Cassidy’s brief glance into someone else’s life

Written: January 31, 2018.

Notes: This story was inspired by my bystander intervention training.

The hole in the wall opens in November - Cassidy fancies it as the result of one two many glasses of wine, ancient plaster, and a particularly sharp stiletto heel. She thinks it’s tiny and innocent (nothing to worry the land-lord over) until she catches a glimpse of what’s under all of her neighbour’s make-up through it, and suddenly all she can see is that one patch of blue staining her wallpaper, marring that face. Their wallpaper is cream, and so is hers, but all there is is blue, blue, blue.

She’s only just moved in and doesn’t know what to do, what to think, doesn’t even know her neighbour’s name, so she does nothing.

Everything starts with nothing, she knows. She knows.

Three days pass, and Cassidy lets it go. There’s a neat little picture of her mom and dad hanging where the hole is. She’s almost convinced herself she’s put it up for the land-lord’s sake, and not her own. She tries to pretend that the crying and stifled screams she sometimes hears at night are her imagination, or a simple misinterpretation.

She can’t quite manage to cover up the sounds. The hole in the wall was so much easier.

Sady, her other neighbour, visits her today. She’s all smiles and dimples and, “Here, have this bunt cake,” until Cassidy brings up her other neighbours, and then Sady closes up. She doesn’t withdraw, no. She just… doesn’t know what to say.

“Tristan and Myriah? They’re okay. They’re okay,” Sady says, finally, nodding her head. And although what Cassidy wants to say is ‘Which one of us are you trying to convince?’ what she does instead is bite her tongue and switch the subject.

They’re all evading it, she realizes - everyone in the whole apartment complex. They don’t want to see it. None of them want to see it. She glances at the picture on the wall, belatedly realizing that for her it’s much too late.

She’s already seen.

Night falls but Cassidy cannot bring herself to sleep. The darkness behind her closed eyes has somehow changed to blue, and all she can hear is the bump thump crack from the night her neighbours broke the wall. She realizes now that only one of those sounds was the wall breaking, and oh how she wishes she could stop wondering what else had happened that night. She won’t let herself think about the nights after. She won’t. She-

Bump thump crack!

Cassidy is on her feet in a second. Somebody is screaming next door and her bunt cake, once nestled up against the wall, has jittered off its stand and onto the floor, but finally, finally her fear has crumbled as well. She rips her stupid picture off the wall and lets herself see through the crack in this inane façade they’ve all built up.

Why? Why?

And maybe she loses her stomach on the floor too, now, because where there was once blue now there is so much red, but Cassidy knows what she must do. She grabs her phone and does what she should have done the very first night she suspected anything: she dials 911, and tells them about the shoe, the hole, everything.

Everything.

And maybe there was more she could have done, too, but this was something. And everything ends with something, she knows.

A week comes and goes. December dances in with a flurry of white, nipping at Cassidy’s fingers and toes and creeping across her windowpanes. The bell rings and Cassidy hurries to answer, expecting a policeman come to speak with her again, or Sady, with her soothing little smile. She gets neither.

Myriah is there instead, standing in her doorway and smiling, except not quite. The bandages get in the way. Cassidy is shocked and happy to see her. Alive. Out of the hospital. Whole.

“Are you okay?” Cassidy speaks first, scared and hopeful all at once.

Myriah nods. “I am… Or at least, I will be, once I’m out of here.” She pauses, smiles again. “I just wanted to say thank you. For everything.”

Cassidy shakes her head. “I should have done it sooner.”

Myriah hesitates, and in that moment they both think, yes, she should have, but- “You did, eventually. You said something. No one else did in the year w- I-I lived here - no one else in this whole building. You. So thank you.” And before Cassidy can argue Myriah smirks (as best she can), and adds, “Sorry about your wall. We - Tristan - never did apologize for doing that.”

They both glance over at the creamy expanse of wallpaper. The hole is gone now, replaced by a raised bald-spot that’s just a touch too shiny to blend in. The land-lord patched it himself. Somehow, Cassidy doesn’t mind it. It’s an ending, she thinks later, once Myriah has left. Bittersweet, but good.

And maybe this ending gave someone the beginning they needed, she knows.