Page 60 of The Quiet Tenant

You listen to the stories. You read them. There are podcasts, online threads unraveling the mysteries for you. You learn about the student who went out with friends and never came home. The wife who went missing and her husband definitely did it, but they didn’t catch him. The girl who went on spring break. The woman who crashed her car and vanished before dispatchers arrived at the scene.

Perhaps you absorbed so many stories they ended up absorbingyou.

You lose the ability to focus. Your professors’ lectures fade into the background. You fall asleep in class and stare at the ceiling at night. Your grades plummet. You stop drinking, cold turkey. You stop seeing friends. You stop texting Matt, your almost-boyfriend. You just stop.

After a while it’s just you, Julie, and the ghosts. Julie never gives up on you. “I worry about you,” she says after you get kicked out of Media Law for snoozing at your seat.

“I’m okay,” you tell her.

“No, you’re not,” she says. “It’s fine.”

“I think I just need a break,” you say.

Julie tells you that’s fine, too. So you take a break. You speak to your academic adviser and go online searching for trees, air, and silence. For the opposite of the city.

—

THE CABIN ISsmall. Ranch-style, one bedroom. Crucially, it belongs to a European woman who has installed shutters on all the windows. The woman believes in locks, in a robust security system. There, you will be safe.

The shuttered house is two hours out of Manhattan. You drain what’s left of your meager savings—four years’ worth of summer jobs, of internships fetching coffee and groceries for editors who don’t bother learning your name—to rent a car. One Sunday evening, you pack a suitcase full of leggings, soft sweaters, and quirky little books. You drive upstate. You put your clothes in the European lady’s drawers. Finally, you take a breath.

Leaving the city is like a massage for your brain. That week, you go to bed early and get up whenever the birds start singing. You keep up with schoolwork to a degree, but mostly you drink tea and read your funny little books and nap a lot. You find a nature book and study birdsong. You start believing in a new world.

—

THERE IS Aplace you like. In the woods. Not too far off the main road. You walk there in the morning, after the sun rises but before it starts giving off any warmth.

Your place is a clearing, of sorts. Grass surrounded by trees. Trees in a circle. Your place is green, then brown, then green again, and then blue. It’s always quiet, except for the softest sounds. Wind whooshing in tree leaves, swirling through blades of grass. Woodpeckers and squirrels. Birds you can’t identify despite your best efforts.

You like to sit down and close your eyes. Feel the humidity seeping through your leggings and let the ground hold you up. Tune out the world to feel yourself exist in it.

One morning, you are walking home from the clearing. You are not in the woods, exactly, but you are not in the town center, either.It’s a country road. Not enough traffic to justify a sidewalk. It’s a place where no one sees you. If you were to scream—this has occurred to you a few times—no one would hear you.

That day, there is a car. It puts its siren on. A Pavlovian response ticks through you—you hear a siren, you think the person at the wheel is in charge.

You glance behind your shoulder. It’s not a cop car. It’s a white pickup truck. Cops do that, you think. They drive unmarked cars all the time.

Through the windshield, the man behind the wheel motions for you to stop on the side of the road. You stop. A safety rule drilled into you since childhood resurfaces: you remain at a distance from the truck.

The man steps out. You take him in. Your brain sizes him up. Friend or foe, ally or attacker? Shake his hand or run?

The man looks clean. He smiles. Lines crinkle at the corners of his eyes. White teeth, parka, jeans. The hair, freshly cut. The hands, clean.

In this moment, you are ready to trust him. In this moment, you do not fear.

—

THE MAN STEPScloser. He smells nice, too. You never expect evil to smell nice. What kind of devil wears cologne?

Later on, you think about carnivorous plants. How they glow to attract insects. How they trick them with tantalizing nectars before feasting on them.

It takes you a second to see the gun, black pistol, black silencer. You see it, and then you feel it. For the first time in your life, a weapon digging into your shoulder blade.

“Don’t move,” he tells you. “If you try to run, I will hurt you. Do you understand?”

You nod your head yes.

“Wallet? Phone?”

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