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“Damn it,” I muttered.

“You have to lift it up.”

I twisted my head to look over my shoulder, and I saw the man who had opened the door to the apartment above me. Then he had shut that door in my face. “What?”

“When you turn the key, lift it up and jiggle it a little. These boxes are old and you have to work with them.”

I swiveled back around and with that trick, the key did turn. I found a mailbox that was stuffed full of papers, which I had to yank hard to remove. Then I stepped to the side to go through them all but nothing was for me. They were addressed to someone named Jasper or sometimes “Jasper the Great.” It looked like a lot of bills or official notices, probably things that a person would need. My mother had not liked to pay attention to official notices or bills, and we had moved enough that she’d been able to outrun them.

“He’s dead.”

I stared at the man. “What?”

“Jasper,” my upstairs neighbor answered. He pointed to the stack of papers in my hands. “If that’s his mail, then you don’t have to worry about it. He’s dead and he didn’t have any family or friends, so there was no one to take his belongings. He lived in your apartment for decades.”

“Did he die in there?”

“There is no such thing as ghosts,” he told me, frowning.

I knew that! I wasn’t a child and I wasn’t scared, if that was what he thought. “It’s not unusual to wonder about deaths in the place you live,” I let him know. “It was a reasonable question.” I shoved the letters into one of my bags, because I was going to write “deceased” next to Jasper’s name before I dropped them back into the mail slot.

I heard my neighbor’s mailbox close and I also heard his footsteps behind me. Yesterday, I’d ridden the old elevator with the two sets of doors, inner and outer, because I’d been carrying my suitcases. Today, I was carrying a bunch of stuff from shopping, but I decided to take the stairs so that I wouldn’t ride with my rude neighbor.

Except apparently, he was also walking up. He beat me to the stairwell and held open the door.

“Thank you,” I said. It hadn’t sounded grateful. We climbed in silence except for the slight slap of our shoes on the marble and the quiet rustle of my bags.

“He was a magician.”

I paused on the landing. “What?” I asked again.

“Jasper, the former tenant. He was a magician,” the man said. He kept climbing and passed me. “The smells that came from your apartment were terrible.”

“Well, I’m not a magician, so you won’t be bothered by that. And I really would appreciate if you keep your music down. We’ll both be good neighbors that way.” I had reached my floor, where he had paused. He opened the door for me and again, I thanked him. I sounded a little more appreciative that time.

But he hadn’t paid attention to my suggestion. I heard his music again when I was in the bathroom, this time when I flushed the toilet and washed my hands. It had to have been spite, right? He must have been doing it on purpose because I had complained to him, and also because he had caught me with my ear pressed against his door. That hadn’t been the best move by me, but I had sincerely believed that I wouldn’t get caught.

I spent the rest of the day working in my apartment and as the sun went down, I realized that I was very disappointed. The place still didn’t look how I had imagined when I’d been picturing myself living here alone, like the quail in the story I’d heard in the library in La Grieta. The plastic shades I’d bought failed to cover both the bottom third of the glass and several inches on the sides—it would have been better to measure rather than guessing how big the windows were. I hadn’t been aware that they weren’t all the same, standard dimension. Another problem was that these shades hadn’t come with hanging mechanisms, and Scotch tape hadn’t done jack squat to keep them up there.

It was going to be bright again in my bedroom when the sun rose the next day, but that was ok. I would wake up early to start the yoga practice that I had decided I would do every morning, and then I would get to work on my real job. During college, I had started charging my fellow students to proofread and critique their essays. Then, luckily, I’d looped a professor into it by offering to check her work for free (at first—it was a promotion). She had referred even more clients my way. Now I had a semi-successful career as a freelance editor, which I liked.

My job allowed me to set my own hours and be at home, away from an office, which was wonderful. I wasn’t tied to someone else’s schedule like I had been with classes and other jobs in college. I also wasn’t forced to work communally, like I had with my mom. She had involved both of us in many, many schemes that were certain to be unsuccessful, like when we’d attempted to make artisanal baskets to sell. We had done that with her new group of friends in Idaho, in a shed, in January. One person had tried to make the forms while the rest of us twisted and wove grapevines around them.

It was hard to be crafty when your fingers were too cold and stiff to move. Another big problem had been that in the tubs where we soaked the grapevines to make them pliable, the water had repeatedly frozen over. The whole time we’d sat out there, Mom had encouraged us to open up about different traumas (I had heard some really, really terrible stuff and I had only been ten) and also to reflect on what we could do to make the world more harmonious. Then we were supposed to get off our stools and shout our ideas, so that they could rise up into the planet’s collective consciousness.

Our baskets had ended up warped and they had huge gaps in the sides and bottoms. Also, the ends of the vines kept popping out as they tried to unweave themselves, so unsurprisingly, no one wanted to buy them. My idea to make the world more harmonious had been equally unsuccessful. I’d risen up and said, “Space heaters for everyone!” But we hadn’t had electricity out in the shed anyway.

We’d moved soon enough. Mom had decided that she might like a warmer location, so we’d headed to Texas where she’d launched a career as an animal-friendly cattle rancher (but not to sell the cattle for meat, so I had never been clear about the point of it all). Those cows had been so, so mean, and neither Mom nor any of the new friends she’d made there had any idea how to handle them.

But now I worked on my own. I hadn’t bought a desk yesterday because I wasn’t sure what kind I wanted (which shape, how many drawers, what type of top) so I tried to make myself comfortable sitting cross-legged on the floor with my two suitcases piled as an improvised work area.

It didn’t function well. I didn’t get much done because the suitcases kept sliding and I had to get up a lot to walk around when my butt hurt. Was I too bony there? Would yoga help with that? I tried to see a reflection of my backside in the bathroom mirror and was dissatisfied by the vision of what was behind me.

Probably more exercise was the way to go, some intense cardio in addition to my newly minted yoga routine. My freshman-year roommate, the one with all the decorating ideas, had been a fiend for the gym. She had started off every day with a group class and then she and her friends had all gone to work out together, too. She’d had a lot of those friends.

It was probably because exercise made her happy and stable, which people seemed to like. They were attracted to that, whereas acting silent and sullen tended to drive them away.

I definitely wasn’t trying to attract anyone when I went out for a run later that evening, after the heat of the day wore off. It was lucky that attraction wasn’t my goal because my outfit would have succeeded in that about as well as my suitcases had worked as a desk. I had doubled down on bras, since I didn’t own one meant for serious bouncing, and that was uncomfortable enough to put me in a really, really foul mood. The shorts I wore had seemed ok when I’d pulled them on in my apartment but as soon as I had started to move, they had made a loud swishing sound that told me that my thighs were probably too close together. They also refused to stay in place and started to twist around and rise up, so I was constantly yanking them back down.