Declan made himself available to his tenants, and so did Edith, although after he died she began widening the scope of her generosity, drawing leases to those she found unusual, or hurt, or in visible need of asylum. She knew what he would have said, how he would have bit down on his smoke and brought a palm over his cheek—that it wasn’t her job to mother the world, no matter what regrets she had about their own children. But he was gone and that was his fault, she reminded herself frequently, for living hard on his body like he had. He could have quit the cigarettes, could have downed a few more vegetables, could have ended a few nights without landing in the bed like a felled pine.
For a year she rented to an out-of-work opera singer with hollowed-out cheeks who was always late with the rent but put on a suit every morning and practiced his scales. A single mother of twins famed for her colossal Afro and her abilities as a wrist wrestler, who often accepted Edith’s offer to babysit while in her apartment she held raucous tournaments attended by bearded men in loud prints. A substitute teacher with a quivering Adam’s apple and a stutter and a little beagle that forever ran ahead of him. A balding snake collector always clad in Hawaiian shirts, who claimed no one else would rent to him, and who cooed into his many cages like a proud father. An Ecuadorean widower who worked construction and came home almost unrecognizably dusty and who nervously patted the front pocket where he kept his wife’s photo. A retired Barnum and Bailey performer who had asked Edith if, for the sake of old times, he could hang a tightwire across the backyard. She had obliged him, and spent a number of spring evenings with a shadow plaid blanket around her shoulders, clapping as his toes gripped the line and he blushed with remembering, as he brought one gnarled foot in front of the other and hovered four inches above the long untended flower beds, perfectly still, waiting for a strong breeze to pass.
HAD SHE FELT ANGRY about how far removed she’d grown from the world as everyone else knew it, Adeleine might have placed the fault on the ages of her parents when they conceived her (forty-two and fifty-three) and the cultural diet they’d fed her, a closed world of musty books and antiquities; but, like most people growing ill in mind, she did not feel in any way ashamed of what she deemed preference. Her rejection of modern society and her collection of previous eras’ talismans thrived like weeds, without any cultivation, at a rate she couldn’t control.
Edith advertised only through physical postings in a five-block radius of the building, and Adeleine had detached the unevenly perforated slip with great anticipation, happy for what she could touch and hold. Finding an apartment without consulting the many efficient tentacles of the Internet had grown next to impossible, and she signed the lease without looking anywhere else.
Over time, her apartment came to appear smaller than the others in the building—so overcrowded did it become with adopted velvet ottomans and other people’s photo albums and a variety of barely functional mechanical devices—though it was actually the largest. She had adored it straightaway, the crown-molded archway between the kitchen and living room, the claws of the forever slightly dirty bathtub, the scratched hardwood floor, the rusted fire escape available through the window in her bedroom. Bit by bit, she filled the space with bygone decades, even the most utilitarian items—the fans and egg whisks and combs—older than her father or mother. She collected until the point when she couldn’t make it more than a block before turning around, her gaze fixed on her windows, and trotting back towards their promise. It was as though she knew she would soon be without any external entertainment: she attended every stoop and estate sale, showed up early and bent her body towards the boxes others ignored, took buses to time-stopped reaches of Queens and then trains upstate, under each arm an empty, beaten duffel bag.
A shelf displaying twenty century-old glass soda bottles, a jar holding a massive tangle of skeleton keys, a box of discarded photos detailing a 1967 vacation to Hawaii, a radio whose speakers had broadcast World Wars I and II: she told herself she was honoring the lives of the people who had touched and loved these objects, remembering them in a way that their death had otherwise precluded. What had begun as a collection of oddities had eventually crowded out reason, and soon required two walls of sagging floor-to-ceiling shelving.
Adeleine’s parents loved to tell her what a happy child she’d been, loved to present this and let the questions that followed arise tacitly. She resented the presupposing. She pointed out that while they may have found endearing the energy their six-year-old daughter had spent writing and illustrating a book about jellyfish who felt invisible against the dark of the ocean, the pages probably pointed to something larger.