The Previous Tenant

The apartment was cheap because nobody wanted it, and Nora Vance had stopped being able to afford wanting things, so the two of them found each other.

It was a one-bedroom on the fourth floor of the Ashmore, a brown brick building on a street the city seemed to have forgotten on purpose, and the rent was four hundred dollars less than anywhere else she'd called, and when she'd asked the man on the phone why, he'd gone quiet for a second and then said, "It's an old building. People want new." Nora did not want new. Nora wanted to make it to the end of the month with her daughter fed and the lights on, and for the first time in a long time the arithmetic on a place actually worked, so she took it without seeing it, which was a thing you only did when you were out of better choices.

She was thirty-four. She worked nights stocking a distribution warehouse out by the highway, which meant she slept in the wrong half of the day and saw her daughter in slices, and there had been a man once who was supposed to make all of this easier and had instead made it this, and she did not think about him if she could help it. What she had was Wren. Wren was seven. Wren was the entire reason Nora's body got up off the floor on the days it did not want to, and that was not a figure of speech, that was a literal fact about certain mornings, and Nora had made her peace with a life that small as long as the small thing in it was safe.

They moved in on a gray Saturday with everything they owned in the back of a borrowed car. The hallway smelled like old radiator and somebody else's cooking. Half the mailboxes in the lobby had no names in the little slots, just the brass numbers, and Nora would think about that later. How many of the boxes were empty, how few people were actually left in the Ashmore. But on that first day she only thought it was quiet, and quiet was free, and she was grateful.

"It's not so bad," Wren announced, standing in the middle of the empty front room with her arms out like she was measuring it. She had her mother's habit of deciding to be okay out loud. "I can see a tree."

"You can see a tree," Nora agreed. There was, in fact, one tree, half-dead, in the lot across the street. She got down on the floor with the girl and they ate gas-station sandwiches off the cardboard box that would be their table until Tuesday, and for a couple of hours it was almost good.

The man who fixed things in the building knocked that evening to see if the radiator worked. His name was Dell, he said, and he had a gray mustache and the slow, apologetic way of a man who had spent years saying sorry for things that weren't his fault. He banged the radiator twice with the flat of his hand, and it clanked, and warm came up out of it.

"There you go," he said. Then, at the door, looking at the old fixture in the ceiling, he added, almost to himself, "You have any trouble with the lights. They flicker, they buzz, anything. You tell me, not the office. The office won't do nothing. You tell me direct."

"Is something wrong with the wiring?" Nora asked.

Dell looked at her for a second, and there was something tired in it, something he decided not to say. "It's an old building," he said, which she was learning was the answer to every question in the Ashmore, and then he was gone down the hall.

The mail started on Friday.

It wasn't her mail. That was the first thing. There was no forwarding, no name she knew. The previous tenant of 4B had left no name at all, the box in the lobby was as blank as half the others, but mail still came for whoever it had been, and that Friday there was a single envelope waiting in the slot, no return address, her unit number written on the front in pen.

She opened it standing in the lobby, expecting a bill, a final notice, the ordinary debris of someone who'd moved on. Inside there was no letter. There was one index card, white, a little soft at the corners like it had been handled, and on it, in a small careful hand, three lines:

March 19.

Howard Adler.

6F.

That was all. No message. No signature. Nora turned it over and the back was blank, and she turned it again as if the front might say something different the second time, and it didn't.

She almost threw it away. It would have been the sane thing, the thing a tired woman with nowhere to put her attention should have done. Somebody's old reminder, a name, a date, a unit number, junk meant for a person who didn't live here anymore. She got as far as the recycling bin by the boxes with the card held out over it.

What stopped her was the unit. 6F. Two floors up and to the right of her own. A real apartment, in this real building, with somebody presumably in it, and the card had a date next to that somebody's name, a date eleven days out, the nineteenth, and she stood there in the cold lobby with her thumb on the soft corner of the card and felt, for no reason she could have defended to anyone, that she did not want to put it in the bin after all.

She took it upstairs. She told herself she'd give it to Dell, or slide it under the right door, do the neighborly thing and forget it. She set it on the windowsill in the kitchen, where the one tree was, and she went to wake Wren for school, and the card sat there in the gray light with its three small lines, and Nora did not yet know the name Howard Adler from any other name in the world.

She would. Eleven days later, on the nineteenth of March, she would learn it very well.