Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
I'm at the edge of the pool again, not getting in. The heat presses down, and I stare at the water until the blue begins to darken at the edges.
And then I'm not here anymore.
I'm back in the car two years ago, the river coming up over the glass, the world going green underneath, the seat belt tight across my chest.
"Mallory?"
The voice is right behind me. I come back into my body with a lurch.
Henry is on my terrace, ten feet away, a folder under his arm.
"Sorry." He thumbs over his shoulder. "I did knock. You looked a long way off."
I wonder how long he’d been there. I wonder what he saw, whether he noticed the way I don't look at the pool or the way I never go past the first step. If he did, he doesn't say. He just waits while I put myself back together.
"How did you get—"
"Side gate was open." He cuts me off and looks down at his folder.
I nod.
I locked that gate. I always lock that gate.
There's a camera there now, one of the two Henry installed along the sides of the house. It should have sent an alert the second he came through.
Did it?
I don't remember hearing one.
"I can go around the front and start again with the doorbell, if you'd rather," he says. "I brought the maps."
He lifts the folder between us.
I should send him away. I should say David's at the hospital. Julia made me promise. You have to leave. Instead, what I say is, "Show me the maps.”
We go in through the terrace doors, out of the glare. He slides the maps out of the folder and sets them on the kitchen island. It’s Oregon by county, pins marking the home invasions and attacks across the years.
"I want to ask you something," I say, before the careful part of me can stop it. “It's my birthday tomorrow. David arranged a party at the Overlake Golf and Country Club. He booked the place before all this, and now it's a train I can't get off.”
I turn a pin on the map so I don't have to watch his face.
“Would you come? I’d love to have you there.”
He doesn't answer at first. When I look up, he nods.
"Of course," he says. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
And that is that.
I feel lighter for it.
I don't dwell on why the person who makes a room full of people bearable to me is also the one my husband can't stand. Or revisit why my best friend made me promise not to be alone with him. It just seemed the neighborly thing to do.
Then he straightens the maps, squaring their edges, and says, "By the way. The intruder from your break-in. The one who went down the steps." A pause. "He died. Last night."
"How do you know that?"
“It was on the news this morning.” He watches my face. “I thought you'd have heard.”
I hadn't. It sits wrong in me now, that a man came into my house and died and I heard it first from a neighbor.
My mind spins.
Last night?
I stand at the island and make the connection I don't want to make. Last night was the night of the green dot. Last night David told me he was fetching things for the party and drove into the city instead.
He stayed at the hospital and didn't answer his phone. And somewhere in that same building, on the same night, the man who came into our house stopped breathing.
I turn away so Henry won't see my face. I run the tap and fill a glass I don't want. I say none of it out loud. David is my husband, and whatever this is, it's between me and him. Not for the ears of a neighbor.
"It's a hard thing to hear," Henry says quietly. "Even about a man like that. It doesn't sit easy on anyone." He lets that sit for a moment. "But it didn't start with you, Mallory. Whatever put him on that road was running long before he reached your door."
For the first time since the break-in, the guilt shifts a little.
He leaves the maps where they are. “Go over them when you get a chance,” he says at the door. “You’ll see more when you stop looking so hard. See you later.”
Then he's gone, up the side of the house and out through the gate.
My phone doesn't make a sound to mark him leaving.
I check my phone. Notifications are on.
And yet there is no alert.
For a moment I think about calling Henry back and asking why. Instead, I tell myself I'll deal with it later.
I should take my pills, lie down, do what I'm supposed to do.
Instead I open the laptop to check the news.
The death is there, the way he said. Four lines on a local site under a photograph of my road taped off five days ago.
A man injured in a Hunts Point home invasion has died of his injuries. Police are still seeking a second man in connection with the break-in.
And below it, because the internet keeps everything, the older article from the week it happened.
They’d released his face. Of course they had.
The second man was still out there. I remember Rodriguez sitting across from me at the kitchen island, swiping to that face on his tablet and telling me where the two of them came from.
Downtown. Pioneer Square, the missions and the rough blocks around it.
They’d been breaking into places together for years.
Rodriguez thought the one who ran would disappear into the same part of the city they both knew.
And suddenly I know what I have to do.
The man in the ICU is dead. The only person left alive who knows why two strangers walked up a private road in a storm is the one who got away. He knows why they came to my door and not to the bigger houses on either side.
I don't decide to go. By the time the thought catches up, I'm already pulling on a hooded rain jacket, even though it's the hottest week of the summer. I can't walk into that part of the city looking like Hunts Point money. I save the man's face to my phone and order a car.
Then I think of David.
I glance down at the app on my phone. He'll see me cross the bridge. I could turn it off, but that would only give him something else to question. Seattle I can explain if I have to.
There is no version of this where I'm not seen.
The driver takes the bridge, then the freeway, and lets me out where I ask.
The street changes in less than a block.
Behind me are glass towers, hotel awnings, tourists, money.
Ahead, the buildings go low and tired, the doorways shuttered, the sidewalks uneven.
Men and women sit against the brick or beside carts piled with blankets and bags.
When the car pulls away, a few of them look up.
Then they look away again.
Skid Row. Rodriguez called it that the day he showed me the faces. Not Los Angeles. Seattle had the name first, back when logs were skidded down toward the waterfront and the rougher streets grew up around the route.
I never thought I'd have a reason to stand here.
I’ve never been this far outside my comfort zone.
I go into it anyway.
The farther I walk, the more obvious it becomes who lives out here. All around me are tents pressed into alleys. Bedrolls against brick. Shopping carts carrying everything someone owns. A man washes at a public sink while a woman nearby sorts through a plastic bag at her feet.
I hold my phone up to the first man who'll look. "I'm trying to find this man. He's not in any trouble from me. I just need to talk to him."
He looks at the phone, then at me, and for a second I think he recognizes the face. Then he laughs, not unkindly, but as if I've asked the wrong question in the wrong language. He turns away.
The next man asks me for money. I give him the loose change in my pocket, and he takes it but tells me nothing. Not because he's hiding anything. Because he has nothing to tell.
I press on.
A woman in a doorway studies the photo long enough for hope to rise in me. Then she looks up and asks if he owes me too.
I keep going, block by block, deeper into the heat. The pavement gives it back in waves, and beneath it is another smell, sweeter and worse, something rotting under sugar.
People jostle me. People ignore me.
Outside a boarded storefront, a man comes up on my deaf side, and I don't hear him until his hand closes around my arm. He yanks me sideways, hard enough to wrench the bad shoulder, and pain whites out the street for one bright second.
I wrench myself free, push him off, and get away from him as fast as I can. I'm beginning to think that coming here wasn't a good idea.
My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth, but I don't look back.
It's a boy who helps me in the end. He’s sixteen at most, sitting on a milk crate with a dog between his feet. He studies the face for a long time.
He nods. "Yeah, I know him. A dope head. He's sick," he says. "You a nurse?"
“Yes,” I say, because it's the answer that gets me closer, and I have always known which lie opens which door.
He points me to a brick building down the block. The windows are covered with plywood and cardboard. The front door hangs crooked from its top hinge.
"Third floor. Three-oh-seven."
I thank him and head toward it.
At the entrance, I stop.
Every sensible part of me says not to go in. I could call the police, tell them where he might be, let them handle it. But if he isn't here, I've gained nothing. And if he is, I need to hear the answer from him.
I push the door open.
Inside, the air is stale.
The stairwell stinks like garbage and piss. I climb to the third floor and follow the numbers until I find 307.
The door is partly ajar.
I push it open and look inside.
"Hello?"
No one answers.
I step in.
The front room is full of people who seem only half there. Men and women sit along the walls in the brown light leaking through the boards. Their heads are tipped back, mouths open, eyes fixed on nothing. The smell hits me again, and for a second I put a hand over my mouth.
Nobody stops me.
Nobody is in any state to.
I move through the room with the photo lit on my phone. A woman on the floor barely looks at it before pointing toward the back.
I find him in a cramped den at the rear of the apartment.