Fall Back (6)

The dog two buildings over had a heart that ran fast and light, like a clock wound too tight.

She had been listening to it for an hour. She had not meant to. She had been sitting in the chair in front of the bookcase with her hands in her sleeves, listening to the lot for the car door, and the dog had turned over in its leaves and settled, and under the sound of its breathing there had been the other sound, small and quick and steady, and once she heard it she couldn't stop.

Her mouth was wet. She swallowed and it filled again.

She got up and went into the dark kitchen and ran the tap and drank out of her hands. The water was nothing. It went down cold and sat in her and did nothing at all. She stood at the sink with her wet hands on the edge of it and listened past the dog, and there were others now that she was listening. The couple in twelve, asleep, two hearts a little out of step. A baby in the end unit across the lot, very fast, and its mother's under it, slower.

She put her hands over her ears. It didn't help. It came in through the bones of her face.

She had not eaten since Saturday. That was all this was. She was sick, and she had not eaten, and her body was doing something to her because of what Graham had put in her, and if she could get out of this house and get somewhere with lights and people and a doctor who would take a blood sample and tell her what it was, it would stop.

Her keys were on the hook by the refrigerator. Her coat was in the closet. Her car was where it always was, under the lamp, twelve steps from her door. She had counted them a hundred times.

She went to the bookcase and took hold of it by the sides to walk it out of the way, the way she had walked it in, a corner at a time. It came up off the carpet in her hands. All of it, every book still in it, came up off the floor and she was holding it. She stood there holding it with her arms hardly bent. Then she set it down against the wall to the left of the door, carefully, so the books wouldn't slide.

She looked at her hands.

Then she put her coat on and took the chair from under the knob and turned the deadbolt and took off the chain and opened the door.

The cold came in. The lot was the lot. The lamps, the pears, the cars in their spaces, the security car at the office with nobody in it. The dark sedan by the entrance, nose in, the permit turning on its hook. She did not look at it. She went down her three steps with her keys already in her fist and the long one standing out between her fingers, and walked to her car, twelve steps, and opened it and got in and pulled the door shut and locked it.

She sat with the key in the ignition and did not turn it.

From here she could hear the sedan. Two spaces from the entrance, forty yards away through her own window and the cold and the other cars. Somebody was sitting in it. Somebody's heart was going in there, hard and uneven, a heart that had not slept in a while.

Her hand came off the key. She watched it do that. It went to the door handle and pulled it, and the dome light came on over her head, and her right foot went out and found the asphalt.

She was standing beside her car with the door open. She was facing the entrance. Her mouth had filled again, and she had taken one step toward the sedan and was taking another, and she did not remember deciding to.

She stopped. She put both hands on the roof of her car and held on to it.

Then she went back. She didn't close the car door. She went up her three steps and in, and shut the front door and turned the deadbolt with fingers that wouldn't go where she sent them. It went partway and caught, grinding against the edge of the strike plate, and she let go of it there. She stood with her back flat against the wood, breathing through her mouth in the dark.

She had not put the chain on. She had not moved the bookcase back. She stood there with her eyes shut and did not do either one.

His number was the first one she had ever learned by heart without trying. She had made herself forget it in August and found she couldn't.

She took the phone off the wall in the dark and dialed it.

She didn't know what she was going to say. Only that she would say it to him, and he would hear it, and maybe that was all he had ever wanted from her. Please. She didn't know what he'd given her but it was working, he had won, and would he please go home now. And she knew about Lyle. Lyle's mother was calling the office.

It rang in her ear.

And outside, a beat behind it, it rang on her step.

She knew that ring. It was the little folding phone. It had rung on her step all summer while he stood out there with the door pulled to behind him, and she had sat on her couch and waited for him to come back in smiling and put the phone face down on the counter.

It rang in her ear. It rang on the other side of the door, close, at the height of a hand.

Then it stopped, in both places at once.

Somebody had answered. She could hear the line open, the hiss of it. She could hear, through the door, the faint sound of her own breathing coming out of the little phone's earpiece on her step.

"Graham," she said. "Please."

Nothing came down the line. Nobody breathed into it. On the other side of the door something shifted its weight on her mat.

"Please go home."

The receiver in her hand went quiet. Out on the step the little phone made the sound it made when it folded shut.

She let go of the receiver. It fell and swung on its cord and knocked against the wall, once, twice.

The first kick came at the height of the lock. The door jumped in its frame, and the wood around the deadbolt made a sound like a knuckle cracking. She stood in the entry with her hands at her sides. It came again, and something split, and the door came in.

It swung all the way back and hit the bookcase she had set against the wall, and three books came off the top shelf and fell around her feet, and the white light from the bulb over her door came in across the floor.

A woman stood in the doorway.

She was about Graham's age, in a raincoat that was too light for October, with her hair flat on one side as if she had slept on it in a car. Joanna had never seen her in her life.

In one hand she held Graham's phone. It was folded shut, and the little window on its front was still lit green from the call, and Joanna knew it, knew the scratch across that window where he'd dropped it on her steps in July. The other hand was braced on the broken frame of the door. Around the ring finger of that hand, holding a wedding band in place, was a wad of white tape, wound thick and neat.

The woman was breathing hard from the kicking. She had come to say something. Joanna could see it in her face, all of it, ready.

She didn't say it.

Her eyes had gone to Joanna's mouth, and they stayed there.

~End~