Pittsburgh Writers Project

Now, I decided, the apartment would be empty. I hadn’t seen the husband leave, but everything had been unusually quiet up there all morning. No telltale creaks, no toilets flushing, no smoke of any kind crawling invisibly along walls, through windows or underneath doors. Still, ahem, you never knew. Thus, the sneaking. My hands shook a little when I reached the top of the stairs and recovered the key, and a thin film of sweat appeared along my hairline. I’m terrified, I thought happily.

As soon as I turned the key in the lock and let the door swing open in front of me, I could smell them. Some combination of old food and dirty clothes, cologne and kitty litter. The apartment was tiny, especially compared to ours downstairs. The door opened directly onto the kitchen. This small room was a catalogue of disaster. Old water and dirty dishes were piled high in the sink with bits of soggy bread floating on the surface. There were two white garbage bags sitting nearly in the center of the floor – one was tied shut, the other lay open and stinking. And the small table, jammed against the wall beside the room’s only window, was littered with mail and newspapers and cans of baked beans. Everything, sadly, was exactly as I’d expected.

I moved as quietly as I could through this mess, stopping only briefly to examine the mail. The living room was little better. Filthy carpet. Scarred and broken furniture. And beer bottles, empty beer bottles on every surface. There had to have been nearly an entire case of Budweiser. It was almost like an installation art piece: After the Big Game or Room with Beer Bottles or simply Drunk. My hands were still shaking, but I was beginning to relax. I’d been in the apartment for maybe five minutes and God had not immediately struck me down nor had a SWAT team come crashing through the windows, so chances were I didn’t need to have a heart attack just that second. Instead, I looked at the wedding photos perched on top of the tv. There was the little gnome and his bride; they were all bad tuxedo and cheesy mustache, and bride-as-tart in a confection of white satin with her bangs plastered to her forehead.
I hated these people.

This wasn’t very nice of me, but there it was. Just to confirm my feeling, I took a minute to rifle through their record collection. It was a 1980s-heavy metal-nightmare. Poison, Motley Crue, Cheap Trick, Warrant. Fucking Warrant. This couple was clearly a case of arrested development. I should have just put the records away and got out. I even thought to myself: just leave. These people are known, you know them. If you look under the couch you’ll see a red cigar box with a sandwich baggie inside full of weed, a package of E-Zs, and a surgical clamp as a roach clip. And I would have looked, got down on my hands and knees and searched in even the darkest corner, but I was afraid to touch the carpeting with my hands much less press my face against it. I imagined invisible little reptiles, like the ones you see under powerful microscopes on tv, jumping onto my ears and crawling into my brain. So I continued to look at the records: AC/DC, Iron Maiden, KISS. I just kept shaking my head. I may have even sighed.

It was at this moment that the cat appeared. It stretched and yawned its way leisurely from the bedroom. A shorthaired grey with a collar and an open, guileless expression, it wasn’t the least bit afraid and came over directly to be petted. I had the thing purring like a madman in no time. Naturally, I concocted a whole story around the cat. How they utterly neglected it, fed it only occasionally when they remembered to, and blew pot smoke in its face so it would limp around the apartment with a crazy expression about the nose and whiskers. “You don’t deserve that, do you?” I said sweetly in the voice I used for babies and small animals. “You’re just a little fur rag. Yes you are.” I had just moved from behind the ears to under the chin, when I heard bed springs creak and the sound of a body turning. I jumped back away from that cat as if it had electrocuted me.

Calm down, I insisted. I knew it had to be the gnome. Shit. I stifled, just barely, the urge to run. He doesn’t know you’re here. Relax. I took a deep breath in my nose – holding it for a second, two – and exhaled out my mouth, forcing control of my heart rate, which had spiked unpleasantly. Then I gave the cat a little nudge with my foot and, instead of running, I backed slowly out of the living room as if trying not to show my back to a monarch. In seconds I was through the kitchen and out the front door. It wasn’t until I was inside my own apartment again with the door closed and locked behind me that I realized I still had Def Leppard’s Pyromania clutched in my left hand.

It was not a normal feature of my life to pull a B & E on my neighbor’s homes. Truly. And so for several minutes I sat on the edge of the couch, the morning sunshine pouring in through the windows and the birds chirping as if nothing had happened, and strained to detect even the slightest sound from above: a floorboard, the ghost of a voice. Nothing. Eventually, I released my death grip on the record and let myself fall back against the cushions of the couch. How did I get myself into these things? What strain of wild, asshole gene did I possess? How on earth, I wondered, was I going to tell my wife? God, help me.

Anne and I had moved to this neighborhood specifically to avoid, well, let’s call it domestic unpleasantness. It possessed, from her point of view, several important benefits. It was a dry town, a term I had never heard before, meaning that there were no bars, no beer distributors, no liquor stores. Dry. The next benefit was that we were strategically located near to a highway entrance that could speed her along quite conveniently to her job teaching seventh grade social studies. I actually had some sympathy for this one, as anyone in this world who signs up to teach twelve and thirteen year olds anything, much less the cultures of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, is clearly a martyr – if not a saint. And finally, this charming locale was close to her family. Her mother had grown up on a street less than half a mile away. One aunt lived with her third husband and four kids just down the block. A second aunt was the manager of a cash-only restaurant, The Rusty Nail, where we ate eggs and bacon and piles of fried potatoes every Sunday morning. Everything, I would learn some years into the future – and far too late – was calculated to prop up a nascent insecurity.

This was true even of the apartment itself. The building was owned by her grandmother, and our apartment, a rambling three-bedroom on the second floor, cost us almost nothing in rent. I had taken up the old carpeting and refinished the hardwood floors, we’d bought some new furniture from our savings, and in no time were inviting all our university friends for dinner parties. Against this background, it was also my wife’s plan to gently convince me to start a family. And so, I often woke up on Sunday mornings, wrapped in a cocoon of warm blankets in our master suite, with Anne’s voice whispering, “I want to have a baby” or “Make me pregnant” or simply “Please?” The combination of yearning and persuasion the woman could give to one little word. Good Christ, what could be better? We were lucky. Right?

The truth is, though, that we retreated here. Three weeks after we returned from our honeymoon, I was robbed at gunpoint. I try not to think about it, and Anne and I never talk about it, but there were a couple of bad moments. The gun was a MAC-10, a semi-automatic machine gun, and it’s her view that she was almost widowed. She had visions of my body eviscerated with bullet holes, lying in a pool of blood. Maybe she was right? I don’t know anymore. What I do know is that the city, our old apartment there, visiting our friends, in short, everything that had composed our lives before we were married and in those few happy weeks directly after, became terrifying to her. She cried every day. Bumps in the night, which she developed a special talent for detecting, especially at three in the morning, had to be investigated.

It seemed like any spare moment she had was spent on the phone with her mother, her voice ebbing and flowing in varying degrees of panic. And I have to admit I might have been a little freaked out too. My own voice sounded wrong, like somebody had me by the throat, and I often caught myself staring blankly into space. Replaying everything, of course. Before I knew it, she’d broken our lease in the city and had us packing up for grandma’s apartment here, in this place, which is neither the city nor quite the suburbs, and where, frankly, despite all the room and the remodeling, despite the low rent and my wife’s weekend seductions, I felt utterly lost.

Perhaps this explains the sneaking up the stairs, the breaking and entering, and the copy of Pyromania that I now have to figure out how to return. I don’t know. It’s possible I’m trying too hard to connect dots that aren’t there. I just don’t know.

For many months, the third floor apartment had been empty. Funny that I’d never had even the slightest urge to go up there then. I never once thought about it. Do people normally sit around thinking about nothingness? It was just an empty apartment. We should have felt lucky to have had the quiet, a kind of time-out from people being close by when we could lick our wounds and find a new way to interact with the world. Maybe we were grateful? I can’t seem to remember.

Then one Saturday, Sheila and the gnome show up with their friends in a caravan of old pickups, vans, and cars. It’s not hard to imagine the scene. Sweaty men in baseball hats drinking beer and spitting chewing tobacco on the sidewalk. Their voices the aggressive snarl and grouse of so many Pittsburghers. In no time, they had a boom box blasting KISS (I-e-I want to rocknroll all night – thunga, thunga, thunga – and party everyday!) and half of their possessions were in the front yard, the whole scene reminiscent of news footage of hurricane devastation. Anne swears she told me they were coming.

“I think I would remember something like this.” I made a vague gesture toward the window and everything going on outside.

“But I even asked you to guess how much my grandmother was charging them for rent,” she said. “You don’t remember that?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Can’t we just pay her their rent too and tell them all to go away?”
There was a loud crash right above our heads from which we both instinctively cringed. Then a cacophony of voices yelling. Who knows what it was? A couch being dropped into place, a bowling ball.

“It might be too late for that,” she said and left me to stare woefully out the window.

Later that Saturday night, after all the moving party was gone and the lawn had been cleared of lamps and chairs and boxes, in that restful, quiet moment that comes upon the world in the summer, with the breeze blowing in the window and the smell of flowers and cut grass lingering in the air, we began to see how things were going to be with our new neighbors. Anne and I were lying in bed in the dark and talking quietly.

Earlier, I had been out for a run, and so my hair was still damp from the shower and my body ached pleasantly from the exertion. Anne even commented on the smell of my shampoo, “girlie smelling,” she teased, like flowers.

“Posies,” I joked.

“No, oranges,” she said after snuggling her nose into my hair.

“Well, things have finally quieted down,” I said.

“Mmm-hmm.” Her voice was already beginning to fade with sleep. “What else can you expect on moving day?”

“They’ll live their lives and we’ll live ours,” she said. “We’re used to apartments.”

“I know. I just don’t like the look of them.”

She draped an arm across my chest and pushed her toes against my leg under the covers. I felt her body begin to settle for the night and I closed my eyes. My wife has ugly toes, I thought randomly. Fat, stubby little Pygmy toes. I closed my eyes again. Everything was so dark, so quiet. I was just moments away from sleep when I heard it or, at least, thought I heard it.

“What was that?” I said.

“You didn’t hear that? Just wait for it. Listen.”

I had put my thumb on her lips to keep her from talking and now she gently bit it. I smiled at her in the dark. That’s the moment when we heard it – a low, inarticulate sound, a kind of keening or lowing.

“That is not,” my wife said, “what I think it is.”

“What else could it be?”

“Shit,” she said and started to giggle like a madwoman. “No, it’s too much.”

Soon there was no denying what we were hearing, accompanied as it was with the rhythmic squeaking of bed springs, and the increasingly frenetic pulse of Shelia’s noises. They were going at it pretty good when Anne said, “Figures she’d be a screamer.”

“Maybe they’re happy tonight,” I said, suddenly philosophical. “New place, new life. Who knows what this apartment means to them? Or what they’re leaving behind.”

“Listen to you, Mr. Sensitive,” she said. “I thought you didn’t want them here?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Still.”

I think for a minute we tried to ignore them and find our way back toward sleep, but there was just no way. With every second or third exclamation from above, Anne burst into a fit of giggles. The quality of Sheila’s voice was so clear, they might have been in the room with us. Maybe it was because it was summer and everyone’s windows were open? What mattered was that between Sheila’s pleasure and my wife’s own warm, laughing body so close under the covers, I felt something begin to wake up inside me. I pulled her toward me and we kissed.

“Hey, Mister,” she said, a big smile on her face, “that’s not where you’re supposed to get your ideas.”

I kissed her again, this time a series of little kisses on her lips and neck and ear.
“Oh, my,” she said, teasing.

“Why should they be the only happy couple tonight?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, “anyway.”

In another moment I think we’d all but forgotten our neighbors, had instead entered a place of our own where nothing mattered except fingertips and lips and embraces. Maybe it didn’t matter where we lived or who lived above us or beneath us or beside us, so long as Anne felt safe and the two of us could find this place together, an intimate geography that didn’t know the difference between the city and the suburbs or any non-place in between. This, at any rate, is part of what I was thinking when something upstairs changed.

“Stop,” Anne said. I had my fingers in her hair and we both froze just like that and listened. She found my eyes in the dark and there was an exchange between us, an open question.

“What’s he doing to her?” she said.

But I had recognized the sound now and so, I think, had Anne. He was slapping her and the sounds she was making had changed from measured and rhythmic expressions of pleasure to shrieks and whimpers, between which it almost seemed possible to listen to her breathe. In a moment we could hear her pleading with him, her voice a whine that instantly made me heart-sick. “Ple-ease, no. Ple-ease.” In another moment she would beg him to stop, but finally it became one long “Noooooo” after another. The gnome himself? Silent, except for the sound of his hand against his wife’s flesh.

I looked at Anne again in the dark and her eyes were full of tears. “What the fuck?” she said.

“Should we do something?” I said.

“Do you think I should go up there?

I was half sitting up now, resting most of my weight on my right arm. The muscles in my shoulders and neck were chords of tension. With Sheila shrieking and pleading it was impossible to relax. Not knowing what else to do, I got out of the bed and positioned myself by the window, straining to hear whatever I could. And I’ll be damned if it wasn’t at that moment, just when I had myself convinced that I was going to have to put on my clothes and go up there and pound on the door, the sounds changed again.

“Do you hear that now?” I said.

I was angry. It wasn’t only that a sweet moment between Anne and me had been undone, but also that the bullshit going on upstairs, for this is what I was now calling it in my head, had returned to my wife’s face that look of dull terror it had possessed in the days just after I’d been robbed. As I looked at her, I felt I was coming to understand it. This wasn’t a localized fear. Anne wasn’t afraid that the gnome was going to come flying through the ceiling and start beating her any more than she’d really been afraid of the man with the MAC-10. No. This something less distinct, a universal dread, that the world was a horrible, messed up, scary-as-hell place from which it was impossible to run.

I was angry because now Sheila was moaning again, just as she had at the beginning, in a way that sounded like pleasure. He had stopped beating her, the bed springs had started to squeak again, and Sheila, somehow, now seemed only moments away from climax.

“Jesus Christ,” Anne said when the change had registered.

I came over and sat beside her on the edge of the bed and again we listened.
“I don’t believe it,” I said.

Before we knew it, Sheila’s screams mounted and arced and, finally, reached their end. At long last, there was quiet. A brief shifting of bodies in the bed, and that was all. An absence of sound so thick I think we were both afraid to move. I looked at Anne and she looked at me.

“What the hell just happened?” I said.

Anne wiped her eyes and somehow smirked, a pained, awful expression that I’ll never forget. “I guess,” she said, “our neighbors just had sex.”

* * *
Weeks went by, and then months, and at least once every few days we were treated to what we came to call the “Sheila and the Gnome” show. He had a real name of course, as we were also to learn, David on his mailbox, Dave when we chanced to meet in the stairway or out in front of the apartment coming and going in our cars. It was my idea to call him the gnome, but Anne never corrected me. After his performance that first night, she hated him. I still wished that neither of them were around, but he was such a small guy, a Napoleon scratching at his lice, that I had trouble drumming up the same depth of feeling as my wife. In fact, I had trouble visualizing this man enacting the events for which I’d had the privilege of such clear audio. Whenever I saw him, I found myself staring at his hands, somehow looking for clues to the violence I knew he’d committed with them. There was nothing to see. They were just hands – four fingers and a thumb. Eventually, I had started to view both man and wife as a kind of curiosity or a problem to be puzzled out. And for a while, we kept the phenomenon of our neighbors to ourselves, a secret to be whispered over in the bedroom as we sat listening to them or at the breakfast table the next morning or during our long walks around the neighborhood. The big question, and this is no surprise, was what did Sheila make of their sex? Did she enjoy it, as she at least sometimes pretended? Anne was convinced that Sheila, whatever her other failings or eccentricities might be, was a consummate actress. I wasn’t so sure. Anne, I thought, simply didn’t want Sheila to be a willing partner in all that we’d heard. She found it much easier and much more convincing to paint Sheila as a victim, tied to her husband by some morbid combination of insecurity and warped values.

“She probably thinks it’s what a wife’s supposed to do,” Anne said. I just nodded.
A few days later, I’d left my job at the bookstore early. All that morning I’d been light-headed and dealing with the shakes and, just before lunchtime, our manager put her cool palm against my forehead and pronounced me feverish. I was in the middle of organizing a table display in the literature section, and when I’d finished, she sent me home for the day. Sweet woman. I remember the ride home as being one of those mind-numbing, automatic pilot sorts of affairs with buildings and traffic gliding by around me. When I arrived home and started upstairs to the apartment, my neighbors and their troubles were the last things on my mind. But I had not gone two feet inside when I saw Sheila slowly descending the steps. I was in no mood to be friendly. I had visions of myself lying on the couch with the blankets pulled up to my chin and a pillow over my face, seeing nothing, feeling less. Perhaps I would let out the occasional moan just to prove to myself that I was alive. Nothing more. So it seemed like a big deal to even look Sheila in the eye and say hello. I would have kept my head down and passed her silently on the stairs. Would have done this, but for the odd way in which she seemed to be hugging the wall and the glacial slowness with which she came down – first one tentative foot on the stair, then the next foot carefully beside its partner, then a significant pause, then another tentative foot on the next stair. It was enough to break through the haze of my illness and give Sheila a second, more appraising look. As we came closer to each other, I moved along with my head up, waiting to make eye contact, waiting for the moment she’d see me and say something.

Then it became suddenly clear that she wasn’t going to acknowledge me; she was simply going to shuffle down the stairs and out the door as if I were invisible. And this un-neighborly attitude, while perfectly reasonable for me to inflict upon Sheila, when turned against me, was unbearable.

“Hey, what’s up, Sheila?” I said with as much brightness as I could muster.
At the sound of my voice, she paused, hanging her head and letting her wavy hair fall in a curtain to hide her face. She clutched the banister with both hands, making it so her shoulder was turned away from me and just stood there, almost catatonic. This was the closest to the woman that I had ever been. I felt a heat coming off her body, smelled the cinnamon scent of the gum she must have just put in her mouth. I looked at her and waited.

What I saw when she finally turned toward me and her hair fell away was a face covered in bruises. Some were fresh, so much so that I almost felt the skin on my face tighten in sympathy. Others, though, were in various stages of healing. And nearly every color was represented: not only black and blue, but also yellow, green, and purple. If I had been allowed to look closer, I would have discovered even more. All looked tender and painful, as if even the feathery touch of a makeup brush would cause her to wince in pain. For ten seconds, Shelia and I stood looking at each other, wordlessly, before she turned away and started again in the same, slow pace down the steps and, finally, out the front door. I sat down on the step and watched her go.

Anne’s immediate reaction was to go to her grandmother. Mary Margaret O’Brien was the family matriarch. Widow of this little non-place’s chief of police, who in his short life had acquired a small residential real estate empire, grandma was a Catholic dowager empress. Or so I liked to style her. She was a poised and careful woman, always in thick makeup and heavily bejeweled, her short hair expensively dyed a deep chestnut. I will forever see her in my mind’s eye sitting straight and still in her living room, surrounded by her collection of religious icons and souvenirs from her trip home to Ireland, with an aging French bulldog, his little bat ears twitching like antennae, sitting on her lap. All of her many children and grandchildren came to be received in audience on her floral patterned couches and be dispensed advice. Today, it seemed, was our turn. Mary Margaret served tea.

I told the story of Sheila’s face, again, and she listened calmly to everything, giving only the briefest raise of an eyebrow when I described the myriad colors of all those bruises. I voiced my concern that something serious might be going on, never hinting at the sex. This was Anne’s idea. She just couldn’t imagine either of us describing to her grandmother the rollercoaster ride of pleasure and pain that we listened to so often. I had agreed. And so at the end of my story, Anne added, “We hear them fighting all the time.”
“Are they breaking things?” she asked. I smiled to myself. The old lady had her priorities straight: property first, the tenants and their faces after.

“No, not really,” Anne said. “I don’t think so.”

“Their fights sound pretty physical,” I said, flirting with a version of the truth. “There might be some damage.”

“I don’t think so,” Anne repeated.

“Well, there was that big bang the other night and some plaster dust fell on our heads.” I was still feverish, and while I could hear myself annoying my wife, I also felt a perverse pleasure welling up in me at every careful innuendo.

“I doubt it,” she said and gave me a look. I got the message.

“Has Sheila ever asked you for help?” her grandmother said. “Ryan, did she ask you when you saw her today?”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t say anything. She looked like a zombie.”

“This is abuse, isn’t it?” Anne said. “We have to do something about it, don’t we?”

Mary Margaret O’Brien sat for a few moments and contemplated the situation. She stirred her tea with a little spoon and took a decorous sip. She looked for a long moment at a fading image of the Madonna and Child that was framed above the mantelpiece. She may have even touched a hand to the crucifix hanging on a gold chain around her neck. Then she sighed. “Sheila’s not pregnant, is she?”

Anne and I looked at each other. Neither of us seemed to have thought of this possibility.

“How could we know?” I replied.

“There are ways,” Mary Margaret said cryptically.

Anne put her hand on my leg. “What if she were?” Anne said.

“Then we would have to do something. For the sake of the child.”

“But shouldn’t we do something anyway?”

Mary Margaret quickly put down her cup and saucer and made a dismissive gesture with her hand, a quick brush as if shooing away a fly. “No. You have to let her ask for help.”

I could tell that Anne did not like this answer. She sat back against the couch and started to loudly chip the polish from her fingernails. The French bulldog, Tipsy, sniffed at the air and made a grumpy half-bark. I decided to test the waters in a different way.

“What do you think would happen if we called the police the next time they were fighting? They would come, right? They would see the bruises and investigate. No one would even have to know that it was us who called the police.”

“Is that what you think?” Mary Margaret said.

“The bruises were bad,” I said.

“Today. Bruises heal,” she said. “And what’s to stop Sheila from telling the police she’d walked into a door?”

“My God, do people actually say that?”

“That and a dozen other things,” she said. “You forget, I was married to the Chief of

Police for thirty years. There are very few stupidities I haven’t heard.”

This was Mary Margaret’s final word. What more was there to say? She knew and we did not. Very soon we finished our tea and said our goodbyes. Tipsy barked us away. In the car, my wife’s frustration was almost a third passenger. “I don’t care what she says,” Anne said. “Somebody should do something.” That somebody, I understood, was me.

Two days later I broke into their apartment.

I came home from work on Sunday in a foul mood. I don’t know what it was – it was nothing, it was everything. I thought it was stupid that the bookstore should remain open until 9pm. I thought I was stupid for me to be working there. “You’re a life-wasting fuckup,” I had rationalized way too calmly on the ride home. A classic underachiever. A wastrel. A nothing. A non-entity. And then I got pissed off for turning even my own self-loathing into a glib little game. What I was, more than anything else, was a coward to have run away from the life I’d wanted in the city – even if it was at the point of a gun. Why had I come away so easily? Why had I let Anne bring me here?

I sat for five minutes in my parked car, the engine and radio off, staring at the outside of our apartment building and trying to formulate an answer. It was a humid night. The streetlamps threw off an almost spectral glare. I followed the flight of moths against their brightness. By comparison, there was nothing to attract the eye at home.

Everything was dark on the second floor. Perhaps Anne was reading in bed. I tried to imagine her there, her hair piled on top of her head against the heat, her fingers wrapped around the edges of a paperback novel, waiting for me, but I couldn’t hold it. My mind was too crowded. I decided that if the city were dangerous, it was also full of people just like us. Not like this place, where the only person I felt I knew was myself, and even that was now slipping away. I saw the flickering light of a television against a white wall on the third floor. Sheila and the gnome. I turned the ignition and the engine coughed and sputtered back to life. I wanted to drive away, toward the rivers and the lights of the city and never come back. I’d send for Anne in the morning.

Of course, I didn’t go. Instead, I turned off the engine and gathered my things and went inside. On my way up the stairs, however, I crafted a compromise: I resolved to crawl into bed with my wife, make love to her – move the earth, change the world – and, when we were through and every nerve was alive with pleasure and satisfaction, I’d tell her that we were moving. I’d say it in such a way that she’d know I meant it, that not only did it have to be so, but that it was good and right and just.

It never occurred to me, as I formulated this plan and let it fill me, that anything could get in the way. Certainly nothing so simple. Anne was asleep. 9:40pm and my wife was out, I mean, just gone. I’d put down my keys and wallet and thrown my lunch bag on the kitchen table and walked through the dark towards the back of the apartment and our bedroom. There I discovered that my vision of her had been half right. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she had been reading A Year in Provence.

However, the light was off and she was snoring, asleep long enough for a little spot of drool to have accumulated on the pillow.

I thought my wife was a beautiful woman. She was lithe and her skin had turned cinnamon in the summer sun. She was lying on her stomach, one leg bent, the bottom of her little butt peeking out from an old pair of my boxer shorts. Even though she was clearly asleep, I still wanted her, wanted to see her and touch her and talk to her.
“Anne?” I said quietly in her ear. I had sat down beside her on the edge of the bed and was stroking her hair. “Hey, baby, wake up.” Maybe she would open her eyes, see who it was, and stretch her arms out to embrace me. I would still be able to tell her everything.

“Honey?” I said. I put my hand on her shoulder now and shook her gently. This got me almost nothing, only the briefest shift in her breathing. She swallowed and turned her head toward the other side of the pillow – away from me. My plans were going to have to wait.

I was disappointed. Maybe irrationally so. As I sat there looking at her, I felt angry. As if she had planned her sleep just so she could avoid the conversation I wanted to have and which she, surely, did not. I put my hand on her butt and gave it a little smack. “Sleep then,” I said. “Dream if you want. I’ll be in the living room having a drink.”
Making the drink made me feel better. There was the notion of ritual about it. The sound of the ice in the glass, the way it cracked and popped when I poured in the vodka, the dash of tonic, and the intense smell of the lemon on my fingers as I squeezed in the juice and stirred. The first sip was brilliant. Almost immediately, I felt my jagged emotions begin to smooth out. I took my drink out to the living room and turned on the tv.

There was a baseball game on ESPN, an old Poirot that I’d seen half a dozen times before, but which I lingered over anyway, a special about harrier jets on the Military Channel. I sat in the dark and flipped around for a while, I don’t know how long, maybe twenty minutes. And then, just as Poirot was saying to Chief Inspector Japp, “I have never before met the corpse whose heart continues to beat,” it began. Almost immediately, I could tell that something was different. Sheila’s soundtrack had become well known to me if not entirely predictable. She always began liking it, God knows why. Maybe she felt pleasure? Or maybe she hoped to encourage him to the point that he’d forget about beating her? In any case, tonight the first thing I heard was a long lingering note of pain. She sounded, horribly, like a cat being swung around the room by its tail. Sheila yowled.

I sat up a bit straighter and listened. Sometimes there were real pauses and I always hoped that things would just end. They never did. It was a mistake for even the unwilling voyeur to become complaisant. In a moment, her screams became louder and rhythmic, like someone playing with the throttle of an engine: “Yowww-er, yoww-er, yoww-er.” For the love of God, I thought, and got up to make myself a fresh drink. Perhaps I wouldn’t be able to hear so well in the kitchen.

When I returned again with my drink, she was still screaming. Later, I would be asked to put together a timeline, to differentiate the moment when Sheila stopped her inarticulate screams and started to actually call for help. “Five minutes?” I said. “The time it takes to mix a drink.” It was something about the way her voice sounded – not what she was saying, not the long waited for “help!” – but its tone and treble that got to me. It was impossible to listen to another human be tortured by the one person in the world who was supposed to love and protect her and not let it ruin you inside. Thirty seconds after the “helps” began, I could feel my heart pounding and my blood pressure jump. I actually ran back to the bedroom to wake up Anne, but when I arrived I just couldn’t do it. She lay there so peacefully, sleeping through everything, blissfully unaware. Even with my hand on her shoulder, ready to shake her awake, I changed my mind and walked back to the living room where I could hear them best.

“Help me! Oh, God, help me!”

I put my drink down on the floor and picked up the portable phone. I looked at its familiar face, at the buttons I could have navigated with my eyes closed. I heard Mary Margaret’s voice in my head saying, “You have to let her ask for help.” Here it was.
“Help!” Her shriek reached a higher, unexpected tone, one I had never known Sheila’s voice capable of. Now I had the phone in one hand and the other holding the handle of my front door. It’s easy: 9-1-1 and then turn the handle and run up the stairs. I closed my eyes and saw myself doing it. Trying their door first, then removing, once again, the spare key from its hiding place. Nothing could stop me. I knew every inch of the way.

And yet I didn’t move. The phone was in my left hand, my right hand on the door handle. Open the door, I thought to myself. Open the door and go. Open it. Open it. Open it.

Just open the door and go.
I rested my head against the wooden door and gently, oh so gently, hit my forehead against it. One, two, three times.

I pressed my cheek against the door. Suddenly, for the first time, I felt drunk. The wood was cool against my skin. I just stayed there. I’ll never know for how long. Enough time for the dial tone to die and be replaced with a busy signal. I could hear it pulsing between Sheila’s cries, “beep, beep, beep, beep.” I clenched the phone tight in my hand like I could crush it. I felt every breath I took. Inhale through the nose, exhale out the mouth, like a runner. Truly, I don’t know how long I stood there immobile. Long enough to hear the gnome running down the stairs, just inches away from me, and then down the sidewalk, the beat of his footsteps fading as he ran farther and farther away. Long enough, now, to hear Sheila’s screams dissolve into wracking sobs. And still I stood there with my hand at the door and face pressed against the cool wood. I listened to Sheila crying, a scouring sound. I felt tears rolling hotly down my own cheeks, and still I didn’t move. Open the door, I thought. Open it now.

I felt Anne’s hand on my shoulder and I turned to look at her. Her face was adrift with sleep and she looked scared.

“Ryan,” she said. “The police are here.” I looked over her head to the window and saw the red and blue flashing lights reflecting dizzyingly against the house across the street.

“Mr. Andersen?” a voice said from the hallway. “It’s the police. We’d like to talk with you.”

I looked at my wife and handed her the phone. Then, at long last, I turned the handle and opened the door.