As she walks on, she keeps hearing the words repeated in her head, in some voice other than her own, I’m home. It is neither a woman’s voice, nor a man’s, and the longer it keeps repeating, I’m home, I’m home, I’m home, the more disquieting it is, this voice inside of her that she has never encountered before. She walks faster in an effort to overtake it, to leave it behind her in the crosswalk.
She buys a large bag of rubber bands at the store, and when the cashier hands her the change, her eyes wander to a display of Sharpies at the register. She blinks, and picks up a black one. She weighs it in her palm and folds her fingers around it.
“How much?”
On Iris’s way back to the office, a woman, half a block ahead of her, steps into the crosswalk, little yellow lights flashing on the pavement to indicate her right-of-way, and a mere second later, a silver SUV comes barreling toward the intersection, with no sign of slowing. Iris sees it at the same moment the woman does. She stops and watches as the woman first waves an arm, thinking the car needs only a stronger indication of her presence, before, in a panic, she changes tactics, jumping back to the sidewalk a second before the car blows through the intersection. The woman turns around and watches it go, and what Iris sees on her face isn’t indignation, or even fear, but pure speechless puzzlement, as though her understanding of things has just floated up and away like a white balloon.
Iris continues walking, and as she approaches the woman, who is still standing motionless on the corner, she wants to say something to her, to let her know somehow that someone has seen.
When she is close enough, she blurts out, “I know,” but she doesn’t think the woman hears it. She turns back a few seconds later, and the woman is walking, quickly, away. Iris quickens her own pace to match.
She stops again in front of the vacant lot.
I’m home.
I’m home.
I’m home.
She is just barely able to squeeze her arm through and reach the sign, uncapped marker in hand.
On the first line, she writes: Are you?
On the second line: Where?
On the third line: So what?
She has a little more trouble freeing her arm from the fence, and is left with a long white scratch from wrist to elbow. She licks her index finger and rubs it on the scratch, rendering it almost invisible.
When she gets back, the office is locked. She finds her key, and struggles for the thousandth time with the lock while vaguely watching 2B. She tries to switch to her peripheral vision, blur the part of her gaze that sees the doorknob in front of her, her own hand grasping it, and focus on the side view, the other door, freshly painted and serenely closed, quiet emanating from its borders. He’s not in there, she thinks, nobody’s in there. This trick works for a couple of seconds, but a twinge of pain in her left eye socket shifts everything back into place as her own door finally comes unlocked. She pushes through and the alarm sounds. Perplexed, she disengages it. She checks the clock on her cell phone. It is not even two o’clock. She was gone for twenty minutes tops.
She knocks on her boss’s door and there is no answer. He must have had an off-site meeting he didn’t mention to her. Or he felt ill, got a headache. There are countless reasons to leave a place.
She sits at her desk and takes the phone off of automatic answer. Just then the phone rings.
“Thank you for calling Larmax, Inc. How may I help you?”
“Hello,” a man says, “I’d like to speak to the owner, please.”
“He’s not in at the moment. Would you like to leave a message?”
“No, that’s all right. Perhaps someone on your sales team might be able to help me?”
“Certainly. I’ll see if someone’s available. One moment, please.”
She dials four for sales and the phone rings until a recording comes on to tell her that the person she has dialed is not available. She dials five, the other sales extension. This time there is no ring at all. She transfers back to the main line.
“Hello, sir?”
“Hello?” she repeats.
He’s gone. The sound on the other end is a quiet hiss, so light it disappears when she stops concentrating on it. Iris hangs up.
She sits for a moment with her hand still on the receiver. Then she stands up and heads toward the hallway. She knows her boss is out, or he has chosen to be unreachable, barricaded behind the door. She swivels around to the door that faces his, the accountant’s office. She knocks. When there is no answer, she knocks again. Finally, she opens the door to find the office empty, though the computer is on, the plant on the windowsill seemingly in good condition. She approaches it to see if it’s real, running a hand delicately over the surface of a leaf, before unintentionally contracting her fingers so the leaf crumbles, staining her fingers a sticky green.
She knocks on each of the junior sales team’s doors, and finds that they too are currently empty, though projects sit mid-completion on every desk, files and drawers open. She has a brief inclination to check seats for warmth, but decides this would look bad if someone were to walk in. She skips the sales director’s office, knowing it to be empty, but then she wonders, is anyone going to take over for her? It’s been a couple of weeks since she left, and two more weeks since she gave notice. As far as she knows, no one has been interviewed, nor anyone promoted from inside.
She checks the rooms one by one and finds them each uninhabited. There are photos on desks. Papers and pens left out. A cold, half-full coffee mug at the edge of one desk, which she picks up, uncovering a dark brown ring.
She shuts the door to each office after she has checked it, and when she is done, she stands in the middle of the hallway. If someone were watching, they would see the expression frozen on her face, eyes narrowed and mouth slightly open. She stands still as a deer hearing footsteps. She stands, feet in an unconscious third position, her body’s memory of the childhood ballet classes she has long since forgotten. Her arms hang at her sides.
So, she thinks. So.
Finally, she returns to her desk and sits. There is a lot of day left, and her boss will most likely be back. Anyone could be back at any moment. Her breath is shallow. If someone were listening, they would hear just how quiet Iris can be while still occupying space.
She doesn’t have any particular task to attend to, nothing in her inbox. She pulls the Sharpie out of her purse. She then takes a sheet of labels out of her desk’s top drawer, and writes on one of them, Property of Iris Finch.
She peels off the label and sticks it on the marker, smoothing it slowly to prevent wrinkles. She blows on the fresh ink, then sets the marker on her desk, in line with everything else. She leans back in her chair and it rolls slightly forward, creaking. She thinks of putting her feet up on the desk, but she doesn’t have enough room, her desk as close to the wall as they could get it and still fit a person in between. She leans back a little further and her head touches the wall, her hair smooth against dried paint. She gazes up at the ceiling, but there’s nothing to see there. She thinks back to a time in college when she and Mallory each took a box of Dramamine. At the end of the night, she lay alone on her bed, watching as words passed by in shadow on the ceiling, too quickly for her to read, until they weren’t even in English anymore, but some kind of Arabic script. Then she stopped trying to read it, and simply enjoyed the shapes as they flitted past. When she woke up the next morning, she felt a certain sadness that words would most likely never appear to her again as they had that night. She looked up at the flat white ceiling, strangely bereft.