Beautiful Lies Read Online Free Page B

that because of her loneliness and my compassion for her, an encounter could represent a ten- to twenty-minute delay. But I wasn’t quiet enough that morning. As I locked my door, I heard hers open.
    “Excuse me,” she whispered. “Is anyone there?”
    “Hi, Victoria. Good morning,” I said, heading toward the stairs.
    Victoria was as thin and pale as a slip of paper. Her inevitable flowered housedress hung off her as if it were still on the hanger. At some point, her hair had been replaced by a slate gray wig that looked as if she’d been at it with a pair of scissors. The skin on her face was deeply lined and sagged like melted wax. She claimed proudly, at least once every time I saw her, that she still had her own teeth. Unfortunately, she only had five or six of them. She whispered rather than spoke, as though she was afraid others were waiting at their doors the way she did. I always liked Victoria, though we generally had the same conversation every day and she never from day to day remembered who I was. She’d tell me of her three brothers, all police officers now dead. She’d tell me how she never meant to stay in the apartment that she once shared with her mother, also now dead, but she somehow just never got around to moving.
    “Oh, if my brothers were still alive…” she said this particular morning, her voice trailing off. “They were police officers, you know.”
    “They must have been very brave,” I answered, looking longingly at the staircase but walking toward her instead. Of all the responses I’d given her over the years, she seemed to like that one the most.
    “Oh, yes,” she said with a widening smile. “Very.”
    I could just see a sliver of her through the door she had opened only a few inches, her housedress with tiny purple flowers, her stockinged leg, her gray orthopedic shoe.
    Victoria lived in a time capsule of antique furniture and drawn shades. There was not an item in her apartment that wasn’t older than I was by at least fifty years, everything worn with time and wear, most of it covered in dust, all of it so heavy, so rooted that it seemed never to have been moved. Heavy oak armoires and bureaus, brocade couches and wing chairs, gilded mirrors, a baby grand topped with a clutter of yellowed photographs. I went in only when I’d gone grocery shopping for her or to change her lightbulbs. I couldn’t leave there without carrying out some of her sadness and loneliness with me like a cloak. There was a smell that I’ve come to think of as life rot. Where a life has spoiled, gone bad through lack of use.
    I used to wonder what choices she’d made in her life to wind up with no one at the end. It’s something I think about now more than ever, like I mentioned: choices. The little ones, the big ones. Maybe once, like me, she had a perfectly wonderful man in love enough with her to propose marriage; maybe she, like me, had turned him down for reasons unclear even to her. Maybe that was the first choice that led her to this life.
    She had a niece who came in occasionally from Long Island (feathered hair, three-quarter-length red wool coat, sensible shoes), an in-home caregiver who came three times a week (different people all the time, carrying themselves with as much energy and enthusiasm as pallbearers), and a couple times I’d seen people from Meals on Wheels. I lived in that building for more than ten years, and I’d never seen her leave the apartment. To me, it seemed as though she
couldn’t
leave. That if she stepped out of her apartment and onto the tile floor of the hallway, she’d crumple into a pile of dust.
    “Well, if they were still alive, they certainly wouldn’t stand for all the noise coming from upstairs,” she warbled, her voice sounding like a top that was about to lose its spin.
    I’d heard him, too, the new guy moving his things up the stairs the night before. I hadn’t been curious enough to poke my head out.
    “He’s just moving in, Victoria.