Painting With Fire (5 page)

“I really do,” he said, rubbing the side of his face with his hand. She noticed the dark red paint lining his cuticles. It reminded her of blood.

She swallowed the last mouthful of her cereal and ran out the door.

In one way, Tom’s ideas made him charming. In another way, it was kind of crazy. Just crazy.

There’s no way anything like that could ever be true, she thought.

She shook her head and told herself he was not the man for her. She couldn’t help but feel something heavy sinking in her gut when he talked about time travel or clammed up about his past. He never wanted to talk about the past.

Pros: He stood b
y her when no one else was there. He was probably her best friend.

Cons: She didn’t want to mess that up.

The truth was Tom was a gamble she wanted to believe in, but she wasn’t much of a gambler.

It would have been easier if they’d started dating back then, Claudia thought. Now, there was so much to lose if things went bad. It wasn’t about the apartment. Her overprotective mother would be overjoyed to have her move back home. She’d offered to pay for the flight and the moving truck. It was about
going back to a life with plain white walls.

She stared at the paintings. The colors seemed off.
Claudia loved the imperfections in his art, like a field of grass with purple blades spotting the landscape. She knew he wasn’t perfect, but she didn’t care. Maybe it didn’t matter that she didn’t really know him that well. Maybe all the things he hadn’t told her didn’t matter. Or maybe they did.

Chapter 7: Neighborly Vibes

Claudia knocked on Janice’s door the next day. This time, she didn’t need to make an excuse. Over the years, they’d swapped Christmas cards, spare keys and glasses of milk.

Kevin undid the chain on the
door and peeked out the gap. The teenager was still wearing a ratty T-shirt and pajama bottoms.

“Hi,” he said, pausing. “What do you want?”

“Is Janice home?” Claudia said a little too cheerfully.

“She’s at work,” he mumbled.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”

Kevin didn’t answer the question. “I’ll let her know you stopped by.” He coughed theatrically and closed the door.

Claudia could smell cigarette smoke and cats from the hallway. Her heart knocked nervously as she pounded on other doors, but no one else answered.

“
Whenever I walk by their door, I always hear the TV blasting, even during the day after Janice has gone to work,” Claudia said to Tom over dinner. “Why isn’t that boy in school? It seems odd.”

“Maybe he’s dropped out, gotten in with the wrong crowd, or he’s just playing videogames all day,” Tom said, sipping up a spoonful of tomato soup.

“You sound just like Doris,” she said. “Racist old bat.”

“But I’m not,” he said, pushing the empty bowl away from him. “I’m more like Kevin. I was a dumb kid once, you know. I fell in with the wrong crowd once.”

“Oh really, what did you do?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Not telling,” he said. “You know I don’t like to talk about it. You’ll just have to move on to harassing the next neighbor.”

Claudia got an easy excuse to talk with Adam Washington, in the form of stray mail. She had never talked to the man, only knew him as a label on a mailbox in an entryway before this. She had seen him scurrying from his car in the parking lot into his home carrying groceries a few times, but never got a hello out of the tall, gaunt man. Framed by a receding hairline, his long, dark face was always contorted like he’d been sucking on a lemon. He always stared away from anyone that crossed his path.

Claudia was relieved to have an excuse to talk to him. It was hard to start a conversation with someone who avoided any eye contact.

It wasn’t unusual for the mail to be jumbled up in the building. About half of the letters in her mailbox didn’t belong to her. Claudia was constantly reshuffling the letters, putting them on the banister in the hallway or slipping them under the appropriate doors. Once she’d gotten a half-opened paycheck that wasn’t even hers.

“You gotta love the Chicago postal service,” she mumbled to herself. “Consistently ranked worst in the nation.”

Sure, she could slide the letter under his door, but it was from a law office and marked urgent. It would be better to make sure he got it right away. She told herself it was a good reason.

Feeling like some kind of sick stalker, she knocked once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once in the evening, before A. Washington’s door finally swung open. Every time she tried, the muscles in her stomach seemed to tighten. She was nervous about going into a strange man’s home, especially considering he was a possible murder suspect whose wife they hadn’t seen for a while.

With the door open, the smell was overwhelming. She thought Doris’ place was bad. But here garbage overflowed from the trashcan in the kitchen to the countertops. Tiny gnats circled overhead. A pot of baked beans boiled on the stovetop. He wore a dirty white T-shirt with armpit and collar stains and a pair of flannel pants. A half-empty bottle of rum sat on his kitchen table.

Still standing in the hallway, she handed him the letter and told him she just got it that morning. Grubby hands quickly shredded open the envelope and wet, brown eyes scanned the w
ords. Then he sat down defeated on a chair.

“Oh G
od,” he said, his shoulders hunching forward in a deep slouch.

Ok, so this was an awkward situation, she thought. But Tom knew where she was, she told herself. Tom knows where I am. I have nothing to fear from this broken man.

“Sorry.” He wiped his eyes and then leapt to his feet. “Oh shit.”

The beans were burning on the stove and pouring over the metal edges, like a frothy army of bloated ants at some kind of sick picnic. The nutty burnt smoke stung Claudia’s nose.

“Now, I don’t even have anything for dinner,” he said, crying.

When Claudia got back to their apartment, Tom rolled his eyes in the kitchen.

“I can’t believe you invited him over for dinner,” he said quietly.

“You know, it’s been years since anyone came over for dinner.” Claudia shrugged and gave him a small smile. “Might be fun.
Plus it seems like the civilized thing to do. He’s going through some rough times.”

“Most civilized people would rather eat at a restaurant,” Tom said. He sliced through a head of lettuce with a large knife.

“Not exactly fiscally responsible for the unemployed,” Claudia said. “I hate having to order a side salad every time. Even if someone else pays, I feel bad.”

It reminded
her that it had been a while since she had seen some of them, her old work friends, and she started to slouch.

“It’s amazing how some people seem to vanish when you don’t have the money to buy a round of drinks,” Claudia told him as she pulled dishes out of the cupboard. “I’m glad my artist friend has stood by me, at least. Thank you.”

She stopped short of kissing him on the cheek and starting laying out the plates on the table instead.

He raised his eyebrows at her and gave her a pat on the arm. “Failed artist friend.”

“Even a failed artist gets some respect.” She leaned against the counter next to him and watched the blade dance through the carrots on the black cutting board. “And you’re not a failure. You just haven’t made it yet. You’re a great artist.”

“Thanks,” he said, with a small smile.

“I miss having a fancy, exciting job title.” She sighed. “It kind of screws with your self-identity, not having a job. People ask you all the time, what do you do? Well, I used to be this. I used to be that.”

Tom rinsed off a tomato under the faucet. She wondered if he could even hear her over the sound of the water.

“I’m starting to think this building is cursed, maybe that’s why I can’t find work,” she mumbled more to herself than anyone. “I can’t even decide what I want to do.”

“You’ll find a job soon,” Tom said. He mixed the
ingredients together in a bowl, squeezed in half of a lime and let the salt slide from the palm of his hand onto the vegetables. She liked watching him in the kitchen with his apron on.

“I’ve lived in a lot of nice places before this, didn’t have neighbors with this many problems,” Claudia said. “Everyone seemed nice and happy.”

“Everyone always seems nice and happy when you don’t know their deep dark secrets. Pretty much, everyone has some somewhere.”

“Even you?”

“Even me.”

“Whatever do you mean by that?” Claudia said, playfully touching his shoulder. “How come you never want to tell me your secrets?” She pouted.

“I’ll tell you later,” Tom said. “I need to finish cooking the spaghetti. Your new best friend will be here any minute.”

When Mr. Washington came, she was relieved to find he had managed to put on a dress shirt over his dirty T-shirt and wore a pair of decent jeans.

He ate three plates of spaghetti before he started talking. Unlike Tom who twirled his noodles expertly against his spoon, he hacked and slashed them with his fork and knife before shoveling them in. The tomato sauce lined the edges of his lips, giving him a sad, clownish appearance.

“Forgive me, but I haven’t eaten this well for a long time,” he said. “My wife used to do most of the cooking before she left.”

“I’m sorry,” Claudia said awkwardly, passing him a piece of butter-drenched un-frozen garlic bread. Her elbow brushed Tom’s. “So that’s what happened to her. We haven’t seen her in a long time.”

They sat at a small table in the corner of the kitchen, a place where the heat of the oven mingled with the breeze from the back screen door.

“We were married for ten
years, you know. She cleaned out most of my bank account and took off with it. Doesn’t look like I’ll be seeing any of my money any time soon. She even took the cat.”

“How much did she do you for?” Tom said.

Claudia kicked him under the table.

“A lot,” Mr. Washington said.

“Maybe she got tired of doing all the cooking,” Tom said. “I sometimes get tired of doing all the cooking.” He shot Claudia a look.

“Tom,” she groaned. “Really. Forgive him. He has a way of sticking his foot in his mouth, if you haven’t noticed.”

“No, that’s all right,” Mr. Washington said. “Maybe he’s right.”

“What do you do for a living?” Claudia said, trying to change the subject. She crunched into another bite of the garlic bread.

“I’m an engineer. Used to be in the Navy”

“Ahh, that’s cool,” she said.
Claudia couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You?”

“I’m looking for a job at the moment,” Claudia said, a bit red-faced in the hot kitchen.

H
e reminded her of Doris in his loneliness.

She heaped a bit more of the spaghetti onto her plate. The wet noodles slipped to one side of the dish, dangerously close to the edge.

“I think it’s more important than ever that we get to know our neighbors these days,” she said.

“It was pretty freaky, that murder in the winter, wasn’t it?” Mr. Washington said, immediately aware of what she meant.

“Did you guys hear anything?” he said.

“Don’t think so,” she said.
She’d gone over the night again and again in her mind, but she hadn’t heard a thing. She had always been a deep sleeper.

“Did you?” Tom asked.

“I heard voices arguing in the stairway before it happened,” he said. “I told the cops what I heard, but it didn’t seem to help. They didn’t do anything about it. Still no arrests.”

“What were they arguing about?” she asked.

Mr. Washington paused awkwardly for a moment, his mouth still full after taking a big bite out of his bread.

“He was talking really loud and agitated.
He said he couldn’t do it anymore. He said it was like God was watching him. He said it wasn’t right.”

“After a while, they left. I was happy to go to sleep, that the conversation was over. I didn’t realize. I didn’t know the man was dead. I feel bad. What if I had gone out there or opened my door to see what they were talking about? Would he still be alive?” His voice caught slightly in the middle of the question and his lower lip quivered.

After Mr. Washington left, Tom gave Claudia a hard look.

“That guy was a mess. What are we doing now? Inviting murder suspects to dinner?” He scrubbed the plates so hard the ceramic banged loudly against the metal sink. “He could be a murderer. Maybe he had some beef with Steve we don’t know about. Maybe the man was banging his wife or something.”

“Tom, really,” she said, pursing her lips in an effort to look serious. “That man, a murderer? He seems so helpless.”

“We should still check out his story.
You trust people too much, Claude. Where’s his wife?”

“
Oh come on. She’s divorcing him. Who else are we gonna start cross examining? Maybe we should check out Doris. She could be a cold-blooded killer beating people senseless with her walker,” she said.

Tom sprayed her with the nozzle next to the sink.

She yelped and laughed but felt a little guilty.

“Here we are making light of a tragedy,” she said, frowning.
“What the hell is wrong with us?”

Tom grabbed her shoulders gently and pulled her toward him in a quick overdramatic hug. “Even when death is outside your door, you still have to live.”

Claudia was not quite sure if he meant something more. She looked into his eyes for a minute, then turned away with a small smile. Sometimes, he surprised her. You think you know someone, she thought.