Chapter 2 - The Third Stairwell
The old man was already moving before I stepped out of the car.
“Back alley,” he called. “Unless you want to spend the night looking at the front of the building.”
I followed him through cold rain, past dumpsters and a gate marked CONSTRUCTION ACCESS ONLY. He lifted its loose chain without hesitation. Behind the Orpheum's grand facade, the block was a maze of service doors, old brick, and pipes wrapped in tired insulation.
The blue door stood beneath a burned-out security lamp. Twenty pairs of shoes crowded the entryway, children’s sneakers beside men's work boots and soft slippers. The smell of onions and detergent drifted from upstairs. This wasn't an empty property awaiting demolition. It was a place where people had cooked dinner.
A woman came down carrying a flashlight in one hand and a girl's wrist in the other. The girl held a violin case against her chest.
“Jonah?” the woman asked. “Is the power coming back?”
“Working on it, Marisol.”
She looked past him at me. Recognition landed hard. “You're the owner.”
I wanted to explain that I owned a development company, not her life. Looking at the dark staircase, I realized how small that distinction sounded.
“My name is Nathan. We're trying to restore service.”
“My daughter has school in six hours,” she said. “Mrs. Ortega upstairs has medicine in a refrigerator. You don't get to say trying like this was weather.”
Jonah touched her shoulder. “Get the residents together in the courtyard. Use the front stairs; the back ones have a rotten tread.”
“There's a sign saying the building's empty,” the girl said to me. “Does that mean we're ghosts?”
I had no answer worth giving her.
I called Evan again. He was on the far side of the block with the electrical contractor. The utility could not simply reverse a formal disconnect without determining whether the shared circuits were safe. He had a licensed electrician coming to inspect the service in the morning.
“Morning?” Marisol repeated when I told her. “It's forty degrees tonight.”
I asked Jonah who he was. “Jonah Price. Electrician. I looked after this place when your dad owned half the block and couldn't afford a proper maintenance crew. I kept looking after it when the new managers decided we didn't exist.”
In the courtyard, people began emerging with blankets and grocery bags. I counted nineteen households and thirty people, including six children, until Marisol told me I had missed a man recovering from surgery on the top floor. The total was thirty-one.
A city fire lieutenant arrived because a neighbor had called about the outage. He asked for the occupancy list. I showed him the file on my phone: ZERO RESIDENTS.
May you like
Jonah stood beside me in the light of an emergency vehicle.
“Now,” he said, “tell him which list you believe.”
