Chapter 21
It’s fate. It’s kismet.
Henry is just about to pull his car away from the curb when the unhappy couple’s garage glides open. The wife’s car emerges. It’s a nice car, silver and sleek, a few years old. It’s exactly the sort of car he’d expect her to drive, and she so rarely leaves the house in it.
He wasn’t headed anywhere important himself.
Just to the store to restock his provisions in his kitchenette.
He shops for himself in his parents’ kitchen as much as he can, but there are some things he likes that they don’t stock, and, despite his dwindling savings, there are some things he can’t live without.
But that will have to wait because the wife is going out, and Henry must follow her.
He waits until her car has eased to a stop at the sign at the base of the street and begun to turn to the left before he presses his foot against the gas and shifts away from the curb. He sees her idling at the neighborhood’s exit, and he lets a car pass before turning to the right, behind her.
He knows how to follow people. He’s gotten better at it over the years.
His spins the dial of his air-conditioning, shifts the vent so that it’s blowing directly into his face.
He bought the car shortly after graduating from his master’s program, applying for a loan with his first full-time salary.
It’s nearly five years old now, and some things don’t work as well as they used to—one of them being the air-conditioning system, blowing only tepid air when the temperature outside crests over ninety.
But he can’t justify the expense of repairs right now.
Ahead of him, the wife merges onto the highway.
Henry keeps a car between them, and he lowers his window, air whipping around his face, mussing his hair. But that doesn’t matter, because she won’t see him. She can’t see him.
After five miles, the wife flicks her turn signal and pulls onto an exit ramp.
Henry does, too. She turns cautiously through the secondary streets, and at a stop sign, she pauses for far longer than is necessary.
For a second, Henry fears that she’s spotted him despite his discreetness, his practice.
Hours of practice, the summer after senior year of high school.
It became something of a game, to while away those vacant days until it was time to leave for college.
He was working for a computer-repair shop, but that was mostly to pad his résumé.
The work was too menial, the hours too few, to adequately amuse him.
Kelly’s hair was copper, and it curled around her forehead in the heat. She had catlike eyes that glowed amber in the sun. Henry sometimes caught glimpses of them reflected in her rearview mirror. The way the light hit them, the way they shone.
Her family had moved to the neighborhood at the start of the summer, just after graduation.
An unavoidable transfer for her father’s work, Henry’s mother had told them, always on top of the neighborhood happenings.
Kelly’s younger brother would be starting his freshman year at the local high school at the end of the summer, and Kelly would be off to the University of Delaware.
She’d only be around for a few months. Perfect, Henry thought.
It was August, heat waves fluttering up from the pavement, when Henry followed Kelly to the local ice cream stand, a small cottage in a grassy field, with sliding windows and a parking lot that was aging and turning to rubble.
She brought her little brother with her, probably because she’d not been able to make any friends in the area.
Henry waited in his car. He watched Kelly stand at the window of the gray clapboard hut to pay, tugging a single bill from the back pocket of her cutoffs.
He imagined her parents handing it to her before she left the house.
Her legs were so pale they were almost fluorescent, loose threads from her shorts grazing her thighs, bare skin dotted with freckles.
She wasn’t his usual type, but Henry found her beautiful nevertheless.
He’d followed her when she walked through the neighborhood, when she went out to run errands.
Once, she’d visited an eye doctor. Another morning, she had gone to Target with her mom.
They’d maneuvered a red cart laden with plastic bags through the parking lot, struggling.
It’d had a bad wheel and seemed to be tugging toward the left, and they laughed about it, Kelly’s giggle a high trill that made Henry smile.
Some nights, after darkness had fallen over the neighborhood, he stood in her yard, just beyond the reach of the motion-detecting light affixed to the back of the house.
The back gate opened and shut soundlessly, and the family had a dopey blond dog who’d lope up to Henry, welcoming him with a lick—the worst guard dog ever.
Henry knew which window was Kelly’s; sometimes he could see her silhouette against the curtains in her room.
Henry thought he’d been careful, but that particular August afternoon, Kelly and her brother tossed their empty ice cream cups into the trash, then walked back to their car.
Henry was feeling perhaps more confident than he should have, his weeks of success turning him brazen.
His window was down, head turned toward them.
The brother climbed into the front passenger seat, but Kelly didn’t get in the car.
Not yet. She spun around, copper ponytail dragging across her shoulders.
She looked at Henry, straight at him. The venom in her eyes was startling.
He should have looked away, shifted his car into drive, but he was frozen.
There was anger slashed across her face like a scar—I see you and I know what you’re doing—and there was no fear.
Perhaps that was the first time he felt it.
The rage. It was like fingers wrapping around his forearm, knuckles white.
Why did she not flush and glance away, smiling knowingly and pleased?
Why was his attention so unwelcome? It made him want to turn his wheel sharply, foot to the gas until his car crashed right into her, pinning her.
He didn’t. All he did was stare straight back at her until she caved.
Her gaze dropped and she got in her car, then backed out of her spot, and Henry wondered whether he’d been wrong, whether he’d imagined the whole thing.
But that he hadn’t backed down, that he had stared back, felt his anger pumping hotly, so much stronger than hers, came as a comfort to him.
Later that night, in Kelly’s yard, he scratched the dog behind the ears. Kelly’s curtains were pressed firmly closed, and when he left, he didn’t shut the gate behind him. The dog tilted its head, watching, curious, before slipping through the open gate behind him.
Two days after that, Kelly and her brother walked along the neighborhood streets carrying flyers printed with their blond dog’s smiling face.
They hung them on stop signs and knocked on doors.
Henry stood at the living room window and watched as Kelly’s eyes met his, as her lips turned down, as she murmured something to her brother, as they skipped Henry’s house.
He’s pretty sure the dog found its way back home eventually. Henry didn’t hurt the dog; that wasn’t the point. The point was that he hurt Kelly.
Now Henry is certain that the wife hasn’t noticed him—she’s just not sure about where she’s going.
Her turn signal flashes, and she goes left.
He follows her, left, then straight through a roundabout.
She turns into a sprawling parking lot outside a looming brick building—a medical pavilion, he realizes.
There’s a white sign out front listing the names of various doctors and medical practices.
He parks his car across the aisle from hers and watches her climb out. She slings her purse over her shoulder and squints at the building, then checks her phone, drops it into her bag. She walks slowly, hesitantly, toward the front doors.
Henry can’t risk following her inside, yet how can he not?
He doesn’t pause too long to think. How does she know he doesn’t just have a doctor’s appointment of his own? What a coincidence, that they’re both here at the same time. Besides, as much as he hates to admit it, she probably wouldn’t even recognize him.
He smooths his hair down as he walks, uses fingers to correct the part, to rake it into place. As he’s stepping through the sliding glass doors, she’s standing in the lobby area, studying the directory. She runs her hand across her dark ponytail, twirls it slightly at the end. A nervous tick.
She opts for the stairs. Henry studies the directory, too, standing in the exact place she just vacated, until he hears the door to the stairwell click shut.
Her footsteps ascending above his, his breaths coming quickly.
On the third floor, she leaves the stairwell. Henry waits two seconds, three, then pulls the door open. He catches a glimpse of her, the stream of her hair, as she disappears into the first office, across the hall from the stairwell.
Henry pauses just long enough to read the sign outside the door; then he spins around, goes back down the stairs, through those sliding doors, across the steaming blackness of the parking lot. His heart hammers, dread pools. It might not mean anything, but it might mean everything.
Dr. Frances Singh & Associates, read the sign, Obstetrics and Gynecology.