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“Not at first. But yes. Eventually.”
I look to the wall behind Dr. Wagner, at the askew Monet. I’ve seen the painting before, although I can’t remember what it’s called. ProbablyBlue Bridge Over Waterlilies, because that’s what it depicts. It’s pretty. Frommy position on the bed, I can see the curve of the bridge as it arcs over the lily pads and blooms in the water below. But I know that looking at it from another viewpoint would yield a vastly different result. The lines of the bridge wouldn’t look quite so clean. The lilies would widen into indistinct splotches of paint. If I were to get up close, the painting would probably look downright ugly.
The same can be said of certain places. The closer you get to them, the uglier they become.
That’s what the Bartholomew is like.
“You felt like you were in danger, so you fled,” the doctor says.
“Escaped,” I remind him.
“Why did you feel the need to do that?”
I sink back into the pillows. I’m going to have to tell him everything, even though that might not be the best idea. This time, it’s not a matter of trust. With each minute that passes, I get the sense that Dr. Wagner only wants to help.
So the question isn’t how much to tell him.
It’s how much I think he’ll believe.
“The place is haunted. By its past. So many bad things have happened there. So much dark history. It fills the place.”
Dr. Wagner’s brow lifts. “Fills it?”
“Like smoke,” I say. “And I’ve breathed itin.”
THREE DAYSEARLIER
21
I wake just after seven to the same sound I heard my first night here.
The noise that’s not a noise.
Although this time I no longer think someone’s inside the apartment, I’m still curious about what it could be. Every place has its own distinct sounds. Creaking steps and humming fridges and windows that rattle when the wind rushes against them at just the right angle. The key is to find them and identify them. Once you know what they are, they’re less likely to bother you.
So I force myself out of bed, shivering in a bedroom made frigid by windows that have gaped open all night. A necessity after the fire. It made the whole place smell like a hotel room in which the previous occupant had smoked a carton of cigarettes.
Padding downstairs in bare feet and flimsy nightclothes, I stop every so often to listen—really listen—to the sounds of the apartment. I hear noises aplenty, but nothing that matchesthenoise. That specific sound has suddenly vanished.
In the kitchen, I find my phone sitting on the counter, blaring out the ring tone specifically reserved for Chloe. Worrisome, considering the two of us instituted a no-calls-until-coffee rule back when we roomed together in college.
“I haven’t had my coffee yet,” I say upon answering.
“The rule doesn’t apply when a fire is involved,” Chloe says. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. The fire wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed.”
The blaze itself was confined to 7C, Mr. Leonard’s apartment. It turns out the heart palpitations Nick told me about earlier had returned. Rather than call 911, as Nick strongly recommended, Mr. Leonard ignored the warning signs. Later, while he was cooking himself a late-night dinner, a heart attack arrived. His fourth.
The fire started when Mr. Leonard dropped the pot holder in his hands when the coronary struck. It landed on the stovetop, where it quickly ignited. The fire spread from there, eventually encompassing much of the kitchen while Mr. Leonard crawled to the door in an attempt to get help. He lost consciousness just as the door swung open, fanning the flames in the kitchen and sending gusts of smoke into the upper floors of the Bartholomew.
It was Leslie Evelyn, also a seventh-floor resident, who ended up calling 911. She smelled the smoke, went into the hall to check, and saw the plumes rolling from Mr. Leonard’s open door. Because of her quick thinking, the rest of the Bartholomew remained mostly unscathed. Just water damage in the seventh-floor hallway and slight smoke damage to the hallway walls of the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors.
I learned all this once residents were allowed back in their apartments two hours later. Because the elevator can fit only so many people at a time and no one was in the mood to take the stairs, a gossipy crowd formed in the lobby. Some of them I recognized. Most of them I didn’t. All of them, save for Nick, Dylan, and myself, were well past sixty.
“I meant emotionally,” Chloe says.
A slightly different story. Although I’ve calmed down since last night, a faint anxiety lingers, just as stubborn as the traces of smoke inside the apartment.