He wanted to know about before, the years preceding the saturation of lithium and various benzodiazepines, and she told him: about the tactical mechanics of waking up amid the belongings of someone months gone and in all likelihood deceased, and how afterward the Internet was filled with the pages he’d abandoned, the snapshots he’d taken of comical typos on deli signs, images of him laughing on stoops with a bottle of wine in one hand. The dissonance between the two, the manifold evidence of his life and the unrelenting fact of his absence, had become untenable to sift through anymore. Thirteen months after, finally gone from their apartment and in her own, armed with or destroyed by the new diagnosis, she still found herself looking for him whenever she left the house, and it was about that time, she told Thomas, that she began on her own kind of vanishing. It was then she began to pile up her nest of glittering curios and nonperishables, her angora sweaters and sundresses meant for extremes in weather she wouldn’t see again, and about that time she stopped leaving.
A memory came to him, teasing at some understanding: his grandfather dying in a mustard armchair, his mother whispering to her sisters, “He’s not eating, he won’t eat,” as though it were a political stance the old man had assumed with sudden conviction. In Adeleine’s bed, remembering this, Thomas knew, then tried to un-know: that trying to lead her outside, talking to her of spring, was like his mother crouched by her father, a fork in her hand, convinced that if only she could sneak in a little food through the clamped line of his mouth, the slow drift of his eyes would sharpen. She had stayed there days on end, failing to discern his total inability, speaking to him of the herbed meat loaves she had brought, the tangy quiches and rhubarb pies.
THE NOTICES, affixed with double-sided tape at all four corners, were smoothed and aligned so precisely that they nearly eradicated the tenants’ memories of the doors without them. It was Claudia, who had been unofficially living with Paulie for two months and four days, who saw them first. She slid down the door and remained there, leaning against it, unable to enter and tell her brother that she no longer knew what to do, that Edith had been the only landlord who hadn’t grown alarmed by the possible liabilities of Paulie living in a place alone. That the best solution she had designed, so far, had been to sleep on his couch and wake with pillow lines on her face and try to do her best at work and entirely avoid the question of her husband, who had stated in too many ways tacit and then not that the care of her frenetic and disabled brother had not featured in their vows.
In these hamstrung moments, she remembered how their mother had looked when she thought no one was watching, how she had peered out the window, a dishcloth hanging from her slack hand, her mouth parted as if to speak out to another life, as if to say, I could pack very quickly, I could be ready to go very soon.
Upstairs, Thomas used the arch of his back to push his door open. He barely managed to hold the items he carried: a voice recorder, a fifth of Scotch, and four tiny oranges. The latter items were meant as gifts to persuade Adeleine into letting him use the first, and they sat tenuously, the clementines lolling in his palm and the sweating glass wedged between his forearm and chest. The fruit was first to hit the floor, their waxed skins revolving on the dusty wood as he read of his imminent eviction.
He felt sure he could not enter the only space she had and inform her that soon it would cease to be hers, and so he didn’t; he placed the recorder and the Macallan on the floor, slid his fingers under the paper until it popped off: his door, then hers. It crossed his mind that by removing this piece of information in a minor way, he would need to excise it on a larger scale. He had two months. The thought settled and adjusted itself, scanning possible solutions, the question buzzing at his joints as he moved around his apartment, setting out ingredients for the simple meal that would fill him.
OVERNIGHT IT HAD TURNED to thick summer. The smells were large—chalky baked soil, barbecue smoke, discarded plastics, rush hour excess—and they squabbled and rivaled for dominance. Thomas and Claudia and Edward sat on the stoop together in light clothing, looking for the youthful feeling the setting and season had once suggested to them, as though soon they might jump in a taxi and pay the driver and meet someone singular and change their life in one night, as though any of them could sustain that kind of mobility and reinvention. Edith’s son had temporarily flown back to whichever place he came from, and it afforded them a short window in which to discuss things, develop a plan if there was one to be had. Thomas was the only one intent on action. Because he sat there full of thoughts of Adeleine and Edith and their need, his convictions were stronger than any that would have developed on behalf of his own well-being.
“Really, I could just move,” Edward said in a clipped voice. “We all could.”
Claudia released the sigh that had been growing, lowered her shoulders, and dragged a palm down her face.
“Right now,” she offered lowly, “right now I can’t—” She didn’t finish the sentence, and it remained unclear what it was she couldn’t do, but the hazy answer seemed to arrange itself in the clotted air between them: possibly anything.