The Last Call Log

The clock on the wall above the empty cubicle row read 11:58. The fluorescent tubes buzzed a half-note below the register of hearing, the kind of sound that settled into the fillings of my back teeth after an hour. I clocked in with my badge, felt the plastic edge bite my thumb where the laminate had begun to peel, and walked the length of the room to my station. Third from the end. The chair still held the warmth of the day-shift operator, a faint human heat that made my skin prickle.

I opened the night log. The cover made that soft crack sound it always made, leather worn to suede at the corners, and the spine exhaled the smell of old paper and something else—the lunch meat someone had eaten over it, probably, or the particular sourness of a municipal building after midnight. The previous shift's entries ran in neat blue ink, the handwriting of a woman named Delia who dotted her i's with small circles. Water main pressure low on Ash. Streetlight cycling on Mercer. A dog barking complaint on Juniper, caller advised to contact animal control. I read each one, my finger tracking down the margin, checking for the little checkmark that meant the issue had been routed to the proper department.

One entry stopped my finger. Blank. Just a timestamp, 3:47 AM, and a phone number. The number sat in the caller ID box, written in Delia's round hand, but the complaint field held nothing. No description. No resolution code. No checkmark. And the number—I knew the number. I had dialed it a thousand times from muscle memory, from the kitchen phone with the cord that stretched, from my cell in the parking lot of the grocery store, from the payphone at the hospital during the long months when my mother forgot my name. My home number. The landline I had kept after she died because canceling it felt like another death to file.

I sat down. The chair's pneumatic tube sighed and dropped an inch. I read the blank entry again, then the one before it and the one after it, looking for a pattern, a reason. Nothing. Delia had simply written the timestamp and the number and then stopped, as if interrupted, as if the call had ended before she could record its substance. The paper felt heavier than it should have, the way a wet page feels heavier, but the page was dry. I turned it over. Blank on the back. I turned it back. The number sat there, and I sat there, and the fluorescent hum climbed into the space behind my eyes.

I noted it in the margin of my own shift log, a small notation in pencil because pen felt too permanent: entry incomplete, no complaint recorded. Then I moved on, because that was the job. The job was to answer the calls, log the complaints, route the issues, and keep the night from leaking in through the gaps in the schedule. The job was not to ask why Delia's pen had stopped.

The first call came at 12:14.

The phone rang with that flat electronic trill the municipal system used, a sound like a metal file drawn across a comb. I picked up before the second ring, because that was my habit, my small pride. "Utilities after-hours, this is Maren."

The line held a sound like water moving through a pipe, a distant slosh and gurgle, and beneath it a voice. My voice. But not my voice as I knew it from the inside—the voice that lived behind my teeth and in my throat. This voice came from far away, muffled and thick, as if the speaker stood at the bottom of a swimming pool and spoke upward through ten feet of chlorinated water. The words arrived warped, their edges softened, their consonants blurred.

"There's a leak under the kitchen sink," the voice said. "It's been dripping for three nights. I can hear it when I try to sleep."

I wrote the words in the log before I understood them. My hand moved, the pen scratching, and I watched the letters form on the page: leak, kitchen sink, three nights, dripping. The caller ID box on my screen showed my home number. The number I had stared at in Delia's blank entry not fifteen minutes before.

"Ma'am," I said, and my own voice sounded wrong to me now, too flat, too close to the receiver. "Can you confirm the address?"

The line gurgled. The voice said my address. My street, my house number, the apartment number on the second floor where I had lived for six years, where the kitchen sink had never leaked, not once, because I had replaced the washer myself the spring after I moved in,