Page 35 of The Quiet Tenant

At breakfast, Cecilia, between bites of scrambled eggs, asks her dad if the thing is today. He asks if she means the race and she says yes and he says yes, too. She groans.

“It’ll be fine,” he tells her. “It won’t last that long.”

After breakfast, he takes you back to the room. He doesn’t explain. You don’t ask. You wait for him to be gone and curl up into a ball. The pain has begun to dull around the edges of your abdomen, but it is still here. Still bending you in half.

Hours later, the front door opens and slams shut, then immediately opens again.

“Cecilia!”

You smile at his pissed-off yelp. She must have beaten him to the door by a second and slammed it in his face. A daughter openly, explosively, angry at her father.

Furious steps pound up the stairs. Another door bangs, closer to you—Cecilia’s room. His own steps—heavy, purposeful, quick but never rushing—follow.

“Cecilia!”

He knocks on her door. A muffled voice tells him to go away. Silence, then a sigh. He makes his way back to the other end of the hallway, then down the stairs.

That kid. His kid. In this moment, you love her so much.

Later in the day, you hear him busy himself in the kitchen. He comes and uncuffs you for dinner. He and Cecilia eat in silence, eyes on their mac and cheese. Halfway through the meal, he makes a new attempt.

“I was helping a friend. That’s all.”

She keeps chewing her food.

“Cecilia. I’m talking to you.”

She looks up, eyes narrowed. “You were ignoring me,” she says. “I didn’t want to go, but you dragged me to this thing. And then you made us stay the entire morning. And you completely forgot about me.”

You assume the thing in question is the race he mentioned at breakfast, the one he promised wouldn’t take up too much of their day. Cecilia stabs the contents of her bowl with her fork. You know that combination of facial expressions—gaze down, jaw clenched, brows furrowed. She’s holding back tears. You feel an urge to pull her into you, to hold her tight. Rock her back and forth like you hope her mother used to.

“Do you have any idea,” she asks him, “how fucking boring that judge guy is?”

He says something about language. She doesn’t listen, doesn’t apologize. Instead, she pushes her bowl to the side and gets up. He goes to grab her arm, but she swats him away and storms back upstairs. You watch so intently you forget to breathe. He’s going to explode, you think. He’s going to run after her. He will drag her back to the kitchen by her hair if he must. He will remind her who’s in charge.

But he doesn’t move. His gaze trails after his daughter and lands on her empty chair. He stares at it for a few moments, then retrieves his phone from his pocket. Unlocks the screen, checks it, and puts the phone back where it came from. A sigh. His leg bobs up and down. He’s impatient. Waiting, you would guess, for something that hasn’t arrived yet.

He takes you back up after dinner. He’ll return in a few hours, once his daughter is asleep and the house quiet. For now, he wants you back where you can’t hurt him, in the room, handcuffed to the radiator.

You go first. That’s how he prefers it. Always makes you walk in front of him, where he can see you. He opens the door to the room and nudges you in.

Your foot lands on something soft. In the dark, you can’t tell what it is, but you know that you don’t want him to see.

“What was that?” you ask, tilting your head to the side, as if listening intently. It’s not subtle, but it’s the only strategy you can think of. He stops, listens up. With your foot, you nudge the soft item in the direction of the bed, pray that your aim is right.

“I can’t hear anything,” he says.

“Must have been a bird or something. Sorry.”

He sighs, resumes motioning you inside, shuts the door. When he switches the light on, the item is nowhere to be seen.

You wait for the post-dinner part of the evening to be over. Some nights, you can hear him and Cecilia downstairs, chatting. Tonight, there is only silence.

You squint, try to peer under the bed, but you can’t see. Can’t even make out the contours of whatever you just hid there.

You hear water running through pipes, the toilet flushing. Cecilia must be brushing her teeth, getting ready for bed. Her bedroom door shuts for the last time today.

You wait for the world to go still. The doorknob rattles. A father steps in, closes the door behind him. He does to you the things he has decided must be done to somebody.

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