Her uncle and herself rarely speak. She loves him and he her, she knows, in his quiet way. But they are not close, each reminding the other of what was lost. No, Maria is alone, and will be until she chooses to have a family of her own, or chooses not to.
She wanders from room to room in the apartment looking at everything as if for the first time, so certain she was that she would never make her way back here again.
Her room, just as she left it: a few unpacked items that never made it into her case, spilled makeup powder on her dresser, the last book she finished before the contract came through. And on the edge of the bed some folded towels Freya must have laundered and returned to her room. A gesture so potent in its everyday kindness that it makes Maria let out a throaty sob. Eyes blurring, she takes in her space, her things, the pictures on her walls, her possessions, things she used to care so much about, each item now seeming alien to her somehow. She rises and wanders to her dresser, the bottles of face cream, scents, nail polishes, strings of beads in all colors and styles all as if someone else’s.
The feeling opens a worrying question in Maria’s mind, the question of whether she has now outgrown her old life, if what she has witnessed has made her real life seem ludicrously naïve by comparison. She heads over to her DSR camera hanging by its strap from her door handle and sits down heavily on her bed.
She flicks on the power and scrolls through her old photos. She’s always thought of herself as having a bit of an eye, spending hours on weekends wandering the streets of Manhattan and catching moments, but looking back now magic no longer glitters through her hard-won photos, only people trying their hardest to live their lives. Maria tries to shake off the thought but it sinks deeper into her and expands. There is no escaping it.
The truth is, the world is not the place Maria thought it was before she left. The world is a place where you can die, where you can be killed and you can kill and everything will carry on as normal—without you—without them.
She winces at the thought of the two men who tried to kill her, the men she subsequently killed. But wincing does not stop the memories from coming. The memories of the rooms, one after another. And the people she did not see, but who watched everything she did. She tries not to think who they were and what it was for, she tries to push away the questions of how many people died in those rooms before her, of what it was all in aid of.
She wondered back there, between bouts of terror, back under the house, if it was just a kind of gladiatorial game for someone’s sadistic amusement or if it had some larger significance? An experiment perhaps— but to prove what hypothesis?
The sound of the fridge clicking on in the kitchen shakes her from the thoughts. She is still hungry. Two days in she still has calories to make up, and even the thought of the fridge and what it might contain in spite of Freya’s restricted diabetic diet is enough to get her up and moving.
In the kitchen she eats her friend’s food, and when she’s full she gathers some clean clothes and a towel from her room and heads to the bathroom. She runs a deep hot bubble bath and lies in it, certain in the knowledge that she cannot live here anymore; she can’t slip back into this old life after what happened to her. She cannot pretend everything is the same when she has pressed up hard against the invisible line between living and not.
But she has savings, she has a lot of savings, from three years of living among the kind of people who could do this to someone. She could move, perhaps move out west, near her uncle? Perhaps a quiet life could work for her now. But she somehow doubts it. She needs to fill the silence that brings on remembrance, not encourage it. Because when her thoughts are free they run like lightning straight back into that basement in Virgin Gorda, they fly through those rooms right back to the final one, and they find her curled fetal on the floor, ready to let the pain take her and for it all to end.
The thought is interrupted by a knock on the door.
Maria’s eyes fly through the open bathroom door to the hallway. She shifts in her warm bubbles and hugs her knees close. The knock comes again.
“Hello,” she calls, and tells herself it’s not them. It can’t be, they couldn’t follow her, could they?
“Hey,” the voice comes back with barely covered disinterest. “Sign for a package: Freya Samuels?”
A wave of relief swims through Maria with such force, a chuckle erupts from her. “Oh, okay. One second. I’ll be right there.”
Maria rises, wraps a towel around her wet body, and pads to the door. She checks through the peephole, sees the package, and opens the door.
He grabs her.
A hand instantly over her mouth, her wet feet slipping and skidding back into the apartment as he drags her and slams the door behind them.
She tries to scream, to bite, but nothing gets past his thick leather-gloved hands. She struggles, but he is stronger. He steers her back toward the bathroom, toward the tub that moments ago was so relaxing, the tub full to the brim with warm bubbly water, and she knows his plan.
And that’s when her old friend kicks in once more. The friend who has always saved her.
She stops struggling and lets her body go limp. When the momentum he has been using against her is no longer necessary it suddenly pivots him forward. Maria is momentarily loosened from his grip as he grabs for the doorframe with one hand, the other still tight around her mouth. She dips to the floor and skids back away from him. She runs to the front door, grabs the baseball bat Freya’s ex-boyfriend bought them for self-defense after a homeless guy was found dead in the building’s stairwell a year ago, and swings it wildly at the back of the stranger’s head.
—
ONCE MARIA HAS CLEANED UP the floor where he fell and moved him to her bedroom, she washes herself again, dresses, and heads out onto the street to find what she’s looking for. She is not worried the man will wake. He’s dead now. She took one of Freya’s old diabetic syringes from her used sharps box and filled it with air. She made sure he would not bother her again.
When she gets to the homeless shelter on East 30th Street her plan solidifies. She pays the men generously for their spare items of clothes until she has a full outfit, which she bundles into a carrier bag, holding her nose, and takes back—to much consternation—on the subway system.
Back in the apartment she changes the man, careful to match the colors of his original outfit she knows would have been caught downstairs on the entry hall cameras.
She pulls the mobile phone from his pocket and uses his lifeless face to unlock the screen and change the password.
Then checking the halls are clear, and for the first time in her life pleased that her building has no CCTV in the hallways, she hauls the 160-plus-pound man along the hallway to the unused stairwell.
—
WHEN FREYA RETURNS TO HER apartment that night everything is as she left it. Which is why she finds it so incredibly odd that all of her chicken is gone. She is sure she had a full container when she left that morning—but her hours were long and everything is stepping up at the hospital now that they’re nearing the end of the year. She checks Maria’s room, but everything there is as it should be.
