Out of nowhere came a memory of Belinda. Her first weekend home from college, she came over to see Stefan and showed me some of her poetry, all about a girl, a persona, called Esme.
Longing Esme/hair of weeds/eyes of starfish/teeth of seeds.
Longing Esme/broken grace/passion buried/under lace.
Such a sad poem for such a happy girl, I told her back then.
Who says I’m happy? she asked me.
Now the enormity of her death rolled over me once more. I saw her in preschool, the day she and Stefan met; Belinda, no bigger than an acorn, already lecturing a taller, gangly Stefan about how people did not play tennis with Ping-Pong paddles… “If you do that, they’ll think you’re a Stoopie Magee.”
How purposefully had I spent so much of each day trying to forget why all this was happening… Say her name…how wrong that was, how morally perverse? Belinda, Belinda. Stefan was alive. Life was hope. Hope offset setbacks. Keith was correct: My anger was indeed misplaced. I had no right to any anger at all. Anger was for the wronged.
I called Keith and left a contrite message: Yes, I would ask for a sabbatical. Could we make a lunch date? Suddenly I couldn’t wait to be away from my campus, my second home.
That was when I saw him.
The hooded figure from the highway, who looked smaller outside a vehicle, was standing across the street from my car on the path to the lake, as students swarmed around him like water around a boulder. I might have hoped that I was wrong, that he was just some freshman in a hoodie and sweatpants twinned to my troubles by my fevered mind—except for what he did next. He raised one hand and pointed a finger at me, wagging it in that same admonishing gesture he gave us on that nightmare drive. I quickly unlocked the car doors, sure that when I looked up and blinked, he would be gone. But he wasn’t. He was standing there when I peeled out of the lot, and he was standing there as I drove away.
When it comes to emotional sturdiness, I have pretty big shoulders. But all this was too much. I was so rattled I couldn’t think in sentences. By dint of muscle memory, I found myself in my own driveway. Just then Jep texted me, reminding about the dry cleaning. So I didn’t even go inside. I backed out and drove away without looking back. I did stop to pick his jacket up at the cleaner’s but was so anxious by then that I accidentally left it on top of the car where I had placed it as I rummaged for the key, then wondered what was that big flapping package flying around on the road that I saw in my rear mirror? When I finally realized what it was, I had to backtrack again along my route to look for it, until I saw a kid maybe ten years old holding it and waving at me. I jumped out and took it and gave him the only bill I had in my purse, a twenty. He said, “Lady, do you know that this isn’t a dollar?” By then I was already back in the car. At least, it was a good day for somebody.
I pulled up and sat at the curb in front of my house, shaking and gripping the steering wheel like a life jacket. What did that figure want? Why did he follow us all the way from Black Creek that day? How did he know where I worked? Where we lived? （This last wasn’t a shock: He could have found that out from the SAY website, which featured photos of our house with the messages painted on the garage door and the sidewalks, like the Lourdes of domestic abuse protest.）
Grabbing my phone, I scrolled to the number for the girl caller with the little voice, then pressed Call.
When she answered, I said without preamble, “Is the one stalking us, a thin kid in a hoodie? Is he the same person who was on the road?”
She said, “I… I don’t know.”
“But you know who I mean.”
“Yes.”
“He’s still after us! What do I do?”
She seemed to drop the phone and then recovered it. “Just…just do what I told you. Tell Stefan not to talk to anyone about that night and nothing will happen.”
“How can you be so sure? Are you the one behind this?”
“No!” she said. She sounded genuinely aghast. “Of course not. It’s complicated.”
“Well, should Stefan be in… I don’t know…in witness protection or something?”
She said, “Don’t be dramatic.”
Suddenly my mind made a connection. “Are you Esme?”
She paused so long I thought she’d hung up. Then she said, “I don’t want to say anything else. I’ve already said too much. Don’t call me again. I’m changing this number.” I heard the phone click. When I tried to call back, the phone just rang and rang, without even the option for a voice message.