She opened the refrigerator. Inside: coffee beans in a sealed jar, green vegetables still fresh, two containers of leftovers with dates written on the lids in a handwriting she could not place but which gave her a feeling she could not name. She closed the refrigerator. She walked back through the living room toward the corridor that led, she assumed, to bedrooms.
This was when she saw the foot.
It was visible around the half-open door at the end of the corridor — a foot, and then an ankle, and then when she pushed the door open with the pressing fingertips of someone who is not sure they want the door to open, the rest of the person who belonged to the foot. A woman. Lying on her back on the bedroom floor, her arms at her sides, her face turned away from the door. She was not sleeping. The stillness of her was not the stillness of sleep — it was the other kind, the complete kind, the kind that had a quality of permanence that the body registered before the mind caught up with what it was registering.
She stood in the doorway. She did not scream, which surprised some part of her that was observing the situation from a slight distance. She stood in the doorway and she looked at the woman on the floor and she felt the specific cold of something enormous and irreversible.
The bedroom was a person's bedroom — not a guest room, a lived-in room, the room of someone's daily life. Photographs on the walls, a specific collection of them: landscapes, some people, all framed deliberately. A bookshelf even in here, with bedside books on top. A dressing table with the small organised architecture of a woman who had a morning routine and kept to it — specific things in specific places, the geometry of habit.
She looked at the photographs on the wall. They were the photographs of a specific person's life — places visited, people loved, the incremental record of a life with a narrative. She looked at the woman in the photographs: dark, thick hair, a wide smile, a quality in the face of someone who laughed easily and thought seriously. She looked at this woman in every photograph and then she looked at the woman on the floor and understood, with the specific cold she had been feeling since she opened the door, that they were the same person.
The woman on the floor was the woman in the photographs. This was the woman whose apartment this was. This was the woman who had bought the Coorg ceramic cup and the pale blue sofa and the specific coffee maker and had printed the card that said a place for everything and had tended the herbs on the kitchen ledge and had read every one of the hundreds of books on the shelves.
