Page 6

6

SHELBY

I don’t tell anyone about the note on my car. My instinct was to go right to the police, of course, but what will they say? It’s a handwritten note. There’s no way to connect anyone to it, and there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it. The idea of fingerprints left behind crosses my mind, but the notion that Riley would dust for them is far-fetched. Someone going out of their way to threaten me and be that careless is also unlikely, so I decide to keep it for now. I need to think. The police have done jack shit to protect me thus far, so I just need to figure out what to do myself. What’s the best way to proceed?

I thought it was over. The thing is, I never told anybody the whole story. They know an intruder locked me in…left me there, but they don’t know the part before that. The humiliation. I can’t even bear to tell my husband. I can’t think about it. I just wanted it to be over. It was over.

But now he’s back. Whoever it is, he’s the only person who would know those cruel words threatened that night. If I tell anyone about him, he would make the people I love pay. He must have really thought I knew who he was, and after all the time passed, realized I don’t, otherwise I would have had him arrested long ago. He thought I would die. To be fair, he didn’t do a good job killing me and I was found. But it doesn’t matter. He hasn’t been caught, so why now? After all this time, why torment me now? What the hell did I do? It’s pathetic to hear myself say why me, but really…why me?

I keep the note in my bag. I’ll tell Clay or Mack and see what they think I should do, but it brings everything back and I just can’t face it—I can’t comprehend why someone is after me. Wrong place, wrong time is the only thing that makes any sense. It’s hard to talk to Mack about it because of all the whispers about Leo. Did he have some mental breakdown? Was it him?

I walk the main hall of the Oleander’s. Lois is untaping garland from the door to her room, Arnie chuckles from the recliner in his room in front of an episode of Three’s Company . Everyone is safe, I keep telling myself. Everyone is fine. I’m fine.

I have Heather showing Evan the ropes around the place. He’s agreed to a part-time evening shift, and I’m delighted. Heather does not have a reputation for being the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she’s sweet as pie…so I make sure to pop in a few times and ensure it’s all going smoothly.

She’s looking at him with googly eyes, although he’s far too old for her. He’s my age and she’s twenty-six, but by the Jim Halpert looks I have caught him expressing to her in return when she’s not looking, I think we’re in the clear there.

I come back into the rec room, which is really the main open area inside the front door next to the small office. It has a kitchenette, a Ping-Pong table nobody uses, a big community table and chairs, a plaid couch and scattering of mismatched armchairs. It’s not the spa-like community living facility I wish we offered. It looks more like my parents’ basement in the 1980s—a stack of board games and puzzles stacked precariously on a bookshelf, an old dartboard on the wall, a minifridge. It’s tacky and kitschy, but we have all found a home here, so I guess nobody is really complaining.

I see Heather chatting to Evan at the card table where someone has finished the Bigfoot puzzle with the exception of one missing piece, which I am certain has Mort in fits. Heather’s introducing everyone; they’re all excited to have new blood in the place. I perch on the edge of the sofa next to Florence, who’s plucking away at a laptop I’ve never seen her use before, and I pop open the foil off a leftover Santa chocolate from the candy bowl on the coffee table. Millie walks in and hands Evan a crumply reindeer gift bag, smiling proudly.

“Oh. Uh…thank you,” he pulls out a rainbow-colored blob of yarn. “Wow.”

“It’s a pot holder,” Herb says, trying to help explain.

“It’s for you,” Millie beams.

“Cool,” he smiles, examining it.

“This is Millie. She likes to give a pot holder to everyone she meets,” Heather says, patting Millie’s arm, oblivious of Millie glaring back at her. I can see the words “up yours, Heather” practically forming on Millie’s lips, but we have company so she just goes and sits down instead.

“It’s the only thing she knows how to knit,” Herb adds. “And she’s flirting with you.”

“Oh, take a pill. It’s not like I’m walking around here in my bra and panties,” Millie says.

“And the world breathes a collective sigh of relief,” Herb replies, and I stifle a giggle.

“And this is Erb,” Heather says, gesturing to Herb.

“Herb,” Herb corrects, shaking Evan’s hand, an unlit cigar hanging from his lips.

“Erb is a cigar collector,” Heather says. Evan’s eyes flit over to me, and I give a quick closed-eye shake of my head to indicate it’s not worth asking. Heather was corrected by a teacher once in high school, after calling things like basil and cilantro “herbs.” She was told that the H is silent. They are “erbs” and she’s applied this knowledge to the first Herb she’s met, and no one can tell her otherwise.

“Cigar aficionado, really,” Herb says. “You a cigar guy? I got a few gems recently. Nicaraguan Perdomo if you’re interested.”

“You don’t have to say yes,” Florence adds, still clicking away on her computer. “Nobody wants to stand out by the dumpster in the freezing cold with you to smoke cigars, Herb.” Then back to Evan, “Seriously. You can get cancer just smelling him.”

“And that’s Florence.” Heather smiles, eternally ignoring the bickering. At that, Heather stands, smooths the front of her pants, and excuses herself to go and finish her office work. She possesses not one iota of a sense of humor, bless her.

“You can smoke a cigar with Herb or play video games with the guys or whatever you like really, you don’t need to man the front door like a royal queen’s guard or anything. We’re just happy to have a little security—someone to keep an eye out,” I say, and chills run along my arms thinking about someone out there in the frigid night—someone who’s watching me.

“It’s nice to be halfway needed again,” he says. “And my father’s house is so depressing and needs so much work that it’ll give me a little break from all that.”

“I can imagine it’s a lot,” I say, “but it’s good to have you back.”

“Good to be back.” He smiles and picks at the edge of Bigfoot’s ear, but I can imagine losing his big-city dreams and collecting disability while living in his neglected childhood home feels very far away from “good to be back,” but I don’t say that. I put the third foil chocolate I was about to unwrap back in the bowl and stand to go. We’ve already done all the boring paperwork, and I’m ready to get out of here and see my girls, so I pluck a strand of hair off of my sweater and tell him to call if he needs anything.

“And you’re technically on shift from 5:00 to 10:00,” I add “but Heather does overnights, so if you ever need to leave a little early or anything, I mean just let me know. We wanna keep you happy.” I think about asking him not to tell anyone what time his shift is because I don’t want anyone to know when we don’t have security. I don’t want them to know when we’re vulnerable, but if someone was in my lot placing a threatening note on my windshield, I have the sinking feeling that I’m so fucked no matter what that none of this even matters—none of us are safe. His words “I won’t even kill you. I’ll just make everyone around you pay and make you watch,” echo in my mind. I try to shake the thoughts away.

I head to the office and finish up a few items of paperwork, and after an hour, I hear Herb’s distinct giggling, so I peer out to see what no-good he’s up to when I see him pouring out a Windex bottle in the sink and washing it out. He hands it to Evan, who fills it halfway with his bottle of blue raspberry Gatorade and they poke each other as Heather walks through. I see Herb give a nod over to Evan, trying to control his snort-laughing, and Evan takes a drink of the Gatorade from the Windex bottle, sending Heather into a howl, and the whole gang in the rec room begin roaring with laughter. I know right away that Evan will fit in at the Oleander’s.

I don’t need him making everyone paranoid guarding the front door, like I said. I’m just happy to have a former police officer around who could shoot somebody if we really need him to…but the friendship he’s quickly making with the gang is more than I could have ever hoped for. I find myself smiling as I walk to my car until fear sets in again—something primal that stops me in my tracks. I look at my car sitting alone on the packed snow that covers the lot, the streetlight above it illuminating the blowing snowflakes in a beam of light above my lonely-looking Nissan. I imagine all of the horror stories I heard as a child—a man waiting in the back seat to wrap a cord around my neck and strangle me when I sit in the driver’s seat; a man waiting underneath the car to sever my Achilles’ heel with a steak knife when I approach. Or maybe he’s lying in wait in a dark SUV a block away, ready to follow close behind and run me off one of the rural roads home. And there’s nowhere to run—it’s all thickets of trees and black two-lane highways for miles, and it’s below zero outside.

I look back to the glowing triangle of light from the front door and feel a rush of panic—a feeling of being watched. I run back inside the way I used to run up the basement stairs as a child after convincing myself there was a monster at my heels, and rush through the front doors. Everyone looks up at me.

“Forgot my keys,” I say, and then I go into the front office with my head down, knowing everyone is aware I probably had another panic attack. Heather’s not in there now, so I close the doors and try to calm down. I can feel hot tears run down my face, and I can’t afford to just break down. Clay has a shift later tonight and I need to pull it together and take care of the girls.

I’m not getting in that fucking car right now though, that’s for sure. I call Clay and make him pick me up instead. He doesn’t grill me on the phone. He just says that he’ll pick up takeout from Dragon Wok and we will swing over and get the girls when their ballet lessons end at six. I wait for him at the front glass doors, telling everyone my car battery died and holding back tears until he arrives.

On the dark and quiet drive to the dance school, I crunch on a wonton and flip through radio stations. He doesn’t press me because he knows I have…episodes…ever since the “tragic event.” And I don’t press him because I know how helpless and angry the topic can make him—he couldn’t help me, and there are a few fist-shaped holes in the garage drywall to prove how much he wants to kill the person who hurt me. To add insult to injury, he’s also taken on night shifts at the hospital again; just front desk triage stuff to make ends meet because the bait shop we own barely breaks even. After spending his entire day there, watching his dream deteriorate with each slow, customerless day, he is also overworked and worrying about me. I try to only tell him what I absolutely need to most of the time, so that the palpable tension stays at a manageable level.

When the girls are settled in the back seat, June clicks on the pink heart reading light clipped to the seat pocket and shows Poppy a picture book called Grumpy Monkey she checked out for her reading homework and they giggle at the illustrations with mouthfuls of orange chicken, which I usually wouldn’t let them eat in the car, but right now a quiet ride home is more important today.

“‘Norman was slumped. His eyebrows were bunched,’” I hear June read, sounding out some of the words slowly, then some more giggling and wrappers crunching.

“Good job, Pops,” Clay says, making a right on Ivy Street.

“That was June,” I say, a common correction.

“Great skills, Juju,” he says instead, and they laugh.

Poppy’s voice begins to read. “‘I told you what would happen if you went p-p-public. I won’t kill you, I’ll make everyone around you pay, remember?’” Clay tenses, and I whip around in my seat and look at her.

“What are you reading? What the hell is she reading?” Clay slows the car down and looks in the rearview mirror, adjusting it to see the girls.

“What does it mean?” Poppy asks, holding out the folded note with an outstretched hand.

“Where did you get this?” I ask her, trying to stay calm, but I can hear the bite in my voice. She shrinks a little in her seat.

“It was on the floor,” she says, pointing down. Jesus, it fell out of my pocket into the back.

“It’s a play,” I say quickly. “It’s just the page from a play that Mort is working on, you know Mort. It’s just lines a character is saying. But it’s not for kids,” I take the note from her and she shrugs and opens a fortune cookie. I stare at the note with a sticky orange chicken fingerprint on it now, and then fold it back up and shove it in my pocket.

Clay’s knuckles whiten around the steering wheel and his neck blooms red blotches, but he doesn’t say anything with the girls in the car.

After they’re dressed in Dora jammies and sitting at the coffee table on the living room floor coloring next to the fireplace, I walk into the kitchen where Clay stands at the counter storing away Chinese leftovers. He’s slamming lids on Tupperware and whipping chopsticks into the trash. When he sees me, he carefully places both hands on the counter, an attempt to stay calm, and simply looks at me.

“Can we sit down?” I say.

“No, tell me what the hell is going on. I’m not an idiot. I saw your face when you heard the words being read, so something has happened. What?” I don’t respond right away. He opens the fridge and almost pulls out a beer, but he is headed off to a shift at the hospital, so he just slams the fridge with a sigh and stares up at the ceiling for a moment. I sit at the table.

“It showed up on my car yesterday. I was trying to find a time to tell you.” He sits, as calmly as he can manage. It’s the first time I’ve seen someone’s face drained of color yet look like their head could explode simultaneously, and I understand it. It’s the way I feel when I think about the girls being hurt—the utter helplessness and rage it evokes.

“Where? Here?”

“No, at the Oleander’s. After my shift. It was just on my car.” He stands, then sits and clenches his fists, and he takes a slow breath, then he stands again, walking over to the alarm system we put in after the incident last year, fuming. He punches in the code and arms it.

“This stays on when you’re home. It’s not just for nighttime anymore. Anytime you’re in the house, this is on,” he says, and I don’t try to explain what a nightmare that is with the girls running in and out and forgetting to disarm it and the crushing noise it makes and the police calling just for me to say, “oops sorry. False alarm.” I just nod in agreement.

Before he can say anything else, I hear the girls’ video end and the local news begin. I head in to turn it off when I stop cold, and I turn to see Clay in the frame of the kitchen door with his eyes fixed on the TV, also frozen in place.

There is a video playing as the top story.

“Authorities have obtained a video that might lead to clues from the frightening events that took place last October when a Rivers Crossing resident was assaulted at Firefly Cafe on 6th Street. The video has never been seen before, and it seems the bar owner across the street had security footage which is just now surfacing.

“It shows a figure walking into frame, pulling a hood over his face and then moving around to the back of the building. There is no footage of the man leaving the cafe which leads police to believe he fled out the back and into the woods behind it. The following images are of the police finding the victim just in the nick of time.” The newscaster with a blond bob and tight lips disappears from the screen and I see my car parked there, police surrounding it. Then I see myself being wheeled out on a stretcher like a corpse.

“Go brush your teeth,” I snap at the girls who just blink back at me, confused by my sudden mood change.

“Now, please!” I say and they scramble to their feet, looking crestfallen as they run down the hallway to their bathroom. The newscaster finishes up her short segment with…

“The owner of the cafe went missing on the same night and was never found, which has left local authorities baffled.”

This is why now. This is why he’s left a note and he’s back, because first the criminal profiler on the news yesterday stirred the whole thing back up—maybe said something that hit close to home although who knows what that would be, it’s all so generic—probably a white male, probably local, likely committed sexual crimes in the past. Useless information if you ask me.

And then, the next day, there is the first trace of actual evidence, and even if you can’t make out the person in the image, he knows it’s him, and maybe it could start to lead to something. Shit.

“Shit!” Clay hisses, echoing my thoughts. I see his clenched fists as he shakes his head at the ceiling, speechless. Then he pulls his coat on and hands me mine.

“Girls, stay inside. We’ll be right back.”

“What are you doing?”

“Come on,” he says, pulling on my sleeve and I follow him reluctantly, shouting “Clay! What?” behind him, all the way out to the back shed. I stand shivering in the doorway as he pulls boxes off a wooden shelf. He tosses an empty gas can out of his way and mumbles his frustrations under his breath the whole while. I know what he’s doing.

“I don’t want to touch it,” I say as he takes the handgun out of the lockbox. He knows this because I said I would take a few lessons and learn how to use it for his peace of mind when he started night shifts, and I did that, with protective gear and an instructor. I’m not shooting cans off tree stumps in the woods behind the house. That’s what this is, and it’s not happening.

“Did you even know where the key to the lockbox is?” he asks.

“Clay, I remember how to use it.”

“How do I know that? How would you even get it if something happened? You insist on it not being in the house, but that doesn’t work. Starting now, it’s staying in our room.”

“Clay,” I start to protest, but he’s right. I hate guns; I hated learning how to shoot it. This stranger who took so much from me that night forced me to learn to use it, and now I get to feel so unsafe I keep a loaded gun in my bedroom. He sees my resolve weaken as my eyes flit from the gun to him, imagining how I’ll ever sleep again with this in the house.

“We’ll still keep it in the lockbox. And I need you to refresh your lessons,” he says. I know he’s trying to do something in this moment to make him feel like he has some control, rather than punching walls and going down to the Trout to drink.

“Fine,” I say softly.

“Let’s make sure you remember how to…” he starts to say as he takes it out of the box.

“No! I’m not fucking shooting that thing out here. The girls are inside. Goddamn it! ” I scream which startles him. My voice shakes, my whole body trembles with cold, then the tears come and I start to panic again. He lays it down and wraps his arms around me and we just stand there in the silence—the distinct, eerie silence only the snow can create when it’s killed off every living, buzzing creature, and the night air rings in your ears.

“Okay,” he whispers, and I cry into his coat sleeve, thinking that if someone wants to kill me, I’m glad at least to have him by my side protecting me.

Inside, after I read the girls the whole Grumpy Monkey book twice and they’ve fallen asleep, I go into the bedroom and look inside the top drawer of the dresser where we decided the gun would stay. The key is taped to the top of the second drawer, and Clay has left for his night shift, so this should make me feel better, in theory. I have an alarm and a gun—two things you shouldn’t need living in rural Minnesota. It’s why we stayed when we found out about the twins. There was a long stretch of time when we thought kids wouldn’t happen, and we had begun making plans to start a new life in Milwaukee, but then we stayed because it’s so safe here. That’s what we said. That’s what we thought.

Maybe we should move. Maybe that’s the solution; except Pops and Juju’s grandparents are here. Their friends, our friends, our business. Can I let him terrorize me out of my whole life? Maybe.

I go into the dim kitchen. I’m keeping the lights low so people can’t see inside the windows, just in case. I pour a glass of Malbec and sit on the ottoman in front of the fireplace to warm my hands. After an hour of staring into the glowing embers and going down my mental list of every person in my entire life I’ve ever known, I still can’t think of who I might have wronged to bring this all about. Who hated me this much, and why? But I’ve lived a pretty simple life in an equally simple town, and I can’t come up with any names. I never do come up with anything but a splitting headache and an anxiety attack. So I ease into the old recliner next to the fire and open a copy of Wuthering Heights that Mort insisted I read because he was personally offended that I never had, and I top off my wine and cozy in, attempting to relax at least a little bit.

The story is, frankly, boring me to death, but I try to scribble down a few talking points so I don’t disappoint him and hopefully make it seem like I’d read the whole thing. By half past eleven, I’m about to click off the lamp and head to bed when I hear a flicker, a pop, and then all of the lights in the house go dark. My heart pounds and I immediately look for my phone to turn the flashlight on, but I can’t find it. And now that I think about it, I haven’t used it since I ran back into the Oleander’s to call Clay. Did I leave it there? Drop it?

I run down the dark hallway, fumbling and feeling for walls, to check on the girls. I don’t want to start freaking out and wake them up. They’re still asleep. I take the pink heart reading light clipped to Juju’s bedside table and click it on, making my way back down the hall to search my purse and coat pockets for my phone. It’s not there.

There’s no way to call for help and my car is at the Oleander’s. I’m…trapped. Oh my God. My heart is beating wildly, and a cold sweat climbs my spine. And then there is a tap at the front door and I freeze, paralyzed in fear as I stare toward the door with my mouth agape, holding nothing but a child’s reading light for protection. I clutch my heart in the darkness and choke down a sob as I scream “Who’s there!” into the silence. There is no answer.

I hear footsteps crunching over snow, and another tap-tap at the kitchen window, and I’m shaking so violently I drop the light I’m holding and crouch to the floor, covering my mouth with both hands and trying to breathe.

“Who’s there?” I say again, but it comes out as a whimper. There is a hard knock at the front door, but nobody answers. “Who’s there?” I bark again, my voice cracking. Then I run to the bedroom for the gun.