“We’re going to call the police, ma’am,” Martin said. “My wife’s watching.” He pointed to the intercom.
“I am watching.” Debra’s voice. Over the intercom, she was all sternness and crackle.
“You’re trespassing,” Martin said. “We’ll call the police right now if you don’t leave.”
The woman’s eyes moved to the intercom. She locked her gaze with the hole in its metal interface that contained the tiny camera. Martin listened for the long soliloquizing rage of Lily’s ghost voice. But nothing. Instead, the woman muttered a few curses under her breath.
And then she stumbled out the door into the early light that shone so softly on her she seemed a little like a ghost herself.
* * *
—
When Martin had found Lily dead, first he had called 911. Next he had turned off the faucet she’d left running. The floor was soaked. Lily’s cat, Mel Blanc, liked to sit in the sink, shedding her hair into the drain. “Keep Mel Blanc out of there before she clogs it up,” Martin once told Lily, and Lily said, “If I wanted something that would listen to me, I would have a dog.” The sink was still full of water and cat hair. He threw up into it.
For a few days, the usual parade of complaints from tenants stopped. 4B adopted Mel Blanc. 7C left a long message on Martin’s machine about how Lily had been the only one to really listen to and not judge her theory about the elevator mechanics being spies. 2D said, “She always held the door for me, Martin, even when I could tell it was so much work for her.”
In the immediate aftermath of Lily’s death, the building felt sad, but also more humane. People held doors and each other’s gaze, took the time to scratch 3D’s Yorkies behind the ears, lowered their voices and spoke almost melodiously about what was gone. In those moments, the building was not a seething mass of wants and demands. There was no pecking order. There were just souls. Souls sitting on sofas and inside apartments and souls fixing elevators and unclogging drains and souls holding doors for other souls. A kind of vision of the building in which, yes, Martin’s chest was translucent but it wasn’t a big deal because so was everybody’s. Everybody was a bit more see-through.
Then the paperwork began. Kenneth bought Lily’s apartment, 5A, and hired an architectural firm to determine ways to combine 6A and 5A into one massive two-floor apartment linked by a glass staircase. Before the official demo crew arrived, Martin was tasked with removing Lily’s fridge.
As Martin had rolled the fridge to the freight elevator, he tried not to think about the large quantities of oranges Lily kept in there, or the ice cream she had always offered him when he was upstairs for a job (“Mint mint mint!” she would sing), or the intimidatingly large bowls of sugary puddings she made, or the slabs of brie that she would not spread on anything, but would scratch at with her nails, eating whatever got stuck to her hands. Just a few months ago, she had held out the remaining cheese block to Martin, saying, “Do the fancy ladies in this building offer you cheese like this when you fix their sinks?” Then she had laughed and thrown the brie back in the fridge, where it stayed and got old, unwanted mold sneaking in. All over the cheese a host of flatulent microbes had clustered, farting more and more, until the smell escaped even the fridge, and Kenneth had breathed it in when he was showing some contractors around 5A and said, “No more!” and called Martin.
“Martin?”
Debra’s voice at the intercom.
“Martin, are you okay? Is the intruder gone?”
The intruder. Yes, that was the right way to think of her if he wanted to get through the day. Not Lily’s cousin. Not a woman he’d kicked out.
“She’s gone,” he said to the intercom. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
He stepped outside the building and breathed in the cold air. The intruder was still in sight, walking slowly west, toward the river. The clouds hung around like wet wrung socks illuminated by a burning yolk of sun, and he had kicked the intruder out, he had done his job.
* * *
—
When he returned to the basement apartment, Debra, exhausted, had already gone back to bed. But Ruby was still huddled by the intercom, glaring at him. Martin’s skin felt stung, like his daughter’s glare was made out of bees. Once there had been bees living in the water tower on the roof. They must have been attracted by the garden Kenneth had hired someone to plant around one of the penthouse’s decks. Martin hadn’t known about the bees, of course. He had climbed up to the top of the water tower, thrown his leg over the ladder so he wouldn’t fall, lifted a small hatch in the roof. He was about to climb in to check on the float switch when bees coated and stung his face and his hands.
Now his daughter took his hands in hers, as though a kind gesture might distract him from the way she was glaring. “She’s Lily’s family,” Ruby said. “Why did you and Mom think it was okay to kick her out?”
“She’s not the first person who I’ve had to ask to leave the foyer,” Martin said. “And you never complained so loud before. Think about that. You’re only upset because this woman looks like Lily.”
“She doesn’t just look like Lily. She’s related to Lily.” Which daughter peered up at him now from the outer-daughter husk? One of the littlest Rubys? No, it was still just his current daughter, a grown woman trying to manipulate him into feeling guilty by summoning his memories of a younger Ruby, by trying to make him think he’d disappointed the purest kid side of her.
“I kicked her out because that’s my job,” Martin said. He removed his hands from Ruby’s grip. “If I don’t do my job, I lose my job. Your mother gets that. Why don’t you?”
“She wasn’t just coincidentally here. She was at our foyer, waiting for Lily.”
“It’s not our foyer.”
“Huh?”
“You said she was at our foyer. But that’s not right.” He scratched at his beard. “The foyer doesn’t belong to us.”
“It kind of does.”
“Maybe you’re getting this household mixed up with your ex-boyfriend’s.”
“John. You know his name.”
“John owns a foyer, maybe,” Martin said. “But not you. Not me. We are a foyerless family.”
“John didn’t own any foyer. His family home in Connecticut has a foyer maybe, but—”
“Foyer,” Martin said. “Such a hoity-toity word. Is it French, do you think?”
Ruby closed her eyes. “I never took French.”
“What did you learn at that school?”