It took three attempts at buzzing the building manager before anyone answered, and then it was a voice too gruff and full of static for Kara to understand. She looked around the 1970s-styled lobby of her new building. Surely, the manager was going to come down and let her in? Or at least buzz her through the interior lobby door? If another tenant came out, maybe she could slip in after them.
She pulled out her phone. It was nearly six thirty, almost two hours after she’d expected to arrive and half an hour after she’d promised to text her mom that she’d made it safely. Stupid Chicago traffic. Mom would be worried, especially since Kara had rejected her offer to take the day off work and drive with her. But Kara had imagined hours of Mom poking into her life and no, thank you.
Made it to the new place. Talk after I get settled.
She put her phone back in her coat pocket.
This was ridiculous. She had already paid her first month’s rent and signed the lease. She had a legal right to enter her new apartment. She put her finger on the buzzer again and left it there.
A moment later, a man of about fifty or sixty with silver hair combed sideways over a bald spot burst through the locked interior door. He glared at her, and Kara yanked her finger off the buzzer.
“You are Kara?”
Who else did he think she might be?
“You come.” He barely waited for her before letting go of the door and turning away. “The apartment is this way, top floor. Is very nice.”
“It looked nice in the pictures.”
The manager, who hadn’t bothered introducing himself, led her to the stairs and bounded up them two at a time. Kara was fit enough to keep up, but it had been a long day, and she was feeling grouchy by the time they reached the fifth floor.
The apartment was smaller than it had appeared in the pictures on the website. Online it had seemed charming, but in person it was old and funny-smelling. The wooden floors looked sticky with too many years of wax, grit lined the edges of the molded baseboards, and a cold draft made Kara shiver as she stepped inside.
The manager smiled and nodded. “Is nice, yes?”
“Uh….”
“You need to sign the papers.” He unfolded a bundle and set it on the laminate kitchen counter. Then he took a pen from his shirt pocket and uncapped it.
Kara had asked the management company multiple times to email the lease for her to review, so she could sign it electronically in advance of arriving. They had eventually done that, but the day before someone from the office had phoned to say that she needed to sign the papers in person. She had politely explained that people signed documents electronically all the time, and they were still legally binding. It hadn’t mattered.
Her concern was that they were trying to pull a fast one, to change the terms of the lease she’d already agreed to. But a thorough look showed her the paper lease seemed fairly standard, nothing different. She signed and slid the papers back to the manager. He folded them in thirds and tucked them into his pants pocket. She was going to have to call the office tomorrow morning to get an executed copy for her own records. She wondered with frustration if all leasing companies in Chicago sucked or if she’d just had the misfortune of working with the worst one.
From a different pocket, the custodian produced two silver keys on a simple metal loop. He gave her a wordless nod and let himself out.
The first thing Kara did was open all the windows. The radiators hissed in protest, but the air inside the apartment felt stale and…weirdly still. Fresh air was definitely needed, cold weather or not.
After that, it was time to start moving in. She’d had to park the moving truck two blocks away. She carried box after box from it to the lobby, where she dumped everything in a heap. Once she was ready to take a load up, she realized the building manager hadn’t said anything about the freight elevator, and, sure enough, it was inoperable. She had to use a box to jimmy open the door of the tiny two-person passenger elevator while she crammed as many other boxes inside as she could. Once full, she rode it up to the fifth floor, pushed everything out in the hall, and went back to the lobby to repeat the process a hundred more times. If she took too long before letting the elevator door shut, an alarm went off. Once, she let the door shut to quell the alarm, and her boxes made their ascent alone. They came back, right about the time the stairwell door burst open, and two people who had probably hoped to ride the elevator glared at her before heading out into the night.
So far, her big Chicago adventure was awful.
She managed to haul in everything but the one piece of furniture she still owned, a couch, which would have to stay in the truck until she could get help.
Moving was always awful, but she’d been dumb not to pay for professionals or at least accept her brother-in-law’s offer to come with her. Independence had its drawbacks, but it would be worth it once she was settled and ready to start this new life.
After looking up the nearest pizza place and ordering delivery, she sent her mother another text: Moved in. Unpacking. Very tired. Mom texted back a heart and a good night message instead of calling. She must have sensed that Kara wanted to be left alone.
And she did. She threw herself into cleaning and unpacking, and by the time the pizza arrived, she felt she’d earned her rest.
But by midnight, she lay wide awake on the air mattress that would serve as her bed until she could buy furniture. Every creak and noise in the apartment seemed to echo off the bare walls. In Eau Claire, the most common noise she’d heard at night was the sound of drunk college students on the weekends. Here she could hear the squeal of tires and the honking of car horns. Every few minutes an automated voice kindly announced to passengers they were on the Route 50 bus. In Eau Claire, she and Hilary had lived on a tree-lined street. At night their room was dark. Now the room was bathed in the glow of the streetlamps. She vaguely remembered having to adjust during her time in Madison for law school, but she and Hilary had moved away from the city center after her first year and spent the rest of the time in a darker, quieter residential area.
Kara took a few deep breaths. She tried to imagine Mom saying, Just close your eyes, even if you don’t feel tired, the way she had when Kara was little and had a nightmare. Sure enough, after a few minutes, her muscles started to relax. She started to enter the delicious state of floating weightless, all cares and concerns muted into dream phenomena that could no longer hurt or worry her. She imagined Hilary sitting in the eating nook of this new apartment, calling out bus stops. Dream Hilary looked at Kara and asked if she wanted something to drink, but before Kara could answer, a clanging—a different one from the radiators—jolted her awake.
She opened her eyes and strained to listen while trying to keep her breath quiet. She went through her situation: she’d locked the front door, and she’d closed and locked the windows before going to bed. She was on the top floor. If someone managed to get past the locked lobby, it was unlikely they’d decide to take the elevator up five floors. If she’d forgotten to close a window, it would be difficult for someone to climb up that high. She was just hearing apartment noises she wasn’t used to yet.
Swoosh. This time it sounded exactly like the refrigerator door being shut.
Kara sat up.
She looked around the bedroom for something to use in self-defense. Her cell phone was resting on the nightstand. She could call the police. But what if it was just a rat? Wasn’t Chicago supposed to have a lot of rats? She didn’t want to seem like an overanxious country bumpkin when the cops showed up.
She held her breath as the floorboards outside the bedroom door creaked. Her heart began pounding in her ears, and she was sure the intruder could hear it, just as surely as she could hear the slow eek-eek-eek of their footsteps.
The doorknob squeaked as it began to turn. Kara covered her mouth with her hands to prevent herself from screaming out loud.
The door opened halfway.
She froze in terror. This was it. Whoever it was, whatever they wanted, she was trapped now. Here they came.
But nothing happened.
She waited a long minute, but the apartment was quiet again, with only the noises of the city coming from outside. Her breathing started to even out, but her hands were shaking.
“Hello?”
She felt lightheaded. She knew she’d heard someone approaching. Maybe they were in the hallway. Maybe they were waiting to lure Kara out of the bedroom.
“Who’s there? I have a gun!”
Nothing.
After what felt like an eternity, she rolled off the air mattress and got to her feet. She took a timid step to the doorway. The floor creaked. Her bare feet stuck to the ages-old wax as she took another step. She reached carefully for the doorknob because despite her threat, she didn’t have a gun.
She hoped like hell no one was there.
The hall was empty. There was no one in the bathroom, which didn’t yet have a shower curtain to hide behind. No one in the living room either.
She made her way to the kitchen and turned on the light.
The refrigerator door was closed, but a carton of orange juice sat on the counter. Kara looked at it with curiosity. Her mother had sent her with a cooler of a few fresh food items, but had there been any orange juice? And had she drunk some of it before going to bed? She didn’t usually drink orange juice, except occasionally at brunch with champagne in it. She returned the carton to the fridge.
She looked around the living room again. The front door was still bolted. The windows were all still closed. If someone had broken in, how had they done it?
She returned to the kitchen. Why would someone break into her apartment to steal orange juice in the middle of the night? There were no dirty glasses. She hadn’t even unpacked the dishes yet. She’d eaten the pizza straight from the delivery box, which was still on the counter. She opened it and peeked inside. The remaining slices were still there. If someone had come in, why would they bother opening the refrigerator when there was food sitting out in the open? If they opened the refrigerator, why would they drink orange juice? Had they drunk directly out of the carton?
Kara opened the refrigerator again and took the orange juice out. She stopped short of tossing the carton into the garbage. A peeping tom with a craving for vitamin C? That didn’t make a lot of sense. Usually the most logical explanation to a problem was the simplest.
I probably just don’t like being alone in a strange apartment in a new city. I probably forgot the orange juice when I put the other food away earlier.
She must have taken the carton out of the cooler and gotten distracted from putting it in the fridge. It had probably been sitting on the counter all night. That was the simplest explanation.
Gently, she set the carton back on the shelf in the nearly empty refrigerator.
It’s an old building, she reminded herself. Their house in Eau Claire, which had originally been constructed in the 1960s, had been renovated only a few months before she and Hilary had moved in. This building hadn’t been renovated since the mid-1970s, if the lobby decor was anything to go by, but it had been built decades before that. Kara probably wasn’t accustomed to the quirks of old architecture. She tested the bedroom doorknob, and, sure enough, it didn’t latch properly against the strike plate.
See? Just your imagination and an old door. Nothing to worry about.
She rooted around for something to use as a weapon to make her feel safer, but all she could find was a butterknife.
Great, I’ll just spread someone to death.
Back in the bedroom, she found her phone and contemplated calling Mom or her sister Becca, but that would only create more problems. If she woke them up in the middle of the night, they’d panic, too. And when she told them she didn’t actually find an intruder, they’d say she was paranoid and this was why she shouldn’t have tried to strike out on her own, far from them and the comforts of the place where she grew up. They’d tell her to come home.
Instead, she opened a streaming app and pulled up an old episode of the British baking show. Somewhere between bread week and pastry week, she finally fell asleep.
By the next morning, cold logic prevailed. There were three possible scenarios to explain what had happened. Scenario one: a draft in the building caused doors and windows to creak. As for the orange juice, she’d either forgotten to put it away when she’d unpacked the cooler, or she really had imagined it. After all, she’d been dreaming about Hilary being in the kitchen. Maybe her mind wanted to see evidence of that.
The second and third possible explanations were that someone had actually come in. Scenario two: the locks in the building were so old that the keys worked universally. Someone who lived in the building had come home, probably drunk, and accidentally let themselves into the wrong apartment. They’d helped themselves to something to drink before they realized their mistake and fled, embarrassed and worried about getting caught. Scenario three: someone had a key to Kara’s apartment specifically. Maybe someone who had never lived in the building, a friend the previous tenant had given an emergency key. They might not have known their friend—brother—whoever—had moved out a few days earlier. They’d come over, had some orange juice, and been ready to crash in the bedroom where Kara was sleeping when they realized their mistake. That seemed like a reasonable enough explanation, something innocuous but nonetheless a violation of Kara’s privacy that would need to be curbed.
After a quick shower, she set out to find the building manager to ask if he would help move the couch and to get a read on the likelihood of the three scenarios. The man, whom Kara found tinkering with one of the washing machines in the basement laundry room, agreed to help her, but as they carried the couch from the moving truck to the lobby, he didn’t seem all that concerned about the possible break-in.
“You want I change lock?”
“No, the lock’s not broken. I just want to know if there’s ever a problem with drafts making doors open and close. Or maybe the key to another apartment works in my lock, and someone stumbled home drunk or something? I was wondering if maybe someone else has a key to my place, like you, or—”
“Yuk-use? Yuk-use?”
It took Kara a moment to figure out what he was saying. “No, I’m not accusing you.”
“I live ten years in America! I never have problem. I work hard. I do job. Everybody think, okay, is immigrant, is liar. Is thief. No have papers.”
The elevator dinged open on the fifth floor, and they wrestled the sofa into the hall through a feat of geometry. At least the guy wasn’t yelling anymore. Kara considered it real progress in their relationship.
“So are you from Poland then?”
“Poland? Poland! I am from Ukraine!”
“Sorry, I just thought—”
“I have work to do.” He stabbed the elevator button, and the door jerked open. He stepped inside and pointed a finger at Kara. “Yuk-use, you go to Eric, say him Oleg is thief. He say no way, is honest. You see.”
“I’m not really interested in going to Eric.” Whoever Eric was. “Never mind.”
“Never mind,” he repeated, his voice tinged with sarcasm. He pushed a button on the panel inside the elevator.
The doors closed as Kara shouted, “Thank you for your help, sir!”
The couch was still yards away from her apartment and the next geometry puzzle of getting it inside the door. She sighed and began to push it inch by inch down the hall.