“Wake up.” A voice close to my ear. A streak of white light.
The train intercom crackled to life. “Next and final stop, Grand Central Terminal. New York City.”
I bolted up in my seat. Strangers shuffled around me, and I wasn’t sure who among them made sure I knew we’d arrived. I must have drifted off against the window—there was a hot spot on my cheek. My head pulsed with a painful ache. My mother’s sunglasses, which I’d kept on the whole trip to camouflage my swollen, purpling eye, were perched crooked on my nose. I’d like to imagine she arrived at Catherine House wearing these same sunglasses—deep-tinted, a subtle touch of armor to hide her own bruises—but she got this particular pair years afterward.
The suitcase I’d stowed on the rack above me was still there, undisturbed. I had the cash in my pocket, the directions on my phone. I could feel my heart beating a little too fast, its echo in my ears, and as we coasted through the still-dark passages of Grand Central, it took over all else.
I was here.
The train rolled ever so slowly through a series of tunnels, seeming like it would never reach the station, that maybe there was no station, that the city was only a story my mother told me, or one I told myself. The overhead lights flickered off and on, and shadows hugged up against the scratched windows, wanting in. Passengers crowded the aisles, clogging the exits at either end of the train car, so I was left in the middle, still in my seat, practically alone. I lingered at the window.
A dim-lit platform drifted past, deep in the bowels of the station. Not a soul was on it. Murky sections of tunnel rolled by, unused and blocked off. The view was industrial and surprisingly fragile at the same time, like the bones of the city could be broken with a swift kick and no one was supposed to know. For a moment, I thought I saw a burst of nature in the grimy machinery, a wild tree growing out from the third rail, alien and budding the green of my mother’s long-lost garden. But it was a splash of graffiti claiming the hidden space. It wasn’t alive. The train sped up and blurred it to black.
At last we stopped. The lights came up and stayed up, and an underground station was visible. The doors opened, and people rushed out. I grabbed my suitcase, my hopes, my coiled nerves, my unformed dreams, and I stepped out onto the platform.
━━━━━
I might never have known how to find Catherine House if my mother hadn’t kept the phone number all these years on the bulletin board in the bedroom she shared with him. Their room on the first floor had a door to the patio that they never kept locked, which meant someone could sneak around outside the house and get in that way, without needing the more visible hallway and door. She used the space over her dresser not for jewelry or a mirror, but to gaze back into her past, to have a reminder of who she was in front of her face every morning when she searched for clean socks.
Tacked to the board were photographs from when she was young, the kind printed on curling, glossy paper, her hair burgundy, or crayon yellow, or blue-black. Ticket stubs from movies and plays and ska shows. Keepsakes, like a withering four-leaf clover kept preserved in a plastic baggie, art postcards of starry nights or ponds with water lilies floating on top, beheaded birthday cards, a single clipping from the Village Voice about a festival screening of short films with her name in small type, circled, starred. Pinned at the base of the bulletin board were the emergency numbers any mother should keep on hand: poison control, local hospital, dentist’s office. And there beneath all that, sparkling with pin holes, crusted with age, a card, catherine house of new york city, as if she might one day have a dire need to rent a room and escape us all.
I didn’t have time to go through her drawers before I heard her coming, but I confiscated the card, and later, after a few echoing rings, someone did answer the phone when I called. There was a vacancy, the voice on the other end told me, eager, almost as if expecting this call. The room was mine, but I should get there, fast, and bring cash.
The thing was, it turned out Catherine House wasn’t so easy to find in a physical sense. From Grand Central, I made it downtown, to the West Village. I was close, or should have been. Yet showing on my phone screen was a gray area, unmarked and untethered by cross streets. I wasn’t sure where to find the address in the nest of gray, and it didn’t help that on the corner of the actual street there were two signs with the same name. waverly pl said one sign. waverly pl said the other, as if the street split into two sides of itself. Here I stood, waving my phone in the air, when I stumbled into her.
She was on the sidewalk, near a blue van with dried mud crusted on its tires, though every street I’d seen here so far was smooth asphalt glistening in the high heat. The van was parked before a sign that said no parking, and she was shaded by its shadow. Maybe that was why I walked right into her.
The impact sent me reeling into the sign, which was sharp-edged where she hadn’t been and crooked in the concrete. The suitcase toppled to its side, skidding off the curb. The van was more decrepit the closer I got to it, with a clutter of mangled tickets on the windshield and a boot on its grimy tire—it might have split apart if taken out on a road. The girl had long eyelashes, and short hair that showed off her neck. Her skin was faint brown, her eyes were deep brown, with golden flecks, almost amber. At least I thought they were, as I’d only been close enough to see for a single moment. She’d materialized from out of nowhere onto this patch of sidewalk. Or one of us had.
“Go ahead,” she said as she helped me with my suitcase. “Say it.”
Not counting whatever anonymous stranger had woken me on the train, she was the first person on the island of Manhattan to speak to me.
“I’m sorry . . . What should I say?”
“Yes, that’s good. Go on. Say you’re sorry. For trampling me.”
I couldn’t tell if she was serious. She had my suitcase still, hugged in close to her, and I wasn’t sure if she’d decided to keep it.
“I am sorry,” I started. “I think I’m lost, and—”
She held up a hand to make me stop talking. “You’re not lost.” Then she turned, distracted. “You hear that, don’t you?”
I wasn’t sure if she was listening to something inside the van or beyond it. The city swelled with noise. It banged and clanged around in my ears and filled my head with a persistent, growing thrum, brimming in the back of my skull. My head was still hurting, and my eye was pulsing from last night. Maybe I should have seen a doctor.
“I don’t hear anything,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said. “It’s so quiet. Too quiet. When it gets quiet like this, you know something’s off.”
I gazed around at the block, unsettled. It wasn’t that quiet. She was shooting a stare past the booted blue van, into the distance. I followed her gaze, but all I could see was a tree-lined block and another much like it beyond, a man on the sidewalk, then no longer on the sidewalk because he slipped into a doorway, a yellow taxicab speeding past, not stopping. Apart from that, we were alone.
“There’s nothing going on,” I said. “Not that I can see.”
“You’re positive?” I wasn’t sure if she was playing with me or if she knew the city so well she could sense a foreboding tremor when I couldn’t. If she knew to run when I didn’t. All I could think was, if she did start running, I’d probably follow.
I shrugged.
“You should watch where you’re walking, by the way. You could get run over.” She pushed the suitcase at me, but one of the wheels was jammed, and it didn’t go. I pulled it back toward me.
“Thanks.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I headed off, dragging the suitcase behind me, until I remembered I didn’t know where I was going. She hadn’t moved from beside the dilapidated van, but the sun had, creating a glaring silhouette that made the expression on her face impossible to decipher. There was a cowlick in her hair, a swirl sticking up that caught my eye and wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t know for sure if she was smiling as she leaned her weight against the van.
I walked back in her direction. “Do you know where I can find this address?” I held out my phone, and that was as close as I got. “I think it’s broken.”
She took a step toward me. “Hmm,” she said.
I had a thought. “Do you know this place? Catherine House?” I recited the street address. My mother may have stood on this very corner trying to find her way that summer long ago. I could sense her shadow, the faintest trace. “Do you know how to get there?”
“I might.”
I waited for more, but there was no more. Instead she was staring at me, openly. She was taking in the state of my face. The sun was blazing, and every gouge and scratch and purple stain must have stood out. It cut through the makeup, making the mask I’d tried to wear all the more obvious.
“Is it that way?” I asked, pointing.
She tapped her foot.
“Is it that way?” I pointed in another direction.
She itched her nose, keeping her face neutral. “If you’re supposed to be somewhere, you’ll find it. If you’re not, you’ll walk right by and miss it.”
What did she mean? There was something taunting about the way she’d said it, also playful, as if this were a grand and possibly cruel game.
I didn’t want to play a game. I wanted to find the house and make sure I had a room. I wanted to plant myself somewhere and stay firm. I wanted my mother to come calling—and then what? I didn’t have that answer. My feet hurt, the suitcase had tipped over and lay flat on the sidewalk, and there wasn’t a single missed call from an 845 number on my phone.
I also wanted this girl to know where I was headed, to be going there, too. It was wishful thinking, but when I gazed down the block again, I knew. I knew the way my mother had known the perfect day we should leave my father, the way I now knew I shouldn’t have gone to that party, the way I knew, marrow-deep, that I was meant to be right here.
Catherine House was down that way, and she’d been well aware all along. I crossed the narrow street, and then I heard her call out.
“Wait.” She paused. “You have to tell me . . . Who did that to your face?”
My hand went up reflexively to touch it, the tender spots, the scratches. The memory of the night before seemed so far away, a world apart from this one, dense and dark and surrounded by the brittle branches of trees.
“Nobody,” I said.
“Nobody smashed your face in?”
“Maybe I did it to myself.”
Her eyes lit up at this answer, and not the way people crane their necks out windows to catch the mangled bits of a car crash so they can have something awful to talk about. Her eyes lit up with recognition, understanding.
“You’re holding your cards close,” she said. “Smart. Keep doing that. It’s over there, by the way. Down that block and to the left on the next block. You’ll find it. I’m sure you will.”
I set the suitcase on its wheels, though it wobbled, and headed off.
“Good luck, and don’t get hit by a bus,” she called after me.
I sensed her gaze as I dragged the unsteady bag behind me, a prickling awareness on my bare shoulders. When I glanced back, just to be sure, she was still watching, staring until I turned away again.
Soon, sooner than I wanted to admit, I reached the block. Catherine House, same as my mother had described in all her stories, made of red bricks and rising five floors into the bright afternoon light. I felt it in my fingers, I felt it in the soles of my feet. Stars prickled awake and gathered, with a slight burning sensation, in the middle of my chest. This was certainty. This was the culminating click of self-determination and fate.
A black wrought-iron gate separated the building from the sidewalk, the glossy fence poles tall and ending in savagely pointed spikes. A plaque on the gate said simply: catherine house—a refuge. Behind the gate was a short walkway that led to a steep set of wide steps. It seemed very far away, though in fact it was close. At the top of the steps was a giant front door, sleek and windowless. Curtains, dark and completely opaque, covered the first floor of tall windows. The only thing that gave a hint of movement was the small stained-glass window beside the door, but I couldn’t make out anything more than that.
I tried the latch on the gate. Locked. There was a buzzer and a small intercom nested in the gate—no name to claim it. I pressed the button and stepped back. Silence. I checked the windows again, and again tried the latch. That was when the giant door at the top of the stoop burst open.
A woman emerged, followed by two girls who were younger versions of her. A mother and her daughters. The girls looked stricken, the younger one sniffling back tears, but the woman appeared irritated, her face pinched. They carried crates and a box jammed full of clothing down the steep stairs and pushed through the gate, ignoring me. They went to an SUV parked at the curb and dropped the boxes near the back, to pile them inside. The gate was open, but I wasn’t sure if I should walk in. It was only when the mother returned that she met my eyes and held them steady for a single moment that pierced me through. Something had happened. Something had happened inside this house.
“Do you live here?” she said to me.
I wanted to tell her I was about to, but I hadn’t signed any papers yet, or paid any money yet, and I didn’t have a room yet or, well, a key, but she didn’t need me to say it. She’d noticed the suitcase.
“You’re moving in,” she said, her voice grim. “Don’t. If I were your mother, I’d tell you to go home. Right now.”
The urgency in her expression alarmed me, and I stepped back, the iron bars pressing cold against my spine.
“I should’ve dragged Lacey out of here before—” She cut herself short. Her daughters at the car had turned to listen, as if aching for information.
“Who?” I said faintly. “What happened?”
She didn’t explain. I was useless. She pushed through the gate and climbed the stairs. No one had answered the buzzer, so before the gate swung closed and locked again I slipped in and followed, dragging the suitcase up behind me.
The other girls—Lacey’s sisters, I assumed; I’d by now pieced together a whole family—had finished with the boxes and came running up the stairs, their cheeks tear-streaked, their long legs flying with grisly determination. They beat me easily, and once I made it to the top, the stoop was empty.
The front door was wide-open, and I slipped inside.
━━━━━
“Hello?”
The door smacked closed behind me. The sense of being watched tickled at my shoulders, but I couldn’t find the source. The woman and the girls were nowhere to be found in the low light.
It took a solid moment for my eyes to adjust. Once they did, my first view of the interior of Catherine House was this grand entry room grayed by shadows. A dimness filled the space, unsettling after the white-hot daylight outside. A crystal chandelier high on the ceiling danced shards of light all over the walls. A sweeping staircase curved upward, disappearing into the darkness of the upper floors. That must have been where the mother and sisters went. A decorative vase so large I could have fit myself inside stood sentry at the door. It probably cost more than a car. I had a sudden flash-fantasy of wielding a baseball bat and smashing the vase, destroying something worth more than I was. I’d done it before. A fizz of anger went through me and was gone as fast as it had come, leaving me alone on the gold-woven antique carpet. I would be different here.
I felt a strange familiarity as I stood on that golden rug—because I remembered it. The rug was what my mother had described—like walking on a tiger’s head, though almost two decades had passed since she’d planted her feet on it. The rug was here, covering the floor, as it had been then.
To my left was a closed door, and across the way a darkened hallway, and there was a large open parlor to my right, with a grand piano and velvet furniture, also in gold. Perched all over the shelves were delicate figurines as well as pearlescent seashells and other tchotchkes, as if this were a forgotten museum. It wasn’t as if time had stopped—otherwise the air wouldn’t be so thick with pooled heat, the carpet threadbare in spots—it was as if no one wanted to admit that time had marched on outside this house, decade after decade.
“Don’t touch,” a voice said.
I’d drifted near a display table and had been letting my hand wander along the surface, fingering an ornamental box made of painted china and, beside it, a decorative elephant tusk I’d assumed was manufactured. I pulled my hand away, but I could still feel it: The tusk wasn’t fake. It wasn’t cold and long-dead, like a fossil. It was slick but warm, like living skin.
I whipped around to discover a girl curled up in a gold velvet armchair before the dark fireplace. There’d been a moment when my hand had almost snatched and kept one of the items, and if she hadn’t spoken up I might have tucked it away in my bag already.
The arms and back of the chair were tall, a semicircle surrounding her. She had a book spread in front of her face, blocking my view. I noticed that the cover had no visible title, not on the front and not on the spine. The surface was soft, made of gold fabric a shade darker than the furniture.
“We’re not supposed to touch the souvenirs,” she said from behind the book.
“I didn’t know, sorry. Hey, do you know who I’m supposed to talk to about the room?”
At this, she lowered the book, careful to conceal its contents. She had a pale face and a set of long, low-hanging bangs that made a severe slash over her eyes, swallowing her eyebrows. When she unfurled herself from the chair, she was much bigger than she’d first appeared. She rose to her full height, imposing and enviably strong. My head barely reached her neck.
“Who are you?” She dropped the book on the chair in a muffled thump, letting loose a cloud of dust.
I noticed she was keeping careful track of my hands, as if she were on to me. There were so many tiny, innocuous things in this room—so many. I couldn’t imagine they would notice one missing.
“I’m Sabina,” I said, awkwardly offering her one of my hands. It was empty. “But you can call me Bina. Everyone does.”
She didn’t take my hand. “And you like that?”
I blinked. “Are you who I talked to on the phone?”
“I’m Gretchen,” she said. “And no. I live here. I don’t answer the phone.” She stared openly at all my deficiencies, and I expected her to ask about the black eye and the scratches on my face, which might have made me look desperate or sinister. All she said was, “You’re here for the last room, aren’t you?”
“I guess so?” I’d called only a day ago, before I snuck out to the party, but maybe the news had traveled to the other tenants. I wondered where the rest of them were, and if they would welcome me in, become my lifelong friends, if soon we’d be dangling our legs off the fire escape together. Hers would dangle so far.
“How’d you find us?” she asked. “How’d you hear about the room?”
“Craigslist,” I said, not even sure why I said it.
But this made her laugh. “Good one.” Her mouth softened. “I can see why you came.” She tapped a black fingernail to the corner of her eye. “Not a moment too soon, am I right?”
I wasn’t sure what she was insinuating.
“There’s a girl on the third floor who got thrown down a set of stairs,” she said flatly, maybe to show I didn’t have it so bad.
“What about you?”
“Oh, no one’s ever touched me,” she said. I believed it. “It’s just they kept putting me away. My mom has the twins now, you know, and I guess I was scaring the children. They kept putting me away, and now I’m here.”
That only gave me more questions. I started to ask, but she shook her head.
“Let’s stop,” she said. “Not with him here.”
She pointed into the front room, and there, as if she’d conjured him, was a man sitting on a bench, head in his hands. I about jumped. All along there’d been someone hidden in the curve of the rising staircase, and I hadn’t realized.
“Should I talk to him about the room?” I asked.
“God, no. He shouldn’t even be inside. We told him Lacey’s not here.”
There was that name again—Lacey. I was putting the pieces of some kind of tragedy together, imagining the bleakest things, the very worst. First a distraught mother and sisters, and now this man, clearly distressed and looking for his daughter.
“The rest of them are upstairs, getting her things,” Gretchen said. “They wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
I was watching him, waiting for him to lift his head, yet also afraid he might and then I’d have to find something suitable to say.
“Don’t be a vulture,” Gretchen said.
I leaned in. She smelled musty, like the pages of the ancient book. “What happened to Lacey, anyway? Did she . . . die or something?”
Gretchen’s expression held a beat too long, not a twitch or a muscle moving. “I told you to stop it,” she said. She plucked her book from the golden chair and left the room, avoiding the man on the bench and climbing the stairs to the rooms above.
She’d left me alone with him, but what could I say? I didn’t know his daughter. I didn’t know what happened, if it was something terrible that occurred, maybe even inside this house.
Someone should be down to help me with my room any minute, I decided. I made a halfhearted circle around the parlor and then planted myself in the gold velvet chair Gretchen had abandoned. All I had to entertain myself with were the souvenirs that filled the surfaces of the room. There were some close by, arranged on a yellowing circle of crocheted lace. I grabbed for the closest item, small and eerily pale, like a mushroom.
My hands were cupped around the miniature ceramic bell, curious to know what sound it might make, when a prickling came at the back of my neck, cold though the room was stuffy. I had the immediate urge to put down the bell.
I craned around. Above the fireplace was a single black-and-white photograph in a gilt frame. A dark-haired young woman in a high-necked black dress sat in a high-backed chair, her hands folded and perched above her knees. It was the kind of pose someone would have made in order to sit for an oil painting centuries ago. Something about it wasn’t entirely convincing.
She had a long face, a meager mouth. At first her expression seemed dull, and slightly sad. Then I checked again. I must have caught the image from another angle, because her waxy gray face had shifted. Now the set of her small mouth was locked. Her eyes formed two daggers. They were intensely black, without any warm flecks or pupils, and they met mine through the glass right as the voice came from the other room.
“Were you here this week?” the man called. “Do you know anything about where she could have gone?”
I flinched. I glanced once more at the picture before turning around. The young woman’s mouth had relaxed, and her eyes were downcast. I thought I must have imagined the expression before.
“I just got here,” I told the man. He was standing now in the center of the outer room, under the chandelier.
“Did she seem out of the ordinary to you? Did it seem like she would take off, no phone call, no email?”
“I just got here,” I repeated, edging closer. “I don’t know her.” But now I was starting to collect questions.
“Of course,” he said, as if he might not believe me. He turned to the tall stairs. “They told me to stay down here. Men aren’t allowed upstairs.”
I kind of nodded. “Are you her dad?”
“I am. My wife’s up there. With the girls, Lacey’s sisters. Getting all her things.”
“I know, I heard.” Curiosity drove me forward. The prickling was at the back of my neck again, the tickle of a dagger point pressing me on.
“They said she’s not coming back here. They said she’s gone.”
I came closer. “What do you mean, gone?”
He didn’t answer that. Instead he said, “This seemed to be a safe place.”
A safe place. My mother had told me she felt safe in Catherine House. She felt protected. Once she opened that gate and left, the real world crushed in.
Bad stories my mother had told me of the city came at me then. Dark street corners, vacant subway platforms, sketchy men. My mother used to wander the streets at night before curfew, boots to her knees, wind in her hair, getting to know all the surrounding neighborhoods, open to whatever might happen. One time a gang of guys followed her all through Tompkins Square Park and she hid out in a twenty-four-hour bodega until they got bored and left. Another time a distressed woman almost pushed her in front of the 6 train. You could have gotten murdered, I used to say to her when she told me her stories, but I didn’t say it with worry or judgment. I said it with awe.
But she was safe, she assured me. She had this house to go back to—and her stories always ended here, secured behind the gate, which was kept locked until morning. That was why the house called to me so, how high she’d built its castle walls in my head.
“We don’t know what happened,” Lacey’s father said. “Being here was supposed to help.”
He looked so broken. He was acting—and this was mystifying to me, from my own experience at having a father—as if the idea of not having his daughter in his life destroyed him.
I had one clear memory of my father from my early childhood. He was talking with another adult, and I was grabbing ahold of his pants leg to get his attention. He peered down on me from a great height, and I lifted my arms to him, thinking he was about to bridge the distance and pick me up. Maybe I thought he’d hold me aloft on his shoulders, the way I’d seen fathers do with small daughters, because I was small and I was his daughter. I could imagine the intoxicating feeling of being high in the air balanced on his two stout and sturdy shoulders. How I wanted him to lift me. How my arms reached. But my father stayed where he was, in the distant stratosphere of the room, his head near the ceiling fan, and mine far below, by his knees, too low for him to hear me call for him. He kept talking to whoever it was he was talking to, his beard hiding his mouth. I dropped my arms. He didn’t lower his distant head.
“She was doing so well,” Lacey’s father said. He had a tight grip on my arm as he spoke. “I don’t understand what happened.”
I had no possible idea. He was holding me harder than he should have, pressing his fingers in until he must have felt the solid stop of bone.
“I don’t know, either.” I wrenched my arm away and glanced up at the stairs. The bend at the top wobbled with shadows. Wasn’t someone expecting me? Wouldn’t anyone who worked here come out and welcome me and help me get settled into a room?
“She was fine,” he said once more. His teeth were showing.
I put something between us—a display table with three bulky wooden legs.
“Maybe she wasn’t,” I found myself saying.
“What did you say?”
“Only . . . I guess . . . maybe she wasn’t. Doing fine. And maybe no one could see it.”
His head tilted.
I’d said a bad thing—I knew it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. It was the start of a story, but his reaction made me stuff it back in. Maybe I should have apologized, but there was a remote observer inside me that wanted to see what he’d say back to me, what he’d do. He was her father. When everything went so wrong at home, after I’d crashed my mother’s car and lied about it, after I’d skipped school for near a week and concealed it, once my mother reached the end of her rope—those were the words she’d used, about what I’d done to her, words that made me cringe—I’d brought up my father. Maybe I should go live with him, I’d said. Live with that man? she’d said. You? Hell no. When I said I could call the gallery—I’d looked it up online, there was a number and an address in the city, the whole storefront could be seen in a blurred snap on Google Maps—she said I shouldn’t do that. He took all the money he got when his father died and opened that place. He never gave us a cent. Or called. Or sent a card. Does that sound like someone who wanted me?
Lacey’s father bowed his head. I wasn’t sure what he would do: shout at me, or push me away, or grab me harder this time.
I backtracked. “I didn’t know her, I told you. I only got here today.”
There was noise on the stairs, and he stepped away and crossed the room. Lacey’s mother and sisters came down with a suitcase and a few boxes. “That’s the last of it,” her mother said. Her face was cool and composed, but her eyes held something heavier and tangled.
“Let me at least help with these,” the man said.
“We’ve got it. Didn’t I say stay in the car?” With that, they all left through the front exit. I watched the door seal shut. The room relaxed without them in it.
“That took long enough,” a sharp voice called from the stairs. A tiny, bony woman descended to the bottom. “They’re always so emotional. It’s exhausting.” A smile crept onto her face. “Please forgive me for keeping you waiting. You can come in now.”
She lifted her arm to indicate the door beside the stairs. I’d noticed it was closed before, but here it was, open. Who’d opened it? “Aren’t you here about the room?” she said. “That is what you came for, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Call me Ms. Ballantine, I prefer it.”
I hadn’t called her anything at all.
She was small yet commanding, standing with marked intensity on the golden carpet. It was a wonder how much space she took up in the room though she was shorter even than me. Tight skirt, shiny. Blouse with ruffles, satiny. Jewelry of all shapes and metals and protrusions, around her neck and wrists and fingers, on her earlobes and pinned to her shirt, all gleaming. Her hair—an artificial golden yellow that mimicked the rug—was pulled back into a severe bun at the base of her skull. She could have been forty or one hundred years old. She was, I’d soon understand, the landlady and manager of the house, though not the owner. Catherine House was controlled by a trust, because its human owner was long dead.
“I’m Sabina,” I said. “Bina, I mean. You can just call me Bina. My mother, she rented a room here a long time ago, and I know it’s weird, but I thought . . .”
She was assessing me without any movement. Not a breath escaped her mouth. Even her eyes were still, unblinking. It was unsettling. Finally she shifted, sliding her fingers together, making the rings knock.
I started talking again. I didn’t know what else to do. “I’m, uh . . . You said bring cash?”
“Don’t be daft,” she said, and most unsettling of all was how wide she was now smiling. “I know who you are, Miss Tremper, not that I’ve told the others yet. You still have to sign the paperwork. This here is my office. Come in.”
It was only as I was walking inside, ushered in ahead of her, that the thought came to me: When we’d spoken on the phone, she’d assured me there was a vacancy. She’d said bring cash. Then she’d ended the call before ever asking my name.