Alexandra, Gone by Anna McPartlin Page B

pleasantries, but the girl’s response to her arrival was slightly shocking. The others turned and gaped at her. The fireman called to his buddies.
    “Lads, it’s a false alarm!”
    The gaping neighbors parted and she was allowed to walk through them with her case rolling behind her. She rounded the corner to be met by two firemen standing in the space where she used to have a front door.
    “What the hell?” she asked.
    “It’s my fault,” the girl who had uttered “shit” in response to her arrival said. “I haven’t heard your music in a few days, and there was a smell.”
    A fireman walked through the doorway. “Well, the good news is we have no dead body; the bad news is the cat has shit all over the place.”
    “I was down in the country,” Leslie said, a little shocked at the scene.
    “I’m really sorry,” the girl said, to the fireman as opposed to Leslie. “She rarely leaves the apartment,” she went on, her tone sliding from apologetic to accusatory, “and for the past few days no music, and then that awful smell.”
    “You smelled cat shit and you thought I was dead?” Leslie said in a voice that was laced with contempt and disbelief.
    The girl turned to face her with her hands raised in the air. “Look, I was just being a good neighbor. You hear about these people left to rot all the time, and to be fair I don’t know what death smells like.”
    “Well, it doesn’t smell like cat shit—and what do you mean ‘these people’?”
    “Well,” the girl said, becoming a little uncomfortable, “loners.”
    Leslie stood dumbfounded.
    “She thought you’d killed yourself,” a random man said.
    The girl nudged him and mouthed the words “shut” and “up.”
    “Well,” he said, directing his speech toward the firemen, “everyone knows that New Year’s Eve is a big night for suicides.”
    “Am I going to get charged for this call out?” the girl asked.
    “Don’t give them your name, Deborah!” the man said.
    “Brilliant, Damien,” she said, walking away and shaking her head. “Thanks for that.”
    The firemen gathered their gear; the five people disappeared.
    Leslie entered her doorless apartment and sat on her sofa, and her cat, who had apparently recovered from her gastrointestinal malady, jumped on her lap, and together they surveyed the pile of cat shit matted into her carpet near her electric fire. Then the realization of how she was perceived in her building hit Leslie like a ton of bricks. I’m the crazy loner cat lady who drops dead and rots in her apartment. The irony was not lost on her, as she had only recently rejoined the society she had shunned for so long.
    A mere two months before this night, Leslie had been sitting in a chair opposite her oncologist. He was the oncologist who had cared for her mother and both her sisters through their cancer. He had also been testing Leslie twice a year for more than twenty years. He was smiling.
    “Good news,” he said. “You are clean as a whistle.”
    “Right,” Leslie said. “Fine. Thanks.” She stood up to leave.
    “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.
    “Nothing. Apparently I’m clean as a whistle.”
    “You sound disappointed.”
    She sat. “Well, would it be odd if I said I was?”
    “Very odd.”
    “I’m sick of waiting,” she said. “I’m sick of waiting for this stupid ticktocking time bomb to go off.”
    “Oh,” he said, and he nodded. “I see.”
    “The truth is, when Imelda died, I stopped living.” She hunched her shoulders. “Now I’m a woman about to turn forty with a cat for company. I thought I’d be well dead by now, yet here I am, alive and lonely.” She smiled at her doctor to assure him she wasn’t going to cry. He must have been shocked at her revelation, possibly the most she’d ever said to him.
    “You know that you might never get cancer,” he said. “But a lot has changed in recent years, and although I’m not a huge advocate of preventative surgery, I can give you