The Apartment

by S. L. Grey

  One advantage of the week is that I’m still thinking in euros, and a bottle of wine here is as cheap as a glass there. I don’t express this to Carla because I don’t want to seem cheap.

  She takes a swig of wine. “How was the hotel in the end?”

  On the flight back home I had wondered whether it was deliberate, or at least some sort of Freudian slipup—because Carla is way too self-possessed to make mistakes like that. It’s quite possible she wanted us to have a bad time, that she wanted our marriage-healing escape to fail. “We didn’t stay there after all,” is what I settle on. “Things worked out differently.” With my dark glasses as a shield, I scan her face for any clue, but there’s no admission in her features. She’s always been there for me, and I don’t think she’d ever want to sabotage my happiness.

  “Did you hear from the apartment’s owners again and find out why they never showed up at your place? Stephanie seemed so worried about them.”

  “Yes, she was. She wondered if they’d got lost or hijacked here in Cape Town, but as you know they at least had the decency to let us know they were alive.”

  “It’s so weird of them not to show up, though, isn’t it? Why advertise for a house swap, arrange for you to stay at their place, and then not turn up? It’s a real mystery.”

  “It is.” I fake a yawn, hoping it will dissuade Carla from probing further. Steph and I had been so fired up about getting to the bottom of the great Petit mystery, but now that we’re back it seems pointless to obsess over it.

  “It was nice of her to worry,” Carla says. “Stephanie’s a nice girl.”

  I ignore Carla’s tone and replay our return for a moment. “You didn’t happen to move things around at the house, did you?”

  Carla peers at me over her sunglasses. “Huh?”

  “We noticed some things were moved around a bit, as if someone had been staying there.” Carla eyes me. Maybe she brought that guy—what the hell’s his name?—around for a bit of off-site adventure. “You were very welcome to, you know, make yourself at home.”

  “I came in twice,” she says, “to water the plants and check on things for you. I didn’t ‘move anything around.’ ”

  Her tone is cold, and I don’t want her to be angry with me—the last thing I want today is another argument. “It’s fine, really. Thank you for helping. You’re always so…”

  “So what?” she says.

  “Helpful.”

  Now she snorts with a sarcastic laugh, and she’s back on form. “Yeah, right.”

  I grin at her for a second, then swill my wine. “It wasn’t all bad, though. I had a sort of epiphany there. A sense that the world is so much bigger and fuller than it seems when you’re stuck in your everyday grind.” Carla leans forward and nods, encouraging me to go on, but I find I can’t access that sentiment anymore; it feels like I’m grabbing at the threads of a long-ago dream. I look out over the parking lot below us, where a hipster is arguing with a car guard at the back of his Mini Cooper. “It was only a week, but it’s strange to be back.”

  “I know exactly what you’re saying. After two days in Richmond, which was so peaceful…the air was clean, you know. Did I tell you that Jamie Sanderson was there? You wouldn’t believe the new creature she has dangling on her arm. You’d think that she was thirty years younger. So on the first evening there, we’re invited to this dinner. Richmond’s version of a soirée, I suppose, and all the poets are supposed to come, only Terri and Marcia and their entourage have rented a minibus in Port Elizabeth and have got lost on the road. I can only imagine that a number of…” I stop listening as she launches into the full story.

  What am I doing here, really, instead of at home with my family? I know it’s nothing to do with infidelity. I’d never choose Carla over Steph if it came to that—and it’s nowhere near coming to that. It never will. Carla sometimes reminds me of who I was when I was still young and powerful, before everything went bad, and that’s the only reason I’m sitting here. And I miss Steph right now. The trip was supposed to heal us, but it just ended up a mess, and now we’re worse than ever. When she took Hayden in her arms this morning, she turned her back to me, shielding Hayden from me. She doesn’t trust me with my own daughter. I should feel glad that somehow she’s convinced herself that the cat was dead already, that I’m only deranged rather than criminally insane, standing in my underwear in a courtyard in the rain.

  I have to make this right, get her to trust me and believe me again; I don’t know how, but I do know that mentioning Zoë is not going to help, which is why I said nothing in the concourse at Johannesburg airport.

  Sitting here with Carla might not help, but I fill my wineglass again and we call over for some snacks.

  —

  It’s after nine when I get home. Someone has tipped over a trash can in my parking space and I double-park next to the neighbors’ van, tripping somehow on the edge of the car as I get out to move the trash can. As I approach it, three massive rats skitter out of the mouth of the can, and I gag as I get a noseful of the putrid stench of rot emitting from it. Stumbling back to the car, I decide to park somewhere else and find a vacant spot a few houses down.

  The house is quiet and all the lights are off; I fumble my keys into the locks and try not to slam the door as I finally get in, turning on the light in the living room as I pass. Upstairs, Hayden’s curled up with Steph in our bed, both fast asleep. I watch them in the doorway for a minute, then head down to the kitchen and raid the cupboard for a bowlful of pretzels and peanuts and pour myself a large glass of whiskey. It’s either pass out now and wake up feeling like shit at one in the morning, or keep the buzz going for a while longer.

  Steph didn’t want to move in here; she wanted us to buy a new place together. “Don’t the memories make you sad?” she’d asked, back when she used to ask such things, back when she tried to tackle my past head-on, as if confronting and naming the ghosts was the best way to exorcize them. She was young, with a naïve, vigorous optimism. But she was no match for reality. The housing market was at an ebb, and what we’d clear for the house after taxes and fees, even if we managed to sell it in this climate, would barely get us a deposit on anything else livable. With my college wage, we’d never get a full mortgage. So we cower in this tainted house from the ghosts of Odette and Zoë and of those filthy invaders.

  Perhaps I have it all wrong; perhaps we’re the invaders in this house and they want us out. Perhaps we’re the ghosts who need to be exorcized.

  Taking another slurp of my whiskey, I turn on the TV to a repeat of an English soccer match and mute the sound. I don’t know when last I had the living room to myself. By the time Hayden’s asleep, Steph and I are either so exhausted we go to bed, or we sit up and talk. After all those times I’ve wished I had some space to myself, now that I have it, the silence is not exactly welcome.

  As I settle into my usual chair, I kick off my shoes and peel off my socks, picking idly at the splinter wound in my sole. It’s healing fairly well now that I’ve been applying disinfectant to it, but it’s left a deep crack down the middle of my foot like the fissure of an earthquake. Looking back up at the game, I notice a glare on the screen—it’s coming from the light fixture set into the wall behind me. I stand up, dim the light, and adjust the set, noticing that it does seem to have shifted from its normal position. The outlines of its stand are etched in dust and scratches on the tabletop. That may have happened before we left, anytime since the burglary in fact. But Steph was right about the books in the bedroom. We never pile them on their sides, and there’s no reason Carla would have touched them. It might have been Hayden, I remind myself, but I’m not convinced. Hayden would have left them lying on the floor if she’d played with them, not stacked up neatly.

  I glance around the room as colors from the soccer match flicker over the walls. With the alcohol beginning to sour in my blood, and without Carla to blame, I start to see the room like Steph saw it yesterday. Something has been moved on the bo
okshelf in here. There’s a gap where there used to be something. I approach the shelf, aware of my own absurd timidity, but nothing leaps out at me. I crane over toward the shelf and my foot crunches on something on the floor. Crouching down, I retrieve the three photo frames from where they’ve fallen and line them back up on the shelf. The glass has come completely out of one that Steph’s father took last year—Steph, Hayden, me, and Rina outside the B and B—and is spiderwebbed over the other two.

  I put my drink down on the shelf next to the photos and go to the kitchen to fetch a dustpan. For some reason I remember Odette standing there, rolling pastry at the butcher block. This was before Zoë even. I remember those nights, my new wife standing in our new home, dusted with flour, sticky hands. I’d sneak up to her and lick her neck, knowing she wouldn’t want to touch anything with her hands. She’d laugh and lean back into me.

  I shake off the ghost and rummage under the sink for the dustpan, and as I come back out and pass the stairs, there’s a light on up there. I could swear the house was totally dark when I came home. I creep upstairs, wincing as the wood squeaks. The light is coming from Hayden’s room.

  Just walk away, part of me is yelling. Leave it alone, that part shouts, spooling images across my mind. God, cowardice is so tempting. But there are two possibilities—someone is up there, or someone isn’t. It’s that simple. More likely, there’s nobody there, but if there are masked bogeymen in my daughter’s bedroom, I can’t let them stay there and threaten my family, not again. Before I think anymore, I twist the doorknob and push into the bedroom.

  My heart lurches as I scan the room and check behind the door. There’s nobody there—but…

  There’s Zoë’s Princess Ariel doll lying on Hayden’s nightstand, hair roughly docked down to the spotted rubber scalp. It should be safely sealed away at the bottom of the pantry, taped up with all of Zoë’s other toys. The princess stares up at me with injured, accusing eyes.

  She’s right. I killed her.

  I was so tired. Odette had been in the hospital the night before and was due to take a taxi home that morning, but the doctors wanted to keep her in for another few hours and I’d made the mistake of taking an equally tired Zoë to do the grocery shopping. She’d been acting up—withdrawn and sullen and then suddenly shrieking in faked laughter about some joke she wasn’t sharing. I started to get ratty with her and it ended in a meltdown in the car. I’d let her into the house, and after I’d hauled the groceries inside, I saw that she’d settled down to a game on the living room carpet. I knew none of this was her fault, and I was overwhelmed with pride in how she was coping and at the same time appalled that my seven-year-old daughter would even have to cope with something so crappy and that there was nothing I could really do about it. I gave her a box of Smarties and a bowl of chips—a Saturday treat—and we cuddled on the couch to watch Toy Story. She started to jiggle her leg and I snapped at her and she started to cry, so I apologized and went to find a bottle of Odette’s tranquilizers, which she took on particularly bad days. I didn’t want to take out my exhaustion on Zoë. I didn’t think the pills were so strong as I curled back up on the couch, feeling better.

  In my dream I was swimming with Odette and Zoë. We were in a pool at the seaside, at an apartment in Knysna we’d rented the year before. Zoë was lining up pebbles on the first step of the pool, Odette looking down at her. I was at the far end of the pool but I couldn’t see them well because the wind was blowing leaves and dust between us, stinging my eyes. The leaves turned to crows, then to a huge black storm cloud, and I was trying to call out to them and warn them to come inside, but they couldn’t hear me. There was no sound at all. The wind was silent. Then instantly the dust dropped and the sky was blue again and I zoomed in to Odette’s face, smiling down blankly at Zoë as she contentedly lined up her stones, her hair dropping out in skeins, her body withering away as I watched. I tried to swim toward them, but I couldn’t move. Now there was a sound of a cat beside me, puking up hairballs, and somehow it was stopping me from approaching my family. Whenever I pushed with my arm—hack, hack, choke—the gasping sound held me back. My kicking ankles collared with a hack, hack, gasp.

  Odette dropped her keys when she saw me, cradling Zoë’s body, her face blue, vomit frothing her lips, the bottle of bright, Smartie-colored pills empty now, killing my daughter as I failed her.

  I pumped and pushed at her corpse, wanting to reverse time, wanting to take all the poison she’d swallowed and have it for myself. I wanted to die instead of her. I was still pumping, but it was way too late when Odette raised me and shoved me away.

  Now I hurry back downstairs to the pantry and check Zoë’s boxes. There’s no reason they should have been touched, but space—seven years of meaningless things I’ve used to block them away—has been cleared away, and Zoë’s life and all her favorite bristle-haired princesses are spilling from the worn cardboard.

  It makes sense to me immediately. I can’t shove her away, out of sight. We are the ghosts in this house—Steph, Hayden, and me. Zoë wants her home back.

  I know what she wants me to do. I open Hayden’s closet and scratch under the piles of bedding and old clothes until I reach the sealed plastic zip-bag and drag it out. I strip Hayden’s bed and work the duvet into Zoë’s cover, the orange and gray chevrons she’d chosen just a few months before because she was getting too old for the Powerpuff Girls. Lilac fitted sheet and salmon pillowcases. It’s only when I finally bundle Hayden’s bedding together, ready to dump it in the hall, that I notice Steph’s watching me from the doorway.

  Chapter 16

  Steph

  We caught a shuttle home from the airport, and at first, the house appeared to be exactly as we’d left it. The only immediate sign of disarray was a scattering of stamens from the arrangement of stargazer lilies I’d placed on the hall table for the Petits, but otherwise the place still smelled pleasantly of furniture wax. As Mark disengaged the alarm, I waited for the anxiety that had taken root after the home invasion to flood in. It didn’t. Nor was I relieved to be back in Cape Town, although the clear sky and midday heat should have cheered me after the gray pall and freezing temperatures of the past week.

  It was just a house after all, nothing but bricks and mortar. Familiar and far more comfortable than the Petits’ hellhole, but not loved. At least not by me.

  Mark sloped off to the kitchen to make coffee, leaving me to drag the suitcases up to the bedroom. I was desperate to shower, wash my hair, and brush my teeth, and I didn’t notice anything was awry until I’d dried off and started rummaging in my drawer for clean underwear. My usually carefully matched socks were separated and jumbled up with my bras. I’d almost convinced myself that I must have scrambled them up during the chaos of packing for the trip, when my eye strayed to the bookshelf next to the bureau. My Tana French and Ann Cleeves novels—the books not deemed worthy enough to be on display on the shelves downstairs—were now positioned in a horizontal pile. I was certain I hadn’t done that. And the dressing table itself looked like it had shifted a couple of inches—there were fresh scratches on the wooden floor around it.

  Panic surged. The cops had told us that thieves often return to the scene of the crime to steal the goods replaced by insurance payouts. But no. They couldn’t have got in. We’d have known about it. Nothing else was missing. The only explanation was that Carla had been through my stuff. She was the only one with a key. How dare she? At the very least she could have been less blatant about it. Something made me pull the duvet back. A single blond hair lay curled on the white sheet on my side of the bed. I gingerly plucked it off the fabric, dropped it into the toilet, and washed my hands. Did it belong to one of Carla’s boy toys? Had she fucked one of her disposable boyfriends in our bed? There were no other signs that someone had slept in it—the sheets were uncreased and still smelled of fabric softener—but I ripped them off the mattress anyway and hurled them into the laundry basket.

  Next, I checked Hayden’s room. T
he door was shut—exactly as I’d left it—and I didn’t get the sense that anyone had been in there. Her little army of soft toys were still lined up on the window ledge, and her clothes were neatly folded in the drawers. I sat on the bed and waited for the internal turmoil to recede.

  When I came downstairs, Mark was sitting at the kitchen table, sorting through the junk mail, the iPad in front of him.

  He glanced at me distractedly. “You feeling better after your shower?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Carla’s been snooping through our stuff. Through my stuff, I mean.” I couldn’t keep the resentment out of my voice.

  “Eh?”

  “She’s been poking through my underwear drawer.”

  “You think Carla’s been through your underwear? Why would she do that?”

  “How would I know? And it’s not just that. She’s been messing with my books as well. They’re not as I left them.”

  “What exactly are you accusing her of, Steph? Are you sure about this?”

  “All I’m saying is can you ask her if she touched or moved anything in the house while we were away? I mean, it’s not exactly kosher, is it?”

  He shook his head. “Right. So, let’s see. She agreed to meet the Petits for us and hung around for hours when they were a no-show. Then she made inquiries about them for us—which as far as I’m concerned was going above and beyond. And then when we were in dire straits she booked us a hotel—”

  “For the wrong date.”

  “It was an honest mistake, Steph. We owe her big-time, and all you can do is accuse her of going through your stuff? So what if she read a couple of your books? What’s wrong with you?”

  With me? With fucking me? I bit the retort back. “I didn’t mean anything by it, Mark. I’m grateful to Carla; I really am.” Lies, of course. If it weren’t for her, we wouldn’t have gone to Paris in the first place.