Baby Steps

by Erin Brookins

There’s a loud one and a quiet one. Loud One crushes beers. Loud One flirts, terribly, outside the window at one in the morning. Loud One plays video games, cursing, until four. The upstairs apartment cannot contain him, and Leah suspects his dumb, endearing laughter can be heard for miles. That it echoes down the canyon at the edge of town, bouncing off hikers, who turn around and say to each other, What’s so goddamn funny.

It becomes evident in your thirties: what untarnished confidence sounds like. There’s no mistaking that never-been-looked-over-for-a-promotion timbre, that buy-now, pay-later bravado. Tim rolls his eyes at its monosyllabic exuberance, but Leah wants to bottle it up, distill it. She wants to crush it into a powder and sprinkle it in her coffee. Who’s she kidding? She’d snort that shit, uncut.

Tim and Leah thought they’d have house neighbors by now, the kind you wave to out on the lawn, gossip to and about at block parties, ask to watch your dog. They don’t. They have rowdy, college-age, upstairs neighbors.

But this is their reality, so Leah tells Tim to remember being college-age: eating sidewalk pizza, peeing drunkenly in closets, punching a tree and breaking two fingers over a girl. How that girl had always been able to get in his head, and was always breaking his heart. Underdeveloped brains, is her point. For them, life’s still tangy and sweet. Tim and Leah try to let them savor it.

Until Loud One begins to stomp.

Because it is not youthful exuberance, Tim says, that starts at two p.m. and goes until four. This is not drunken abandon that goes from one corner of the room to the other, tracing a line diagonally from above Tim and Leah’s fuzzy, brown couch to above their vintage smoking chairs. It’s the whole ceiling, the whole room vibrating. Then it pauses, turns around, and starts again.

Leah admits it’s strangely militaristic. Oddly hypnotic.

Fascist, Tim says. Oppressive. He says it’s creeping into his bones. It’s tingling in his fingers as he types.

Leah’s confused. She’s the touchy one. Tim’s chewing is torture, but this bounces right off her thin skin. Maybe, she thinks, it’s interruption she hates, not noise: the crunch of a chip when you least expect it. The sudden intrusion of someone else’s meal into your day.

Then Leah wonders why for Tim the clear pattern is his torture. Why knowing the future is of no comfort, when for her it makes it all okay.

***

Walks become a sanctuary and Leah is always desecrating them.

We need to talk, she says. About things.

Tim is pretending not to listen. He tightens his grip on the leash. Ralph, their sweet, old boy, still pulls like a puppy.

We have to start thinking about what we want, Leah says.

She takes the leash from Tim, and he puts his hands in the pockets of his old down jacket. Either we make a decision soon or it’s made for us, Leah says. Tick-tock, she thinks. Tick-tock.

She looks up to find Tim lingering behind. He’s taken out his phone and is staring up into a tree. There’s a flash of blue and a warble. This is a new hobby, this cataloging and collecting: the accumulating of free, wild things.

Stellar’s Jay, he says, a tinge of disappointment in his voice. He’s captured this one before.

Leah nods. She grabs his arm, pulls him back on course.

Kids, Leah says.

Exactly half their friends have made the leap: a perfect fifty-fifty. No rhyme or reason to any of it. Tim always needs a reason, and there’s never a good enough one. Leah wonders, through all of history, if there ever has been.

I’m open to it, Tim says.

Just one, Leah says. She holds up a finger. One little finger, not scary.

They’re so expensive.

I know, she says. But worth it?

The quarter-of-a-million-dollar question. Leah feels a shameful nostalgia for the old approach, when kids were just a thing you did: buy now, remorse later.

Nowadays, you have to choose for yourself. Nowadays, it’s just you and time in a standoff. Time cracking its knuckles at Leah’s ovaries, and Tim pretending not to hear it.

We’ll have to move, Tim says.

Not right away. Remember the baby that lived upstairs?

Tim shudders at the mention of that unit. Now we just have toddlers, he says. Ones that would wake up a baby.

We can start looking at houses again, Leah says.

Tim grunts. Interest rates, he says.

Let’s move upstairs, Leah says. Let’s teach our baby to stomp.

Tim chuckles, then nods.

Sure.

Ralph pulls again, looking for a place to go. Leah pulls out a small, clear plastic bag. Tim insists on reusing fruit bags from the grocer, but there's a reason they make real doggie bags dark and thick. Tim’s worried for the future of the planet. He’s always thinking about that future—the big one.

Remember our agreement, Leah says. What happens if we wait too long.

Tim mimes a violent snip with two fingers.

There wouldn’t be any delayed mid-life panic. No younger, fertile second wife.

***

It’s the day before Labor Day and Tim has bags under his eyes. Leah often catches him staring up at the ceiling, waiting. When she puts on a podcast, he startles. When she gives him his coffee, he spills.

I’m going to talk to them, Tim says.

Leah looks up from her computer screen.

Tim stands. He’s pacing, following Loud One on his path.

Even if Leah had gone off birth control, it wouldn’t have mattered. They still fool around a bit, cuddle and grab each other on the couch in front of the TV, but she misses the face he makes when he finishes: a squint and a smile, like Popeye.

What are you going to say? Leah says.

Tim hasn’t thought that far.

We need to handle this diplomatically, she says.

Tim agrees, though every time she asks him to run through his speech there are far too many fuckings and fucks.

Should I come with you? she says.

Tim shakes his head. I have to do this myself.

They’re just babies, she thinks. Be kind.

Leah closes her eyes and listens to his steps trace up the stairs. She holds her breath as he approaches their door. She senses Tim’s hesitation, and pictures a squint and a smile as he raises his fist.

Leah hears a knock. The stomping evaporates, mid-step. Another knock. Then nothing. Tim is making his way back down to their apartment. He opens the front door, distraught.

What happened? Leah says.

They didn’t answer. I knocked twice.

Success?

Tim looks up at the now quiet ceiling, then back at her. He nods.

Leah’s dad had sent her an article once, about a “free-spirited woman” who had an MD, a JD, and a PhD (that last one, it teased, just for fun). She can’t remember if the word mother had crept up, wound its way in between the degrees.

***

I can’t take it anymore, Tim says.

The whole situation reminds Leah of what they say about kids: karma. Tim had been booming, back when they’d first met at a party. He’d stomped around like he owned the place.

We don’t have a choice, she says.

Tim holds one finger up to his temple. One little finger, not scary. He cocks back the thumb trigger and pulls.

Don’t joke about that, Leah says.

Not a joke.

Leah bites her bottom lip. Tim is prone to despair: hard and heavy and fast. Hers lingers, choppy waters licking at her ankles, but Tim’s comes on like a tidal wave.

We should get you help, Leah says.

Tim doesn’t respond, only looks up at the ceiling.

Do you hear me? We need help!

She doesn’t know which is louder now: her clock or the stomping, Tim’s grunts or that voice. But there they all are. Discordant, then moving into sync.

Where are you going? Tim says.

You know where, she says, and throws open the door.

Her footsteps are thunderous, exhilarating. She wants them to hear her coming.

Leah crests the top of the stairs. Their front door is an exact mirror of her own: earthy red hue, small peephole. Before she can change her mind, she taps out three knocks.

The whooping stops. The room grows quiet. Leah waits for a few seconds, but no one appears. She inhales and knocks again, louder this time. Then she turns to look down the long, carpeted hallway. Empty. Her breath begins to quicken.

No one else is suffering like they are. No one is coming with the pitchforks.

Leah begins pounding on the door. She hears whispering, then murmuring from inside. She hears shuffling from a few of the other units. She keeps at it.

The apartment behind her opens its door. Leah doesn’t turn to look.

Excuse me, a young woman’s voice says.

Sorry, Leah says.

What’s going on?

A light in the apartment one unit to the left has switched on. You can’t hear them? Leah says.

Who?

The door opens. It’s bright inside.

***

When Leah comes back downstairs, Tim is wide-eyed. A mess.

What happened? he says, before she can shut the door. Did you see them?

Leah considers him for a moment: the touch of gray at his temples, the sweat on his forehead. He’s still so handsome. That stock is still on the rise.

They can hear us, too, she says.

Tim blinks, and pushes the covers away. What? The fighting, she says. Divorce Court.

Divorce Court?

That’s our nickname, she says. For them, it’s every day at six p.m. Every day, Divorce Court.

Tim brings his eyebrows down. His mouth puckers in. The stomping? he says.

Marching band, Leah says. He’ll practice somewhere else.

And when I knocked?

Would you want to talk to Divorce Court?

There are your whys, Leah thinks. She fans them out in front of him, flips one over for each burning question. Then she waits for Tim to say something. She wants him to interrupt. To keep her from flipping over the last one.

Maybe we weren’t built for upstairs, Leah says. Maybe we’re exactly where we belong.

Tick-tock, she thinks. Tick-tock.

Erin Brookins is a writer living in the foothills of Colorado with her partner and a dog named Lou. Her work has been featured in Birdy and AntipodeanSF, and her first script about a cursed flannel and the search for purpose was a ScreenCraft Horror Semifinalist and Barnstorm Short List selection.