The Doorbell Game

Dennis pulls into the gravel lot at six on a Thursday, feeling he is a man arriving at the wrong party. The address had said warehouse, and he'd figured that was some kind of joke, but no. It's a warehouse. An actual spice warehouse, squat and gray, sitting on the edge of town where the Highlands start thinking about hills.

He locks his car and checks his reflection in the window. Forty-six years old, gym shorts he bought three years ago and never wore, and a t-shirt from a sound gig he did in Inverness. Divorce gear, his sister would call it. He almost turns around and drives home.

Then he hears the music. Somebody's got a portable PA going inside, and there's a voice counting over it. He goes in.

The place is bigger than it looks from outside. Tall metal shelves run the length of the floor, stacked with burlap sacks. Cumin, says one. Cardamom. Smoked paprika. The air smells faintly of turmeric, warm and dusty, as if the whole building is one giant simmering pot. About a dozen adults are arranged in rows, doing jumping jacks, and at the front is Tyra.

He knows her instantly. Tyra from the night course at the community college, twenty-odd years back. They were both in their early twenties then, both working day jobs and taking an evening class in audio production for reasons neither of them could explain now. They'd kept in touch, loosely. Christmas messages. The occasional pint when she passed through town.

She's forty-five now and she looks good. She's got her hair pulled back and she's leading the warm-ups with her arms up, counting loud, and when she spots him standing by the door looking lost as a dog she breaks into a grin.

"Well, look what the cat dragged in," she calls, mid-count, not missing a beat. "Class, this is Dennis. He mixes sound for films, so if any of you need a movie scored, he's your man."

Half the class waves at him. Dennis feels his ears go hot. He finds a spot in the back row and starts copying whatever the person in front of him is doing, which turns out to be arm circles, which turns out to be harder than arm circles have any right to be.

Tyra keeps glancing his way. Every time, there's that grin. It feels like old times, the way they used to trade jokes across the classroom while the instructor droned on about microphones. He'd forgotten how easy it was with her. That's part of why he came, if he's honest. Not the self-defense. He didn't even know she taught self-defense until he saw the flyer with her face on it.

The warm-up ends and she claps her hands.

"Right. Partner drills. Everybody grab somebody you didn't come with."

The class shuffles around. Before Dennis can locate a partner, Tyra is standing in front of him.

"You're with me," she says. "Instructor's privilege."

"Seems like a conflict of interest."

"Seems like you're in no position to argue." She's already positioning him, pushing his shoulders, adjusting his stance with a tap of her foot against his ankle. Her hands are firm and quick. "Wrist grab drill. I grab, you break free. Watch."

She grabs his wrist and he twists out of it, badly, and she laughs.

"God, your form is tragic!"

"I mix sound for a living. I lift faders. That's my athletic range."

"Uh huh." She grabs his wrist again, slower this time, and holds it. She looks up at him. "So. Divorce gear, is it? The shorts?"

Dennis snorts. "You noticed that."

"Everybody noticed that. Julio over there noticed that." She nods at a big fellow in the front row who is very much not paying attention to them. "It's fine. It's a look. Depressed lumberjack."

"I'm not depressed. I'm recalibrating."

"You're depressed," she says, still holding his wrist, her thumb resting on his pulse. "That's alright. That's why you're here." Then she leans in, close enough that he can smell the eucalyptus on her, and drops her voice so only he can hear it. "I saved a special exercise for you tonight. Later. After class."

He opens his mouth to ask what she means and she lets go of his wrist and claps again and calls the class to the next drill, leaving him standing there with his pulse doing something unscheduled.

The class goes on. Punches into pads. Escapes from bear hugs. Dennis is mediocre at all of it and Tyra circles the room correcting everyone, and every time she passes him she gives him a look. Not a teacher look. The other kind.

Then the doorbell rings.

It's a real doorbell, an old-fashioned one, mounted by the front door of this warehouse like it was salvaged from somebody's granny's house. It goes off once, bright and wrong in all that spice-scented quiet.

Tyra stops the class. "Anyone expecting anybody?"

Nobody is. She walks to the door, peers out the little window, and reports back.

"Nobody. Empty lot."

The bell rings again while she's standing right next to it and there is still nobody there.

"Aw, no," says a woman near the front, delighted. "Is it the ghost again?"

"There is no ghost," Tyra says. "It's the wiring. This building used to be three different things and the electrics are haunted by consequence, not by spirits."

The bell rings a third time, longer this time, like somebody leaning on it.

"The ghost's got opinions tonight," Julio says.

The class dissolves into chatter. Tyra holds up her hands for quiet, gets about half of it, and gives up. "Fine. Twenty-minute break while I go flip the breaker. Don't die."

Dennis drifts toward the shelves, mostly to have somewhere to be. He's reading the side of a sack of smoked paprika like it's fascinating when Tyra appears at his elbow.

"Walk with me," she says.

"That was my special exercise?"

"That was the ghost. My special exercise is in the back."

She leads him between the shelves, past sacks of cumin and cardamom stacked taller than his head, toward a back room with a rolling door half down and more sacks stacked in towers. It's quieter back