I hear a door shut upstairs so heavy, it must be the front door. I wait, give her enough time to walk up the steps, unlock and relock the gate. Then I bang on the bathroom door until my knuckles go numb. I yell, “Hey! Hey! Wake up.”
I am shivering now from the cold inside this dark house but also from something else.
If I run now, I can still catch the woman upstairs. Maybe she can help me. I race to the front door, then pull up short. Help me. The words are sown on the backs of my lips.
If the woman in the bathroom is dead—I’m not saying she is but if—and I am here with her . . .
I take a deep breath. Try to focus on the facts:
If she took the drugs Michael gave her.
If she is dead.
And I am here with her.
And who am I? A woman on the street who followed her home.
And she took drugs.
Why am I here?
I don’t think the truth—that I wanted to help her home, that I wanted to see her house, just to see how the other half lived—will fly far.
Who am I? To the police, I am her dealer. I am a woman on the street who sold her the drugs that killed her.
At the very least, I am the woman on the street who left her to die.
Last night, I stopped knocking on the door. I climbed into her swing. I let myself fall asleep. Did I know she was dead? Did I trick myself? Did my mind and my body collaborate against me to let her die so I could sleep one night in a nice house?
You’re a bad, bad person. But that can’t be true. I didn’t know. I still don’t know. The reasonable explanation is . . . The reasonable explanation was . . .
She’s asleep. She was drunk and she’s passed out asleep.
I don’t want to look. And if I don’t look, if I never know for sure, she can live forever in my mind.
I start toward the door. Then I stop.
Maybe she isn’t dead. I need her to be alive. To save her. To save me.
And I can’t leave now.
The woman upstairs saw me. She knows my face, could describe me. If the woman in the bathroom is dead, it’s manslaughter. If I walk away, they will think I’m guilty.
You should have just checked. You should have trusted your tragedy-warped instincts.
I inhale sharply. I think I can smell her. You need to know. You need to find out for sure.
I pull my sleeves up over my hands and scan the guesthouse—is there a key? A credit card I can use to jimmy the door? Could I break the lock?
My heart is revving up, burning a hole in my chest. My eyes land on that statue of a woman becoming an animal.
I stalk toward it. I lift it, grunting with the effort. It’s heavier than I thought.
What if she’s gone? What if I break down the door and the room is empty? What if it’s a trick? Maybe she’s my fairy godmother. Maybe this is all a dream.
We were testing you. We needed to find someone pure of heart.
I lug the statue, step by step, toward the bathroom door. I must pitch it, at an angle, toward the lock. I must be careful. If she is leaning against the door, it could hit her. If she is too close, it could maim her.
“Hey!” I try one more time. “I’m breaking down the door.”
I grunt as I lift the statue over my head.
I never would have thought that I could do a thing like this, bust down a door. But the statue leaves my hands. And the door splits like tinder, not where I wanted it to, but right down the middle. And through the crack I can see the curve of her black-tight-covered feet.
My fingers snake through the break, unfasten the lock. I open the door before I have time to remind myself that I don’t want to see another dead body.
The door moans across the white tiled floor, splintering in its wake.
LYLA
Even though I insisted we meet up, I don’t see Demi the next day or the next. She doesn’t go out as much as she used to. She is settling in. I see her coming up and down the stairs and want to catch her, but I am never quick enough. She waits until the exact moment I’m not looking, then slips past like a fog.
I listen all week, learning her. It’s like I have a special part of my brain tuned in. I hear her in the kitchen. I hear the squeal of her teakettle. I hear her music and her movies. I try to figure out what they are.
“Three Women,” Graham says abruptly one night. He is in his chair scrolling. The music disappears if you don’t listen hard enough. “Robert Altman.” Every so often Graham says something that reminds me he had a girlfriend before me. “He’s a good director,” he adds as justification.
The neighborhood is louder at night than I remember, or maybe I just didn’t notice it before. Bean is always barking—suddenly, ferociously—then lapsing into haunting silence. Cars roar past us above and below. Disembodied laughter floats from a party across the canyon.