I pushed open the heavy green door of my building and dropped onto the bottoms of my feet. The sun was blazing high in the blue sky, and the air, so thick and humid, droplets of sweat were already collecting across my back.

Inside the right pocket of my chinos I felt keys and my wallet – check. I fished through my other pocket, which seemed light and almost empty – headphones, an eyeglasses cloth, a mound of lent at the bottom, near the seam, which felt like a cotton ball between my fingers. 

But where was my phone?

I patted both pockets again. Damn, I left it, I thought, but I couldn’t go off to work without it, could I? 

I yanked open the main door, then the second door in the mail room, rushed up five flights and pounded three times on our door. 

“Open up, it’s me!” I said out of breath.

From where I stood, I could hear a muffled motor, waving in and out, almost like a low flying airplane. I put my ear to the door, concentrating on it. 

It was a blow dryer. Fernanda was drying her hair.

Annoyed by this, I fumbled through my pocket and found the rounded copper key for the top lock. Turned it left, after which I inserted the silver key a locksmith had made for us only a month before on the hottest day of the year. That afternoon Fernanda had asked me to assist her in carrying a bag of laundry up from the basement. It’s only towels, I had said, can’t you carry them this time? She shrugged and said no, that there were too many, plus I had forgotten about all of my socks. Reluctantly I acquiesced, threw on faded Adidas shorts and a grey t-shirt, she already had the keys, she assured me, so I followed her into the basement with nothing but my dirty clothes on. After we tossed the warm clothes from the dryer into a blue Ikea bag, she began staring into space, not saying anything. 

“What is it? What are you thinking?” I asked.

She said nothing for a while, then I figured out that she had taken my office keys and not her own by mistake. Two hours later, the locksmith burst through the deadbolt on our door with a high-intensive drill, and I turned the key into the new lock counterclockwise, a month later, not without remembering all of this as the lock disengaged.  

Fernanda jumped up in the bathroom. “You’re back!” 

“Sorry, yes,” I said, holding open the door and scanning the living room. 

She turned off the blow dryer, unplugged the cord from the wall and stowed it under the sink. “You really, really scared me. Did you forget something?”

“What does it look like?” I said, looking around the shoes by the door. “Have you seen my phone?” I paused and glanced at her after I asked, for I was being curt with her, I suddenly realized, and taking it out on her the way I sometimes did, the urge to deflect my frustration, put it on someone other than myself, whomever was closest, actually, which usually amounted to her, was not something I wished to do but did anyway.

Probably affected by my voice, she shook her head. Her look was serious, but then a subtle grin began at her cheeks, replacing her once tight skin with dimples, over which both sides of her mouth indented, with a curved line, while her brown eyes, previously large and full of defense, squinted and decreased in size, so much so they almost closed completely.

“I take that as a no?” I said, smiling with guilt. “Did I not leave it in the bed? Or did you move it?”

“I didn’t touch your phone, Michael,” she said and left the bathroom. 

“I’m not accusing you,” I said, and stepped into the bedroom. Nothing was on the desk, nothing on the floor. The bed was a disaster. Blankets and sheets lay in a pile so that I had to pull everything off, one by one, as if I was going to make it, which of course I was not.

It wasn’t there either.