Back upstairs, I check the window again. The glass is cool to the touch. I shiver; then I catch sight of it, across the road, another lit window, another person framed in it, looking right back at me, as plain as day.
It’s a woman, older than me. She gestures something with her hand, and I realize it’s a thumbs-up, a question.Are you okay?I am already thumbs-upping her back before the strangeness of this interaction hits me. And suddenly I recoil, remembering with utter horror that I am only in a T-shirt and underwear.
I flip out the bedroom light and inch forward to peek back outside.
There is no one there, no lit window, no person looking out. All the windows on the street are dark now.
I try to look beyond the moon-reflecting glass of each little window, each little life lit with reflected glow, and I try to work out which it could have been. But all I can see are the backs of curtains, the dark voids of unlit rooms.
I scan the doors at street level. It could have been Number 17, 19, or 21. But it definitely didn’t look like Arabella at Number 19. Perhaps it was another phantom garment bag waving in the night breeze. It wouldn’t be the first time tonight I’ve thought I’d seen something that wasn’t there.
Too much change. Too much uncertainty. And a tired brain trying to play catch-up. This is what I tell myself.
I shake my head, pull down the blind, and slip back into bed, Blue snuggling in close beside me.
Just before I settle under the covers, I bury my hand in his fur and kiss him on the head. Then I stop short. Something strange is sticking out around his neck. I sit up again, flick the light on, andtwist his collar around. It’s half-undone, the strap sticking up at an odd angle.
I swivel it around farther, to the buckle; the collar has been done up on the wrong hole. The usual hole, divot-dented with overuse, lies empty. Blue’s collar has been removed and put back on again.
I spin the collar around even farther, and that is when I see it: a message has been written on his collar, the words etched roughly, with something sharp, into its red leather.
Two words, each slash of the letters slicing and puckering the red leather to reveal the pale-cream suede beneath:
Help Me
Chapter 4
Bad Things Happen, All the Time
It’s just a sick joke,I tell myself. A prank.
Help Me.
With steady hands, I gently remove the collar and ruffle the fur where it sat on Blue’s neck. He purrs in thanks, leaning into the massage. I surreptitiously check his neck for sore spots or possible injuries, but he seems unbothered. He’d let me know if I snagged anything that hurt him.
I stop rubbing him and he shakes himself, stands, and jumps unceremoniously from me and finds a comfy spot atop a stack of unpacked sweatshirts, coils himself into a fur ball, and buries his nose in his paws.
One only has to listen to a podcast or a documentary to know that these things happen in real life. Bad things happen, all the time.
I lean back against the pillows and inspect the rest of the collar. The depth and viciousness of the letters, the force it took to entrench them: it looks like it was done in haste, impassioned. This person clearly could not be ignored. The brass coin tag with my phone number etched into it glints back at me in the lamplight.
Whoever did this will have seen my phone number, too.
I pick up my phone and open the neighborhood group chat that Arabella added me to this morning. I scroll back up to my message about Blue. It’s been hearted a lot; there are also a few messages of support beneath it. Blue’s soft blue-gray features shine out at me.
I’ve seen clips online of women covertly flashing the international signal for help behind their backs, in supermarkets andparking lots, and being rescued by Good Samaritans. Old news stories come to mind, ones that have haunted me over the years. Then there are the true-crime shows, the trove of horror movies. These always start with women in need of help and end in “last seen” on blurry self-checkout video footage or on glitchy, black-and-white transport CCTV, all because no one believed them. Or they were alone.
All those pixelated women could have been saved, and they flicker through my mind: here they are, in basements, on stained mattresses, body parts in suitcases, vacuum-packed in freezers, their DNA splattered on old vinyl car seats, the whole grotty plethora of it packaged up as…TV entertainment. True-crime shows have always made me feel uncomfortable.
Ben used to put them on all the time. He liked them on in the background while he scrolled through football scores on his phone. Now, of course, I know that he was textingher.
He liked trying to figure out who did it, in those shows, he told me. I didn’t. The only thing I saw was dead women, their lives reduced to a guessing game. They weren’t coming back, no matter how well you worked out who did it.
This was the only time Ben and I spent together, toward the end—watching these women die, one by one, that or people burning cakes in baking challenges. I didn’t die or get eliminated—though maybe Ididget eliminated from my marriage, come to think of it.
Help Me
Does someone actually need help? Or is it just…what…some angry teen acting out?
