Page 58 of The Quiet Tenant

A cold, hard surface against your back. A faint rattle of metal above your head. The back of your skull burns. Your eyelids are heavy. Your body is one large wound.

Everything is a blur. Dark walls and darker shapes—furniture?

Boxes.

Piles of boxes. The outline of a chair. What you think is a workbench, a pegboard with tools.

Sounds coming from above—a voice, then another.

You are in the house. The bowels of it.

The basement. That has to be it.

You shift the slightest bit and wince. Everything hurts.

But you are alive.

CHAPTER 40

The woman in the house

You don’t know how many days go by. You don’t know what he tells his kid. It’s not your job to know. You are so tired of carrying yourself through everything. Of bolstering his lies, of playing along.

This is the most honest the two of you have ever been with each other.

He comes in and doesn’t say a word. He brings you water, sometimes soup. He feeds you. Lifts cups of water and spoonfuls of chicken broth to your lips. He props you up in the crook of his elbow. When you choke, he pats you on the back, between your shoulder blades.

Sometimes you think that’s all he wants. To possess someone, fully and absolutely. For someone to need him, only him.

That must be why he didn’t do it. In the woods. He saw something in you that was more interesting than death. Pain, and your endless ability to feel it, to demonstrate it. He will entertain the possibility of you being whole again, as long as he’s the one who gets to put you back together.

Rule number five of staying alive outside the shed: He must need you at least as much as you need him.

One morning, after Cecilia leaves for school, he brings you to the bathroom and leans you over the tub. Water cascades onto your head, into your ears and mouth. You taste blood. He shampoos your hair, gentle strokes against your scalp. Still, it burns. You wince, and he says, Don’t move, don’t move—it will go faster if you stay still.

After, you throw up. He grabs you by the shoulders, directs you over the toilet. He gathers your hair in one hand and holds it back, like you’re hungover and he’s your friend, like you’re sick and he’s your mother. Your stomach muscles clench so tightly you get out of breath. You keep retching even when there’s nothing left, noisy, painful gags echoing down the toilet bowl. You grab his hand. It’s a reflex. You don’t know you’re doing it until he gives you a soft squeeze back.

You get through it together.

He takes you back to the bedroom, lays you down on the bed. No more hardwood floor. You let yourself sink into the mattress, the sheets soft against your cheeks. If it must, the comforter will swallow you. The room will collapse on top of you. You will let it all happen to you.

You are done fighting.

He rests his palm against your forehead. You’ve spiked a fever. Your vision blurs. Every time you try to sit up, the ground opensunderneath you. You tell him you need to see someone, a doctor, anyone. He tells you not to worry. It will all be okay, he says, as long as you calm down.

Your brain is on fire. You are wounded and he’s here and you feel cold, so cold, even as he piles a new blanket on top of you. Sorrow freezes you from inside. You start weeping. You cry for yourself, for Cecilia, for her dead mom, for the women he is now after. It all crashes into you, one sadness after the other, until he asks what’s going on.

“Your wife,” you say between sobs. “Your poor wife.” It’s all you can muster. He pauses and looks sharply at you.

“What about my wife?”

You try to explain, to drag him under your own tidal wave of pain. “She was so young,” you tell him. “They both were. Your wife and your kid. I’m just so sorry for your kid.” And you mean it. You feel her loss as acutely as you feel the absence of your own mother. Do you even still have a mother? And if she’s alive, does she still hold out hope that you are, too?

“Cancer,” he says. “Nasty stuff.”

Cancer,you want to say.Really?

Through the haze of your fever, you squint at him. You thought maybe he’d done it. Maybe he’d been the one to kill her. But he’s telling the truth. The two of you have never been so close, so direct with each other.

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