Into the Night

“I mean more than that. I mean she was alone with herself, completely alone. She wouldn’t let people get near her. I liked her, I felt good seeing her in the hallway or on the stairs, I’d always pass the time of day with her, but I never got anywhere near her. I don’t think anybody did. I don’t suppose anybody could.”

“I see.”

“I think she was sorrowful,” the woman said. “She didn’t broadcast her sorrows but I think it was there all the same. I think something or somebody caused her deep pain, and I don’t think she ever got over that pain.”

“Maybe she would have,” Madeline said. “If she’d had a longer life.”

“Maybe,” the woman said. And then, after a moment, “But you know, there are some kinds of pain you never get over.”

“Yes,” Madeline said. “I know.”

“Well,” the woman said. “If there’s nothing else, I have things I ought to be doing. A house like this, there’s always something that needs doing.”

“Could I—”

“What?”

“I’d like to stay here.”

The woman stared at her. “You want to rent her room? You want to live where she lived?”

It hadn’t occurred to her, but now she allowed herself to entertain the thought. Could she move right into Starr’s life that way?

The thought was not without a certain appeal, but it didn’t really make sense. She didn’t want to become Starr Bartlett, which was anyway impossible on the face of it. No, she wanted not to live as Starr but to live for her. To perform some service for Starr that the dead woman could not perform for herself.

But what service? What could that be, and how could she ever discover it?

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t want to rent the room. I think you should rent it to somebody, though. Clear it out and rent it. The way it is now, it’s a tomb for an absent corpse.”

“Yes,” the woman said. “Yes, you’re right.”

“But in the meantime, I’d like to spend a little time here,” she went on. “I’d just like to be alone here.”

“Alone?”

“Well, virtually alone. Alone with Starr.”

“You’ve had your sorrows too,” the woman said pointedly. “Same as she did.”

“Maybe.”

“I guess it’d be all right for you to spend a little time here,” the woman said. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt anything. Except—”

“Except what?”

“I don’t like to say it.”

Madeline waited.

“Sometimes a person’ll decide to... do away with theirselves. And rather than do it where they live, they’ll take a room just for that purpose. That happened here once. A man came, no luggage, said it was being shipped, said he’d pay a week’s rent in advance, and that very first night he took pills and died in his sleep.” The woman avoided Madeline’s eyes. “And you,” she said, “wanting to see a dead woman’s room, and wanting to be alone in it. I don’t think you’d be wanting to do that, and I didn’t want to say anything, but I was the one walked in on that man and discovered his body there. One look and I knew he wasn’t sleeping. He didn’t look anything like somebody who was sleeping. His face was so blue it was near to purple.”

“How awful for you.”

“They said he was sick with something that would have killed him before long. He wanted an easy death, and he came here to spare his loved ones the horror of finding him. But he evidently thought it was all right for a total stranger to have that same horror.”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Madeline said gently.

“I know you’re not. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I... had to.”

“I understand.”

“You stay here as long as you like,” the woman said. “I don’t know what good it could do you, but it won’t do anybody any harm, will it? Spend all the time you want. I left her room as she left it. I tidied up just a little. The police were through her things and they don’t always take the time to be neat. There were some things they left on the floor that I straightened up and put on the bed there.”

“I see.”

“As if she wouldn’t want her things left messy. As if she cares now what her room looks like. But she was neat, you know. She kept to herself and she kept her things neat. So it only seems right to keep them neat now.”

“Yes.”

“I think you’re right, what you said before. Soon as I have the strength for it I’ll pack up her things. Instead of waiting for somebody to come for them, I’ll just ship them back home to her mother. And I’ll rent this room out.”

Madeline nodded.

“But for now,” the woman said, “spend what time you want here. Maybe her spirit’s here, or a trace of it. Maybe you can have some kind of contact with her. There’s stranger things than that happening every day of the year.”

Madeline stood there motionless for a long time after, just where she’d left her. Listening to the echoing, inside her heart, of something that she’d said just now. Heavy and hollow, cold and lonely, sad and blue.

Its tough to die when you’re young. Like a stray dog.