Ridgeline - Part Two: The Man on the Trail

Her hands moved first.

Before she registered the cargo shorts or the 5K t-shirt or the mask bunched under his chin — before any of that assembled into a man on a trail where no man should be — her fingers had already tightened on the stroller handle. Knuckles white. She felt them do it and didn't understand why.

Fifty yards. Forty. He walked toward her at that same drift, that unhurried non-pace, and the podcast was still playing in her ears — one of the women saying something about the husband's phone records — and Dana reached up and pulled out the right earbud. Just the right one. She kept the left in. She didn't think about why she kept the left in. Her attention was splitting without her choosing it — one ear on the gravel where a man was walking toward her with his hands in his pockets, one ear in the studio where two women discussed a murder in Minnesota — and she couldn't have said which was the real world and which was the one she was hiding in.

Thirty yards. His shoes were trail runners, gray, newer than his clothes. The 5K shirt had a logo she almost recognized — a hospital fun run, maybe, or a charity walk, the kind of shirt you get for showing up, not for finishing. His hair was brown and thinning and he hadn't cut it in a while. The mask was cloth, faded blue, the elastic stretched out on one side so it hung crooked under his jaw.

He didn't have a water bottle. No daypack. No earbuds. Nothing you bring on a trail if you planned to be on a trail. Just the cargo shorts with both hands in the pockets and the slow drift forward that didn't look like exercise or recreation or any of the reasons a person takes a walk.

She nodded. The reflex. You nod at people on trails. You say hey or afternoon or you raise two fingers from the handlebar and keep going, because this is the Piedmont and people are polite here, people acknowledge each other even when they shouldn't have to, and the nod was in her neck before she'd decided to give it.

He didn't nod back.

His eyes passed over her. Not through her — over, the way you look at a mailbox or a trail marker, something you register as part of the landscape and assign no particular meaning. The eyes were flat. Not hostile. Not anything. The absence of expression where expression should be, like a face that had been wearing the same look for so long it had stopped being a look and become the face itself.

Something in Dana's stomach dropped. A physical sensation — the elevator feeling, the one-inch free fall behind the navel — and it happened before she could name what caused it.

His right hand was in his pocket. The thumb was out, resting on the seam, and the thumb moved. A slow rub along the stitching. Back and forth. The hand doing something the face didn't seem to know about.

Twenty yards. Fifteen. Close enough now that she could smell him — not body odor, not anything sharp, but the stale-laundry smell of clothes that had been worn more than once without washing. The t-shirt had a crease across the chest where it had been folded and left somewhere.

The back of her neck was prickling. The fine hairs at her nape standing in a way that had nothing to do with the cooling air under the canopy. Her body was doing something her mind hadn't authorized and she recognized the feeling because she'd been living with it for three months — the animal underneath the person, the part of her that pulled the blinds aside when a car sat too long at the curb, the part that watched the man in the Walmart parking lot cough and calculated the distance in feet, the part that measured every stranger against an invisible threshold she couldn't define and was ashamed of.

I'm doing it again.

She knew this feeling. She'd been told about this feeling. Scott, on the phone from the distribution center in April, his voice patient in the way it got when he thought she was being unreasonable: Dana, you can't keep living like every person outside the apartment is a threat. Her mother, on the phone two weeks ago, the connection thin and echoey because her mother still used the landline: Honey, the isolation is getting to you. You're seeing danger in everything. You've always been this way a little bit. Remember when you used to cross the street when a man was walking behind you?

She remembered. She remembered crossing the street and hating herself for crossing the street and going home and lying in bed and thinking about the man on the sidewalk who was probably walking to the gas station for cigarettes and had no idea that a woman ahead of him had crossed the street because his footsteps were behind her and she'd been taught — by what, by who — that a man's footsteps behind you at dusk were a threat assessment, a probability calculation, a thing your body did to you that your brain had to correct because the math was almost always wrong and the cost of acting on it was becoming the kind of woman who crosses the street.

The kind of woman who pulls her earbuds out when she sees a man on a trail.

The kind of woman who tightens her hands on a stroller and scans for exits and adjusts her route because a stranger didn't nod back.

Ten yards. She could see the collar of the t-shirt now, yellowed, fraying. The mask under his chin. The thumb still working the pocket seam, back and forth, back and forth.

She thought of the Facebook post. The thirty-seven thumbs-up. The woman who'd written about the fresh air and the sawhorses and nobody around. The trail was a gift and she was ruining it the way she ruined everything lately — by letting the alarm system she couldn't control fill the air with its noise until the thing she'd come here to feel was drowned in it.

She put the earbud back in.

The podcast women were talking about the husband's alibi now. One of them laughed. The sound was bright and contained inside her head and the man on the trail was five feet away and she stepped to the right side of the gravel — six feet, maybe, close enough — giving him room, the stroller wheels crunching as she angled past, and she didn't look at him and she didn't speed up and she didn't slow down and the left side of her body — the side nearest him as they passed — registered the heat of another person for the first time in months. Not Scott's heat. A stranger's. The particular warmth that comes off a body you don't know and can't predict.

They passed.

She kept walking. Her legs wanted to go faster and she made them stay at the same pace because speeding up would mean something and she was not going to mean anything by this. He was a man on a trail. She was a woman on a trail. The sawhorses were down and the rules were broken and people went where they wanted now, even people without cars in the lot, even people who came from wherever he'd come from — the other side of the ridge, maybe, or the creek bed, or one of the houses in the subdivision below — and the math didn't have to work because the math never worked and she was doing it again, she was that woman, she was the woman on the phone with her mother who couldn't stop counting footsteps.

The sweat was cooling on the back of her neck now. Goosebumps rising on her arms in the shade. She told herself that's what the prickling was — the temperature drop under the canopy, the sweat drying, her body adjusting to the shift from sun to shade the way bodies do when they've been running and stop. A physiological event. Not a warning.

Bree made a sound. Not a cry — a short, sharp note, the startled bark she made when a door closed too hard or the dryer buzzed. Dana looked down. Bree's fists were clenched and her body had gone rigid in the harness and her eyes were open very wide and aimed at something behind the stroller that Dana could not see without turning around.

Dana did not turn around.

She adjusted Bree's harness strap — it didn't need adjusting — and kept her eyes forward and pushed. The trail unwound ahead of her. The red maples where the creek screened the bank, and the light had changed — the canopy that had been cathedral glass an hour ago was just canopy now, dense and close, the shadows running together under the trees so the trail looked narrower than it had on the way out. She could hear the creek below her, louder than before, or maybe just louder because the birds had thinned out with the falling light. The stretch where the gravel thinned to dirt and her footsteps went quiet and she could hear only the stroller's front axle and the podcast and her own breathing, which had gotten shallow somewhere in the last hundred yards without her noticing. She made herself breathe deeper. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way the YouTube prenatal instructor had taught her when contractions were fifteen minutes apart and the hospital was thirty minutes away and the breathing was the only thing she could control.

The gravel again. Crusher run under the wheels. The lot ahead — she could see the landscape timbers through the trees, the pale edge of the parking area, her Civic sitting where she'd left it. The sawhorses. Her shoulders dropped a half-inch. Her grip on the handle loosened and she could feel the blood come back into her fingers, the ache of it, and she thought about what was in the freezer for dinner and whether Scott would be late and the ordinariness of the thought was like stepping off a curb into warm water. She was fine. Nothing had happened. She'd passed a man on a trail and the man had kept walking and the alarm had been wrong, the way it was always wrong, and she was almost back to the car and tonight she'd put Bree down and take a shower and the hot water would undo whatever the last twenty minutes had knotted up inside her.

She still did not turn around.

The podcast played. She listened to it the way you listen to music in a dentist's chair — not for content but for the fact of sound, for the way it filled the canal between her ears and left no room for the other thing, the animal thing, the alarm that was ringing somewhere below her ribs in a register she'd trained herself to ignore because three months of quarantine had taught her that the alarm was the isolation talking — and underneath that, the older shame, the woman who crossed the street.

She pulled out both earbuds. The evening was louder than she expected — crickets starting up, a mockingbird cycling through its set in a tulip poplar to her right, the creek somewhere below and behind. The air had cooled. The shadows of the sawhorses stretched halfway across the lot and the light was amber going orange.

Behind her, on the gravel, footsteps.

Not the drift she'd heard before. Not the aimless pace of a man going nowhere. These were faster. The crunch of crusher run under shoes that were covering ground, closing distance, and the rhythm was wrong — not a jog, not a walk, the in-between stride of someone who has made a decision and is executing it.

He had doubled back.

She knew this the way she knew the gravel was under her feet — not through reasoning but through the body's instant triangulation of sound and distance and intent. The footsteps were forty yards behind her. Thirty-five. And they were getting faster.

The stroller handle was already in her fists. The Civic was sixty yards ahead. The earbuds hung against her chest, swinging, and the podcast women were still talking, tinny and small, their voices leaking into the air between Dana and the sound behind her that was not an alarm, not the isolation, not paranoia, not the thing her mother said she'd always done a little bit.

It was footsteps. They were faster than walking.

Go to the next part: https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/ridgeline-part-three-cut