. “It hasn’t stopped since Saturday.”
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say oh sweetheart, he doesn’t crouch down next to me, he doesn’t put his hand anywhere on me. I can hear him breathing badly, though. That’s how I know what it’s taking out of him. And there’s a part of me, small and mean and entirely justified, that’s glad.
When I can, I close the book and wipe my face with the heel of my hand and stand up.
“Is there anything you want,” I say, “before you go.”
He looks at me. His eyes are red-rimmed and there’s rain still coming off him onto the carpet, and this is the moment where a normal man would ask for a minute of my time.
“No,” he says.
“No?”
“I’m not going to ask you for anything.” He stops there.
His jaw works, and he starts the next sentence and loses it halfway.
“Not today, not next week. Because if I ask you for something, then all of this turns into—” One hand comes up toward the boxes and drops back to his side.
He looks at the floor, then at me. “It doesn’t turn into anything. It’s just yours.”
My throat aches. “Okay.”
“Okay.” He doesn’t move right away. “The key rack’s in the top box. I wrapped it back up so the hooks wouldn’t take the enamel off anything.”
“Connor.”
“Yeah.”
“Go.”
And he goes. He doesn’t argue, and that’s what undoes me later, when I think about it.
He puts the van keys in his fist and walks out into the rain, and he’s careful with the door on the way out because the closer’s shot and it’ll bang, and he knows that already, because he noticed it on the way in.
That man notices doors. He notices every single thing about a building and almost nothing about a room with his wife in it.
I watch the van pull off the curb badly, the same way it parked.
And I wanted to go after him. Standing in that window with my face still wet, I wanted to knock on the glass and get in that van and go home, and put the radio on, and not talk about any of it, and eat something at our own counter.
That want is right there under my ribs and it does not care at all what happened on Saturday.
Underneath it, in the same body, at the same time, I wanted to pick up my grandmother’s book and throw it through the window at the back of his head.
I didn’t know both of those could live in one person at once. They can. Roommates.
Marisol reappears with two coffees from the place on the corner and hands me one without a word about my face. I love her for it.
“So,” she says. “I want to bring somebody through here.”
“Through what? There’s nothing to bring anybody through.”
“An architect.” She’s looking at the ceiling instead of at me, so I know she’s being sneaky.
“Andrew Reid. He does old buildings, the real kind, historic stuff, he did that bank on Dell that everyone lost their minds over. He’s good, he’s not precious about it, and he owes me because I saved his firm from a client who wanted a fainting couch in a pediatric dental office. ”
“For an office,” I say slowly. “You want a preservation architect to look at a mattress store.”
“No.”
“Mari.”
“I want an architect’s eyes on an idea I’m not saying out loud yet.
” She takes a drink of her coffee and finally looks at me.
“Because if I say it today, in this weather, with you like this, you’ll say no, and then it’ll be dead, and I’ll have killed it by being impatient.
So I’m going to be patient. Look at my face. This is patience.”
I know exactly what the idea is. Of course I do. It’s sitting in cardboard on the floor between us and smelling like lemon.
“Fine,” I say. “Bring him.”
She goes to argue with the landlord about the deposit, and I stay.
The rain’s let up into that fine stuff that isn’t worth an umbrella. I sit on the floor with my coffee going cold and do the only thing I can think of that isn’t crying or reading comments about myself. I open the top box.
The key rack’s wrapped in butcher paper, taped at both ends, and somebody’s done it carefully. I get it out and set it across my knees.
It’s heavier than I remember. The rack from the breakfast room, brass gone brown in the low spots, all its little hooks in their rows, and one number missing off its hook entirely, the way it’s been missing since before I was tall enough to reach it.
I know which room without looking. I run my thumb over the gap, back and forth, and I sit there a while with the wet window light on it.
There’s a binder under it in the box, and I flip it open on my knees, and about a third of the way through the handwriting changes.
Mine. Nine years old, doing the daily count in pencil because Grandma paid me a dollar a page and told me the worst thing a hotel could be was sloppy about its own numbers.
My sevens have little crossbars. I don’t know where I got that from and I still do it.
I close it before it can get me again.
Then I get up and I go looking for a nail, and there’s one already in the wall by the door where the mattress people hung something, a little high and off center, and I don’t care.
I hang the rack on it. It takes a couple of tries because the wire on the back has gone loose, and when I let go it settles crooked, sagging toward the low side, and it looks ridiculous in a rented mattress store with a flickering tube light over it.
I don’t straighten it. Straightening it feels like deciding how long I’m staying.
I stand there in the middle of that awful carpet with my arms crossed, looking at my grandmother’s key rack on somebody else’s wall, and for the first time since a ballroom went quiet, I’m not standing in dread.
Whatever this is, it’s small, and it’s mostly stubbornness.
But it points forward instead of back, and I’ll take it.