The Last Dance Read Online Free PDF Page A

remembers seeing the super putting out his garbage cans. Her father lives on the third floor. It is not an elevator building, he can’t afford that sort of luxury. His wonderful days at “The Hospital” left him precious little when he retired. As she climbs the stairs, the cooking smells in the hallway make her feel a bit nauseous. She pausesfor breath on the third-floor landing, and then walks to apartment 3A and knocks. There is no answer. She looks at her watch. Nine thirty-five. She knocks again.
    The things he does often cause her to become impatient at best or exasperated at worst. He
knows
she is coming here this morning, she told him last
night
that she’d be here. Is it possible he forgot? Has he gone out somewhere for breakfast? Or is he simply in the shower? She has a key to the apartment, which he gave to her after the last heart attack, when he became truly frightened he might die alone and lie moldering for days before anyone discovered his corpse. She rarely uses the key, hardly knows what it looks like, but she fishes in her bag among the other detritus there, and at last finds it in a small black leather purse that also contains the key to his safe deposit box, further insurance against a surprise heart attack.
    She slips the key into the keyway, turns it. In the silence of the morning hallway—most people off to work already, except the woman somewhere down the hall cooking something revoltingly vile-smelling—Cynthia hears the small oiled click of the tumblers falling. She turns the knob, and pushes the door open. Retrieving her key, she puts it back into the black leather purse, enters the apartment …
    â€œDad?”
    â€¦ and closes the door behind her.
    Silence.
    â€œDad?” she calls again.
    There is not a sound in the apartment.
    The quiet is an odd one. It is not the expectant stillness of an apartment temporarily vacant but awaiting imminent return. It is, instead, an almost reverential hush, a solemn silence attesting to permanency. There is something so complete to the stillness here, something so
absolute
that it is at once frightening and somehow exciting. Something dread lies in wait here. Something terrifying is in these rooms. The silence signals dire expectation and sends aprickling shiver of anticipation over her skin. She almost turns and leaves. She is on the edge of leaving.
    â€œI wish I had,” she says now.
    Her father is hanging on the inside of the bathroom door. The door is opened into the bedroom, and his hanging figure is the first thing she sees when she enters the room. She does not scream. Instead, she backs away and collides with the wall, and then turns and starts to leave again, actually steps out of the bedroom and into the corridor beyond, but the mute figure hanging there calls her back, and she steps into the bedroom again, and moves across the room toward the figure hanging on the inside of the bathroom door, a step at a time, stopping before each step to catch her breath and recapture her courage, looking up at the man hanging there and then looking down again to take another step, watching her inching feet, moving closer and closer to the door and the grotesque figure hanging there.
    There is something blue wrapped around his neck. His head is tilted to one side, as if it had dropped that way when he fell asleep. The hook is close to the top of the door, and the blue—scarf, is it? a tie?—is looped over the hook so that her father’s toes are an inch or so off the floor. She notices that he is barefoot and that his feet are blue, a blue darker and more purplish than the fabric knotted around his throat. His hands are blue as well, the same dark purplish-blue that resembles an angry bruise all over the palms and the fingers and the backs of the hands, open as if in supplication. He is wearing a white shirt and gray flannel trousers. His tongue is protruding from his mouth. It appears almost black.
    She steps up