Someone knocked at my door. I jumped, sweat breaking out on my back. Was that him? Would he come here? I wished I had my laptop open to my calendar. I never wanted to see that cursed L. again, but at least I’d know if I should answer the door or stay here, trembling and silent.
I sat very still. There had been no buzz from the front door, but did that matter? Would he force his way in if I didn’t answer? Somewhere I had a list of this building’s tenants and their numbers. If I called, maybe a neighbor could investigate for me. But no, that was stupid; I wouldn’t know what to tell them to look for. He could be a twelve-year-old selling Girl Scout cookies for all I knew.
“Hello?”
I didn’t move.
“Clay? It’s Mrs. Russo. Are you there?”
I exhaled and moved on slack legs to the door. I had unlocked it and started to pull it open, relieved at the thought of seeing her short gray hair and smooth olive skin, the crow’s feet around her eyes, when I was leveled by a frightening idea: Could Lucian show up as someone familiar to me?
Again the eddy, the cold fingers clutching at my chest.
Panic is an illusion, a small voice inside me said. Open the door and face her—it—whoever it turns out to be.
I pulled the door the rest of the way open, ready for anything.
A plate of muffins. Blueberry, by the look of them. Across our shared second-floor landing, Mrs. Russo was just closing her door. Upon hearing me, she came back out.
“Well, there you are!” She smiled and retrieved the plate from the mat. I stared, making certain it was the same Mrs. Russo who had brought me lasagna the day I moved in, who had helped me arrange my furniture—which consisted of little more than a few items on sale from Crate & Barrel and a desk my grandfather made for my eleventh birthday—and who had declared the result “elegantly Spartan.” Mrs. Russo, the widow whose husband had died of the kind of complication people sued hospitals over—though I don’t think she did that. It would have seemed beneath the woman who often referred to those things that can and can’t be changed, and to the will of God. Mrs. Russo, whose mail and newspapers I collected when she went to visit her children and grandchildren. Mrs. Russo, who was always baking, warm and homey smells drifting out onto our landing from her apartment as they did now from the plate I accepted from her hands. My stomach cramped.
“Clay, dear, are you all right?”
“I’ve been sick.” It wasn’t far from the truth. Dehydration had taken its toll. I was sure that my face was pasty, my eyes shadowed and hollow. My breath was certainly bad enough.
Have you ever been harassed by a demon? I wanted to blurt.
“Have you? That must explain why I’ve been thinking about you so much these past couple of days.” She reached up to lay the back of her hand against my cheek. Her crisp white shirt crinkled when she moved. A double strand of pearls hung in the neckline like a beady smile around her neck. She was made up for the day, her lipstick the color of new bricks. Her hand smelled like Jergen’s lotion.
“Well, you don’t have a fever.”
I wanted to tell her everything, from the first meeting in the café to the dreams and the accident—the horrible accident—to unload it all like tears spilled in a mother’s lap. But one long, stream-of-conscious sentence out of my mouth and that matronly look would change to alarm or worse. Mrs. Russo would disappear behind her door, and this moment of relative normality would be taken from me as surely as the peace had disappeared from my life that first night in the Bosnian Café.
What peace? I had not been at peace before this. But even my discontent and general aimlessness had been better than this.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” She frowned, her hand going to her hip. Her camel pants were smartly pressed, and I realized she was about to head out for the day. I nodded, angry at finding myself on the verge of tears.
“I think I need to lie down. Thank you, Mrs. Russo, for the muffins,” I said. She looked as if she might say more, but I gave her a weak smile, thanked her again, and closed the door, hoping I hadn’t offended her in my graceless haste.
I SPENT ALL DAY thinking about who to go to. Who I could tell without seeming like a lunatic. And I came up with only one answer.
No one.
I LOCKED MYSELF IN my apartment for two days. I slept in fits on my sofa, refused to open my laptop for fear of what I would find on my calendar, and ate Mrs. Russo’s muffins. Though I had never suffered from agoraphobia, I began to understand how easily I could become one of those people who refused to leave their home. I wondered if any of them had been stalked by demons.
On the second day I found myself rationalizing what happened in the Garden. Lucian really had tripped. When he murmured, he was merely talking to himself, calling himself clumsy and cursing his human body. Maybe he made an appreciative comment—she had been an attractive blonde, after all. That he disappeared when he did meant nothing; he routinely disappeared when I wasn’t ready or whenever I wasn’t paying close attention.
Anything to explain it. The truth was too appalling.
Sometime into the second day, after calling in sick again, I retrieved the stack of notes from my desk drawer. The summary account of my demonic encounters to date consisted of portions of two notebooks, of random pages stuck inside the cover of one, and the backs of a few pages from the recycle box. The last of these pages was scrawled in wild, volatile script. I had started to write about the Common and the Garden the night of the accident but never finished—mostly because I could not reconcile reality with Lucian’s strange behavior and the events that followed.
The other reason was that I was drunk.
Lying on the sofa and reading through my notes up to that day, I began to feel a strange sense of control—over my words, if nothing else, as though I had captured and contained events that defied rationality. The page brought order, a shape to all experience, the comfort of events scripted into story.
I picked up my pen and began to write, chasing reason, meaning, sanity.
8
After three days in my tiny apartment—the false, mundane world shut out beyond my door—my denial made its pendulum swing to reckless acceptance. The mad ruminations, the nightmares, the panic gave way to exhaustion until, in my depleted state, it became very simple: I could never return to my in-transit, post-divorce life. My life might never be normal again, but I could not keep to these sequestered shadows forever. I was tired of playing the specter in my own life, of huddling behind the flimsy lock of my apartment door.
Lucian had the power to kill me—he had proven that much. And if that’s what he wanted, there was nothing I could do about it.
But I didn’t think that’s what he wanted.
For whatever reason, he desperately wanted to tell me his story. He wanted it written and published. And though I had no intention of doing either, I had the power to give him both.
Like a fever, my fear broke.
The next morning, I lowered my chin into the collar of my coat. I did not look into anyone’s eyes on the street, nor did I make my routine stop at the bagel joint near the T station. Even so, I half expected some stranger to hail me by name, to signal me in the front lobby of my office. To turn toward me on the elevator as the doors closed.
Nothing like that happened.
When I passed Sheila’s desk, she asked how I was feeling. She had circles under her eyes but managed a small smile that still managed to look attractive. She had always been like that—almost prettier when suffering. It used to tug at my heart, and it brought back the old envy I had felt toward Dan when he first started seeing her. Even when her mother died, she had been beautiful, a weeping Madonna at the funeral. Today, however, that trait struck me like a line repeated one too many times. I murmured something about the stomach flu and feeling better. I didn’t want to talk to her.