Welcome to the club, Lina thinks, thrusting the can toward Kirsten because it feels like it’s begun to stick to her fingers. Welcome to the club, is all I can say, she thinks. But she doesn’t say it aloud.

They walk purposefully from building to building, or at least Kirsten does. As for Lina, she’s just along for the ride now, 34because she’s tired. That’s the way it’s been lately. Perhaps it’s the spring light and the long walks, but it’s more what he said. It wasn’t genuine, all that love. It was just something she’d fabricated to make time—no, her life—pass, and afterward she sat there utterly still, and the silence felt like a balm. But now it was time to move on, and the days just kept coming, and she wanted to sit down on the curb and let Kirsten run up staircases eleven and twelve. She won’t let herself do that though, but when they reach number fifteen, she starts letting Kirsten say where they come from, contenting herself with standing in the background and helping out if people can’t get the coins through the slot. That seems to work okay. The collecting can grows heavier and heavier, and that’s great, Kirsten says, even here by Sydvest Station, and then, on the fourth floor of the seventeenth building, they come to an odd door. It’s so odd that Kirsten outdoes herself, trying to guess who might live behind it. “Holy shit,” says Kirsten, laughing because a rubber skeleton is hanging on the door and the person’s called Elsa. Elsa’s got a stainless-steel nameplate and a peephole, but the skeleton blocks the hole, so she couldn’t see out if she wanted to. Lina tells Kirsten it’s the kind of skeleton that’ll glow in the dark if all the lights on the stairs go out; her nephew once had an entire can of small insects made from the same sort of rubber. When he’d been tucked in and the light in his room turned off, they glowed everywhere. He’d taped some to the ceiling, while others were under his bed among the Lego bricks, creeping and crawling, illuminated like those fish in the depths of the Mariana Trench. “If it were night, that skeleton would be the only source of light in the entire staircase,” Lina says, and Kirsten bursts into laughter 35and says she’s got a notion that Elsa’s pretty spry. “She’s got a sense of humor,” Kirsten says. “She’s a party of one,” and then she raps on the door, though Lina’s about to say that maybe they should skip this door.