Fall Back (2)

The kitchen was at the front of her unit, beside the door, and the blind over the sink had never once been down. He had watched her eat standing up at that sink. He had watched her wash one plate and one fork and set them in the rack and dry her hands on a towel she kept hooked through the handle of the refrigerator.

She came into the kitchen now in a long shirt and sweatpants, with her hair pulled back hard. She didn't turn on the overhead. The light came from the stairwell behind her, enough to show her shape and not her face. She went to the telephone on the wall by the refrigerator and lifted it off the hook and held it against her chest with both hands while she looked out the window over the sink.

She was looking at the lot. He had come out from under the pear trees, and he stood at the dark edge of the asphalt with his hands at his sides and let her.

She dialed. It was a short number. She stood with the receiver at her ear and the cord stretched across the front of her, and she talked without moving anything but her mouth. Once she put her free hand flat on the glass, low, by the faucet, the way he had laid his hand on her door. Then she took it away and wiped the print off with the side of her fist.

He couldn't hear her. Sound came to him from a long way off if he wanted it, but glass and brick and the furnace running under her floor made a wall of it, and he only caught the end of her voice going up at the close of a sentence. A question. Then a long stretch of listening. She nodded at whoever it was. She hung up and stood with her hand still on the receiver in its cradle, and then she stood at the sink with her arms folded and each hand holding the opposite elbow, and she didn't take her eyes off the lot.

She had called someone. She had looked out at the dark under the pears and the dark by the dumpsters, and she had picked up the phone to put somebody between herself and what was out there. Nobody had ever called anyone about him. They had never known there was anything to call about.

At the bottom of the horseshoe the door of the rental office opened.

The guard came out with a flashlight already on and pointed at the ground. The little television went on talking behind him to an empty room. He pulled the office door shut and tried it to make sure it had caught, and he set off across the lot on foot. He walked like a man whose feet hurt. A radio rode on his belt, and every so often it said something to itself and he paid it no mind.

He was a big young man, soft through the middle, in a navy nylon jacket with SECURITY across the back in letters that took the lamplight and threw it. A patch was sewn on one shoulder. His flashlight swung out ahead of him, and as he passed the dark sedan the beam went across its windshield the way it went across every windshield, and it lit the woman behind the wheel. Her hands were still on top of the wheel, one over the other, the white tape on the top hand. The beam rested on her for less than a second. She didn't lift her hands to her eyes. The guard didn't stop. The beam swung on to the next car.

She had called him. He was the one she called. He was coming across the lot with his flashlight and his sore feet, between her door and the trees, which was where she had sent him.

Between her building and the next there was a concrete walk with a strip of grass on either side, and halfway along it stood the dumpster enclosure, a three-sided box of painted block with a gate of wooden slats. From the walk the enclosure cut off every window on her end of the building. For the length of three steps, nobody in her unit could see who went by.

He went into the enclosure ahead of the guard and stood against the inside of the gate.

It smelled of wet cardboard and old fruit and the sweet rot that came up from under the dumpsters where nobody ever hosed. A cat had been in there. It wasn't in there now. He listened to the guard's shoes on the walk. A scuff and a step, a scuff and a step, the left foot dragging a little at the end of each stride, and the flashlight beam coming ahead of him along the concrete in a long yellow oval that jumped when he breathed.

The radio on the guard's belt said, "Four, base."

The guard didn't answer it. The shoes kept coming.

"Four, base. You copy?"

The beam reached the gate. The light came through the gaps between the slats in stripes and lay across his chest and across his face, and he didn't move, and the guard didn't look in. Nobody looked in. People walked past the enclosure every day of their lives and never once looked in, because it was where you put what you were done with.

He opened the gate.

Afterward he stood in the enclosure with the jacket in his hands.

It was warm on the inside. It was heavier than it looked, because the pockets were full: a pack of gum, a ring of keys, a folded paper that crackled, a pen with a chewed cap. He took everything out of the pockets and set it on the lid of the near dumpster in a row, and then he put the pen back in, because a man with a clipboard would carry one.

He put the jacket on. The shoulders sat out past his own. The sleeves came down over his knuckles and he turned the cuffs back once and they still came to the middle of his hand. He pulled the zipper up to his breastbone and stopped there, the way the guard had worn it, open at the throat.

The radio lay in the leaves by the drain in the corner. "Four, base. What's your twenty?"

The flashlight had rolled against the block wall and was still on, pointing at nothing. He picked it up and switched it off and switched it on again. It was a good flashlight, long and heavy, with a rubber grip that someone had wrapped in black tape for a better hold. He held it the way the guard had held it, low, pointed down.

"Four. Base. Pick up your radio."

The voice was a woman's, tired, eating something. She sat in a room somewhere in the city with a board of lights in front of her, and one of the lights was this one, and she had been calling into it for four minutes. She would call into it a while longer. Then she would write something down and call somebody else.

He left the radio where it was. He came out through the gate and latched it behind him and stood on the walk.

He was a guard now, in a jacket that said SECURITY. He put his own hand on his chest, on the cold nylon, and held it there and felt nothing underneath it, and he took his hand down.

He didn't go straight to her door. The guard wouldn't have. He walked out to the end of the walk where it met the lot and stood under the last lamp, in the open, in the light, with the flashlight pointed at the ground, so that anyone looking out of her window would see the jacket and the letters on the back and the beam on the asphalt. He turned so the letters faced her. He shone the beam along the row of parked cars, slowly, as the guard had done every forty minutes for eleven nights. He knew exactly how it was done.

The beam crossed the dark sedan. The woman behind the wheel had turned her head. She was looking at him now, at the jacket, at the letters on it. Her mouth was open a little. Then she looked away, back out through her windshield, and he moved the beam along to the next car and let her go.

He had stood under her pear trees for eleven nights and she had never let herself look at him once. Now she was going to watch him walk straight up to her door in the light. She would see him come, and she would take the chain off for him. She had called for him.

In the kitchen window the shape at the sink had not moved. The arms were still folded, each hand on the other elbow. When his beam came across the front of her building it found the glass and slid off it, and he saw her lean an inch closer to the window, and then he saw her lift one hand and lay it flat on the glass again, as though she could stop him with it, or wave him on.

He crossed the lot. He took his time. He let the flashlight swing at his side, and he let his left foot drag a little at the end of each step. The bulb over her door was the bright one, the new white one, and it showed him everything. The welcome mat. The three steps up. The brass knocker nobody ever used. The knob with the scratched collar of the lock she'd had changed.

Inside, the kitchen light came on. It came on all at once, the overhead, every corner of the room white, and he heard her feet on the linoleum, quick, coming to the door.

He went up the three steps and stood on her mat with the light on him and lifted the guard's flashlight and turned it around in his hand, so the heavy end was toward the wood.

On the other side of the door the deadbolt went back. Then the knob turned, and the chain slid in its track, and stopped.

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