I reach for the flashlight Ms. Geissler gave me. I turn it on. It casts a meager glow around the room, not much but enough. The light bounces on the wall from the tremor of my hands.
What I find is a wall of cardboard bankers boxes—dozens of them—with holes chewed out. Rodent droppings and old building supplies. Gallons of paint, boards of hardwood, boxes of screws and nails.
A makeshift nest—clumps of twigs and leaves—is nestled into the corner of the attic, and on it, there’s some hairless and fetal-looking thing that looks like it’s just climbed out of its mother’s womb. A mother squirrel stands over her baby, scowling at me.
What I don’t find is a four-poster bed. A white comforter. A cord dangling from the ceiling. A man. None of those things are here. It’s just a ratty and dilapidated attic inhabited by squirrels, just as Ms. Geissler has said.
I feel like I can’t breathe. The pain in my chest is immense, in my arm, my jaw, my abdomen. The room is empty, though as sure as I live and breathe, I saw a man here.
I stand looking out the window and toward the carriage home. I don’t know how long I stand there, staring, thinking that maybe he will appear. That somehow we’ll have swapped places. But he never appears.
I make my way back down the steps, where Ms. Geissler stands waiting for me. On her face is a complacent look. AnI told you solook.
“Find what you were looking for?” she asks, though I can’t speak. A lump forms in my throat, but I will not cry. I cannot cry.
“I told you, Jessie,” she gloats, and I know then that she did this only to humor me. “There is no man there. Squirrels. Only squirrels.” And then she thrusts the ladder back up so that the squirrels can’t take over the rest of her home.
She shows me the door, but before closing it on me, she first asks, “Did you ever think, Jessie, that you’re only seeing what you want to see? You need help.” She all but pushes me out of her house and slams the door behind me. I hear the sound of a lock clicking shut.
The porch light goes off, and once again I am submerged in darkness.
I set myself down on the top porch step, feeling exhausted. My body aches from the lack of sleep, from ten nights of my mind depriving me of sleep. It’s an insidious way to die, I think, from lack of sleep because there is nothing gory about it, no blood, no guts, and yet the effects are just as gruesome. I know because I’m living it.
As the sun begins to rise on the eleventh day, it’s only a matter of time until I die.
This is what it feels like knowing you’re about to die.
This is what Mom must have felt like knowing she would die.
I sit on the stoop and talk to myself, blathering about what’s happening to me, hoping to make sense of it, but striking out. I can’t make sense of it. I count to ten to make sure I can still do it, losing track at number six. I cry, a proper cry, shoulders heaving, the first in a long time. My heart, my head, everything hurts. I fold over sideways on the porch step, rolling up into the fetal position, pulling my knees into my chest, wondering if this is where I’ll die.
* * *
All at once I look up and have no clue where I am.
By now the sun is just barely beginning to rise. It turns the world from black to gray. One by one people appear on the street before me. Joggers, early-morning commuters.
As a hint of daylight fills the sky, I suddenly catch a glimpse of something on the other side of the street. It’s a man in jeans and a jacket, bustling down the street with his hands in the pockets of his pants. His chin is tucked into the coat to keep warm, and there’s a hat on his head, an orange baseball cap, and for this reason I know that it’s him.
But how did he get here? How did he slip out of Ms. Geissler’s home without me seeing him?
And that’s when the answer comes to me. The balcony. The one that leads from street level up to the third floor.
He climbed down the balcony before I had a chance to go up the stairs, sneaking out as I cut across Ms. Geissler’s lawn. That’s when the light in the window went black. It went black because he’d already left. As I examined the attic with a flashlight, he was at ground level, looking in through the windows, watching me.
I rise quickly, calling for him, waving my hands to get his attention. I fall down the porch steps, all six or eight or ten of them. “Excuse me!” I scream, but if he sees, if he hears, he doesn’t look and he doesn’t wave back. He doesn’t slow down. He never stops moving. He’s in a hurry. He has somewhere to be.
I run as fast as my legs will carry me, which isn’t fast.
The twitch in my eye has gone from one eye to two, so that they both spasm and I can’t get them to stop. My hands shake. My arms ache, my legs ache, my back aches and, as I move across the street, not looking either way before I cross, a passing car nearly runs into me. The driver slams on their brakes to keep from hitting me.
I stand there in the street, three inches before the hood of the car, staring at the panicked driver, myself unfazed. Because I don’t have it in me to be scared. The driver shoots me a dirty look. When I don’t move, she douses the window with windshield wiper fluid, splashing me as she hoped to do. She screams out the window at me, and only then do I go.
By the time I turn away from the car, the man has advanced a quarter of a block or more. He’s harder to see than he was before, farther away. Every now and then I see the orange cap bobbing and weaving down the street, but then it gets blocked by a low-hanging tree limb and I can’t see him.
I panic; I’ve lost him.
But then again it returns, and I follow along.
