The building, a brick row house, was only a few blocks from the subway, and Amy got there first. A rose had been left on the stoop, laid vertically on the slanting top of one of the stubby walls that descended on either side of the steps. Against the soft old auburn sandstone, the velvet petals almost glared. Maybe the person who had bought the flower had reconsidered, Amy thought. Or maybe the person the flower was given to had.

The woman from the university’s real estate office was wearing a tight skirt, which kept her steps shallow. “You said you don’t mind a first-floor unit?” she asked as she walked up. This was their third try.

“It doesn’t face the street?”

“It’s very quiet. It faces away.”

Classes started in a few days. Amy, who was going to be a first-year at the law school, needed to make a decision soon.

A man still grimacing his face awake, his hair wet and just combed, approached. “Unit one?” he asked. He seemed to be the super.

One as in year one, Amy thought, as the super unlocked the front door. When she had first started looking at apartments, she had had the sense, as she ran taps and flushed toilets, that she was mimicking George, the man she was trying to learn to think of as no longer her husband, since soon he wouldn’t be. The way that, if she ever went looking for a used car, she would probably kick the tires because, when she was a child, she had seen her father kick them. Maybe her father hadn’t known why he did it, either. A couple of months ago, at the green market—was it before or after George’s announcement?—she had overheard one woman ask another why the two of them were peeling open the tops of the ears of corn in their hands. The second woman had laughed and suggested, uncertainly, “Bugs?”

“It’s to see if the kernels have been fertilized,” George said when she brought the story home. He always knew, even though he didn’t like it when she expected him to.

In the lobby, a bricked-up fireplace faced a staircase with a stately curvature. Once upon a time the building must have been a single-family residence. Beyond the fireplace was a door freshly painted an institutional green, in the center of which hung a new brass fixture, a combination knocker and peephole. Above the dead fireplace, a mirror reflected a lamp without a shade, which cast a rather stark light, in which the knocker and peephole shone as bright as the buttons on a little boy’s blazer. 

“I put in a stronger bulb,” the super said, it wasn’t clear to whom. He said it almost apologetically, nodding at the lamp as he looked through the keys on his ring, turning them over one by one like playing cards. 

Because Amy had barked at George’s polite questions lately, he had stopped asking them, and so when the door swung open and she saw inside, she was looking for herself only. She wasn’t going to be giving anyone else a report on the white blankness of the walls. On the strong, almost gasoline-like smell of the recently polyurethaned floor. 

Along the left wall ran a strip of moulding at hip height, as white as the wall it divided. Along the right stood a sink, six inches of countertop, a gas stove, and a refrigerator. Past the sink a door led to a bathroom; above the sink were shelves.

The super crumpled a piece of paper that happened to be lying on one of the shelves and shoved it into the pocket of his hoodie. 

The saving grace was the light, which fell in through frosted panes in a door in the rear wall. A floor-to-ceiling steel accordion grille barred this door, chopping the light into diamonds. Light also came in through an unfrosted window in the same wall, protected by a cast-iron grille whose bars swooped out, in a belly-like shape, in case anyone ever wanted to install an air conditioner. The door grille, which was inside the unit, had been sloppily painted the same white as the walls, but the window grille, which was outside, had been painted black.

Through the window a yard was visible: a rectangle as narrow as the building, extending straight back, with a faded wooden fence around its perimeter. It could have held a garden and maybe a picnic table, but it didn’t. Instead, in the seams between concrete flagstones, a grid of thin weeds was seeping up. Beyond the flagstones, more weeds were grappling for a foothold on hillocks of white-flecked, gravelly dirt. There were a few piles of cinder blocks and cracked bricks. A tub lying on its side had once held roof tar, according to the printing on it. There was a caved-in basketball that had gone yellow from sun, and a gray sheet of plywood that was splitting. A tree of heaven careened diagonally. 

“Can we go outside?” Amy asked.

“That door hasn’t opened since at least three coats of paint ago,” the super said. 

“Oh, look. A tomato,” Amy noticed.

“People throw all kinds of things out the window,” the super said.

“No, I mean a tomato plant. It’s growing.”

“Really?” the super asked. He looked over her shoulder.

The plant was poking up from inside the hollow of one of the cinder blocks. It had a couple of small whitish fruits. Its gingerbread-work leaves were already yellowing.

“We can put up blinds for you,” the agent suggested.

“They should be up already, to be honest,” the super said.

“Is there a closet?” Amy asked, realizing, as she asked, that there couldn’t be. There was nowhere for a closet to hide.

She took the place anyway.

“Do you think it’s safe?” George asked, when she did give him a report after all. 

A student had been killed on the campus in the spring, a woman in her first year at the law school, and both George and her parents, who had read about the crime on news sites at the time, went through bouts of being worried about Amy’s living there on her own. But the woman had been killed by people she knew; it could have happened anywhere.

“The windows have all these bars on them,” she said. “It’s like jail. A sunny jail.”

“You know you can stay here longer if you need to.”

Her first week at Ann Arbor, she had been curious about the thin white diagonal scars, almost like a geometric tattoo, that she had noticed on the slender knuckles of a boy in Yeats and His Circle, a seminar she went to the first class of but didn’t get into. As if a skeleton had briefly rested its fanned-out fingers on top of and across the boy’s. “Where are you from?” she had asked, with the courage sometimes available to shy people in a new context. She had grown up on the Upper Peninsula, and it turned out that he had, too, in a town only seven miles away. He didn’t get into the seminar, either. She never found a way to ask about the scars directly, and it wasn’t until they were driving home together for the Christmas holidays, an established couple, and he gave her one hand to massage while he kept the other on the wheel, that he told her he had gotten them in an accident with a table saw. He had been cutting a piece of wood that had had tacks in it. The heads of the tacks had rusted off, making the teeth still embedded invisible until the blade spun them into his hand. It’s pretty, though, she said, splaying her fingers out where the skeleton’s had been.

Drawings by Cathleen Clarke, courtesy of the artist.

After graduation, they moved to New York, got married at city hall, worked as a waiter (George) and a grant writer (Amy), and got into the same law school. He delayed coming out to her until the summer before they were supposed to start, and during the long conversations that followed, he offered to defer for a year and she offered to let him keep the Brooklyn apartment, so that each of them could have breathing room, and so that she could at least have a running start. Could take at least that much back. He had taken only fifteen months from her. Or six years, depending on how you counted. Everybody said she was so young, and that she still had plenty of time to start over. When he mentioned, however, that he didn’t mind delaying law school, because there was so much for him to get used to, because it was a whole world, she did manage to tell him—a therapy account she followed on social media suggested that it was okay to stand up for oneself in such situations—that she didn’t want to hear that part.

For the new apartment, she ordered a desk, wardrobe, and bed frame in cheap blond-wood veneer, as well as the same mattress that she had picked out for George and herself two years earlier, and one of the same pillows. On a rainy Saturday, she waited alone in empty unit one for the deliveries. She had brought with her a suitcase of clothes, a backpack of books, and a bright yellow Amazon-delivery bag containing half their sheets, towels, dishes, and kitchen utensils. She had wrapped the dishes in the towels, and the towel on top had gotten a little damp in transit, so she hung it on the rack in the bathroom. She knew she was going to be too busy to reread the books; bringing them was a piece of sentimentality. On the other hand, not having any time for herself, not having a life, was going to be a mercy, probably, in a way.

There is a nothing sound that rooms make that is easier to hear when a room is empty. A sort of reflecting in on itself of the room’s size and angles. Outside, rain was hitting the split plywood, the cracked bricks and blocks, and the droopy mustaches of the ailanthus leaves. Inside, the refrigerator maundered reassuringly. It was when the refrigerator gave a little wheeze and then fell silent that you could hear the nothing sound best. The sound of waiting. Leaning against a wall, she tapped through photos that old friends were posting of their late-summer vacations. Of last visits to beaches on the lakeshore. Of a baby. Of another baby.

Was she sure the doorbell worked? She opened the apartment’s heavy green door, which was metal—that was nice—and stood in the doorway. Across the dark lobby were the two sets of glass doors at the building’s entrance. Through the glass there were only the same slanted gray slicings in the air that the rain was making in the yard in back. 

The lamp on the mantel in the lobby was off. She was pretty sure it had been on when she arrived. She already thought of the lobby as in a way hers, since there were no other units on the first floor. Checking that her keys were in her pocket, she let the apartment door shut behind her.

The fireplace and the bricks that were blocking up its mouth were painted a uniform black. The lamp was art nouveau or anyway had been when it had still had a shade, and running down the stem and spreading across the base were veins or rootlets chased into the metal. Or maybe the ornamentation was meant to represent dripping wax. She found a knob on the stem, which she turned until it clicked.

The lamp didn’t go on. Because it was a rainy day, the shadows in the lobby were soft. Edgeless.

At the foot of the stairs, she found a switch on the wall that did the trick. The light was unpleasant—jagged and brusque. Suddenly there was a thud.

A delivery person in uniform was shading his face