Page 39 of The Quiet Tenant

You read the essays during your lunch breaks. Then you go back to class, where your creative writing professor exhorts you. She’s your mother’s age, maybe older. Kind in person, ruthless on the page. She has five books and an endless stream of magazine pieces to her name. You look up to her in a way that feels like love.

Your writing is nice, your professor tells you. But it’s quiet. It’s oddly stiff. You’re not like this in real life, your professor says. You’re sensitive and funny. You’re droll. She calls you droll and it satiates you, just for a second.

I’ll work on that, you tell her. I’ll work on my voice.

She shakes her head. It’s not the voice, she tells you—it’s what you write about. You’re not writing about what matters. You’re hiding. As long as you keep hiding, your reader won’t know what to make of you.

You read the women’s essays again. “I Lived Through It: My Best Friend Eloped with My Brother.” “I Lived Through It: I Was Switched at Birth.” “I Lived Through It: My Neighbor Turned Out to Be a Spy.”

You think about the things you have lived through. There is only one you can picture on the website. For days, you avoid it, and then one night, you sit and write it all down. The words come to you, bones demanding to be excavated. “I Lived Through It: My Brother Put Me in His Suicide Note.”

It doesn’t feel like your story to tell. It happened to your brother before it happened to you. He’s the one who took the pills, the firsttime and the second time. He’s the one who survived. He’s the one who wrote the note.

You weren’t supposed to see it. You happened upon it the night of the second time, when you came home and your parents were still at the hospital, filling out paperwork.

“How am I supposed to find my place in the world,” your brother wrote, “when everything keeps bringing me back to her?”

He meant you. Your brother, who got in trouble. Who didn’t know how to love without losing himself. Whose turbulent adolescence gave you no choice but to become the best kid you could be. You knew how to exist in ways society rewarded and he did not. To you, his mind was a thing of genius, a volcano where precious rocks were made. You thought of yourself as the boring one. It had never occurred to you that your brother might see things differently.

The essay sits in your computer for weeks. You don’t know what to do with it. You think about emailing it to your professor but can’t bring yourself to hit “send.” The writing feels messy, self-centered, immature. It feels like something you might regret one day.

The classmate with the book deal shares a photo on Facebook. It’s her, pen in hand, wrist resting on top of a stack of papers. “Amazing news,” the classmate writes. “The contract is signed. It’s official: THE LITTLE BLUE HOUSE is going to be a movie. Well, maybe! One day! If all goes well! But the rights have been sold and it’s a huge first step. I feel so grateful.”

Things are happening. You need them to start happening to you. You find the essay on your laptop, type a five-sentence email. Attach. Send.

It runs the following week.

At first, your brother doesn’t say anything. Then, one night. A Sunday. The family back at home for roast chicken and lemon potatoes. Your parents in the living room, the two of you in the kitchen, washing dishes.

“You know,” your brother says, scrubbing a plate. “I saw it. Your article.”

It takes you by surprise. You focus on shining a wineglass with your mother’s kitchen towel.

“It’s fine,” your brother tells you. You consider him: two yearsolder than you, tall but fragile. A delicate child, hypersensitive—that’s how your mother described him to a schoolteacher once. Strong jawline, crooked smile. Your father’s gait. Your mother’s eyes.

He picks up another plate, resumes scrubbing. “Although,” he says with a bitterness you recognize from his teenage years, “you kind of proved my point.”

Later on, when it’s time to put your coats back on and hop on the subway, your brother says goodbye to you. Usually, he would hug you. Your brother, who taught you how to roughhouse. How to run, how to land a punch. Your brother, whose love came out in the breathless mess of playtime. Mud stains on your clothes, blades of grass in your hair. That night, your brother gives you a light, tidy tap on the shoulder.

“Get home safe,” he says. Well-adjusted. Free of you.

Your brother waves at you from the other side of the platform, and you know. You know that you have lost him forever.

CHAPTER 26

The woman in the house

You find yourself wanting to repeat the Sunday movie experiment. It’s not the film you want, but everything around it. Cecilia next to you on the couch. A change in your itinerary, a stop between the kitchen and the bedroom. A lull between dinner and the silence of the night, the things he does to you.

So when Cecilia starts hovering toward the living area and gives you an interrogating look, you check in her father’s direction. He’s looking at his phone. You give her a nod. With your silent support secured, she starts negotiating. “It doesn’t have to be a full movie,” she tells her dad. “It can just be a TV show. Just one episode. Twenty minutes.”

You do your best to catch her father’s gaze. You glance at his phone, discreetly at first, then without hesitation. A subliminal message. He has to be the one to realize that this could be good for him. That with his daughter’s eyes glued to the screen, he’ll be free to keep texting.

He caves. One episode, he says. And the deal is sealed.

One evening, while navigating from live TV to the streaming platform, Cecilia pauses on a news segment about a musical. You understand it’s about the Founding Fathers. “Are you a fan too?” she asks with an excited smile. On TV, two people talk about the show. You catch the wordshistory,national tour,masterpiece. You infer that the musical is important, not only to Cecilia but to the world at large. “Sure,” you tell her. “I mean of course.”

You used to love theater. The last play you saw was not long before he took you, when your life was beginning to unravel but things still felt salvageable. Julie, your roommate, had tickets for an off-Broadway show. She urged you to come with her. “You haven’t left the apartment in three days,” she said. “This will be good for you.” You caved. It was the right decision.

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