The Hour of Bad Decisions by Russell Wangersky

lit with unfamiliar light – the oblong of the streetlight-lit window somehow always wrong, in the wrong place. The room, soft and unthreatening, yet turned on edge, sideways-shifted.
    The cat, black and white and short-haired, heard the screaming and didn’t flinch, hardly paused, step-stepping carefully, more intent on each paw-lifting, paw-settling step than on the fugitive noises of neighbours.
    Kevin, on the stairs, stopping. “Is she in trouble?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy, then?’
    â€œBecause he left.”
    It was explanation set as punctuation – just the naked why. But Heather was sometimes like that: anexplanation was unnecessary, as long as the outcome was clear. Eventually he learned more: that the neigh-bour was Mrs. Bird, that she had two cats, that Mr. Bird had left for work one evening like he always had, a night watchman prowling the periphery of an oldage home, alone with his thoughts and the buttonless night. Nothing to suggest he wouldn’t be back in the morning, like always, sitting in his kitchen in his sleeveless undershirt, drinking one more cup of milky sweet tea. Heather said his face hung on his skull as if it had come unpressed, that it drooped away from the muscles beneath, and that every day he was there, waiting for the clock to count down to bed.
    Except, one day, he wasn’t. As easy and as unlikely as that. From the door of Heather’s laundry room, looking across to the Birds’ kitchen, Kevin could imagine a cup of tea, steaming, waiting. It was five years ago, Heather told him eventually, and still Mrs. Bird was keening, still waiting for the front gate to open at his quiet touch.
    And still Kevin was learning the shape of the house he was living in, the pattern of the place. Learning when the hot water would fail two full inches before the bath was full. Already he knew that the rooms weren’t square, although sometimes the variation was only slight: looking at the ceiling of the living room, it was possible to see that the back of the room was narrower than the front by a few inches. In other rooms, the unevenness was more pronounced, all the result of a house built to fit a space between its neighbours, on an oblong and long-used lot.
    At night, when Heather was out, Kevin would wander the house, picking things up, setting them down, wondering about the history behind glass bottles, the heavy, green, once-stoppered Superior Lemonade bottle on a window ledge in the bathroom, the flat, flask-like bottle whose only features were the words “S.A. chevalier’s life for the hair.” Candlesticks were silent about their provenance, but rested inside cupboards with a particular pride of place. Wineglasses, all different styles, were organized in rows without any particular discernible order. Shelves of paperback books, speaking of half-remembered university English courses, whispering of not having been moved in years. Photographs of smiling couples he did not know, a wedding picture of Heather’s, turned face down now that her husband was gone, where, smooth-cheeked and literally radiant, she looked like no Heather he had ever met.
    And somehow, it was as if he might be able to find Heather’s whole life in there, locked up in code, if only some sort of Rosetta stone would make itself obvious in among the tablecloth runners, or deep in the pine cupboard where the casserole dishes hid. But there was no simple solution there – even though there were telling pieces, like the careful imprint of her lips in lipstick on a glass waiting to be washed, the overall pattern eluded him. Sometimes, he could feel it in the air in front of him, as fine as the smell of lemon peel. As fine as the thin, high trill of Mrs. Bird, once again her own private ambulance, drivingthrough the narrow highways of her halls, rising, fading, rising again.
    One day, through her window, as he was heading out Heather’s gate, he saw her, saw