The Courtyard

The apartment had been nice at one point, trendy, even. The pink and blue geometric linoleum in the kitchen and dining nook was of its time. Early nineties, if she had to guess. Now, the pinks looked like browns and the blues like more brown. A brassy, frosted-glass light fixture hung low at her left, waiting for a table. The kitchen wasn’t bad. Cabinets lined the wall to the right of the door, terminating in a rounded peninsula that formed an L-shape. Beyond it, was a small living room with four large windows. There was a stainless steel sink, an electric stove, and a small fridge under the counter. 

For the last three months, she’d lived with four housemates in a big, old victorian. They were all younger than her. It wasn’t ideal. Before that, she’d spent a stressful year pouring what little money she’d gotten out of the divorce into a swanky fourth-floor apartment in the arts district. She couldn’t afford to live there. Why had she ever thought she could? She’d also thought she could step back into an industry she left eleven years ago. She’d been a fool. Now she was a completely broke fool.

The victorian, with the rent split five ways, was incredibly affordable, but still untenable. She couldn’t bring her kids there. She hadn’t spent the night with her children in over two months. Her housemates were young, childless, raunchy and too self-involved to make any extended effort at accommodating her family. She needed a place of her own, and it needed to be dirt cheap and close to downtown if she was going to balance it against her less-than-ideal job, childcare, and school schedules. 

This was temporary, of course, as was her job. It had taken her six months to discover no one in her old industry was going to hire her and then look for work that would pay her quickly accumulating bills. So she was a receptionist at an auto repair shop. The owner let her leave during breaks to transport her children from school to the daycare center. In that way, the job was great. But she had to give Daniel more time with the kids. Transporting them was the only time she saw them during the week. Daniel felt, rightly so, that he deserved to have them while he paid the entirety of their care expenses. A temporary concession, she assured herself.

Temporary. Sometimes it meant a slight bump along an upward trajectory. That’s how she hoped people heard it when she said it. That’s what she wanted it to mean. Practically, however, everything “temporary” had just been another step into a chasm she couldn’t see the bottom of. 

It was a temporary job. A temporary living situation. A temporary concession.

Down. Down. Down. 

This was the last apartment on her list. It was $600 a month. She wouldn’t be able to pay for childcare and take back weekdays with the kids, but she’d be able to save a bit of her wages. She could have some disposable income.

The landlord stood in the doorway with a hand resting on the knob. He was a pot-bellied old man in suspenders and a dingy flannel button down. He had a big grey mustache, a bald head, and dirty fingernails. He didn’t say a word. There was no sales pitch here. 

Lindsey went further into the apartment. It didn’t smell bad, which was a small miracle. The carpet in the living room beyond the kitchen remembered it was mauve only around the edges of the room, where constellations of divots gave ghostly impressions of furniture. 

The end of the peninsula pointed toward a short hallway, off of which there were three doors. All closed. Lindsey opened them from right to left. The first two were bedrooms, sad, low-lit, and grayish brown. The wallpaper was discolored, but not yet peeling. The third door, to her left, was the bathroom.

It was much larger than Lindsey expected. When she opened the door, there was a small vanity directly in front of her. A shower stall occupied the corner beyond it. Opposite the shower, to her left, was a bi-fold door to a small closet. Next to the closet, directly opposite the vanity, was a floor-to-ceiling window. On the other side of the window was an open space, maybe two by three feet. Its walls were clad the same concrete-effect panels Lindsey noticed on the outside of the building. The top of the box was open. It let in natural light, and, she imagined, rain and snow. 

The box’s only occupant was a slender tree with a braided trunk. A money tree. She stared for a moment, surprised to find such a feature in an otherwise thoroughly depressing apartment. What was the real name of that tree? She’d gotten one as a gift when she graduated college. Hers was probably still in the corner of her old living room. Or maybe Daniel gave it away. He hadn’t let her take it when she left. 

The irony of a money tree in the center of this apartment didn’t escape her. Its floppy, hand-shaped leaves were curling into themselves like arthritic fingers. The tree was clearly in decline, possibly root-bound. That tracked. 

Lindsey called out to the landlord, who hadn’t moved from the door. “Do all the apartments have a … what do you call this? With the tree?”

“It’s a courtyard.” He rasped back at her. “Yeah, they all got ‘em on the top floor. Some nicer’n t’others. Some got animals stuck in ‘em and I couldn’t get ‘em out.” He let out a long wheeze. “Dumb if you ask me.”

“There’s no way to access inside them?” Lindsey imagined conducting her morning toilette alongside the remains of a dead possum. She shuddered. 

“Not that I found. Maybe from up top, but I ain’t goin’ up there.” 

She’d been so taken by the ‘courtyard’ (a rather grand moniker for the feature - it wasn’t even as big as the shower stall), that she only then noticed the toilet tucked in an alcove to her left. Sitting on it, she’d have a view of the outdoors. What luxury. “Ok. I’ll take this unit.”

Temporary. For once, the word didn’t set her teeth on edge. She’d been in the apartment three months. It had been eighteen months since she walked out on her old life. 

There were no rogue animals in the courtyard. 

Last week, she bought a second-hand bunk bed for the kids so they didn’t have to sleep on mattresses on the floor. The purchase, made with money saved scrupulously over the past six months, had made her happy. Her children didn’t seem quite as thrilled. Could a four-year old be a snob?  

She’d found a routine. However, her new normal didn’t look anything like her old normal. She spent far less time with her children. That hurt. By most measures, her station in life had lowered. Her neighbors used to be wholesome-looking women who took walks in hundred-dollar leggings. Now, her elusive neighbors were … baggy. Baggy clothes, bags under their eyes. They carried ratty tote bags. The backs of their pants sagged. Their shoulders sagged. Lindsey was right there with them. When she stopped spending $800 a month on grooming and clothes, there was a marked difference in her appearance. But that, honestly, didn’t hurt much. 

She still had a pair of fancy leggings. The seam at the outside of her right thigh was coming apart, though. She wouldn’t be able to wear them much longer.

She didn’t have a television. Daniel let Evelyn bring her iPad so she and Danny watched cartoons on it together. One Sunday evening as she handed off the children, Lindsey found the courage to ask him for the guest room television. There were two other TVs in the house and the one in the guest bedroom was the smallest and least used. Daniel refused, his handsome face stoney. She’d taken her own clothes, her car, and her toiletries. That was it. She didn’t blame him, she just wished his hurt would fade. 

When she’d been in the apartment nearly six months, Lindsey discovered a thin sheet of mesh resting atop the money tree. It must have come from the roof. She realized that’s why there’d been no rogue animals thus far. It seemed an obvious method of deterrence, yet, if it had blown away rather than fallen inward, she would never have known it existed. She began to worry about a carcass scenario. Worse, that she’d be forced to watch an animal slowly starve to death, eventually becoming a macabre courtyard installation. 

She asked Markos, her boss at the garage, what she should do. He gave her a panel of chicken wire and a hand-held staple gun. That evening after work, she made her way to the roof, found the opening to her own courtyard, and stapled the panel in place. There were a few other courtyard openings with mesh still in tact, but most were open holes. The landlord could’ve easily come up here and replaced them. 

Back in her apartment, Lindsey went into the bathroom. The mesh was still caught in the tree. It simply didn’t make sense to have no access the courtyard from inside. Surely, the designers would have wanted tenants to be able to prune the trees, treat them for pests, and the like. She ran her fingers over the perimeter of the window. It was smooth and flush. She went to one side of the window and pressed her forehead against the glass, squinting to see the outside frame of the window. She saw nothing like hinges. She couldn’t see a latch anywhere. But, for the first time, she noticed cylindrical bits welded to the outside of the window. They were in the center of the top and bottom sills and extended above and below the window. On a hunch, she opened the bi-fold door to the linen closet and reached blindly into the dark, recessed shelves, running a hand along the wall the closet shared with the courtyard. Her fingers discovered a small plate, like a light switch with no switch. She felt around until she found a small latch, and flicked it open with a fingernail. Inside the compartment was an oblong handle. She wrapped her fingers around it and pulled. With a sound like a suction cup being pulled off a shower tile, the window to the courtyard popped open. 

“Yessssss.” Lindsey hissed to herself. The right side came outward and the left inward. She pushed the left side inward as much as she could without damaging the tree. She stepped onto the window ledge, went on tip toes, and removed the mesh. Then she stepped back into her bathroom and pushed the right side of the window until it clicked back into place. 

The following day marked Lindsey’s one-year anniversary at the garage. She gave Markos back his staple gun and he gave her a dollar-an-hour raise, far more than she was expecting. Even so, during her lunch hour that day, she scrolled through job listings. She was no longer desperate for work, but that didn’t stop her from looking. So far, she hadn’t found anyone who wanted to hire a communications major with a decade-long gap in her resumé. She’d waited too long. She would turn forty next month. 

She’d left life in a big suburban house where her two children whined for the same absurdly expensive Christmas gifts as their neighbors. The American dream.

Daniel didn’t understand. He’d married a confident, accomplished woman and watched her disintegrate until, finally, she left him. She left him. 

It had been a series of temporary steps. A pregnancy would only impact her job for a finite period of time. The pre-natal depression had an end date, the post-natal depression as well. Quitting her job at the ad agency had been the only right choice. Daniel made more money than her, and he could make even more if they moved to Denver. She needed to take a break before she broke. It was temporary; she could jump back in as soon as she got her mind right. She could spend a few months at home with her newborn. They made the move. She fell pregnant again. Another abyss opened up. When she managed to claw her way out of it, she found herself in town she didn’t know, isolated. She’d wanted to go back to work, but Daniel insisted, “You shouldn’t tempt fate by stacking a job onto your already full plate.” They were a stay-at-home mom and a corporate dad. Two children. A cat. She was in a laundry detergent commercial. Another abyss approached. She ran. She’d broken everything that meant anything to her, and she’d run. 

A year and a half later, she was a receptionist at a garage. It was an excellent garage; she liked her boss. She was proud of her work there. 

It was eighteen months after she ran that Dan called her at work to tell her he had a date, could she take the kids this Thursday? It took her breath away. She felt sick. She breathed out a quiet, “Yes, of course,” and hung up. 

For over a month, the chicken wire worked. Not a bird or even an adventurous raccoon found its way into her courtyard. 

Dan had gone on three dates. Her name was Katie.

Lindsey was getting ready for work, doing her make up in the mirror above the vanity. It was early morning, the sun was low. The courtyard was usually quite dim this time of day, but this morning it seemed eerily bright. Not yellow with sunshine, but a pea-green, cold light. Suddenly, there was movement behind her. She saw it in the mirror. She spun around and scanned the money tree for fur or feather. Nothing. Maybe a bit of rain? She thought she saw color, though. Orange. 

She returned to the mirror and went back to applying her brow gel. She was nearly done.

There it was again. This time she didn’t turn around. She froze and peered into the mirror. Over her shoulder she saw … Danny? He was in that little orange onesie Lindsey’s mother had given them. He was tiny. He was on the floor under the money tree. Tummy time. She remembered this. He was nearly three now, but through the window under the money tree, he was still a baby. 

The longer she watched her son in the mirror … no. A memory of her son. The longer she watched this memory of her son, the more familiar it seemed. It wasn’t something she often recalled, but, yes. This had happened. She remembered sitting with her back on the ottoman with a timer running. Danny hated tummy time. He cried and cried, his face mashed into a quilt, unable to raise his head from the floor. She didn’t offer relief. The doctor said tummy time strengthened his neck, so she sat next to him on the floor as he whimpered and wailed, both of them miserable. That money tree, the one one in her old house, lived in a corner by the front door. If she stood in that corner, perhaps like a fly on the wall, this is what she would have seen. Not now, of course, but two years ago, right before she ran. 

Slowly, so slowly, she turned. The memory didn’t vanish this time. It continued to play out in the pea-green haze under the tree. Still moving slowly, Lindsey crouched down and crawled to the window of the courtyard. She could see more of the room now. She saw the whole quilt. And, sitting at the edge of the quilt, her back against an overstuffed fabric ottoman was … her. She looked at herself and she wondered how Daniel hadn’t known she was unhappy. Her own eyes seemed dead. It scared her a bit. Nothing like what she saw in the mirror now. Then she looked at her baby. He was so close. If she could get through the window, she could touch him. If she could get through the window. 

She didn’t want to break the spell. She got carefully to her feet. She kept her eyes fixed on the back of Danny’s fuzzy head, willing it to stay. She reached inside the linen closet, opened the little compartment, and curled her fingers around the handle. Her eyes still on Danny, she pulled. The window popped open, but the image didn’t shift. She let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding, then clasped her hands to her mouth, stifling a cry. Her cheeks felt wet. 

She dropped down on all fours and pulled the window open. She crawled over the frame, scraping her shins, her hands on slimy stones. She smelled ozone. They were still there. She could see Evelyn in her high chair in a corner. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and crawled forward. She picked her hand off the stones and placed it down on a smooth hardwood floor. She kept her eyes closed until she felt hardwood under her knees as well. 

Lindsey opened her eyes. Danny, his cheek on the quilt and his eyes on her. She scooped up his little body and squeezed him to her chest. She was fully crying now, sobbing and gasping for air and his smell. A little voice, Evelyn’s, said, “Mama?” Lindsey turned to her and smiled. Then she saw herself, and her own eyes wide with horror.  

Lindsey dropped carefully to the floor, keeping pudgy, beautiful little Danny in her lap. 

“Everything is okay,” she told her old self. “Don’t worry. I just … I want to tell you something.” The old Lindsey took a shaky breath and reached for Danny. Lindsey reluctantly handed him to her. “I just want to tell you something,” she repeated. “And then I’ll leave.”