The zipper on Marcus’s sleeping bag had been broken since Thanksgiving, so he slept with his shoes on and his coat wrapped around his legs like a tourniquet. This meant he woke up every morning with dead feet, pins and needles from the ankle down, and had to sit on the edge of his cot for two or three minutes just stomping feeling back into himself while the other men in the room pretended not to watch.
Christmas was no different. He stomped.
The shelter had put up decorations — donated garland from the dollar store, the kind that shed green metallic dust on everything, so the floor near the doorways looked like someone had crushed a beetle the size of a Buick. A paper snowflake hung from the ceiling vent by a thread of dental floss. When the heat kicked on it spun slowly, and Marcus watched it turn while he waited for his left foot to stop lying to him about being gone.
Forty-six men slept in this room. The room was designed for thirty. You could tell because there were thirty electrical outlets and sixteen extension cords, and last week a man named Gerald had nearly burned the place down plugging in a heated blanket he’d found behind a Walgreens. Gerald wasn’t here anymore. Nobody said where Gerald went. People didn’t, in shelters; you just noticed the empty cot and then the cot wasn’t empty anymore and the new person had different problems.
Marcus was thirty-one. He’d been thirty-one for four days. He knew this because his mother had called the shelter’s front desk on the 21st and left a message with Deena, the night volunteer, who had written it on a Post-it note in purple ink: Your mom says happy birthday, she loves you, call when you can. He had not called. The Post-it was in his coat pocket, folded into a square the size of a stamp.
He did not want to think about his mother on Christmas morning, so he thought about coffee instead. The shelter served coffee at seven. It was Folgers, and they brewed it weak, and it came in Styrofoam cups that squeaked when you held them. Marcus had never cared less about the quality of coffee in his life. He wanted it the way a dog wants to go outside. A body-level thing.
He put both feet on the cold floor. Stood.
The gift was on the chair beside his cot.
He didn’t register it at first. His brain processed it as clutter — someone’s bag, maybe, shoved over from the next cot during the night. But the next cot was Jimmie’s, and Jimmie was already up, sitting cross-legged on his mattress and reading a Bible with a cracked spine, and Jimmie’s stuff was all accounted for: the backpack under his cot, the jacket balled up as a pillow, the photograph of his daughter wedged into the bed frame like a playing card.
The thing on the chair was a box. Brown cardboard. Taped shut with clear packing tape, the kind that goes milky at the edges. On top of the box, in black Sharpie, someone had written: MARCUS.
Just that. His name. Block letters, a little uneven, the S slightly larger than the other letters like whoever wrote it had misjudged the space.
He looked at Jimmie.
“Don’t look at me,” Jimmie said, not looking up from Deuteronomy.
“This yours?”
“I just said don’t look at me.”
“Jimmie.”
“Man, I been sitting here since five. Woke up and it was there. Merry Christmas.”
Marcus picked up the box. It was heavier than he expected. Something shifted inside, solid but padded — wrapped in cloth or paper, something that kept it from rattling. He turned it over. Nothing on the bottom. Nothing on the sides. Just the tape, the cardboard, his name.
He sat back down on the cot. The springs complained. He held the box in his lap and realized his hands were doing something strange: they were shaking. Not much. Just a fine tremor at the fingertips, the kind you’d only notice if you were looking at them, which he was.
He hadn’t received a gift in three years. He was trying to figure out the last one and landed on his ex-girlfriend Tanya, who’d given him a pair of headphones from Target the last Christmas before she’d stopped returning his calls. Which was the last Christmas before a lot of things stopped. He’d sold the headphones for eleven dollars at a pawn shop on Magazine Street in February and used the money to buy a poboy and two tall boys of Modelo and sat on the levee eating and drinking in the cold and thinking about absolutely nothing, which at the time felt like a victory.
He pulled at the tape. It resisted, then gave.
Inside the cardboard box, nested in a wad of newspaper — the classifieds section, he noticed, which still existed apparently — was a smaller box. Wooden. Dark stained, about the size of a thick paperback. A hinged lid with a small brass clasp. The wood was smooth and cool, and it smelled like something. Cedar, maybe. Or— no. His grandmother’s closet. That’s what it smelled like. The closet in her shotgun house in Gentilly where she kept her good shoes and her Sunday hats in round boxes and where he used to hide during thunderstorms when he was five, sitting on the floor with his knees up, breathing in that smell of old wood and lavender sachets and feeling like nothing bad could reach him.
His throat did something involuntary. A catch. He swallowed past it.
He opened the clasp.
Inside the wooden box, lying on a piece of felt that had been cut to fit, was a folded piece of paper and, beneath it, a key. The key was brass, small, the kind that might open a padlock or a mailbox or — he didn’t know. It was attached to a keyring with a round tag, the white plastic kind you see at hardware stores, and someone had written on the tag in the same block Sharpie: 219 DELERY ST APT 4.
Marcus set the key on his knee. He unfolded the paper.
The handwriting here was different from the Sharpie. Smaller. Blue ballpoint. Cursive that slanted hard to the right, the kind of handwriting he associated with women over fifty, though he didn’t know why he thought that and it could’ve been anyone’s.
Marcus —
This is paid through June. First and last and deposit, all handled. There’s a bed and a hot plate and towels. It’s not much but the heater works and there’s a lock on the door that’s yours.
You don’t owe anyone for this. There’s no catch and no one is going to come collect. I know you won’t believe that. That’s fine. Go see the place. The rest you can figure out for yourself.
You’re not what happened to you.
— a friend
He read it twice. Three times. His eyes snagged on there’s a lock on the door that’s yours and stayed there, reading that fragment over and over, because something about those specific words was doing something to the inside of his chest that he could not have described if you’d paid him.
A lock on the door.
His.
“You good?” Jimmie asked.
Marcus realized he’d been sitting perfectly still for what might have been a full minute. The paper was in his left hand. The key was on his knee. His right hand was covering his mouth.
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know.”
He looked at the key. It was just a key. Cut brass, machine-made, the kind you get duplicated at a kiosk for two dollars. There were probably ten thousand identical keys in New Orleans right now, sitting in junk drawers and coat pockets and gutters. But this one had his name on it. Or at least it had an address on it, which was the same thing, almost, which was actually better, because a name was just a sound but an address was a place you could go and close the door and be.
“Can I see?” Jimmie said. He’d put the Bible down.
Marcus handed him the note. Watched Jimmie’s lips move as he read it. Watched his eyebrows go up.
“219 Delery,” Jimmie said. “That’s down in the Lower Nine.”
“I know where it is.”
“That’s real.”
“Maybe.”
“Somebody paid six months on an apartment for you and you’re sitting here saying maybe.”
Marcus took the note back. Folded it along its original creases. Put it in his coat pocket next to the Post-it from his mother and felt both pieces of paper in there, thin as nothing, and thought about how the most important things he owned right now could blow away in a mild wind.
“Could be a scam,” he said.
“A scam for what? You got nothing to steal, brother. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“So go look at it.”
“It’s Christmas.”
“So?”
Marcus didn’t answer. He picked up the key again and turned it between his thumb and forefinger, slowly, the way you’d turn a coin. The brass caught the overhead fluorescent light and threw a small bright shape on the wall beside his cot. He tilted the key and the shape moved; a tiny spotlight sliding across cinder block. He did this four or five times. He didn’t know why.
Around him the room was waking up. Cots creaked. Someone coughed the long rattling cough that Marcus associated with Ray, two rows over, who’d been promising to see a doctor since October. The heat vent exhaled and the paper snowflake spun. From the hallway came the sound of Deena’s sneakers on the linoleum and the smell — there it was, thin but real — of Folgers.
He put the key in his pocket with the papers.
He stood up to go get coffee. But he stopped in the middle of the room and just stood there, between the rows of cots, with his broken sleeping bag behind him and the hallway ahead of him and forty-five men in various states of waking around him, and he pressed his hand flat against his coat pocket and felt the shapes through the fabric. Key. Post-it. Letter.
A man named Darnell walked past him carrying a towel and said, “Merry Christmas, Marc.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said. “Hey, Darnell. You too.”
He walked to the hallway. Then he passed the coffee table. Deena said something to him and he said something back and later he would not remember what either of them said. He walked past the bulletin board with its flyers for NA meetings and job training programs and free dental clinics, past the donations bin where someone had left a bag of tangerines, and he pushed open the front door of the shelter and stepped outside into Christmas morning.
It was 6:52. The air was cold for New Orleans — maybe forty-three, forty-four degrees — and it smelled like wet concrete and truck exhaust and, underneath that, something green. Somebody’s yard. A hedge or a tree doing whatever trees do in December in the South, which is not quite dying and not quite living; just holding on.
Delery Street was twenty-two blocks away. He knew because he’d walked it before, back when he was staying under the Claiborne overpass, back before the shelter, back when the distance between where he was and where he might be was measured in bridges he slept under.
He started walking.
He didn’t run. He wanted to, in a strange childish way that embarrassed him even though no one was watching. His legs wanted to run. His stupid legs with their pins-and-needles feet in their tied-tight shoes wanted to carry him there at full speed, as if the apartment might evaporate, as if six months of paid rent could dissolve like breath on a window.
He walked. The sun wasn’t up yet but the sky was getting lighter in the east, going from black to a bruised blue, and he could see his breath. He passed a gas station with a handwritten sign that said CLOSED MERRY XMAS. He passed a dog tied to a fence who looked at him with one brown eye and one blue eye and did not bark. He passed a house with an inflatable Santa in the yard that had partially deflated overnight so that Santa was bent at the waist, bowing, like he’d been punched in the stomach.
Marcus almost laughed. Didn’t.
He kept his hand in his pocket the whole way, his fingers around the key, and the key got warm.
219 Delery was a shotgun double that had been converted into four apartments. He knew this building. He’d walked past it a hundred times. Yellow paint, peeling. A wrought-iron railing on the front porch that was missing two balusters. A crape myrtle in the side yard, bare now, its branches like cracked fingers against the sky.
Apartment 4 was in the back. Up a set of wooden stairs that groaned under his weight. A door, painted red once, now faded to the color of a brick that’s been in the sun too long.
He stood in front of it.
He took out the key.
His hand was steady now. He noticed that. On the cot, opening the box, his hands had shaken. Here, in front of the door, they were still. He didn’t know what that meant. Maybe nothing. Maybe his body had decided something his brain hadn’t caught up to yet.
The key went in. It fit.
He turned it. The lock clicked. A small sound, mechanical, precise. The most ordinary sound in the world. He’d heard it ten thousand times in his life. But this time the sound entered through his ears and went somewhere deeper than his ears usually sent things, and he felt it in the place behind his sternum where feelings lived that he didn’t have names for.
He pushed the door open.
The apartment was small. One room, really, with a bathroom off to the side. A single bed, made up with a blue comforter that still had the fold creases from the package. A hot plate on a wooden table. A window with blinds, half-open, letting in the first gray light. Two towels, green, folded on the bed. A bar of soap on the bathroom sink, still in its wrapper.
It smelled like fresh paint and Pine-Sol and cold air.
He stepped inside. The floor was wood, old, and it creaked. He closed the door behind him. He locked it.
He stood there in the middle of the room, in his coat with his shoes on, at 7:14 on Christmas morning in an apartment he had not known existed twelve minutes ago, and he listened to nothing. No coughing. No cots. No Gerald burning the place down or Deena’s sneakers or the heat vent spinning its paper snowflake. Just the sound of a building being quiet around him. Just the tick of the baseboard heater starting up.
He sat on the bed. The comforter was cheap, polyester, and it made that shff sound when he sat on it. He put his hands on his knees.
And then, because no one could see him, and because the door was locked, and because for the first time in nine hundred and twelve days there was a door to lock, Marcus put his face in his hands and cried in a way he had not cried since he was a child. Ugly crying. The kind with sounds. His shoulders going, his breath hitching, snot running into his palms. He cried for a long time, or what felt like a long time; he didn’t know. The heater ticked. The light through the blinds moved from gray to something warmer.
When he stopped, he wiped his face with one of the green towels and looked at the wet marks on the fabric and felt vaguely guilty about it, which was such a small and stupid thing to feel that it almost made him laugh again.
He took the letter out of his pocket and smoothed it on his knee.
You’re not what happened to you.
He wanted to argue with that. He had arguments, good ones, stacked up like evidence in a case he’d been building against himself for three years. He had dates and amounts and names of people he’d disappointed. He had a whole prosecution. He was very good at the prosecution.
But the room was warm, and the bed was made, and someone had bought him soap.
He folded the letter. Put it on the table next to the hot plate. Then he took off his shoes, slowly, and then his coat. He lay back on the bed in his clothes and stared at the ceiling, which was white and cracked and had a water stain in one corner shaped like the state of Louisiana, which felt like either a coincidence or the kind of thing that would make Jimmie say God don’t play and tap his Bible.
His feet were warm. Both of them. All the way to the toes.
He reached into his coat on the floor and pulled out the Post-it. Unfolded it. Read the purple ink. Your mom says happy birthday, she loves you, call when you can.
There was a phone in the shelter. He’d need to go back for his sleeping bag anyway, broken zipper or not. His stuff was still there — not that he had much stuff, but still. And Jimmie would want to know.
He’d go back. He’d make the call.
But first he lay there in the warm room with the locked door and listened to the baseboard heater and the nothing else, and he let himself have five minutes where the only thing that existed was a blue comforter and a bar of soap and a key that was still warm from his hand.
Outside, a bird started up. Just one. Singing like it was pissed off about something, or thrilled; with birds it was hard to tell.
He gave himself ten minutes instead of five. Then he got up.
He put his shoes back on. Laced them tight the way he always did, double-knotted, because when your shoes are most of what you own you tie them like you mean it. He put his coat on. He stood in the middle of the apartment one more time and looked at everything — the bed, the table, the hot plate, the soap — and memorized it. Not because he was afraid he’d forget, but because he wanted to have this picture for later, for the next time the prosecution started building its case. Evidence for the defense.
He locked the door behind him. Tested the knob. Locked.
He walked back to the shelter. Twenty-two blocks. The sun was up now, barely, a pale disk behind thin clouds, and the city was doing that thing it does on Christmas morning where the streets are empty in a way that feels less lonely than usual. Like the emptiness is on purpose. Like everyone’s inside somewhere warm, which on any other day would’ve made him feel like the one person left out, but today didn’t. Today he had a somewhere. He just wasn’t in it yet.
The shelter was loud when he got back. The breakfast crew had set up folding tables in the main room and there were trays of scrambled eggs and sausage links and white bread toast, and someone had brought a box of Krispy Kremes that were already half gone. Jimmie was at a table near the window with his tray and his Bible and he looked up when Marcus walked in and didn’t say anything, just raised his eyebrows.
Marcus sat down across from him.
“It’s real,” Marcus said.
“I know it is.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know it is because you came back looking like a different person and you been gone forty-five minutes.” Jimmie bit into a sausage link. “Tell me.”
So Marcus told him. The stairs, the red door, the lock, the bed with the comforter still creased from the package, the soap in its wrapper on the sink. He told him about the water stain shaped like Louisiana and Jimmie pointed a fork at the ceiling and said “See?” and Marcus said “That’s not proof of anything” and Jimmie said “Everything’s proof if you know what you’re looking at.”
Marcus ate some eggs. They were overcooked and undersalted and he ate them like they were the best eggs he’d ever had, because his body was doing something it hadn’t done in a long time, which was being hungry for real food for a real reason, which was that he had something to do today that wasn’t just survive until tomorrow.
After breakfast he went to the front desk. Deena was gone — her shift ended at seven — and the morning volunteer was a guy named Terrence who had a shaved head and glasses and never talked much, which Marcus appreciated.
“Can I use the phone?” Marcus said.
Terrence pushed the desk phone toward him without looking up from whatever he was reading.
Marcus pulled the Post-it from his pocket. He didn’t need to look at it. He knew the number. He’d known the number since he was eight years old, because his mother had made him memorize it the way she’d made him memorize his address and his blood type, and some things you can lose everything else and still keep.
He dialed.
It rang four times. He almost hung up. Then five. Then a click, and a sound like someone fumbling the receiver, and then her voice.
“Hello?”
He opened his mouth and nothing came out. Just air.
“Hello? Who’s calling on Christmas morning at—”
“Mom.”
Silence. Three seconds. Four. He could hear her breathing change.
“Marcus.”
“Yeah.”
“Baby.”
That word. He’d heard it a thousand times from her and it had never meant less than everything and right now it meant more than he could hold, so he held the phone tight against his ear and pressed his other hand flat on the desk and let the word land where it landed.
“I got your message,” he said. “From my birthday. I’m sorry I didn’t call.”
“You’re calling now.”
“Yeah.”
“Then that’s when you called.” He could hear her settling into something. A chair, a couch. The sounds of her house, which he hadn’t been inside in almost four years but could still picture down to the plastic covers on the good furniture and the school portraits on the wall going back to kindergarten. “Where are you? Are you warm?”
“I’m warm,” he said. And then, because he didn’t know how to say the rest of it in a way that would make sense, he just said it. “Somebody gave me an apartment.”
Quiet.
“Somebody gave you a what?”
“An apartment. I don’t know who. It was in a box on my chair this morning. A key and a note and six months paid.”
“Marcus.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Who would do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“No, ma’am.”
He heard her exhale. Long and slow, the exhale of a woman who had spent three years waiting for a phone call and was now getting one that contained more information than she knew what to do with. “Is it safe? Have you been there?”
“I been there. It’s in the Lower Nine. It’s small but it’s clean and the heat works.”
“The heat works,” she repeated, and her voice did something on the last word that told him she was crying but wouldn’t admit it, because she was his mother and his mother did not cry in front of him or on the phone with him or anywhere he could detect it, except he always could.
“Mom.”
“I’m here.”
“I’m gonna be okay.”
He hadn’t said that to anyone in three years. He hadn’t even thought it. The prosecution would’ve torn it apart. What evidence do you have? What basis? You lost your job, your apartment, your girlfriend, your self-respect. You slept under an overpass. You sold headphones for poboy money. You are not the kind of person who gets to say that.
But he said it anyway. Into a phone on a desk in a shelter on Christmas morning. He said it and she heard it and neither of them could prove it was true, and that didn’t matter, because some things you say not because they’re true yet but because saying them is how they start becoming true.
“You come see me,” she said. “When you’re ready. You don’t have to be ready tomorrow. But you come see me.”
“I will.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
They talked for eleven more minutes. She told him his sister Denise had a new baby, a boy, seven pounds four ounces, named after their grandfather. She told him the oak tree in the backyard had dropped a branch on the shed during a storm in November and Dale from next door had helped her clear it. She told him she’d been lighting a candle for him every Sunday at Greater Mount Zion, and he didn’t say anything about that because what do you say about your mother lighting candles for you in a church you haven’t stepped inside since you were seventeen. You say nothing. You let it sit.
When he hung up, Terrence was still reading. Hadn’t looked up once. The man understood things about privacy that most people never learn.
Marcus went back to his cot. He rolled up his sleeping bag, broken zipper and all. He put his few things in the plastic bag he kept under the cot — a change of socks, a razor, a paperback copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X that was missing the last thirty pages, which he’d never finished and probably never would but kept anyway because some things you carry aren’t about finishing.
Jimmie was sitting on his cot watching all of this.
“You leaving?”
“Going to the apartment.”
Jimmie nodded. Picked up his Bible. Put it down. Picked it up again. “I’m happy for you, man.” He said it simply, without performance, the way you’d say the sky is blue.
“Thank you, Jimmie.”
“You find out who did this, you tell me. I want to know what kind of person puts a key in a box for a man they don’t even—” He stopped. Shook his head. “Just. You know.”
“Yeah.”
Marcus carried his bag to the front door. He stopped at the donations bin and, on impulse, took three tangerines from the bag someone had left. He put them in his coat pocket. They were cold and round and they bumped against his thigh as he walked.
He pushed open the door. The morning had warmed up a little, maybe forty-eight now, and the sun was higher and the clouds were breaking apart in long streaks and somewhere a few blocks away somebody was playing music — Donny Hathaway, “This Christmas,” coming from an open window, tinny and distant and perfect.
Twenty-two blocks.
He walked. The tangerines bumped. The key was in his other pocket, warm again already.
At the apartment he unlocked the door and stepped inside and set his sleeping bag in the corner and put the tangerines on the table next to the hot plate and stood there looking at the room that was his. The letter was still on the table where he’d left it. The soap was still on the sink. The water stain on the ceiling was still Louisiana.
He’d never find out who left the box. He’d spend weeks turning it over, asking Deena if she saw anything, asking Terrence, running through every person he’d met in three years on the street and in the shelters and wondering who had the money and the motive and the specific knowledge of which cot was his. He’d come up with theories and discard them. He’d wonder if it was his mother, but she didn’t have that kind of money, and besides, the handwriting wasn’t hers. He’d wonder if it was Tanya, but Tanya had blocked his number and moved to Houston. He’d wonder if it was random — some church group, some charity — but the wooden box with the cedar smell was too personal for a program, too chosen.
He’d never find out. And slowly, over weeks and then months, the not knowing would become less important than the having. The apartment would stop feeling temporary. He’d get a job washing dishes at a Vietnamese restaurant on Claiborne in January, and the owner, a woman named Mrs. Phan, would let him eat the leftover pho at the end of his shifts, and he’d carry the warm containers home to Delery Street and eat at his table by the window. He’d call his mother every Sunday. He’d visit her in March and sit on her couch with the plastic covers and hold his nephew, who was tiny and furious and grabbed Marcus’s finger with a grip that seemed impossible for something that small.
He’d go back to the shelter once, in February, to bring Jimmie a bag of groceries. Jimmie would be gone. His cot would be occupied by a new man with different problems. Nobody would say where Jimmie went. Marcus would leave the groceries with Terrence and walk home in the rain and think about how people come through your life and leave marks that don’t wash off even when the people do.
But all of that was later.
Right now it was 8:41 on Christmas morning and he was standing in a room that was his, and on the table was a letter from someone who knew his name, and in his pocket was a Post-it in purple ink, and on the ceiling was Louisiana, and outside the window the bird was still going, still singing its one furious song, and Marcus peeled a tangerine and ate it standing up in the middle of the room, juice running down his wrist, and it was the best thing he’d ever tasted.
Not because it was a good tangerine. It was a regular tangerine. Ordinary.
But he ate it in his home.
