Six watches. Seven bottles of perfume. Two hundred and eighty-three books. Two computers, one laptop, one tablet, one Kindle. Fourteen bottles of wine. Seventy-two rolls of toilet paper.
I have never loved math this much. I will have to be careful selling some things—the idea of selling anything makes me nervous—but there is a lot of money to be made inside these walls.
The woman upstairs crosses the floor over my head. I will have to be extra careful. But everything I need is here. Everything is laid out for me, like the wish granted by a twisted fairy godmother.
There is just one major stumbling block: the body. I glance at it laid out next to the door. Is it taking on a grayish cast? Is it starting to look more dead?
When I was twelve or thirteen, our next-door neighbor died. They found the body in summer, but he had been dead since January. The police came to speak to us to try to find his next of kin, but we didn’t know him, and he didn’t know us. They advised us to stay somewhere else that night while they removed the body. Someplace else wasn’t a possibility. My dad got drunk; he smoked cigarettes. He turned up his music, Led Zeppelin, the perfect dead-body music. And we tried not to hear, we tried not to see, we tried not to know as they opened the door.
But the smell came in so hard, our insides shriveled. There’s nothing that smells like a dead body. There is nothing that sticks to the back of your mouth, coats your nostrils, burns your windpipe. And it stayed for days. It stayed, really, forever in the hallway. So even years later I would be feeling my way along the wall when the overhead lights went out and I would choke on a sudden gust of death smoke still oozing from the seam of things.
Nonetheless, there is some hope in this memory. If a dead body can survive six months without getting caught, how long can I live? Does anyone ever really know their neighbors? Does anyone care? We all want privacy, our own cocoon. We pay for it.
I think of Lyla, her Gothic appeal. Maybe I should ask her to help me. I can knock on her door, smile and say politely, Could you please help me carry a few trash bags out to my trunk? Sorry about the smell! Just some junk I don’t need!
I almost laugh, feel it bubble wickedly up my throat, but it dries abruptly when the knock from my imagination barks on my own door.
I switch off the music. My eyes go right to the body, her profile in repose, waiting for a spell to bring her back to death.
I don’t move. I keep my mouth shut. I should have left the music on, shouldn’t have alerted the person outside to my presence. It’s too late now.
And it is late. It’s after dark. Why would the neighbor be knocking now unless they knew something was wrong? Unless they knew.
Does the body smell? Did someone contact them? Did someone call the police? We saw this girl in the village and she wasn’t smiling, Officer. We knew something must be VERY wrong.
They knock again so loud, I think the whole neighborhood will hear. A dog starts barking, louder and louder, as if it is getting closer, as if it is tracking me down.
I have to answer. I have to do something.
“Hey!” A gruff voice calls. A shadow runs along the window. “Hey, it’s me! I know you’re in there!”
It’s worse than I imagined.
DEMI
I hook the body with my hands and drag it into the corner. Her wallet falls from her pocket. I kick it under the sofa. I pile pillows to distort the body, cover everything with a blanket from the back of the sofa.
He knocks again so loud, I’m afraid the woman upstairs will hear.
“One second!” I call. I rush to the door, then glance back at the body to make sure it’s fully covered. I think I see whispers of the strands of her hairs on the floor, then realize it’s just the fringe on the blanket.
“Open the door.”
I fumble with the lock, swallowing hard terror. I don’t know what I’m doing, what I’m thinking. The dog is still barking wildly in the canyon, my telltale heart.
Michael is standing on the patio. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him stand straight. He is always stooped, as if trapped in a world too small for him. At his full height, he is shockingly tall.
He is swaddled in his tattered blanket. He moves with the swagger of someone at the end of their rope. He opens the screen, steps into the apartment. His eyes move quickly, frowning at the weird art, the statues and the carved bookshelves.
“Is she here?” His voice drops as if she wouldn’t have heard him pounding on the door. His eyes flicker toward the bedroom.
“No,” I breathe. I lock the door behind him.
He smiles and his limbs loosen, right at home. He follows the hum of the refrigerator. He flicks on the kitchen light and opens the fridge. “Beer!” He takes one out, cracks it open. He offers it to me first.