For two days my whole floor griped in the group chat about the howling from the old woman’s unit in 4E, and I was the one who wrote, “Some of us work Saturdays, Loretta. Shut it up.” My neighbor in 4F, the man we all let take the elevator alone, never typed a word. He went over and put his boot through her door.
Her husband had moved out in August.
Forty-four years, and Kenneth left with the recliner, the good car and the television, and she kept the beagle.
That was all any of us knew about Loretta Sundberg. That, and the dog.
It started Thursday night, a little after ten.
Not barking. A long low howl, then nothing, then the howl again.
By Friday lunch Marisol from 4B had posted a video of the empty hall with the sound turned all the way up.
“Is anybody else hearing this or am I losing it,” she wrote.
Eleven people liked it.
Somebody said call animal control. Somebody else said Loretta had probably gone to her daughter’s out of state and left the dog with a bowl of kibble like a lunatic.
I wrote my line. Then I went back to my spreadsheet.
I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.
The man in 4F never posted.
Dariusz had been on our floor since spring. Thirty-nine, enormous, a neck tattoo of something with wings, a pickup that sounded like a fight starting in the parking lot.
He worked nights at the rail yard and slept days, and in seven months he’d said maybe four words to me, all of them “elevator’s out again.”
People waited for the next car rather than ride down with him. So did I.
Friday afternoon he went and knocked at 4E.
I heard it through my own door. Three knocks, a long wait, three more.
The beagle went crazy on the other side.
Nobody came.
He went down to the office. I know because Anwar, who runs the building, told me later exactly what Dariusz asked him for. A daughter. A son. Anybody with a key.
Anwar called the only number on her lease.
It was Kenneth’s.
“She’s not my problem anymore,” Kenneth told him. “She does this. She wants me to drive over there. Don’t let her drag you into it.”
So Anwar said he couldn’t open a tenant’s unit because a neighbor had a feeling. He said it twice, he told me, like saying it twice made it true.
Saturday the howling went hoarse.
It stopped sounding like a dog and started sounding like a hinge.
I put my earbuds in and vacuumed. The vacuum has a squeak in the left wheel I’ve been meaning to oil since June.
When I carried my trash out around four, Dariusz was at Loretta’s door with his forehead an inch from it and one palm flat on the wood.
“Dariusz. What is this,” I said.
“Listening for her.”
“You’re scaring people. Marisol thinks you’re casing the place.”
He turned and gave me a long look.
“Two days,” he said. “Nobody’s walked that dog in two days. Where’s it going?”
I didn’t have an answer, so I took my trash to the chute.
Sunday morning, the howling stopped.
It stopped for so long I made coffee and thought, finally.
Then through my door I heard Dariusz on his phone. Slow and even, like he was reading off a list.
“She’s seventy-something. Lives alone. Husband left. The dog’s been going since Thursday. Nobody’s answered in forty-one hours. Now it’s quiet.”
Then the beagle started again. Weaker. A scrape at the bottom of her door, a whine.
Dariusz pounded with the side of his fist. “LORETTA. CAN YOU HEAR ME.”
Nothing.
He listened to the phone. Said “okay.” Said “how long.” Said “no.”
Then he set the phone face-up on the carpet, still on speaker, and took two steps back.
I yanked my door wide. “Don’t you DARE,” I said.
Marisol came out of 4B in her robe, already holding her phone up.
He drove his heel into the door just under the knob.
The whole frame jumped.
“He’s breaking in,” Marisol said into her own phone. “Fourth floor. He’s breaking into some old lady’s place.”
He hit it again.
Then a third time, and the jamb split, and the door swung in and banged the wall.
The beagle came out low and fast, went straight past all of us, and sat down at the elevator like it had been waiting for one.
Dariusz went in.
None of us did. We all stayed out in the hall in our socks like a fire drill nobody believed in.
Then his voice came back out to us: “SHE’S DOWN. SHE’S BREATHING. Tell them to hurry.”
She’d been down since Friday morning.
Thirty-one hours, by the paramedics’ math, which they did out loud in front of us on the fourth floor of a rental block in Yakima.
Her hip was broken. She’d reached for the top cupboard and gone over, and her phone sat six feet off on the table, beside a stack of papers and her reading glasses.
She’d dragged herself as far as the dog’s water bowl.
She’d been drinking out of it.
I’m not proud of the next part either. I went in behind the paramedics, because I wanted to see.
The papers on the table were from Kenneth’s lawyer. Little yellow tabs stuck out of every page where she was supposed to sign.
She hadn’t signed one.
Her phone lit up while I stood there. A text, from KEN.
“Did you sign yet? Lawyer needs them Monday. Stop ignoring me.”
Dariusz read it over my shoulder and didn’t say anything.
They wheeled her out past the beagle, past Marisol, past nineteen people’s worth of group chat standing in the hall in their socks.
Loretta caught Dariusz by the sleeve as she went by.
“The top page,” she said. “Don’t let him see the top page.”
He went back in and turned it face down.
Whatever she’d written across it in pen, lying on that floor, he still won’t tell me.
The back of the top page
He laid it on the table beside her reading glasses and pressed it flat with two fingers.
But she’d been holding that pen like a nail. The ink had come through.
From where I stood, I could read the biggest line backward, the way you read a sign in a rearview mirror.
THE DOG GOES TO 4F.
Under it were five or six more lines, smaller, running downhill toward the corner of the page. I couldn’t make those out. Only the one, and the tail of the F, dug in so hard the paper had torn.
He saw where I was looking.
“Go home,” he said.
I didn’t. I stood in her kitchen in my socks while the paramedics lifted her on a count of three, and she made a sound I’m not going to put down here either.
Out in the hall the beagle was still sitting at the elevator.
Dariusz went out and crouched. He didn’t call it. It walked straight into his arms and pushed its head up under his chin.
One of the paramedics looked back from the stretcher. “That your dog?”
“Tonight it is,” he said.
The recliner on the dolly
Kenneth moved out on a Saturday in August, and he made it look like a favor to the rest of us.
He had a nephew and a rented truck. He brought a box of maple bars up from the Safeway and left it open on the ledge by the elevator with a sticky note that said FOURTH FLOOR.
I took two.
He wheeled the recliner out of 4E on a dolly and held the elevator for me with his foot. He called me “neighbor,” like it was my name.
“Lo’s going to need people,” he said, while the doors bumped his shoe. “She gets worked up. You’ll see.”
Loretta stood in her doorway in a gray sweatshirt with the beagle on a leash and didn’t say one word to him the whole time he was loading. I remember thinking she was being hard on him.
About the man with the maple bars. That’s what I thought.
That night he posted in the group chat. Nine good years on four. Look in on Lo for me. She won’t ask.
Thirty-one hearts. One of them was mine.
Our chat shows a little row of faces under every message, everybody who’s opened it. He never left. All fall that row carried a gray-haired man in a fishing hat, Ken S., and I stopped seeing him the way you stop seeing the smoke detector.
The other thing I’d stopped seeing was six in the morning.
I’m up early. The spreadsheets don’t care, but I am. From my kitchen window I can see the corner of the lot where Dariusz parks the pickup when he comes off shift.
Most mornings in September, Loretta was already down there with the beagle when he pulled in. The dog would hit the end of the leash so hard she had to plant her feet. He’d get down on one knee in the gravel, still in his orange yard vest, and let it climb him.
She laughed. I could see her laughing from four floors up.
Sunday afternoon, after the ambulance, Marisol posted her video to the chat. Forty seconds of his back, his heel and the door. She titled it this is what happened on 4 today.
Under it, in the row of faces, the second one was the fishing hat.
Taped to 4F
Monday morning there was an envelope taped to Dariusz’s door, under the peephole.
I read it. I’ve told you I’m telling all the parts.
It was on Hanrahan Property letterhead with Anwar’s name at the bottom, and it said the door and jamb at 4E had been “forcibly damaged by the resident of 4F.” Replacement door, jamb, hardware, labor: $1,140, due in thirty days. Under it was a lease violation notice with one box checked. Complaint received from leaseholder.
The leaseholder of 4E was Kenneth.
I went down to the office in my slippers. Anwar was eating cereal out of a mug at his desk.
“He broke a door,” Anwar said, before I’d asked anything. “I’ve got an owner. I’ve got a complaint in writing. I don’t get to have feelings about it.”
“She was on that floor thirty-one hours.”
“And I’m glad she’s alive. The door’s still eleven-forty.”
So I did what I know how to do. I went back upstairs and typed.
Can we agree 4F shouldn’t be paying for that door? He’s the only one of us who did anything.
I meant it as a fix. Inside an hour it was the worst thing I’d posted all week, and I’d posted “shut it up.”
Marisol: He still kicked in a door in front of me. I had no idea what he was doing in there.
Somebody in 4A: Rules are rules, sorry.
Then the chat did a thing it hadn’t done since August. The fishing hat posted.
Appreciate everyone looking out for Lo. She’s in good hands now. For the record, the man in 4F went through her personal papers while she was on the floor. Please don’t let him back in the unit.
Twenty-six hearts.
Personal papers. The only man alive who knew there were papers on that table was the man who’d sent them.
That night I knocked on 4F for the first time in seven months.
He opened it in a T-shirt, the beagle behind his legs, the envelope already off the door and folded in his hand.
“Let it go,” he said, and shut the door.
The new door on 4E
Tuesday a man from Hanrahan was hanging a new door on 4E, a cheap hollow one the color of oatmeal. Anwar had a clipboard and was watching the hinges go on.
“He gave notice this morning,” Anwar said, when I asked what the clipboard was. “Kenneth. Thirty days. His name’s on the lease, hers isn’t. Never was.”
“Where’s she supposed to go?”
“He’s got her looked at for a place out in Yakima Valley. Rehab first, then the long-term side.” He clicked his pen. “Her stuff goes to storage on the thirtieth unless somebody claims it.”
“And the dog?”
“Pet addendum’s in his name too. He wants it back by Friday. He said he’ll take it to the Humane Society himself, since she can’t manage it.”
Sign by Monday, and the apartment and the dog were one man’s to clean out.
“Could she sign a lease of her own?” I said.
Anwar laughed, not unkindly. “On Social Security, at a thousand eighty-five a month? Not without a guarantor. Some nephew with a W-2.” He watched the hinge man. “Nobody does that for a neighbor.”
The new door swung shut. It didn’t sound like anything.
“He’s coming in Friday at ten to sign it all over,” Anwar said. “He told me, and I’m quoting him, she won’t be coming back to it.”
Room 418
Wednesday there was a plastic grocery bag hanging off my doorknob.
Inside were her reading glasses, her phone, a charger with the cord wound tight and a strip of masking tape on the charger that said ROOM 418. Nothing else. No name.
She was propped up by the window with a tube in the back of her hand. She put the glasses on before she said hello, like she wanted to see who it was first.
“You’re 4C,” she said.
“Yes.”
I plugged the phone in and set it on the tray table. It woke up right away and lit up with the chat. Somebody in 4A asking if anyone had a ladder.
“Turn it over,” Loretta said.
I turned it face down.
“That thing sat on my table all weekend,” she said. “It lights up when they write. If I put my head down on my arm the right way, I could read the top line from the floor. Who it was, and the first few words.”
She looked at the ceiling while she said the next part.
“Thursday it was everybody’s dog problem. Friday was Ken’s name, twice, on the lock screen. He’d answered Anwar and then he wrote me to quit the theatrics.” She moved her hand on the sheet. “Saturday about eleven it was you.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything I had that was the right size.
“I kept waiting for one from 4F,” she said. “He doesn’t type. Takes him a week to answer me about the big bag of dog food. He carries it up for me Fridays when he gets paid.” She almost smiled. “So I had my pen. I’d been sitting there with it all morning, not signing. I pulled the top page down off the edge.”
“I saw the first line,” I said. “Through the back.”
“Then you saw the part that matters. The rest was to Ken.” She took the glasses off and folded them. “Where the good bank card is. That I wasn’t mad. Forty-four years, you’d think a person would have a better last thing to say than where the bank card is.”
She held her hand out for the phone. I gave it to her and she opened the chat herself and scrolled up, her thumb slow, and turned the screen so I could see.
Under my message, Saturday, 11:12 a.m., the row of faces. The fishing hat was third.
Under Marisol’s Friday video. Under every one.
Sunday, 7:50 a.m., ten minutes before he texted her to stop ignoring him, Ken S. had opened all of them.
Anwar’s office, Friday at ten
I spent Thursday on a spreadsheet, which is the one thing in this story I’m any good at.
Every message from Thursday, 10:04 p.m. to Sunday at noon. Who wrote it, when, and who’d opened it. A row for Anwar’s call to Kenneth, Friday, 2:40 p.m., which Anwar read me off his phone without asking why I wanted it. A row for the text, Sunday, 8:00 a.m. Thirty-eight rows.
Row 14 was mine. I made it yellow.
Then I posted it in the group chat, yellow row included, and turned my phone off.
Thursday afternoon I drove back to Room 418 with Anwar’s blank lease forms. Loretta signed hers on the tray table. I signed the guarantor page under her.
Friday at ten Kenneth was already in Anwar’s office in the fishing hat, a folder on his knee, smiling at the door when I came in.
“Morning, neighbor.”
Dariusz came in behind me with the beagle on a leash and stood by the water cooler. The dog lay down on his boot.
“Good, there it is,” Kenneth said. “Saves me a trip upstairs. Anwar, I’ve got the notice signed, and the addendum says that animal goes with the leaseholder, so.” He held out his hand for the leash. Dariusz didn’t move. “Pal. That’s my dog. I paid four hundred dollars for that dog in 2019.”
I put the printout on the desk. One copy for Anwar, one for Kenneth.
Kenneth read it standing up. It took him a while to find what it was. Then he found his face in the columns, down every row, and he sat back down.
“So I read the chat,” he said. “I’m in the chat, I read the chat. You know how many times I drove over because Lo fell? Four times, and four times she was sitting there with the TV on, waiting to see if I’d come.” He tapped my yellow row with the back of his finger. “And you want to put it on me? Nineteen of you, thirty feet down a hall. You could hear it. I was across town. If none of you thought it was worth getting off the couch, why was it on me?”
Nobody answered him.
“She was supposed to sign last week,” he said. “She told my lawyer she’d sign. She sat on them to make me drive over there. That’s the whole thing. It’s always been the whole thing.”
Then the door opened again and Marisol came in, in her work scrubs, with her phone already out.
“I’m not here for him,” she said, and pointed at Kenneth without looking at him. “I’m here because of the complaint.”
She played her video on Anwar’s desk with the sound up. You could hear what I’d heard through my door Sunday and never listened to. The phone on the carpet, face-up, on speaker. A woman’s voice coming out of it.
Sir, the engine’s twelve minutes out. Can you get to her?
And Dariusz, before the first kick: I can get to her.
“I filmed it because I thought he was robbing her,” Marisol said.
Anwar looked at the screen, and then at the printout, at Friday, 2:40 p.m., where I’d typed what he’d told me he said to Kenneth. Can’t open a unit because a neighbor has a feeling.
He took the lease violation notice out of his tray and tore it once down the middle.
I put my check for $1,140 on the desk beside it. Then the new lease, Loretta’s name on top, the pet addendum in her name, mine on the guarantor line.
“You can’t do that,” Kenneth said. “That’s my lease.”
“Your lease ends on the thirtieth,” Anwar said. “You gave notice Tuesday. Hers starts the first.”
Kenneth looked at the beagle, and then at Dariusz. “What did she write on that page? He’s got it. She wrote something on my papers, and he’s got it.”
Dariusz bent down and clipped the leash a little shorter.
“She told me what to do with him,” he said.
Kenneth folded his copy of the printout in four and put it inside his folder. He went out without his hat on. The little bell over Anwar’s door rang behind him like it was a shop.
Six a.m., the second Sunday in November
The hall still smells like the new door’s glue.
Loretta came home from rehab on a Thursday with a walker that has tennis balls on its back feet. The beagle’s back in 4E. The lease is in her name and mine is under hers, so if she ever comes up short in a month, it’s my month. My door money came out of what I’d been saving for a new car. The old one’s fine.
Nobody in the chat brought up my yellow row. Two people quit the chat. One was Ken S.
Sunday morning I carried my trash out at six, and the elevator was standing open at our floor.
Dariusz was in it in his orange vest, holding the door with one boot, the beagle on its leash and Loretta behind it with her walker.
I waited with my bag, the way I always have, for the next car.
“Plenty of room,” Loretta said.
I got in.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody whose neighbor’s dog has been going all day.
For more stories about people being let down by those closest to them, read “They Found Me in the Dining Car on Night Two. Dalton Wasn’t With Them.” and “I Told My Father He Wasn’t Giving Me Away. He Said, ‘Fine.'”. And for another tense story with an unexpected family twist, there’s “My Husband Changed the Locks While I Was in Surgery, Then My Dad Pulled Up With an Envelope”.
