Free The Affairs of Others: A Novel by Amy Grace Loyd Page A

him lately. Please . I’m so worried.”
    I did not know I was running until I stumbled and felt my heart in my legs and feet too acutely. I gripped his key in my hand like a dagger, as if it had remedy in it already. But when I got to his door, all of me froze. I almost turned around. I studied his door. The imperfections of the paint. I did not paint this door, not this one, others, but I had chosen the color. I touched it. The comfort of wood, the waxiness of high gloss. I knocked carefully. He could be home, just returned, or sleeping, or merely wanting privacy. No one answered the phone anymore. I knocked again. Please, I said to myself while hearing not Jeanie Coughlan, but Hope saying it at the same time, drawing it out as she had, threading it into an evening that was not intended to be my evening. I got angry then, insensibly. I stabbed at the lock, finally working the key in, but of course it was already unlocked. The key was useless. How many times had I spoken to him about this? I was a landlord, not a nurse or a mother-confessor. I was not his daughter.
    “Mr. Coughlan?” It took work to hold my voice as low and impersonal as that. “It’s Celia, your landlady. Are you here? I’ve had an inquiry from—”
    Darkness as in a cave, silence as absolute, and me diminishing with knowing I had to break it. There was no one here, no one who could or would respond. My hand searched and found the switch for the overhead light. Objects jumped to—his chair, standing lamp, radio, the yellowing charts on the wall, the blue enameled kitchen table to one side, where he took the meals he didn’t take in his chair. An arrangement which in its extreme simplicity didn’t mean things didn’t matter, but that it was just these few that did or should, that chair, that old lamp, that radio, and the path from them to the window. How many times had he walked it to see water? In this bedroom, the double bed on a metal frame had no headboard and no occupant; the sheet and a rough blue blanket had been assembled and pulled smooth. In the bathroom, the single towel was dry. The surfaces had been wiped down lately, if not scrubbed. Two cans of soup were left in his cabinet. In the fridge, the cheese was mostly gone; the bread, of which four slices remained, had begun to mold. Perhaps his eyes couldn’t decipher it, flecks as yet. None of this spoke of a hearty appetite, but it did not necessarily speak of illness or precipitous departure either. In the past weeks, Hope’s presence had distracted me: I had bought the soup for him, one or two cans at a time so as not to be overly conspicuous; when I could, I’d replace the cheese he’d once picked up, once chosen himself; I’d done so at least a half-dozen times. I always opened it, cut off the hard end. I stuck ten- and twenty-dollar bills in his wallet, once or twice a month—he never remarked the money or the food, or if he did, saw fit not to comment.
    It was nearly 10:30. I fell into his chair, a recliner that was mostly wide planes of worn wood save for leather-upholstered padding on its seat and back that had begun to lump and sag to fit the shape of the missing man; the chair’s seams were full of crumbs, its smell musty, old, but not unpleasant. I let my lungs fill with it, and with the stillness that had shocked me when I entered his apartment.
    I hadn’t noticed till it stopped, but I had been shaking a moment ago, and now I was here, alone, far from everyone else. I was grateful to Mr. Coughlan, yes, wherever he was. I’d simply wait for him here. I’d explain the intrusion with worry, his daughter’s. By midnight he’d be home surely. Even an old man wasn’t immune to the spring air on his skin, under it. He’d be home by midnight surely.
    *   *   *
    I woke to bare bulbs shining on me—the overhead light I had switched on. Mr. Coughlan had removed the cover, perhaps to change one or both of the bulbs. How bright it was, how sharp, and then came low