Free Audrey’s Door by Sarah Langan Page A

bare feet slapped against cold, hard wood, but didn’t echo. All the doors were open, like the empty rooms were watching.
    He was waiting at the end of the hall.
    “I didn’t take your comics, and if you—huh-huh”—she panted—“if you want the piano so bad, you can have it.”
    He shook his head but didn’t leave. She waited for his apology. It didn’t come. She tried to make it easier for him. “You looked gay in that shirt. That’s why I hid it. I didn’t like people thinking you were gay. It embarrassed me.” Then she heard herself, and winced. This was her idea of an olive branch?
    He’d drunk so much that his eyes were dilated and black. It reminded her of the man in the three-piece suit from her dream. A chill ran from the tip of her neck to the small of her back. “Not my pro’lem,” he slurred.
    “What?”
    “Tapping yourself—” He imitated her, bending down low enough that they were eye to eye, and slapping his thighs. The sound was a muffled whip:
    “One leg—” Whack!
    “The’other leg—” Whack!
    “One leg—” Whack!
    “The’other—” Whack!
    He stood tall again, holding the wall for balance, and kept talking. “—Moving stuff when I wasn’t looking, like a spook…” He glared at her, his jaw set firm and furious, and she knew that whatever was coming next was going to be bad. She squinted, like not looking directly at him might soften the blow.
    “You don’t have any friends. Nobody likes you. You never leave the house except for work. It’s like you’re a ghost. Like you don’t even exist.” Hundred-proof spittle flew as he shouted. The blood drained from her face and pooled at her feet, making her dizzy. She squeezedher hands into fists. Blinked once. Twice. Three times. Felt the tears as they cooled her cheeks.
    Though she’d never seen it, she’d always assumed that, deep down, he had a cruel side, just like Betty. But she’d also always hoped she was wrong. His eyes were so dilated they looked black, and he squeezed his hands into fists. It occurred to her that he was about to hit her. Show the true self he’d been hiding from her all this time. A violent man who would one day trade his study walls for her soft flesh, or their children’s birdlike bones. What was worse, she wanted him to do it, so she’d never have to speak to him, or feel bad about leaving him, again. She turned her cheek, to give him a better shot.
    His fists tightened briefly, then dropped open at his sides. But his rage remained, a palpable thing.
    “I hate this,” she said.
    “Yeah? Well, I hate you.”
    He turned fast and didn’t wait for the elevator. Instead, he jogged down the fire exit stairs. She heard the echo of his steps. Quick tap-tap-taps followed by a loud tumble (thump! thump!). Then he got up again and went slower.
    Audrey shut and locked the door, then threw herself down on the air mattress. An old episode of Law and Order played. A doctor conducting an autopsy removed a sheeted body’s spleen, heart, and liver, then dropped them into a metal bowl. The corpse looked cold without those things. Vacant.
    Saraub. Every time he’d told her he loved her, or pretended, when they were sitting on the couch playing Honeymoon Bridge, that he was happy; every offhand glance she’d spied, in which he’d coveted her rear, or else just watched her move, like he was so proud of his girl; every surreptitiously snapped photo; every time he’d run his two fingers down her spine, and traced every bone: all lies. Because his love had been conditional. Allalong, with his camera and cold eyes, he’d been watching her, and in her mannerisms, and cleaning, and shyness that people so often mistook for coldness, judging her not good enough.
    As she lay there, she cried for the first time since she’d left him. Before this instant, she’d never really believed that their breakup was real.
    Too tired to pull her air mattress into the bedroom, she fell asleep in the den, with the sound