Mackenzie had even less furniture than Maude, like any kid who’d just moved out of her parents’ house, but she had a ludicrous number of suitcases, like she needed a different shirt for every hour of every day. She and another girl around her age pulled up in two separate cars, hauling Mackenzie’s stuff up the porch steps and down the basement stairs like two picnic ants, and then they stood on the porch talking and laughing for what must have been an hour as Larry awkwardly stood by, waiting to hand off the door key.
When the other girl finally left, she took a couple of empty suitcases with her. She also took Mackenzie’s quiet confidence, and suddenly Mackenzie was only quiet. She no longer seemed like she fit in her own clothes and skin, like someone else had inhabited her body, dressed her and decorated her and then left her, bewildered and lost, standing in someone else’s ripped skinny jeans in front of someone else’s house.
She stuttered an almost-inaudible thank-you to Larry, took the key, and hurried into her apartment. Larry heard the door close and lock and bolt behind her.
2139B, the entire main floor, remained vacant for almost a month before it was occupied by a woman named Sunna. She had long shiny fingernails and short shiny hair and white shiny teeth lined up neatly in a mouth that smiled without alerting the rest of her face. She was extremely beautiful, but in a different way than the grocery store woman. Where that woman could grace the cover of Larry’s favorite punk magazine, Razorcake, Sunna was someone you’d see in a commercial for perfume or playing a lawyer in a TV drama.
He and Sunna hadn’t gotten off to a great start—when he’d showed up to give her the house key, she’d grasped it gingerly between her thumb and middle finger like it was dirty, said a curt “thank you,” and opened the door without even looking at him, though he continued to babble on about keys and mailboxes and the other women living in 2139A and 2139C—but still, every time his phone rang from that day forward, he hoped it was her asking him to come fix the dishwasher or something. It wasn’t love, but only because he was being more careful about love these days.
He didn’t mention the ghosts to any of the tenants. They’d find out soon enough.
A LETTER ARRIVES AT 2139 MONTREAL STREET
Sunna
Sunna had been transferred, and she was still trying not to take it personally. It wasn’t that she wanted to stay—she wanted to leave more than anything—it was that she didn’t want to be sent away. Leaving should be her idea, and people should beg her not to go.
But Fire! Fitness was expanding, with new locations in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and sending Sunna to one of them made the most sense, logistically, so Sunna had to act sad (to be leaving) but not too sad (lest they reconsider and decide to send someone else), when all she really felt was relief. She needed to be out of this city, where everyone knew Brett but not Sunna, where Brett’s face grinned from billboards and signs in the subway and from the stages she graced when she was asked to emcee fancy events and charity dinners. This was Brett’s city, and while Sunna had long wished she didn’t have to live here, she’d never had a good enough reason to leave.
So Sunna flew west, and she spent much of that flight contemplating all the usual things people worried about when they were leaving anything for anything else—whether she was running “away” or “toward,” whether she had failed or outgrown, whether she was being stupidly impulsive or thrillingly spontaneous. By the time she landed in her new home—Regina, Saskatchewan, the Queen City, the Actual Center of the Middle of Nowhere—she’d landed on all the most unflattering conclusions. She was running away from Brett, she had failed at everything she’d ever attempted, and accepting this transfer was one big fear-and-failure-fueled mistake.
But just because you knew you’d made a mistake, that didn’t mean you knew how to fix it, and the cab from the airport to her hotel was only fifteen bucks, where a flight back home would’ve been several hundred. And maybe there was something for her in this tiny city. Maybe it would be easier to find because it had so few places to hide.
Within days, she’d found a more permanent temporary place to live and was accepting a house key from a scrawny guy dressed like a fourteen-year-old who couldn’t look her in the eye but wouldn’t shut up about keys and mailboxes and the other tenants living above and below her. When she’d seen the listing for this gorgeous, mansion-like home, he was not the sort of landlord she’d pictured greeting her at the front door.
The letter came a week later, and she didn’t think for one second that it was meant for her because she didn’t have friends who communicated by snail mail. More accurately, she didn’t have friends.
When she left Toronto, there had been a going-away party, put on by a group of people she had once called her friends. They’d acted sad and said they’d keep in touch, but Sunna didn’t expect them to and wasn’t bothered by the thought that they wouldn’t. Her moving away wasn’t the real end of those friendships, but it was tangible and easy for everyone to point to. As though she’d begun to dematerialize during a dinner party and no one had noticed until a voice from a seemingly empty chair said, “Well, I guess I’ll be leaving now.”
So this letter wouldn’t be for her; it would be for one of the other renters. The landlord had mentioned that he planned on installing separate mailboxes and doorbells for each of the suites as soon as he could; he said he simply hadn’t thought of it before and then apologized and apologized and apologized. People who apologized like that, like they were begging for reassurance, drove her nuts.
She reached into the mailbox, rolling her shoulder up so her purse wouldn’t fall to the porch. The envelope, along with a grocery store flyer and a door hanger advertisement, was sitting in several inches of rusty water.
“Oh, gross,” she said, holding the soused papers in front of her with the tips of her acrylic nails. There was a clucking sound behind her.
“That mailbox is awful. We need to speak to Larry about it. Every time it rains, it fills up like a bathtub and wrecks my coupons.”
Sunna looked up. An older woman stood there, shaking her head and cradling a grocery bag like it was an infant. She wore glasses on a beaded chain around her neck and a ridiculous Kentucky Derby–style cocktail hat on her head. The hat had a veritable bouquet of feathers and flowers on the side and would’ve looked festive except for the fact that it was all black, which meant the feathers looked like they’d come from a crow, and the flowers looked like they’d come from a funeral scene in a Tim Burton movie. Except for that strange gothic hat, everything about her was sharp and no nonsense, from her nose to her collarbones to the pleats in her pants.
“Larry?”
“The landlord,” said the woman. Her voice was sharp too.
“Oh. Right, yeah, Larry,” said Sunna, embarrassed.
“I’m Maude,” said the woman. “I live above you.” Her tone also seemed to say, I am above you.
“Right. I’m on the main floor. I’m Sunna.”
“Oh.” The woman’s lip curled disdainfully, as though she didn’t like names that couldn’t be found in very old Canadian phone books.
Sunna looked down at the mess in her hands, holding it out so as to not drip rusty mailbox water on her shoes. “You’re right though. This is . . . oh. What—”