Karen Heuler
LAURA and her three elderly neighbors had been living in a West Village tenement for over forty years. They weren’t close friends, but as the tenants in the rest of the five-story walkup came and went, they clung to their shared connection to the building’s history and their own place in it. Each floor had a slightly different odor, created—Stella on the fourth floor once told Laura—by the skin cells they each shed every day over the decades. She said that the cells stuck to the walls and produced an odd stippling effect after a fresh paint. There would be the smell of paint for a week, and then the old smells would creep back like spiders repairing their webs.
“The fifth floor has wallpaper showing through,” Alberto pointed out. Stella remembered that wallpaper, with its pattern of foggy trees and mountains. She recalled the janitor who had put it up, who later fell off a ladder, who had been taken away and never came back. The four old people had, over the years, known neighbors who had died behind their closed doors. The smell had given it away. Stella, for instance, had moved into an apartment where someone had died. She still had a tendency to sniff suspiciously on damp days.
It was best not to think about that.
Alberto lived down the hall from Laura, and when she found a package wrapped in red paper outside her door, she naturally asked him about it. He had found one as well. As did Stella. As did Gerald on the first floor. They all contained flimsy but beautiful dollar-sized papers, of various denominations, with Money of the Dead written in script on them. Laura invited her neighbors over for coffee or brandy, whatever they chose, so they could discuss the situation.
“At first I was afraid it was some notice from the landlord,” Stella said. She was in her eighties but stood straight and slim, with hair cut short like a boy’s. “Is someone pointing out that we’re all old? Is that what it is?”
“It might be a joke,” Alberto agreed. “There’s an old story where I was born, that ghosts get tired of the places where they died, and search for a nicer place to live. Ghosts are restless.”
“And do they pay rent? Is that what the money is for?”
He shrugged. “Someone knows the story and is making a joke? Could be.”
“Maybe not. Maybe they’re giving it to us to use it for something,” Gerald said. He had a bad habit of winking, which he did then.
They had all brought their packages and they sat around the table, counting and studying the money. “There are no signatures on any of the bills, and no serial numbers. Just the amount, and Money of the Dead, and a dark image.” Alberto was the most meticulous of the bunch, neat and analytical and, sometimes, slow.
“It looks like a road at sunset,” Laura said. She considered herself sensitive to the arts.
“That would be fitting.”
“And dark shapes at the end. Indistinct. Trees? People?”
“No one ever knows what’s at the end,” Alberto suggested.
They had different amounts, ranging from one hundred to five hundred, and no one knew whether it was better to have more or less of it. Who wants to have dead wealth? Were they supposed to buy something with it and pay someone for it?
“We should wait a day or two,” Gerald said, “in case we get a catalog.” He winked again.
“Not everything is funny,” Laura said.
“I believe this is money for the dead,” Stella said. “But what do they want us to do with it?”
“Exchange it for someone who’s dead?” Laura asked.
A sudden chill ran through each of them.
Yes.
* * *
Laura went through her photo albums, turning pages to look at her little boy. She had very few of Brian as an adult, and those she did have showed a steady growth of depravity. She chose one photo when Brian was eight and studied it. He had turned into a cold, impatient man and he had dabbled in crimes she could only imagine. He gloated about cheating people. One of his victims had killed him.
She decided that having her son back—the good son, the boy she remembered—was worth every bit of money she had.
She told the others what she was thinking.
“Don’t do it,” Stella said. “I wouldn’t. No good can come of it.”
“But what else is the money for? They left it for us because we know so many of the dead. They gave it to us for a reason!” She looked around at them, waiting for them to agree.
Alberto shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s something bad about this.”
Laura blushed in irritation. They had lived down the hall from each other for almost forty years, and they had little in common. She felt, very often, that he disapproved of her. For what? For the failure that was her son?
“What else would the money be for?” Laura repeated. “Why else would they choose us?”
They looked around uneasily; Gerald even raised his eyebrows instead of winking. Stella believed they were the only ones in the building to get the money. Everyone else was young, and the dead don’t matter to the young. But these four were old, and they knew some of the dead.
On one side, life; on the other, death. It was almost, sometimes, as if they could see across the divide, or hear a furtive, melancholy whistle. Their friends were there, as were their enemies. Did the dead think about them? How often?
“Maybe we’re supposed to do something special,” Alberto said, lifting his head. They had each been lost in thought. “But I wouldn’t be hasty. We can remember our beloved dead the usual way. Candles. Prayers. No exchange. You’re suggesting an exchange.”
“I don’t know what to call it,” Laura said. “Reaching out—that’s how I think of it. Like sending money so my boy can visit me.”
“I think we should be very cautious about this,” Stella said softly. “I imagine there’s a right decision and a wrong decision here, and, since we each have the money, we’re in it together. Let’s think about it some more before we act.”
The debate continued. Laura sat there, watching it fly around from one insistent neighbor to another. They weren’t going to agree that night, and she had already decided what to do. They could get angry, it didn’t matter. She could recall the years when she was happiest, when Brian still loved her, and here was a chance to have it again. She thought he would come, stay for a while, and then leave. Maybe fade away, like a memory.
That night she took all the money, folded it in the red paper along with a note that said, Brian, age eight, and the photograph. He was all smiles, looking happy. She placed it outside her door.
Anxiety kept her awake. She was torn between feeling stupid, regretting such a risky, unpredictable move, and hope. He used to look at her with love, with unrestrained confidence; he used to check in constantly, assuming she knew everything and would always know everything. Perhaps he had never recovered from the realization that she didn’t. It was so hard to believe that a cruel man had been waiting inside that gentle little boy. He had been a radiant child.
What had changed that child into a thug, a monster, a bully, and a cheat? She had seen nothing—no, there was nothing to see when he was a child, none of what he would come to be. There was no point in blaming herself, was there? They had loved each other then. She had done her best with him and he had repaid that by growing into a man who had stolen from her, threatened her, ruined people she knew, and died in a fight on a dark corner.
In the middle of the night she regretted offering all the money. Why hadn’t she held some back, just in case? Money might be needed for something else, something she couldn’t imagine yet. She tiptoed out to the door, opened it, and saw the package was still there. A longing suddenly overtook her, a longing for the sweetest part of her life. It didn’t matter how much it cost.
It might be wrong to change her mind, anyway; it might be insulting to remove some money. She left it.
Brian was filling her head. How she missed that boy, how she missed the love they’d had for each other. No other love had rivaled that—certainly not the love she’d had for Brian’s father, who had died when Brian was two and had been easily forgotten. The boy had been all that mattered, and had made her life whole.
Such good thoughts! She slept for a while and woke with anticipation. She got up, her heart beating wildly, and opened the door. The hallway was empty.
Nothing. Laura was hit by disappointment. She would not see the boy she cherished so much. She had a quick image of the adult Brian, pushed it away, and then flushed in shame. But she hated to think of him as an adult. It was better to forget what he’d become. Over time, he had changed and she had changed too, holding herself back as the ten-year-old, the twelve-year-old, the fourteen-year-old stared her down with contempt. She had lost control totally at fifteen, with his piercings and shaved head or dyed hair, his ripped clothes, and the snarl in his voice. At sixteen, he took her money and a credit card and left. Just left. She hadn’t the heart to cancel her card (it was the one way she knew he was still alive) until the bill came. It took her two years to pay it off. And after that, it got harder. Phone calls, threatening letters, all from people he had cheated. And police visits.
She turned to make herself some coffee, and stood staring blankly at the wall when Brian came in, rubbing his eyes, asking for cereal. “Mommy,” he said. His voice was soft and familiar and cozy, as if this had been going on every morning of his life—as, of course, it had, at that age. She had missed the sound of it so much, had missed the ease of it.
She held her breath at the first sound of his voice; she finally let it out. “Eggs?” she asked. “We’re out of cereal.”
His childish eyes looked at her with attention. “Did you forget me, Mommy?”
“I didn’t forget you,” she murmured, getting out the eggs. “I forgot the cereal.”
* * *
From the moment of his return, Brian shadowed her. That was soothing at first, and confirmed how good they were together. But he never gave an inch. After a week, she was aware of how he crept up behind her and startled her with his breath on her neck. He would push in beside her when she sat on the sofa, and drape his arms around her shoulders and across her chest. How much he loves me, she thought at first, but day after day his hands got tighter and his breath got hotter. “Let me breathe,” she would murmur as she untangled him.
“Don’t you love me?” he asked sadly and then, once, “Don’t you love me as I am?”
What did that mean? Why did her heart drop? Had he ever asked her anything like that when he was a child?
Of course not. She would have remembered. Or would she? Was this love and she had forgotten?
* * *
“Who was that?” he asked when Alberto knocked and asked to meet the following night. “He doesn’t like you. He thinks you’re a pushover.”
“Brian!” she had said, shocked.
“Well, I think you are, too,” he said without rancor.
Just that morning he had told her she shouldn’t go out so often, that it was careless. “Why do you always go away? Why won’t you stay here with me? I’m always alone. Is that what you want—to leave me? You can’t stand to be with me?”
“Never!” she had said, anxiously sitting down beside him so she could hug him. He held his body stiffly, however. Had he felt unloved as a child, is that what he thought? He had been everything to her; what had she been to him?
And then one day, without preparation, without thought, after he had accused her of staying away too long—he didn’t want her leaving, he said; ever—she blurted out, “And where have you been?”
All sounds stopped; nothing came through from outside, no sound from the street, no sound from the hallway. Nothing in the sky, even though she couldn’t see the sky. She knew it. The silence layered into deeper and deeper thicknesses, and her heart beat with each ratchet down into the silence. He looked at her as if he’d been waiting for a long time for this question, as if it would all turn on what happened after this moment. What would turn? She wondered that in the side of her mind, a mere notation.
“You know,” he said, “I was so lonely. You sent me there, didn’t you? You wanted me there. There’s no one there, Mommy. I was all alone. Don’t send me back, Mommy!” He sobbed in a dry voice that still managed to pierce her.
“I would never,” she told him. “I would never.” They held each other even as she recalled what a relief it had been when he died. She held him tighter. But how relieved she had been!
“Don’t send me away, Mommy! Please, Mommy!” His teeth showed like a madhouse clown’s and he repeated that “Mommy” a few more times.
Then he started using that word relentlessly, lisping it, snarling it, saying it dreamily or even lustily. Oh how she learned to hate it. “Where have you been, Mommy? Did you talk to anyone, Mommy? Mommy, there’s no more milk. Mommy, why were you gone so long? Don’t you love me, Mommy?”
There were times when he looked heartbroken, his eyes gleaming, and cried out, “I don’t think you want me here, Mommy. Do you?”
Did she? Had she made a terrible mistake? This wasn’t the Brian she remembered, the charming boy who giggled at their private jokes. This Brian was challenging, complaining, and possessive. She had always wondered how Brian had become such a brutal adult, whether she had somehow contributed to it, formed him, influenced him. Had she? How?
She ran into Alberto a few weeks after Brian arrived, as she was leaving her apartment—or, she thought later, maybe Alberto had been waiting outside her door for a while. His apartment was in the front of the building; hers was in the rear by the staircase.
He cleared his throat and asked, “Any problems? I mean, with the, with the—the package?”
She had never much cared for Alberto’s stiffness, but she felt lifted up to see a person who wasn’t Brian. “It’s not what I expected,” she admitted. “I asked for my son as a child again, the best age, and it’s not what I remembered. You?”
“I had a friend who killed himself, a long time ago, when we were in college. He was the most interesting person at school. I’ve never been able to stop thinking about him, about how I might have said something, one word, one sentence, that would have made a difference. I remember him as remarkable and vibrant.”
“How is he now?” she asked, touching him lightly near the elbow. She had never touched him before, but it felt good; human.
She was afraid for a moment that Brian might see it, somehow. She let her hand drop.
Alberto stood there, frowning, his eyes looking into the air. “It’s not what I thought,” he said finally. “I’ve always wondered if I might have made a difference. He says I would. He says he gave up because of me.”
They both were silent until she said, “Alberto, I’m so sorry. Do you believe it’s true?”
His eyes, which had been staring almost absently away, turned back to her. “What else can I believe?”
Even if Brian couldn’t see them, maybe he was listening on the other side of the door. She motioned to move down the hallway; surely they couldn’t be overheard there. Still, she dropped her voice. “Are we sure that they are who we think they are?”
He nodded. “Or the reverse. I sometimes wonder if I am who I think I am.”
“Oh,” she said, nonplussed. They were who they’d always been. Of course they were. “I haven’t seen Stella or Gerald lately, have you?”
“I saw Gerald a few days ago. He was coming out or going in—at any rate, in his doorway. He said he had found someone to buy his share of the money. He had listed it on eBay. I don’t think that was wise, do you? But he’s always been that way. Out for himself, I mean.”
Who isn’t out for themselves? Laura wondered, but that was Alberto—disapproving. Although she didn’t care for Gerald either.
* * *
Stella lived on the fourth floor, and Laura followed Alberto upstairs to check on their neighbor. They stood outside her door while he tapped once, twice. There was no answer. What a weak knock he has, Laura thought, and pounded loudly. “Stella!” she called. “Stella! It’s Laura and Alberto! Talk to us.”
And then they heard the lock turn, and Laura repeated, “It’s us, Stella. Your neighbors.”
The door opened and Stella blinked at them. “Thank God it’s you,” she whispered. “Has it been you each time? Are you banging on my door every night?”
“No,” Alberto said. “We haven’t seen you in a while, so we came by to check. What’s going on?”
She shuddered. “Every night. All night. Someone pounds on the door, then it stops. Another pound. Then it stops. At first I looked, but there was no one there. But I won’t look any more. I thought about why this was happening, and then I thought maybe it’s about the money of the dead. I know you two put out money and got what you wanted, but I didn’t put anything out. It seemed sacrilegious. So, I put out half of it because of all the banging, and the next night it was two knocks each time. I put out the rest, and it was three knocks. All night long. Does that make sense? The money is gone, so why are they so mad? What do they want from me? How do I make it stop?”
“I don’t know,” Alberto said. “I’m sorry. Laura and I asked for specific people, and that’s what we got. They obviously knew you had the money. I don’t know why they won’t stop.”
“And who are they?” Laura asked. “Do you have any idea?”
Stella’s eyes blinked. “I think it’s the woman who died here. I think it’s her and anyone else who died here. I think they want to come back in.”
She looked away for a second, then gathered herself together. “I’m leaving,” she said. “I’ll stay at a hotel until I decide where to go. The rent’s paid. I’ll get someone to come for my things.”
“But you’ve been here so long!” Laura said. “And all they do is knock?” She bit her lip as Stella glared at her.
* * *
Three days after Stella left, the screams began in Gerald’s apartment. They were sickening. Laura stood in the first-floor hallway, on her way out to the store, her heart thudding. She couldn’t bring herself to knock on his door—what could she do? She glanced through the front door and saw Alberto outside, his shoulders hunched. He lifted his head and saw her, and came in.
“I hear it,” he said stiffly. He took her elbow and they walked back down the hall, to the stairway. “But it’s his own fault. It was all a lie, this whole business. He told me yesterday. He put the money outside our doors, as a joke. He said he found a package outside a funeral home in Chinatown.” He frowned. “He took someone’s offering to the dead.”
“But the screams—”
“I told you. He said he had a buyer. Maybe whoever that money was originally meant for, I don’t know. There’s nothing we can do now. We’ve invited them in, each of us, in one way or another.”
Laura looked back along the hallway to the glass front door. She would have to go past the screams to reach the street now. If she actually made it outside. There was a new heaviness weighing her down when she left Brian, a weariness and worry. What was he doing; was he calling her? She wanted to be free of him, beyond the door, outside, but didn’t that prove her failure as a mother? How could she feel the way she did? What kind of person hated their son, dreaded him, hated the sound of his voice?
He called for her a lot now, sometimes just repeating, “Mommy Mommy Mommy,” from across the room or right next to her, and nothing she did would shut him up. She was beginning to hate that looming face and the sound of his voice. “Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy.”
Another scream tore through the hallway, and Alberto drew his breath in. “We’re stuck with what we’ve done,” he said finally.
But she hadn’t stolen the money. And she had returned it, after all. Was that true? Had she returned it? Or used it?
Upstairs, a voice called from inside her apartment. “Mommy!”
They stood still, heads cocked, listening. There was another scream from Gerald’s apartment. Laura felt a layer of regret folding the two of them together. “Can we send them back?” she asked. Was there any way to undo this, to change what she’d done, to go back to a time when she could have made a different choice? But which choice had been the one to bring her to this point? “Can we?” She could see that small face, those eyes of his—her child, her tormentor. The question was aimed at herself more than at her neighbor.
Behind her, upstairs, she heard him again. “Mommy!”
They lifted their eyes upwards, the lines of bannisters and railings like the inside of a telescope, narrowing and narrowing their vision. Alberto’s eyes met hers and he stepped under the stairway to hide, in a move that seemed perfectly justified, and she called up to Brian and rose slowly back to him.
“Why were you talking to him about me?” he asked, once she was inside.
“I wasn’t,” she said immediately, but he looked annoyed. “I mean, we know each other and we ask about each other’s lives. That’s what neighbors do.”
“Really?” he asked, his eyes shining with calculation. “You were talking about how to get rid of me. Us.”
Her heart lurched.
* * *
“What does your friend say to you?” Laura asked Alberto. She didn’t know if “friend” was the right word.
Alberto winced. “That he would have lived if I’d been kind to him. I don’t remember what I told you. We argued. I swore I would never see or speak to him again.”
“And yet you called him back now.”
“He left me a suicide note,” Alberto continued. “I’ve never been able to forget that note.”
When they met, they often found themselves standing silently together, lost in thought.
“I told Brian once that I hated him,” she said finally. “More than once. He was a cruel man. Evil. I said I wished he was dead.”
He nodded, and after a while he said, “It isn’t love that haunts us, but regret.”
* * *
She found it increasingly hard to leave the apartment, and she often stopped at the building’s front door, too uncertain about where to go and what to do.
The tenants on the first floor and on the second floor above Gerald’s apartment moved out because of the screaming. The owner came through one day, knocking on doors and asking those who were left about the screams, which didn’t happen while he was there. “Yes,” she said, “there are screams.” Brian came up next to her. “I didn’t hear any,” he said. “Mommy.”
“He doesn’t go out very much,” she said weakly.
The owner looked thoughtfully at Brian. “Cute kid,” he said. “That’s a good age. Wait till he’s a teenager.” He grinned, cast a last look around, and left.
She remembered those years, of course, the constant fights and threats and stealing and everything else. Was it her fault he’d turned out that way? Had she given up on him and left him to crumble? She looked at Brian. “Are you happy?” she asked. “Were you ever happy?”
He frowned and said, “I’ll always love you, Mommy. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” His voice kept getting louder.
“Stop that,” she whispered.
* * *
The next day she woke up choking, and found Brian in bed with her, clutching her, his hands wrapped around her throat. She reached up and grabbed his fingers, prying them off as she gasped. “What are you doing?” she finally cried.
“I missed you. I wanted to be close to you.”
He had crawled into bed twice before, and she had told him not to do it again. He had said the same thing: “I missed you.” She sat up, her back to him, trying to make it seem normal somehow. But it wasn’t normal.
“You’re too old for this,” she said, and he pressed against her, his arms reaching around her shoulders. “Mommy Mommy Mommy,” he said.
From that night on, she locked her bedroom door. She pulled pillows over her head, but she would wake in the middle of the night and hear him whispering through the door, “Mommy.”
* * *
She found Alberto standing at the front door again, looking out. “How far can you go?” he asked, and she realized then that her orbit had been closing in. Now, she only went to the small grocery store across the street.
“I’m getting extra food every time I go out,” he said. “Stocking up. You should do the same.”
She had thought that once and then forgotten it. When she was away Brian filled her head completely; she could only think of him until she returned. There was no reason for her to put up with any of it. He might be her son (she certainly recognized him) but she had wanted the kind son and he certainly wasn’t that. He was the adult Brian in the boy’s body. That wore her out.
The next time she met Alberto it was at the bottom of the stairs, where he told her more about his friend.
“He said I never cared for him, still don’t, that I have no ability to feel for another. Do you think that? He says there are other people I’ve affected, he knows it, other people I’ve driven insane. He says I pushed him to it, after all.” He cast his eyes down and frowned, then looked at her intently. “I can love people, don’t you think? He says I can’t, but I’ve been a good friend, a good neighbor, haven’t I?”
She wanted to say yes—she wanted to shout it and touch his hand, but her throat hardened and all she could say was, “I always found you kind of reserved, but we’re just neighbors. Some people are like that.” On another day she might have made it sound better; but this was, she thought, still a fair statement. They were neighbors, not friends.
It was getting harder to leave, and Alberto stood next to the front door the next day, just standing there. He nodded, and she stood beside him, looking through the glass-paned door. She supposed they would stay there until someone came in or out.
She had not seen anyone else in weeks. “Have all the other tenants left?”
“I think so,” Alberto said. “Or they don’t come out when we’re around.”
She drew in her breath. What a strange thing to say.
“Haven’t you noticed how quiet it is? Even Gerald’s screams are getting quieter.”
Alberto tapped on the front door; it made a very faint sound. She reached out and touched it too, as if to make sure it was real. They stood there in the quiet until they gave up and turned back.
She could no longer hear her own footsteps in the hall.
That was the last she saw of Alberto, or anyone except her son. The front door to the building had become too heavy to move. When she gave up and went back to her apartment, the door opened easily going in, but after a few days it wouldn’t open out at all. Brian stood there grinning and saying, “You were never enough, Mommy. You were never enough!” and he’d scream with joy, then, his face contorted, and she felt her body grow heavy too, with the weight of his hatred. Never enough? She had wanted that part of her life back, the part she’d thought was successful. She had wanted his love back, and she had assumed he’d wanted hers. But all this time he’d judged her. She had thought he was the one who’d failed! Imagine that!
She could barely walk and began to crawl, and he watched with glee. “Try harder, Mommy, try hard as you can!” and she thought, finally, that there was no end to the hatred the dead held for the living; that no matter how much she had tried (had she tried?), she had no real love for Brian, and he would never forgive her. She would be stuck with him for as long as she lived, and then, she was certain, for even longer after that.