Points of Departure (21 page)

On Wednesday night, she watched the late-night news on television and drank a nightcap. Lately, she had been bothered by small sounds at night: the floors creaked as if someone were walking softly in the hallway; she heard rustling, as if cloth were shifting in the wind. Once she thought she heard someone tapping at the window, but it was only a tree branch tapping against the glass. She was constantly
on edge, plagued with the same sort of anxiety she had felt when Andrea was very small. As she lay in bed at night, she listened, though she did not know what she was expecting to hear.

But she did nothing except turn on the television to drown out the silence. She could think of nothing to do. Mentioning her anxiety to Andrea would only worry her daughter and make her think that her mother was
getting old and foolish. There was no use doing that.

Mrs. Jenkins became seriously alarmed on Thursday morning, when she found evidence that someone had made a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich during the night. On the kitchen counter she found an open jar of peanut butter, an open jar of strawberry preserves, a knife liberally coated with peanut butter and jelly, and a scattering of bread crumbs.
She blinked at the mess in the morning light. Could she have fixed herself a midnight snack and forgotten? But even at midnight she wouldn’t have been so sloppy.

She put away the peanut butter and jelly and wiped the counter clean, but she glanced uneasily over her shoulder as she left the kitchen.

At work that day she was distracted. She read aloud to the kindergarteners, as she did each Thursday
morning—a weekly treat for the children and a welcome break for the teachers. Her selection was a fairy tale about a princess who was kind to a frog who later turned out to be a prince. But she was distracted and her words lacked their usual conviction.

Later that morning, she spilled a cup of coffee on her desk, and while she was mopping it up with paper towels from the bathroom, she snagged
her nylons on an open desk drawer. By noon, her head was aching and she snapped at two fourth grade girls who were loudly arguing about whether a stegosaurus could beat a brontosaurus in a fight. She told the kids that both dinosaurs were vegetarians and would not fight in the first place.

“Something wrong?” asked Annie Clark, the college student who helped in the library on a part-time basis.

“Just a headache,” Mrs. Jenkins murmured. “I haven’t been feeling well lately.”

Annie insisted that Mrs. Jenkins take two aspirins. For the rest of the afternoon, Annie hushed the children whenever they started to get noisy.

At three o’clock, half an hour before school let out, Mrs. Jenkins sat at her desk and checked in the magazines that had arrived that week, tucking each one into a plastic
cover and stamping it
PROPERTY OF PUTNAM AVENUE SCHOOL.
It was a simple mindless task that kept her from thinking too much about the strange occurrences at her apartment. She hesitated with a science fiction magazine in hand and inspected the cover. The picture showed a spaceship descending in the night sky over a city. The spacecraft was fire-engine red, sleekly streamlined, and equipped with
sweeping tail fins. It left a trail of blue-white light across the glossy black sky. Mrs. Jenkins stared at it for a moment, remembering the falling star and thinking about aliens who lived in the sewers and crept in through the plumbing. It would have to be a very small alien, she thought, to fit through a drainpipe.

“Are you feeling all right, Mrs. Jenkins?” asked Annie with concern.

Mrs.
Jenkins jerked her eyes away from the picture guiltily, startled by Annie’s question. She had not heard the younger woman approach. “I’m fine,” Mrs. Jenkins said defensively. “Just fine.”

Annie shrugged, smiling at the older woman. “It’s just that there’s a nasty flu going around. You’d better take care of yourself.”

Mrs. Jenkins nodded testily. “I take care of myself,” she muttered, and continued
her work, avoiding Annie’s eyes.

That evening, as she rode the bus home from work, she felt uneasy. She walked very slowly from the bus stop, delaying the moment that she had to enter her house. She checked the mail: a letter from Andrea and a junk mail advertisement addressed to someone named Beth Bettbett. She took both letters upstairs.

The dead bolt offered a reassuring resistance when
she turned her key in the lock of the front door. The lock was secure—no one could get in and surely she had nothing to worry about. Quietly, she closed the front door behind her and prowled through the apartment, searching for signs of an intruder.

The apartment was laid out in a linear fashion, with room following room like the boxcars on a train. All the rooms—her bedroom, the bathroom, the
living room, the kitchen, and Andrea’s old bedroom—led off a single badly lit hallway that ran the length of the flat. A door near the end of the hallway let onto the backstairs, which led down to the garbage cans and a tiny weed-choked back patio.

Just beyond the back door was Andrea’s old room—an afterthought, a tiny cozy room that was just large enough for a twin bed, a chest of drawers, and
a small writing desk.

Mrs. Jenkins’s bedroom was just as she had left it: warm, cozy, reassuring. The kitchen was clean: no crumbs, no mess. Outside the kitchen window, a sparrow perched on the branch of an ancient pine that grew in the adjacent yard. The sky was the pale soft gray of goose down. It was February and the brief California winter was giving way to spring. For a moment, in the midst
of her nervousness, Mrs. Jenkins felt something different stirring: a sense of anticipation and welcome. She had always loved spring, and the monotony of rainy winter days had left her eager for the sun.

She dropped the letters on the kitchen counter and went to check the back door. The deadbolt was in place and the door was secure. But when she glanced toward the back room, Andrea’s bedroom,
her nervousness returned.

It was silly, of course. Foolish to think that anyone might be hiding back there. She listened at the door. No sound came from within. She laid her hand on the knob, hesitated, then jerked the door open suddenly.

The room was filled with silence, dust, and Andrea’s cast-off possessions. On the shelves were high-school yearbooks, a collection of Nancy Drew mysteries,
and a few old picture books. In the closet hung Andrea’s prom dress and an old ski jacket—out of style but too good to discard. On the desk was a transistor radio with a broken tuning knob. Andrea’s ancient security blanket, a worn piece of flannel with a faded print of red roses on blue, lay folded neatly at the foot of the bed. On top of the blanket, looking as if they belonged here, were the rhinestone
brooch, the rounded green glass; and the lost kerchief.

Mrs. Jenkins snatched up her possessions. She felt like an intruder, but she had always felt a little out of place in Andrea’s room. She forced herself to look around, examining the faded rock groups that smiled from posters on the walls. The air held a faint scent that she could not identify: vanilla, perhaps, or cinnamon. The door to the
closet was ajar. When she glanced into the darkness, she thought she saw movement behind the prom dress. She waited, listening for a sound. When she heard nothing, she backed out of the room and closed the door firmly behind her.

For dinner, she made herself a small salad and reheated part of a casserole she had made earlier in the week. Over the meal, she read Andrea’s letter, a cheerful note
that talked about her work in a New York advertising agency and about the miserable weather in New York. As always, Andrea sounded quite cheerful, practical, and very, very distant.

For dessert, Mrs. Jenkins had chocolate ice cream. It had been a difficult week and she felt she deserved a reward. She left her daughter’s letter on the kitchen counter with the unopened advertisement, poured herself
a nightcap, and sat down in the living room to watch the late-night movie.

She went to bed late and dreamed that she heard a baby crying. In the dream, she wandered through her apartment, searching for the source of the sound, but could not find it. She was alone in her apartment with the constant cry of an unhappy child.

She woke feeling confused, disoriented. She showered, wrapped herself
in her robe, and wandered into the kitchen. The shaft of morning light spotlighted the ice cream carton. It lay on its side in a pool of melted ice cream, as dark and thick as blood in the morning sun.

Mrs. Jenkins reached for the junk mail advertisement with a hand that trembled.

The letter had been torn open, as if by eager fingers. Brightly colored brochures spilled from the envelope. Mrs.
Jenkins pulled one out at random. For $9.95, the brochure said, she could have a picture book personalized for her child. The picture on the brochure showed a little girl wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed her name to be Sue. Sue was reading a picture book titled My Secret Friend and the little girl in the book was named Sue. In the space on the order form marked “Your child’s name here:” someone
had scrawled
BETH
.”

Outside the kitchen window the sky was blue and the sun was shining, but Mrs. Jenkins could not stop shivering. Her hair, still wet from the shower, dripped down the collar of her robe to send a cold trickle down her back. Moving quickly, she swept the advertisements off the counter and threw them away. She wiped up the melted ice cream and put the carton in the trash. Then
she fled the kitchen, dressing quickly and hurrying to work.

On the bus to work, she eyed a disheveled old woman who wore three sweaters over her flowered dress. The shopping bag at the woman’s feet was stuffed with clothing and the woman was talking loudly to the disinterested businessman who sat beside her, trapped in his seat by the crowd on the bus. The woman was telling him about the aliens
who came to her apartment and stole her things. They came at night, she told him; they came out when everyone was asleep and nobody noticed but her.

Mrs. Jenkins watched, wondering if this woman had started by forgetting things, misplacing things, until at last she no longer remembered where she was or what she was doing.

The last time that Andrea had been out to visit, she had asked Mrs. Jenkins
if she were still comfortable living alone. A simple question, an innocent question, but suddenly Mrs. Jenkins was worried about its implications: rest homes, senior citizens’ clubs, places for women who could not take care of themselves.

Mrs. Jenkins was very glad when the bus reached her stop.

At work, she could not concentrate. She felt a little sick to her stomach, a little dizzy and disoriented.
At noon, she told Annie Clark that she had a touch of the flu, and she went home early.

With the afternoon sunlight streaming in the windows, her apartment seemed cheerful and homey. Sunshine cast a glowing rectangle on her bedroom carpet. The bathroom and living room were just as she had left them.

She stopped in the door to the kitchen. Her stomach tightened. On the counter lay the advertisement
that she had thrown away. She knew for certain that she had thrown it away—on one corner of the brochure was a smear of chocolate from the ice cream carton in the trash.

Beside the brochure, a stuffed toy watched her with bright blue glass eyes. She picked it up and smoothed back its soft fur with a hand that trembled. It was a sweet little toy, a plump white kitten with white plush fur. She
remembered buying it for Andrea’s ninth birthday. She had known, even as she took the kitten from the shelf in the toy store, that the stuffed toy was too babyish for Andrea, too cute, too sweet. But Mrs. Jenkins was drawn to it, and she bought it at the same time that she bought the chemistry set that Andrea really wanted.

Andrea had opened the chemistry set with cries of delight. The kitten
she accepted politely and set on her bookshelf where it had grown dusty over the years. Mrs. Jenkins had never once seen Andrea take the kitten from the shelf and stroke its fur.

Mrs. Jenkins stood in the kitchen and held the stuffed toy in her hand. The chill that had touched her spine did not go away. She placed the toy on the counter and she backed from the room.

She had never noticed before
how badly lit the hallway was. No windows here, and only a little light filtered in through the open kitchen door. She tiptoed down the hall until she stood outside the door to Andrea’s room. Through the door she could hear the faint sound of a transistor radio playing a scratchy rendition of a rock-and-roll tune.

She put her hand on the cold metal doorknob, listening intently. Her stomach ached
and she was angry. Finding the kitten made her feel sad and lonely and somehow the sadness and loneliness had become an anger that centered somewhere in her stomach.

“Listen,” she said softly. Then more loudly, as if she were scolding a room filled with boisterous children, “Listen to me!” She could hear a hysterical edge in her voice, but could not control it. “You’d better get out of here,
you hear me?” She listened for a moment. Over the staticy music she thought she heard something else: a small sigh as if someone on the other side of the door had let out a breath.

“I don’t know who you are or how you got in here, but I’m telling you that I’m putting a lock on this door,” she said. “A good strong lock that opens only from the outside. So you’d better get out of here while you
can.” She rattled the doorknob and the radio abruptly fell silent. “You’d better get out of here.”

She fled the apartment. When she returned, an hour later, she carried a hammer, holding it in her hand like a club. Tucked under her arm was a brown paper bag from the hardware store.

The hallway was quiet, a brooding stillness. Mrs. Jenkins went directly to Andrea’s door. There too the hallway
was quiet: no radio, no muffled breathing.

The lock was a simple sturdy mechanism. A steel rod about half an inch thick slid into two metal rings that attached to the door and two metal rings that attached to the doorframe. The young man at the hardware store had assured Mrs. Jenkins that the lock would make any door quite secure.

Dust motes danced in the stream of afternoon light that shone
through the kitchen door. Mrs. Jenkins waited, listening. Only silence.