Halloween morning, my task list from Shawna was ridiculous. Two pages of ridiculous. If I’d actually planned to finish everything, I wouldn’t have a spare minute to myself.
I decided to complete what I could at my own pace. More important, I promised myself I’d stop in at the apartment periodically to check on our kids. Lynn had been acting so strange lately, obsessed with Halloween, denying the holiday as her idea of punishment, consequence, whatever she called it. In my experience, if you put a lid on something, you actually create a pressure cooker—which explained all the blowups I had with my parents growing up and also explained why I tried to be so easygoing with Mattie and Amber. Kids need their parents to be calm, and Lynn was having trouble meeting that need.
I hoped to provide a normal parent’s kind of surveillance. You know, not the twenty-four-hour, Big Brother hidden-camera type Lynn was currently experimenting with,but the healthy way parents have always watched over their kids: making sure they don’t hurt themselves, that they’re kind to each other, maybe that they learn a thing or two about history or about other people or how the world works. Or just hang around with them and goof off once in a while—exercise a sense of humor, instead of being so serious all the time. That was the main thing I hoped to pass along to my children.
That was my plan, at least. Somehow the time got away from me.
Every task was frustrating. The way Shawna filled the list, I suspected she’d been saving the worst to dump on me the last day of the month, almost like she was trying to get me to quit. Dreaded shelf replacements in not one but three units—each board a non-standard size that needed to be measured, cut, placed, adjusted, then placed again. Some clogged sinks just on the edge of needing professional plumbing, and in the first job I broke a rusted pipe and had to keep the family’s water turned off. The other sink had the most disgusting hair clog I’d ever seen: I snaked the drain and pulled back a slick wet thing like the arm of a drowned dog. In that case, the newly cleared drain unclogged with a spray of black gunk, and I had to repaint part of the wall above the sink. As the eggshell paint began to dry, the black gunk started to fade through, and I had to promise another layer the next day before the resident would let me leave.
Honestly, I felt like I was building things merely to take them back apart. Lots of fruitless labor, with no improved results.
Then there were the pest traps. For some reason, Shawna decided it was time to inventory them. All of them. I’d labeled the traps on the bottom—for good reason, since it kept tenants from spotting the dates and querying if they’d expired. But that meant I’d have to lift each trap from the dark corner where I’d set it to check underneath. Well, there was something on most of the traps—and not the critters we were trying to catch. Some kind of glue or syrup drizzled out of the opening or overtop the plastic casing, and it got on my hands or, when I moved the trap with a screwdriver or pliers or a wooden dowel, it stuck to that, too, and then to my foot as I tried to separate the pieces. A real nuisance, and after a few encounters I sniffed my fingertips and the chemical odor made me worry it was some leaked poison, applied by an exasperated tenant hoping to make these cosmetic traps into something more effective. Had I rubbed the poison beneath an itching eye, or pressed some of it into my hair or dragged it along my lower lip?
In the midst of this paranoid freak-out, in a dark spider-webby nook beneath the basement stairwell of building ten, my work cell rang. On instinct I reached for it, my fingers sticking to the lining of my pocket as I dug into it and closed around the buzzing, vibrating phone. I swiped my finger over the unlock screen. The glass felt like sandpaper, and I imagined a layer of my skin shredding off with the aggressive swipe.
If I’d seen the caller ID in time, I wouldn’t have answered it.
Joanne Huff’s voice rose shrill from the speaker. “Harris, there’s a smell in the building. Like a mouse crawled between the walls and died. I can’t tell you where it’s coming from, but it’s there. Do you hear me?”
“Yeah.” Initially I’d held the phone away from my ear to keep it from sticking to my face, but I brought it closer to speak. My lips brushed against the mouthpiece. Closer to my nostrils, the chemical smell grew stronger. “Busy.”
“Come and see for yourself. Smell for yourself, I mean. Right away.”
“Can’t. At the other end of the property.” A new odor seemed to waft from the phone, an awful concoction of poison and rot.
Her illness. Joanne’s mystery illness, transmitted through the phone. It occurred to me then that Joanne was smelling her own decay.
“Right away, Harris. It’s not bad yet, but I know it will get worse.”
“Seems like that’s always the way, doesn’t it?”
“What? What did you say?”
I hung up. Joanne would call the office next, which was fine with me. Let Shawna deal with her for a change.
Like I said, I planned to stop home periodically and check on Lynn and the kids, but I felt like my work tasks sabotaged me. The way Shawna prioritized the items took me to the opposite edge of the community, too out-of-the-way for me to visit my family.
I thought about them, though. I wondered what my kids were doing. Perhaps they fantasized about Halloween and all the candy and the fun scares they could be enjoying. Or perhaps they treated the day like a punishment, as Lynn expected from them.
At the very least, I hope they enjoyed the time home from school—treated it like a snow day, a gift of freedom, the hours suddenly and gloriously all their own.
I’d like to think that. A snow day is much better than a sick day. Bored and napping and waiting for a dose of cough syrup or clear broth—the hours falling into dismal patterns.
At one point I was certain I’d heard Mattie’s laugh. I was getting fresh bulbs from the storage closet in building four and the laugh seemed to carry in the wind, as might happen in fall and winter when the leaves didn’t dampen sound; and midday, with few cars roaring past, the televisions and stereos mostly silent. Probably it wasn’t Mattie, but it sounded so much like him.
Later, when I crossed the parking lot to building eight, I saw Amber out of the corner of my eye. She ran behind the building toward the gap in the fence that led off our property. My eyes played tricks on me, though. It must have been another of the neighborhood girls, in a blue dress similar to one of Amber’s—though, come to think of it now, any girl Amber’s age should have been in school at the time.
But the kids were home being punished. Their mother never would have allowed either of them outside to play.
My phone buzzed again, and I pressed through my pocket to mute it. Cold wind whistled through barren branches. The phone continued to vibrate in my pocket.
Joanne’s voice came through anyway.
“The smell is worse now. It’s so bad I can almost notice it on my own clothing. It’s everywhere, Harris.”
I pressed the heel of my hand against my pocket, trying to muffle the phone, strangle it into silence.