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What is a man doing at our apartment?
I take the steps two at a time, my bag slipping from my shoulder to the crook of my arm. I leave it there, not wanting to take the time to push it back up. Suddenly Sienna is all I can think about. I need to get to Sienna.
I round the corner and see her first, and practically heave a sigh of relief because she’s okay. She stands there in the open doorway in her pajamas—a pair of plaid, flannel boxer shorts and a boxy, cropped T-shirt that reveals a small amount of pale midriff—her feet bare, one foot balanced on top of the other, her arms knotted across her chest. She’s already washed up for bed. Her face is bare, sans makeup, her hair thrown into a messy topknot, and if I had to guess, she’s not wearing a bra.
Sienna sees me. Her head and her eyes come to me, gazing over this man’s shoulder. He stands in the hall just outside my front door with his back to me. “Mom,” Sienna says, a lilt to her voice as the man spins around so that I can see his face. He’s an actual man—not some teenage boy like the other day—but a grown adult, thirty-five to forty years old if I had to guess, wearing jeans, a blue button-down, and he meets me with an uncurbed smile that I don’t return, that I can’t return because smiling is the furthest things from my mind.
“What’s going on?” I ask, breathless. I hear the strain in my voice as I step past him, putting myself between him and Sienna. I don’t wait for someone to tell me what’s going on. Instead I ask, “Can I help you with something?” trying to ascertain how he got into the building in the first place and what he’s doing at my apartment door, talking to my teenage daughter alone. I thrust my bag up onto my shoulder and cross my arms, wishing for more height to have greater leverage.
“I’m Evan,” he says, extending a hand that I don’t take, thinking that he’s some kind of salesman, and how inappropriate—if not illegal—that he’s gotten into our apartment building at this time of night to try and sell us something we don’t want or need. There isn’t a No Soliciting sign on the front door that I can remember, but one would think a locked door would suffice.
“What can I do for you, Evan?” I ask, a tartness to my words that doesn’t sound like me.
“Mom,” Sienna says, and I hear the disapproval in her voice, the embarrassment, because of how I’m acting and because I still haven’t taken the man’s hand. In fact, I don’t take his hand, and ultimately he withdraws it, humbling. As he slips his hand into the pockets of his jeans, his smile fades.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to impose. My wife and I just moved into the apartment downstairs. We got some of your mail by mistake. I came to return it.”
I draw in a breath, thinking of the movers I saw the other day, hauling boxes and furniture inside. I look back to Sienna. Said mail, I see now, is in her hand. It was hard to see at first because of the way her arms are crossed, but she uncrosses them and waves the envelope in my face. I look at it and then I let my eyes go back to the man.
I take a step back, into the apartment, bumping into Sienna, who falls a step back herself and then turns and retreats further into the living room. I reach for the door to close it. “Thank you for bringing the mail up. That was kind of you,” I say, and then I actually close the door, putting a stop to any further conversation.
I watch the man’s expression go flat as the door closes, though my pulse thrums in my neck and my heart beats with such force that I need to sit down.
“That was so embarrassing,” Sienna declares when the door is closed and the dead bolt locked. I turn to face her as she drops down onto the sofa, kicking her feet up on the edge of the coffee table so it slides forward an inch, taking the rug with it, buckling the wool. “Did you really just kick him out?”
I don’t answer her. Instead I ask, “What were you thinking, Sienna?” I still stand, staring at her aghast from the other side of the coffee table. “You know better than to open the door to a stranger.”
“He’s not a stranger. He’s our neighbor, Mom,” she says, which he is, but she didn’t know that when she opened the door for him, and either way, he’s still a stranger; we don’t know him. “Besides,” she goes on, very blasé as if she has no idea what could have happened to her tonight if that man had different intentions, “I thought it was you. You said you were on your way home so when he knocked, I thought it was you.”
She’s right. I did. I texted her maybe twenty minutes ago from outside the restaurant to let her know I was on my way. But still, the thought of Sienna opening the door to a stranger scares me. She should know better and I thought she did, but now I’m not so sure anymore.
“You didn’t have to be so mean to him,” she says.
“I wasn’t mean.”
“You weren’t exactly nice.”
Fair point. I wasn’t, but he caught me off guard. I was scared for Sienna’s sake. “Listen,” I say, “next time use the peephole, okay? It’s there for a reason.”
“What reason?”
“To keep us safe.”
“From what?” she asks, and again, her optimism scares me a little, that feeling that bad things happen to other people and not her.
“There are bad people out there in the world, Sienna. Not everyone has good intentions. There is a man out there attacking women in their own homes. You watch the news—you know that. You have to be more careful. You can’t trust everyone you meet. Okay?” I ask, and she says okay back, but her eyes are on her phone, and I’m only fifty percent sure she’s listening.
Nine
The next morning, I pick up my mail on the way out of the building, dropping it into my bag to make room for today’s to fit. As I walk to work, I overhear two women just ahead of me talking about another attack in the city last night and it unmoors me. I didn’t turn the TV on this morning. I didn’t read the news. I didn’t know about this latest attack. There have been so many now I’m losing count. They say he wears a black mask when he goes after women, so no one has gotten a good look at him.
It’s been weeks now and still no one knows who he is.
At work, the police come.
I’ve just come back from a quick lunch to find two male officers standing inside Caitlin’s room. I come to a dead stop before the nurses’ station when I see them. My feet stop moving all of a sudden and my body has a very visceral reaction at seeing the police. The uniforms. Their hulking bodies. Guns and tasers on their vests.
All other thoughts are quickly dispelled from my mind. The only thing I can think about is why they’re here. We have had police in the ICU before, but not when it’s a suicide attempt because there’s nothing illegal about trying to take your own life.
