Audrey’s Door

by Sarah Langan

  They were laughing when the doorbell rang, and Jayne hopped up in her lone high heel, leaving her crutches on the floor. “It’s Jay Leno!” she announced. “He needs me to save his ass.”

  “You know, a boot would be better for your knee,” Audrey said.

  “Better than Leno? I do not think so,” Jayne said as she hopped down the hall.

  Still seated, Audrey scooted in her chair until she turned 180 degrees. “Are you answering my door?” she asked. “It’s very rude.”

  Jayne’s face was pressed against the peephole. “It’s a guy. He’s really big. Like he could lift a car.”

  Audrey’s ears got hot. “Brown skin? Short black hair?”

  “Yup.”

  Audrey got up and walked down the hall. Jayne stepped aside. She didn’t look through the peephole. She was afraid he’d able to see her eye.

  “Audrey, you in there? I need to talk to you.” This time, he didn’t slur.

  She turned and started in the other direction. Jayne hopped after her. “Are you going to open it?”

  Audrey stopped and leaned against a wall in the hall.

  Clack-clack!

  He banged the knocker, and they both jumped. Then he used his fists: Bam! Bam! “Please. Let me in. It’s important.” The sound of his voice resonated in her chest. She wished she could be like the normal people of the world who, in her place, would probably not want to pee their pants right now or smoke so much hash they saw stars.

  “Audrey!” he called again. She got the feeling he could see her through the wood. Right into the hall, and her eyes, all the way to the curved sockets of her skull. Into her thoughts. She touched her throat, and thought, I’m wounded, and you know it. So why do you keep knocking?

  She pressed her cheek against cool plaster. Jayne leaned against the opposing wall and wrapped her arms around her waist like a lonely hug.

  “Does he hit you?” Jayne whispered with the phlegmy rasp of a habitual smoker. In the gray light, her eyes shone bright and wet. Audrey understood then, why Jayne called men five times a day. She needed reassurance. She expected the worst from them because the worst was all she’d ever known.

  Oh, Jayne, you poor thing, she thought. She considered taking the girl’s hand in her own, but it wasn’t her way to touch other people, so instead she matched Jayne’s honesty with her own. “He’s never hit me, but I worry. He holds it in. I’m afraid he’ll burst. He used to hit the walls when I wasn’t home…There’s this place in his study nook with holes in the drywall from his fists”

  Jayne nodded like, of course, she’d expected this. Weren’t all women afraid of getting hit? On the other side of the door, Saraub slammed the brass knocker into wood three times: Clack!-Clack!-Clack!

  Audrey looked down the drab hall and the doors that opened upon cavernous rooms. She remembered what Jayne had helped her forget: murder had happened here. New grout and Home Depot tiles didn’t change the truth: this was a bad place.

  “How long have you been together?” Jayne asked. Her cheeks were boozily flushed, and runny eyeliner had congealed into black gook in the corners of her eyes. She acted late twenties, but looking at her in the harsh hall light, Audrey realized with some shock that she had to be at least forty.

  Audrey looked down at her turquoise pumps and tried to forget the lines cut into Jayne’s cheeks like scored glass. Tried to see Jayne the way she wanted and deserved to be seen: fresh and young and fearless. “We’ve been together two and a half years…” she said.

  Jayne answered in a whisper. “That’s a long time. I don’t know for sure, but I think he’d have done it by now.”

  “Probably,” Audrey said. “But it’s still not a good sign.”

  “If you love him, you should answer it.” Jayne fixed her eyes on Audrey, like she was willing her to be brave, because maybe she didn’t think she’d ever find love, but she wanted it for her friends.

  “Bam!” Saraub knocked again, but she could tell that he was getting tired, and the knocks were becoming less frequent. Soon, he’d give up and go home. And pretty soon after that, he’d move on and find someone else. It can happen like that, even when it’s the real thing: love dies all the time.

  “I should answer it, shouldn’t I?”

  Jayne’s dimples deepened. “Well, duh! He’s a total hottie.”

  Audrey took a breath and headed for the door. She realized then, that if Jayne hadn’t been with her, she would never have answered the intercom. She would have stayed in this vast, miserable apartment, lit only by the light of the television, as she’d rearranged the furniture, or God help her, worked on that door, and the night had passed into day. And another day. And another. Until this mistake of an apartment became her prison. Thank God for Jayne.

  As she pulled the latch on the door, Saraub banged once more: Bam!

  Then, suddenly, an old woman shrieked, “No subletting! I’m calling the police!”

  This was followed by another raspy, feminine shout: “She’s not home. Leave her alone!”

  And then a baritone: “What’s this, young man? You don’t live here!”

  Audrey swung the door wide and wondered for a moment if she’d accidentally moved into an old-age home. About ten residents were standing in the hall. Unlike at Betty’s loony bin, none had shoulder dandruff, or drooled. Instead, their hair plugs, wigs, and sprayed-over bald spots were coiffed into Claudette Colbert curls and dapper pomade comb-overs. A few clutched gimlet glasses filled with brown liquid and cherries—Manhattans? They wore cocktail dresses or dapper suits that had faded over the years, but were fine nonetheless. Their skin was pulled taut, so she could see the ridges of their skulls and blue veins. More surgery. Some of it was good, some of it, horrific. It was close to midnight on a Monday night, and these fossils had been having a cocktail party.

  One of the old men was even wearing a white porcelain mask with holes for his eyes and nose, but no space for his mouth. She thought he might be recovering from a recent, drastic procedure. Galton—Jayne had mentioned him.

  The old lady from 14C next door—Mrs. Parker—had traded her dressing gown for a sequined black cocktail dress that revealed dimpled chicken legs. Bad. Worse, her orange lipstick feathered along the skin of her upper lip. “No subletters!” she shrilled.

  “I don’t like strangers. They give me terrible dreams,” Galton mumbled through his mask.

  A tall man wearing a bow-tie tuxedo bellowed, “Siamese twins belong in Siam!” He banged what looked like Edgardo’s knobby cane…In a fit of senility, had he stolen from his own super?

  “Shaaddup, Evvie Waugh, before I throw a drink at you!” Mrs. Parker shrieked back at him.

  The guy closest to Audrey’s apartment crouched, so that his center of gravity was level, then raised his Parkinson’s-shaking dukes at Saraub like he was going to throw a punch. His face got so red that she thought it might burst: “You leave the little lady alone!”

  Audrey’s eyes met Saraub’s, and they exchanged a single, half-formed thought: what the hell?

  Saraub lifted his hands above his head, open palms facing out. Sweat rolled down his thick, black brows, and he wiped it away with his raised shoulders. His wax jacket lay in a crinkled pile in front of her feet, where he must have dropped it.

  Parkinson’s didn’t budge. Audrey feared that the stress would give him a coronary seizure.

  “I’m sorry,” she announced to the cocktail party. “It’s fine. Please, it’s a personal matter. I hope we didn’t disturb you.”

  Instead of backing away, the shaking old man inched closer, like he’d decided she was a battered wife defending her abusive man.

  Evvie Waugh (14D?) lifted the knobby cane like a baseball bat, and got ready to swing. The sight was both terrible and ludicrous.

  Saraub panted, and his eyes bugged. He hated getting in trouble, even imaginary trouble. “Really, folks. It’s fine,” she called out.

  Jayne peeped her head from behind Audrey’s shoulder and waved at them. �
�It’s fine!” she agreed with bouncing, irrepressible delight. “We were having a girls’ night!”

  Audrey put her hand on Saraub’s back and he lowered his arms. “This is my boyfriend”—she winced at the misuse of the word, but now wasn’t the time for fine distinctions—“I’m very, very sorry. We don’t usually fight…This won’t be a regular midnight show,” she said. “You can all go back to…. your party.”

  “Boyfriend! Edgardo said she was single. I wasn’t expecting it. I don’t like surprises. Party’s over! My whole night is ruined!” Mrs. Parker screeched, then stomped back into 14C.

  Evvie lowered the knobby cane. He, Galton, and a handful of others followed Mrs. Parker back to 14C, where Audrey imagined they’d been having a Bengay orgy. They smelled like it. Thank God for soundproof, plaster walls.

  “Just as long as you’re okay,” Parkinson’s announced to Audrey without ever looking at Saraub.

  “Marty Hearst, she’s fine,” Jayne told the shaking man. Then she waved her hand at him like it was a broom, sweeping him away: “Skedaddle!”

  Sheepishly, Marty Hearst dropped his dukes and retreated with the others. Drinks in hands, the rest of them meandered toward the apartment near the fire stairs.

  “Good night, everybody,” Audrey called, then picked up Saraub’s wax jacket from the floor where he’d dropped it and entered 14B. Hopping at her heels, Jayne followed. Saraub brought up the rear and shut and locked the door behind him.

  “Bananas!” Audrey announced.

  14

  We Pick Our Own Families

  They walked down the fifty-foot hall. Though they’d never met, Saraub took Jayne’s upper arm and helped her as she limped.

  “Jayne,” Audrey heard her say, and he answered, “Saraub Ramesh. Pleased to meet you. Do you live in the building?” He sounded flustered, but polite.

  When they got to the den, he helped Jayne into the fold-out chair, seeming immediately to understand that she required kid gloves. Jayne grinned, delighted by the attention.

  “That was, indeed, bananas,” he said to Audrey.

  She smiled. “Yes, but could you have taken Marty?”

  He shook his head, like she was incorrigible. “Funny girl.” Then he picked up the mostly empty bottle of wine and pointed it at her. “Liquid dinner?” His eyes followed her shape from turquoise pumps to coffee-stained blouse, and the slack belt that cinched nothing, in between. “Looks like too many liquid dinners.”

  She shrugged. “The breakfast of champions.” She was out of breath as she spoke. Surprisingly nervous. Surprisingly happy. What if he’d come here to apologize? What if she left with him right now and never had to breathe the depressing air of this apartment ever ever EVER again?

  “You should know that my phone got stolen by a band of roving dwarfs. I hope you didn’t call and get hung up on by one of them,” she added.

  “Oh, I just thought that was you, being a bi—” he didn’t finish, and looked down.

  “Bird?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Something like that.” Their eyes met. She willed herself not to look away.

  Jayne grinned ear to ear like a kid, and Audrey felt a swell of affection for her, and Saraub, and even for herself. They were all pretty okay people. You make me happy, she wanted to tell him, and Jayne, too.

  Saraub sighed, as if just then remembering something. “I came here for a reason. Can we talk alone?” he asked.

  Audrey nodded. “Yeah, but Jayne’s my friend. It’s fine.”

  A car alarm resounded, beeping and thrumping like a siren getting closer, then farther away. He closed the turret window. Doubled birds became single. The room got darker, and the air thickened. She hated this apartment, she really did. She hated everything it represented, too.

  “It’s bad news. You should sit down.” His grin had gone from tense to rictus. She noticed that he was wearing a suit instead of his usual corduroys. A job interview? Had Maginot Lines finally gotten backing?

  “I tried to get you at work, and here, too. I stopped by a few hours ago, but you weren’t home yet.”

  “What?” she asked, still without sitting. She tried to sound natural, but her voice had a frog in it. Was he leaving town?

  Saraub squatted, so that they were eye to eye. “The hospital’s emergency contact was the landline at our apartment,” he said. “I didn’t give them your cell-phone number. Maybe I should have, but I wanted it to come from me.”

  Something clicked. It took her a second, her mind raced forward, then back. At first it was a possibility, then she knew without a doubt. There was only one thing it could be.

  “There was an emergency at the Nebraska State Psychiatric Hospital?” she asked.

  Saraub nodded.

  She got breathless. In her mind, the birds flapped their wings inside the stained glass but couldn’t break free, and the rotted floor under the piano opened along broken, uneven lines. Something intelligent, but not sane crept out. She looked down at the wood, and thought about how high up she was—the fourteenth floor. What hubris to believe that men could erect buildings in the clouds and trust that they didn’t collapse into ashes. What hubris to believe that she’d escaped the Midwest, when all along, it had only been biding its time, waiting to snap her back. Clever Betty.

  Her knees buckled, but Saraub clamped his hand around her upper arm and held her steady. Crippled Jayne reached up from her seat, and held her other arm with an ice-cold claw.

  She knew what had happened. Betty had gone AWOL, just like in Omaha, and Hinton, and Sioux City. “Have they looked in the bars nearby? That’s usually the first place. I’ll need them to come up with a list. Or maybe you guys could help.”

  Saraub pushed her down into a chair, and then knelt in front of her. His skin had gotten sallow since she left. Drinking? Eating every meal out? The man was good at taking care of other people but terrible at taking care of himself. She regretted that it hadn’t occurred to her to worry about him until now.

  “Audrey,” he said.

  She nodded, to let him know that yes, she was ready for this. She was prepared.

  “Your mother tried to kill herself. She’s in a coma.”

  15

  Children’s Hour

  It didn’t hit her. She didn’t believe it. “You’re sure? Betty Lucas?”

  Saraub nodded. “Positive. Betty Lucas. Nebraska State Psychiatric Hospital. An overdose. She’d been hoarding her pills, they think.”

  “A suicide,” Audrey heard herself say. Her tongue was dry and flopping in her mouth. “She cycled again.”

  Saraub let out a breath. “That’s the word they used, too…They said you needed to get out there right away if you want to see her before…”

  She nodded and touched her throat, which was dry. “Did they tell you what pills, or when?”

  He shrugged. Only one bulb in the ceiling was working, so the room was pretty dark. The television still played, but someone had turned down the volume. His shiny face and the water in his eyes reflected the miserly light. “I don’t remember what pills. But I checked the airports—there’s a flight out of JFK tomorrow morning through the Twin Cities, to Omaha.”

  “Lithium? Depakote?”

  He nodded. “That’s right. Lithium, I think.”

  She let out a breath. Bad sign. Most people don’t wake up from lithium comas, and even if they do, the brain damage ruins them.

  “They said…she’s dying. So if you want to see her, you’ll have to leave first thing.”

  “Dying,” she said. In her mind she rearranged. She placed dishes atop one another, stacked papers and topiaries and engraved mourning walls. (How many dead over the years, the centuries? They piled and piled, the ghosts of this world. There weren’t enough living to mourn them.)

  “Yeah. That’s what they said.”

  In her mind, she repeated all the things he’d told her, and heard him. Her mother and best friend had tried to kill herself.

  It was then that her thou
ghts kaleidoscoped into discrete segments of shock, pretty and fragile as stained glass. She looked around the room, and like a compound-eyed insect, saw each shard clearly:

  There was the green Parkside Plaza, whose design was too cold. For the first time, she understood why she’d never liked the feel of grass between her toes, or dogs, or countertop clutter; she was frightened of them because they were unpredictable, like her mother.

  There was yellow Jayne, who’d played cheerful for so long now to mask her sorrow that even she could not distinguish the woman from the act.

  There was blue Saraub, holding her hand. Like her mother had predicted so many years ago, she’d broken the heart of a man she hadn’t wanted.

  There was the black Breviary, which she knew right then, without doubt, was haunted.

  The center of the kaleidoscope was red, and in it she saw weeping Betty Lucas. An abandoned wretch in a backless hospital gown, no family save the daughter who never called.

  The kaleidoscope narrowed until there was only Betty, and for a moment everything around her went red, too. The air, the floors, Saraub’s shirt, Jayne’s gauze bandage. All like blood.

  Saraub knelt at her chair. “It’s okay,” he said, with his lips so close to her ear that she could feel their warmth. The sound of his voice echoed at first, then went dead, like something in the walls was stealing his words as they reverberated. She knew in that moment that Edgardo and the movers had been right. She was too emotional. Her heartbreak, first from Saraub, and now this, had roused something terrible.

  Her grief made all these things clear, and fleeting. They existed as a distraction, flitting about the memories of Betty that were too painful to bear.

  Her eyes watered, and to steel herself from a crying jag, she thought about the broken promise Betty had made to her, so many years ago. That lost photo. Thought about the lines on her wrists, unacknowledged. Those bullshit coveralls with holes in all the wrong places.

  Her eyes dried, and in the place of tears, a slithering thing radiated from her stomach to the edges of her skin. It unfurled as it grew like a vine. Black spores of rot in berry clusters hung from its branches. It filled first her chest, then her limbs, and the space between her ears, and then her eyes, so that she lost the knowledge of color, and finally, her mouth, so that even her appetites were gone. The spores of fury were dry and bitter. They shriveled her insides, smaller and smaller.