Page 13 of The Quiet Tenant

“So, what,” Yuwanda continues, “she stopped at the store and then went for a hike? Who goes hiking that late?”

Eric takes a sip of his beer. “Maybe she wanted to watch the sunset?”

Cora shakes her head. “Nah. First of all, the sun sets earlier than that now. At seven, she would’ve had nothing left to watch. And why bother going to the trails? I know that town. You can see the sunset from just about anywhere.”

I go to take another sip of Ryan’s pumpkin sour, then settle for a whiff and set my glass down. There’s something I can’t make sense of. “Why are they even focusing on the trails?”

Cora looks down, a slight admission of defeat. “They found her shoe in the brush,” she concedes. “But I don’t know. It’s just a shoe. It doesn’t explain why she’d go on a hike that late in the day, and by herself, too.”

Eric pats her arm. “People do weird stuff all the time,” he tells her softly. “It happens.”

“Eric’s not wrong,” I say. “Accidents do happen.”

No one challenges me. People look down at their drinks, at the rings of condensation they’ve left on Ryan’s table. You don’t argue with an orphan who tells you accidents happen. My father: a heart attack on a sunny Saturday morning two years ago; my mother: a car crash in the haze that followed.

“Anyway,” Nick says after a few beats. “I heard some chef from the city bought the building where Mulligan’s used to be. He’s turning it into a steakhouse, apparently.” He turns to me with what could pass for an air of gentle ribbing: “Maybe he’ll tell you where he gets his sirloin, if you ask nicely.”

I sigh. “You know, Nick, I think it’s really healthy how you don’t sweat the small stuff. When people ask me what I love most about my head chef, I always tell them he’s a real big-picture guy.”

The line gets smiles from Eric and Yuwanda. Everyone else chooses to sit this one out. I would, too, if I had to spend fifty hours a week in a kitchen with Nick and a wide array of butcher knives.

A couple of hours later, Eric drives us back to the house that used to be my parents’, which I now share with him and Yuwanda. It was one of those arrangements that fell into place because it had to. They both showed up the day after the car crash and took care of me the way only childhood friends can. They kept the fridge full, made sure I ate and slept, at least a little. They helped me plan two funerals at once. They kept me company when I couldn’t be alone and gave me space when I needed it. Somewhere along the way, we agreed it would be better if they never left. The house was too big for just me. Selling it would have required some remodeling, which was out of the question. So we moved my parents’ stuff into storage one weekend and collapsed on the couch at the end of the day, our new equilibrium sealed. Imperfect and slightly unusual. The only thing that made sense.

Tonight, I toss and turn, exhausted but unable to fall asleep. I think about the missing woman. Melissa. All that’s left of her: a first name, a job, the name of a town, a shoe found near a trail. Like the eulogies people gave for my parents, accurate but desperately lacking.My father’s life pared down to a few words: he was a chef, he was a dad, he worked hard. The pieces of my mother’s existence, like the other half of a puzzle: she ran the business, she was the hostess, she was the bookkeeper, she was the glue that kept it all together. All true, but nothing that captured them as people. Nothing about my father’s smile, my mother’s perfume. Nothing about what it felt like to live with them, to be raised by them, to be loved and abandoned by them in equal measures.

I go back to the missing woman, try filling in the gaps in her narrative. It feels treacherous, using her as a blank canvas to make her up the way I want to, but something about her story has a hold on my brain.

Maybe she was a bit like me.Was—look at me, thinking of her in the past when we don’t know yet. Maybe she, too, grew up at once captivated and terrified by the world. Maybe she was made to wear dresses when she preferred pants. Maybe she was made to say hi to the grown-ups when she wanted to be alone. Maybe she learned to always feel a little uncomfortable, always a little sorry. Maybe she grew up and waited for a teenage rebellion that never came, and maybe when she reached her mid-twenties she regretted never getting the angst out of her system.

This is the story I tell myself. No one’s around to tell me it doesn’t make sense. It starts out as a tribute and ends in selfishness. It isn’t about her. Not really. It’s about me and the parts of my life that find me in the dark. It’s about me and my younger self and the way she looks at me, the way she keeps calling out to me, demanding answers I don’t have.

CHAPTER 9

The woman in the shed, when she was still a girl

The warning signs come in 2001, the year of your tenth birthday. Your best friend’s mom gets cancer. Your cousin’s apartment is ransacked, her priciest possessions gone overnight. Your aunt dies. Each time, the lesson becomes a little clearer: bad things happen to people you know.

You start suspecting that bad things might, one day, happen to you. Somewhere in a corner of your heart, you hope to be exempt. Until now, you’ve had a blessed life. Loving parents who taught you how to ride your bike in Riverside Park, an older brother who doesn’t treat you like an idiot. Fairies leaned over your crib and gave you these beautiful things. Why should your good fortune run out?

Your childhood ends with the hope pretty much intact. Then, the teenage years begin, and the journey gets rockier. Your brother takes the pills. A first time, a second time. You learn to feel sad. You learn to occupy the hole in your parents’ heart, the one that yearns for a golden child. You turn fifteen. You are ready for someone to see who you really are. You are ready for someone to love the true you.

At a ski resort, you kiss a boy for the first time. What you remember from this moment: his heart beating against yours, the smell of his hair gel, the glow of snowplows making shapes on the walls of your rented room. After you go home, it becomes apparent that the boy has no intention of calling you, ever. You learn heartbreak. It will take you longer to recover from this than from actual breakups as an adult. Summer comes. You begin to heal.

Two years later, you meet your first boyfriend. He’s perfect. If they marketed mail-order-boyfriend services to teens, you would have picked him. If a witch had gifted you a lump of clay with the ability to come to life, you would have molded him.

You take the work of being a girlfriend seriously. This is your first chance to prove yourself in this area, and you want to do everything right. You take him to see Duke Ellington’s grave at WoodlawnCemetery. For his birthday, you buy a multitude of tiny presents—a music box that plays theLove Storytheme, a weed lollipop, theCatcher in the Ryepaperback with the horse on the cover—and hide them on your body, stuffed in your back pockets and tucked into the waistband of your jeans. When the time comes to give him his gifts, you tell him to search. He puts his hands on you.

You’ve never had sex. He has. He’s six months older than you. You’re in no rush to grow up. You know this is something you should feel ashamed of, but you aren’t. Not enough to change your mind.

But you do the other stuff, and it’s good to be with a guy who knows what to do. You let him slip his hands underneath your shirt. You let him unclasp your bra with two fingers. You let him pop open the button of your jeans. After that, you tense up, and he can tell. He stops. He always stops.

Around the two-month mark, you think about ending it. Instead, you let yourself fall in love. One sunny afternoon in July, you lie beneath the trees on the Columbia campus and realize it’s been six months. People tell you how lucky you are, that a guy like him has stayed with a girl like you for this long without pressuring you into sex. You smile and say you know.

And you do know. You can’t believe he’s yours. Sometimes, he falls asleep, or maybe he pretends to. All you know is he’s here and his eyes are closed and even though your arm is numb you can’t imagine removing it from underneath his head. You’re seventeen. Love tastes even sweeter than you expected.

One night, your parents drive to New Jersey for a fundraiser. He comes over. You “watch a movie,” code for making out. Two weeks ago, the two of you “watched”Requiem for a Dream.You couldn’t quote a line from that movie if your life depended on it.

That night, it’sFight Club.You’ve never seen it. He, like all the boys, says it’s his favorite. It doesn’t matter. Nothing aboutFight Clubmatters. What matters is his skin against your skin and the warmth of his breath on your face. His fingers in your hair, on your thighs, between your legs. You feel so adventurous, so happy you’ve found him to guide you. This is what the magazines told you to look for: Someone you like and who likes you back. A boy you can trust.

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