Page 5 of The Vacancy In Room 10

I sit on the edge of the couch and run a hand through my hair, trying to quickly figure out what I’m supposed to do—how to help.

“I...killed someone,” he says. “I did. It was me.” And then I hear a deafening bang, and the line goes dead.

3

ANNA

The body of thirty-six-year-old local artist and teacher, Henry Samuel Hartley, was found in shallow water on a bank of the Rio Grande just south of the Santa Fe city limits early this morning. Authorities are ruling it a suicide.

The papers told the world only hours after I found out and before most of his family were informed. The photo next to the story is the one he uses for all his professional sites and business cards—his sandy blond hair hanging ever so slightly over one eye, his smile meeting his blue eyes and beaming at the camera in his shirt and tie that look out of place on his body. Maybe because I’ve only seen him in formal attire a handful of times in my life. He’s usually in paint-stained jeans and vintage T-shirts—The Smiths, Tears For Fears—that’s more his style. They should have chosen one of the photos that showed who he really was.

The shock hasn’t subsided. In the two weeks since his death, the funeral has come and gone, the life we shared together snatched out of thin air. My things are packed in boxes, and the house is going on the market next week because I can’t stand the emptiness and the memory of him haunting every room. I can’t be here without him. So now here I am. At The Sycamores.

I feel close to him in a different way in this eerie place because his work is here. Some boxes of belongings and all the hours of his life he spent inside these walls are all I physically have left of him now. And maybe there will be clues inside these boxes or on his computer or even in his paintings—something to help me understand what was happening to him.

I need to know. Why was he so desperately sad over the last months—who the hell does he think he killed? That can’t possibly be true, but something made him take his life. I never told the police or his family that part—I mean, of course I told them he called, crying and saying he’s messed up and was so sorry and hysterical. They needed to know what preceded the suicide—his fragile state—but the I killed someone part? No. Because it can’t be true.

I pull a suitcase across the concrete between the parking lot and the external stairs up to Henry’s studio. My new home. I pass the pool where a few women sit at a white plastic table playing Go Fish and drinking 7-Eleven jumbo Slurpees. I notice the brunette because her excess girth spills through the shell shaped cutouts in back of the plastic chairs. She’s yelling at a kid floating in the pool with water wings and a dinosaur squirt gun.

I struggle with the broken wheel as I tug my bag past them.

“You got a seven, Rosa. I saw it!” one of the women hollers.

“Go Fish, Jackie.” The other one, Rosa, I guess, giggles.

“Don’t tell me you ain’t got no fuckin’ seven. I saw that shit.” Jackie stands to snatch Rosa’s card, but the plastic chair is stuck to her backside, so she sits back down. Jackie pulls the chair off her butt and stands and lights a cigarette with a scowl. “Whatever.”

“This is why no one plays with you, Jackie,” the unnamed third woman says.

“You play Monte, lady?” one of the voices asks, and then I realize they’re talking to me.

“What?”

“We ain’t playin’ Monte, Crystal. We’re playin’ Go Fish. Plus, she ain’t gonna answer you. Chick looks beat up,” the other says. I don’t know who’s who anymore.

“You okay, chick?”

“Uhhh,” I start to reply, but they’ve forgotten about me and continue arguing among themselves. So I gratefully continue on and heft my bag up the stairs, one at a time, until someone appears behind me. I begin to apologize in a daze, a knee-jerk reaction to being in the way, and I try to shift to the side to let them by, but I realize it’s a face I recognize.

“Sorry,” I say, masking my surprise as he picks up my lopsided suitcase.

“Can I help you with this?”

“Oh...”

“I mean if either of us are getting up the stairs,” he says with a half smirk, and I think I offer a semblance of a smile back, but I’m so numb every day that it’s hard for me to really be sure if my face matches my intentions anymore. The man is Carson, maybe. No... Callum...something. He’s the guy who told Henry about the apartment here.

I only met him once, at a school play. They teach at the same place; well, they did. And I met him and his wife at intermission. They were putting on West Side Story, and Henry and I were at the concession stand eating bake-sale blondies and wishing they sold stiff drinks instead to get us through the second half. Callum and his wife came up.

I feel bad I don’t recall her name, but she looked so thin I instantly judged her, and on the way home in the car, I joked to Henry about needing to bug Callum for her diet plan. He told me she was terminal—I don’t even remember the kind of cancer—a bone cancer, I think. But I do remember that I felt like the shittiest person on earth, so her beautiful, frail face and thinning chestnut hair and tiny frame is etched in my memory forever.

He told me Callum and his wife only lived in this shithole because they didn’t have medical insurance and the bills destroyed them. I guess he was only part-time at the high school, and she had to stop working, and the debt buried them. She finally passed a few months ago, according to Henry.

When I look at Callum, I feel the weight of his grief mirroring my own, right back at me, and it’s hard not to look away and run from this additional reminder of pain. The realization happens in a moment when I meet his eyes. We both lost everything we care about, and life has dumped us here, like a further punishment.

He has the case at the top of the stairs before I snap out of my catatonic moment and say anything at all. I climb the rest of the concrete stairs and nod at him.

“Thank you,” I quietly say, and I pretend not to remember who he is before slipping safely behind the door of 203.

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