Countdown City

1.

“Hey, Al. Come look at this one.”

Susan Wendt studied the screen of her MacBook while her husband, Alex, paused the DVR and walked over to the kitchen table. He read the Craigslist ad over her shoulder and delivered a quick verdict: “Bull crap.” He cracked his knuckles and scootched behind her to get to the fridge. “It’s total bull crap, baby.”

“Hmm. Maybe.”

“Gotta be. You want?”

He held up a Brooklyn Lager by the neck and waggled it back and forth. Susan shook her head, scanning the Craigslist ad with a slight frown. Alex opened the beer and went to crouch beside her. “It’s one of those where the broker lures you in and then goes, ‘Oh that place? That place got taken yesterday! How about this one? Rent is joost a leeeeedle beeeet more expensive….’” He slipped into a goofy gloss on the thick

Brazilian accent of the most recent broker to take them on a wild-goose chase through half of south Brooklyn. Susan laughed.

“But wait,” she said, pointing at the screen again. “It’s not a broker. See? ‘For rent by owner.’”

Alex raised his eyebrows skeptically, took a swallow of the beer, and wandered back to the TV.

Their apartment search, now two and a half months old, had been her thing more than his all along. He felt that their current place, a one-bedroom-plus-office-nook off Union Square, was perfect. Or, if not perfect, then at least perfectly fine. And the idea of moving, the logistics and the packing and the various expenditures—it all made him want to tear his own head off. Or so he rather vividly expressed it.

“Plus,” Alex had argued, “I’m not sure this is the time to jack up our rent.”

Susan had been calm but insistent: it was time. It was time for Emma to have a proper bedroom, one that wasn’t a converted office nook; time for Susan to have a place to set up her easel and paints; time for Alex to have a real kitchen to cook his elaborate meals. “And rents are a heck of a lot lower than they used to be, especially in Brooklyn. Besides, Alex,” she had concluded, making a blatant appeal to his vanity, “you’re doing really well right now. Come on. We can just look, right?”

Alex had relented, and “just looking” rapidly escalated into a full-on search. Every evening that summer, after Emma had her bath and went to bed, while Alex settled in for his nightly dose of god-awful reality television, Susan trolled Craigslist and Rentals.com and the Times real estate section, entering rents and square footage and broker’s phone numbers on a master spreadsheet dotted with hyperlinks. On the weekends the family tromped from open house to open house, from Fort Greene to Boerum Hill, clutching cups of deli coffee and informational folders from Corcoran, pushing Emma in her bright-pink Maclaren stroller.

They’d found places they loved for way too much, places in their price range that they hated, and, for occasional variety, places they couldn’t afford and hated anyway. Last weekend they’d schlepped all the way to Red Hook, riding the F train to Smith and Ninth and then the B61 the rest of the way. The apartment they’d seen there, a converted artists’ loft on Van Brunt Street, was Susan’s favorite so far. It was footsteps from Fairway, cater-corner from a hipster bakery famous for its salted-caramel tarts, and featured a master bedroom with a thin slice of East River view.

But the apartment was forty-five minutes from the city, and with no utilities included it was just north of their budget.

“We really can’t push it on price,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Especially with you not working right now.”

Susan had smiled tightly, hiding her deep disappointment at his veto. She’d been increasingly and painfully aware, as the apartment search continued, that she had little leverage on the question of cost. It was true—she wasn’t working just then, a state of affairs Alex had totally supported, but it didn’t give her a lot of leeway on rent. She carefully transcribed the details of the “for rent by owner” Craigslist ad into the spreadsheet on her MacBook. They hadn’t even looked in Brooklyn Heights, because—well, what the hell for? No one was renting two-bedrooms in the Heights for under four thousand dollars a month, recession or not. No one except (Susan copied the name carefully from the ad) Andrea Scharfstein, who was offering the top two floors of her Cranberry Street brownstone: “1300 sq. ft., 2BR 2B, d/w, ample closets.” All for a startling $3,550.

“Thirty-five-fifty?” Alex snorted, fast-forwarding through a commercial break. “Bull crap, baby. Guaranteed.”

When Alex, Susan, and Emma arrived on Cranberry Street a little before their scheduled appointment at 10:30 the next morning, Andrea Scharfstein was waiting for them on the top step of her front stoop, reading the Sunday New York Times and sipping tea from a big yellow mug with the WNYC logo blazoned on the side. As they approached, their pink stroller bouncing over the uneven slate of the sidewalk, Andrea folded the newspaper and stood squinting down at them with her hands on hips: a thin and frail old woman with a big cloud of curly steel-gray hair, wearing a sixties-fabulous peach sundress, a gauzy taupe shawl, and big chunky bracelets on both wrists.

“Look at this! Right on time,” she said approvingly, glancing down at her watch. Susan unbuckled Emma and scooped her out so Alex could fold the Maclaren. “I like you people already.”

“Hi!” called Emma, climbing the tall steps with an exaggerated, marching stride, clinging to the banister. “I’m Emma.”

“Of course you are, dear! And a lovelier specimen of Emma I’ve never seen. Did you pick your name?”

“No!” Emma giggled. “My mama and dada picked it.”

“Good for them. My name is Andrea.”

Alex followed Emma, steadying her with a hand at the small of her back, while Susan lingered at the bottom, taking in the facade. The house at 56 Cranberry Street had steep concrete front steps, ascending from a little black wrought-iron gate to the oversized front door, which was painted in a rich and pleasing orangey red. Surrounding the stoop was a front garden, overgrown with azaleas, crab grass, and small flowering trees. The house itself was red brick, with wooden shutters framing neat lines of windows, three per floor. There were window boxes, growing what looked like herbs, in the windows of the first-floor apartment—Andrea’s apartment.

I bet it has pressed-tin ceilings, thought Susan, and then—suddenly, fiercely—I really want to live here. She teased herself as she caught up with Emma and Alex at the top of the steps.

Down, girl. You wanna see the inside first?

“You folks move quickly, I’ll give you that,” said Andrea Scharfstein, shaking their hands briskly. “You called maybe five minutes after I wrote that ad. Or what am I supposed to say? After I ‘posted’ it. Anyway, ten minutes, at the most.” Andrea’s hand in Susan’s was dry and papery. She spoke quickly, with a voice that was thin and the slightest bit gravelly, like she was on the verge of a cough. Beneath the bushy mass of hair, her face was a map of small lines and spots—from her face and body, which was slight and stooped, Susan would have put Andrea at seventy or older. But there was a sharpness and snap about her movements, a vigor that defied her physical appearance.

“Well, follow me, this way, here we go,” Andrea said briskly, turning the handle of the big front door and leaning into it with a thin shoulder. Susan was fleetingly and pleasantly reminded of Willy Wonka leading the wide-eyed contest winners into his chocolate factory for the first time. “Grab that mug for me, Alex. Is it Alex? It is, yes? If I leave a mug out here with even a drop of tea in it, we’ll have ants in no time.”

Emma trotted fearlessly inside, a step ahead of Andrea, looking around in the dimly lit downstairs landing. “Is this your house?” she asked.

“It is,” answered Andrea, patting the girl on the head. “What do you think?”

“It’s really good.”

Andrea took Emma’s hand and helped her up the interior stairs to the second-floor landing. I want to live here, Susan thought again, almost defiantly, and this time she didn’t bother to chastise herself. Instead she glanced at Alex, who had paused beneath the one dusty light fixture, a cheap chandelier shedding haphazard illumination on the stairwell. Susan felt like she could read his mind—he was cataloging flaws, looking for reasons to reject this charming and quaint old house. The stone of the stoop is slightly crumbling; the paint on the door is chipped and fading.

Susan didn’t care. This was where she wanted to live.

The interior stairway led one flight up and ended at a small carpeted landing with a single door.

“It doesn’t say ‘number two’ on the door,” said Andrea. “I hope that doesn’t bother you. You’d have to be pretty stupid not to find your own apartment. You just come in, come up the stairs.” Susan laughed politely, and Andrea smiled gently at her. “It was one big house, of course, until I lost my husband, Howard. I suppose it’s possible I’m still resistant to the change.”

As Andrea cleared her throat noisily and led them inside, Susan wondered how long ago that change had occurred; how many other tenants had there been? There was something about Andrea that suggested the sturdy, independent spirit of a longtime widow. Following her bent back down the long front hallway of the apartment, Susan felt a wave of sympathy for this woman, smart and lively as she was, growing old and dying here alone.

The door opened onto a hallway that ran lengthwise down the entire apartment, and featured not one but two coat closets. The expansive hallway ended, on the Cranberry Street side, in a bright and cozy kitchen, with granite countertops and a decent, if not overwhelming, amount of pantry space. “So the kitchen’s not eat-in?” asked Alex, and shot a significant look over Andrea’s head, which Susan could easily translate: not a lot of space for cooking… .

Susan just smiled. The kitchen in their current apartment was so small, the refrigerator and oven couldn’t be used at the same time, because the doors banged into each other. She ran her fingers along the countertops and crouched to open and close the cupboards while Emma played don’t-step-on-the-crack on the hardwood floor. Above the stove a pair of windows faced onto Cranberry Street, filling the room with gorgeous midmorning sunlight that cast the floorboards in lustrous browns.

“Floor’s maybe a little uneven,” Alex noted, crouching to run his palms disapprovingly along the ground.

Andrea shrugged. “Yes, yes. Actually, Howard was meaning to redo the floors in the whole place, but somehow we never had time.” Alex nodded as he straightened. Susan glanced down; the floors looked A-OK to her.

“This building was first constructed in 1864, the same year as the Brooklyn Bridge. But it’s a solid old thing, and it’s got plenty of character. Much like myself.” She gave Alex a broad, almost vaudevillian wink, then brayed throaty laughter. Alex smiled politely and gave Susan another meaningful glance: We’re sure we want this old loon as a landlord? But Susan ignored him and laughed along with Andrea. Emma, too, squealed and hid her mouth behind her hands—at three and a half years old, she loved jokes, even when she had no idea what they were about.

“Oh, by the way, in case you happen to care, the ceiling?” Andrea gestured upward with a thumb. “That’s pressed tin.”

2.

If Susan had any doubts about the apartment, the thing that sold her on it, absolutely and irrevocably—what made her certain in the core of her being that she had to live at 56 Cranberry Street #2—was the bonus room.

At the opposite end of the apartment’s first floor from the kitchen, back down the long entrance hallway and through an arch framed by two funky old-fashioned sconces, was the living room, spacious and irregularly rectangular, with light flooding in from two big back windows. The center of the far wall bulged into the room like a semicircular column; it was an odd architectural detail, and at first Susan thought there might be a pillar behind it. Closer inspection revealed it to be an air shaft, separating 56 Cranberry Street from the house next door. It even had two decent-size windows, which let in yet more light.

“Very strange, I know,” said Andrea of the shaft, tapping on one of its windows with a big costume-jewelry gold ring she wore on her pinky. “It runs from the roof all the way down to the basement. You’ll see when we go upstairs, it cuts through the bathroom up there. Lots of light, though, lets in lots of light.”

“Cool,” said Susan, and Alex peered through one of the windows, craning his neck to look up and down the shaft.

“My best guess is, it was a dumbwaiter when this house was first built,” Andrea continued. “Run drinks from the kitchen up to the second floor, that sort of thing. One time a bird got in there somehow and couldn’t get out. Flapped around and made the most pitiful noises until it died. Awful. Just awful.”

Even Alex couldn’t criticize the living room, considering their current apartment didn’t even have one. While Andrea stood with hands on hips in the archway and Emma walked the room’s periphery, playing some complicated game of counting steps, Susan slipped next to him and squeezed his hand.

“What are you thinking?” she whispered.

Before he could respond, Andrea strode across the room and pulled open a door in the left rear corner—a small door, painted the same color as the wall, so innocuous that Susan hadn’t even realized it was there.

“Back here is this funny little room,” she said, gesturing them over for a look. “I call it the bonus room, because it’s sort of, you know, a bit of something extra. It’s what we would have called the ‘sewing room,’ when I was a child. Of course, when I was a child we were sewing sweaters for our pet dinosaurs.”

“Pet dinosaurs!” Emma shrieked, raising her hands to her mouth in exaggerated amazement. “Whaaaat?!”

“This one, I like,” said Andrea, patting Emma on the head while Alex smiled.

Susan stepped into the bonus room. It was barely a room at all, really, more of an overgrown closet, with the one door and a single window, letting in a steady and unbroken stream of golden light.

This is it, Susan thought, experiencing such a powerful wave of joy that she had to clamp her hands to her mouth to keep from whooping aloud. This is it!

She’d had second thoughts galore since leaving her job last year. Second thoughts, third thoughts, and more—it seemed so audacious, so unrealistic, so selfish, after all this time to abandon her career and “go back to her painting.” But she had done it. She had worked up the nerve to tell Alex what she was considering and found him to be not only understanding, but incredibly supportive: “Of course,” he’d said. “If that’s what you want, we’ll make it work.” She’d given her notice and gone to Sam’s to supply herself with new brushes, new oils and pastels and turpentine. And then… somehow, the subsequent months had flown by, and Susan found one reason after another to put off starting. She’d gotten involved in a friend’s run for city council, spent a month going door to door with pamphlets, collecting signatures; Emma had been seriously ill for five days, ended up at New York-Presbyterian one harrowing night with an IV line; they’d gone to Alex’s parents for a week in July; and then of course she’d decided their apartment was too small, and they had to move.

Things kept interfering—or, as Susan knew very well, she let things keep interfering, so that she wouldn’t have to face this enormous life change she’d set up for herself. But now, in this room…

When she was at Legal Aid, counting the hours until she could go home, feeling like a fraud and a liar, her toes throbbing in her pinchy black work shoes, she would indulge flights of fancy in which she stood painting on a sunny midmorning, bathed in a shaft of sunlight and lost in a cloud of artistic effort. On such occasions it was just this kind of room in which she always imagined herself.

God, Susan thought, tears welling in her eyes. I don’t even think it was this kind of room. It was this exact room.

“I didn’t even mention it in the ad,” said Andrea, as she and Alex ducked into the room and stood next to Susan. “I’d feel like a huckster, because you can hardly count it as a room. Good for storage, though. Or a nursery.”

“Or a studio,” Susan said softly.

“Oh? Are you an artist?”

“Well, it’s kind of a long story. I was—I mean, I am. But—”

“Yes,” interrupted Alex, throwing his arm over her shoulder. “She is.”

Emma was getting antsy, so Susan set her up in the center of the empty living room, producing from her oversized pocketbook a box of crayons, a stack of construction paper, and a small snack of dried fruit and cheese.

“Stay in this room, please,” said Alex, and Emma nodded without looking up, already deeply engaged in her coloring.

“My goodness, she’s a happy duck, isn’t she?” said Andrea as she led Susan and Alex up the narrow uncarpeted staircase to the second floor. “Howard and I never had any of our own, but I’ve always loved children. Even the miserable snot-nose types, but especially happy little ducks like yours.”

The second floor was really just two large rooms, a master bedroom and a second bedroom, separated by the staircase landing and a decent linen closet. The upstairs bathroom, where the air shaft ended in a small arced skylight, was large, with room for both a shower stall and a full jetted tub. At the sight of it, Alex whispered a mock-lascivious “hey now” into Susan’s neck, and she nudged him playfully. The master bedroom, like the kitchen downstairs, faced Cranberry Street and was similarly bathed in warm and generous light.

“All these windows are double paned, by the by,” said Andrea, rapping on the sturdy glass. “Noise reducing. Work like the devil. I got ’em downstairs in my apartment, too.”

On the way out, Susan asked to see the bonus room one more time. While Alex spoke to Andrea in his low, all-business voice, she walked in a slow, enchanted circle around the tiny room and then stopped to rest her hands on the windowsill and gaze outside. The small back lot was separated from the mirror-image lot, belonging to a house on Orange Street, by a weathered wooden fence. The lot was overgrown with wild grass and dotted with bent and spindly trees; Susan wondered which of these gnarled beauties she would paint first.

From all the way down the hall she heard Andrea’s voice saying, “So I’m sorry about that…” and then something she couldn’t hear, to which Alex replied, “… I know how it is…” Then Andrea laughed a dry rustling titter and said, “Well, the less said about them, the better.” Emma could be heard giggling and hooting, having coronated herself princess of the living room, with a host of invisible subjects.

Turning from the window, Susan was suddenly struck by a sour unsavory odor, a nasty staleness in the closed air of the room. She crinkled her nose, and in the next breath it was gone.

She shut the door of the bonus room behind her, gathered up her daughter, and found Andrea and Alex in the kitchen, framed by the slanting sunlight. Andrea was nodding vigorously, eyes narrowed with interest, leaning into the conversation.

“A photographer?” she said. “Is that a fact?

“It is,” Alex said.

“Two artists! My humble abode will be quite the atelier.”

Susan glanced uneasily at her husband. Alex was not an art photographer—not anymore. Like Susan, he had begun his postcollege life a decade ago with high artistic aspirations. Unlike Susan, who had folded up her easel after eighteen months of desultory effort and gone to law school as her parents had always intended, Alex had bopped along for a while, enjoying just enough success to encourage him but never enough to make a living. What he had found instead was an unusual niche in the world of commercial photography, at which he had been unexpectedly successful—so successful, in fact, that he hadn’t taken what he would consider a “real” photograph in years.

“I’m not really an artist,” Alex told Andrea. His tone was light, unoffended, and Susan exhaled. “I own a small company called Gem-Flex. We take pictures of diamonds and other precious stones, for jewelry catalogs and advertisements.”

“Really? How interesting!”

“Ah. That’s where you’re wrong,” said Alex, giving Andrea an easy lopsided grin. “But it pays the bills.”

Back outside on the stoop, they all shook hands. Andrea knelt with some effort to give Emma a hug, which the girl surprisingly accepted.

“Thank you so much for showing the apartment to us,” said Susan. “We’ll be in touch soon, OK?”

“Take your time, take your time,” said Andrea, and coughed. “But I’ve got a good feeling about you people. I do.”

They had Emma all buckled in when Alex turned back and called, “Oh, hey, Andrea? One more thing.”

Susan squeezed her eyes shut: here we go. He was fishing for a problem, for a reason to exercise his magical with-you-not-working-right-now veto, to keep them entombed in their one-bedroom on Twelfth Street for all eternity. The place is amazing, Alex, she thought. This is where we’re going to live. Just accept it.

“You seem like you’d be a great landlord,” he was saying. “But if there are, I don’t know, problems, with the heat or the toilet or whatever—”

Andrea interrupted with her high, throaty, barking laugh.

“Oh, good heavens! No. These ancient hands will not be plunging your toilet.” She held up thin, knotty fingers. “There’s a nice gentleman, an old friend, who is very handy and takes care of all that sort of thing for me. He can handle anything. I promise.”

“Oh,” said Alex, seeming mollified. “Well, great, then.”

That’s my girl, thought Susan, and beamed up at Andrea, who waved.

“All right, folks. See you soon.”

It was three or four blocks down Cranberry Street to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where Emma hopped out of the stroller for some much-needed running around. Susan and Alex leaned on the railing and stood side by side, gazing out across the broad expanse of the East River at the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, and the skyline hole where the World Trade Center had once stood. Susan glanced furtively at her husband over the top of her Ray-Bans, trying to assess his state of mind. It was turning into a hot day, and she wore not only her sunglasses but a big floppy hat to protect herself from the sun. She had sensitive blue eyes and the kind of pale Scandinavian skin that burned easily; Alex, rugged and dark, had no such problems. He never bothered to wear sunscreen, which made Susan envious and, occasionally, mildly irritated.

They turned their backs to the railing and saw Emma streak by, shrieking merrily, in fervid pursuit of an adorable little boy in blue Crocs and a windbreaker, his hair in neat cornrows.

“All right, dear, moment of truth,” Susan said at last. “What do you think?”

“Well, I think a lot of things.” He let out a long breath and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Did you hear? Her last tenants ran out on her, so she’s asking for three months’ security deposit.”

“Three months? Jesus.” Susan did some quick math in her head. “So that’s—”

“It’s ridiculous, is what it is.”

“Can we afford it?”

“We can, because the rent is crazy low. I mean, really insanely low. In fact—” Alex gave Susan his most serious pretend-serious face. “It’s probably haunted, right? Gotta be haunted.”

Susan cracked up and rested her head on his shoulder. She had a good feeling about where this conversation was going. “Totally,” she said. “Built on the only Indian burial ground in Brooklyn Heights.”

“Shame,” he said. “Because otherwise it’s fabulous.”

“It is, right? And a great neighborhood. And an easy commute for you.”

“Yup.”

“And, it’s got that… what did she call it?” Susan pretended to try and remember. “The bonus room. It’ll make a great studio, I think.”

“Right. Now, did you notice? No washer/dryer.”

“Eh. I’ll live.”

Susan looked around for Emma and found her right away, on a nearby bench with the little boy, chatting merrily with a woman Susan guessed was the boy’s mother. Susan pointed to herself and then to Emma, mouthing “she’s mine,” and the other woman smiled back and waved cheerily.

God, Susan thought. I love it here.

“So, OK,” Susan said, turning back to Alex. “Why don’t we sleep on it tonight, and…” She trailed off and broke into a surprised smile. Alex had his phone out.

“Screw it,” he said, grinning. “Let’s call her right now.”

Susan’s heart leaped in her chest.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We both know we’re going to take it. So let’s just take it.”

As Alex dialed Andrea Scharfstein, Susan felt a sharp sting on her calf and bent to smack at the mosquito. She nailed it, and her palm came up bearing a thick bloody smear.

Andrea sent the lease three hours later to Susan via e-mail, exactly as she had promised. After Emma was asleep and after Alex left for a long-scheduled and eagerly anticipated game of Texas Hold ’Em with some college cronies, Susan sat down to review it.

“I’ll take a look when I get home,” Alex promised.

“Sure you will,” said Susan, and gave him a kiss as he headed out the door.

He would, naturally, be drunk later, or at least buzzed, and the truth was she didn’t really need his help. She was, after all, the lawyer. Well, Susan thought with a smile, as the document emerged from their sleek miniature laser printer, former lawyer.

The lease was obviously cut and pasted from a sample document floating around on the Internet. Across the top margin it said: SAMPLE OF A NEW YORK STATE RENTAL AGREEMENT, MODIFY AS NEEDED. But Andrea had not, so far as Susan could tell, modified it in the slightest. Still, it took her more than an hour to read through everything, not counting ten minutes of comforting Emma, who woke crying from an upsetting dream: in it, she said, while Susan kissed the tears from her cheeks, “Big Grandpa was chasing me”—Alex’s grandfather had died seven months ago—“and his face was all melty, like it was big chunks coming off of him.” Susan had no idea what could have inspired such an unsettling vision of decomposing, sliding flesh. She got Emma a glass of water and sang “Little Eliza Jane,” stroking her soft brown hair until she fell asleep.

Alex got home after midnight, mildly but pleasantly drunk, rambling giddily about the monster pot he’d won by making trip sevens on the river.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. But nice work,” said Susan. “You ready to sign a lease?”

He grinned. “Totally.” Alex fell into the seat next to her and grabbed the pen. His sleeves were rolled up unevenly, and he smelled like cigars. “Oh! Wait! Shit. There was this guy at Anton’s, a lawyer, named Kodaly—Kodiak? Something. Starts with a K.”

“Uh-huh?”

“He said the person has to, like, promise the place doesn’t have bedbugs.”

“Well, no. Not exactly.” Susan turned the pages of the document and found the clause the mysterious Kodiak was referring to. “Here. ‘The landlord or lessor warrants that the premises so leased or rented and all areas used in connection therewith in common with other tenants or residents are fit for human habitation.’ Blah, blah, blah, et cetera. It’s called a warrant of habitability, and…” Susan stopped. “Um, excuse me?”

“What?” Alex asked with sing-song innocence. He had leaned over in his chair toward hers and was busily working his hands into her shirt, fumbling for her breasts. Susan leaned back into his arms.

“I thought you wanted to hear about the bedbugs.”

“Not so much, as it turns out.”

As always, Alex fell asleep almost instantly after sex, sprawled out naked on top of the sheets; Susan lay awake, reading and listening to him breathe softly. After knowing him eight years, and being married for five, she still could not say whether or not she found her husband handsome. Attractive, yes: Alex was tall and solidly constructed, with dark hair and coloring, and he radiated a kind of easy magnetism— especially when he was smiling, which was most of the time. But there was also a kind of roughness about him, a coarseness in his features when you caught them in the wrong light. And the largeness of his body and features, the same largeness that made Susan feel safe and protected when he laughed and threw his arms around her, was a little scary when he was being sullen and aggressive.

Susan pulled on her robe, poked her head into the curtained nook to check on Emma—sleeping soundly now, looking startlingly like her father in her open-mouthed dead-to-the-world repose—and padded back to the kitchen table and her MacBook. She e-mailed Andrea and said the lease would be on the way back tomorrow with the appropriate checks; she e-mailed their management company to let them know this would be their last month on their month-to-month lease; she went to the website of Moishe’s, a moving company she had used in the past, filled out their detailed move-request form, and pressed “submit.”

It was now 2:47 a.m. on August 16, 2010. They were traveling to visit Alex’s parents on Labor Day weekend, so on the move-request form Susan had indicated they’d like to move to Brooklyn on September 12, a Sunday.

3.

The week after Labor Day, the week preceding their move, the news was dominated by a grisly murder that had occurred in Downtown Brooklyn, just one neighborhood over from the Heights. As was relentlessly reported on 1010 WINS and WCS-880, the twenty-four-hour news stations Susan listened to compulsively—especially when she was at home working on a large project, like packing—a young mother had killed her three-month-old twins. It was an unsettling crime, irresistible to the news stations because of the horrific and strange way the children had been killed; and, as Alex pointed out, because the alleged murderess was young, privileged, and white. The woman, whose name was Anna Mara Phelps, had taken her two daughters in their big black Phil and Ted’s double stroller to the roof of their sixteen-story luxury building and then rolled it off the edge, with the infants still inside.

Horror-struck bystanders had watched the giant carriage flipping end over end as it plummeted toward Livingston Street, where it shattered, killing the babies on impact. Phelps was charged with double homicide and considered likely to plead guilty by reason of insanity. On the day of the move, while Alex supervised the crew from Moishe’s, Susan took Emma to buy picture hangers at a hardware store on Court and Livingston. She stopped to stare at the spot where the stroller had landed, now marked by a massive shrine of flowers and toys and dolls.

“Well,” Alex said sardonically when she described the mournful scene, “welcome to the neighborhood.”

The movers were done by quarter to five, and Alex dipped into his low, all-business voice to thank each one for his hard work and slip him a twenty. Then Emma, Susan, and Alex wandered around their new home, navigating the monolithic wardrobe boxes, upside-down furniture, and lumpy duffel bags filled with clothing, pillowcases, and knick-knacks.

“Well, folks, we’ve got our work cut out for us,” said Susan.

“First we get the TV set up, right?” Alex replied, half joking.

“Where’s Mr. Boogle?” said Emma.

“We didn’t put Mr. Boogle in a box, honey. He’s around.”

Just before six, Andrea Scharfstein knocked on the door holding a bottle of cheap champagne and an autumnal bouquet in a disposable plastic vase.

“You made it!” she growled pleasantly.

“That is so sweet of you,” said Susan, and she meant it. The last time she’d been welcomed, when she and Alex moved in together on Union Square, it was with a three-page bulleted list of rules and regulations that had been slid under the door by someone from the management company, even though they were home at the time. Andrea’s hair was tied back with a green cotton headband, and she wore a plain blue sheath dress. Susan reflected in passing how pretty she must have been, years ago—and still was, in her old-lady way, with wide deep-set eyes and high cheekbones.

“Hi, Andrea!” piped Emma.

“Hello, young lady.”

“Did you bring your pet dinosaur?”

“So clever, this one is! You should be on television, dear heart.”

Alex invited Andrea to join them for dinner, but she declined, to Susan’s relief.

“Oh, please. Get settled first. Another time.” On her way out, Andrea gestured to a thin stack of take-out menus she had left on top of a box, and Susan noticed that her hand trembled just the slightest bit. “Try the vegetarian Chinese place, on Montague. I forget what it’s called, but it’s good.”

The vegetarian Chinese place on Montague Street was called the Greens, as it turned out, and it was good. They ordered vegetarian moo goo gai pan, miso mushroom soup, and something called General Tso’s Soy Protein, which Alex proclaimed “vastly better than it sounds.” After dinner they dug up towels and shower stuff, plus enough books and toys for Emma to have a decent playtime before she bustled happily off to bed.

“I don’t miss old house at all,” Emma intoned solemnly as Susan tucked her carefully into her white IKEA bed, which the movers had reassembled before leaving.

“Really, sweets? It’s OK if you do”

“Of course it’s OK,” said Emma, her eyes already drifting shut. “But I don’t.”

The movers had also reassembled the big queen-size bed in the master bedroom, a process that Susan had anxiously overseen. The bed was very possibly her favorite possession, and she had agonized over its purchase for several months for reasons both aesthetic and financial. It was a sleek low-slung modernist beauty with a sturdy slatted frame and a black-oak headboard, sold by Design Within Reach for $2,550 plus tax—a significant chunk of change, even back when she was working.

True to form, Alex had protested, mildly, that their old double bed was just fine. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Well, I’ve had it since college, for one thing. Plus we’re two people. We need a queen.”

“But aren’t doubles for two people? Two? Double?”

Susan had prevailed, arguing in part that a decent bed would help her sleep. She was a chronic insomniac, unlike Alex, who bragged that he could fall asleep in a muddy ditch or stay sleeping through artillery fire—a gift that had been maddening to Susan during Emma’s infancy, when he slumbered peacefully through many a late-night screaming session.

After Emma was down they puttered around for a couple hours, drinking Andrea’s champagne from plastic cups and unpacking a few boxes marked UNPACK ME FIRST! Susan found the box of perishables and arranged its contents in the pantry while Alex focused on his treasured kitchen gadgets: the coffee grinder, the rice cooker, the nonstick frying pans, the knife block and full set of Henckels Twin Select cooking knives. Finally he yawned, announced that he was exhausted, and headed upstairs.

“I can’t believe we have two floors,” he said, pausing midway up the steps and gesturing expansively at all their space, in the manner of a Roman emperor. “Nice work, Sue.”

Susan finished her champagne and poured herself another cup, adding new items to her to-do list, until her eyes were drooping shut and she admitted to herself there was nothing else that could realistically be accomplished that night. She went upstairs to the bathroom, unzipped her gold toiletries bag, and fished around until she found the Altoids tin in which she kept her Ambien. She counted the pills, each one a perfect little white oblong: there were twenty-seven ten-milligram tablets left, out of an original stash of fifty, prescribed eighteen months ago with instructions to take half a pill when anxiety made it impossible to asleep. On nights like this one, however, with her mind racing through all the upcoming tasks, Susan gave herself a dispensation. Carefully she split a pill with her fingernail, put one half back in the Altoids tin and placed the other half on her tongue, cupped her hands to collect a scoopful of water from the faucet, and washed it down.

But if the Ambien worked, it didn’t work nearly enough. The minute Susan’s head hit the pillow, her mind busily began annotating and revising the to-do list, which she could see in her mind’s eye as clearly as if it were displayed on the iPhone screen in front of her. Unpacking, of course, was at the top of the list, broken down into several subcategories: Emma’s things, her and Alex’s things, kitchen things, sheets and towels. Now that they had more space, they would need more furniture, and there was a sublist for that, too: small end-tables for the living room, some sort of sideboard for the kitchen.

…and could they afford new furniture? How much had the movers ended up charging? Alex would know the exact figure, but Susan couldn’t remember—four thousand? five?—plus that massive security deposit—moves were a money sieve, Alex was right…

Susan’s restless mind jumped to the universe of small activities, mundane but crucial, that went with setting up a new household: the making of keys, the filling out of address-change forms, the search for good grocery stores. It was to Susan, of course, that most of these tasks would fall.

…since you’re not working right now… since you’re not working right now…

She looked at her husband, his thick torso, his face squashed in his pillow, a thin line of drool connecting his lower lip to the collar of his ancient Pearl Jam T-shirt, and wondered just how angry he really was at her, just below, or not even below, the surface, how much resentment he harbored. Alex had artistic ambitions, too, after all, which he had long ago boxed up and stashed away, just as she had. But now she was taking hers back out again, unpacking the dreams of her youth like antique linens from an old chest, while he was stuck shooting pictures of watches and diamond rings, pretending to take pride in it… supporting her and their child, her and her dilettante ambitions.

Of course he’s resentful, he must be, he…

Susan took a deep breath. Alex had never expressed any such feelings to her, of course—everything he had said on the subject was quite to the contrary (“To tell you the truth, Sue, I think it’s a great idea!”)

But that wasn’t good enough for Susan, lying awake in the Brooklyn dark in the middle of the night, surrounded by a shadowy forest of wardrobe boxes and furniture in an unfamiliar room. Surely Alex thought terrible things of her, surely he seethed every time he looked at her. Why, otherwise, had the question of more children never been raised between them? Somehow the time to bring it up always seemed wrong. Somehow it always felt like if she did bring it up, he would launch into a list of reasons why a bigger family was impossible right now, would slam the door on the question, just as he had slammed the door shut on the artists’ loft with a harbor view in Red Hook…

…oh, hell, Susan, you don’t need that place anymore, you got this place, remember?

This thought, vaguely comforting though it was, led her back along her twisting maze of anxiety, to yet more things that needed to be done: find out when recycling goes out, find a nonfilthy Laundromat—no washer/dryer, remember?—look into preschool programs for Emma for January—she had secured a slot at a well-regarded place in the Flatiron District, but now Susan had wrenched up the family and moved them here, for no reason, for no good reason…

Susan sat up, panting, clutching a hand to her chest. “Shit,” she said to the darkness.

The bedside clock read 2:34. Susan rose, stepped into the bathroom, and took the other half of the Ambien.

Reluctant to return to bed, Susan turned the other way out of the bathroom, slipped past the linen closet, and creaked open the door of Emma’s new room. Looking down at the peaceful, sleeping figure of her daughter, Susan felt almost unbearably in love with her. Emma’s little chest rose and fell, rose and fell. She had her father’s thick dark hair and big brown eyes, but her small frame and sometimes-playful/sometimes-hesitant spirit were all Susan.

“Oh, sweet pea,” she murmured. Gingerly she eased the covers down from where Emma had tugged them up under her chin. She insisted on being tucked in so tightly, even in the late-summer heat.

Then Susan glanced at the window and gasped. “Oh God! Oh my God!“ she said, loudly, scaring herself in the quiet dark of the bedroom.

Emma stirred but didn’t wake. Susan stepped closer to the window and gaped, wide-eyed, at where a person, or the shadow of a person, was standing in the backyard, leaning against the rickety back fence and staring up. The man was massive. In his hand was the long barrel of a gun, or some kind of club, or… something… in the darkness, from this distance, it was impossible to say.

“Alex!” Susan shouted, but he didn’t answer. Susan’s heart was knocking at her ribs, and she clutched at the windowsill. “Alex! God damn it, Alex!”

Emma shifted and moaned in her sleep. Susan opened her mouth to scream again—she would have to go in there and shake him awake. But then she looked again, and there was nothing—no one—in the yard.

Whatever Susan had seen, or thought she had seen, it was gone.