Apartment A

The apartment brought her a new sense of calm. She thought of it as her cocoon.  Her husband's death had now moved into her back brain and settled down. The head-on collision. The kid texting. The trial. All of it receding into a low-grade ache in the background.

In the safety of the apartment, she  now thought only briefly about the three embryos that lay frozen in the clinic. She too was frozen inside. They were together in their suspension of life. On hold. That was enough for now. If her husband's death was stationed in the dark crevices at the back of her brain, the embryos inhabited space that floated between her eyes, a bright vibration somewhere above her head.

It was her old friend Paula who had found the apartment. Her old and only friend now. She had disconnected from her former life. The apartment was housed in a pudgy white stucco building built in the twenties, surrounded by aged, trim yew hedges, with only four units simply called A, B, C, and D. The landlady had told her about the other occupants. Jane had wanted to know who was above her, afraid they might be noisy.

“Oh no,” said the landlady. “That Mary Macauley, she’s very old, lives alone, doesn't go out. Worked her whole life at NASA. Mary Mac they called her. Kind of famous down there. Her son moved her here a year ago.”

At night Jane would sometimes hear the old woman above her. It sounded like she was bumping into furniture. Jane always envisioned her in an astronaut's outfit, puffy and silver, floating through the darkness, knocking the bureaus and chairs, tethered by a cord to some mysterious source of oxygen. She knew this was silly as the woman had only worked at NASA, and was probably a pencil pusher for thirty years. Yet, during the night when she awoke to the sounds above, a lady astronaut was what she saw through her closed eyelids.

The four small rooms nestled in the deep plaster walls comforted her. Her mind wandered and lit upon happier memories as she curled in a cozy armchair. Sun shining through the English ivy made dancing shadows on her arms and legs. She thought of the first attempt at an IVF fertility cycle so many years ago. She and Rich were both giddy with hope on the way to the egg retrieval, both so sure it was going to work. They hadn't yet suffered the years of disappointment and loss that would eat away at her natural optimism. As they headed to the clinic, she had already taken an anti-nausea medication that began to sedate her as she stared out the window of the car into the deepness of the blue sky above.

“You know that I used to hear colors as a child.” she said dreamily, detached, as if someone else were speaking about her.

“Really...people do that, it's called synesthesia, when the senses cross themselves,” Rich explained, looking at her sideways. She had thought it would surprise him, this strange fact about her that she had never shared with anyone except her mother. Of course Rich would know something about it, and that it even had a name. Rich always knew something about everything.

“That doesn't surprise me...you're so in tune with colors....'in tune'...ya get it?” he mused.

She gave his inevitable pun the usual half-smile, returning her gaze to the puffs of white clouds that joined together and broke apart, thinking about what lay ahead that day, hoping, praying.

In the exam room, he held her hand as she lay back, the paper crinkling under her naked body as the nurse worked the IV into her arm. Another nurse came in with a clipboard, “Dick?” she said rather hesitantly. They both looked up, and Jane could barely stifle a laugh.

“Uh, it's Rich,” he said, smiling. Flustered, the nurse looked back at the chart, turning to the top sheet, and explained, “I guess I saw Richard and then...anyway Rich, are you ready?” The hilarity of the fact that he was being called Dick and then being taken away to give his sperm sample was more than she could contain as the IV sedative kicked in.

“Fun with Dick and Jane!” she laughed, and lay back on the gurney.  Staring up at the white ceiling, her mind became a jumble of pictures from those early primer books. See Jane run. See Dick run.  As a child, letters would swim before her on the page; they played tricks, turning themselves around and made mischief. “Alphabet soup,” she called it, before the doctor diagnosed it as dyslexia. Letters were hard, something to battle. To tame. To make sense out of the chaos as they mixed and changed. But colors soothed her and spoke to her in a language of sound all her own.

Blue was a wave that could wash away scary thoughts, drowning monsters in a calming wall of water, filling her up from the inside. Red was most often just a soft beating, a heart-womb that nurtured life and calmed the wild animal inside her from taking flight. She would have to melt into the color to really hear it,  dissolve herself into its boundaries until she felt her cells vibrate with the sound of it. Yellow was a silly sun that sounded like an egg sizzling. Green made music, mimicking crickets, grass, and summer with strange clicks and whirs. Her favorite was white. She hadn't even known that it made a sound until she was in the hospital with an acute appendicitis at age eight. She stared up at the white ceiling while her mother stroked her head. The noise of the emergency room faded away and she heard white. Pure, dizzying, clear white cleaned away everything, all her pain dissolving into a deep silence...silence that had a sound...like snow falling.

From then on white became her “safe place.” She could make herself hear it by looking at two cotton balls, softening her gaze and allowing what she called her “whitewash” to happen. She’d keep cotton balls in her pocket for that purpose, fingering them, ready to escape when needed. She had finally told her mother about how she could hear sounds when she looked at colors; when her mother looked back at her worriedly, Jane knew she had done something wrong.

“Sweetheart, I am sure that’s something you will grow out of...but I don't want you to talk to your father or anyone else about it. Your father is under a lot of strain right now and...anyway, let's just keep this between us, okay?”  For her mother's sake, she never talked about it again. She even tried not to hear colors anymore. She knew her mother worried about it, and her father had already accused her mother of having a “stupid, awkward daughter that didn't seem to have inherited any of his genes.” Jane knew that her “hearing colors” could be a weapon used against her and her mother.  She forced the sounds out of her head when she heard them, and eventually they quit coming. She still mourned this secret part of herself. After her last miscarriage she prayed to have her “whitewash” back and find her safe place again. She strained to hear it, to feel it. She tried painting, immersing herself in the auras of the paint, trying to rediscover her inner language of color, her private landscape of interior sound. She often felt it grow close, than elude her. She found she couldn't force it to happen.

Paula had signed her up for a night class on how to write a  blog, something Jane had been struggling to do in her attempt to become a food journalist. Writing had always been a challenge for her. She had been working on a Central American Cuisine cookbook for about seven years, and was passionate about food before Rich's death. Cooking was one of the things she felt she did well. They had spent time in various countries in Central America. While Rich worked for the EPA setting up clean water infrastructures in the  major cities and suburbs, she tried new foods and collected recipes. Her favorite country had been Guatemala, and she had become fascinated by the indigenous people there. She wanted to travel to Lake Atitlan and experience life with the Mayans, whose culture was still vibrant and alive. Rich had promised her they would spend two weeks there at the end of his project; the project ran over and they never went.

She loved the central mercado of Guatemala City and took great delight in shopping in the open air, speaking her broken Spanish with  gnarled crones in their elaborately embroidered blouses. Their crooked brown fingers holding up the most purple pepper, their teeth brilliant against the contrasting earthy tone of their faces, they gestured to her belly and asked about babies. She answered with a sad shake of her head. They responded to her in words she couldn't understand but their sympathetic tones and gestures felt more comforting than any of the glib assurances she had received back home. She learned to say hello, utz awatch, in Kakchiquel, a Mayan dialect of the lake highlands. The women's faces broadened into enormous smiles at her attempt to speak to them in their own language. They hugged her, forcing her from then on to take vegetables for free. The vegetables were of unusual shapes and drenched hues that matched the shades of the rainbow in the sky after every shower. It was here that she remembered her colors again. Remembered what they meant to her and again felt the sense of loss, a vacancy inside her that mirrored her barren womb. Even then she hoped that a child would heal the past for her. She wanted the colors back. Arranging all the vegetables on bright platters, she began to paint again. Praying the paint would get her closer to what she craved -- the sensual intimacy she'd had with colors as a child. Rich admired her painting and encouraged her. He encouraged her in everything. He tried to help her find her “colors”again. He gave her articles on synesthesia, pointing out to her that it often occurred in artists.

Now, years later, her fantasies took her back to Guatemala -- investigating airplane tickets in her bolder moments and picturing herself in a cottage along the lake, painting, cooking, living. She shook the images from her head, bringing herself back to the reality of the armchair and a leg half asleep, the sun setting, and a burgeoning anxiety over the next week's writing class.

Apartment B

Another sheet of paper announced itself under the door with a slither. Was it pink or purple? The last purple piece she noticed had transformed itself into angry ink stains that flew about the room, diving and swooping at her before skittering away through the crack in the ceiling. The lights no longer worked and the refrigerator had ceased its incessant  hum. “No matter,” she thought. She was unsure that she could see much anymore anyway. She felt, more than saw, the passing of time by fingering new bruises on her arms and legs. She guessed she got them in her nightly visits to the bathroom.

She hadn't left the apartment in months. She used to try to go for walks, but her eyesight was dimming and she only saw shadows of the creatures that hunted her at night. Those angry black shadows prevented her from sleeping. Her son had stopped calling, or else the phone no longer worked. She wasn't sure. All those years at NASA, so sure of her outcomes and figures, equations. Now Mary Mac, unsure of anything, was slipping away. She had spent the last four days in bed without moving. She had not meant to, but she fell down on the bare mattress and just didn't get up again. Positioning herself on the bed in such a way that when it rained she could catch drops of water in her parched mouth trickling from a hole that had opened in the ceiling. For days this was the only sensation she felt in her body. Then the boy came. She thinks he climbed down through the ever-widening hole in the floral patterned plaster surrounding the enameled light fixture. He was different than the things that came for her at night. He was like a cherub, she thought, naked but without wings. She woke to find him perched on the chair next to her bed. His eyes fixed on her did not frighten her. Was he a messenger? Could he help her? Was she seeing with her eyes? He would disappear if she looked away.

One night she struggled up to look for him and found she could barely stand, her legs collapsing beneath her as she dragged herself back to the bed. He was there in the room, along with a girl now. The boy sat on his chair and the girl hugged her knees in the corner. Both naked, their bodies looked as if made from dough. She fell asleep under their watchful stares.

She found she didn't even want the water anymore. All she needed now was to watch and be watched, comforted by the presence of the boy and girl. One moment she awoke, although she could not separate sleep from waking, night from day. A glimmer of a feeling told her the children were gone. She felt pain for the first time in a while, although she wasn't sure it came from her body. She couldn't tell. I must find the children, she thought but now she looked back at the bed and was startled to find that they were there, lying where she had been, their bodies entwined. Lifting their faces up at her, they beckoned to her, welcoming her, their arms waving open to embrace her. She shed her fear and lunged forward in a giant step that felt like falling, but the falling was more like flying. A fall without end. She expected to land on the boy and girl, a melding, a merging of their atoms, but she waited, suspended above them. Then, a feeling like a whispered kiss on her ear, the breeze moving a curtain, an  emerging oneness that kick-started the final electrical synapse inside her. She fell...the thought exploded in a light so brilliant it blew a hole through the night sky.
 
Oh Mary Mac, Mac, Mac

All dressed in black, black, black

With silver buttons all down her back

Jane awoke from a pleasant dream in which she and Rich were making love. When she looked up into his face she noticed it wasn't Rich after all but it didn't seem to matter. She felt a delicious safety in the man's arms and tried not to wake up. She listened and realized she heard rain. It had been raining for days but now the sound was more insistent. She struggled out of bed and went into the bathroom. Oh, crap, she thought.

She’d been watching a stain on the bathroom ceiling. She would lie back in the bath and make a game out of deciding what it looked like. First it was small and grinned like a lopsided smiley face. A few days later it  had changed into a winged dragon, and then had finally spread out into a tea-colored cumulus cloud. She knew she should have told her landlady about it, but the idea of being in the presence of that anxious little woman, and workmen invading her apartment, was too much for her. Now the cumulus cloud had turned into a full blown storm of yellowed water raining down on the clawfoot tub. She dialed her landlady's number.

“I think the toilet in the apartment above may have overflowed, as I have a ton of water coming in my bathroom ceiling,” Jane told her.

“Oh, Jesus,” the landlady croaked and hung up. Before Jane could figure out what to do besides position a pot under the biggest torrent, she heard sirens outside. Looking out the window she saw two firetrucks and a police car with its lights flashing. Men's voices filled the hallway as they pounded up the stairs. It seemed a bit dramatic and extreme for an overflowing toilet. Jane collapsed into the easy chair, shivering.

There was a knock on her door. She opened it warily to a young fireman with shaggy hair who looked still groggy with sleep.

“Ma’am, your upstairs neighbor has....is deceased,” he faltered. “Because there’s widespread damage and flooding to both apartments, I have been told to inform you that you will need to evacuate the premises."

“Now?” she asked, unbelieving.

“Yes, Bio-Recovery team will be in here and I mean it's a mess up there. Do you have somewhere to go?” he asked, cocking his head to one side. She nodded and walked over to grab her phone. “I'll come back to check on you in a minute,” he added, joining the others back upstairs.

She texted Paula, Old lady died upstairs, I have to leave the apartment tonight because of  leaking ceiling, can I stay with you? That was the thing about Paula. She slept with her phone next to her bed in case one of  her children, ex-husbands, or anyone else needed help. She was a pain but she was there if you needed her. Jane's screen lit up. OMG of course you can stay with me  do you want me to come get you? Paula's pleasure at being indispensably needed was palpable.

Jane heard her landlady's strident voice in the hallway. “I know I should have checked on her, I thought something might be wrong. You see my husband’s been sick...it’s his second round of chemo and...” Jane looked out to see her wringing her hands as she explained to the police officer, who was clearly pained by this interruption to his sleep and finding himself surrounded by old women, one distraught, one dead. Jane poked her head into the hallway, expecting to be sickened by the smell of death coming from the open door of the apartment above. She teetered back stunned, and crumpled into a heap on the faded rosebuds of the carpet. She expected to smell the rot of death and decay, along with the heavy mildewed atmosphere, but it was something else that caught her unawares and made her break down sobbing. There was a sweetness that lingered in the hallway after they had removed the woman's body. It was the smell of Dove soap, the scent of her mother, who she had lost only three years before.

The fireman pushed open the door to find her in a fetal position on the floor. She couldn't answer as he questioned her.

“Oh shit,” he said and bent his large frame, curving it over her like a mother shielding a child from an explosion. The warmth of his body helped her to stop shaking and she spoke in sputters, “I'm sssorrry,” she croaked, “mmy husband died...a few months ago.” She straightened herself onto her knees and rocked back and forth as she spoke.

He continued to hold her and rocked with her.

“You don't need this,” he said over and over as she calmed down. She pulled away, embarrassed.

“Thank you.” She stood up shakily, strengthened by the closeness of his body. She went to the bathroom, washed her face, and grabbed a few things that she threw in her purse.

When she came out he still stood there with a concerned look on his face. He motioned to the old blue Naugahyde suitcase she’d dropped on the ground beside her.

“Do you need a ride somewhere?” he asked.

Her phone vibrated continually on the coffee table as she looked at the multiple texts and calls from Paula, including the last one that said, I'm coming over.

“The airport?” Jane said jokingly. “No, really, I can get a cab,” she added.

“Actually I don't live that far from the airport. It's pretty much on my way home. If you're serious,” he told her.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“No problem,” he added. He grabbed her bag. She turned her phone to airplane mode as she followed him out.

Light was just beginning to crest on the horizon and the rain had stopped as they climbed into his truck. She was surprised to see the Fire Chief emblem adorning its doors and she realized she had underestimated his age, discerning fine traces around his eyes that were now visible in the morning light. She glanced out to the rain-glazed street and saw Paula's minivan pulling around the corner just as the fireman started his engine and moved the truck slowly forward. Jane thought Paula spotted her as the cars passed each other and she turned to watch Paula park in front of the apartment building. A wave of relief rushed through her body as they accelerated onto the freeway and she relaxed into the corner of the bench seat. The fireman rambled on about the strange circumstances of the old lady's death. He said it was unusual that the body had not decomposed more but the thing that spooked the firemen the most was that when they went to break down the door they found it was unlocked.

“Unlocked, just like that,” he kept repeating to her as if the fact that old Mary Mac had lain up there alone all that time, was all the more unnerving because her door was unlocked. Jane gazed at the raindrops that the wind chased off the waxy finish of the truck's cherry-red hood. She was shivering hard, losing all sense of the present, when she heard a faint heartbeat. Something old and familiar awakened in a corner of her mind. She took a deep breath and stared hard at the reflection of the truck's red paint. Don't scare it, she said to herself. She took another breath. She dove into the red, submerging herself in the vibrations of a womb. A place she could be reborn. Beat, beat, beat, she heard it, her jaw tensed with joy. Settling back in the seat, she let the sound inside her build...build to a crescendo, that vibrated right down to her core, leaving her trembling, limp, triumphant.

The fireman's friendly voice in the background brought her back to the present. She was leaving. She knew a flight that connected through Orlando to Guatemala City, that left at 10:37. She smiled again as she looked up at the pure white promise of the morning sky, her safe place now awakening again within her. She listened intently to the white...the sound of snow falling on the new day.

© Ellenora Cage 2019