I try to breathe, to process what happened. I sink down to the step.
Who did I think was following me?
What am I afraid of?
I take a second to catch my breath before letting myself back into the house. “That was quick,” my mother says about my walk, and I blame the weather. “You’re out of breath, Nina,” she says when I speak.
“It started to rain. I had to run home.”
“You’re wet. Let me get you a towel,” she says. Beneath my coat, I’m not drenched, but my shirt is spotted with rain and my hair is damp, but I think it must be my wet shoes squeaking on the floor that give me away. I step out of them, carrying them back into the mudroom.
“No, it’s fine,” I say, wiping up the wet footprints on the floor. “I’m going to go change into something dry. I’ll be right back,” I tell my mother, climbing the stairs for the master bedroom, “and then I’ll start dinner.”
I get upstairs. I close the bedroom door. I sit on the bed with the laptop. My heart still beats hard. I sit there on the bed for a minute trying to collect myself. Outside, the rain becomes a driving rain, pelting the windows. I take a quick look to be sure the windows are closed and they are.
I go to my Facebook page. Our friends Anna and Damien have announced their pregnancy on social media now. They’ve used one of those felt boards to do it. On the felt board are the words Coming Soon. Anna holds the board beside her growing belly, while Damien stands beside her, with his arm around her shoulder. Anna is radiant, glowing, wearing this stunning, rust-colored, tiered silhouette minidress, and I feel a stab of jealousy because I don’t know if the woman in this picture, happy and pregnant, will ever be me. I’m thirty-eight now. These days, they call that a geriatric pregnancy. In other words, I’m getting too old to be having kids. It makes me feel like I’m ninety years old. Jake and I are clearly not at a place to be starting our family, not when he won’t speak to me, I don’t know that I trust him and I don’t know where he is. Damien looks adoringly at Anna. She looks the same way at him. They’re so much in love, it shows. Jake has never once looked at me like that.
I go to the neighborhood’s Facebook page. I look for replies to my own post. I need to see Jake’s face. I need to know why he was here.
In the comments to my post, someone has told me that sometimes a package is mistakenly marked as delivered, though it hasn’t been. Give it another day, he suggests, and then report it. That’s not helpful.
Thankfully his isn’t the only reply. A house that sits diagonal from Jake’s and mine has shared a video clip with a comment. Not sure if this helps, the poster says, but the timeline fits.
I expand the video so that it fills my laptop screen. The camera picks up this homeowner’s porch and property, but it also gets a view of the street and a partial view of the house on the other side of the street. The quality is better than I would have expected. The only downside is that the view is not in line with Jake’s and my house. I can’t see our house from this angle.
Still, there’s something on the video the original poster thought might be relevant, and so I watch despite not knowing what it has to do with me.
There are potted plants on the front porch. Fountain grass grows in them, with giant plumes that sway and bend in the breeze. The speakers capture the sound of the wind, amplifying it so that the audio is incredibly loud, the wind like a tornado.
I watch. I’m expectant, on edge, knowing something is going to happen but not knowing what.
The sound of a car reaches my ears before a black car, a four-door sedan, enters the frame. I’m not any good with types of cars. Jake would know better than me what it is, if he could get a decent view. The quality of the video is good, but I don’t know that the angle is right. You definitely can’t see the make or model on the back end of the car, and you can’t see the license plate.
The car pulls to the side of the road directly across the street from this doorbell camera. It sits there, idle, the driver sedentary behind the wheel so long that I wonder if he’s ever going to get out.
Could it be Jake? Could something have happened to his car? Could Jake be using a rental, or has he borrowed someone else’s car?
The door opens. A man gets out. No, I think to myself, disappointed. That’s not it. This isn’t what I’m looking for. This man isn’t Jake and this isn’t Jake’s car. This man is taller than Jake. He’s leaner too. He wears jeans, a jacket and some kind of hat, and I can tell, even just from the way he walks—confident, hands in his pockets, something just short of a strut—that this man is not my husband. Jake is confident when he walks, but it’s different than this.
The fountain grass plumes keep getting in the way.
The man walks around the back end of the car, fighting the wind. He cuts across the grassy parkway for the sidewalk. With his hands still in his pockets, he keeps walking along the sidewalk, and then he exits the frame. His face is almost always turned the other way, which doesn’t matter because I can tell in a million other ways, without seeing what he looks like, that this man isn’t Jake.
The video ends there.
My heart sinks. This is totally irrelevant. Whoever shared it thought they might have caught my package thief. But there is no package thief. This is just some man, stopping to visit a friend. It has nothing to do with me.
I minimize the screen.
I respond to the video. I say: Many thanks. Anyone closer that has proof of this man actually taking the package? In other words, does anyone have actual footage of my house or door? That’s what I need to see. I want to see Jake. I don’t want to see this man.
I’ll have to wait and hope that someone else caught something more relevant.
CHRISTIAN
In the middle of the night, I jerk upright in bed. I’m not fully awake. I’m somewhere in that void between unconsciousness and consciousness. I don’t know what I heard. I couldn’t describe it to save my life. But in some subliminal way—there just beneath that threshold of conscious perception where it was still able to elicit a response—I know there was a noise that pulled me from sleep.
Beside me, Lily is sound asleep. She snores, gently. I don’t wake her.
I hold my breath, listening for the noise. My eyes are wide.
I’d been sleeping so well. This was the first night in a few nights that I fell asleep when my head hit the pillow. I was lost to oblivion until now. The digital clock across the room reads 4:12.
I look around the room, searching for something off. The room is dark, like charcoal. It’s cloudy and opaque, and it’s hard to see much of anything. The door is closed and locked. For the time being, we’ll sleep like that. We never used to sleep with the door closed. But it makes Lily feel safer now, though there isn’t a reason for her to feel unsafe.
We didn’t have a conversation about closing the door, but the other night, before we lay down in bed, Lily watched me close and lock it, and then she just barely nodded as if agreeing it was the prudent thing to do. It’s not exactly a robust lock; any little screwdriver can pop the lock. But what I like about it, and what Lily likes about it, is that there is this barrier between us and the unknown when we’re out cold. Popping the lock or rattling the door handle would make a sound and wake us.