I went down to the courtyard feeling like I was escaping an airless basement. The afternoon sun, a pale yellow, filtered through the branches of the trees, drawing spots of light on the concrete ground. The atmosphere of the courtyard contrasted with the stillness of the fifth floor. Some kids were playing basketball, shouting at the top of their lungs. Several women sitting on benches were snapping beans and gossiping animatedly. I was heading toward my car, ready to start it to go pick up my son, when a wrinkled but firm hand grabbed my wrist.
“Kesha, is that you, baby?”
I turned, startled. It was Miss Hattie. She had been the president of the tenant association back in the day, and although she was retired, she kept that air of authority and the taste for knowing everything. She was sitting on a stone bench, fanning herself with a piece of cardboard, and looking at me intently with narrowed eyes.
“Yes. Hi, Miss Hattie. Enjoying the breeze?” I greeted her politely.
Miss Hattie didn’t answer my trivial question. She made me sit beside her and looked around as if she feared someone would hear her. Then she leaned close to my ear and whispered with an air of mystery. “Did you go up to pay the debt to those two again?”
It surprised me she knew about such a private family matter, but I nodded. “Yes, today was payment day.”
Miss Hattie clicked her tongue and shook her head with an expression of compassion mixed with certain fear. She lowered her voice even more. “Poor thing working like a mule to support people who don’t deserve it. Listen to me good. Next month don’t give them a single cent.”
I frowned, not understanding her. Miss Hattie was known for being a gossip, but she wasn’t a bad person who would incite children to be cruel or not pay their debts. “Why do you say that? I only have a couple of months left. It’s for the $12,000 Marcus borrowed to go to North Dakota. I have to fulfill my obligation.”
Her hands squeezed my arm tightly. Her eyes opened wide, staring at me, and her voice, though trembling, pronounced every syllable with hardness. “They say around here that the dead sometimes ain’t that dead.”
A chill ran down my spine. I got goosebumps. Miss Hattie’s words were like a blast of freezing air from the beyond in broad daylight. “What are you saying? My husband died five years ago. We have the death certificate. We even brought his ashes back.”
She interrupted me with a wave of her hand. “I ain’t talking about ghosts. I’m talking about flesh and blood people. Haven’t you noticed that house is quieter than a church during the day, but around one or two in the morning, you hear noises? One night, I couldn’t sleep. I went out on my balcony to smoke a cigarette and saw the shadow of a man going up to the fifth floor. The way he walked looked real familiar to me. Real familiar.”
My heart started to beat hard.
“Yes, that way of limping with the shoulder dropped a little. Just like Marcus after he broke his leg in that motorcycle accident. And the strangest thing is that whenever you come to bring the money, that same night or the next, that shadow appears.”w
I stood paralyzed, my mind blank. Marcus died in a work accident in North Dakota. A representative from the contracting company brought us the urn with his ashes. “Surely you’re mistaken. Your eyesight isn’t what it used to be.” I tried to find a logical explanation, but my own voice was trembling.
