“Should I even ask why you’re crawling around in the parking lot on your hands and knees?” a voice banters.
I jump, almost hitting my head on the car. I look up to find Ryan standing there in the glow of the afternoon sun. I shade the light from my eyes with a hand to see him. He looks down in amusement at me, though his droll smile and his raised eyebrows fade away when he sees the expression of shock on my face.
Ryan’s words are tempered. “Nina?” he asks, cocking a head and pulling his eyebrows together. “What is it? Is everything alright? Did you lose something?”
My jaw is clenched. “Can you… Could you just look at this for me? Can you tell me if it’s what I think it is?”
“Yeah,” he says gently, nodding. “Sure.” He sets his bag down, and then he lowers himself to the ground beside me, on his knees, asking, “What is it you want me to look at?”
“It’s here, under my car,” I say, so that he’ll bend down to look. It’s cramped where we are. When we bend down to look, our heads practically touch. There can’t be more than three feet of space between parked cars, which is hardly enough room for one person to fit, much less two.
I use my phone’s flashlight to illuminate the underside of the car, pointing toward the small black boxlike thing that sits close to the edge of the car, almost directly beneath the driver’s seat.
“What am I looking at?” he asks.
“This,” I say, touching it.
Ryan reaches a hand under the car. He removes the object easily from the car’s undercarriage because it was just held in place by some sort of adhesive. He comes up with it in his hand, and then he pushes himself to his feet before extending a hand to help me to mine.
“This shouldn’t be here,” he says as I stand up. He runs his eyes over the object, examining it. His eyes turn soft and pitying and he says, “It’s a GPS tracking device, Nina.” I feel suddenly weak. I lean back against my car, letting it support me. My fingers go to my mouth. I was right, then. That’s what I thought it was, but hearing him say it makes it so much worse. How I wish I’d been wrong.
Ryan reads my face. “I take it you didn’t know it was there?”
I shake my head. “No. I didn’t know.”
Ryan opens his mouth to speak, but then rethinks and closes it.
“What is it?” I ask. “What were you going to say?”
He takes a step closer, bridging the distance I’ve made. He reaches out with his hand to give my arm a gentle squeeze. “Are you okay?” he asks. I nod, but it’s automatic. I don’t look at him. I find my eyes locked on the device in his hand, wondering who put that on my car. I don’t know that I’m okay. “Is everything alright at home, Nina, with you and your husband?” he asks, treading lightly. I never told him about Jake, about what’s been happening with Jake.
But that isn’t what Ryan is asking. Ryan isn’t asking if Jake is okay.
Ryan is suggesting that Jake put this tracking device on my car.
“Why do you think my husband did this?” I ask, feeling the need to defend Jake all of a sudden. Jake isn’t the controlling, jealous type, but he is the type who likes to ask questions. Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? Once I remember he got upset with me when I got a text from a male colleague in my department, thanking me for a coffee date. It was completely platonic and professional. Something had come up in a department meeting that had upset him and he wanted to talk to someone about it. I remember that, at the time, I’d been put off that Jake was snooping on my phone and reading my personal texts, but instead of telling him that, I found myself defending the reasons I had coffee with a male colleague, apologizing for it, feeling like I’d done something wrong when I hadn’t.
I shiver, despite the warm fall day. I wrap my arms around myself to keep me warm. Did Jake think he couldn’t trust me?
Ryan is apologetic. He searches visibly for words. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insinuate that… I didn’t mean to say anything bad about your husband. It just seemed like the logical choice.”
“Why?” I ask, my words brusque and I don’t mean to take my feelings out on Ryan, but it happens. “Because Jake seems like a stalker or because husbands in general do?” I ask.
Ryan looks hurt. He says, “I’ve only met him a couple times. I don’t know anything about your husband.”
“Then why do you assume it was him?”
“Please don’t be like that,” he says, and I regret the tone I took with him. “You know I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just trying to help.”
I shake my head. I put my head in my hands. The only reason I took offense was that he touched a raw nerve, because I was thinking it too.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have reacted like that.” I try to think, to process what’s happening, to make sense of this. “I just don’t know why Jake would do something like this.”
“But if not him, then who, Nina?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I have no clue.”
Ryan bends his knees slightly to lower himself to my height, so he can look me in the eye. “You would tell me if things weren’t okay at home?”
“Yes. Of course,” I lie.
“Would you?”
Ryan can tell that I’m lying. “No,” I say, shaking my head.
“No what?” he asks. “No everything is not okay at home, or no you wouldn’t tell me?”
“No everything is not okay at home,” I say, my voice and posture crumbling. With my confession come tears. “Shit,” I say, swiping at my eyes. I hate to cry. I’m not the crying type, especially not in public like this, with Ryan and only God knows who else as a witness.
He looks around the parking lot first to be sure no one is watching us. Ryan comes closer. He reaches for my shoulders and tentatively pulls me into him. I resist at first, but then I give in, finding comfort in his embrace. His arms wrap around me. He quiets my crying. “Shhhh,” he says. My own arms hang stiffly at my sides, but I lean into him, resting my head on his chest, knowing that I haven’t been this close to another man except Jake in years.
He runs a hand the length of my hair. It’s calming. “Talk to me, Nina. Tell me what’s wrong.”
I pull back, but we still stand close. The sun is behind Ryan. It’s bright. I tent a hand to my eyes as I say, “Jake left me,” feeling a sense of shame wash over me. Now that my mother saw Jake at our house the other day, I know definitively that he isn’t dead and he isn’t missing. He made a choice to leave. He doesn’t love me anymore. I went so far as to call the police this morning and tell them what I discovered. There was no point in them searching for Jake when they have truly missing people to try and find.
“What do you mean he left you?”
It isn’t that Ryan is confused. It’s that he finds it inconceivable that Jake would leave me, which I appreciate.
“We got into a fight a few days ago. These days, it seems we’re always getting into fights. I can’t do anything right. He left for work Monday morning and never came home. I thought something terrible had happened to him, but no. My mother saw him over the weekend and he’s fine. He just left me.” More than once, Jake has threatened to leave. He finally made good on his threat.