I
The coughing started my second night. Thin, wet, patient — the kind of cough that has stopped expecting to be answered. I lay on my mattress on the floor, boxes still taped shut around me, and listened to it come through the wall like weather.
I didn't meet her for three weeks. I'd hear her locks — three of them, in a specific order, like a ritual — and sometimes her radio, always the same jazz station, turned down so low it was more felt than heard. Once I heard her laugh. It surprised me. It sounded like a normal woman's laugh, the kind you'd hear in a grocery store.
We met in the stairwell. She was sitting on the second-to-top step, head against the railing, and she looked up at me with an expression that wasn't embarrassment, exactly. More like she'd been caught mid-sentence in a conversation with someone who wasn't there.
"You're in 13A," she said. Not a question.
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry about the coughing."
I told her it was fine. It wasn't a lie, exactly. It had become part of the apartment's architecture, like the radiator's clank.
"I'm Abby," she said, and put out a hand that shook a little when I took it.
She was twenty-six. She looked both older and much younger than that, in a way I couldn't articulate for a long time — old around the eyes, young everywhere she moved
