Shadows & Tall Trees (26 page)

W
hat’s that?”

They were in the kitchen of a multi-family home, two or three apartments on each floor. Trying to decide if this was where they wanted to move.

Don turned around.

The apartment was right under the building’s roof. There was a short wall under the slanted roofline on that side of the kitchen, following the pitch of the ceiling. Set in the wall was a door only two feet tall.

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s where we’ll have to move next.”

Carolyn clicked over in her high heels to study the door more closely. “It is sort of charming. Kind of like a dwarf door. Or it’s creepy. But seriously, why would anyone do that?”

“I saw them before, when I was in college.” And at the beginning of his career, when this was the only type of place he could afford. “The space closest to the roofline isn’t usable as living space, since the ceiling is so low. So they box it in for storage space.” He reached down in his dark business suit, pulled the door open.

Through the floors he could hear the other, unseen tenants sharing this same house.
So
unlike being in their home, where the only sounds not coming from one of them came from the ice-maker, or the air conditioning. Rising up from below his black shoes came muffled voices that sounded like a girl arguing with her boyfriend. The only phrase he could make out was, Great tits!

Carolyn’s quizzical face. “You’re not eavesdropping, are you?”

His embarrassment. “No.” He clicked the door closed.

The apartment was small. Kitchen in front, bedroom in back. That was about it. Carolyn poked her head inside the bathroom off the kitchen. Toilet, sink with long rust stains under the taps, old-fashioned tub with a plastic shower curtain celebrating goldfish.

“What are you thinking?”

She hugged herself. “I’m thinking the clothes we’re wearing are too good for this place.” Gave him a wounded look, apologizing.

They took the apartment.

They had to sell nearly all their furniture. Didn’t get anywhere near as much as they expected. While he was in the front foyer boxing up what little they could fit into their new home, he realized he hadn’t seen her in about an hour. Walked up their central staircase, found her sitting on the master bedroom carpet, under a window. “You okay?”

Red face looking up from the carpet. Wordless shrug. Brave smile. “Yeah. I’m fine.” Got herself up. Gestured helplessly at the window, the wide green lawn below, the blue pond in the distance, its weeping willows. “I know, really silly. But oh my God, I used to love that view. I’d look out that window every morning while I had my coffee.”

Once they had everything moved into their new place, carrying it up the three flights of stairs themselves to save money in moving expenses, Don sat on a cardboard box marked Kitchen Utensils and said, “Before we unpack anything, let’s assemble the bed. Because we don’t know how long we’re going to last tonight. We can always do the rest over the next couple of days.” Still perched, he reached over, clicked the dwarf door under the ceiling open. Heard nothing. Shut it.

Carolyn, in a better mood now, accepting what had happened (she was like that), raised a slim forefinger. “Even better idea. Why don’t you put the bed together, because we both know I’d just be standing around watching, and while you do that I’ll go out and buy us some food for our first night in our new home.”

They ate at the kitchen table, by candlelight. Ribeye steaks, fettuccine tossed with olive oil and garlic, tossed salad greens with slices of Gorgonzola.

Don’s strong jaw moved as he ate a hot, red chunk of the steak. Eyebrows going up. “These are from Angelo’s, aren’t they?”

Face rising bravely, fork still in her salad. “I figured, What the fuck? We’ll get back to where we were. We’re just between places right now.”

They didn’t have a cable connection, so when they got into bed they listened to the radio.

Carolyn slid her bare legs out of her side of the sheets at one point. “Be right back.”

He listened to another oldies song by himself.

Heard her clear her throat behind him.

She was standing in the bedroom doorway, in her nightgown. In this dim light she looked younger. He wondered if he did, lying in their bed. “I figured we should christen our new home,” she said.

He sat up on his pillow as she sauntered into the bedroom, hands behind her back. Bemused look on his face. “I’m not sure what I should say.”

Both hands coming out from behind her back. A small black bowl in each.

“Oh.”

“Remember when we moved into our first apartment? What you surprised me with that first night?”

Don looked down into the bowl she handed him, saw the scoop of red and green swirls. “Peppermint ice cream?”

Don volunteered to take a few days off from his job-hunting to get the apartment in order while Carolyn went back to work. He figured he’d unpack all the boxes, set their contents out on the kitchen floor, then decide where to put everything. The General in charge of an army in retreat.

Looked around the shabby kitchen. Is this what the rest of his life was going to look like?

About halfway through sorting all the worldly possessions they still had, he realized there just wouldn’t be enough space for everything in these two rooms. He glanced at the walls. Put up shelves? He saw the door leading under the eaves. It was ajar.

Don went to the door with the intention of closing it. But as he neared he heard faint voices. Or one voice. He opened the door wide. Squatted beside it.

Yes. One voice. Faint. “Can you get up? Can you hear me? Sweetheart?”

He barely thought about what he did next, crawling into the storage space. A little shuffle forwards on hands and knees, head and upper body only a short way in. Tilted his head down as if to drink from the dust. Listening. He heard the sound of footsteps receding and he shuffled after them, the crawlspace earning its name. He was glad to be wearing jeans and his old college sweater; dust swirled around him. Cobwebs broke against his face. He pulled them from his skin with a grimace and the pause had him inhaling dust enough to cough. When he’d finished he could hear nothing else from below. Cocked his head one way then the other, straining to hear.

“What the hell am I doing?”

Wiped his face again and began a slow retreat, emerging from the hatch into the kitchen feet first. Legs. Backside. Kneeling, he wiped his palms on his thighs—”Quite enough of that”—wondered if talking to himself was what he had to look forward to now. He nudged the door closed again—
snick—
and turned back to the kitchenware spread around him. At least they had plenty of storage space for whatever they couldn’t fit into the drawers and cupboards—the passage he’d just explored seemed to follow the wall all the way around, beyond the kitchen, and behind the other rooms. Other apartments. He wondered if they were all the same size. Wondered if his neighbours were on their way up in the world or sliding their way down. Whether they were on the ladder or the slippery slope, watching everything they lost as it whizzed past. He told himself it was only temporary, as no doubt everybody else did. But he couldn’t even lie properly any more. Not to himself, anyway.

Don grabbed handfuls of cutlery and dumped them into the appropriate compartments, feeling condemned with each metallic rattle. A man fastening his own chains.

“I met one of our neighbours,” Carolyn said, arriving home. She kicked off her high heels in the hall with twin sighs.

“Me too.”

She went to Don with a quick kiss, passing him to drop her bag on the kitchen table. “Hey, great job.”

Don was pleased by her effort to admire his effort but the truth was clear enough on her face. Their kitchen was that of a Wendy house. Pans that once hung above a central work surface were now stacked one inside the other beside the oven. Where before they’d had their espresso machine with bean grinder, their pasta press, their cake stands, now they had a kettle with containers marked Tea, Coffee, Sugar. Tea in bags. Instant coffee. Little changes that made more of a difference than they should. He had stored a half bag of beans in the freezer even knowing they’d never grind them.

Carolyn took it all in with a tight smile that he somehow loved and hated at the same time. It only faltered when she saw how carefully he was watching her. “It’s all right,” she said.

Don couldn’t agree but didn’t want to contradict her either. “Tell me about our neighbour,” he said.

“Well.” She went to the fridge. There was still half a bottle of white. She poured herself a small glass, raised the bottle to Don. When he shook his head she topped up her glass with a little more. “Nice lady. About my age. From somewhere east, judging by her accent. Welcomed us to the building and asked
a lot
of questions.” She sipped her wine.

“What did you tell her?”

Carolyn wrinkled her nose at the wine glass but took another sip anyway. “You’re Dimitri,” she said, “A Greek sea captain who wants to set off in his ship for parts unknown. I’m Dolly and I design ‘artificial companions’—” she made speech marks in the air as best as she could with a glass of wine in one hand “—for lonely men and women. Mostly men. I’m in the middle of constructing a replica Dimitri because I suspect once you do take off on your voyage, you’ll never come back. You’ll get lost.” A moment of sadness in her eyes.

“But our marriage is a sham.” He smiled, showed he wasn’t hurt.

“We grew to love each other.” She smiled back. Sipped her wine.

Don retrieved the bottle and took a glass from one of the crammed cupboards. “What did you tell her really?”

“The truth.”

He looked at her.

Carolyn shrugged. “Not all of it.”

He tilted up the wine bottle’s bottom, carefully filling their glasses. A look of shame on his face. “Did you tell her I lost my job?”

Carolyn quickly reached for his hand. “It’s okay, it really is.”

“I’m going to find an even better one.”

Squeezing his fingers. “You don’t think I know that?”

“Beginning tomorrow. I’ll go online, start sending out résumés.”

She gave him that special smile of hers. “One door closes, and another door opens.”

It was easy to get lost behind the walls.

Each level had square openings in the crawlspace’s floor at one or two spots along their narrow lengths, presumably for maintenance, which he could use to squeeze up or down to the house’s next level. A bit like climbing up and down trees when he was a boy.

The narrow passages themselves were dimly lit by tiny holes sparkling along the inside wall. Abandoned nail holes from hung pictures and paintings that had since been moved. At first it was enough to just peer through these holes into the rooms he found. But over the long days of his explorations, it bothered him more and more that he was always on the outside. He wanted to know what it would be like to walk within those rooms.