At last the stranger stops in front of a squat stucco apartment building. The small front garden is overgrown, crowded by a large bush by the entrance and a wild-looking tree whose dark, glossy leaves partly obscure the facade. He pauses to look up, and through the leaves I see that the windows of the first floor are lit up. He goes through the front gate, but instead of entering the building he walks around to the side alley, and four or five skinny cats spill out of the bushes, threading through his legs and purring as he removes some tins from the supermarket bag. He peels off the tops and sets the tins down on the ground. The cats swarm, more appearing from under the bushes. When he kicks some empty tins aside, they leap back and tense. He says something to calm them, and they return to devouring the food. I stand under the streetlamp, no longer caring if he sees me. But if he knows I’m there, he doesn’t let on. Stuffing the plastic bag into his pocket, he comes back around to the front and pauses, as if to sniff something in the night air, and looks up again at the lit windows through the leaves. The branches move in the breeze, tapping the glass, and he stands, jingling the coins and keys in his pocket, as if trying to decide something that could go either way. Then, squaring his shoulders, he hurries up the path and disappears into the dark lobby. A cat yowls, somewhere a television is on, but otherwise it’s quiet. For a moment I think I can hear the waves, but it’s only the breeze rising in the leaves. I cross to the other side of the empty street, but it’s even harder to see into the windows from there. It’s obvious I’ll have to climb the tree.

Standing at the base of the trunk, I search for a foothold and manage to hoist myself up into the branches. The twigs catch on my T-shirt, and the resin that oozes out of the broken stems makes my hands sticky. Once my foot slips, and I almost fall. But then I am high enough, and close enough, that I can almost reach out and touch them: a young woman and a child, sitting peacefully at a table, framed in a rectangle of light. Her long hair is braided down her back, and when she looks up from her book to see what the child has drawn, I see her light-colored eyes, and the thought comes to me—calmly, clearly—that somewhere, somehow, someone has given him the wrong key, and that she is the daughter he has come back to watch over. Legs trembling from effort, I grip the tree trunk, waiting for her to hear the doorbell and to let him in. What could be taking him so long? What is he rehearsing on the other side of her door? And is it only their own doors, the doors of those they love, that become locked to the dead?