Alice Mercier
THE HOUSEGUEST
A key in a small manila envelope appeared under the door early on the morning my favorite aunt left town, along with a note asking me to water her plants while she was away. She'd also asked her neighbours for the same favour, so by the time she returned, most of her plants had drowned. My aunt was sad about that, but she laughed when she called me a killer. She'd bought the neighbours a bottle of good wine to say thank you, because, she said, neighbours get treated differently from family. But before all that, while the plants had lingered somewhere between life and death, something had happened.
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My husband was still asleep when I lifted the envelope from the floor and felt the thick metal edges of the key through the paper. Tall inky letters that I recognized immediately as my aunt's handwriting spelled out my name. That evening I walked over to her apartment, let myself into the building’s main entrance with the key, and climbed the narrow stairs to the top floor, where her door was left unlocked. On every windowsill there were ferns or small palms or hibiscus flowers in terracotta pots, and outside were vines and creepers that wound themselves around the wrought iron bars of the fire escape balcony that connected my aunt's apartment to the one next door.
She'd left quick instructions on the kitchen table, and at the end of the note she’d written: I’m away all month. Stay if you like. I opened the fridge and poured myself a glass of long-life milk, and for the rest of that first evening I cooked spaghetti and kept watch as a large house spider darted between the gaps in the floorboards beneath me. The next day my husband arrived with a suitcase of our things, and we stayed for the summer. My aunt's apartment was bigger than ours, and closer to the train station, and filled with air and shade, even in mid-August. And her kitchen contained rows of cups and saucers and other small objects that I liked to pick up and turn over in my hands as though I might take them with me one day.
In the second week, after we'd finished all the food in the apartment, we went to the supermarket to buy pasta, bread, milk, coffee, and also several unusually expensive items that we would never have bought if we were at home, including a packet of fresh king prawns, and a wide slice of very pale blue cheese. At the checkout we didn't blink at the price, and back in the apartment we restocked the fridge and cupboards quietly together. Something about that apartment had made us different. We moved softly through those rooms. We didn't shout. We became careful people. And secretly we wondered whether we’d ever really move back into our old apartment.
In the late afternoon I watered the plants on the fire escape that hugged the side of the building, stretching out from the small door in the kitchen, past the bedroom window, to the neighbours' fire escape door in their kitchen. My husband would water the plants again at night. And we both went on watering them, even after we noticed that the neighbours tended to all the plants on the balcony each morning before the sun came up.
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One evening my aunt phoned to say that she'd met an old friend - by chance - in the centre of another city, and also to remind us that she'd be back in ten days. Then she said bye and hung up. I looked around the kitchen that suddenly seemed to be sprawling with our things—things that didn't belong there. Neither of us wanted to return home, although we weren't sure why—there was nothing wrong with our apartment. My husband suggested that we start looking for somewhere else to live: "Somewhere we want to stay for a long time,” he said. Then he ran the cold tap in the sink and went out onto the balcony to water the vines. I walked through to the bedroom and lay down in the warm dark. I tried to imagine somewhere I wanted to live for a long time. I closed my eyes. At first there was nothing. And then there was a stretch of wild land that disappeared down toward the ocean. It was getting late, and I watched the dark tide from where I was, some distance from the house that glowed behind me. I could hear the murmur of guests in the background as they gathered near the door before dispersing out into the evening and away. Then there was only my husband left, standing alone in the glass-fronted dream house. Except that he didn't look like my husband at all. I opened my eyes and listened for his footsteps as he let himself back into the kitchen and started washing the dishes from dinner. Just above the noise of running water I could hear another layer of sound that was like a whisper, and I realized he was praying. I let myself drift into sleep. The rest of our evenings went like this, and I grew accustomed to the late whispering, even though I couldn’t make out a single word, no matter how close the whispering came—it was as though he was speaking the first syllable of a thousand thoughts, one after the other, and as soon as I tried to concentrate too hard on any one sound, I'd fall quickly and deeply to sleep.
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The first plants began to lose their young leaves the week before we left. Sometimes I felt certain they’d been overwatered and I’d try to let them dry out in the heat of the afternoon. But then the temperature outside would soar, and I’d pour pitchers of sugar-water into the pots and watch as the liquid rushed around the stems and pooled above the soil. I wanted to know what the neighbours thought but they were never at home when I knocked. In bed one night I closed my eyes and listened to the tap running in the bathroom as my husband brushed his teeth. I could hear him praying again, and I wondered for a moment how he was speaking and brushing his teeth at the same time. He came into the bedroom and switched off the light at the wall before lying down beside me.
“I think the plants are dying,” I said as I turned to face him in the dark.
“They might be,” he said.
“Do you think they have too much water or not enough?” I asked.
“Not enough,” he said, “it’s hotter than usual.”
I meant to ask him about the whispering too, but my body felt suddenly full and heavy and I didn’t know whether the rest of my words were spoken or dreamed. Then it was morning.
The next night the whispering came so close that I could tell he was standing in the hallway just outside the bedroom door. The noise of it filled the room like smoke, and I could almost see the shapes of the words without needing to understand them. I wanted to call out to him, but I’d already fallen too far toward sleep to summon my own voice out of my body and into the room.
“Damn,” he said suddenly, which brought me back around. He'd said it loudly, but it had been muted by the glass of the window because he was standing outside on the fire escape, and yet I could still hear him whispering on the other side of the bedroom door. Then the whispering stopped. The door to the fire escape opened and closed as he stepped into the kitchen, and I heard his footsteps coming toward me until he opened the bedroom door and said: “I broke this cup. I was using it to water the plants—I'll superglue it tomorrow.” He was holding the mint-green cup in one hand, and a small sharp matching piece of chipped ceramic in the other.
“Were you praying just now?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Were you whispering anything?” I asked.
“No, why?"
“I heard whispering,” I said.
“When?”
“Just now, outside the bedroom, in the hallway. But every other evening too—I thought you were praying.”
“I haven’t prayed for a long time,” he said, “maybe I should.”
“But then where’s that noise coming from?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He dropped the piece of ceramic into the cup it had broken off from, and a flat note rang out into the room for a split-second as it hit the bottom. “What’s the voice saying?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “the rhythm is like speech, but I can't make out any words.”
“Has it ever happened before?”
“Never,” I said, although in that moment I realized that it had, just once.
ϖ
I was lying in the bath with the lights off and the tap running so that the water rose up close to my face. Earlier that evening my ex had phoned our landlord to say we'd be leaving at the end of our lease. That was the last month we'd spend living together. A small square window let in just enough of the city’s light for me to make out the shapes of my own body below the surface of the water, as well as the outlines of some of the objects in the room. My ex called down to me from the attic where he was moving the boxes that we'd never bothered to unpack. He'd opened one of mine and found a note I'd written to a man whose name he couldn’t quite place. An argument spun from there. The note was from a long time ago. It was addressed to someone I'd known since childhood, when I'd often found him killing insects for fun—he'd grown into a much gentler adult, and the man I'd end up marrying much too soon. But I'd never sent the letter—not out of dilemma or hesitation, more out of forgetfulness, or apathy.
"You're lying," said my ex, "I know you're lying." His footsteps landed heavily on the ceiling above me. I didn't respond. Instead I let my back slide down the cold ceramic of the bathtub until my head was underwater, and I summoned something I couldn’t define into the house, and willed it to rip through every room and pull him down through the attic floor and break his bones. The water became thick around me, and I thought I could hear a voice whispering. It sounded as though it was asking me a question; it sounded as though it was asking whether I was sure this was what I wanted. I hesitated. And the room became silent and still again.
For the next two days my ex had a cough that occasionally left him fighting for breath. He stayed home from work. He was worried he'd inhaled something poisonous in the attic. On the second night he asked: “Who did you really write that note to?” I answered again that it was to someone I'd known since school, which was part of the truth, but he didn't believe me. We spoke about something else, and I hollowed my body around his and listened to his breath through the back of his ribcage. I was thinking about the bones of his skeleton, and the uneven shapes of his organs, and the muscle and blood beneath his skin. It had been a long time since I’d last observed the aliveness of his body in quiet awe.
ϖ
I didn’t tell my husband any of this in the apartment where the plants were dying. Instead I looked down at the floor while he pressed his hand gently to my forehead and begun to recite a prayer. I shook it away, and as I turned my head toward the window I caught a glimpse of the neighbours standing out on the fire escape, watching us through the glass. But the silhouette wasn’t quite right—it wasn’t the neighbours after all. And then they were gone. My husband noticed a shadow move across the floor. He looked toward the window, where there was no longer anyone. Then he held me close to him and whispered the rest of the prayer into the empty space of the room. I kept my body pressed against his, my face buried into his chest, and I drew him ever so slightly closer toward me. ◊ ◊
APPOINTMENT
Alice Mercier
There’s something wrong with the right side of my mouth. I can feel it. The floss never comes out clean no matter how long I stand in front of the bathroom mirror. And there’s an instability about the back tooth. For as long as I can remember now, I avoid it when I eat. I go to the dentist and he says I need two fillings, one on each side, almost symmetrical—something about the structure of my molars has caused them to decay harmoniously, but the right side is worse. I might lose that tooth. He tells me to book a double appointment at the front desk.
"You can come back tomorrow morning if you want," someone at reception says from behind a computer. "You're lucky. There was a cancellation. Otherwise you'd have to wait a month."
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The dentist repositions the fluorescent light overhead, clears his throat, then says, “We’ll be here for quite some time.” He’s starting with the left side, which he injects twice. I can taste the newness of his gloves in my mouth as he begins to scratch at the tooth with a small metal implement. He asks the hygienist for something. She doesn’t hear. He asks her again, louder this time. There is already a tempered impatience to his tone, and I wonder if this is how he is, or if this is just how he is with her. He starts to drill the tooth and I catch my breath at the sudden force of it. He stops, lowers his surgical mask, and asks, “Is everything fine?” and I make a sound in my throat that means yes. He continues. I can smell the rot in the tooth as he goes. I look for something in the room to distract myself with. There's a small TV fixed high on the wall in front of me and the news is on. I watch the headlines change in the red banner at the bottom of the screen until I've memorized the order in which they appear. The drilled tooth starts to smell different. I think of cut marble, of surgical saws, and butcher shops. It occurs to me then that I don’t know this man at all. I imagine him drilling through perfectly healthy teeth, a slight smirk forming behind his mask. I start to feel nauseous. I turn my head slowly away from him and he stops the drill to ask, “Do you feel pain there?” I shake my head no, but I don’t turn back toward him. “Okay,” he says, “well we’re done on that side anyway. I just need to set the filling.” He moulds the filler into the tooth, holding it in place with his thumb while it sets, and letting his other fingers rest heavily against my cheek. I look up toward his jawline. He looks toward the TV. He’s younger than I thought.
The next side takes longer. When he injects my gum I taste blood. He starts the drill. He says he can probably save the tooth, but it’ll be close. I feel suddenly tired and I let my body become heavy. I wonder if he will tire too. Then what? I gaze up at his face again. He looks bored, rather than tired, but also like he could do this all day and not lose focus. There's a resigned attentiveness to his expression that I like. He's still drilling the tooth. His face is now quite close to mine. I watch him for minutes at a time, blinking up at him. Perhaps he will ask me to stop watching. He doesn’t. He eventually sets the filling on this side, switching between his thumb and forefinger to check how it’s holding. With his free hand he removes his mask and starts to tell me about his plans for the weekend. He’ll finish work early today—he only has one more patient to see after me. Then he’ll go to a birthday party for his nephews—they’re twins. And tomorrow he can begin packing up his house because it’s finally been sold—he’s moving at the end of the month. He takes his hand out of my mouth, disposes of his gloves, then touches my shoulder lightly and says, “You’re all done.” I sit up. The hygienist smiles briefly at me and hands me a white plastic cup brimming with aqua-blue liquid. She watches as I spit strings of blood and blue water into the small sink beside her. Then she passes me a handful of paper towel while she tells the dentist that she’ll go and get the paperwork ready for the next appointment. He nods his head without looking at her, and she leaves. Now he’s telling me about the compound that my fillings are made from. I want to stay longer. I want to know what his new house is like inside. I want to know how tidy he'll keep it when no one else is there. I want to know what he eats when he’s alone.
The hygienist returns with a clipboard and the new-patient information form for the next appointment. I stand up to leave. He tells me to call reception if I have any problems, and I thank him, and then I ask how long my fillings will last.
“What do you mean?” he says. He glances toward the next patient’s form that is now lying on his desk.
“When will I need them replaced?” I say.
“Oh. Hopefully never. They should be good.”
“You mean—until I’m in the ground?” I say.
He looks up from the clipboard, and says: “Don’t say it like that.” And I wish he was still pressing his thumb firmly against my tooth and letting his other fingers fall lazily into the soft flesh of my cheek. ◊ ◊
Alice Mercier is currently editing a book of short stories. She lives and works in Ithaca, NY, where she attended the creative writing program at Cornell. Before, Alice lived in London and studied photography. Alice, grew up in Bath, UK.