The Other Half
The landlord was very clear that the other half of the duplex was empty. He said it twice, the second time without being asked, which I should have noticed.
“Water damage,” he said. “Back in ‘15. The owner’s tied up in some estate thing. Nobody’s been in there in eleven years. You’ll have the whole place to yourselves, basically.”
Maren loved it. High ceilings, a porch with a swing, a yard with a crabapple tree. We’d been in a one-bedroom over a laundromat for three years, and after that, quiet felt like a luxury you could hold in your hands. We signed in August.
The voices started the second week.
It was always late, after midnight, and always through the bedroom wall, the one we shared with the empty side. A man and a woman, talking. Not arguing. Just the low, ordinary murmur of two people at the end of a day. You couldn’t make out words at first, only the shape of them, the rise of a question, the fall of an answer, the little pause where someone laughs.
I told Maren it was probably squatters. She said squatters don’t sound that relaxed. We called the landlord, who drove out on a Saturday, unlocked the other side, and walked us through it: bare boards, a sagging ceiling, a smell of old wet plaster, no furniture, no footprints in the dust except ours. He locked it up again and didn’t quite look at me when he left.
That night the voices were clearer.
Did you call your sister back?
I’ll do it tomorrow. She’s going to want to talk about the thing with Dad.
You can’t avoid her forever.
Watch me.
And the woman laughed, a short surprised laugh through her nose, and I lay in the dark next to my wife and felt the skin on my arms tighten, because it was Maren’s laugh. Not similar to. Hers.
The next evening, while I was doing the dishes, Maren came in from the porch with her phone.
“Did you call your sister back?” I said. I don’t know why I said it. It was just the thing you’d say.
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” she said. “She’s going to want to talk about the thing with Dad.”
I put the plate down very carefully on the rack.
“You can’t avoid her forever,” I heard myself say.
“Watch me,” she said, and laughed through her nose, and went upstairs.
I started keeping a notebook on the nightstand. I didn’t tell Maren. I’d lie awake until the voices began and write down everything I could catch, in the dark, by feel, and in the morning I’d read it over coffee and wait.
It was always right. Every word. What we’d have for dinner. The name of the movie we’d almost watch and then not. A joke I’d make about the neighbor’s dog that I’d never have thought of on my own, until I heard myself make it, word for word, and Maren laughed, and I had to go out to the car and sit there with the engine off for twenty minutes.
I tried to break it. Of course I did. I’d read the night’s lines and decide, firmly, that I would say something else. And I would. I’d say something completely different, and feel a wild little flare of triumph, and then that night through the wall I’d hear the man say Let’s just skip it, I’m not hungry, which was exactly the different thing I’d said, and I’d understand that I hadn’t broken anything. The voices had simply gotten there first.
That’s the word I kept coming back to. Not predicting. Rehearsing. They sounded like people running lines. Sometimes the man would stop in the middle and start a sentence over, with a slightly different weight on a word, like an actor trying it another way. Sometimes there’d be a long silence, and then the same exchange again, smoother.
They were getting better at us.
And night by night, they were getting closer to the wall. At first the voices had been across the room over there. By October they were right against it. If I put my palm flat on the plaster I could feel the man’s voice in my hand, a low vibration, the way you feel your own voice in your chest.
Last night was different.
The man didn’t speak. There was only the woman, Maren’s voice, and she wasn’t talking to anyone. She was on the phone. I could hear the pauses where someone on the other end answered.
No. No, he just went out to the car. He said he’d left something in the car.
A pause.
It’s been four hours. His keys are here. His phone is here. The car’s still in the driveway, the doors are locked, I just — I keep thinking he’s going to walk back in.
A long pause.
And then she began to practice crying. I don’t know how else to describe it. She’d start, and stop, and start again, trying to find the right sound. Trying it another way.
I didn’t write anything down. I lay there until the window went grey.
So here is what I’ve decided. Tomorrow I don’t go out to the car. Whatever I think I’ve left there, I leave it. I don’t go near the driveway, I don’t go near the door. If the script needs me to walk outside, then the script can go without.
Maren is asleep beside me now. The wall has been silent all night, for the first time since August, and for a while I let myself believe that meant something good. That I’d done it. That with nobody left to rehearse, there was nothing left to perform.
Then, a minute ago, I heard a voice again.
It isn’t coming from the other side of the duplex. It’s much closer than that. It’s coming from inside the wall itself, from the narrow dark space between the plaster on our side and the plaster on theirs, a space no wider than a man lying on his side.
It’s a man’s voice. Hoarse, and very tired, as if it’s been calling for a long time.
It’s mine.
Is anyone there? it says. Maren? Can anyone hear me?
He’s trying it another way. He’s getting better at it.