Before the Ridgeline - Part Two: "The Lot"

The strip mall was on the west side of town, off a road Carla didn't know the name of. A dollar store with a CLOSED sign taped inside the glass. A nail salon, dark. The lot wrapped around the back where the dumpsters sat and the pavement cracked along the curb and a strip of brush grew between the lot and the drainage ditch behind it. Carla had found it two days ago — the rotation running out of options, the spots that worked narrowing to the spots that hadn't kicked her out yet.

She parked near the dumpster, backed in, the way she always parked. Mid-morning. The lot was empty — the emptiness of a place that had been emptied rather than a place that was naturally empty.

Honey needed out. The dog had been in the car since the night before and was circling in the backseat, turning and turning between the car seat and the door, the whine coming through the nose.

Carla opened the back door. Honey jumped out and moved fast — the grass strip, the dumpster, the brush line. The dog squatted and then sniffed along the base of the dumpster and then moved to the edge of the brush where the scrub met the drainage ditch. Twenty feet from the car. The dog's nose down, working the ground.

Shay was in the backseat. Half-asleep, the blanket from the apartment around her shoulders, her shoes on the floorboard. Carla was in the driver's seat with the door open and her feet on the pavement. She drank water from a bottle and watched the dog at the lot's edge and the lot was empty and the morning was warm and for a few minutes the only sound was Honey moving through the brush.

The man appeared at the far end of the lot. Not from a car — no door closing, no engine. From the sidewalk, or from behind the building, or from the direction of the road, Carla couldn't tell. Walking. The gait steady, unhurried, a person who had been walking without a destination and had arrived at this lot the way you arrive at the end of a sentence you started without knowing where it was going.

Carla saw him and her hand set the water bottle on the console. The right hand moved to the keys in the ignition. The left hand went to the door frame. She didn't decide to make the movements. The body made them — the body had been making them for months, in lots and gas stations and sidewalks where someone walked too close. Keys accessible. Door ready to close. Engine one turn away.

The man was walking toward the car. Not toward the dumpster, not toward the stores, not along a path that happened to pass near the car. Toward the car. A straight line. None of the things a person does when approaching a stranger's space — the slowing, the angling, the small adjustments that say I see you and I'm not a threat. This approach had none of that. The line was straight and the speed was steady and the body was aimed.

Carla's fingers found the key and turned it one click. Not the engine — the accessory position. The dashboard lit. The car was one turn from running.

Forty feet. Thirty.

The face. She could see it now. The face was doing something she'd seen before — not on this man, not in this lot, but on other faces in other lots, faces that belonged to men who had stopped maintaining the face for the people around them. The expression wasn't an expression. It was what was underneath an expression — the features present and arranged the way features are arranged on a person who is sleeping or a person who has stopped caring what the arrangement communicates. The eyes were on the car. Not on Carla. On the car itself, the way a person looks at a thing they're walking toward rather than a person they're approaching.

Twenty feet. His right hand was at his side. The thumb working the seam of his pocket — slow, repetitive, the thumb rubbing back and forth along the fabric as though the hand were doing something the rest of the body didn't know about. The motion was small and continuous and Carla watched it because her body told her to watch it, the way her body had told her to put her hand on the keys, the way her body was telling her to close the door.

He didn't speak. Fifteen feet from the car and not a word. No hey. No you need help? No you can't park here. A person approaching another person says something — a sound that says the approaching has a reason. The silence was the absence of the reason.

Ten feet.

Carla turned the key. The engine started.

Honey was between the man and the car.

The dog had been moving back from the brush line, heading toward Carla the way the dog headed toward Carla whenever the dog was finished at the lot's edge — the return route, nose up now, the body oriented toward the car where Shay was. The dog's path crossed the man's approach. The dog was in the space between the man and the open back door — the door Carla had opened to let the dog out, the door that was still open, the door that was five feet from the man.

The man's hand extended. Toward the dog. Not fast. The gesture of a person moving something out of the way — casual, the hand reaching for the dog's head the way you reach for a branch across a path. The hand coming down without hurry, without acknowledgment that the thing it was reaching for was alive.

The dog's body contracted. The shoulders bunched. The weight shifted backward. The hindquarters dropped an inch and the head pulled down and the entire body compressed into itself — every joint bending inward, every muscle shortening, the body becoming smaller against the hand that was coming down. The dog had never done this before. Not in the apartment, not in the car, not in any of the lots where Carla parked. This was new. This was the body learning a new gesture in real time — the gesture of compressing against a wrong approach — and the body learned it in less than a second and the learning was complete and the gesture would not go away.

The dog bolted. Out of the compression and into motion — not toward the car, not toward Carla, but away, into the brush at the lot's edge, the crashing of sixty pounds through scrub and branches, the sound loud and then quieter and then gone. The brush closed behind the dog the way water closes over a thing that has dropped through its surface.

The man was at the open back door. The door where Shay was. Carla's left hand grabbed the inside handle and pulled and the door swung toward the man and the man stepped back — one step, the first movement he'd made that wasn't forward — and the door closed. Carla's foot found the gas. From the backseat: "Mama?" The word small and exact, the word of a child who had woken into something and the something had no name but the child could hear it in the engine and the tires and the way the car was moving, the acceleration that was not the normal acceleration.

Carla drove out of the lot. In the mirror, the man was standing in the space the car had occupied. He wasn't looking at the car. He was looking at the ground where the car had been, the way a person looks at a place where something was and isn't. He didn't move. He didn't follow. He stood there and then the lot turned behind the building and he was gone.

The dog was in the brush. The car was on the road. Between them: the distance opening like a cut.

She circled back in ten minutes. The lot was empty. The man was gone — no figure at the far end, no shape on the sidewalk, no one. Carla parked where she'd been parked before. The pavement still warm from the engine. She got out and stood in the lot and the quiet was the sound of no one.

"Honey!" Her voice crossing the lot. "Honey!" The name hitting the strip mall's back wall and coming back without the dog. She walked to the brush line. The scrub was broken where the dog had gone through — branches snapped, the weeds flattened in a path that led into the ditch and then up the other side and then into the trees behind the drainage easement. She called the name into the trees. The trees held the name for a moment and then let it go.

Shay's face in the backseat window. The glass between the face and the lot. The eyes scanning — left, right, left — the way Carla's eyes were scanning, the same search in a smaller face, the same result.

She drove the blocks around the strip mall. Slow, the car at walking speed, the window down. Shay's face at the window the entire time. Residential streets — chain-link fences, trucks in driveways, the lockdown quiet over everything. No brindle shape in the yards. No brindle shape on the sidewalks. A woman on a porch looked at the slow car and looked away.

The next morning. The lot again. Early, before the light was fully up. Carla walked the perimeter — the dumpster, the brush, the drainage ditch, the trees. She called the name until her voice thinned. She stood at the edge of the brush where the broken branches were already springing back and the path the dog had made was closing.

The day after. The lot. The calling. The brush line showed nothing — the broken branches had sprung back, the weeds had straightened, the path the dog had made was gone as though nothing had ever passed through. The name going out and the quiet coming back and the quiet getting louder each time because the quiet was the answer and the answer was not going to change.

The gas gauge. The needle below a quarter. The driving cost gas and the gas cost money and the money didn't exist because the church was closed and the temp agency number rang and rang and everything that might have helped was closed the way everything was closed. She couldn't look for the dog and feed her daughter with the same tank.

"Where's Honey?"

Shay's voice from the backseat. Not the first time. The fifth, the eighth, the tenth — the question arriving at intervals that shortened the way contractions shorten, the space between each asking compressing until the asking was almost continuous, a rhythm, the girl's version of calling the name into the lot. Shay was asking because asking was the only thing Shay could do. Shay was asking because the last time something was gone and Shay asked, the something came back — a toy, a shoe, a blanket. The asking had always worked. The asking was the tool. The tool was not working and Shay kept using it because Shay was four and four-year-olds don't have another tool.

"We're going to find him, baby."

Carla's voice. Flat. The delivery of a woman who had said things she didn't believe before — to landlords, to case workers, to the boyfriend's voicemail — and the saying was a skill and the skill was a scar and the scar was the thing that let her say the sentence without it breaking in her mouth. The sentence was a lie and the lie was the last thing she had to give her daughter and she gave it the way she'd given the puppy — because Shay's face required it and the requiring overrode everything.

She pulled out of the lot. The lot emptied behind them. Through the back window, if anyone had been watching: the strip of broken brush slowly closing, the branches springing back, the path the dog had made through the scrub filling in with new growth that wouldn't remember the shape that had passed through it.

The name stayed in the air for as long as the air could hold it. Then the air let it go. The lot was quiet. Somewhere east, in a drainage ditch the car couldn't reach, a brindle dog was lying in the mud with its ears flat and its body pressed against the ground.

The car turned left on the road Carla didn't know the name of. Shay was in the backseat without the dog. The backseat was fifty-three inches wide and Shay was thirty-eight inches tall and the rest of the seat was empty and the empty was a shape Shay's hand reached for in the night and didn't find and reached for again and the reaching continued for weeks, the hand moving in sleep toward a warmth that was supposed to be there, the hand finding air, the hand pulling back.

April went on without them. It went on without the dog too.

Final Part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/ridgeline-part-three-sound