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By LeAnne Kline
The breathing woke her; excited, uncontainable panting, like an overweight
frenzied dog fearfully obeying his master’s command to sit still. But it wasn’t
her dog. She knew right away who it was and recounted her steps before
crawling into bed that night, the doors, windows all locked, the skinny piece of
wood slid into the metal groove of the sliding glass doors. The deadbolt, the
chain lock, the foot-stop lock that penetrated into the floor. She fought the
urge to open her eyes, pressing her lids tight against themselves to prolong
the moment, this last moment. If she opened them, the room would be dark
anyway and though she wouldn’t be able to see him, he would be able to see
her eyelids flicker, and then he’d make his move, and do what he came here
to do.
She wanted to roll over, quick and stealth, pull open the drawer of her
nightstand that housed the gun. Her gun. A .22 pistol she had borrowed
from her dad two weeks ago, who claimed it was hers, had been since she
was five, though she had never fired it or seen it, for that matter, before he,
not her dad, but he, showed up again, this time in person not in letters or
flower deliveries, but two weeks ago he had drummed up the nerve to show
up in person at her door. Her front door. The fucker had walked up to it like
it was a summer Sunday afternoon and knocked on it.
It wasn’t summer, it was winter. It wasn’t Sunday, it was Thursday. It wasn’t
afternoon, it was nighttime.
He caught her completely unaware. She never expected him to materialize in
person, after ignoring the years of creepy letters written in cryptic block
letters, two lines of text for every college-ruled line on the sheets of paper,
and flower deliveries every year though she moved from apartment to
townhouse, west coast to east, phone number changed every year or so, the
flowers always showed up, Valentine’s Day was always a reminder that he
had found her…again. She didn’t believe he would show up again two weeks
later after his botched attempt to knock on her door and come in. She told
him off, said she’d call the cops, her dog was barking, as she raced her
fingers along the wall for the light switches, brightness chasing away the
shadows he wanted to perch behind, blend inside, hide underneath. He only
got to the twentieth step. Her step, her front step. Then failed to get in.
Nevertheless, without opening her eyes, her body enshrouded by her cotton
sheets, duvet, and quilt, she knew he was now standing in the corner of her
room. Heaving breath. Waiting. Patient, as he had been all these years.
Calculating his next move. And she would not be able to open the drawer and
grab her gun. Though, she thought she still might give it a try.
He knew the gun was there, he had been in her room before when she wasn’t
home. Had opened every drawer, cabinet, envelope, pulled down her
blankets and laid his head on her high thread-count sheets, imagined staring
into her eyes before she fell asleep. He had calculated the steps ahead of
time, the steps to get to the gun, seven total: open the drawer, pull out the
gun, remove the holster, lock, load, point, pull the trigger. He could, would,
overcome her by then, by step two, seven was too many for her to succeed.
She had smiled and said hello to him as they passed in the hallway at a party
one summer, years ago, eleven years, to be precise. He was on his way to
the bathroom, she was on her way out the back door to the lawn lined with tiki
torches, smoking coals in the grill, wine, candles, and a weeping willow’s
branches swaying in the breeze, white moneymen floating through the air like
a fantasy summerland. She was on her way out back to her boyfriend, his
best friend, to sit in his arms, a friend who no longer spoke to him. When
they broke up, it made things easier on his conscience to continue trying to
get in touch with her, just one more smile from her to him, a moment he could
slow down in his memory would last the rest of his life. Just one. One smile
from her. But she never responded. And he realized he had to do something
more, something different than what he had been doing, he couldn’t let the
years pass any longer so patiently, he couldn’t be patient at all anymore.
It took him years to summon the courage to bridge the distance between his
world and hers. Years of planning, conspiring, mapping, watching, and
studying her. And every year, month, day, hour, every minute, every second
had been spent planning the one meeting that would lead up to knocking on
her door. He sent her flowers every Valentine’s Day. She never said thank
you or returned his attempts to communicate with her. For what reason he
didn’t know. But her perfection, in some way, he was convinced, was
responsible for their separation.
She didn’t know all of this then, it wasn’t until just before the lights dimmed
that he confessed to her everything he had been thinking over the past
decade, in a whisper, rancid breath in her nose, she couldn’t move by then,
though, and had to hear him out.
He described his complicated thought processes, wanderings and
obsessions and the labyrinth in which his ideas played, running around
themselves, amok, creating new thoughts and ideas, all intertwined around
her. Only her. As he explained and pleaded, for a moment on his knees in
front of her, beside her on the floor next to the bed, like a child saying his
nighttime prayers, then back up again holding her gun tenderly as though it
were one of her limbs, her wrists, or her delicate fingers, as she lay in bed,
frozen, and he babbled on about his plans.
Meticulous. After all the years of thinking it through, the steps were outlined,
theorized, proofed, re-worked, beta-tested, until one day, two weeks ago on
a Thursday evening in winter, blood draining from his head, snow falling
through the bare limbs on the trees, heart pounding adrenaline into beads of
sweat, he got out of his car and…
One: Locate her new apartment. Two: Park car outside. Three: Study her
habits. Four: Follow her for one week. Five: Rent new car. Six: Follow her
for another week. Seven: Buy chocolate. Eight: Buy gloves. Nine: Clean out
the basement to make space. Ten: Get haircut. Eleven: Buy new pair of
jeans and shirt. Twelve: Wait for her to get home. Thirteen: Listen to music
for courage. Fourteen: Breath mint. Fifteen: Close car door quietly.
Sixteen: Walk swiftly, twenty steps to her front door. Seventeen: Breathe.
Eighteen: Knock. Nineteen: Wait. Twenty: Say Hello. Twenty-One: Walk
inside. Twenty-two: Express love. Twenty-three: Give her chocolate. Of
course, he hadn’t planned on harming her dog.
As the lights dimmed, repulsed by his body now in her bed, her lids open,
eyes gone blind, her last thought was wishing she had worn matching socks,
wondered why he had wasted ten years of his life for this, this end, then the
foil on the open chocolate bar sparkled no more.
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