“It’s no trouble,” she says.
We’re at my house and the flagstone steps that lead to the door. She doesn’t say her usual quick goodbye. She doesn’t keep walking to her own flagstone steps and walkway and door. Instead, she stops and faces me.
“People always say they can’t understand why celebrities aren’t happier. They’re so lucky to have all that attention and money and never have to worry about anything.”
I think I know what she’s trying to say, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable. “I’m not exactly a movie star,” I tell her. I try to be lighthearted. I sweep my hands in front of my body. “Not that Hollywood isn’t banging down my door to get a piece of this.”
She laughs and nods but then returns to what she wants to convey. “You saved those people in that store. You saved theirlives. And now you deserve to be protected. We owe that to you. And whatever pain it’s caused you—well, I’m sorry. It shouldn’t be that way.”
Sunny has me on the brink of tears, and I don’t have the energy. I’ve been up most of the night again, scouring footage from a hotel parking lot, and now I have to get to the job and function until it’s time to pick up the girls from school, and Mitch will work late because he can’t stand to be around me, so I’ll retreat to our room and let him spend time with his daughters. I won’t think about what is happening to our marriage. Instead, I’ll wait until the house is dark and my family is in bed and I’ll make a fresh pot of coffee and it will all begin again. This endless cycle of watching and waiting and wondering when the storm will hit and whether I can stop it.
Sunny sees the tears well, and she cuts me a break. “When this is all over, whenever that is, let me take you out. I think you could use a few cocktails.”
She looks away, smiles. Glances toward her house. I follow her line of sight, and we both spot an Amazon delivery truck. It’s one of the smaller ones. A white van.
“Oh my God—Silence of the Lambs, right? Vans still freak me out,” she says.
“Yeah, definitely. Never park next to a van in a parking garage.”
“See—now we have to go out! You could give me useful advice, and I could cheer you up. Think of it as public service outreach.”
In spite of myself, I lean in and hug this woman whom I barely know but who seems to know more about me than I do at the moment. I am lost inside my own mind, the trees in the forest whose edges have disappeared. When I let her go, we use banal pleasantries to detach from this moment of connection because it is intense and we both have things to get to. There’s no graceful exit.
She walks away, and I give it just a quick beat before heading up to my house.
Inside, the quiet mirrors the stillness of the weather. I close the door and turn the lock. I purge myself of the tears and the sunshine and the hug. I move quickly now because the two young officers out on the street are waiting for me to leave so they can leave too. It’s been a long night for them, and I imagine they have normal, ordinary lives waiting. Hot showers and sound sleep.
I go first to the kitchen where I bring two cereal bowls and two juice cups and one coffee mug to the sink, rinse them, and put them inside the dishwasher.
Upstairs, I turn on my shower and let the water run. And while it runs, hopefully from cold to hot, I check the girls’ room, drawing comforters loosely into a shape that covers each bed, turning off the lights. Their bathroom is across the hall, and I see the light on there as well, so I make a final stop before checking the water.
Fran left her pajamas on the floor. I pick them up in one hand while I reach for the light with the other, and it’s then that I see a pink towel on the floor, just beneath the hook behind the door where it must have fallen. I don’t reach for it. I don’t move a muscle.
The water runs next door. Fran’s sweet baby smell rises from the pajamas. And my heart pounds, just from the sight of the towel, and I realize that all this time Mitch has been cleaning up after the girls so I wouldn’t have to see them. The pink towels. He hangs them up behind the door, washes them every week. Tucks them into the drawer beneath the sink. In spite of what’s going on between us now, my husband has been doing this for me. I don’t know what to feel. Has he done this to appease his guilt? Was I supposed to notice before today and return the kindness somehow? What used to be so easy between us now feels like a maze I can’t get out of. There is nothing but confusion around every corner.
I bring that thought with me as I drop the pajamas in the hamper and then take off my sweats from the afternoon before, which have carried me into this new day, and enter a room now filled with steam. I leave the door open to let it out, then get into the stall. The water shocks my senses away from everyplace they want to take me. But the thought stays, lingering through pathways of memories—small acts of love like picking up towels and holding me through the night, strong arms, warm body—until it can’t find any more and slowly recedes.
I’m wired as I wash my hair and soap my body, moving quickly because I’m running late. Through closed eyes, I picture the cops in their SUV checking their phones for the time and sighing with irritation. And then I see Sunny walking to her house, not even at her flagstone before I turned away.
These thoughts, too, find small memories and bring them out for me to examine—my subconscious asking a question I can’t quite articulate.
Sunny walks. My eyes are watering. The sun shines, and the air is still. But the sound—what is the image that wants to be seen again? A van. A delivery truck. White with that orange arrow. The one we’re so used to seeing we don’t even notice anymore. The truck from Amazon. Squeaky wheels parking across the street a few houses up. It arrived while we were waiting for a different set of squeaky wheels—those from the school bus.
After the shooting, Mitch ordered the pink towels from Amazon. The truck delivered them in a brown box. The driver left them right at the doorstep. Only that vehicle was bigger. They come in all sizes now, I think. I’ve seen some as big as moving trucks, which are brown, and the small black ones with electric motors that remind me of Europe because of their odd shape, and others that are just white vans.
White vans with an orange logo.
And how hard would that be—to rent a van and have a logo made and stick it to both sides? Not hard at all, especially if that’s all you had to do all day. Not hard at all, especially with the websites and apps that connect renters with car owners. And owners of white vans.
Fear crawls from these thoughts to my body, down my spine, and through my blood where they find a pulse. I gasp for a breath but otherwise stand frozen, my back to the open door that leads to the bedroom, the stream of water hitting my chest.
Slowly, I reach out and turn off the faucet. The air stirs with steam, but all sound fades as the pipes settle. I wipe my eyes with my hands and move to face the glass door, which has fogged.
It’s only a shadow, I tell myself as I look through to my bedroom. It doesn’t move as I lift my hand and press it to the glass, clearing my field of vision from left to right.
And when I can finally see clearly, when the steam is wiped away, the shadow becomes a figure and the figure becomes a man who lets me see his face before disappearing.
Wade. It’s Wade, in my bedroom! Inside myhouse!
