Watch You Die (18 page)

“Wow,” Stan said. “That guy went seriously postal.”

“Thank you for what you did.”

“Anytime, babe.” He winked, igniting a fan of wrinkles beside one eye.

I laughed at that; Stan was a fine writer, a respectful colleague. You just never knew what an emergency would draw out of a person: hero or damsel in distress.

“If we were cartoons, I’d squeeze your arm muscle,” I said.

Now he laughed, and that was good, because neither of us really knew what to say. I wasn’t sure what the protocol was. Did I announce that I’d had an in-house stalker or was that pretty much like telling a co-worker you had a venereal disease?
Too much information
.

I didn’t realize until the crowd dispersed that Elliot had been among them. He joined me and Stan, asking questions, and we both reverted to reporters serving up information to our editor as objectively as possible. I spoke of Stan’s heroism, he of my having been attacked. Elliot listened attentively, nodding as we took turns speaking. Outside in the natural light Elliot looked older, his skin more papery. Though still early in the day, a shadow of whiskers had started to form on his jawline.

“I think I’ll go get a new lunch,” I said. “It’s still wrapped but it’s been on the ground.”

“I’ll go with you,” Stan offered.

“Darcy,” Elliot said. “Go home.”

“I’ve got a lot of work.”

“Do it at home.”

He was right. I couldn’t just go back to work as if nothing had happened. I didn’t know if Joe would be held or released – and as soon as I thought of Nat
I
realized I’d feel safer meeting him when school let out.

I explained about my laptop. Elliot and Stan both accompanied me to Security where I filled out two sets of paperwork: the first, a theft report which allowed me to receive a replacement laptop; the second, an incident report which would be filed both on site and with the Midtown precinct.

“He’ll be fired,” Elliot promised.

“Funny how things happen,” I said. “I’ll actually feel safer at work now.”

“Stan? Walk Darcy to the subway.”

“My pleasure.”

And so I gathered what I needed from my desk, remembering to take the stalking log I’d started from the top drawer. I filled in the new
event
while the backup of my hard disk transferred onto the new laptop. At the last minute I remembered to change my email password so that new messages would not be intercepted by my old laptop – and Joe. Then Stan walked me to the Sixth Avenue entrance of the F train. As we walked, he told me all about his twins, a boy and a girl, and how they were already developing differently.

“The nature/nurture thing takes on a whole new light when you have kids.” He angled past a Dumpster protruding partway onto the sidewalk,
a
gesture that steered me away from a sharp corner he seemed to worry I hadn’t seen.

“My husband used to say that, after we had Nat.”

“I heard about your husband. I’m really sorry. It must be hard being a single mom.”

“Not that hard.” But tears formed in my eyes anyway, mostly because an image of Hugo cradling naked baby Nat had lodged in my mind. “He was born
whole
, Darcy,” Hugo had said. Hugo: half-naked himself, his hair-flecked chest above the early bulge of a middle-aged paunch. “I never really got that about babies. They’re born
who they are
.” And then he gently kissed his son’s face thirty-six times (I counted), saying, “A kiss for every inch,” though there weren’t that many inches on a baby’s face.

I took the subway straight to Park Slope where I was forty-five minutes early to meet Nat. It was especially important to be on time since he wasn’t expecting me. I bought a sandwich and a cup of coffee, parked myself on a stoop across from the school’s entrance and called Jess.

“OK,” he said, after I explained what had happened, “I’ll make a call and find out where he is in the process, if they’re holding him, all that. But my guess is they won’t. He didn’t actually touch you. And I talked to the police in Martha’s Vineyard – they knew him, but they’ve got nothing on him, no restraining orders, no mental history, just some notes
about
complaints, all verbal. That makes it harder for you now. They’ll probably give him a warning and let him go, but you should file an incident report as soon as you can.”

“It’s been done.”

“Good.”

“It was terrifying, the way he came at me.”

“Sure it was.”

“If I had filed a restraining order with the police, would he be arrested now?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t mean they could hold him very long. You didn’t like how angry you saw him? Picture that times ten. I still say it’s best not to get an RO just yet. This guy, he’s on our radar. We’re watching him.”

“Now what?”

“Keep safe. Be careful. Stick to routines. Go out, so long as you’re around people. Keep your doors and windows locked. Everything I told you this morning.”

“OK.”

“Meantime let me get on the phone and find out where our guy is. I’ll let you know.”

Next I called Courtney, gave her the quick version of what had happened since she was in the middle of a lunch meeting, and told her I was working from home the rest of the day but would be in the office tomorrow.

Nat emerged just past three in a gawky crowd of eighth-graders whose bubble of noise moved with them until they reached the sidewalk and dispersed. The kids were so tall, I was lost among them, and Nat passed me right by, walking toward the corner with his friend Henry.

“Nat!”

He looked back and saw me. “Whoa! Mom! What’s up?” Henry peeled away, joined up with another boy and turned onto Fifth Avenue.

“I had some business nearby,” I said, “and thought I’d meet you.”

“Business? Like an interview or something?”

“Research.”

“In Park Slope?”

How did my child know to doubt me? Was I that bad at lying? Just as I was about to add lie to lie, Rich passed beside us.

“Hi, Mr Stuart.”

“Hi, Nat. Hi, Nat’s mom.”

“Hi, Nat’s teacher.”

“Well, nice to see you.” He smiled, glanced from me to Nat to me, and kept walking. As the distance between us grew, my eyes stayed on him: his paint-speckled jeans and orange shirt with the sleeves rolled just below his elbows, his moss-green suede sneakers, his thick brown hair cross-hatched after a day teaching art, the notches where back
became
neck and which I’d kissed just two nights ago, the skin I’d kissed and smelled and tasted. I had never noticed how graceful his body was in clothes.

“Earth to Mom. You like him. Admit it.”

“That obvious?”

“Totally.”

“I guess I do.”

“So why don’t you go out with him?”

“I did. Over the weekend.” Sharing this with Nat seemed fair. And I couldn’t bring myself to tell him two outright lies in a row.

“So, like, are you stalking him?”

“That’s not funny.”

“I get it.” My son looked at me and said: “You’re scared.
That’s
why you’re here.”

I forced a smile. I couldn’t let Nat share my fear. “Oh, sweetie, that’s silly.”

“You sure, Mom? Because you can tell me.”

And I wanted to! In ten or fifteen years, I would. But he was still a child and my job was to protect him which included shielding him from worry.

“Positive. I just wanted to see you. Isn’t that enough reason to show up?”

He smiled and nodded, his bushy hair bobbing around his beautiful face. “Totally.”

We took the bus home together and after a snack he started homework. I lay on my bed with the new
laptop
, which wasn’t exactly new and was identical to the other one except for a sticker of a blue Smurf on the lower corner of the frame. Checked email. Along with a new batch of junk from the usual unending flow, two caught my eye: one from myself – from my account; from Joe? – sent before he tried to attack me on the sidewalk, and the other from the Martha’s Vineyard police with the subject line
Fingerprints Nat Mayhew
. I opened the one from myself first.

Bitch

it read, dead center, in a pretty font. Without thinking, I deleted it, sending it straight to the garbage can. Then I remembered the file Courtney had created on the other laptop, where I had gathered most of Joe’s other crazy emails. I created another such file here, labeled it unapologetically
Joe Coffin Go to Hell
and dragged the new email into it. Dropping my head on my pillow, I stared up at a crack on the ceiling, following its ragged journey from the corner toward the center of the room. Thinking.

Joe would have seen that file. He would have read all the emails sitting in my inbox between me and Sara – how we’d discussed him, analyzed him, investigated him, belittled him. He would have all
my
work-related emails. Would he think to look into my Word files – my notes and reminders, where I detailed everything?

Of course he would. He wouldn’t leave a single file unopened. He would see everything there was to see about me. All my thoughts and plans. Everything I had generated. Everything I had received.

I closed my eyes, banishing the crack, the ceiling, the house, the move, Hugo’s death, my mother’s Alzheimer’s –
banishing Joe
.

From across the hall I heard Nat shuffling to the bathroom. Flushing the toilet. Running water in the sink.

I opened my eyes and called to him, “Don’t forget to turn off the light.”

“Got it.”

Then shuffling back to his room. It was his
I hate homework
shuffle: lackadaisical, uninspired.

I opened the second email and thumbnails of Nat’s ten fingerprints appeared on the screen. Each print was a perfect asymmetry of lines so beautiful it could only be found in nature; it was the kind of perfection art tried to imitate but rarely could. Each was unique – and yet I’d read somewhere that fingerprints were not as reliable a forensics tool as some had long assumed. Fingerprint analysis could be wrong. Dental records were better. DNA was better still. I pulled Jess’s card out of my pocket to look up his
email
address, forwarded Nat’s prints and shut the file.

I clicked
send/receive
again and found that Courtney had just emailed me about her visit earlier in the day to Buildings: a success. The official lot sale documents did not match the copies Abe Starkman had given me.
Abe Starkman
– I had saved his contact information in my computer address book –
Joe now had his name
. Queasiness bubbled from my stomach into my throat, arriving in my mouth as an acrid taste of vomit. I swallowed it, reminding myself that Joe didn’t care about Abe Starkman or my work; he cared about
me
.

In the quiet of my bedroom, alone, thinking, I could hardly believe this was happening. That I was being stalked. I had heard about it on the news and read stories about women who had lived for years with stalkers in their shadows but I had never grasped the intractability of the situation. Stalked, like an animal; stalked for the kill. Why else would someone stalk you? In the hope that you’d cave in and love them? Absurd. Though I recalled once reading about a woman whose stalker had blinded her by throwing acid in her face when she opened her front door, served a long prison term, then come out and, yes, married her. If Joe blinded me, sentencing me to a life of darkness, would that make me lonely enough to love him?

Never
.

And how had I not been aware he’d been stalking me on the Vineyard? It seemed impossible to believe I wouldn’t have noticed on such a small island. He had been stalking me when Hugo was still alive. How would
he
have reacted to this now? Hugo would have known what to do.

I closed my eyes and breathed, loving Hugo, missing him, thinking of Rich and our Wednesday morning
breakfast
, hating Joe – feeling confused and exhausted. It was past five o’clock and I had a teenage boy in the next room; he would be hungry soon, ferociously hungry as only teenage boys can be and he would need dinner. We could go to the bistro on the corner of Smith and Dean Streets; Nat loved their burgers, which came with the world’s best French fries and a side order of salad, a rounded meal. But as soon as I thought that, I thought of Joe. Had he been arrested? Or was he
out
?

I dialed Jess. He answered promptly: “Detective Ramirez.”

“It’s Darcy Mayhew.”

“I just got word.” He sounded glum. “They released him about an hour ago. Gave him a warning.”

“Jess, maybe I should get a restraining order. I’ve been thinking—”

“Whatever you want, Darcy. It’s up to you.”

There he went again, like a doctor unwilling to advocate his own plan.

“But you still advise against it?”

“I do.”

Silence. He really believed it was a bad idea. I really felt scared and wanted protection. But the workplace order hadn’t protected me at all – so why would a police order? His experience-laced logic kept coming back at me. Every time I wanted to demand a restraining order, I heard his voice and saw his face – the ugliest face in the city on the kindest man – and acquiesced to his wisdom.

“OK. So he’s out. Now what do I do?”

“Everything we discussed. And if anything happens,
anything
, Darcy, even if your phone starts ringing again – call me. Any time of the day or night. And don’t worry about my wife; she’s used to me getting calls from ladies at all hours.” He chuckled.

“Thanks, Jess.”

I hung up, feeling briefly fortified, but not enough to take Nat out for dinner. I wasn’t sure exactly what we had in the cupboards, fridge and freezer but there had to be something I could whip up in a hurry.

Pasta and limp broccoli which, steamed, wasn’t so bad. Ice cream for dessert. Then, later, I lay beside Nat in his bed like I used to when he was little. He rolled over to get his favorite backrub: two knuckles running up and down either side of his spine. When
I
got up to leave, he surprised me by saying, “Don’t be scared, Mom. I’m sure it’s going to be OK.”

“I’m not scared, sweetie,” I lied.