Alice Mercier

The Houseguest

A key in a small manila envelope appeared under the door early on the morning my favourite 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’d returned, most of her plants had drowned. My aunt had been sad about that, but she’d laughed when she’d called me a killer. She’d bought the neighbours a bottle of good wine to say thank you, because, she’d said, neighbours were to be treated differently from family. But before all that, while the plants 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 recognised immediately as my aunt’s handwriting spelled out my name. That evening after work 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 terra cotta 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 apartment next door.

She’d left quick instructions for me on the kitchen table, and at the end of the note she’d written: I’m away all summer. Stay if you like. I opened the fridge and poured myself a glass of UHT milk, and for the rest of that first evening I ate 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. My aunt’s apartment was bigger than ours, and closer to the station, and filled with air and shade, even in mid-July. 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 one day steal them.

By the second week we’d finished all the food in the apartment, so we went to the supermarket to buy more pasta, 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 the rooms. We didn’t shout at one another. We became careful people. And secretly we wondered whether we’d ever really have to go back to our own place.

Late each afternoon I’d water the plants on the fire escape. The metal balcony hugged the side of the building, stretching from the door in the kitchen, past the bedroom window, over 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, week after week, even when we noticed that the neighbours also watered all the plants on the balcony every morning before the sun came up.

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One evening my aunt phoned to say that she’d bumped into an old friend, by chance, on a train to another city, and also to remind us that she’d be back in ten days. Then she said goodbye 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 more like this. Somewhere we want to live 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 towards the ocean. It was getting late, and I watched the dark tide from where I was standing, some distance away from a house that glowed behind me. I could hear the murmur of guests in the background as they gathered by 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 really look like my husband. I opened my eyes and listened for his footsteps as he let himself back into the kitchen and started to wash the dishes. Just above the noise of running water I could hear another layer of sound that was like a whisper, and I realised that 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 syllables of a thousand thoughts, 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 to lose their young leaves did so the week before we left. Sometimes I felt certain they’d been overwatered, so I’d let them dry out in the heat of the afternoon. 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 about the plants, but they were never home when I knocked.

In bed one night I closed my eyes and listened to the tap running in the bathroom while 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. Then 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.

“We’ve over-watered them,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” he said, “it’s hotter than usual this summer.”

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 towards 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 treading towards the bedroom until he opened the door and said: “I broke this. I was using it to water the plants—I’ll superglue it tomorrow.” He was holding a mint-green cup in one hand, and a small sharp 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 night too—I thought you were praying.”

“I haven’t prayed for a long time,” he said, “I probably 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 come 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?” he asked.

“No, never,” I said, although in that moment I realised that it had, just once.

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I’d been lying in the bath with the lights off and the tap running so that the soap 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 ever live together. A small square window let in just enough of the city’s light for me to make out the shapes of my 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’d been 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 nowhere. The note was from some time ago, and it was addressed to someone I’d known since childhood—although he’d actually quite unnerved me as a child, not least because he’d killed insects for pleasure. But he’d grown into a much gentler adult, and the man I’d end up marrying much too soon.

Not that my ex could’ve known that would happen. Still, his footsteps landed heavily on the ceiling above me and I could hear him cursing me loudly under his breath. I let my back slide down the cold ceramic of the bathtub until my head was underwater, and then I summoned something I couldn’t define into our 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 the walls of the room started to look like wet cement, and I thought I could hear a voice whispering—it sounded as though it was asking a question, 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 as a child, which was one part of the truth that concealed another. He didn’t believe me anyway. We spoke about something else, and I hollowed my body around his and listened for 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, with quiet awe, the aliveness of his body.

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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 began to recite a prayer. I shook it away, and as I turned my head towards 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 floorboards. He looked towards the window, where there was now no one. Then he pulled me close to him and whispered the rest of the prayer into the empty space of the room behind me. I kept my body pressed against his, and my face buried into his chest, and drew him ever so slightly closer towards me.

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.