The Darkroom Incident

Phillip called me on a Thursday to brag. I didn't pick up, so he left a voicemail, which was somehow worse. He went on for two minutes about his new condo, his new boat, and a woman named Delores who apparently plays tennis.

"I just want you to be happy for me, Cath," he said, right before he hung up. "I've never been better. Honestly, I hope you can say the same someday."

I was fifty-two years old, I audited nail salons for an insurance company, and my ex was leaving me voicemails like he'd won a raffle. I had dated the man for six months, two years back, and I'd dumped him because he talked about himself the way other people talk about sports teams they don't even follow. Apparently he'd gotten worse.

I listened to the whole thing twice while I sat in my car outside my building, and that's when I noticed my keys sitting on the kitchen counter, visible through the window, next to my microwave.

I'd left them there that morning. On purpose, probably, because I'd been carrying coffee and a file box and my brain had filed "keys" under later. Now it was nine at night, the landlord didn't answer, and the lockout service wanted two hundred dollars I refused to spend on a Thursday.

I went through my options out loud, sitting in the driver's seat. None of them were good. Then I thought of Kurt.

Kurt lived in the apartment next to mine. He was forty-eight, worked as a nail technician at a salon over on Fulton, and we'd been exchanging hallway small talk for three years. He had a cat named Trevor. He'd helped me carry a mattress once. It wasn't much of a relationship, but it was more than I had with anyone else at that moment.

He picked up on the third ring.

"Cath? It's late."

"I know. I locked myself out. I'm standing in the parking lot like an idiot. Do you happen to know anyone with a spare key to my place?"

"Nope. Landlord?"

"Not answering."

There was a pause. I heard Trevor meow somewhere in the background.

"Okay, well. Look, I close at the salon at nine. I'm still there, actually, doing inventory. There's a storeroom in the back with a cot, sort of. A cot-adjacent situation. It's not glamorous but it beats your car seat."

"You're offering me your workplace storeroom."

"I'm offering you a roof. Take it or sleep in the Corolla."

I took it. I drove over and he met me at the back door in his apron, still holding a clipboard. He smelled like acetone and hand lotion.

"It's through here," he said, leading me past the dryers. "Fair warning, it's mostly shelves. The cot is from when the old owner's nephew stayed over. Don't ask."

"Was it a whole thing?"

"It was a whole thing. There's water in the mini fridge. Bathroom's down the hall, the door sticks, lift and push."

He showed me the storeroom, which was about eight feet by ten, packed with boxes of polish and stacked towels, and then he stood there awkwardly for a second.

"I'll leave my number on the counter. I'm heading home after this, so call if you need anything." He paused at the door. "You okay? You seem rattled."

"Phillip left me a voicemail."

"Ah." He nodded like that explained everything, which it did. "Get some sleep, Cath."

Then he was gone and I was alone with the towels.

* * *

I didn't sleep right away. I never do. I poked around the storeroom instead, because there's only so long you can sit on a cot belonging to a nephew you've never met before you need something to do.

That's when I found the darkroom.

It was behind the towel stacks, in the back corner. A previous tenant, years ago, had apparently done photography. There was a blackout curtain hung over a nook, and inside it, a small counter with three plastic trays, dried white rings of chemical residue, and a red lamp on a clamp. The lamp still worked. I pulled the chain and the whole nook went red, deep and warm, like the inside of an eyelid.

There were empty film canisters on a shelf and a corkboard with pushpins and nothing pinned to it. It was oddly peaceful. No window. No light from the street. Just the hum of a small vent fan that also still worked, barely.

I sat on an overturned bucket and thought about Phillip and Delores and the boat. I thought about how he'd said "I hope you can say the same someday" in that tone of his, the one that meant the opposite. And I decided, sitting there in a red-lit nail salon storeroom at ten at night, that I was going to have the best solo night of my entire life, out of pure spite. If Phillip could be happier than ever, so could I, and I didn't even need a boat.

Then I remembered the lost-and-found box.

Salons accumulate things. I'd gone through this one's box during an audit in March. Under an umbrella, two gloves, a phone charger, and a child's mitten, there had been a vibrator. Sleek, rechargeable, rose-gold, the kind that costs real money. Someone had left it in a changing room and never come back. It had been sitting in that box for months, clean in its little satin pouch, unclaimed.

I'd logged it in my report and forgotten about it. Now I went and dug through the box and there it still was, same pouch, same rose gold. I pressed the button and it buzzed to life in my palm, low and steady.

Now, I want to be careful here about the ethics, because I do audits for a living. But the box had a policy taped to it. Unclaimed items after ninety days go to whoever finds them first. It was July. I counted on my fingers. April, May, June. Ninety days, done. Legally speaking, and I use the word loosely, it was mine.

I took it back to the darkroom nook and sat on the bucket, and then, because I'd committed to the bit, I stood up and took my clothes off.

Fifty-two looks like this, I thought, folding my blouse over the towel stack. Like a woman who goes to the gym twice a month and has opinions about bra styles. I hung my slacks on a shelf hook and stepped out of my