Not long after our twins turned three, my wife, Anna, accepted a transfer to the West Coast. The opportunity was lucrative, but that wasn’t why we were eager to go. Anna had spent that March and April involved with another man, a colleague, someone whose name I’d never heard until she told me about him. She said that it had been a terrible mistake, that it had only made her hate herself, and that this person had now begun almost to frighten her, continuing to call after she’d asked him to stop, declaring that he’d leave his family, demanding to speak with me. I was surprised to find that, more than anything, I felt sorry for her. The episode was the culmination of a long withdrawal that each of us had made from the other—for some time, our mutual unhappiness had felt like too delicate or intimate a subject to broach. I knew I wasn’t blameless. The hard-to-fathom part, really, was that she’d hidden it from me. It felt so old-fashioned, predicated on such a rigid understanding of who we could be together. In bed, in the dark, I told her that, if we wanted to try again, we would have to redraw the map. We spent the days that followed talking more openly than we had in years—about our girls, our childhoods, old lovers, doubts and desires we’d each been afraid to confess.
In San Francisco, we found a house in the Outer Sunset, four blocks east of the Pacific. The neighborhood was row after row of small town houses, all with the same footprint, in sun-bleached pastels. Most of them had been built in the thirties, which was not long after the area had been known as the Outside Lands—desolate and windswept, just scattered people growing vegetables in the shifting dunes. We’d been warned against the Sunset because of the cold and fog that often settled there. But on clear days we woke to pristine ocean views. There was a walking path by the beach that led north to Golden Gate Park and south to the zoo. The girls would run ahead, holding hands, leaning close sometimes to whisper, and we’d push the stroller behind them. They could talk with just the barest application of language; they really did have that preternatural intimacy I’d always heard about in twins. After they’d gone to bed, Anna and I would sit on the deck with some wine or a joint and watch the sunset. It felt good to be there. I told her which of my friends I’d always been slightly in love with. She told me that she’d never stopped silently reciting the nightly prayers she’d learned as a child. I asked her once what she’d wanted from her relationship with this other person, what she’d hoped might be possible. The question made her laugh. She said, Ecstasy, a miracle—I don’t know.
Weekdays, Anna dropped the girls at school before driving to work. I made an office out of our downstairs mother-in-law unit, built into the garage’s back corner, and stayed home. Soon I felt attuned to the place, the way it sounded and felt across time. Surfers jogged down the hill every morning, carrying their boards. Deep in the night, sometimes, the sinking moon lit up the ocean. People were friendly. Hal and Eleni were our neighbors to the right. Early on, they rang our bell with flowers and a cheerfully annotated map of the neighborhood, printed from Google in black-and-white. Across the street from us was another young family who seemed very nice; we resolved to take our kids to the playground together someday but never did. And, in the house to our left, there was an elderly woman who lived alone. Hal said that her name was Bing.
Weeks passed before we met Bing, though we often heard her—she had a booming cough and a landline phone with an old-fashioned clapper that seemed to be mounted on our shared wall. All night long, she played her television at earsplitting levels. I assumed she slept in front of it. Now and then, I’d see her from our bedroom window, hanging laundry on her back patio. She was hunched and overweight and used a walker, and the whole sad spectacle—the way she’d labor to get the basket of wet clothes out the door at the back of her garage, let it drop onto the plastic table there, then hang each article, one by one—was hard to watch. I’ve always been a bad sleeper, and sometimes, as I was lying awake at four or five, a sudden glare through the window would startle me: the motion-activated spotlight over Bing’s back door. I imagined that if I got out of bed and walked to the window I would see her on the patio, dressed for the day, making her slow, lonely progress at something or other.
One Saturday in September, on our way out the door to Point Reyes with the girls, we found a conversion van parked in front of Bing’s house. A man our age, forty or so, was there, helping Bing up into the back seat of the van. It was our first opportunity to say hello, so we loitered in our driveway as he braced his shoulder against her, rubbing her back very tenderly as she climbed, her entire body trembling. Trying not to watch, I set my eyes on the walker, which stood alone on the sidewalk. The man got Bing seated, helped buckle her in, then jogged over to introduce himself. As we talked, Bing smiled out at us, leaning forward to see through the van’s side door. His name was Henry, he said. He was Bing’s youngest; he’d grown up there in the house beside ours and now lived in Stateline, Nevada, where he was a rock climber. I thought he looked too put-together for that, with his unwrinkled golf shirt tucked into khaki shorts, but the van, I saw, was rugged and full of gear. In that Californian way, to which I was still becoming accustomed, Henry seemed authentically pleased to meet us. He wanted to know if I played tennis. There were courts behind the high school, and he had his racket in the van. He’d come home to take Bing to the doctor, but he’d be around all weekend. Henry was well built, in easy possession of his body; he carefully and politely divided his attention between Anna and me as he spoke. I declined, with regrets. I’m pretty sedentary, I said, except for walks in the woods, things like that. Sure, he said, no problem. When Anna called out to Bing to say that she’d raised a very nice son, Bing responded warmly in Chinese from the back of the van. Before we left, Henry asked if we might exchange numbers. His father had died last year, his brother lived in Denver and his sister in New York, and his mother was stubborn about her independence. It would be a comfort to know that there was someone just next door.
Then, one morning in March, I was at my desk when a sound that had been nagging at me as I read from my laptop drifted to the center of my attention: Bing’s phone. It had been ringing incessantly, I realized, half a dozen calls or more. It stopped, a minute passed, then it started again. I stood, stretched, and walked out of my office, through the garage, and into the foyer of our house, where I pressed my ear to the wall. When the phone rang again, I could feel it against my head. And there was the sound, too, of Bing’s television, played at its soaring overnight volume. But now it was close to noon.
I climbed the stairs to our bedroom and walked to the window. No laundry on Bing’s line. It was misty and cold, a dark shelf of clouds seated atop the ocean. I felt tired, as I always did at that time of day; I was fully remote, working East Coast hours. And I knew that when I checked my phone—which, to prevent distraction, I always left charging in the kitchen—I would find messages from Henry. It was inevitable. He’d explain that his mother wasn’t answering the phone and he was growing worried. His request that I knock on her door would be apologetic but insistent. And when she didn’t answer—of course she wouldn’t; why would she answer her door but not the phone?—he’d tell me where to find a key. Soon I would be on the other side of the wall, slowly climbing Bing’s stairs, calling her name. I had a bitter feeling about it, as if this outcome, this moment, had been waiting for me since I’d first seen Bing, and by extension long before that—since we’d found this house in the Outer Sunset, or since Anna had received the offer to go to California. I watched the ocean for another minute or two, then walked into the kitchen for my phone.
Bing’s house was a bone yellow. There were no succulents in the ground out front, no gourds or pots or small cheerful things. All the curtains were drawn. I thought she’d put her garbage out on Tuesday, but I couldn’t be certain. I’d seen Bing through our kitchen window once, shuffling back from the curb with no walker and the recycling still up by her garage. I’d gone down to offer my arm. She took it, smiling, and we walked together. When I commented on the day, which was cold but bright, she nodded, said something I couldn’t understand, then turned her eyes back to the ground. I looked into her open garage. There was a car inside, an ancient black Mercedes that must have been off the road for many years. There were cardboard boxes wilted with moisture, newspapers in short stacks, unused gardening tools hanging on the walls.
Now I rang the bell, then pounded on the iron gate—most of the houses had them, small gated entryways. No answer, I texted Henry. As my screen registered his typing, I hurried over to Hal and Eleni’s and rang their bell. No one home. The driveway across the street was empty.
My phone buzzed. I can’t reach anyone else nearby. There’s a key under the flat stone beside the walk. Again am so sorry but would you please? Whatever protests I had—that this wasn’t my business, that Henry was the one who’d left his poor invalid mother so that he could scale cliffs in Tahoe, and that someone else should be appointed to do this, not me—ran on a distant parallel track in my mind. The key was there, pressed by the stone into the pale, dusty soil. I had to wrestle it some in the lock, but then the gate sprang open.
Battered sneakers sat in pairs by the wall of the entryway; old junk mail lay on the ground. I knocked on the wooden inner door. I called out, Bing? This is Tom, your neighbor.
No answer. But the inner door was unlocked.
The sound of the television, caustic at that volume, broke over me as I entered. The lights were off inside, the air close. It was clear that the house’s layout was identical to ours: a foyer off the garage on the ground level, living space up on the second floor. I put my hand on the bannister at the bottom of the stairs. I’m coming up, I yelled, though I knew how absurd it was to do so. I would climb the stairs, surface in the living room, and find Bing dead on the sofa in the television’s changing light.
My lips and face were numb, I had a sense of moving further out of myself with each step, and when I did find Bing it was almost exactly as I’d imagined—though it was an armchair and not a sofa, and she was seated upright. But what I saw first, before any of that, was the man by the window on the far side of the room. The curtains were drawn, lights off, and because I couldn’t make out his features I thought he was deep in shadow. Then a commercial for tile cleaner threw vivid blues and whites across the room, and I saw that he was wearing something over his head—a tight-fitting black sleeve that covered him entirely from the neck up, something like Lycra, without eye or mouth holes. Apart from that, he wore a gray hooded sweatshirt, zipped up, and dark jeans. He stood very still, hands at his sides, facing Bing.
There was no question that Bing was dead. You’d never mistake it. Her eyes were half open, lips parted, hands in her lap and upturned. She wore a thin white robe, feet on the ottoman, and the robe fell open above her knees. I looked quickly. The skin on her thigh shone like pearl.
I can remember feeling a confused impulse to smile and apologize to the man for intruding. There were what looked like paint flecks on his jeans, and my mind supplied the rationalization that he could be a handyman. But of course that wasn’t right. More likely he was a burglar. Hal had warned me about the roving professionals who loved these old houses; they could drill through the garage doors, trip the wires that ran to the electric openers, steal bikes, tools, anything, and be gone in seconds. And yet nothing in the house appeared to have been disturbed. The man held nothing in his hands. He hadn’t run, or made any moves, or threatened me in any way. The front gate had been locked and the spare key in its right place. I’d seen no hole drilled through the garage door. Unless he’d sneaked in through the back—which was difficult to do, all the yards were fenced off, there were no alleyways—I had no idea how he’d entered the house.
My phone buzzed in my hand. Henry calling.
What I wanted was to turn and run down the stairs and out into the street. I would run until my chest burst. But I felt paralyzed by the man, by the extraordinary volume of the television, and by Bing. And what if he were violent, this person? I guessed I couldn’t turn my back on him. Still, I understood that some action was incumbent upon me. We couldn’t stand there forever. So, despite it all, I raised my voice over the television and said, I’m Tom. Henry asked me to come.
The commercial changed again. The room grew dark, then light.
I nodded toward Bing. I said, Henry asked me to check on her.
Across the room, the man shifted on his feet.
Bing seemed newly dead. There was no odor, nothing like that. It wasn’t some awful spectacle, just a fact needing attention. And, faced with this unexpected presence, I found myself thinking very clinically. I’d told him I was here to check on her, and so now I had to—check for breath, or a pulse, even if there was no point in doing so. I’d never really taken anyone’s pulse. I had the idea of taking my own, to rehearse, but I found that I didn’t want him to see me do it. My tongue and throat were dry, the numbness spreading through my head.
I told him I was going to check on her now.
As I moved into the room, he took several steps sideways and back, and in that way we maintained roughly the same length of floor between us. Just as in my house, the kitchen and living room were contiguous, split by a wall with open doorways at either end, west and east. He was hovering now at the eastern threshold, where the floor changed from carpeting to linoleum.
I’d only ever stood beside a dead body at a funeral. It upset me to see Bing up close, but I touched her neck with two fingers, as I’d seen it done in movies. Her skin was cool and not unpleasant, and my eyes moved to a framed photo on the wall: Bing and her family in younger days. Henry was easy to pick out, but Bing herself was nearly unrecognizable—tall, slim, and radiant. The friendly-looking man beside her, smiling without showing his teeth, must have been her husband. They all stood around a restaurant table, in suits and dresses, hands on the chair backs.
To the man with the head covering, I said that she was dead.
I flushed when I said it, looking at his shoulder to avoid the sight of his face. Even in the low light, the fabric must have been sheer enough to see through. He seemed to be tracking my movements—like an owl, or an insect.
I told him I would now have to call the authorities. Before I do it, I said, I’m going to turn off the television. Then I will open the curtains to let the light in.
The remote control sat on Bing’s armrest. Once I’d pressed the power button, I saw I’d chosen the wrong order of operations: I would have to cross the floor in the dark. I felt dizzy doing it; I imagined the man striking from the left. But I kept my composure, and, when I’d pulled open the curtains and let the day’s meagre light in, he was there, as before. He’d moved back again, a few steps, through the doorway and into the kitchen. We were now a little closer to each other. I could see that the armchair was a maroon suède, and that the couch beside it was covered in plastic. On the tray to Bing’s right was the last of a meal. I held my phone high and watched him as I dialled.