No one tells us to keep it down, to stop stomping around, shaking the chandeliers beneath our feet. They left last night, an exodus. We heard the front door opening and closing and opening and closing and then slamming. SLAM. Their baby was crying in the driveway.
We’re dancing in the living room, eating Eggos with our hands and hopping like mad. We’ll have pizza for lunch and leave the box on the porch, because we can. Because there’s no one below us to huff and complain about attracting flies or to call animal control on our dog when we let him pee in the yard without us and he wanders and roots through the garbage bags that won’t fit in the bins. We’re wild and haven’t even put bras on yet.
Even the dog is dancing.
When we were in junior high, we tipped over mannequins in JC Penny and ran the entire length of the mall and burst out the doors with our lungs burning. We were so high that we ran all the way home, flew like kites, laughing with sun on our faces. When we reached her house, her mom stood from the kitchen table and shook her head. We’d been gone so long, hadn’t we thought of her? How worried she would be?
We just let her talk and didn’t even tell her that we had made a mess with the mannequins all over that aisle of JC Penny. She wore a dark purple sweatshirt that said ESPRIT in bold white print and she called my mom. You need to start thinking of people other than yourselves, she hissed with her hand over the receiver, you should have called for a ride. But we never were the people who thought of things like that.
When we’re done dancing, we collapse on the couches and Sam suggests we go and see what their apartment looks like, what they might’ve left behind. Maybe there will be some beers in the fridge. The door is locked, but she finds the window by the side porch is open and is so small, she can fit right through. Whoa, she says. I hear the lock turning, the door opens. This place.
It’s our apartment, exactly, only white. Completely white walls. There isn’t anything left, except some candles on the mantle, burned down to uselessness, and a baby jumper hanging in a door frame between the living room and dining room. It’s like they were never here. Like they never tried to set up a home and fought in shouting matches over whose fault it was that the laundry didn’t get to the dryer. Like he never spent hours in the garage in thrift store t-shirts with hacked off sleeves, cranking and banging and fixing a motorcycle that I never saw him ride. Like she never paced around with her heels clicking all over the place, or leaned her head out the bathroom window to blow smoke from her lips. Like we couldn’t smell their bacon on the stovetop or see them that time she chased him into the road and he told me the next day that she’s just hormonal and paranoid. Like they weren’t always setting off the fire alarm and their baby wasn’t crying and crying.
Wait, Sam calls out from the kitchen and I find her, leaning on the wide-open fridge door. Jackpot. White wine and so many boxes of leftover take-out. She grabs a bottle and we take turns taking swigs while opening every cabinet, pulling every drawer. We can hear the scratching of our dog’s paws, walking over our heads and Sam tells me, you should go upstairs and dance around, I want to see just how loud we are.
Lena, from the diner the next block over, has frizzy brown hair that she puts up in a ponytail for waiting tables, but she had it smoothed out the time I saw her here. It had a sheen that reflected the sun and her boots were to her thighs. I was jogging up the driveway when she was leaving and the man from downstairs met me at the front door. My cousin, he said, clearing his throat. His eyes are gray-blue or blue-gray or maybe they change, depending on the light.
When he called me to the garage weeks later, as I was lugging in bags of groceries, I shouldn’t have gone. I should have skipped right by, put the milk away, emptied my fruit into the bowl and not let the ice cream sandwiches turn soft and melt in their cardboard box, resting by the porch steps. But, instead, I stepped into the cool shade of garage, where he only wanted to thank me, he said, for not ruining his life, for not telling his wife about Lena. Lena who, on some Saturdays, refills my coffee and brings me my scrambled eggs and pancakes. He didn’t mean to be an asshole, didn’t mean to make the terrible mistakes that he did. His gray-blue or blue-gray eyes rimmed with tears. He lost his first wife the same way. He thought he was going to be better. He loves his baby boy. Loves his wife. He just kept talking. Pouring out a confessional that wasn’t for me to hear, and yet I stood still against the garage door and let it crash all over me.
He walked around the motorcycle, wiping the grease from his hands onto his t-shirt. I should have nodded and said no problem and turned away, gone into the house with my bags of fruit and milk. But there was a dull ache growing and my feet were immovable. I thought of running, of how it feels to run until your legs shake and you’re miles away from where you started and your lungs burn, red hot. He came close enough that I could smell his skin, and I let the ice cream melt.
Upstairs, I take the dog by her front paws and she stands to dance with me. I don’t jump this time, just spin in circles and tap my toes. I pull out a dining chair and walk from room to room, opening drawers, closing cabinets. Nothing that could be worth complaining about, the movements we make, how we live our lives. Can you hear me now? I whisper, then again, but louder, can you hear me now?Then, I shout CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW! to the walls, to the universe, to the couple that left in the night, to my best friend drinking wine alone in the apartment underneath me?
YES, I CAN FUCKING HEAR YOU! Sam shouts through the ground below my feet.
I’m perfectly still for a moment, the silence ringing in my ears.
And then, I burst out laughing, a huge guffaw that borders on tears.
We lay on the wooden floor and look up at the chandelier that we surely were shaking just an hour ago. I close my eyes and open my mouth to speak. I…
Sam sits up and finishes the wine in a long swallow. She tells me she heard everything. Even the toilet flush before I came back down here. But I’m not surprised at all.
We could hear everything, too, the year that they lived under our feet.
Melanie Haney is an author and photographer, living in Southern New Hampshire where she homeschools her four children and writes to preserve what sanity she has remaining. Her work has appeared in Family Circle Magazine and numerous literary journals and magazines, including Blue Earth Review, Clockhouse, Berkeley Fiction Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, The Ernest Hemingway Shorts and more.