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Oliver Marchand shut the door.

I stood there for a moment before I remembered that he also had a little peephole, and although he would have had to bend a lot to look through it, he would have been able to see me in the hallway. Since he already seemed to believe that I was nuts, I decided to go. Quickly.

I went back down to my apartment and listened. Then I risked my chair by climbing up on it to get closer to the ceiling, and I listened more. Nothing. I knew that Oliver Marchand was in his apartment, probably walking around, slamming his refrigerator, maybe doing jumping jacks. I couldn’t hear one damn thing. I downloaded a decibel meter app on my phone and climbed up again. It did register sounds, some that I also heard (a truck passed by in the street outside) and some that were too quiet for my ears to pick up on. It appeared to be working.

I kept it on as I went into the little kitchen. Then I turned on the tap above the sink, and there was the song again. It was even louder, still not enough to make out any words, but there was a definite difference in volume. At first, I thought that the meter on my phone had detected it, too…but then I realized that it could have been recognizing the sound of the water splashing into the basin below.

I turned off the tap and the music stopped, and I closed the app and took a breath. It was coming from the pipes. It wasn’t just some weird coincidence that I only seemed to hear the song when I took a shower or got a drink of water at the kitchen sink. The next step was to tell Mrs. McGlothen that I had a plumbing problem, and the problem was that I heard music whenever I flushed the toilet.

If I had come across as a lunatic to my upstairs neighbor, I was going to sound even worse when I announced that to the building manager. I took another breath and decided to call in a plumber on my own, without telling her. I further decided to say that I had a clog instead of explaining the actual issue. When the guy showed up and I turned on the water, he would hear it for himself.

He did not.

“A song?” The emergency plumber, whose services cost double because he had come immediately and on a Saturday, reached over and turned on the hot as well as the cold. Then he bent closer to the sink, leaning down to listen, but when he stood back up? He was shaking his head.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Do you have any kind of auditory issues?” I asked. “Has your hearing been tested lately?”

He put his index finger into his ear and stared at me. “I can hear just fine. There’s no song playing in your sink.”

“Let’s try the bathroom,” I urged, and he did slowly follow me in there. I turned on the shower and the sink and it was clear as bell to me. Well, I still couldn’t distinguish words, but I definitely heard the faint melody. I tapped my foot along to the beat of it and waggled my finger from side to side.

Then I saw the plumber staring at me again, his eyes wide. “I’m not picking up on any music,” he said. “But that’s ok. Don’t worry about it.” He started backing out of the room. “I’m not going to charge you for this visit. Ok? Good luck.” Before I could even turn off the water, he was gone. I heard the front door slam as he left.

I could have called another plumber but I had a terrible feeling that the result was going to be the same: I would hear it clearly and he would make a quick exit. And I also had to consider other possibilities. Could I have mental health issues? It wasn’t far-fetched. My early life had been unpredictable and uncertain, and so had my early influences. My mother was pretty much the definition of unstable. She wasn’t a bad person at all—in fact, she’d always had really good intentions about helping others and changing the world for the better. None of her ideas had ever worked due to her flightiness, which made her fail to think through plans before embarking on them and fail to follow through once she’d started on them.

They had also been bad ideas, so even without her flightiness, they almost certainly would have fizzled out. A few years ago, I had made a list of everything that I could remember, all the different businesses she had tried to start and schemes that she had pursued. I had gotten to fifty-three but she’d probably attempted even more that I hadn’t known about. There was the organic fern nursery that she wanted to build in La Grieta, situated in the California desert. There were the misshapen baskets, hand-crafted in frigid northern Idaho in the winter. There was the cattle ranch and she was afraid of the cows. After she’d given them away but before we’d left Texas, she’d also gotten an idea about dying tumbleweeds. The dirt was supposed to be their canvas and their movement would turn the landscape into an art project (it also had not worked and local environmental protection had gotten involved).

I had never seen any signs of mental disturbance in her, though. She was always very clear-minded, even when she was absolutely wrong in what she was thinking. I also felt like I was, but the way that plumber had just looked at me and then run…

I decided to go for a run, too. It was a beautiful day here in the city, perfect outside, and I could jog as far as I could and then walk for a while. I put on my new bra, extra supportive so that I didn’t have to wear two normal ones, and also the new shorts I’d gotten that didn’t make the swishing sound and allowed me to run silently (except for when I was gasping and wheezing).

The first block went ok but I was still very worried about what had just happened with the plumber. To tell the truth, I’d been on edge for the past few days anyway, and that was why I leaped up and screamed when I noticed that someone was running just behind me, next to my shoulder.

It was my neighbor, Oliver Marchand. He stopped when I did and he stared at me, appalled. Other people on the sidewalk were staring too, because that was what you did when someone shrieked without reason.

“Sorry,” I told him. “You startled me.”

“I apologize.”

“I didn’t expect anyone to be right there,” I explained.

“We left the building at almost the same time. I’ve been next to you for blocks.”

“We were running together?” I asked.

He shrugged and started off again, so I did, too. We were definitely next to each other now and I had enough breath to talk, a little.

“Were you just on a trip?”

“Yes,” he answered. “For work.”

One of the work trips where he wouldn’t seek out other women, according to Mrs. McGlothen.

“There was no possible way that I could have played music in my apartment for the last five days,” he added. “There’s no music.”

“Yeah, I…never mind that,” I said. “It’s fine.”