Chapter 4: Kitchen Door Still Locked
I didn't wait for him to answer the silence I'd left hanging.
That was the trick I'd learned living with him — if I waited, he'd fill the space with another question, another version of the same question, until I was answering him instead of leaving. My bag hit against my hip as I turned, the chain strap cold against my collarbone, and I walked toward the kitchen.
It wasn't the front door. The front door was three feet behind him where he'd positioned himself without seeming to. He hadn't moved to block it; he'd just never moved away from it. The kitchen door was the other way out. Past the rug, past the couch, through the narrow doorway beside the framed artwork, into the galley kitchen and out through the service door to the hallway. We'd used it a hundred times for groceries, for trash, for when the front entry was jammed with his bike.
I felt him watch me go. I didn't look back.
The living room felt too bright. Daylight was pouring in from the windows and hitting the rug and the wood floor until every dust mote showed. My dress caught a little on the side slit as I walked — that tie I'd knotted myself that morning, the one I'd chosen because I liked how it moved — and I had to tug it once with my free hand. My other hand stayed on the strap of my bag. I wasn't going to set it down.
The kitchen doorway was open, but the door itself was closed. That was wrong.
We never closed the kitchen door. It stuck in the humidity and he'd taken the doorstop away last spring and never replaced it, so it swung open on its own. Now it was pulled shut, the off-white paint bright in the lamp light spilling from the living room. I reached it and my breath was still coming fast from the conversation, shallow and audible in the quiet.
I put my hand on the knob. It was the old brass one, loose, that rattled if you turned it too hard.
It didn't turn.
I tried again, a quick twist forward, then back. Locked. From the inside, the little push-button lock on the knob was pressed in. I stared at it, my thumb over the button, and pushed, pulled. Nothing gave. The door didn't even rattle in its frame.
Behind me, I heard his weight shift on the rug.
"When'd you lock this?" I said. I didn't turn around yet. My voice sounded flat in the small space.
A pause. He cleared his throat.
"I locked it earlier," he said. "Before you got ready to go out."
I turned then. He was still near the table lamp, hands at his sides now, not pleading anymore. His sleeves were still rolled to his elbows, his belt catching the light. He tried to look casual.
"Why?" I asked.
"Neighbor said someone was trying handles downstairs," he said. "Thought it was safer."
He said it quickly, like he'd rehearsed it but not well enough. He didn't look at the door when he said it. He looked at me, at the dress, at the bag.
That was the lie. I felt it land.
We didn't have a neighbor who warned us about anything. Mrs. Cho across the hall kept to herself, and the kid downstairs blasted his TV through the wall. And if he'd locked it earlier, before I got ready, I would have hit it when I went in to get water an hour ago. But I hadn't gone into the kitchen an hour ago. I'd been at the bathroom mirror tying that dress, and he'd been in here, moving around while I wasn't watching. The apartment had been quiet except for the floor creaking in one spot by the artwork — the spot he was standing near now.
"You locked it after I said I was leaving," I said.
He shook his head once, short. "I told you why."
"No," I said. "That isn't why."
The chain strap dug into my shoulder. I let go of the knob and stepped back from the door, just enough to see the whole thing. The paint around the lock was scuffed where a key had missed. There was no key in it. He'd taken it.
"I need to get through," I said.
"You don't need to go out the back," he said. His voice dropped, lower, more serious now, not pleading. "Just stay and talk to me. You're making this a bigger thing than it is."
That was the second control move, quieter than the first but the same shape as the question he'd asked in the living room. Who are you trying to look good for. Now it was which door are you allowed to use. I felt the apartment shrink — the flag on the wall behind him, the lamp, the rug we'd picked together — all of it suddenly arranged around that locked door.
May you like
I didn't answer him right away. I looked at the knob again, at the little button pressed flat, and I knew I wasn't going to fix it by asking him nicer. I'd have to go back the way I came, past him, back into the bright living room where the front door still was.
I adjusted my bag higher on my shoulder and turned away from the kitchen door without unlocking it.
