I switch off my radio. It’s 8:40 now. I aim my eyes at the cemetery’s entrance.
Five minutes later I see a shifting form moving up the walkway, a shadow playing on the illuminated sign, and then on the path out front. Right on schedule.
He wears a long dark coat and moves quickly. He’s a giant. A freak. My hands ball into fists. This feels like a nightmare—an enormous ghoul emerging from a cemetery, flying straight at me.
But when he steps into the dim light, he’s much smaller than his shadow had led me to believe. It’s not a nightmare. He’s just a man, approximately five nine.
A car passes, and it feels like a screen wipe. I’m back to business now. I can see 0001’s words in my mind: Do not leave your car until you see him exit the cemetery. Act as if you are making a call. . . . DO NOT speak to him until he is crossing the street. I get out of my car. I step into the streetlight and start playing with my phone. I sense him stepping off the curb, but my gaze doesn’t lift until I hear his footsteps jogging across the macadam.
And that’s when I see his face.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. The clean-shaven head, the hollow cheeks, eyes peering out from beneath a low brow, just as they’d glared into his rearview mirror and through my windshield two weeks ago. That purposeful Manhattan stride. That expensive coat. That shiny Porsche, parked up the street, behind the Tesla. It’s his Porsche. I know you. His name escapes my lips. “Dr. Duval.”
He stops jogging. “You.”
He did see me that night. I wasn’t imagining it.
“Who are you? Why are you following me?”
I don’t know what to say. For a second I’m embarrassed, but then I remember who he is. I think of that woman on our page, a sister. My sister, her daughter killed by this plastic surgeon’s carelessness—a cruel, callous man, she said, who had never apologized, never paid. Her daughter gone forever. Cancer didn’t get her. But you did. I hear myself say, “Were you visiting her grave?”
He stands perfectly still. “You’re one of them. You’re sick. You’re all—”
A big pickup truck roars through the intersection and runs down Dr. Duval, crushing him beneath its wheels.
MY THROAT FEELS very sore, which tells me I screamed. But I can’t remember doing it.
I can’t move, and when I finally am able to take a step, it’s as though I’m pushing through water. My legs shake. My lips tremble. It’s very hard to breathe.
By the time I make it to the middle of the road, the driver has backed up and gotten out of the truck, and she’s kneeling beside Dr. Duval. He seems to have gone between the truck’s wheels rather than under them, but it doesn’t matter. Blood pools beneath his body. His mouth forms a word. “Cla . . .” And then his eyes go as still as glass.
The pickup truck driver has gray-streaked dark hair that hangs in her face, and she wears tan corduroy pants, now stained with Duval’s blood. Her build is sturdy, her movements practical. She puts two fingers to his neck, feeling for a pulse. Thumps his broken chest hard with both hands, then feels for a pulse again. She shakes her head. “I didn’t see him coming.” She says it like an incantation, her voice low and melodic. “I didn’t see him coming.”
My own voice returns, but it sounds weak and tinny, as though it’s coming from somewhere else. “We have to . . . Don’t we have to . . . to call . . .”
“He just jumped in front of my car. I didn’t have time to move out of the way. You saw it.” She brushes her hair out of her eyes and turns her face to me, and it’s as though we’re all members of the same repertory theater, Dr. Duval and me and this steely-eyed woman—I’m Susan, she had said to Wendy and me—and we’re all starting work on a new play. The one about the plastic surgeon stepping into traffic. “You saw it, sister.”