I knocked on my neighbour’s door last night.
“Sorry John,” I said, “I know you’ve only just got home from work but I need your help. I can’t get into my house. I was in a rush and my front door key is in my trousers which I’ve left beside the bed.”
“Okay, so what do you want me to do then?” he asked.
I said: “Go upstairs to your bedroom and get them for me please.”
John didn’t move for three seconds. He just stood there holding a plastic grocery bag with two frozen dinners sliding against each other at the bottom.
The porch light flickered once, making that little buzzing sound it always made when the bulb was loose in the socket. Fourteen weeks running steel up from the river town in southern Illinois will make a man value his own silence more than gold, but standing there on John’s welcome mat, I would have traded every quiet night on the road just to not hear the hum of that fixture.
“Your bedroom window looks right across into my second-floor landing,” I told him, keeping my voice lower than I wanted to. “You can reach right over if you open the screen.”
John shifted the bag to his other hand. He didn’t look at my face. He looked past my shoulder at my dark front porch, like he was checking to see if my truck was still sitting in the gravel drive where I’d left it twenty minutes ago after the long haul up from Cairo.
“Bill,” he said, and his voice sounded thin, almost annoyed. “You got a back door wide open.”
The words sat between us on the concrete step. A stray dog barked somewhere down the lane, two long hollers and then nothing. I reached up and rubbed the back of my neck where the road dust had settled into my collar like dry sand.
“My back door is deadbolted from the inside,” I said. “I checked it before I left this morning at 4:15. I always lock it.”
“Well, it ain’t deadbolted now,” John muttered. He pushed past me down his own hallway, his heavy work boots clicking against the laminate floor. “Come on then. Let’s go look from the top room.”
The last fourteen weeks had been three thousand six hundred and forty miles of highway, mostly at night when the semis are heavy and the state troopers are sitting in the crossovers with their lights off.
I had three spare shirts folded in a plastic crate behind the seat of my Ford, and every time I stopped for diesel at a truck stop off Route 51, I thought about Brenda back home in our kitchen with her coffee and her crossword puzzles. I thought about the way she kissed me right on the corner of my mouth before I pulled out in August, her hands smelling like cinnamon toast. I used to run my thumb over the steering wheel and tell myself that working the double shifts down south was buying us something real, buying us the kind of quiet retirement my dad never got to see after forty years at the grain elevator.
John’s upstairs hallway smelled like old carpet and fried pork chops. He walked straight to the guest room at the back, the one with the window looking across the narrow gap between our two houses.
Our second-floor windows sat barely six feet apart, just enough space for the squirrels to jump the gap if they were feeling bold.
“Look right there,” John said, pointing a thick finger at the glass. “See? That ain’t closed.”
I leaned in close, my shoulder pressing hard against the yellow wallpaper. My window, the one to the spare room we hadn’t slept in since my brother passed five years back, was pushed up four inches from the bottom. Just enough to let the night air drift in. Just enough for a hand to reach through from the inside and slide the latch.
“I didn’t leave that open,” I whispered.
“Well, somebody did,” John said. “Or you forgot. You was in a rush, you said.”
“I never leave that window open,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine anymore. It sounded small, like it was coming from the bottom of an empty cistern. “The screen’s got a tear in the corner. We keep it shut tight on account of the hornets.”
John looked sideways at me then, his jaw working a piece of chewing gum from one side to the other. He reached out, grabbed the white wooden frame of his own window, and shoved it up with a sharp squeak of old pulleys. The cool October air rushed into the room, smelling of damp earth and wood smoke from someone burning leaves down by the creek.
“Here,” John said, stepping aside. “Reach your arm across. You’re taller than me. You can grab the sill on your side and pop it open the rest of the way.”
I didn’t move. My boots felt like they were nailed to the floorboards. Downstairs in our house, the kitchen clock was ticking away the minutes, slow and steady like a pulse you can feel behind your eyes when you’ve had too much black coffee.
“Go on, Bill,” John urged, nudging my elbow. “Unless you want me to do it.”
I leaned out into the dark space between the two houses. The wind hit my face, cold and sharp. I reached my arm across the six-foot gap, my fingers stretching out over the black drop to the grass below. My hand hit the screen of our spare room window, and it gave way instantly with a little plastic snap.
That was when I smelled it.
It wasn’t wood smoke. It wasn’t road dust. It was cheap menthol cigarettes and sandalwood shaving cream, the exact scent I’d smelled two weeks ago when I found a receipt for a double-occupancy motel room in Paducah tucked inside the pocket of Brenda’s winter coat while I was hauling it out to the cedar chest. She told me back then it was a mistake, that the credit card number had been stolen by someone online, and I had nodded and kissed her forehead because the thought of it being anything else made my chest feel like it was being squeezed in a vise.
I shoved my hand through the torn screen and pushed the window hard. It slid up with a dry rattle.
“Got it?” John asked from behind me.
I didn’t answer him. I pulled myself halfway through the opening, resting my weight on the wooden sill, and swung my legs over into our spare room. The room was dark, lit only by the amber glow of the streetlamp outside filtering through the lace curtains. The bed was made, the quilt pulled smooth and tight the way Brenda always kept it before she went downstairs to watch the late news.
Except the indent in the pillows wasn’t hers.
I walked out of the spare room and down the short hall toward our master bedroom. Every board in the floor creaked under my boots, loud as pistol shots in the quiet house. I didn’t turn on the hall light. I didn’t need to. The moonlight was coming in strong through the big picture window at the front of the landing, cutting pale white stripes across the carpet.
The door to our room was cracked open about two inches.
I stopped right outside it, my hand resting on the smooth wood of the frame. I could hear the faint sound of someone breathing inside, slow and even, the rhythm of a person who wasn’t worried about the time or the miles or the state troopers sitting in the dark on Route 51.
“Brenda?” I said.
The breathing stopped. A floorboard groaned inside the room, heavy and slow.
The door swung open another few inches, pushed by a hand in the dark. Brenda stood there wearing my old flannel shirt, the red one with the frayed cuffs I’d left hanging on the back of the bathroom door when I drove out of the yard in August. Her hair was tangled on one side, and her eyes looked wide and dark in the shadows, staring at me like she was seeing a ghost come up out of the river.
“Bill,” she whispered. Her voice didn’t have any fight in it. Just a tired, flat drop. “You weren’t supposed to be back until Thursday.”
“The load dropped early,” I said. My hands were shaking down at my sides, so I shoved them deep into the pockets of my canvas jacket to keep her from seeing. “I called the house three times from Marion. You didn’t pick up.”
She didn’t move. She just stood there in the doorway of our bedroom, the place I’d spent thirty years coming home to, the place I’d thought about every single mile I pushed that truck through the dark.
“Mark’s still asleep,” she said softly.
I didn’t ask who Mark was. I already knew. Mark was the man who ran the hardware store down on Main Street, the one who sold me the deadbolt on the back door three summers ago and offered to help Brenda put it in while I was up in the Quad Cities hauling gravel.
“I know,” I said.
I turned around and walked back down the hall toward the spare room, my boots heavy against the floor. Behind me, the door didn’t click shut. It stayed open just an inch, letting that smell of sandalwood drift out into the dark hallway, thick and heavy enough to choke a man.
I climbed back out through the spare room window, reaching across the gap to John’s house, and pulled myself down into the cold night air of the lane. John was standing at his front door waiting, holding his plastic bag of frozen dinners, looking at me with that careful, quiet look small-town neighbors give each other when they know the roof has just caved in.
“Get your keys?” he asked.
I looked down at my hand. I didn’t have them. I’d left them right where I said I did, sitting on the bedside table inside a house that didn’t belong to me anymore.
“No,” I told him, and I kept walking straight down the gravel drive toward my truck. “Leave the door open, John. I don’t think I’m going back in tonight anyway.”
