“Then he’s an idiot,” Ryan says, reaching for my elbow, his eyes holding mine for a long time.
Noise comes all of a sudden from the school building. I fall away from Ryan, pulling my arm back, turning to look. A cluster of teenage girls has stepped outside, giddy and happy and laughing. I feel my cheeks go red, hoping they didn’t see Ryan and me so close. I can only imagine what they’d say about catching Mrs. Hayes and Mr. Schroeder in an embrace. My eyes return to Ryan’s. He, too, was watching the girls. He looks back to me.
“I’m sorry you’re going through this, Nina,” he says.
I swallow. “How does it work anyway?” I ask, wiping my eyes on the back of a hand, eager to change the subject because I don’t want to talk about Jake anymore or our homelife.
“This?” he asks, holding up the tracking device.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know for sure,” he says, turning it over again in his hands, “but I think it’s a real-time GPS tracker, where someone can monitor your location from their own cell phone.”
I imagine a little map with some digital cartoon image of myself, giving real-time updates every time I get into my car to head to work or to the grocery store. I imagine someone watching from afar as a dotted line tracks my movements across town. Work. Errands. My mother’s doctor’s appointments. A cool wind sweeps across the parking lot and I shiver, hugging myself tighter as the tiny hairs on my arms and on the nape of my neck lift in the breeze. I wish I’d brought my jacket.
“You look cold,” he says, his eyes going to my arms, which are spread with goose bumps.
“I am. I have to go,” I say, suddenly remembering about my mother’s biopsy. I look at my watch. “Shit. I’m going to be late.”
Ryan seems reluctant to let me leave. “Do you want me to follow you? Make sure you get home okay?”
I appreciate his concern. There is a part of me that wants to say yes, to ask him to follow me home. This tracker has me on edge, for good reason. But it’s more than just this tracking device. It’s the anonymous and unsolicited flowers too. Did the same person who has been watching me also send the flowers? “No. I’m fine. Really. For all I know, this thing has been here for years,” I say, trying to make light of it, though that’s not possible because it was only about six months ago that Jake bought me the car.
“This is yours,” he says, handing me the GPS tracking device before he turns to walk around his car for the driver’s door. He pauses there on the other side of the car, gazing over the roof at me. “Are you going to be okay, Nina?” he asks.
I nod, but I’m scared to be in my car now, despite the fact that the tracking device has been removed. What if someone is still watching me somehow?
“I’ll be fine. Thank you again for your help.”
“I’d get rid of that by the way, if I was you,” he says, pointing at the device, before he opens his car door and gets inside. As I watch, he starts the engine and pulls away.
I hold the tracking device in my hands. I handle it with care as if it’s a bomb or a grenade, about to go off. I turn it over in my hands, feeling exposed even just holding it.
I walk over to the trash can before I leave, and drop the device in. It’s heavier than everything else in the can, upsetting it. The device sinks down low, getting buried beneath the rest of the trash.
It’s gone. But my mind can’t get rid of it so easily.
We’re ten minutes late to the appointment, which does nothing for my mother’s or my stress. The biopsy is a fine needle aspiration, which I’ve read is the easiest as biopsies go. There are far worse types. I ask her if she wants me to come into the room with her, but she goes in alone.
It doesn’t take long. After the biopsy, we go out for dinner, though we’re both too worked up to eat, for the same and for different reasons. She is thinking about the biopsy results. I am too, but I’m also thinking about Jake and about the device I found on my car. I can’t stop thinking about it.
We go for Mexican, which was once my mother’s favorite. From across the table, I can see that she is tired. We eat, or try to eat—it’s mostly a wasted effort—and then we go home.
“Don’t think about it,” I say to her as I drive, reaching for her hand. “Easier said than done, I know, but there’s no point in worrying about the results when we don’t even know if we have anything to worry about.”
The house is completely dark as I approach, so dark it’s hard to see. Both the outside and the inside lights are off. It was late afternoon when we left for the doctor’s appointment. The sun wasn’t anywhere close to setting. I didn’t even think to turn a light on, distracted and not thinking how dark it would be by the time we got back home. We were gone for hours and, in that time, the sun went down, night fell.
I press the button inside my car to open the garage door—grateful for the light the garage gives off—and drive my car in.
After turning the ignition off, I get out and go toward the door, to let myself into the house while my mother is getting out of the car.
But a foot from the door, I become paralyzed. The door into the house is moving. It’s open. I can see it bobbing in place from the air outside as a cool breeze wafts in the open garage. The door isn’t standing wide-open, but it isn’t pulled fully closed either. I could open the door just by pushing on it.
I never would have left the door like this. I didn’t leave the door like this.
“Is everything okay?” my mother asks, coming to stand behind me. She sees my reluctance, how I stop briefly before the door, taking a breath, looking at it lapping in the wind against the frame like waves on the shore. “Did you forget to close it?” she asks.
I don’t want to tell her what I’m thinking because she’s already so stressed and worried about everything. I don’t want to make it worse. “I must have,” I say, stepping up to the door. I lay my hand flat against it, take a breath and press it slowly open, wondering who or what I might find on the other side.
I slip my hand in first, feeling for the light switch. I find it and turn it on. A flush mount ceiling light shines down, bathing the room in light.
I look for something amiss. I find something.
The cleaning lady was here today. Her name is Martha and she’s a godsend. She came this morning when I was at work, when only my mother was home. Martha washes the floors by hand and is always very thorough and conscientious. She came recommended from a friend and is the best. In all the years she’s been with us, her work is flawless. She never leaves a speck of dirt or dust behind.
But just inside the mudroom is a partial shoe print. It’s a dab of tracked-in dirt on the luxury vinyl tile. My mother doesn’t even notice, but I see it right away, sticking out like a sore thumb. It looks like someone stepped through mud or dirt coming in, and then walked into the house with it on their shoe. The shoe print is longer and wider than either my mother’s or mine. It’s big like a man’s footprint, though it’s an incomplete print.
Martha would never have overlooked something like this; she never would have left it behind.
There hasn’t been a man in my house since Jake.