So I climb the stairs, one at a time, my legs feeling heavy as I reach the second floor. When I swing the door open to the fourth-floor landing, I am relieved to be home.
It is far from the noise of people and death, and I am back in a comfortable safe space.
I fish out my keys, digging into my coat pocket, and as I pass the quiet corridor, I hear a chain link rattling, sliding and unlocking from inside one of the apartments behind me.
Turning, I see movement, a shadow of light sliding from beneath the door of apartment five.
I know the tenant.
Miles Goldman.
Bald, lips shaped like a fish, puckered when he talks, and coke-bottle size eyes. He’s spooky but harmless. When you talk to him, you learn immediately that he has a stuttering problem. He says he was born with it, but it is hard to understand him at times.
When I met him five years ago after I first moved into the building, he told me he felt safe having a cop living close by.
As I slide my key into the lock of the door, I hear the door across the hall creak open. Mr. Goldman is whispering at me from around the doorjamb.
I turn and wave.
He never smiles. Nor does he lift one of his craggy hands to return the gesture. He just stands there, his withered old face illuminated in pale light from the soft hall fluorescence.
“What are you doing up so late?” I ask, the paper bag crinkling in my hand.
He stares at me but doesn’t answer. Looking at him sends an icy finger down my back. When I turn around to pull the key out of the door, I feel a breeze stirring behind me.
I whirl around and let out an involuntary gasp. I jump back a few inches and almost lose the grip on the paper bag.
Mr. Goldman stands arms-length behind me in the obscured shadows.
He extends a gnarly finger over my shoulder. “There was somebody at your d-door earlier.”
I swallow and nod and turn to my apartment. I look back to him, though my gaze doesn’t linger. I am a bit frightened by his presence at this early morning hour.
“A man,” he says, moving his skinny arms up and down to adjust the estimable height. “Tall.” He lifts his long arms to illustrate, his eyes as wide as half dollars. “Slender man, tall.”
A horror movie junkie, I am aware of his references. I back up to the edge of the doorway. “When was he here?”
Miles takes a moment to answer, then says, “An hour ago.”
He sounds certain, as if he’s been up all night.
I run off a list of names in my head of tall, slender men in my life.
It can’t be Steve. He’s the opposite of Miles’ description.
Maybe it is one of my fellow police officers checking in with me.
Otherwise, there is nobody else who has visited me in the last few hours, or days.
I exhaust all avenues until all my ideas dry up, and I feel the itching heat of sweat running under my uniform. I hold up a hand to acknowledge him, but more to keep him from coming any closer.
I’ve never seen Miles smile, so when he lifts the corners of his craggy mouth, the pale pinkness of his gums stretches like taffy from ear to ear.
His skin is thick like tree bark and withered from years of sun exposure and smoking. “Bad night?” he asks, looking down at the paper bag in my hand, the top of the vodka bottle poking out.
I ignore him and tuck the bag under my arm.
His gaze shifts from the bag to my gun secured to my utility belt. His eyes are bloodshot.
I keep an eye on his hands, which are shoved into his red plaid pajama bottoms. My gaze falls to his feet, and I think he is wearing shoes made from snakeskin, but he is just barefoot.
“You better get back inside,” I tell him. “You’re going to catch a cold running around barefoot.”
“You don’t catch a cold from being barefoot,” he says. “You get a cold from viruses.”
I don’t know if he is trying to be funny, but he is not smiling. So I nod, and start to head into my apartment, pushing the door open with my boot.
I glance into the pitch-blackness of my apartment, and scold myself for not leaving a light on before I left.
Contemplating whether or not I should walk three feet into the apartment and flip on the light switch near the refrigerator, I feel Miles staring at me.
I see him outlined in my periphery—a tall, thin apparition silhouetted against the cold-white light of the corridor.
His description of my night visitor burrows deep into my psyche, and I shudder at the thought of somebody making a house call during this time of night.
As I push my apartment door open and step further inside, a feeling of dread sits heavily in my chest. I bring my hand up to my gun and leave it there.
Then I think: if the door was locked, there is nobody inside.
I reprimand myself for being weak, but I know I locked the door before leaving earlier.
I turn to Miles, and nod. “I’ll be fine. Thanks for keeping me company.”
Miles shuffles back to his apartment across the hall. I wave to him as he creeps back inside and locks the door.
I see movement underneath the door, a bar of light from his outline, moving from left to right. It looks like he is dancing with himself. Light behind the peephole is swallowed up in blackness.
He is watching me.
It is not until I get inside my apartment and shut the door, sliding the bolt lock firmly in place, that I know I’ve been holding my breath.
* * * *
I’ve been sitting in the dark for an hour in front of the rain-streaked balcony window on a rattan armchair I found at a yard sale a few months ago.
An old relic is somebody else’s fortune, my mother once told me. It’s got a couple more good years left, I surmise, as I pour three fingers of vodka into a tumbler half filled with melting ice and take a slow sip, chips of broken ice sliding down my throat like shards of glass.
This is the only time I am by myself, a cosmic stillness, to think and rationalize.
Staring out at lines of rain crisscrossing down the sliding glass doors, I see a young dead girl lying in her own blood, clutching a rosary, her face distorted and covered in blood from a deep knife wound.
What does it mean? I wonder, tipping the glass and emptying the vodka in one long pull.
I refill, wishing I had bought two bottles when a single soft knock at the door rattles me, and I lose my grip on the bottle and glass.
My drink spills across the scattered rug, and the edge of the glass smashes against the armchair at a ninety-degree angle, slivers of glass splintering across the floor.
“Fucking-A.”
There’s another knock, harder, more urgent.
I stand, wiping beads of alcohol off my hand and arm, and turn, staring at the closed door.
The time on the microwave reads 3:36 A.M.
Nobody visits this early in the morning. I wait and listen, hoping whoever it is will go away.
Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.
Then…
Two raps, hard, forceful, and demanding to be answered.
I shudder, and my heartbeat rages in my ears.
As if paralyzed, fear traps me in place, and my hands are trembling and clammy and cold.
But I conjure up enough strength to yell, “Hello?”
I hear mumbling, but the words are unclear.
I swallow hard and step over broken glass, walking in the semi darkness to the edge of the mini kitchen, inching closer to the door.
“Hello?” I say again, reaching for my gun on the counter and cocking the hammer.
There is no answer.
I skulk to the edge of the door and lean up against the eyehole, straining to glimpse a tall lean shadow stretching across the far wall in the hallway.
Stepping back, I aim the gun at the closed door, hearing my neighbor’s voice in my head.
Tall. Thin. Ghostly.
“Who is it?” I yell.
No answer.
I am buzzed fr
om the booze, my head swimming with unpleasant thoughts. I step toward the door and unlock the chains, my hand hovering on the handle.
I look out through the eyehole; the hall is empty.
I aim the gun out in front of me as I turn the bottom lock counterclockwise and pull the door open slightly, the chain link lock still affixed, clattering in place.
Staring out the crack, I don’t see anybody. “Hello?”
But there is no response.
I close the door and step out into the hallway, slowly, cautiously, looking left to right. Right to left, aiming the gun in every direction.
At the far end of the corridor, near the stairwell exit, I see a figure, masked in a dark hoodie, staring out the window to the tenant parking lot below.
“Hello?” I yell.
The figure turns in slow motion, and I catch a glimpse of his long face in the bright moonlight spilling in from the high window.
The end of the whole dilemma eight months ago resurfaces like a nightmare that won’t stay dead, as I glare into the face of my past sins.
Sheridan, my ex-boyfriend, stares back at me from out in the hall.
Chapter 4
My life with Sheridan Dees is complicated.
Was. We no longer talk.
Until now.
Goddamn it!
I feel my shoulders stiffen, as my thoughts backpedal to a place of unhappy times between the two of us.
Think of a roller coaster teetering on the edge of its metal tracks, or someone standing on the precipice of a steep mountain and staring down hundreds of feet to the infinite bottom, ready to jump.
That sums up our entire existence.
Tension. Anxieties.
On again/off again love is tricky and dangerous and uncertain.
Complicated. That word again.
He pushes past me into my apartment.
I watch him roam my place like a lost spirit, unspeaking. He stares out the balcony window, his back to me, his hoodie still pulled up over his head and face.
The soles of his sneakers are damp with mud, I notice, as he leaves a trail of ghostly footprints along my floor. The carpet absorbs most of the impact, but I let out a frustrated sigh at his presence back in my life.
After eight long months, I ask him, “What are you doing here?” My tone is slurred from too much alcohol, and I have to yell over the hard, pouring rain.
He answers me, but I can’t hear him over the jackhammering sound of the storm.
The relentless drilling on top of the roof is heightened for a few odd seconds, but then everything goes quiet, as if we are in a dream, and somebody is flipping a light switch on and off.
On. Off.
Sheridan looks elfin since I’ve last seen him, even in his bulky raincoat, which hangs on his skeletal body like shedding skin.
I stare down at my gun on the counter in front of me and then up at the back of Sheridan’s head.
“What do you want?” I ask, gripping the edge of the kitchen counter.
He turns around slowly, and I glimpse the side of his square jaw, sunken eyes, and gray skin. In the light, his face is the consistency of crepe paper.
“I needed to see you,” he says directly, sharply, as if his voice is someone else’s.
The ends of my fingers are turning blue and numb from the vice-like pressure on the counter. “This is a really bad time,” I say, clenching my teeth.
I see him struggling not to make eye contact with me. He is turned sideways so he can direct his gaze on anything but me.
I glance at the gun and raise my trembling hand to pick it up.
Opening the kitchen drawer where I stash sharp knives to debone chicken, I drag my weapon into the drawer and slam it shut.
Sheridan looks up at me, his face half-masked in my dimly lit apartment, his expression unchanged by the commotion and noise.
“It’s a bad time,” I say again, and before he can answer I am moving with urgency toward the living room.
We are standing inches from each other’s mouths. So close I can smell his familiar maleness. The warm heat of his animal musk is cloying. I inhale deeply, my nostrils flaming.
“You have to leave,” I say, breathing hard. “Now.”
Sheridan looks away, and walks across the room to the armchair and sits, making himself at home.
“What are you doing?” I am shaky and losing control.
“Sitting,” he says, pulling the hoodie off and looking up at me, his gaze dodgy.
His emaciated facial structure is something made of nightmares. He is almost unrecognizable in his new face: gaunt cheeks and cadaverous eye sockets; taut, spineless skin; and small lips, dry and splintered.
Ravages of dehydration and drugs, I surmise, but I am the last person who should cast blame.
I hear my father in my head, heckling like the sound a long-ago neighbor: “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
Queer!
Sissy!
Fag!
I clench my hands into fists, wincing at my father’s degrading choice of words.
I am unsteady, my brain disoriented and drowning in a haunting, humiliating past. “We’re like day and night,” I say.
He scowls, almost snarling, his gums lifting over his teeth, a rabid animal on the verge of drawing blood.
“This is why I left you, Sheridan. Your rage.”
I do not want to stoke those unspoken memories from our past, but Sheridan gives me no choice.
He is shaking so hard the veins in his neck and forehead are visibly clear and pulsing, as he gets angrier, his wild eyes unblinking, and the bone-white complexion of his cheeks redden to dark crimson.
“Sheridan, you’re going to have to leave if you can’t control yourself.”
I can hear an animalistic rumbling building in the back of his throat. He draws a breath, as his chest rises and sinks in a slow, unsteady pattern. He closes his eyes and opens them at the sound of my stern voice.
“Why are you here?” I ask, feeling the heat of his stale breath in my face.
“I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.”
“It’s been eight months,” I remind him.
He knuckles saliva from the corner of his mouth and looks at me with a damaged, troubled stare.
Sadness envelops me and I feel myself falling down the rabbit hole. I fold my hands behind my neck and shake my head. “No. No. We can’t, Sheridan. My life is different now. I’m different.”
“I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you.”
Jesus Christ. What’s happening here?
“I was an asshole,” he says. “I know that.”
His childish pleading is annoying and manipulative. “Sheridan, there is no future for us,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you came here just to hear that, but I thought you knew how I felt about us eight months ago.”
He looks hurt, his eyes downcast, and I notice he is trembling harder than before.
Then I remember how manipulative he was. I wonder if this is just a ploy, Sheridan playing the victim and feeling sorry for himself.
“Sheridan,” I say, but he talks over me in his usual, sociopathic defiance.
“I didn’t come here to ask you to come back to me,” he says, which takes me off guard.
I’ve lived with him long enough to know his controlling tendencies: when he interrupts me, or his voice gets loud and accusatory. “Then why are you here?”
“Like I said, you’ve been on my mind.”
“Thinking about your ex and showing up in his life almost a year later are two very different things.” I pause. “This is out of the blue, Sheridan, and I’m not only surprised but concerned.”
“Concerned?” His voice takes on the tone of a small child and I’m aware in the subtle shift in his body language that multiple characters may be living inside his head.
He is gentler, kinder in those split seconds, and the wiry hairs on my knuckles start to tingle. “Why?” he asks.
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I stare at him speechless, fighting the urge to hit him. “We haven’t talked in a long time,” I say. “And you just show up at my door eight months later. I have every right to be worried.”
“I wanted to see you. That’s all.”
“You’re eight months too late.”
“I tried calling, but you changed your number.”
“For obvious reasons.”
His mouth curls into a clownish grin, and he looks away.
I think it is the trick of the light playing games with me. But no, he is smiling.
He stands and walks to the dark screen of the glass doors and gazes out into the rainy night.
“What do you want?” I ask, losing my patience.
He sighs and says nothing.
“I want you to leave,” I tell him. “Before I call the police.”
He laughs, and I realize what I’ve said. “You are the police,” he mumbles.
“Get out!”
“I just wanted to see you,” he says, calmly.
I stand behind the kitchen counter now, my hand gripping the drawer handle. “Get out, Sheridan!”
He turns and stares at me in the coiling shadows of the room.
“I want you to leave,” I say, my heartbeat pulsing at an unsettling rate.
“I thought you loved me, Jack,” he says, walking toward me, recapturing that quiet-like child voice.
I think, once upon a time, but say, “I want you to leave.”
He skulks to where the living room and kitchen meet, and stops at the end of the counter, his dark gaze settling on me like hot flames. “I didn’t come all this way to be rejected.”
“I think you’ve said enough.”
The menace in his triggering stare makes me shudder.
But I keep calm.
Do not show him you’re intimidated.
As he slides up next to me, his shoulder brushing mine, a muscle in my face twitches.
Then a firm rap on the apartment door separates us, and I feel a sense of strange relief when Sheridan pulls away and turns to the door. “Expecting company?” he asks, looking at me, the unhappiness in his voice taut and sharp.
I start for the door but he steps in front of me, blocking my path. “Get out of my way,” I tell him, staring at him.
“Is e-everything all right in there, Jack?” Out in the hall, I hear my neighbor Miles.
Past Sins Page 3
