Mr. Adler

She did meet him, before the nineteenth. That was the part that would not leave her afterward, that the name on the card became a face, and the face became a man holding a bag of oranges, and then the date came and the man was gone.

It happened the ordinary way. Three days after the card arrived, the elevator was out (the elevator in the Ashmore was a rumor more than a machine) and Nora was carrying a laundry basket up the stairs when she met an old man coming down them sideways, one hand on the rail, a net bag of oranges hooked on two fingers of the other. He was small and neat in a cardigan, and he was breathing like the stairs cost him something, and he stopped on the landing to let her pass and said, "You're the new one. Four-B."

"That's me," Nora said.

"Howard," he said, and shifted the oranges to shake her hand, and the net bag swung against his knee. "Adler. Six-F. I've been here since before they let the place go." He said it without bitterness, the way you'd say you'd been somewhere a long time. "Anything you need, you knock. I don't sleep much."

She had carried his name on a card in her kitchen for three days, a date written next to it, and here was the name attached to a living man with a bag of oranges and a thing he wanted her to know, which was that he didn't sleep much, in case she ever needed someone awake. She almost told him. She got as far as opening her mouth. And then it seemed insane (a stranger, you have a card, there's a date) and she said instead, "Thank you. I'm Nora. That's Wren, she's seven, she's loud, I'm sorry in advance," and Howard Adler laughed and said loud was fine, loud meant alive, and went on down the stairs sideways with his oranges, and that was the only real conversation they ever had.

The nineteenth was a Tuesday. Nora worked the night of the eighteenth into the morning of the nineteenth, and she slept through most of the day the way she did, and it was Wren, home from school, who came and stood in the bedroom doorway and woke her by saying, in the careful voice children use when they've decided something is important, "There's a lot of people outside Mr. Adler's."

There was no siren by then. That was the thing about it. It was all very quiet, very procedural, a small van and two patient people in jackets and Dell standing in the hall with his cap in his hands. Howard Adler had died sometime in the night or the early morning, alone in 6F. His heart, they thought. He was eighty-one and he lived alone and he had a heart like an eighty-one-year-old man who climbed six flights for his own oranges, and nobody who said the word heart said it like it was strange. People that age died in the night. It was the most ordinary thing a building like the Ashmore had to offer.

Nora stood at the edge of the small crowd in the sixth-floor hall with her daughter's hand in hers and she could not feel her own face.

March 19. Howard Adler. 6F.

She told herself the thing a sane person tells herself, and she told it hard, standing right there. She told herself that an old man's death on a given day was not a prediction, it was a coincidence laid over the simple arithmetic of being eighty-one, that if you wrote a date and the name of a very old, very alone man on a card, you would not have to wait long to be right, and that somewhere there was probably a sad, ordinary explanation, a relative who knew he was failing, a calendar with a doctor's appointment on the nineteenth, a previous tenant who'd been close to him and kept track of his bad days. People who loved the dying counted. That was all the card was. Somebody's worry, mailed to the wrong apartment.

It was a good explanation. It held all the way back down the stairs and into her own kitchen, where the card still sat on the windowsill by the one tree, exactly where she'd left it, and she picked it up and made herself read the three lines again the way you press a bruise to prove it's only a bruise.

And it held until she went down to the lobby that evening to check the mail, because there was a new envelope in the slot for 4B, no return address, her unit number in the same small careful hand.

She did not open it in the lobby this time. She carried it up two flights without breathing right and she sat down at the cardboard box that was still their table and she opened it there, with Wren in the next room talking to her drawings, and inside was one white index card, soft at the corners, three lines:

March 26.

Ray and Lottie Petersen.

5F.

A week out, not eleven. The fifth floor, not the sixth. One floor down, and this time two names instead of one, two people, a couple, and Nora sat very still at the cardboard table in the failing light and understood that she had a problem she could not put in the recycling bin, because the previous tenant of 4B had not stopped sending the mail, and the mail was not done, and it was coming down the building toward her one floor at a time.