There was a feature on holiday giving and making a difference. In lieu of giving “meaningless bric-a-brac,” readers were urged to adopt pets or donate money to animal rescue groups in the name of their gift recipients. Since the pandemic was declared, families had begun to surrender long-loved pets, out of fear that they would transport fleas carrying the virus into their homes. British scientists had officially claimed that fleas weren’t the vector, but in spite of that, animal shelters across North America were at an all-time high capacity and euthanasia rates were through the roof. A pie graph demonstrated how animals were being scapegoated—even though flea-prevention medications were available. I thought back to the Black Plague, to how Londoners were convinced that dogs and cats spread the disease. The animals were killed en masse and the rat population soon overtook the dwindling human one.
I thanked the server again and collected my mail from the box at the bottom of the stairs. The tenants had clearly taken in their own mail, but a handful of mine they had just shoved into an empty mailbox beside theirs. I found some letters from the university, loads of junk mail, and something official-looking from the City of Windsor.
By that point, I could smell pot floating down the stairwell, so I trekked back upstairs to see if the occupants had mellowed out and if I would have more luck with them. I banged on the door but again it went unanswered.
“I used to live here,” I hollered. “Can you just open the door and talk to me?”
This time the door opened with the security chain in place. A wolfish-looking twenty-year-old eyeballed me from behind a beard and a bush of hair. His pupils were dilated. He said slowly, his words halfway between a statement and a question, “You aren’t blonde?”
I told him, no, I wasn’t blonde. That I was the original tenant, before the girl who had lived there before them.
“Before the girl who …” He seemed to consider that a long time. Then he said, “Right! Travis!” He said something to someone I couldn’t see, and then another guy appeared.
“I just want to come in and see if any of my old things are still here. Look, I’m pregnant.” I stuck out my hips and placed my hand on my belly for emphasis. “I’m no threat to you. Can you help me out?”
“Yeah, man, check it. She’s huge,” the bearded one said to Travis, who was lurking somewhere outside of my sightline.
It took them a second to figure out how to close the door and take the chain off. When they opened it again, I saw that Travis was holding a baseball bat. I ventured in slowly. Things weren’t entirely the way I had left them, but many of my possessions were still there. My pink curtains. My IKEA kitchen table. The mismatched chairs from my mom’s. My thrift-store four-seater sofa with the curved wooden legs. I sank down onto it without being invited. Travis glanced at his buddy, who introduced himself as Nicolas.
“You guys are really high, huh?” I said.
Travis stowed the bat under my coffee table. He called into my bedroom for a girl named Carrie to come out. The girl shuffled into the living room, shifty-eyed and stinking of weed. She was thin and dark, and sat down in one place and didn’t move the rest of the time I was there. They were typical stoners. I asked them what year they were in and they said second. I told them my department and asked if they knew Karl. They took a long time to think about it, then said they didn’t. One of them said that the place had been repainted before they moved in—I could see that—but that all the furniture had been stacked in the back. The landlord hadn’t liked the girl who was there before, and even though he’d fumigated the place for fleas, he had still put the furniture out.
“She was high-risk,” Nicolas said of my subletter, running an explanatory hand through his mane, stopping to twist the ends, “and the landlord just wanted to be rid of all of it.”
I didn’t need to ask what he meant by high-risk.
These three had lugged much of the furniture back in, up the fire escape, because they could use it. The dining area was now a makeshift bedroom, with sheets strung up to section it off, and the living room was both the living and the dining area. I wasn’t sure how they managed to live that way, three of them in a space that was clearly intended for one.
I went down the hall into my bedroom. A bunch of my things were still in the closet. I found some better footwear and my winter coat, which, even though it wouldn’t close up all the way, was worth taking. My bed was gone, replaced with someone else’s, but it was my alarm clock on the window
ledge. I didn’t ask if I could take it—I just shoved it in the inside pocket of my coat. There was kitty litter on the carpet, although I didn’t see the cat. One of the guys called out to ask if I was going to take anything they needed. And the other asked if I wanted to smoke with them. I said no to both.
In the kitchen, I ran my fingers over the counters. This was where Karl had come in that night I was making macaroni. I felt so strange and nostalgic, being in that space that was mine but not mine.
Then I went out back, down the fire escape, and found boxes with other possessions of mine—a big leather bag I could pack things in, some other clothes and trinkets and books that were all too wet and mouldy to bother with. There was a framed photo of me and my mom in the Head Start salon, and I grabbed it because even though it was a little weather-stained with one green wrinkle at the top, it was still snug behind the glass.
I went back in and tore back through the closet, pulling out more clothes now that I had a bag to fold them into. It seemed the girl, in spite of being a few sizes smaller than me, had an eye for good vintage. I was grateful she’d gone dumpster diving and saved my things from the weather. But now they were coming with me. I found a familiar-looking towel and rolled it up and stuffed it in too. By the time I’d finished, the zipper on the bag wouldn’t close.
When I walked back into the living room, I left the bag in the hall so they wouldn’t see how much I was taking. The two guys were lumped around the girl. She was in the same spot,
sitting straight as a German vampire in a silent movie. Nicolas had his head in her lap and Travis was squished in behind her with an arm across her shoulders. They were staring at the TV, which was on mute. It was my TV, but it wasn’t a good one. That was when I realized I’d taken the wrong stuff—I should have grabbed things I could sell. I had gone for the clothes because I was cold.
I sat down on the edge of the couch and looked around, realizing I’d never had much that was worth anything. The laptop was my only item with resale value, and of course, it was gone. There was an old stereo record player and speakers, but who listened to vinyl these days? It might be worth fifty bucks, but how would I carry it?
“Do you listen to that?” I asked, gesturing.
“That’s the heart of the apartment!” Nicolas suddenly became animated. He sprang off the girl and opened the cupboard where I’d kept all my vinyl. He flipped slowly through the records, pulling out gems and presenting them to me as if they were his finds and not my own. “Isn’t this cool?” He put on the Velvet Underground’s
White Light/White Heat
. He had only just discovered it.
Listening to my records in my old apartment, I started to cry. I told them about getting out of the WEE and trying to find Larissa’s, and how the building had disappeared. They were freaked about that. Their eyes got big and they started talking over each other.
“We have to help her find her!” Travis called to Nicolas as if it were a rescue mission.
“Go on the Internet.” Nicolas gestured toward the hanging sheets.
They had a computer hidden away in the sheet bedroom. Using 411, I was able to locate Larissa. Her listing was in her name, not Jaichand’s, and gave her address between Jarvis and Parliament streets, in the direction I’d just come from. Walking to her condo, I’d passed within three or four blocks of where she was now.
I called her on the land line that was listed online.
“Who is this?” Larissa said.
“Lara, it’s Hazel.”
There was a sound like she had dropped the phone.
“It’s Hazel!” I said again, in case she hadn’t heard me.
“Is this … a joke?” she said haltingly.
I told her how I had been in quarantine for eight weeks with no outside line. I told her how good it was to hear her voice.
“Keep talking,” she said, “so I can tell if it’s really you.”
Why would it be a joke? I asked, but it probably didn’t help that the stoners were trying to croon along to “Stephanie Says” in the background.
“People play jokes on me these days,” Larissa said, her voice flattening to a hard edge.
“Larissa, it’s me.” I told her to come get me at my old apartment. “Then you’ll see. You want to see me, don’t you?”
“I don’t know if I can drive,” she said. Then she changed her mind and said, “I guess I can. I’ll be there in ten.” And she hung up. I reflected that she hadn’t once said that she was relieved to finally hear from me. It was kind of a weird
reaction, I thought. But then, it occurred to me that maybe, like the people at the Thai restaurant, she’d thought I was simply gone—dead. Maybe she was in shock.
I picked up my bag and came back into the living room to thank the inhabitants of my apartment, which was when the girl saw what I’d taken. For the first time, her stoned eyes seemed to focus on a single object. She squinted.
“What do you need all that for? That black one,” she said, raising her arm slowly until she was pointing dramatically. “That one,” she said, her finger striking the air in the direction of the sleeve of a dress that was hanging over the side of the bag. “It isn’t even going to fit you anymore.”
I looked down at my gut. I pulled the dress out of the bag and held it up, tried to fit it across me. She had a point. I tossed it to her. It landed on the end of my sofa, and Travis flipped it up on his socked toe and extended it backward over his head to her. It was the one I’d worn in Karl’s office that first time we messed around.
“What about your records?” Nicolas asked.
I told him to take good care of them.
The Larissa I’d spoken to on the phone was not the one who greeted me when she picked me up. Her car practically swerved into the curb, and she was out of the front seat in no time and on the sidewalk with her arms around me.
“Oh my god, Haze,” she said, looking down at my belly. “Oh my god! Look at you.”
Tears ran down the sides of her face, and she had to fumble in her purse and find Kleenex while I loaded my bag in the back seat, hefting it overtop of Devang’s empty baby seat. Then she grabbed me and hugged me again. She stood stroking my back in the middle of the sidewalk. She was wearing a bright white beehive wig, very Marie Antoinette.
“What’s with this?” I asked, one hand creeping up to feel it. It was an extremely firm piece of equipment, and had gold trinkets fastened into it, dangling like earrings.
“It was a gift from an artist,” Larissa explained. “She made it for me. She said if we have to wear them, why not go all the way, right?”
Sure, I said. We got in the car and drove. At stoplights, Larissa kept reaching over to touch my hand or my shoulder, or she would toggle my coat collar. Watch the road, I told her. I’d been through too much for us to have an accident now, even just a fender bender. Jesus, it was good to see her.
“I practically lost it when I couldn’t get through,” I said, “and then when I went to your place and it was just gone …”
Her face darkened. “Isn’t that crazy? There was an explosion.”
“What?”
“In the middle of the night. Some woman down on floor four had SHV, and I don’t know what she did, but, she blew the windows right out of the place. The building was in danger of collapsing. We all woke up, and Jaichand and Devang and I ended up down on the street in the middle of the night in our dressing gowns.”
“Wow, that’s serious,” I said. I asked her if she’d got my message on her cell. I told her about trying to get a pickup.
“Oh,” she said, “my cellphone, it’s …” Beneath the white heaps of fake hair, she got a cloudy look on her face. “It’s—I left it at work,” she said decisively. Then she smiled in a way that seemed to me broken, disingenuous.
I wondered if maybe she was on some kind of medication, but then I dismissed the idea, telling myself I was suspicious only because I’d just been around three very stoned people.
We pulled up at the apartment and it was unlike any place I’d ever expected Larissa to live. She must have seen my look, because she said, “Yeah, a lot has changed. We had to take something really fast after the explosion. But they’ve got other condos partially built, and they’re supposed to relocate us all eventually.”
It was one of those old buildings where people seem to be living on top of one another. I protested, saying I was just surprised because I was so used to seeing her in her other place. I had begun to think of it as her “house.”
“Well, so had I,” she said toughly as she took me in through a grubby stairwell, and from there down a concrete hall.
“When I looked at the unit, a nice carpet ran through here—” Larissa gestured to the hall floor, and I saw on closer inspection that black streaks over the concrete were rubber and glue where carpet had been torn it up. “Fleas …” Larissa said with a sour face. “There weren’t any, but no landlord
wants to be accused of it. They fumigated my unit before I moved in. It’s written into the lease.”
The place smelled like soap and sausages. We took the elevator up, and Larissa shouldered my bag. She laughed and seemed to come back to herself, saying, “Look at you. How many months?” She touched me again. “That’s great,” she said, as if the whole thing were something I had planned on.
“I’m getting used to it,” I replied.
“Listen,” Larissa said before she opened the door, as if she were bracing me for something, “it isn’t much. It’s just all I can afford for now.”
I told her if she’d been where I had, she’d think it was a palace.
We went in and Larissa turned on the hall switch. I took my new-old boots off and parked them next to a pair of hers. The boots were all hers, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. She went into the little kitchen and turned on the light there and asked if I was hungry. I said no and was about to go into my story—tell her how they’d fed me at the Thai restaurant, how charitable everyone had been, but she stopped me by saying, “That’s good, because to tell you the truth, I don’t have much. I meant to get groceries. Tomorrow. I’ll do that tomorrow.”