She stood in front of him, looking much the way Anthony felt—as though she would just as soon beam herself away to some distant galaxy as stand here and weather a human interaction. She stood cupping her left elbow in her right hand, her left hand raised to her face. Her fingers rested on her forehead, her palm loosely covering that left eye. She seemed to be trying to create the appearance of a casual pose. If so, the attempt failed badly.
Anthony looked at her face and found it hard to breathe. The interior of his chest tingled. He had no time to wonder why. He had to talk.
He had summoned her here, and now he had to talk to her.
“Thank you for your time,” he said.
“Oh, it’s no bother.” Her voice was light, both in volume and . . . well, Anthony couldn’t quite explain it, but her voice made his chest feel lighter, in a couple of different senses. Both less weighty and more illuminated. Her voice was making his world lighter. “My husband said you were taking a survey. When I was in college I made extra money with a door-to-door survey. I got lots of doors slammed in my face. I know how that feels.”
“Thank you,” he said again. But differently this time. A deeply heartfelt statement, because he was grateful she had said something kind, intended to put him at ease.
“What’s the survey about?”
In the brief silence that followed, Anthony marveled at the flaws in his plan. The idea had been simply to bring the woman to the door. Just to see with his own eyes that she was okay. Of course, once she was there she would ask questions, and he would have to answer them. A conversation was bound to ensue. He couldn’t just run away. It was hard to imagine that he hadn’t prepared more carefully for this inevitable moment. Somehow since witnessing that act of violence he had been unable to unscramble his brain.
“Art,” he said. Because he had blinked his eyes and seen a visual memory of the abstract painting over the fireplace. “It’s about the art that people choose for their homes.”
“So why is it a survey for the woman? Men buy art.”
“Sure. I’m sure they do. But the organization who’s funding this survey feels that the woman is ultimately in charge of how the home is decorated.”
“And what organization is it?” she asked, in that voice. That voice that lit up the world. She didn’t sound as though she were giving him the third degree. She seemed genuinely curious. As if his work interested her. Then again, it was hard for anything to sound troublesome when spoken in that voice.
“The National Art Council,” he said.
She nodded seriously. As if the probably nonexistent council deserved her respect.
“How many pieces of art do you have in your apartment?” he asked her.
As he did, he had to prepare to write down her answer. So he pulled his right wrist out of his coat pocket and braced the clipboard on his right forearm, securing its bottom edge against his waist. He took hold of the pen with his left, preparing to write with it, as he had been teaching himself to do for months.
Her amber eyes moved to his nonexistent right hand. To the space where she had been so sure she would see it. Of course her eyes did that—everybody’s eyes did. Anthony had to witness this moment with every new person he met, or even passed on the street, which is why he tended to keep his right wrist buried in his pocket.
He didn’t blame her for it. He didn’t blame anyone for it. It was just a human reaction.
But with this woman—Edith, the man had called her—the moment felt more complex. Because, in the moment she looked, she forgot to halfway cover her left eye with one supposedly casual hand. Either that or she felt compelled to look with both eyes at once.
So while she took in Anthony’s missing right hand, he was able to see her left eye, despite its being half-covered with wavy auburn hair. He could see segments of the dark ring of discoloration underneath it. He wondered, in a disconnected way, why people call it a black eye when it tends to be purple, yellow, and green.
“I think six,” she said, jolting him back into the moment.
He wanted to ask her if she was safe, but he was afraid her husband could hear them.
He silently wrote down the number six.
“And here’s the most important question,” he said, quickly pulling up some phrases he had learned in his eighth-grade art class. “Is it representational? Or abstract?”
“Mostly representational. There’s only one abstract, but it’s my favorite one. It’s the most valuable one, too. I inherited it from my great-grandfather. It’s a Valenowski. The artist is dead now, so, even though I haven’t had it appraised, I think it might be worth something.”
Anthony nodded as he wrote it all down.
Then he heard, from deep in the apartment, what sounded like a shower turning on. But the sound was muted—clearly coming through a closed bathroom door.
It was the first time he had been able to get a bead on her husband’s whereabouts.
He lowered his voice. And, in a move that surprised him with its boldness, he looked directly at her left eye. While she was looking at his face, and would notice.
“Are you okay here?” he asked her.
Her gaze cut immediately down to the carpet again. She stammered a few unintelligible sounds before any actual words came forth. “I . . . ,” she said, then seemed to go no further in that direction. “You need to go now. I mean, I need to go now.”
And she closed the door.
But it was how she closed the door that Anthony would always remember. She didn’t slam it. Almost the opposite. She eased the door latched with a deliberate caution, a gentleness. As if the door were installed directly into Anthony’s chest or gut, and she might hurt him if she mishandled it.
And it mattered a great deal to Anthony, because she did have the power to hurt him, though as yet he had no idea why.
Chapter Three
Who Are You?
Anthony sat in a chair by his bedroom window. His back was getting stiff and a little sore, but he didn’t want to move. Because, in that position and that position only, he had a view through the eyepiece of the telescope into the living room of apartment 2D across the street, and also an unaided view out through his window and down to the entrance of the building.
It was the following late morning. He hadn’t eaten breakfast because he felt too unsettled. But he sipped intermittently at his second cup of coffee, setting it on the desk in between sips. There was a book open on his thighs, a hardcover edition of a book about planetary alignment, but he couldn’t concentrate well enough to read much of it.
A motion caught his eye, but not through the telescope. It was a couple entering the building from the street below. But not the couple.
Then, several minutes later, he saw a movement through the eyepiece of the telescope. His heart jumped and skipped about one and a half beats.
He leaned over the scope and peered more closely through its lens. Edith was moving in a jerky pattern, first forward across his small field of vision. Then backward. It filled him with a frightening sense of déjà vu. Then she came forward again. Then backward.
It took him a good minute or more to understand that she was vacuuming the rug.
When he did realize this, he sat up straighter and squeezed his strained eyes closed, calming the beating of his heart. As he opened them, he saw a man leave the building across the street, and felt ninety percent sure it was Edith’s husband. Granted, the man was far away, and Anthony was looking down from above. And the man was wearing a hat. Still, there was something in his movements, his body language, that felt familiar.