things with you. Make sure everything is going smoothly at home.”
So that’s how I met Chelsea, my “sitter” who I later found out was a social worker, paid for by the state. Chelsea was a local from Nelsonville who went to Hocking Community College and I was part of her practicum for her social work degree. She was young and religious and she smoked Marlboros on our porch whenever Mom wasn’t home, which was a lot.
Garvey would’ve probably had fewer problems after finding the girl had he not been such a private person. He always jogged early in the morning when the bike path was clear of rollerblading college kids and families on bikes. A physical examiner gave a name to Garvey’s behavior: Dämmerschlaf, twilight sleep. He didn’t phone the authorities immediately, but two hours later, after he’d returned home, washed the slick sweat from his body and fallen asleep on his couch. While he lay there in the room above my bed, flies circled the girl’s bloated body. Asleep, he dreamed that he was watching an open air movie with Maynard when a bug bit his neck. He swatted and pulled his hand away and looked at the crushed exoskeleton of an ant in the weak light. He felt another bite, then another until he realized that he was sitting on an anthill. His legs were covered in ants. Then he woke up and called the police.
I can remember thinking, where does our renter’s half of the house start and ours end? Is it the staircase, the landing? When do our walls blend into his? For the first semester, Mr. Garvey was away. I suppose it would have been easier had we had footsteps or jingling keys at the door or a face to connect to the place, to establish boundaries. But the space remained silent.
“I’m sure your Mom has a key,” Chelsea said. We had been talking about Mr. Garvey’s mail, strange letters from France and Japan, letters bearing the willowy lines of university insignias, crests and coats-of-arms from California, the UK, Singapore, places I’d only heard of. He got great periodicals, The Smithsonian and National Geographic, and I’d put them in mom’s wicker basket in the bathroom and read them cover to cover. In time, though, Mom would make me relinquish all of these, haul them upstairs in front of his door and drop them in a cardboard box left over from our move.
I asked, “Why would Mom have a key?”
“You own the place,” Chelsea said. “What if you wanted to break down a wall or repaint it or something? What if,” Chelsea said, shaking her finger for emphasis, “what if someone was squatting in there?”
“Squatting?”
“She would have to have a key.”
But Chelsea lost interest after about a week, leaving me with an image of a homeless man squatting like a frog, cooking a hot dog over a makeshift fire above our living room. As the weather cooled and the forced air heating came on and the barometer swung south, sounds would come from renter’s apartment: small squeaks or taps, like someone rapping their knuckles on a desk. The squatter was there, I was sure of it. Soon he’d make a noise, take a false step, and Mom wouldn’t be able to ignore it. She’d march upstairs and have to throw him out.
The next day, Garvey canceled his music theory course and all of his meetings. He needed time to decompress. He was a suspect. He’d never been a suspect before. It made him feel guilty. At the Burrito Buggy he paid for his lunch with a one-dollar bill by mistake and the kid with the bandana said “it’s more than a buck” in a way that felt accusatory. When Garvey walked his dog and saw two girls hanging upside down from the monkey bars he turned away. He did not see the girls’ shirts fall almost to their heads, didn’t hear their laughter or smell their bubble-gum breath. Suspicion. He started to live in his mind, imagining how a true predator might feel. The worst was the questioning. “Where were you?” or “Why did you come back to the apartment?” There was time Garvey couldn’t account for. He hadn’t known how long he slept. He’d been alone the night before. And then there was the little detail of his divorce. That they had fallen out of love wasn’t enough. Was there another relationship? A perversion? Would they mind if they checked his computer? That he was capable of crime, this little organist who could play scales with his feet, was too vulgar to consider. Now, walking around with his dog, he wondered if he’d taken the wrong approach. Here he was again, alone with his thoughts. He should surround himself with people, share his feelings. Darla said he was too insular, that she felt she could never reach him, that he stroked the keys of his organ more than he touched her. He needed to live outside himself, to find those things that people use to measure the passage of time: sports events, lunch with friends, yoga class, socials. He had his professional contacts, the music journals and recitals, his students. But friends for him were like lapsed contracts. He’d been invited, sure, invited for coffee, for lunch, but there was his tenure review, then his divorce, and now he had the habit of taking his coffee in his office, of eating alone, of walking his dog. Every Monday and Wednesday he used to have lunch at Seven Sauces with other faculty food snobs. He would go again. Yes, tomorrow. If only he could endure their questions.
On one of the rare weekdays when Mom was home, I helped her clean out our gutters. I hadn’t thought much about Garvey or the apartment for a while. It had been raining nonstop for a week and our gutters were clogged so badly that the water ran right over the edge, surrounding our porch like a bead curtain, and turning the front flowerbeds into giant mud puddles. When the sun finally emerged, Mom borrowed our neighbor’s extension ladder. “Hold the ladder and don’t move,” she told me. She had an ice cream bucket for the leaves, and when she climbed the ladder, she always tested her step first, then hoisted herself up carefully like she was a rock climber without a belay. The bucket thwacked against the aluminum ladder and when she got to the top, she reached with her right hand to pick up leaves, but she couldn’t seem to hold herself back from the ladder enough to put them in the bucket. She wouldn’t let her left hand, the one holding the bucket, go.
“I’m coming down.” Mom said. She’d given up putting leaves in the bucket and had just let them fall. At the bottom, we both looked up to the gutters. Mom put one terry-cotton-gloved hand against her forehead and sighed. She had only cleared about a foot and she was shaking.
“Are you afraid of heights?” I asked.
She looked at me. I hadn’t ever thought of my mother as afraid of anything. It seemed like something I should have known: mom’s one weakness, her own Achilles’ heel, afraid of heights, acrophobia. She took off her gloves and threw them on the ground. The cream cotton was grey and sopping. “Your father always used to do this sort of thing,” she said.
I circled the ladder for a while and kicked one of the clumps of leaves. Mom wasn’t coming out. I slid Mom’s gloves onto my hands. They looked like flippers. I tried to remember Dad cleaning the gutters. It would have been a year ago now: autumn in Ottawa. I pictured him at the top of the ladder, expertly flinging leaves into a garbage can below. He wouldn’t use a tiny bucket. He would wear his steel-toed boots, the ones with the green triangles on the side and his work coat—an old barn jacket covered with paint and motor oil stains. Fling fling fling, a little wrist flick like making a basket. I missed this man. I took off Mom’s ridiculously large gloves and climbed onto our roof.
It was my first time.
The gutter leaves were black and slick. I tossed them off the side of our house where they peppered our lawn that was still green, even in November. I took my time, slinging the leaves out and away. Then I got to the north side, the gabled side where the two shuttered windows looked out onto our back yard.
It had been a couple weeks since I’d given up trying to get into the upstairs apartment, bugging my mom and nosing around for the keys. And here I was, standing on my roof in front of one of the gables, opening the shutters to reveal the window, raked with peeling paint. It was unlocked. I could see it clearly, the cupped half of the brass latch free from the upper window. And loose. Without hesitation, I pulled on the window,
