Damn it.
What was going on with Esme? What was going on with Pete Sunday? I promised myself I would call him first thing tomorrow.
Finally I lay back down, but I shook and sweated in my sheets. I slept and woke, exhausted. The house was dark and chilled. I didn’t dare go back to sleep. Yet, sleep overcame me, hauling me down. When I awakened in the dark, she was sitting in my chair near the window, her back to me. I could see her plainly in the silver light from the streetlamp. She didn’t turn around. “Thea,” she whispered. “Thea, you are the door.”
I snapped on my bedside lamp. Then, I stayed up the rest of the night, drinking so much tea and eating so much cinnamon toast that my stomach washed side to side like a water balloon when I walked.
When Jep came home, I climbed and clung to him, voracious, unable to wait even for him to shower the road off him. “What did I do right?” he asked me afterward, naked and streaked with new sweat.
“Don’t leave,” I pleaded. “Don’t go to any more camps. Don’t even go down to get a snack. I’ll bring you pie. I’ll bring you coffee. Stay up here, please. Remember when we were going to put a little refrigerator in our bathroom?”
“And then we decided it was too decadent?”
“Why did we decide that?”
“Because it is too decadent. We’re people with limits, Theaitsa.”
“Just stay by me.”
“What’s wrong tonight? What’s gotten into you? Not that I mind.”
“You’re right about everything. I’m up on the ledge. I have to find a way to vacuum my mind.”
While Jep was in the shower, I put on one of his shirts. He did go downstairs to make a sandwich. He did go down again, for pie. But he held me as I slept. Normally, I wouldn’t have craved this: I’m not a cuddler. Be skin to skin with me while we’re going at it, but afterward, you don’t have to prove anything else: Let me sleep unencumbered on my own little island of cotton and feathers.
In the middle of the night, I heard a crash and Molly’s frenzied growling. She wasn’t yapping, as she did to annoy the UPS guy; she was trying, in her aging, Australian-shepherd-lady way, to warn somebody off her turf. I paid attention, because Molly would have welcomed the ghost of Genghis Khan if he’d brought liver treats. Jep was on his feet, but I was faster, throwing my robe around my shoulders like someone in an English ghost story movie. Stefan was in the kitchen…with, to my horror, a sledgehammer in his hand.
“He was out there,” Stefan said.
“Who’s out there?”
“The guy,” he stammered. His eyes were pits. “The stalker from the road, Mom. The Unabomber.” Stefan said he was up late, working on some sketches for a Whole Blooming World project for which he’d been recommended by Luck Sergenian, a big job with a big budget, doing all the landscaping and plantings for a new college-prep school for girls. He had headphones and some raucous music on, but through it, heard Molly whining and scratching at the patio door. He came out of the library where he’d been working and switched on the light over the back door. He very nearly screamed.
The stalker was standing there, not six feet away, perfectly at rest, his arms by his sides. He wore black tennis shoes and that black sweatshirt with the deep, voluminous hood Stefan remembered from that icy day on the highway back from Black Creek. Stefan couldn’t see his eyes, but he knew the guy was watching him, watching for him, that it was the same person: Something about the slant of the shoulders and the stance had branded itself on Stefan’s memory during those awful few seconds after we spun down the embankment. Stefan didn’t move. The figure didn’t move. Stefan felt that if the stalker rushed the door, he would die—even if the door was double-locked, even if the glass was reinforced, he would die. What should he do? Turn off the light? Call the police?
Just then Molly threw herself against the door, growling and scratching, and Stefan almost let her out, his only fear that the guy had a weapon and would hurt the dog. But instead, he turned and walked away, unhurried, out of the silo of light from the patio fixture. But where had he gone?
Stefan ticked over the locks, basement, front door, garage door…and gasped aloud when he thought of the side door of the garage which we sometimes left unlocked, that led out into the backyard. Forcing himself, knowing that the guy might still be in earshot, Stefan sprinted into the garage, grabbed the mallet, slipped back inside and locked the side door.
I generally hated phrases like “the new normal.” They were slick the first time you heard them, but quickly facile. But this time I could not avoid its apt quality: This was our new normal, in which nothing would ever be normal. What, I wondered now, was this creepy guy’s part in all this? Was he another vigilante, entirely separate from Jill and her minions, with his own dire purposes? Standing around, I well knew, was no crime. So would he ever be stopped?