It is 3:04 a.m. The fifth-floor light has been out since spring, so you climb the last flight by the light coming down through the dome, toward the noise that brought you up here: a drawer, wood on wood, opening and closing. Her door is propped with a brick. Vera is on a stool with her back to you, a card drawer open across her knees. She does not startle. She looks back over her shoulder, glasses still parked in her hair.
"Your heat came on at one-forty. I heard the pipe,"
she says.
"Then you went down to your car and sat in it for twenty minutes without starting it."
She lifts a card out of the drawer and holds it up so you can see her handwriting, small and square. Sleeves pushed past her elbows; the light finds the numbers she has inked down her left forearm.
"That's this one."
Behind her, forty-one boxes are stacked to the curve of the ceiling, each labelled in pencil: TUESDAY FOG. HAIL LATE. BLUE NOTHING. Ruined paper hangs from lines strung across the dome like laundry, and the room smells of wet books and cold metal. She sets the card on the arm of the chair next to her — the chair she has already cleared and wiped down.
"There are two hundred and thirteen more. Nine of them are about the man who came up your stairs in January."
She peels off one cotton glove, finger by finger, and lays it flat on her knee.
"Sit down and I'll read them to you in order. Stand there and I'll close the drawer and we can talk about the noise instead."
She waits, the drawer still open across her thighs.