Everyone was at work. I work at home.
A knock came at my door, and I got up to see. As I walked across the kitchen, I pulled on a button-up shirt over my tank top, because I wasn’t wearing a bra. I was barefoot. I used the peephole. There were two men standing there, one tall and broad, with a smaller man behind him. My door is heavy and you can’t really talk through it; the door chain is broken. It’s not the safest neighborhood.
I opened the door a little and the big man explained that they were there to check the water. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt, dirty and worn thin. His face was relaxed, but his friend looked shrewder. The friend also wore no uniform.
I was confused. “There have been complaints,” he said, “about the water in the building. It’s not always hot?”
This is true. The water occasionally goes lukewarm in the middle of a shower. But the building management is lax; unless it went ice-cold for days, I wouldn’t have expected them to come fix it. I hadn’t bothered to call and couldn’t imagine anyone else in the building calling about such a relatively small thing. We were still trying to get them to fix the front door, so people couldn’t walk in off the street. The latch had been broken for weeks.
“We did some work downstairs,” the big man continued. “We need to check to see if your water’s hot.”
They weren’t wearing uniforms, but the management hires all kinds of under-the-table men.
“Okay,” I said. I opened the door all the way.
My hallway is narrow, and suddenly I realized how big this man was. Huge, really. And there were two of them, and one of me.
“You’re the only one home in the whole building,” the big man said.
I flushed. I pressed myself to the wall so they could walk past me and I pointed, way across the apartment, to my sink. “There it is,” I said. “Over there.”
They were in now. I stayed in the doorway. I put my back to the swung-open door. My right hand hung in the free air of the hallway. Let them steal if they wanted.
The smaller man—not actually a small man—looked at me. He didn’t say a word the entire time. A slight smile appeared on his face. I could see him thinking, She’s afraid. I could see him laughing at me. In that sort of situation, only the man can laugh. Only the man knows whether something terrible is about to happen. And even then, he might take himself by surprise. My vigilance isn’t unique.
The big man turned on my faucet, the hot tap only.
“Come over here and see,” he said.
“No, I’m good,” I said. “I trust you.”
Steam rolled out of the faucet, coiled over my cabinets. The big man laughed. “Come over here and feel it.”
The small man smiled some more.
“No,” I said. “No, thank you.”
I shook for hours after they left.
30
* * *
after
I’d noticed Anne Harris on the very first day of eighth grade, in gym class. As I stood next to my locker, pulling itchy green uniform shorts over the thighs I considered far too big, in walked this person in a black leather jacket trimmed with toothy silver zippers and accented with shining buckles. She was tall and long-limbed and moved with the loping gait of a boy. Anne’s hair was the color of sand, the top half pulled up into a ponytail held by a fluffy red hair tie, the lower half shaved close to her head. I had never seen hair like that, nor had I ever seen a girl shuck off torn, oversize jeans to reveal boxer shorts. She was very slim under all those clothes, but clearly strong, her hands long and wiry, her eyes smudged in black. I planned to stay out of her way.
Later that week, though, Anne fell in step with me and a girl named Amber as we ran laps outside. Between halfhearted attempts to jog through the dusty heat, Amber bemoaned the death of Kurt Cobain. She had just started listening to Nirvana, and Kurt had died about a year and a half earlier—not long before Mom—but as Anne drew up to us, Amber was dabbing at tears and gazing wistfully into the distance. I remained silent as Anne asked what other music Amber listened to and she fumbled for a cool answer. Anne smirked a little, looked into my eyes, and moved the conversation on to something else.
I still had my Maine accent then, and Anne asked where I was from, what had brought me to Texas. My mother had died, I said. Amber responded with silence, her glossy brown hair falling over her face while she stared at the ground. But Anne asked some more questions, real questions, and my answers slowly revealed a sketch of what had happened: Mom was murdered, I was there, the guy was still free. And then I told a lie. I said that before I’d left Maine, my family had put me in a mental hospital for a while. It was the sort of lie that you don’t realize you’re about to tell until you hear it coming out of your mouth. The sort of lie you yourself believe immediately. And like many lies, this one revealed a wish. How lovely it would have been, I thought, to have had some time just to sink into misery. To not have to deal with family or school. To be surrounded by people whose job it was to keep you safe from your suicidal hand. And to have the circumstances of your life truly reflect what had happened to it. A mental hospital seemed to make a lot more sense than neat rows of chairs and desks, than football bleachers, than that white-lined running track.
I didn’t say much else that day, but by the end of class, Anne was insisting that I spend the upcoming weekend at her house. We quickly became closer, and I’m sure that within a few days or weeks, Anne realized that I’d lied about the mental hospital. But she never called me out, never even mentioned it. I have always been grateful for this generosity. I think she understood what I was trying to tell her. That I was tired. That I needed some help.
* * *