Dwellers Read Free

staircase.
    “Well?” I say. I hear squeaks against a cement floor.
    “Old furniture,” Louis says. He grunts. “It smells really bad down here.”
    “Dead cat?” I say.
    “It smells like shit and bleach.”
    “Did you say ‘bleach’?” I say, but Louis doesn’t reply.
    For a minute I couldn’t hear anything. Then heavy footsteps, boots crashing through wood. Louis emerges from the dark basement, ashen-faced.
    “What?” I ask, wheeling myself back. He puts down the flashlight and the hammer on the floor and slams the basement door shut. He pulls off the goggles and sits on the floor with his
back to the door. He covers his face with both of his hands and tries to breathe.
    I’m frightened. This is no dead cat.
    “Louis?” I say, softly.
    “Oh my God,” Louis says, dropping his hands from his face. He looks at me. “There’s a chest freezer down there.”
    My heart stops.
    “There’s a dead girl in it,” Louis says.

5
    WHO ARE THESE people, really? Louis and Jonah—who are they? For the first time since we arrived in this house, I am disturbed by the lack of photos on the walls, the lack
of framed certificates, words to live by, the lack of life.
    The girl in the chest freezer is naked and emaciated, Louis tells me. Sunken cheeks, ribs poking through. Fingers like claws. She looks both old and young, at once a child and a grandmother.
Louis finds it impossible to guess her age, though he immediately thinks of the words
anorexic
and
teenager.
She is concealed beneath melting blocks of ice.
    Today marks the third week since I left the hospital. How long has she been in that freezer?
    Who hid her there?
    We puzzle over the detail of the fallen dresser cabinet. Someone went to the basement, toppled the cabinet over, and left how?
    Louis says there is a large window over the freezer, large enough for an adult to crawl through. The glass panes have been painted over with brown paint. It’s locked from the outside and
leads into the backyard. All right: so someone came from outside, toppled the cabinet over, and went back out the window? Clearly the cabinet was pushed to discourage people inside the house from
exploring the basement.
    “Is that why they were driving so fast?” I say. I remember us in the SUV. I remember the sedan with Louis and Jonah (though we didn’t know their names then) zooming out of a
street and appearing in front of us, suddenly in the way, suddenly giving us a way out of our old life.
    They were driving fast because they were escaping the scene of a crime, a scene we have now inherited.
    “We need to get out of here,” I say.
    We have moved back to the dining area. Louis is massaging his forehead. It is starting to get dark.
    “We don’t have a car,” he says. “You are injured.”
    “But we can’t stay here.” It is starting to get dark and I am terrified.
    “We wouldn’t have known about the chest freezer if the electricity didn’t go out.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “If the power comes back we’ll be okay.”
    “And if it doesn’t?”
    “Then we’ll go,” Louis says. “But we’re doomed if that’s the case. A neighbor will call the police and report the smell. They’ll discover the body in
the basement, and the man who delivers our groceries will be questioned and he’ll tell the police who we are.”
    This damn body. This damn face.
    Louis says, “We’ll be on the run.”
    Again,
I say in my head.
    “And we can’t really run that far.”
    “I can’t believe this is happening,” I say.
    “I know.”
    “Isn’t it ironic that I try to escape and I end up anyway in the body of a –”
    “Don’t,” Louis says. “Just don’t.”
    There comes a time when you just need to let the tears fall. To Louis’s credit, he keeps his gaze averted, giving me some privacy. (Irrelevant, really, in my case, when I can’t even
give myself a bath or even hobble to the urinal by myself.)
    “Maybe they didn’t do it,” he says. “Maybe Louis