I walked half a block on Erie. I cut into the alley behind the parking garage. The alley smelled like wet cardboard and old grease and the underside of a hotel kitchen. There was a delivery van idling at the far end with its hazards on, the driver inside on his phone, paying me no attention. I walked past him at the same pace. I came out onto Rush Street.
I doubled back south.
I crossed Rush mid-block, between two parked cars, with the absent walk of a woman who had decided she was on the wrong side. I went into a small Italian place that did lunch, asked for the bathroom, was waved toward the back. There was aservice exit by the kitchen, propped open with a wedge of folded cardboard for ventilation. I went out it.
I came back onto an alley behind Rush.
I walked west.
At State Street I let myself glance at the window of a chain pharmacy. I did not turn my head. I used the corner of my eye.
Nothing.
I did not let myself believe it. I walked another block and I cut south on impulse and I did the corner-of-the-eye thing at the polished black side of a bus shelter, and at the back window of a parked SUV with tinted glass, and at the door of a Walgreens as I passed it.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
I had now, by every rule I knew, performed three separate counter-surveillance routines, any one of which should have shaken a competent tail. Two cutouts through buildings with multiple exits. One doubling-back inside a block. A reset of direction. And he was not there.
The first thing I felt was not relief. The first thing I felt was a kind of slow careful disbelief, like a person who had been holding her breath underwater and was not yet sure her face had actually broken the surface. I took ten more blocks before I let myself acknowledge it.
He was gone.
I went into the Cultural Center because I did not know where else to go.
It was warm inside in the way public buildings in winter were warm—not comfortable, exactly, but a baseline kind of survival warmth, the warmth of a place that had decided a long time ago not to refuse anyone. I climbed the marble stairs to the third floor. I went into the room under the Tiffany dome and I picked a bench at the edge, the one against the far wall where the light from the dome did not quite reach, and I sat down.
I sat for a long time.
I watched the light move under the dome. People came and went—tourists with their phones held up at the ceiling, the older couples who stood with their hands clasped behind their backs, a man in a parka who sat on the bench opposite mine for what must have been an hour and stared at nothing in particular and was clearly there for the same reason I was. No one looked at me. No one looked at me for a long time, and the not-being-looked-at was so total and so unfamiliar that I began, against my will, to relax.
My calves hurt. My shoulder hurt where the bag strap had been. I let my head rest against the wall behind me. I let my hands sit open in my lap. The grey wool of my gloves had dried stiff and pilled at the cuffs, and I rubbed at the wool with the pad of my thumb and thought, with a brief absurd warmth, of Wendell, who had stood at a sink somewhere and run water through them for a woman he did not know.
I did not sleep. I did not let myself sleep. But I sat in the kind of stillness that was almost as good as sleep.
The hours moved over me the way the light did, slowly.
I went down to the second floor at some point and used a bathroom and washed my hands and looked at myself in a mirror. I looked like a tired woman. I did not look like a hunted one. The face I had been wearing all morning—the small flat alert face—had loosened around the mouth and the eyes. There were shadows under my eyes but they were the shadows of any woman who had walked too far in the cold, and behind them my actual eyes were quiet again.
You are going to be okay,I thought.
I almost smiled at myself. Almost.
I went back upstairs. There was an exhibit in the room next to the dome, photographs of a neighborhood I had never been to,and I read the placard beside the first photograph three times because I could not concentrate.
Hours later, when I felt truly safe, I stood up. I went down the marble stairs and pushed through the heavy door onto the street.
The streetlights had not all come on yet but the early ones had, the ones on timers that ran a little fast, glowing weakly above sidewalks that still had the last grey of the day on them.
I walked east. Not toward anything in particular. Toward water, vaguely. Toward the thought of finding somewhere to eat something cheap and somewhere after that to be invisible for the night.
I had walked perhaps two blocks when I saw him.
He was across the street. He was inside the lit window of a coffee shop, standing at the counter as if he were a man waiting on a drink, looking at his phone. He was not looking at me. He did not need to be looking at me. He was positioned so that the door of the coffee shop opened onto the same cross street I was about to walk down.
The cold thing my stomach had done in the morning had been a small cold thing. What it did now was different. What it did now was the inside of a freezer.
I kept walking. I kept the pace. I did not turn my head. The analyst in the back of my head was waking up again, the cold competent voice, and the cold competent voice was very quiet, almost gentle, the way doctors were gentle when they were about to tell you something terrible.
