DECADES OF NEGLECT had left the property an elaborate obstacle course, and navigating it depended on delicacy and memory. Of the sixteen interior steps from top to bottom, two were unwise to use and rotted quietly. The tenants left these stairs to the wear inflicted by former occupants, as they did much of the leaning banister, which from any given angle revealed at least four layers of dark red paint. The wallpaper that ran along the stairs had not seen a change since the late sixties, when Edith had requested Declan install a pattern she’d fallen in love with: gold leaf details of trees, the background beige but made rich by the gaudy foliage, all of it smeared with a sluggish gleam. It hadn’t detached or discolored except at the base, where the sun reached it, and served as one last tribute to Declan’s craftsmanship, the forest he had pasted there to stand forever. The peeling door of each apartment was a different color, some by most definitions ugly and others slightly more palatable. Declan had insisted on this from the beginning, thought it a unique touch that spoke to his role as an eccentric. Edith’s was a deep royal blue the color of the Atlantic at a certain time of summer, Paulie’s a pastel pink nearing heartburn antidote that he called “The Terrific Tongue,” Edward’s a lavish purple he forever hated and for whose retirement he campaigned, Thomas’s a kitsch butter yellow he secretly found quite pleasant, and Adeleine’s a bath-tile green that suited her no matter what because after all it was a door she could close.
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HAD SHE NOT BEGUN mentally confusing the words for appliances with those for breakfast items, had she continued as the attentive and reliable and well-liked landlord she once had been, Edith would have noticed. The turnover in the building had always been high; she had always kept around the ad she placed when an apartment opened, pulled it from the same bulging, marbled green file that held decades of obsolete lease agreements. She had liked this coming and going, especially the moment when she opened the door into the newly empty space, walked around it remembering her own first tour of the building. Had she not begun discovering her purse lodged in the freezer, her keys hidden in the forest of her potted plants, she would have understood that her current tenants were terribly intent on staying, that each of them had seemed to grow roots in an urban area known for a perennial turnover of wealth and identity, for changing impossibly around any fixed point. She might have observed that Edward retained a garish and incongruous set of silk curtains for most of a decade, and surmised he was waiting for the redheaded woman who’d lived with him to come back and take them down. Certainly, she would have recognized that Paulie’s sister, Claudia, had barely looked around the place before she signed the lease, most likely because there was no one else in the city who would rent to a strangely loquacious man of six-two with an eight-year-old’s disposition. She knew Thomas better than the rest of them, and she would have continued to visit him, seen the frames and canvases bulging from closets and cabinets, from under his couch and bed, and sensed the irrational belief he lived daily: that he had to stay in the place where the stroke had found him, where his gift had left him, in case it returned. She would have knocked on Adeleine’s door for never seeing her and concluded that the stockpiled cans of nonperishables, the desperate collection of coin banks and postcards, indicated a woman who kept her entire world close at hand.
But Edith didn’t and couldn’t—her incapacities growing each year—and still the tenants avoided the fourth and ninth steps, knew intimately the three important milestones in unlocking the front door, forgave the brokenness of their pre-war windows, placed pots under leaks and called the sounds of the water coming in familiar.