The Neighbor Woman
"You're blocking the stairs."
Adrian turned around, one bag still hanging off his shoulder, and saw her standing two steps below him. Arms crossed. Not moving, and not in any hurry to move him along either. She just stood there like a woman with all the patience in the world and none of it left over for him.
"Sorry, almost done."
He shoved his last box against the wall to clear the way. It toppled sideways and spilled a tangle of phone chargers, and one ancient games controller, across the step between them.
She looked at the mess, then at him, one eyebrow raised. She said nothing, which felt worse than if she had.
"I can explain that," he said, crouching to scoop everything back into the box.
"I don't need an explanation. I need to get down these stairs before my milk goes off."
He gathered the rest of it quickly, knocking his knee on the corner of the box and swearing under his breath. She didn't smile. She watched him with her arms still folded, like she'd spent most of her life waiting for men to get out of her way and this was just today's version of it.
He got a proper look at her while he worked. Mid-forties, he guessed. Dark hair pinned up loosely, with a few strands escaping around her face as if she'd given up fixing them hours ago. Reading glasses pushed onto the top of her head and forgotten there. A cardigan thrown over what looked like pajamas, even though it was three in the afternoon on a weekday, and an expression that had clearly been aimed at plenty of people before him.
"You're new," she said.
"Adrian." He held out a hand.
She looked at it as if it were an odd thing to offer on a staircase, then shook it anyway, quick and businesslike. Her fingers were colder than he expected, and gone again before he'd registered them.
"I know. Mrs. Bennett's told me twice already. Once when your deposit cleared, and again this morning in case I'd forgotten." She stepped past him, sideways, careful not to touch his boxes or him. "Try not to slam that door at night. These walls carry sound, and I sleep lightly."
She kept climbing. He watched her go up the last four steps to the landing and stop at the door across from the one that was apparently his.
"Wait," he said, mostly because he wanted to say something. "Which one's mine?"
"Whichever one doesn't have my name on it." She didn't turn around. "You'll figure it out. You seem clever enough, underneath the chargers."
Her door closed. Not hard. Just closed, the way a sentence ends when there's nothing left to add. Adrian stood on the landing holding a lamp he didn't remember picking up and felt like he'd lost an argument he hadn't known he was having.
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The building was old, the kind with a staircase that creaked in the same two places no matter who was on it, and a smell of furniture polish and damp wood that got into everything. By the end of the week it had got into his clothes and his sheets and even the cereal he'd left on the counter. The wallpaper in the hall was a faded floral that had probably been fashionable forty years ago, curling at the seams, and the light on the landing buzzed whenever it rained.
The Bennetts owned it and lived on the ground floor. Mr. Bennett had said perhaps nine words to Adrian all week, nearly all of them about the bins. He delivered them with the same flat urgency every time, however often Adrian promised he understood which day was which. Mrs. Bennett more than made up for him. She had opinions on everything, and she handed them over with tea nobody had asked for, in a kitchen that smelled of toast and lavender.
"First floor's two rooms," she told him the next morning, putting a cup down on his windowsill without waiting to be invited in. "Same landing, same four steps. You're across from Elena."
"I met her. On the stairs. She wasn't exactly thrilled."
"Did she tell you to get out of her way?"
"Something like that. More politely than it sounds."
Mrs. Bennett laughed, short and knowing, and sat down on the edge of his one unpacked chair as though she planned to stay. "That's Elena being friendly, believe it or not. You should see her when she isn't in the mood for company."
"Is that often?"
"Depends on the week." She picked at a thread on her cardigan sleeve. "She's had a hard few years, that one. Divorced. Doesn't talk about it, not to me, not to anyone, and I've learned not to ask twice. But there's a sort of quiet about her that isn't really quiet, if you know where to look. Like a kettle that's been left just short of boiling."
"That's a strange way to describe a person."
"You'll understand eventually." She stood up, satisfied with some private conclusion. "Most people who move in across from her do. Give it a month."
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He had taken the room because it was cheap and close to the shared office where he rented a desk, and because it was as far from his father's house as he could get without leaving the country. His parents had left the country themselves two years ago, for a job of his father's in the south of Spain. Adrian had stayed. He told people the company was the reason. The truth was less flattering: nobody in that villa would ever stop asking him how it was going.
He found her full name that evening, on the row of brass mailboxes in the entrance hall, slightly green at the edges. Two plates, one above the other. *A. Vale.* *E. Hart.*
Elena.
He said it once under his breath, standing alone in the dim hall with a stack of mail addressed to the last tenant. It sat better in his mouth than it had any right to, for a woman who'd told him to move within a minute of meeting him.
He learned her age the way he learned everything in that building, over tea he hadn't asked for. Six years in the flat, Mrs. Bennett said the following morning, topping up his cup without checking. Forty-five now, though Elena would never confirm it if you asked outright. She'd also said more than two whole sentences to him on the stairs, which was more than she'd said to any new tenant in about a year.
"Maybe she just likes complaining about chargers," Adrian said.
"Maybe." Mrs. Bennett's eyes glinted in a way that said she didn't believe it, and she moved on to a story about a previous tenant and burnt toast.
His sister rang around eleven, as she did most nights. Sophie lived two hours north with her boyfriend and followed Adrian's life like a soap opera she was legally obliged to watch.
"So, how's the big escape?"
"It's a rented room, not a prison break."
"Same thing, coming from you. Mum wants to know if you're eating."
"I'm eating."
"Sitting down?"
He looked at the sandwich on his desk. "Mostly."
"What's the place like?"
"Old. The landlady talks too much. A neighbor told me to get out of her way about ten seconds after I met her."
"Sounds awful."
"It was fine, actually."
Sophie was quiet for a moment, which wasn't like her. "Okay," she said. "Go to bed."
He didn't, straight away. He did the math instead, lying on top of the unmade bed with half his boxes still unpacked. Twenty-one years between his door and hers. It was only a number. It belonged on birth certificates and forms, and he didn't see why it had followed him into the dark.
Around midnight he heard her door open across the landing, footsteps going to the bathroom, water running, footsteps coming back. The click of her lock. He lay there a long time afterward with his eyes open. The light under her door went out before his did, and he noticed that, and told himself it meant nothing.
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