Fall Back (4)

She woke on the couch with the afghan pulled up over her mouth and the sun lying across her legs.

It had come through the gap at the side of the front blind, one long bar of it, and where it lay across her shins it felt like a pan lifted off the stove and set down on her. She pulled her legs up under the afghan. The bar of light lay on the cushion where her legs had been. She watched it for a while. Then she put the back of her hand into it, to see, and took her hand out again and held it against her stomach under the afghan.

She was on the couch. She had gone up to bed. She remembered going up to bed, the stairs and the cold sheets and lying on her side facing the window, waiting, and nobody coming.

The last thing she was sure of was the car.

She had seen it from the bedroom with the slat held down under her finger. It was parked by the entrance under the pear trees, nose in, dark, and from upstairs she couldn't make out the color, but she could see the permit. It hung from the rearview mirror on a white plastic hook, and when the lamp at the mouth of the lot caught it, it went blue. It was the permit for the garage under his building downtown. She had ridden in that car with that permit swinging in front of her face, and she had once asked him why he left it hanging there when he only needed it at the gate, and he had said he liked to know where he was allowed to be.

Graham's car. In her lot, at half past twelve, with the engine off.

She had gone downstairs and called the office. She hadn't called 911. In August, after the key, she had called 911, and a patrolman had come and stood in her kitchen with his hat in his hand and written down that a man she used to see had let himself into her townhouse and sat on her couch and waited for her to get home from work. Then he had asked her if anything was missing. Then he had told her to change her locks. So last night she called the office, where the night man answered on the fourth ring with a television going behind him, and she told him there was a car in the lot that didn't belong there and a man who might be in it, and the night man said he'd walk over.

She remembered hanging up. She remembered standing at the sink waiting.

Then she had gone up to bed, and nobody came.

She got up. Her legs held. The front room was gray except for that one bar of sun, and she went around it the long way, by the bookcase.

The front door was unlocked.

She stood in the entry and looked at it. The chain hung loose. The deadbolt lever was turned up, open. She put her hand on the knob and turned it, and it turned all the way, and she let go of it as if it had moved on its own.

She had locked it. She locked it every night in the same order, knob and then bolt and then chain, and she had done it last night after she hung up the phone. She could feel herself doing it.

She turned the deadbolt. She put the chain on. She went to the kitchen and got a chair from the little table and wedged its back under the knob, the way she'd seen somebody do it in a movie, and pushed on it with her hip to make sure it held.

Then she went through the house.

The back slider was shut and the broom handle was in its track where she kept it. The coat closet held coats. Upstairs the covers were thrown back the way she had left them when she got up to look at the lot. The pillow still had the dent from earlier in the night. She had gone back up after the phone. She had lain there waiting. She put her hand flat on the sheet where she would have been, and it was cold all the way across.

Her purse was on the kitchen counter where she always left it. She took out the compact and opened it and stood at the counter with her back to the window and held the little mirror up to the side of her face.

Under her left ear there were two marks. They were close together, the width of a pencil apart, small and dark and crusted at the edges, and the skin around them was the yellow of an old bruise. She pressed one with her fingertip. It didn't hurt the way it should have. It hurt behind her eyes and down in the hinge of her jaw.

She had given blood at the drive at work in the spring. The nurse had taped a cotton ball in the crook of her arm and given her a cookie. That mark had looked like this. A needle, and somebody who didn't know how to use one.

She closed the compact and set it face down on the counter.

He had a key to the old lock. He'd had a key to the old lock and he'd sat on her couch in the dark, and when she came in and turned on the lamp he'd said he only wanted to talk, and he'd smiled at her the way a man smiles at a dog that has finally come to him. She had changed the locks. The man from the hardware store had come out and done the knob and put in the deadbolt and shown her the chain, and she had paid him in cash out of the envelope she kept in the freezer.

It hadn't been enough. He had got in, and he had done something to her while she slept, and then he had put her on the couch and gone out her front door and left it open behind him, so she would know.

She picked up the phone off the wall. She held it against her chest with both hands. Then she hung it up.

The patrolman would come and stand in her kitchen with his hat in his hand. He'd ask her if anything was missing.

The sun moved. By noon it was coming through the window over the sink, the one she had never once put the blind down on, and it lay across the counter and the compact and the floor in front of the refrigerator. She tried to cross the kitchen through it to get to the trash bags under the sink and had to stop with her arm over her face, and she crossed back out of it and stood against the far wall breathing through her mouth.

She got the bags another way. She went down on her knees and crawled under the edge of the counter where the light didn't reach, and opened the cabinet from below, and pulled the box out onto the floor.

She did the kitchen first. She tore the bags open along the seams and taped them over the glass with the packing tape from the drawer, two bags across and the edges doubled, until the window over the sink was black and the kitchen was a cave. Then the front room. Then upstairs. In the bedroom she held the slat down one last time before she covered it and looked out at the lot in the full daylight.

The car was gone.

The space by the entrance where it had been was empty, an oil stain and a scatter of the little hard pears from the trees. The security car sat in its place by the office. Everything was where it went. She taped the bag over the window.

The bed was wrong. It sat against the outside wall under the window, and the window was a black rectangle now, and she couldn't lie there with her back to it. She pulled the mattress off the frame and stood it on its edge and walked it down the hall a foot at a time to the linen closet, the only place upstairs with no outside wall and no window. She took the towels out and stacked them in the hall. She got the mattress through the closet door on the third try, folded down at one end where it met the shelves, and lay on it in the dark with the closet door shut and her knees up.

The phone rang downstairs. She lay still and counted. On the fourth ring the machine picked up and she heard her own voice telling whoever it was that she couldn't come to the phone. Then the tone.

"It's me." Her sister, from Columbus, in the voice she used on Sunday afternoons. "Just calling. Mama says you didn't call her. Call her. Okay. Bye."

The machine clicked and wound back.

She didn't go down. She lay in the closet and felt her own pulse going under her ear, against the folded towel she'd put there, slow and heavy, slower than it should have been.

When the light around the edges of the bags had gone from white to gray to nothing, she got up.

Her legs were steady on the stairs. In the kitchen the clock over the stove said six-forty and the clock on the cable box said five-forty, and she stood between them a while before she remembered that the clocks had gone back in the night. She left the stove clock the way it was.

She went up to the bedroom. Its window was taped black. She peeled one corner of the bag back from the glass, a hand's width, and looked out.

The lamps had come on. The pear trees stood at the mouth of the lot. The space by the entrance was still empty.

She held the corner of the bag back with one finger and watched the entrance, and every time headlights turned in off the road she watched them come up the lot until she could see the mirror and what hung from it. None of them were his. She stood there a long time.

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