The Guilty One (7 page)

“I mean, it's not fancy at all. And it doesn't have good light like this.” Pet swept her arm, indicating the light that spilled luxuriantly across the scarred wood floors, the riot of fabrics on the furniture, the drawings on the walls. “And the guy who was in there—it's probably pretty disgusting.”

“I don't care about that.” Maris could feel her mind grasping at this chance, this possibility. It would be even more anonymous than a motel, a place no one would think to look for her. “You know . . . it just might work. And I could pay cash up front.”

Pet gave a little half smile and picked her phone up from her worktable. Her thumbs flew across the screen, that impossible pace that Calla too had perfected. All of the kids, while she and Jeff had to struggle for every character. “I'm texting Norris now. He's usually pretty good at getting back. Maybe he can meet you here after work or something.”

“Thanks,” Maris said once Pet was finished texting. She stood up and shouldered her purse, feeling suddenly oddly formal again. “I suppose I'd better wait for the glass guys out front. Thank you so much for helping me out today. This wasn't . . . planned.”

Pet shrugged, yawning. “Hey, in this life, nothing ever is, right?”

PET CAME OUT
onto the porch as Maris was paying. She was signing the form on the clipboard, watching the glass repair guy out of the corner of her eye to see if he'd reacted to her name, thinking that if she was going to continue this ruse of using her maiden name she would have to get a new credit card.

Pet watched, with her arms folded, as Maris slipped the guy a twenty-dollar bill from her purse. He'd taken only twenty minutes to replace the window. It seemed as though the job should take longer, but he worked quickly and confidently, humming to himself. Maris supposed they did a great business in Oakland. Near the school, cars were broken into sometimes in the brief interlude it took parents to pick up their children. That was the main reason the principal had offered her a space in the teachers' parking lot, a perk she accepted guiltily. He didn't offer it to the student volunteers from the St. Mary's teaching program, who drove old, dented hand-me-down cars.

Her Acura looked good as new again, with its glass replaced. The lease would soon be coming due, but Maris had treated it well and put so few miles on it. Another thing Maris would have to decide: buy this familiar car, or maybe get some little cheap import, easy on gas, another token of trading the old life for the new. But that was not a decision for today.

“They rip you off,” Pet observed. “Well, not you, but the insurance company. Whatever the company will pay, plus your deductible, that's what they bill.”

That wasn't really a rip-off, Maris thought. Just the way business was done. She'd paid her hundred dollars and she didn't care what other money exchanged hands beyond that. Already she was cherishing this new sealing off of herself, this anonymity.

“Norris called. He's on his way.” Pet smiled hopefully. “You're still interested, right?”

“Yes.” Maris tried to inject a note of cheer into her voice, but the afternoon was catching up with her, stealing the bravado she'd felt earlier. The sun beat down, unrelenting even as it slid low in the sky. There was no relief in the shade. Her scalp felt greasy, her body stale.

“Good, 'cause I hate to see who else he's going to drag in here. Two renters ago? The guy was a registered sex offender. He
said
all it was was a public indecency thing, he was peeing out back of a bar. But I looked him up and he did something with a kid under fourteen.”

“You
asked
him?” Maris was both impressed and troubled by the thought. She would have feared that the question alone would provoke such a person. But then again, she realized the image that came to her mind was the shambling man from the diner. Not all sex offenders looked like what they were. Why should they? Murderers didn't look like what they were, either.

“Yeah.” Pet grinned, cocked a hip. She was tough, or trying to be. “I told Norris too—Norris didn't want any trouble, got rid of him.”

“How?” Maris knew about tenants' rights issues from the news. It wasn't as bad in Oakland as in the city, but it was still enough to quash the passing interest she and Jeff once had in investing in real estate—luckily, as it turned out, since the crash came almost right after. As it was, it took years for their own house—the one she had driven away from this morning—not to be underwater on the mortgage. “Isn't it almost impossible to evict someone without all kinds of paperwork?”

“Oh, I imagine Norris
warned
him,” Pet said. There was complicity in her grin: the kind of warning, then, that fell outside the bounds of paperwork and regulations. What was Maris considering getting into? “Speaking of whom.”

A black SUV turned slowly into the drive that ran next to the house. Maris brushed a leaf from her blouse while she listened to the engine turn off, the door opening.

A man walked slowly back toward the front of the house, staring into his phone. Even as he rounded the steps he was staring at the little screen. He didn't look at Maris and Pet until he was a few feet away.

“Hey, Norris, this is Mary,” Pet said.

Maris held out her hand. “So nice to meet you.”

He grunted and gave her hand a limp, reluctant shake, the kind a man gives a woman when he doesn't expect her to shake hands at all.

Norris was tall, his posture stiff, his skin both freckled and brown. His hair was short, his cheekbones and chin strong and jutting, his mouth set in an implacable frown. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt buttoned almost to the top, his undershirt visible through the striped fabric, a plastic pocket protector in the breast pocket. The brass plating was wearing off the buckle of his belt, revealing dull metal underneath.

“You interested in renting the apartment short term,” he said, looking not into her eyes but somewhere around her chin.

“Yes, I am.” Maris was conscious of a straightening of her spine, the meticulous speech that she so disliked in herself, but that was almost unavoidable when she was nervous.

“Just how long we talking?”

“Well, for several days.” She made a snap decision. “Two weeks.”

He thought for a moment, twisting his mouth. “Most people like to move on the weekend. I could get someone in here this weekend, likely. But two weeks, starting today, that puts us to a Tuesday.”

“Okay, through the weekend, then,” Maris said quickly. “Two weeks and, what would that be, three days.”

Norris nodded slowly. “Place is a mess, though. That's the thing. I was going to clean it up tonight.”

Behind him, Maris saw Pet roll her eyes. So Norris was trying to work her—that was okay. Now that she'd seen him speak, he didn't frighten her.

“I'll do the cleaning myself. I don't mind.” And she didn't—she would have gone over every surface anyway, just to expunge any trace of another person's presence. She wanted to be the deepest kind of alone, with no one else's shadows around.

“Paint's pretty bad, though, is the thing,” he said. “I'll be repainting it before the next tenant. You'd have to take it the way it is. And the floors, they're pretty scratched up. Wood, you know. No carpet.”

“I don't mind,” Maris repeated. A wood floor could be scrubbed; carpet couldn't. Carpets held on to stains, especially the worst kind. Vomit, urine, blood. In her days of presiding over a household with a baby, a child, dinner parties, and craft projects, she'd cleaned any number of things off the floors and furniture. It was a matter of pride to Maris that she didn't leave the worst stains for the housecleaners to deal with, at least not without making a token effort first.

This was what had appeared, in her path. If Maris believed in God, she might have thought he'd given her a gift, directing her toward this apartment. Or at least a consolation prize, she who needed consolation so badly.

“Seventeen days—that'll be eight hundred. Up front, cash. And another five hundred security deposit. Also cash.”

“Hey,” Pet objected.

“That's fine,” Maris said crisply. A cash payment could save her from having to pass a credit check, a raft of paperwork that would probably include her social security number, driver's license, other things with her name on them.

Thirteen hundred dollars, if he kept the deposit, was still less than she would pay for a motel.

“It's fully furnished,” Norris said. Now it was his turn to sound uncertain. “Linens too. Plates and cups, silverware, all that.”

“Can I see it?”

He grunted in affirmation, glaring at Pet until she shrugged and backed off. In her doorway she turned. “Good luck. I have to head to work. It's the Coal Mine, on MacArthur. Come by if you can. If you want to. I'll be there till closing.”

She closed her door. If the apartment didn't work out, this would all be over, this fragile stack of hopeful maybes. Maris wouldn't be going to any bar then, to visit this strange new acquaintance. Probably she would give up and drive down to Alana's.

Alana. Oh no. As Maris followed Norris down the driveway, squeezing past his SUV, she stole a glance at her phone: three texts from Alana, but without her reading glasses she couldn't read them. She stuffed the phone back into her purse: it would have to wait.

The back door had a hand-lettered sign, a piece of wood sanded and painted, nice: 126B 1/2, in an old-fashioned type, gold on red.

“Upstairs, that's me, 126A. Front apartment, Pet's, that's 126B.”

She saw Norris stiffen just as the smell reached her nose: garbage, rot, chemicals. He put a hand on the doorjamb and spoke testily over his shoulder. “I told you I hadn't had a chance to clean.”

Maris took a breath, squared her shoulders, and nodded. If it was too awful, she would just leave. She hadn't given him any money yet. Still, she was curious now, she needed to see.

Norris flicked a switch. The overhead fixture had a flickering bulb, lighting the main room weakly. It was both kitchen and living room, a big square space lined with pine cabinets on two walls, avocado green appliances, shredded curtains with an old-fashioned vegetable print blurred by dust. This was the house's original kitchen, and Maris guessed it hadn't been touched since the building was converted. In the sink were dishes—coffee cups and aluminum pots and a scratched nonstick pan with what looked like scrambled eggs crusted on it, patches of what might have been spaghetti sauce on the counter. A trash can with no lid, clouded by flies, the blackened skins of a banana resting on wadded plastic and crushed paper plates. Something coated the floor under her feet, both gritty and sticky.

A small shape dashed by along the wall. Maris expelled her breath, and was glad she didn't shriek. Back home, a mouse would have had her running for Jeff.

Norris kicked something out of the way, a wrapper or trash bag. “If I'd had tonight,” he snapped, as if it was her fault.

“Let me see the rest.”

“Now hang on.” Norris paused again, barring her way through the passage to the rest of the apartment with his body. “Upstairs I have a new mattress and box spring, never used. I was going to set it up for the next tenant. You help me get it down the stairs . . .”

Maris nodded once, noncommittally. Maybe. But she had to see the rest. Just how bad had it gotten, for the one who came before her?

Norris snapped another light switch and let her pass. A tiny room led off the kitchen, barely wide enough for the single bed and old painted wood nightstand. A small square window over the head of the bed was strung with tangled metal blinds. The linens had been pulled most of the way off the bed, revealing a stained pink mattress, sagging toward the center.

Maris knew that most mattresses, at the end of their useful lives, were stained. Even those belonging to the most meticulous. Her mother's, before she died . . . the one Jeff had when they were dating. But the stains on this one were too large, too dark. She blinked and turned away, focusing her gaze on the wall.
Plaster and lath,
she made herself think, a purposeful distraction.
In surprisingly good shape
. Her gaze traveled down: scratched, dark-stained wood floors, a few dust bunnies, nothing terrible there. Finally, she forced herself to look at the bed again. The comforter was covered in pastel swirls, a pattern from the eighties, synthetic and pilled. An edge had unraveled, the batting leaking. A sour odor rose from the sheets.

“There's somewhere to dispose of the old?” Maris asked, her voice formal and unnatural.

“I'll call someone. Whatever you put out on the curb, I can have it picked up in the morning.”

“All of that goes too.” She pointed at the mound of linens, the pillow coming out of its case, as stained as the mattress.

“Yeah, I know,” Norris sighed, as though they had already agreed. “I have an extra fan, probably fit that window.”

“What was this, anyway?” Maris asked. “The laundry room? Pantry?”

“Yeah.”

It wasn't an answer, but she didn't press. All that was left was the bathroom. She went in first, expecting a filthier version of Pet's, but when she turned on the light, she got the first nice surprise of the day.

It was dirty, of course. Along the baseboards, the floor was covered in a brown film embedded with dust fibers; a mildewed plastic shower curtain hung from only half its rings, the rest torn. The toilet seat was pink faux-marble. But the bathroom was large, the old tub was in good shape, framed in an arched opening. There was beautiful octagonal black-and-white tile on the floor; the walls were accented with a row of pink tiles on point, the grout fairly clean. The overhead fixture was milk glass and the medicine cabinet's mirror was etched in a wheat pattern. Built-in shelves held only a razor, a flattened tube of Crest, an empty bottle of Advil on its side—there was room for everything Maris had ever kept in their bathroom at home.