23 seconds

— This way, Miss Greer.

The corridor smelled of chlorine. Underneath there was something else. Cold metal, linens boiled too many times, the air of rooms without windows.

She signed the register. The pen was cold. Her name came out crooked. Her hand had written it on its own. The rest of her was no longer in the room.

The attendant walked off. He walked fast. For him it was a Tuesday. He opened one door, then another. The third resisted. He pushed harder.

The walls were gray. Not painted. Worn. The gray of what's left when everything has been removed.

He pulled two drawers.

The sheets rose.

Vera. Colton.

Side by side in the steel. Like two wrongs. Not theirs. Someone else's. Her mother no longer had that crease at the corner of her mouth. Her hair was pulled back. The forehead it revealed was not the one she knew. Her father looked larger. The way things look larger when you can no longer reach them. Dark, thick skin. A pallor that had nothing left to do with rest or sleep or anything living. His face had slopes and hollows like a piece of land. All that remained was the geography of a man. The rest had withdrawn.

She looked.

That was all there was to do.

Nola turned her head away. Her stomach knotted at once. Something burning rose in her throat. The air would no longer go down. She placed her hand on the cold railing, removed it, wiped it on her pants. Did it again. Once. Twice. Three times.

The attendant folded the sheets back down. He pushed the drawers shut. Metal scraped against metal, a dull, long sound that vibrated through the floor, through her jaw, through the bone behind her ears. The sound stayed. Lodged in the enamel. Like an insect that had stopped moving without ceasing to be there. She stepped back when the plates found their place again.

She stood there.

Before the closed facades. And it seemed to her that she was the one who had just been filed away.

Something rose from the bottom of her body. Not an image. Not a face.

— We could buy the orchard. I'd be my own boss.

Her father had said that one evening, sitting on the front bench, the laces between his fingers. Apple trees. Straight rows. Black earth under his nails. Leaving before dawn during harvest season. A place two hours away, not big, not expensive. Just work, time, a little peace. It wasn't a grand dream. The kind he carried in the pocket of his work jacket and fingered in the evenings coming home the way you press a bruise to see if it still hurts. And it still hurt. Each evening a little less. Each evening a little more.

The orchard had never existed. There had been years instead. Bills. Alarms at five. The same work laid on the same shoulders.

And now he slept in a steel drawer. The orchard slept with him.

The door closed behind her. The impact was sharp. The steel rang against her back. Her heart began to pound so hard that everything else disappeared. No more room, no more attendant, no more light.

Then her mother.

Not a voice. No one was speaking. But the words were there. Whole. As if preserved somewhere in the body.

— I hate enclosed spaces.

Nola wanted to answer. To say yes. To say I know. To say me too.

They're together.

Her field of vision narrowed. Her hands shook. Her breathing came undone. And then, in the middle of it, something gave way in her chest.

She took a few steps. Her feet struck the floor. She couldn't hear them. The corridor stretched then closed in. Outside the light was bad, too white on the facades, too hard on the concrete.

Then the world warped.

The buildings leaned toward her. The windows bulged like bellies. The whole city was coming apart under a heat only she could feel. A sound left her throat. Not a scream. Not a call. Glass that cracks and holds anyway.

She tried to breathe in.

The air came in wrong. Then not at all.

The emergency lights carved the day into blue and white. Gloved hands seized her. A voice said breathe. A mask was pressed over her mouth. She was laid down. The straps passed over her and tightened and the pressure was almost a mercy, something that told her where her body ended. The ambulance ceiling rolled above her eyes, white, flat, too close. A lid.

At the hospital someone slipped tablets into her mouth. One by one. She swallowed without resistance. The fingers placing the tablets on her tongue had the same gentleness as those that close the eyelids of someone who will not wake. For them too it was a Tuesday.

She did not sleep. The drawers were still sliding. In her head. The same scraping. The same steel. It wouldn't stop. The sound of the drawers had created an organ inside her.

At the station the fluorescents buzzed. The air smelled of hot wiring, burnt coffee, the sweat of people sitting too long in rooms too small. Voices circled around her.

— We know it's your brother. We can't figure out his reasons.

Nola didn't answer. The sentences fell, clean. The tape recorder turned. It recorded everything.

Harlan was sitting beside her. The words came out in pieces. Half-sentences.

— His parents cut him from the will. Because he loved men. So he killed them. That's all. There's nothing else to understand.

The cop looked at Harlan. The cop looked at Nola. The tape recorder clicked.

Outside the day hadn't changed. Same sky. Same cars. But in there, under the fluorescents, everything had the texture of an interrogation even when the voices stayed soft.

Harlan brought her back to his place that same evening. He signed what needed signing, answered what needed answering, spoke to who needed speaking to. Then he brought her up without asking a single question. He gave her the big bed. Clean sheets. The firm pillow he kept for guests. He drew the curtains, turned on the bedside lamp, the one that buzzed before settling, then closed the door with the slowness of a man afraid of noise.

Nola stayed lying down.

The hours fell on top of one another without order, without outline, and formed above her a white, mute mass. At moments something rose. Then everything left again.

Harlan kept watch.

Three days with almost no sleep.

He sat in the armchair near the door. He kept his eyes on the pill organizer sitting on the nightstand. He checked the time. He counted the capsules. Did it again.

He didn't open his files anymore. The Civil Code was under a pile of cups, ringed with dried coffee. His pens had gone dry. His phone buzzed sometimes in the other room. His life had stopped with an almost insulting discretion.

Nola kept her eyes open.

She watched the ceiling. The ceiling watched her back. Its damp stain near the corner. Its thin crack. Its dirty whiteness.

The living room clock worked behind the wall. Each second fell at the same distance from the next.

The sound of the drawers wouldn't leave her. It was inside her now. Like something she had swallowed that refused to be digested.

In fits her body would rise. A hiccup. A tremor. Short spasms that folded her in two then died out. Afterward came a silence harder still. She no longer left the bed. Knees drawn up, arms closed, forehead against the sheet.

She had no family left.

And nothing, not the tablets, not the daylight behind the curtains, not Harlan's hand placed sometimes on hers, changed any of it.

Each morning she rose from a dreamless sleep with the sensation of climbing out of a black shaft. The faces came back anyway. Her mother's quiet forehead. Her father's wide silence.

It was him she thought of most.

His shoulder.

One day her head had rested on her father's shoulder. The hollow between the bone and the neck. It exists in no book. It is the only place on the human body with a single function. The kitchen smelled of soup. Her father smelled of dust. Not the dust of houses. The dust of worksites. Plaster and cement and sawdust that entered the fabric of his shirts and the pores of his skin and never came back out. It was part of him. Like his bones. The cotton had lost its finish long ago. Washed and rewashed until it was nothing but fiber and endurance.

He hadn't moved. Neither had she. It lasted only a minute, maybe less. He said nothing because there was nothing to say.

She also thought of that dance they had never danced. An almost ridiculous image, stubborn all the same. Her father in the middle of a room too brightly lit. Stiff in his suit. These were hands that had carried cement and trimmed branches and laid grout and fixed everything that broke in people's lives, hands that knew the exact weight of things, and now these hands didn't know where to go, one too high, the other too low, the fingers too stiff, and he tried anyway with that quiet stubbornness of a worker who knows things give in eventually if you insist. Under the sheet Nola's feet barely moved. One-two-three. One-two-three. Her toes pressed the cotton, released. He slept in a steel drawer. Too far for her to lay a hand on him.

Harlan sometimes stroked her hair. Always the same. From forehead to nape. Slowly. He almost rocked her, clumsily, his eyes caught elsewhere.

His hands trembled.

His jaw clenched then gave.

At moments he thought of Gideon. The shame took him in pieces, without logic. One Sunday Gideon had started to say something. My father. Or maybe just my father. Harlan hadn't even set down his pen. That's what was killing him now. The pen in his hand. Across from him something was looking for a way out. He hadn't looked up. He had decided without knowing it that what Gideon was about to say was worth less than what he was writing.

One evening in the kitchen Gideon had been cutting onions. He stopped. Set the knife on the board, blade turned toward the wall. As if the blade too had to look away during what would follow. He turned around. His mouth opened. Not much. His eyes were wet. Harlan looked at the onions on the board. It was easier. Then nothing. Thirty seconds maybe. Gideon picked up the knife. The onions. The silence.

The pen and the onions. Twice. That had been enough. And both times he hadn't looked up.

Sometimes Nola took the pill organizer in her hand. The plastic was warm. It had slept against the lamp all night. She held it in her hand and it was warm and alive and it was unbearable.

The lid made a small soft sound. A mouth sound. She tipped the capsules and they fell into her palm with a sound of dry, light rain and she counted them with her fingertip. One. Two. Three. More. Enough to sleep a long time. Maybe enough not to come back. A gesture without theater, without a letter, without anger. Swallow. A glass of water. Lie down. Slip beneath the surface.

But something stopped her. Older than her grief.

Not the fear of dying.

Something else.

Her hand closed. The capsules stayed in her palm a moment. Then she put them back. The pill organizer returned to its place against the lamp. With the patience of a well-set trap.

And her mother's sentence came back.

Intact.

— I hate enclosed spaces.

The third evening Harlan fell asleep in the armchair. His head thrown back. His mouth half-open. His hands on his thighs, a stillness that made her believe, for an instant, that he was dead. Him too. Then the fabric of his shirt moved. One centimeter. No more. It was enough.

She didn't lie back down. She stayed sitting on the edge of the bed. Feet on the floor. Hands on her knees. She didn't lie back down.

The light came in through the gap in the curtains. A white line on the carpet.

Harlan woke up. Rubbed his face. Red eyes. He saw her. Said nothing. He went to the kitchen. The coffeepot hit the counter. The smell crossed the corridor and entered the bedroom and it was the first smell since the chlorine. Coffee.

He came back with two cups. Set one on the nightstand. Drank the other standing, his back to the wall. Then:

— We could eat. The Japanese place. The one you liked.

Liked. The word knew exactly where to go.

She nodded. It meant nothing.

The tram smelled of sweat and rubber. The crowd compressed in the curves, spread apart after. Nola watched the tile floor. She thought: get off. Get out. Harlan held her hand. Not tight. Just enough for her to stay.

The restaurant smelled of rice and wood. Red lanterns on the ceiling. The waiter arrived with his smile.

— What would you like?

She didn't answer.

Harlan brushed her hand.

— The shrimp?

She tilted her head.

He talked. About the tram. The weather. The traffic.

The plate arrived. The steam rose. She took a shrimp. Chewed.

Nothing.

No taste. No hunger. No disgust. Her body worked in pieces. Each organ alone in its corner.

She took a second. Same.

Harlan went quiet.

— Nola.

She didn't look at him.

— Nothing tastes like anything anymore.

It wasn't the food. Her hand closed on the napkin. He wanted to speak. Gave up.

The waiter came back. Harlan waved him off. The man walked away.

The tram the other way. Nola watched the window. Not the street. The window itself. The condensation. The fingerprints. A scratch in an arc.

At the apartment the air was warm and closed. She sat on the bed. Harlan stayed in the corridor. Water ran in the bathroom. Then nothing.

The phone was on the nightstand. Next to the pill organizer.

She picked it up.

She found an unlistened voicemail.

Dated four days earlier.

It was her father.

— Well… you're not picking up, so I'll leave a message. It's about the shower. You told me it was leaking again. I can come by Thursday afternoon if you're there. I'll bring the washers and the wrench. Otherwise, tell me another time. That's it. Call me back. … I love you.

She stayed still. The phone against her ear.

Twenty-three seconds.

She listened to it once. Then again. Then again.

The words of a man who speaks the way he works.

She heard the grain. That deep timbre, slightly veiled. The way he dragged on certain vowels.

And the small breath before the last sentence. That tiny breath. A background sound. A rustling of fabric. Maybe his jacket. Maybe his hand in his pocket. Maybe the keys against his thigh. Him. Behind his door. The keyring in his pocket. The cold key in his palm. Ready to come in, to drape his jacket over a chair, to kneel in front of the shower, to take apart what was stuck, to tighten what was giving way.

After a few listens she heard something else. The gaps between the words. The first one after well. The one after another time, a little longer. And the one before the end. Before I love you. That silence had an architecture. It had a floor and walls and a ceiling.

I love you.

She added the message to her favorites.