Lock Every Door(26)

I recall a screech of tires.

A blast of car horn.

A panicked yelp from somewhere behind me.

Pain. Darkness.

It’s the same with my arrival in the hospital. I remember half of it. Bernard and his bright scrubs and being told the unfortunate news about the car. But I can’t recall how I got here or what, exactly, I said when I arrived.

I chalk it up to painkillers. They’ve made me light-headed.

“Let’s try another question,” Dr. Wagner says. “A witness said he saw you burst out of the Bartholomew and run right into oncoming traffic. He said you didn’t stop. Not even for a second.”

That I remember.

Even though all I want to do is forget.

“That’s right,” I say.

The doctor casts me a curious look from behind his tiny frames. “That’s not exactly normal behavior.”

“It wasn’t exactly normal circumstances.”

“It sounds to me like you ran away.”

“No,” I say. “I escaped.”





FOUR DAYS EARLIER





12


I dream of my family.

My mother. My father. Jane, looking exactly like the last time I laid eyes on her. Forever nineteen.

The three of them walk through an abandoned Central Park, the only people there. It’s night, and the park is pitch black, all its lampposts having been snuffed out. Yet my family gives off their own light, glowing a faint greenish gray as they traverse the park.

I watch their progress from the roof of the Bartholomew, where I sit next to George, one of his stone wings folded around me in a gargoyle semi-embrace.

Out in the park, my parents see me and wave. Jane calls to me, glowing hands cupped around her mouth. “You don’t belong here!” she shouts.

As soon as the words reach me, George moves his wing.

No longer hugging.

Shoving.

The stone of his wing is cold against my back as he pushes me right off the roof. Soon I’m falling, twisting in mid-air as I plummet to the sidewalk below.

I wake with a scream in my throat, on the verge of setting it free. I gulp it back down, coughing a few times in the process. Then I sit up and eye George through the window.

“Not cool, dude,” I say.

My words have barely faded in the cavernous bedroom when I hear something else.

A noise.

Coming from downstairs.

I’m not even sure it qualifies as a noise. It’s more like a sensation. An ineffable feeling that I’m not alone. If someone asked me to describe it, I wouldn’t know how. It’s not an easily definable sound. Not footsteps. Not tapping. Not even a rustle, although that’s the nearest comparison I can think of.

Motion.

That’s what it sounds like.

Something moving through space and leaving a slight whisper in its wake.

I slip out of bed and creep to the top of the steps, leaning over them to hear more. I end up hearing nothing. But the feeling—that hair-raising sensation—persists. I am not alone in this apartment.

It occurs to me that it could be Leslie Evelyn, making an early-morning check of the apartment to see if I’m following the rules. I’m sure she has a set of keys to the place. Annoyed, I throw on my tattered terrycloth robe and whisk downstairs. She said nothing about apartment checks. I wouldn’t have agreed to that.

Who am I kidding? For twelve grand, I’d agree to almost anything.

But when I get downstairs, I find the apartment empty. The door is locked and deadbolted and the chain remains undisturbed. The noise or presence or whatever the hell you want to call it was just my imagination. The foggy remnants of my nightmare.

Exhausted but too jumpy to go back to sleep, I head to the kitchen to make coffee. Instead of a quick and easy Keurig machine, the apartment has such a high-tech, absurdly complex coffeemaker that I spend several groggy minutes just turning it on. It takes so long that my body is aching for caffeine by the time coffee starts dripping into the pot.

As it brews, I go back upstairs and shower, trying to shake off the nightmare. God, what a strange, awful dream.

There have been others, of course. Not long after my parents died. Nightmares about burning beds and thick smoke and internal organs blackened by illness. Some were so wretched that Chloe had to shake me awake because my cries threatened to wake the entire dorm. But none had ever felt so true, so real. Part of me worries that if I look out the window into Central Park, my family will still be there, glowing their way across Bow Bridge.

So I spend the morning looking at clocks.

The digital alarm clock in the bedroom as I dress for the day.

The clock on the microwave as I pour the coffee that has at long last brewed.

The grandfather clock as I drink said coffee in the sitting room, counting the pairs of eyes in the wallpaper. My tally stands at sixty-four when the clock bongs out the hour. My heart sinks. It’s only nine o’clock.

When I was laid off, I was presented with a folder of resources. Job-hunting tips and career counselors and information about student loans in case I wanted to go back to school. Everything I needed to face life as someone who was officially unemployed.

What wasn’t in that folder was advice on what to do with all that sudden free time. Because here’s something else no one understands unless they’ve been there: unemployment is boring. Soul-crushingly so.