Page 34 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“A ride.” Callum barks a humorless laugh. “The shady car full of other drug lords and murderer-types out front was his ride to his regular-guy job as a trucker. Wow. I mean. How is this even happening? This shit doesn’t happen to normal people. This is...” He cradles his head in his hands and trails off.

“My car is right outside that back door. What if we...we wrap him up? There’s a closet full of linens by the back door. We can leave him in there till it gets dark and then put him in my car.”

“Jesus,” Callum says, but his eyes are darting back and forth, contemplating this, I can tell.

What choice do we have? He is a monster. He is a terrible person, and it’s a civic duty to have gotten him off the streets. I repeat these thoughts to myself.

“Why should we be punished—no...very likely killed—for happening across the wrong sociopath? He’s dead either way. So we either risk our lives, and by risk I mean probably get slaughtered in our sleep, or we just don’t tell anyone. It was self-defense. We didn’t do anything wrong. It’s his fucking fault we’re in this mess.”

“Okay,” Callum blurts.

“What?” I say, unsure I even wanted him to agree, confused and dizzy and nauseous with all of this.

But when we look at one another, the decision is made. The threat is too great. I think about all of the alias names we searched on the office computer and how it implicates us, but I have to believe we will be so far from suspects of any kind that it will never be discovered. Even so, I sit back down in front of the screen and tell Callum to get Eddie to the utility room, and I’ll get the cleaning supplies and sheets.

“We’ll take turns at the party,” I say. “I’ll clean, and you tell them I got a call from management about a leak in one of the vacants, but I’ll be there. Then you slip away once you’re seen at the party for a while, and I’ll stop in for a bit—make it look normal because if anyone looks back on this night and says we were gone or acting weird... If the shit hits the fan with all this, we can’t be remembered being fucking weird.”

He nods, silently agreeing.

I try not to throw up when he grabs under Eddie’s armpits and pulls him across the concrete floor, leaving ribbons of red in his wake. Callum is ghostly white, and I see him trying to slow his breath and calm himself with every step.

Once Eddie’s locked in the utility room, Callum takes off his blood-soaked shirt and cleans up in the laundry room sink. There are boxes of clothes and other crap people have left after they moved out lining the walls in the back closet, and I tell him he can find a T-shirt there. When he comes out, he’s wearing a stranger’s pale green shirt, and his eyes are glossy and fearful.

“God,” he says.

“I know,” I whisper. “Go.”

Callum slips out the back door.

I tremble as I walk to the closet and fill the mop bucket with water and bleach. I pull all the hand towels I can find off the shelves and pour a bottle of floor cleaner over the blood until it turns pink and translucent. Then I kneel on the floor and start to scrub until the shaking becomes uncontrollable and my body convulses as I sob harder than I ever have before.

15

ANNA

I swear I heard something inside that front office. The blinds are closed, and it’s locked which is unusual on its own, but there was movement. I know it. I toss Callum’s bag onto Henry’s small desk inside the front door and look around at this unknowable place that looks very different than it did a few hours ago. It’s no longer filled with his scent and his work and his personal things I treasure, it’s now filled with potential clues and suspicion.

If he painted her a hundred times, where the fuck are all these paintings? Not at our house that I cleared out, not in the garage or with his school things, or the storage unit we kept. I’ve been through every inch. There are countless stacks of unframed canvas and paper portraits stacked against the walls. I grab at the pile closest to me and start sifting through them. Most of them are faces of strangers—volunteers who sat for him, some homeless person who he paid in hot meals in exchange for painting them, some residents here. Babs’s face smiles a toothy grin in an eight-by-ten oil on canvas. She holds a gin martini and has a red boa wrapped around her neck. A few paintings are snapshots in time. He painted the ladies playing cards by the pool with a streaky orange sunset on the horizon behind the building. There are no faces I see painted more than once, let alone a hundred goddamn times.

I push the stack aside and look through another—same thing. Most of these I’ve seen. Some are unfinished. None are faces painted again and again. I don’t understand. What did he do with them all?

I lie flat on the floor and stare at the ceiling fan. I try to decide if I’m more angry at him for what he’s done to us, or at myself for being so removed that I didn’t even have an inkling something like this could happen. How did I make him feel that if he really loved someone else, he was still stuck with me? I can admit we were closer to best friends than red-hot lovers over the last few years. Would I have understood? Let him go? Forgiven him—told him to go have the family he wanted? He didn’t believe I would, or he wouldn’t have hidden it. If I’m honest with myself, I don’t know how I would have reacted. I’d probably just hold on tighter until I suffocated our relationship. He’s all I’ve ever known. No matter what he wanted, he’d never break my heart, and my body aches at the thought of this. I’m utterly exhausted.

I hear a muffled rendition of “Sweet Home Alabama” piping from someone’s Bluetooth speaker on the pool deck. A sweet and rich smoky scent hangs heavy in the hot night air, and the din of conversations and barks of laughter rise and fall from the party outside. I slip out the door and sit on the ugly chair on the balcony. I see Rosa and Crystal playing cards, face-tattoo guy flips burgers on a charcoal grill, and Jackie tries to make Earl Jr. eat corn on the cob, but he throws it into the pool and makes all the little girls scream.

Mary from 109 tries to coax a sad-looking boy to play with the other kids, and Gwen, who I met the once, is dancing by herself in a bikini top and cutoffs, trying to attract some male attention and waving her blue Big Gulp over her head to the slow beat of the music. Then I see Barry, who sees me and waves his hands in the air. Shit.

“Anna!” He hurriedly pulls a Corona out of a cooler full of ice water and holds it up, half dancing to the song and gesturing me to come down. “You gotta come. You’re part of the family now.”

As much as this sentiment horrifies me, another part of me craves some distraction and cold beer and does not want to sit here alone right now. I make my way down the concrete stairs and take the beer from him.

Crystal pulls out a plastic chair for me to sit, and I join them at the card table, timidly perched at the edge of my seat and picking at the Corona label on my bottle. Who is it? I wonder. Is his lover one of these women? That’s hard to imagine, but they must know something.

Rosa hands me a paper plate with a hot dog and lump of potato salad on it, and I smile and take it with no intention of actually eating it. Jackie asks if I want to be dealt into gin rummy, and I decline. Then Barry pulls up the drink cooler to sit next to me and adds himself to the conversation.

“Beat it, Barry,” Crystal says, and it seems that she notices his hovering is making me uncomfortable, but I’m not sure if she actually picks up on that or they’re just hardwired to beat up on Barry.

“Girls only,” Jackie adds.

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