Beside her, Will tipped his head to the right. “We gotta go down the hall.”
She nodded and took a nervous breath, indicating to him that she’d follow his lead. She could’ve made her own way, certainly—every apartment in the building was the same, with bedrooms toward the front of the building and the living areas toward the rear, all of the rooms stacked up single file in the long, narrow arrangement of countless other Chicago apartments. But letting Will go ahead of her at least allowed her the opportunity to openly gawk at the changes without his notice. Even the hallway seemed brighter, and when she tipped her head back to see that two modern-looking light fixtures had been installed, she felt . . . well! She felt almost envious.
But then, she smelled it.
“Oh,” she said, stopping past the first bedroom, right before the apartment’s bathroom door. It wasn’t quite so bad as Will had made it sound, but it sure wasn’t great, either. “I got it now.”
“Yeah. So far as I can tell, nothing in the bathroom, though. No leaks, nothing in the cabinets.”
She edged forward and peeked in, found it as gleaming as the kitchen—nothing on the countertop other than a full bottle of hand soap, a crisp white curtain hanging bright and smooth across the shower. There were fluffy white hand towels to match, hung from a shiny chrome rod on the wall. Hey, she didn’t have one of those! She had to use this annoying freestanding thing that took up extra space on her countertop and made it hard for her to blow-dry her hair without the cord getting caught. Twice she’d almost broken a toe because of it falling down. Also, had he put a new faucet in? That one looked nice, more functional than her—
“I think it’s coming from in here,” he said.
He gestured toward the apartment’s biggest bedroom, the one at the very front of the building with the large picture window. It was the copy of the room she’d been in inside her own apartment—the room that had once been Nonna’s. Seeing Will’s version of it—nothing much more than a (gulp) crisply made bed and a couple of nightstands—was a reminder of how big it really was when it wasn’t crowded with the furniture of Nonna’s that Nora had stubbornly kept even as she’d tried to fit in the things she needed to make her own life here work.
Thankfully, there was no time to dwell on that, not with the reason for her visit becoming immediately more pungent. It still wasn’t quite as bad as she’d been imagining—it reminded her a little of the way the basement had smelled in the shared house she’d lived in for her last year of college—but it certainly wasn’t the kind of odor anyone would want hanging around or spreading.
“You already checked under the furniture?” she asked.
From the doorway, Will nodded. She followed his eyes toward where two vent covers had been lifted from where they were usually set into the hardwood floors, and she furrowed her brow in curiosity.
“I didn’t know if—” he began, then cleared his throat again. “I thought maybe you’d put something in the vents.”
Her eyes snapped to his. “For God’s sake!” she said. “What kind of person do you think I am?” (The kind of person who has definitely thought about it once!)
He shrugged. “I didn’t—”
“Wait,” she interrupted. “Did you hear that?”
She waved a hand to shush him before he could answer, turning her head. Silence. But she could’ve sworn she’d heard something a second ago, a barely audible, high-pitched . . .
“There!” she said, waving him over to where she stood. “Did you hear that?”
Slight miscalculation to usher him over, since once he was beside her she again felt compelled to move closer, to lean her body into his. If she pressed her face against his chest, if she breathed in the scent of his soft-looking T-shirt, she wouldn’t have to smell the—
“I heard that,” he said, and she nearly jumped.
Forgetting yourself, she scolded.
“Right?” she said, even though she’d missed whatever he’d heard by virtue of her inappropriate olfactory fantasies about a rude man’s T-shirt. “It sounds like a—”
“Oh, Christ. Is there an animal in here?”
“Shh.” She tiptoed in the direction of the closet. After a few seconds of renewed silence, she looked back at him and whispered, “Did you already look in here?”
He nodded, stepping forward to follow her. And then, like they’d choreographed it, Nora slipped her phone from her back pocket and flicked on its flashlight, and Will reached his arm out to slide open the closet door.
Despite not-dumpster day, this hadn’t been emptied yet, and immediately, Nora felt a wave of sadness to see a line of Donny’s faded flannel shirts, so familiar to her.
“This stuff still has to go to Goodwill,” Will murmured.
Nora ignored that, stretching to her tiptoes and shining the light on the shelf above.
“I said I already—” he said, but quieted when they heard the noise again, coming from somewhere lower, and before he could stop her, Nora dropped to her knees, bending forward to stick her whole head inside the closet. Will made a noise behind her, maybe some kind of cough-warning, and at that moment she realized both her awkward position and her suddenly increased risk of getting bitten or spit on by a rabid animal that was about to have its hiding place discovered.
But from her spot on the floor, she could hear the noise clearly when it came again, and it was only because she knew this closet as well as she knew her own that she could tell immediately where it had come from. She thought of that bad-smelling basement from college, remembered the roommate who had an old and recalcitrant cat that had a sad habit of missing the litter box.
She knew what that sound was.
