In Spite of You and Della

It is no use, Doctor. You cannot open it. I am writing this on the last clean page of the book, sitting on the floor, while you shout, because dead paper is the only one of them that has ever let me finish a sentence.

How he calls and pounds.

Now he is shouting for something to pry it with. Then I hear his feet going down the steps, and then nothing at all for a long while, which is worse than the shouting.

It would be a shame to break a beautiful door like that. It is the only thing in this house anybody loved. Ninety years old, and the hardware is original, and the family has a note from the woman who sold them the hinges, and it locks with a key, which is why I locked it with a key, because Hollis can open anything with his phone.

"Hollis dear," I say, in my gentlest voice, "the key is outside. It is under the hostas by the front steps, on the right, behind the second clump."

That silenced him for a few moments. I thought he might cry, and I considered whether that would be the moment to be generous.

Then he said, very quietly indeed: "Open the door, my darling."

"I can't," I say. "The key is under the hostas, by the front walk, on the right side, past the porch post."

And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and I said it so often that he had to go and see. I heard the leaves, and then the porch, and then the stairs. The leaves are big enough to hide a body, but a man who is looking will find a key. He came in, and he stopped short inside the door with the key still in his hand.

"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing?"

I kept on creeping just the same. I did not turn around. I looked at him over my shoulder.

"I've got out at last," I say, "in spite of you and Della. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back."

Now why that man should have fainted, I cannot tell you. He is a hospitalist in a level-one trauma center. He has held a heart in his hands and called for the next blood, and he stood in this doorway with his mouth open and his keys in his fist, and then he went down, all at once, in his good shoes, and he lay there across my path along the wall, and I have to creep over him every time I go around.