No One Knows Us Here
Rebecca Kelley
PART ONE
“Because I love you,” he said.
That’s when I did it. The knife was already in my hand. It was a boning knife he’d insisted on buying. A skinny six-inch blade with an extrasharp tip for gouging into joints. Scalpel sharp. I’d told him we didn’t need it. He didn’t like dealing with raw meat, all that cold skin and bone and gristle. Usually we made pasta. We made salads. Cheese plates. We didn’t need a boning knife for any of that.
He insisted, though. He insisted on buying the whole set. Before meeting me, the man had nothing but IKEA knives, flimsy things made out of plastic and cheap metal.
The new knives were marvels of engineering, perfectly balanced. I had demonstrated in the store, perching the ten-inch chef’s knife on my index finger. See how it hovers there, without dipping one way or the other? We inspected the edges. This was Japanese high-carbon stainless steel, I explained. I knew the whole sales pitch backward and forward. The edges were hand finished to nine-degree angles and then cooled with nitrogen. The handles were ergonomically designed, smooth in the palm. Feel that? He gripped the handle firmly, mimed chopping and slicing motions. He grinned and jutted the knife away from him, like he was winning a sword fight.
All he really needed was a good Santoku knife to get started. I told him that.
He bought them all. The paring knife, the serrated utility knife, the bread knife, two Santokus, the ten-inch chef’s knife I’d balanced on my finger, the honing steel, the scissors, the magnetic strip we would install over the counter ourselves with the power drill. And the boning knife.
When he said he loved me, I plunged it straight into his throat.
CHAPTER 1
She came at the end of summer, when everything around us was on fire. The city suffocated under the dirty gauze of smoke. Ash fell like snow from the sky. Ash was everywhere that summer: on the hoods of cars, on the ferns in the park, caught in spiderwebs.
The forest fires surrounded our city on all sides. The early ones seemed far away, in British Columbia and Montana and California. If the wind blew just right, we could forget about them for a day or two; we could go on thinking everything was normal. But then the gorge burned, and the Coast Range. Farmland down in central Oregon. The Cascades. I lost track of them after a while, all of these fires.
People were walking around the city wearing face masks and carrying parasols to protect their outfits from the ashfall, like we were living in apocalyptic times, like we were the dad and that kid in The Road.
If I had known she was coming, I could have picked her up at the airport. I could have taken a day off work without pay or, at the very least, come home early. Or at the very, very least, I could have come home right after my shift instead of going out to drink at the Marathon with my friends. I didn’t know, though. I wasn’t expecting her, so I worked my whole shift.
The forests were burning and the sky was falling, but still we opened up shop on NW Twenty-Third Avenue, and still people streamed in and bought Le Creuset teakettles and W?STHOF knives and Zyliss salad spinners. It kind of made me feel better, like it was a good sign that we weren’t nailing up boards to the windows and locking ourselves in fallout shelters. The people who came in were the same people who always came in. They weren’t dressed for the apocalypse at all, save for the face masks. They were dressed in nice sundresses from J.Crew. They brushed the ash from their sleeves when they walked in, and then they bought their decorator tips and their toasters. Some of them set up wedding registries. When people are buying salad spinners, how bad could it be?
I walked home from the Marathon late. I couldn’t smell the smoke in the dark. Either that or I’d gotten used to it. I couldn’t see the smoke in the dark, either, except as an eerie haze around the streetlights. I could almost pretend it was an ordinary evening. The smoke had come and gone all summer, but the ash hadn’t started falling until a few days ago. This is how it is now, I remember thinking. It will never be the same again.
My apartment was a rare three-bedroom place, not far from work, on a beautiful tree-lined street surrounded by much grander and more expensive houses and apartments. My apartment building was grand, too, or at least it had been at one time, with Corinthian columns and balconies in the front.
There were five of us crammed into that apartment. I had moved in almost a year ago with Steele. We were kind of going out at the time, and even though we weren’t that serious, we decided to move in together anyway because the rent was cheap and it was within walking distance of La Cuisine, where we both worked. This was a long story that ended with us breaking up and both refusing to move out. He won a coin toss, and I moved into the closet—just big enough for a twin mattress on the floor. It was better than the alternative, which was for Steele and me to split the room in half, drawing a line down the middle like squabbling siblings.
Brooke and Melanie, a couple—married, I think—whose names appeared on our lease, had been there the longest. They lived in the middle room, hung dyed tapestries instead of curtains over their windows, and smelled like nag champa.
Then there was Mira.
Mira had her own room, the south bedroom. Sometimes she’d leave her door cracked open, and I would peek inside. Her room didn’t seem to belong to the rest of the apartment, and neither did Mira, really. Her room had real furniture and an ivory wool rug that arrived in a huge, heavy roll from a store I’d never heard of. I looked it up online. The rug cost $1,500, and that was half off.