The Order of Floors

One floor down. That was the line in her head all that week (one floor down) while the second card sat on the windowsill beside the first, Ray and Lottie Petersen, 5F, March 26, and Nora tried to decide whether she was a woman with a problem or a woman losing her grip, and could not tell, and went to work anyway, because the rent did not care which.

The good thing on the fourth floor was June.

June was in 4D, down the hall, a wide easy woman about Nora's age with a boy named Sammy who was six and had decided that Wren, at seven, was the most important person in the building. June knocked the second week with a plate of something and the words, "You look like you work nights, I worked nights for nine years, come borrow my coffee maker, it's better than whatever you've got," and that was that. They were not friends the way people who'd chosen each other were friends. They were friends the way two tired women on the same bad floor of the same forgotten building were friends, which is to say completely, because there was no one else. Their kids played in the hall. June watched Wren for the hours between school and Nora's shift, and would not take money for it, and got mad if Nora tried.

So Nora had, on the fourth floor, exactly two things she could not lose. And on the windowsill she had a card that said the deaths were coming down to the fourth floor.

She decided, that week, that she was not going to just watch. Whatever the cards were, she was done being polite about them. On the twenty-fifth she went up to the fifth floor and knocked on 5F, and a man in his sixties opened it on the chain, and behind him Nora could hear a television and smell the close, sealed warmth of a sealed-up apartment, the space heater going because the building's heat on five had been out for a week. Dell had told her that, Dell had said the office wouldn't send anyone.

"I'm sorry to bother you," Nora said, and then she said the only true thing she had, which sounded insane the moment it left her mouth. "Please be careful tonight. Please… the heater, the windows, please crack a window, check the… just be careful tonight and tomorrow. The twenty-sixth. Please."

Ray Petersen looked at her the way you look at a person you have decided to be afraid of. "Are you with the building?" he said. "You tell the building to fix the heat. We're fine." And he shut the door, gently, and she heard the chain, and she stood in the cold hall on the fifth floor having done the only thing she could think of and knowing it was nothing.

They were found on the twenty-seventh. The twenty-sixth had been the date, and a day later somebody noticed the Petersens hadn't been seen, and Dell let the paramedics in, and it was the heater and the sealed windows and the bad air, the slow kind of dying that looks like sleep, two people in two chairs. Carbon monoxide, somebody said. A faulty heater they shouldn't have needed, in a building that shouldn't have let the heat fail. Nobody said the word murder. There was no murder. There was just a building, doing to two people in March what it had done to an old man eleven days before, and a card that had known the date.

Nora did not cry, which frightened her more than crying would have. She came home from the warehouse the morning of the twenty-seventh and she took the two cards off the windowsill and she sat at the kitchen table (they had a real table by then) and she laid them side by side in the gray light, and for the first time she looked at them not as two strange pieces of mail but as a list.

March 19. Howard Adler. 6F.

March 26. Ray and Lottie Petersen. 5F.

Six, then five. The nineteenth, then the twenty-sixth. A floor down, a week on. She did not need to be clever to see where the line was pointing. She got up and got a pen, her hand not quite steady, and on the back of an envelope she wrote what came next if the line held (April 2, the fourth floor) and she looked at the words the fourth floor in her own handwriting and felt the cold go all the way through her, because the fourth floor was her floor, the fourth floor was Wren asleep down the hall from her right now, the fourth floor was June and Sammy three doors down.

She went down to the lobby still holding the envelope. She told herself there would be nothing in the box. She had just worked all night. She would sleep. This was the kind of thinking the body did when it was wrung out.

There was an envelope in the slot for 4B. No return address. Her unit number in the same small, careful hand.

She opened it on the stairs, sitting down on a step halfway up because her legs had stopped being reliable, and inside was one white index card, soft at the corners, three lines, and the line had held, the line had come exactly where she'd written it would, except for the part she had not let herself imagine, which was the name.

April 2.

June Okafor.

4D.