Page 10 of The Vacancy In Room 10

When I lean over the sink in the darkness of my apartment with the canned laughter from an I Love Lucy episode echoing in the background, white light from the black-and-white TV screen flickering across the walls, I let myself cry. I promise myself again a promise I know I won’t keep—that I will never do this again. That I got lucky, but just barely.

5

ANNA

The heat in the apartment is suffocating. I spent the night cross-legged on the floor with a bottle of wine and an egg foo yong, just sifting through boxes of Henry’s things. Between the piles of notebooks, art supplies, and miscellaneous crap he already had here, and all his things I brought from the house, including countless boxes from school that sat unopened since he was let go, it will take me an eternity to get through it all. But there must be clues in here—some sign—an indication of what the hell happened to him and why he’d do this. I don’t know what that would even look like, but maybe I’d know it if I saw it.

But it’s midmorning now, and last night’s wine is pounding in my temples and sitting sour and acidic in my gut. My shirt is clinging to my skin, and I feel like I can’t breathe in this room. I tinker with the air-conditioning unit in the window again. It just made a rattling noise and dripped yellow water onto the battered wood floors last night so I gave up on it, but now I have to call someone named Cassidy Abbott to fix it, I guess. It’s on the lease paperwork to call the caretaker, but a chick handyman seems unusual, so maybe I have it wrong.

I dial the number, and it goes to voicemail. Of course it does. I leave a message and step out onto the balcony for air.

It’s generous to call it a balcony, because, of course, it’s really a shared walkway. Most units have a camping chair or lawn chair next to their door. The person next door to my unit has a Radio Flyer filled with half-dead plants and a coffee can overflowing with cigarette butts. There are a few pink tricycles with handlebar streamers and flowered baskets in front of 202, and across and down a floor an exceptionally hairy man sits in a folding chair, in checkered boxer shorts, reading the paper.

I fan myself with an old People magazine and watch the women playing cards by the pool. I wonder if it’s one of them who left me that note. The one flicking ice chips from her drink at a ten-year-old in the pool, telling her to stop splashing her brother, or the quiet one wearing bedroom slippers, sucking on a blue Popsicle stick. But why would they? Maybe hairy guy? Maybe...ugh. I mean, it must be one of these people.

I watch as an impossibly thin woman with ghostly blond hair and strangely short bangs steps out next to him and lights a cigarette. She’s practically swimming in a pair of pink shorts and a tank top. She’s giving him a hard time about leaving his dishes all over the place. She tries snatching his paper to get his attention, but he pulls it away before she can, so she smacks at the paper and calls him an idiot, then disappears back inside.

I’m startled by a voice behind me.

“You Anna Hartley?”

I turn to see a woman in denim overalls and long, wavy dark hair piled in a heap on top of her head. She’s striking, even sweaty with no makeup, and I don’t put together right away that she’s the handyman or caretaker or whatever they called it in the lease.

“Uh, yeah. Why?”

“You called me.”

“Oh, you’re Cassidy...”

“Cass,” she corrects, in a swift, practiced way.

I nod and open the door to the apartment. I begin giving her the rundown on the noise the air conditioner is making and how I really need it to work, and she stops me quickly.

“Yeah, that’s not my jurisdiction,” she says.

“I’m sorry?”

“The air conditioner isn’t part of the building. A tenant bought it and stuck it in the window. If it don’t belong to the building, I don’t fix it. You’re on your own.” She starts to go.

“Wait. Henry wouldn’t have bought this.”

“Okay?”

“So it’s not my problem. It’s part of the rental.”

“You the wife?” she asks, her eyes softening slightly as she stands backlit by the sun in the doorframe, practically blinding me. I shield my eyes with my hand.

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry about what happened,” she says, picking up her tool bag from the ground. I want to ask her about him, but I don’t know where to start yet. It’s not the time.

“Look, Home Depot is totally out of ACs with this heatwave. Amazon will take a week. I’m fucking dying in here, okay. You can’t just look at it?”

“It’s a liability thing. Sorry.”

“Wait,” I say to her back before she makes it to the stairs. I follow after her and show her the note left under my door. The words GET OUT stare back at me as I hand it to her.

“Someone left this for me. Do you know who would do something like that? I mean, since, I guess you probably know everyone here?”

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