She started for the bathroom—a quick shower. Saw that even after an entire night’s sleep, the bags under her green eyes had deepened. She ran the tub, since the shower didn’t seem to be working. Brown water glugged. A red ant crawled out from the drain, and she smashed it. She really hated ants. Always had. Then she remembered the thing she’d forgotten: she had an eleven o’clock status meeting. Big day. Huge, career-making day. And she was really late.
She raced. Found the only business attire that wasn’t wrinkled—a black skirt, white polyester blouse, and clashing turquoise pumps, then reached for her jacket inside the double-doored den closet.
She would have missed it if she hadn’t bumped into it. The sound was pretty, like the light footsteps of small children (One! Two! Three! Four!). Boxes scattered. They didn’t bounce against the hardwood floor, or roll. Instead, they skated.
The empty cardboard boxes from her move. About twenty of them. They’d been recorrugated into new shapes; doubled-up triangles, squares, and rectangles, and were taped together end to end with clear packaging tape. Leaning against the far closet wall, they formed a solid, six-foot-by-four-foot rectangle. At the center edge of the rectangle was a circular cutout. A hole for a handle…This thing was a door!
She ran her hands along the side of the structure. Sparks of electricity ignited in her fingertips like touching dry ice. The materials were shoddy, but the construction professional. The various shapes fit perfectly, like a jigsaw puzzle, and each one buttressed the next. They’d all been turned inside out, so their writing (PALMOLIVE, SERVITUS, PFIZER, HAMMERHEAD, UNITED CHINESE EMIRATES) didn’t show.
She remembered a snippet of her dream. The man in the closet, and her mother’s accusation: It’s a bad place, where you live…. and something else, too. Something about Hinton that she couldn’t quite remember: a mirror layered with ants, down a muddy hole.
Who had built this door? Edgardo, playing a mean prank because he’d gotten fired? One of the neighbors? Saraub? Clara? The man from her dream?
She sighed. But her sharp box cutter lay on the piano, its blade open. Her arms hurt, and so did her back. Even her legs ached. But it’s hard for your watch to dig a welt into your wrist when you’re sleeping soundly. A truth she preferred not to admit was now too obvious to deny: a professional had done this thing. She had built this thing.
She took a deep breath and turned away from the closet. Its evidence was too unsettling. Sleepwalking. Strange dreams, sleeping in front of a television instead of in a proper bed. Moving into a haunted and crumbling apartment like a modern-day Miss Haversham. These decisions were pathologically stupid. No doubt about it: she was turning into her mother.
Audrey’s lower lip got quivery. But no. She wasn’t like Betty! Why couldn’t she ever give herself credit? She’d gotten herself to New York. A scholarship to Columbia University, for Christ’s sake! Everybody knows those programs aren’t easy. It’s like being a doctor! She paid rent once a month, and on time. When Saraub got cut off, she’d been the one to draw up a budget so they’d been able to afford orange juice and winter coats. She’d been the one to keep him from taking an office job, so he could push forward on Maginot Lines, too. So yeah, she’d peed her pants last night. But that didn’t make her crazy.
As for the boxes and alarm-clock wire, she’d just been sleepwalking. Growing up, she used to sleepwalk all the time. Pretty reasonable, given the circumstances. Whose subconscious wouldn’t run from Betty?
She sighed and put her hand to her throat. Sore. She knew what she had to do next. An unpleasant but unavoidable necessity. She needed to find a shrink. Fast. Because Saraub wasn’t around anymore, and there was nobody left to catch her if she fell.
Then she looked at her watch, which she’d put on the other wrist: 10:30. “Cripes on a cross!” she shouted. How the heck had she just wasted an entire half hour? She opened the door and fled.
While waiting for the elevator, a tubercular-skinny old woman with a yellow, spray-on tan peeked out from 14C, the apartment next door.
“Hi, darling,” she said.
Audrey startled. It took her a second before she realized to whom the old lady was speaking.
“Hi!” Audrey said. The arrowed, ivory button pointing down was carved, not stamped, and time had worn a finger-shaped groove into its