The Locked Pantry

Joan Tomlinson was forty-four years old and she had been arranging the same tray of canapés for ten minutes without actually arranging anything.

The house was the kind of Victorian that made her think of her grandmother's soap operas, all dark wood and dusty light and rooms that went somewhere for no reason. Stale air. Yellowed windows. A piano in the parlor that nobody had tuned since sometime last century. She had catered a hundred of these property showings for Henri's company and she knew the drill. Set up in the kitchen, keep the trays full, smile at the real estate agent, go home.

But today she kept looking through the doorway at Henri.

He was standing near a narrow door off the back hall, talking with the real estate agent, a woman named Marian Rasmussen who was thirty-nine and wore her blazer like she was running for office. Marian laughed at something. Henri laughed back. He touched the corner of the agent's elbow to steer her toward the pantry, and Joan's stomach did something ugly about it.

Which was stupid. She knew it was stupid. She had ended a six-year relationship with a man who never proposed three months ago, and ever since then her insides had been doing this thing where every small slight felt like proof that she was worthless and everyone knew it. Henri Tupa was her boss. He was forty-one, he signed her checks, and two years ago, at the Henderson holiday party, he had kissed her in the coat room and then never mentioned it again. Not once. Not at a single Monday meeting or a single job site in two years.

She set down the tongs.

"Cover for me a second," she said to Dev, the kid on drinks, who was twenty-five and did not look up from his phone.

Then she crossed the back hall like a woman with a purpose, which she was, though the purpose was embarrassing.

* * *

The pantry was narrow and windowless and smelled like old flour and closed-up decades. There were shelves along one wall and a floor of creaking boards and Joan realized, once the door swung shut behind her and cut off the murmur of the showing, that she had not actually planned what to say.

Henri turned around. He had been reaching for a shelf, probably checking the space like Marian had asked him to, and now he was standing two feet away in the dark with his boss face already coming off.

"Joan? What are you doing in here?"

"I need to ask you something." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Two years ago. The Henderson party. You kissed me in the coat room."

He went very still. Even in the dim light coming under the door she could see it happen, the way his whole body stopped.

"I remember," he said.

"You remember. Okay. Good. Because I've spent two years wondering if it happened, you know? Like maybe I imagined it, like maybe I had too much of the cabernet and made the whole thing up. And you never said a word. Not one word, Henri. You look me in the face every Monday morning and hand me a work order."

"Joan."

"No, let me finish. Do you know where I am right now, in my life? I just got out of a six-year non-marriage with a man who would not marry me and would not leave either, just sat there in the middle of my life like a couch nobody wanted. And I finally get out. And I start thinking, well, maybe I'm not finished. Maybe somebody out there still thinks I'm worth kissing. And the only kiss I've thought about in two years is yours, and you pretended it never happened."

The words ran out and the pantry was quiet. Somewhere in the walls a pipe ticked.

Henri rubbed his jaw. "I was scared," he said.

"That's it? That's the whole answer?"

"It's most of it." He leaned back against the shelves and looked at the floor. "You worked for me, Joan. You still work for me. I kissed my caterer in a coat room at a client's house and then I panicked. I kept thinking, if I bring it up, it becomes a thing. An HR thing, or an awkward thing, or she files something, or it just gets weird, and I lose the best caterer I've ever had. So I decided the safest thing was silence. Which, I know now, was the worst thing."

"So you weren't sorry you did it."

He looked up at her. "No. I was not sorry I did it. I think about it more than I should."

Joan felt heat go up her neck. "Well," she said. "Okay. That's. Huh."

"I'm forty-one years old and I handled it like I was in middle school," he went on. "I'm sorry, Joan. Genuinely. It was cowardly and you deserved a conversation and instead you got two years of me pretending to be a vending machine."

Despite everything, she almost laughed. "A vending machine."

"A very guilty vending machine."

"Okay. Well. Thank you for saying it." She took a breath. "For what it's worth, I didn't come in here to make a scene. I came in here because I saw you with Marian and I got jealous, which is insane, because you're my boss and I'm forty-four and I'm supposed to be past this."

"You're not past anything," Henri said. "Nobody's past anything. Marian's nice but she's selling me a house, that's all it is."

"I know. I know it's all it is. It's just." She gestured at nothing. "Three months out of six years and I'm apparently a raccoon in a garbage can, I'll grab at anything."

"You're not a raccoon."

"You haven't seen me at a buffet."

He smiled at that, and for a second the pantry felt almost warm, and Joan thought maybe they were having an actual conversation, an adult one, the kind she'd been owed for two years. Then the door handle rattled.

Somebody outside had grabbed it and turned it, and instead of the latch clicking open there was a cheap metallic crunch, the sound of something small and old giving up for good. The handle on the inside spun loosely in Joan's hand when she tried it, spinning and spinning like it was no longer connected to anything at all.

"Oh no," she said.

"What?"

"Ted, is that you out there?" she called. "The handle just came apart."

It was Ted, the buyer, a retired contractor of fifty-two who had spent the last hour thumping walls with his knuckles. His voice came through the door, muffled and apologetic.

"I just leaned on it a little! Is it stuck?"

"The handle's broken clean off, I think."

There was a pause, then the sound of Ted doing what retired contractors do, which was knocking on things and listening. "Hinges are on the inside," he reported. "Solid door. Old growth pine, probably. That's good wood, that is. Bad luck about the latch."

"Can you get the agent?" Henri called. "Marian? The lock is jammed and the handle is gone."

"On it. Hang tight!"

Footsteps moved off down the hall. Joan stood with her hand still on the dead handle, and the pantry was very quiet and very dark, just the thin yellow line of light along the floor where the hall came in. The house creaked somewhere above them.

"So," Henri said in the dark. "Marian's got keys, probably. Twenty minutes, tops."

"Twenty minutes," Joan agreed.

Neither of them moved toward the door. The line of light lay across the floorboards between their feet like something they were both pretending not to notice, and somewhere in the walls of the old house, soft as breath, something seemed to lean closer and listen.

The quiet lasted maybe a minute. Then a draft came through the pantry, and it was cold in a way the rest of the house wasn't. The hall outside had been warm, autumn-afternoon warm, but the air moving past Joan's ankles felt like a cellar door had opened somewhere underground.

"Do you feel that?" she asked.

"Yeah." Henri straightened off the shelves. "Where's that coming from?"

"Old house. There's always a draft in an old house."

"Sure."

He didn't sound sure. Joan hugged her arms around herself. The draft moved across the backs of her hands and then it was gone, and the pantry settled into its stale quiet again. Old flour and closed-up decades. That was all it was supposed to smell like. But under it now there was something else, faint and mineral, like a jar of pennies left open in a basement.

Then she heard the breathing.

It was low and slow and rhythmic, and it was not hers and it was not Henri's. It came from somewhere behind the shelves, or inside the shelves, or in the wall behind the shelves, a place that had no room to hold anything, because the shelves went back almost to the plaster. In and out. Patient. Like something was sleeping a few inches from her shoulder.

"Henri." Her voice came out thin. "Tell me you hear that."

He was quiet for a second. She could just make out the shape of him, a darker dark against the dark.

"Breathing," he said. "Yeah. I hear it."

"Is there a vent? Some kind of duct?"

"In a pantry? No!"

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know, Joan."

The breathing didn't change. It didn't speed up the way a person's would when they were heard. It just kept on, in and out, in and out, and Joan realized she had stopped breathing herself, holding her chest still, as if it might notice her and stop too.

"Hello?" she said.

Nothing answered. The draft came again, colder this time, and this time it seemed to come from between the two of them, a column of cold air about as wide as a person.

"Okay," Henri said. "I'm going to look behind the shelves. There's got to be a gap, a mouse hole, something."

"Henri, don't."

"It's probably a raccoon in the walls. You like raccoons."

"That was a joke. That was my joke and it was twenty minutes ago."

His hand found her arm in the dark, a brief squeeze, and then he moved along the shelves, and the floorboards creaked under him the way they had creaked all afternoon. The breathing kept its rhythm. Joan stayed where she was, one hand on the dead door handle, and tried to think of the hundred property showings she'd worked and how many old houses she'd stood in and how none of them had ever breathed.

Then it spoke.

"There you are," it said.

The voice was low and even and it did not come from the shelves. It seemed to come from everywhere the cold came from, from the air itself, soft as a radio turned down to almost nothing. Joan's whole body went still.

"Did you hear that?" she whispered.

"I heard it."

"Hello?" Joan said again, louder this time.

"You don't need to shout," the voice said. "I'm closer than that."

Henri came back toward her fast, and his hand found her shoulder in the dark and stayed there.

"What are you?" he asked. "What is this?"

"A question. A fair one." The voice paused, and the breathing filled the pause, in and out. "I'm old. Older than this house, though the house suits me. And I am hungry, the way I am always hungry, though you two are the best meal to walk through my door in a very long time."

Joan's mouth had gone dry. "We don't want any trouble. We're just stuck. Marian's coming with keys. Twenty minutes."

"Twenty minutes," the voice agreed, almost kindly. "Plenty of time."

"Plenty of time for what?" Henri asked.

"For you. You've been feeding me since you walked in, do you know that? Both of you. All afternoon." The breathing deepened, slowed, like something settling in. "Jealousy is a fine flavor. So is want. And you've been marinating in both for two years, and today you finally said it out loud, in my room, with my door shut. Do you have any idea how that tastes?"

Joan felt her face go hot in the cold air. "We didn't. We weren't. This isn't."

"It isn't what? You want each other. You've wanted each other since a coat room at the Henderson party, and you've carried it around like a stone in your pocket ever since. It's the loudest thing in this house. Louder than the buyer thumping his knuckles on my walls. Louder than the agent in her good blazer wanting to be anywhere else."

"How do you know all that?" Henri's voice had