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I didn’t sleep well that night. Not only did I worry about the chemistry stalker discovering my new location, but a deathly silence like none I’d ever experienced in the city cloaked Beth’s entire block as though life had ceased to exist here in the suburbs.
The quiet gave me plenty of time to think about my stalker. Secretly, I’d always hoped I’d become the target of a love-obsessed man. The truth was, I was rather plain. In college, the mailman would faithfully cram our mailbox full of menacing love letters addressed to my gorgeous roommates, leaving nothing for me. Their faces would contort with fear as they read the passages aloud. “I love you so much, I’ll excorticate you if you won’t have me back,” one trembling girl would read, and I’d be filled with jealousy. Why didn’t anyone love me that much?
Never in all my twenty-nine years did I realize having a stalker would be this terrifying.
I dozed off several times but never for longer than ten minutes. By the time I heard Beth’s alarm sounding down the hall, I sighed and flung back the covers. Too tired to shower, I pulled yesterday’s work clothes back on my body.
I waded through the ocean of debris on my journey toward the kitchen. I heard the shower running upstairs as I opened the refrigerator. I located a croissant, which I unwrapped and bit into. It was stale but not overly so. I only had to recall the sensation of a rice cake on my tongue to appreciate the taste.
Beth came downstairs a few minutes later, toting Marianne on one hip. She paused in the living room. “God, this place is a mess.”
I was about to concur when it occurred to me that she might be setting me up. After I insulted her house, she could kick me out without an ounce of compunction.
Beth flew into the kitchen and pulled a piece of bread out of the breadbox, sticking it into Marianne’s mouth. Then she began rummaging through the refrigerator. “Ness, did you eat anything out of here?”
I gulped. “Anything?” Surely she wasn’t searching for a stale croissant. Who knew how long that thing had been in there.
The vegetable crisper muffled her voice but I heard her anyway. “I had a croissant I was saving for breakfast today.”
My mind pedaled for an excuse, coming up short as usual. “Um, I might be eating that.”
Beth popped out of the refrigerator. “Does that mean you are eating it?”
“Yes.” I flushed. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were saving it.”
Her face reddened, and her free hand inched toward her hip. But she didn’t reprimand me, which only made me feel worse. Instead, she turned away to fix a bowl of cereal and screamed “Roger!” at the top of her lungs.
Roger crawled into the kitchen looking almost subdued. His lethargy shocked me. I’d never before seen him in a state any less energetic than manic. As he picked up his cereal spoon with his eyes almost closed, I felt a rush of affection for my young nephew.
Beth sat down with Marianne and watched the three of us eat. Her scrutiny unnerved me, but I finished off the croissant anyway. I figured she’d be even more upset if I threw her food away after ingesting only a few bites.
Roger signaled the end of breakfast by tipping his cereal bowl over his head, sending milk raining down the front of his shirt as he tried to lick the bottom of the bowl.
Beth readjusted Marianne and stood up. “Roger, go get your backpack.” She yanked her purse off the counter before stomping into the garage without a single word to me.
I collected my own purse from the living room and followed. Exhaustion slammed into me when I climbed into Beth’s passenger seat. Three days spent eluding a chemist was finally taking its toll.
Beth buckled Marianne into her car seat and went back inside to fetch Roger. Two minutes later we took off.
After Beth dropped off her children, we continued toward downtown Seattle in silence. Or, more accurately, we didn’t hold a conversation. Beth cursed nonstop at the other drivers while I drifted in and out of sleep. She had to shake me before I realized she’d parked. I stumbled out of the car, shielding my eyes from the garage lights shining overhead.
Beth grabbed my arm and dragged me into the elevator. “Your office is that way,” she told me when the doors opened, heaving me toward the street entrance. “Meet me back here at quarter after five, or you’ll be taking the bus.”
Grateful for the instructions, I somehow managed to slog to my own building two blocks away.
Once in my office I tried to work, but my fatigue blurred the computer monitor to the point of incomprehension. Usually I could see the monitor, I just didn’t find the content interesting enough to focus on.
At nine o’clock, I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. Although I’d only been at work for an hour, my forehead had already bumped into the copy machine several times, and I had an unsightly gash on my thumb where I’d unthinkingly tried to detach the nail with a staple remover. I needed a nap, and I needed one fast.
Fortunately, I knew just the place to go.
* * *
Emerging from the reference room an hour later, I dashed back to my desk to interrupt the computer screensaver before skedaddling off to the bathroom. Unfortunately, Henry was stomping near my cubicle entrance like a windup toy ape.
“Where have you been?” He waved around a handful of papers. “I need twenty copies of these reports in two minutes!”
I stifled a yawn. I knew I should have hidden out on the other side of the building a bit longer. Then he’d have no choice but to make the damn copies himself.
I took the papers from Henry’s hands. “I gave you copies of these last week,” I protested, irritated he hadn’t simply told me to double the number I’d done then.
Henry’s eyes flashed. “You were supposed to give me copies last week.”
“Oh.” In my continued aversion to busywork, I must have dumped the papers somewhere on my desk and forgotten about them.
Henry leaned closer, squinting. “Vanessa, why is your left cheek all creased?”
I gestured toward the copy room. “I’ll just get these . . .” Then I ran away.
As usual, someone had left the copier blinking with an indecipherable error message. ‘Clear Tray 6TL984.5,’ this one read. I yanked out the only tray I could locate, disappointingly labeled One. Not noticing any stray papers, I shoved the tray back in and proceeded to bang drawers, pound buttons, and shake the machine. Nothing happened. I kicked it. The copier hummed loudly and spat out several pages covered with gibberish.
Kelly ran into the room, not a single wayward strand slipping out of her hairspray-fortified do. “Vanessa! You fixed it!” She lifted the copies to her nose and inhaled as if they were freshly minted bills.
“It’s printing garbage,” I told her. “You’ll have to feed your papers through again.”
“This is what the industrial hygienists’ field notes look like,” she explained.
“Oh.”
Once the copier finished with Kelly’s documents, I started on Henry’s packet. Since this was a copy assignment and not a shredding exercise, I used the glass flatbed instead of the feeder tray. It required that pages be processed one by one, but avoided the feeder’s nasty proclivity to tear contents to a pulp.
By the time I finished, Henry’s meeting had already begun. I slipped into the conference room and placed the packets by him. His eyes were hard, but I knew he wouldn’t reprimand me when surrounded by upper management. He likely worried I would exact revenge by wrenching his toupee off amid gasps of supervisory horror. His fear remained unjustified as far as I could see. Most of the people in this room had receding hairlines, assuming they had hairlines left at all. And what did these people do anyway, besides sit around making tons of money? I can be a manager too, I thought as the person to Henry’s left emitted a deafening burp.
My spirits lifted after I returned to my desk and checked Henry’s online calendar. He’d be in that meeting for two hours. That was two uninterrupted hours I’d get all to myself. Thank goodness for corporate bureaucracy.
For twenty minutes I played solitaire before I noticed my voicemail light shining. I wondered how many minutes, hours, days, or months that message had sat there unheard. I’d instructed both Beth and Brian to hang up and dial later should voicemail ever pick up. Otherwise, I couldn’t be held responsible for not responding.
I lifted the receiver. The dial tone screamed in my ear. Now what? How did I access voicemail? I’d heard of people checking voicemail messages before, but for all I knew the stories were just urban legends.
I began hitting buttons as if operating the fax machine. Various beeps and bleeps sounded before I spotted the button labeled Voicemail. I pressed it, and a mechanical female voice took me through a series of commands. After keying in my extension, loudness preference, social security number, and shoe size, I was in. I felt like management material already.
An ominous male voice came on the line. “We’re still waiting for the lab reports. Return them ASAP, or you will be sorry.”
My smugness evaporated. I clutched the receiver but was no longer listening. I almost missed the robotic woman coming back on the line and announcing, “Message left . . . Today. At . . . Seven. Fifty. One. a.m.”
He knew where I worked—or where I spent my days at least.
The receiver fell onto the desk with a clatter.
* * *
“He knows where I work,” I hissed at Beth as we moved toward the mall food court.
I’d insisted she meet me for lunch today despite her unusual show of reluctance. I suspected she was still angry about the croissant incident. She had also resisted eating in a mall instead of at one of our regular restaurants, but I’d persisted. I wanted the shopping crowd jostling around us like a shield against madmen.
We forged our way to the sandwich shop in the center of the first floor and grabbed our selections from under the sneezeguard, fighting off the savages pushing in line behind us.
“What are you talking about?” Beth asked as we paid for our food and headed toward a table.
Once we sat down, my heart pounded harder. Despite the surrounding chaos, sitting in the middle of the open mall left me feeling incredibly exposed. “Let’s go eat in a changing room,” I suggested, jumping back up.
Beth followed warily as I ran off.
We maneuvered through the throng of ravenous businesspeople swinging briefcases as they fought each other to the food court. I took Beth’s hand and rushed into the first clothing store I saw. I ripped a garment off a rack, and we whizzed toward the changing rooms.
“Excuse me!” a shrill voice called out as I made a mad dash for the corner stall.
I halted and turned around. A woman with a name badge glared at me.
I waved the item of clothing in the air. “I want to try this on.”
The woman placed her hands on her hips and eyed my selection. I glanced at the scrap of fabric, a flush working its way up my cheeks. Somehow, I’d managed to grab the skimpiest baby tee ever created.
The woman sneered. “You can’t simply barge in. We need to count the number of garments each . . . customer brings into the changing room.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I stared at the two-square-inch piece of pink fabric in my palm. “One, please.” Or was this considered an eighth of a garment?
The woman hesitated before reaching under the counter and handing me a plastic disk.
“Thank you.” I seized the disk and hustled toward the stall before she could change her mind.
“Wait! And where do you think you’re going?”
I froze to see what I’d done now, but it was Beth the woman had in her line of vision.
“We need to go in together,” Beth told her. Before the changing-room attendant could protest that lesbian make-out sessions were not allowed in the store, Beth latched onto my arm and pulled me into an empty stall. She slammed the door shut behind her, nearly amputating my lower leg in the process. “So, tell me what this is all about.”
Shaking, I slumped onto a tiny wooden stool. “I’m calling in sick tomorrow. The stalker left me a scary voicemail message. He knows where I work.”
Beth’s eyes bugged out. “The same guy you saw following you around with the Wall Street Journal yesterday?”
I shrugged. “It could be.”
“Did you call the police?”
“What can they do? He didn’t leave a name.” I shuddered just thinking about some thug knowing all about me but me not having a clue who he was.
“So? At least file a complaint and have it on record this guy terrorized you.”
“But I don’t know who the guy is,” I insisted. “I’d look like a fool.”
Beth scrunched up her nose. “So you’re just going to sit here and hide out?”
“Yes.”
Beth leaned against the wall and aimed her sandwich at me. “Let me get this straight. You’re going to take off work because you got an anonymous prank call? You’re going to shun all your professional responsibilities because someone threatened you on voicemail?”
“Yes.” I took a bite out of my sandwich, relieved she understood.
Beth’s eyes narrowed. “You’re going to let this creep get away with scaring the living daylights out of you while you cower in a changing room?”
I nodded. It sounded rather pathetic put that way, but at least I’d get to go on living for another few days.
“You know what your problem is?” Beth lobbed her ham and cheese onto a mounted pincushion. “You’re too damn passive!”
“Passive?” I sputtered, a cold cut hanging from the corner of my mouth.
Beth threw her hands up. “You sit there and wait for things to happen to you. You never go out and do anything to get what you want.”
The surprise accusation propelled me into a standing position. “That’s not true! I started day trading, didn’t I? I’m not sitting around on my duff waiting for Ed McMahon to come ringing.”
Beth snorted. “Please. How many trades have you executed in the past ten days?”
I counted. Dissatisfied with the first figure, I tried again.
“One.” Beth stuck an isolated middle finger straight up to emphasize the tally. “You’ve made one trade in ten days, and you call yourself a day trader. And it wasn’t even a full trade at that! You haven’t even sold Newie yet.”
“But I don’t know how to sell,” I stammered.
“Exactly. You’re waiting for someone to show you how to sell instead of learning for yourself.” She jutted her chin out. “Passive.”
I opened my mouth to protest. How dare she make these sorts of unfounded accusations because I’d moved in for a few days!
But somehow, I couldn’t form the words to refute her. After all, it was true I’d only bought one stock since becoming a day trader. But I’d tried to do more. Really, I had. All those meditation minutes on the living room pillow couldn’t be considered passive. Okay, so I’d expected to absorb financial information through spiritual connection and osmosis, but at least I’d tried. And I’d spent a few hours—rounding for simplicity—studying Hain Celestial’s annual report too. That had to count for a proactive something. I’d even committed to changing my diet and starting an exercise routine.
But you’ve made those sorts of commitments in the past and never acted on them, Analytical Vanessa scolded. And hadn’t that first purchase of Newie only been at Beth’s insistence? She’d practically had to grab the mouse from me and press the button herself. I’d thrown away Trevor’s donated financial dailies too, thinking they weren’t relevant to my success. After all, when had success ever hinged on my actions?
Never, I realized, my stomach dropping. Never in all my twenty-nine years had I succeeded through some deed of my own because never had I performed any act of significance.
Good God, Beth is right, I thought, burning with shame. I was passive. Sure, I’d become a bit feistier since getting dumped, but the facts remained the same. I still couldn’t do anything useful. A blind carrot would be more adept at making decisions than me.
“And now look at you,” Beth continued, but with less force. “Hiding away because you’re too scared to fight back.” She shook her head and exited the changing room, shutting the door behind her.
I flopped back onto the stool, tears slipping over my eyelids and down my cheeks.
I stared at the blur of pink fabric I’d never be able to fit into. At that moment, that stupid baby tee represented all my life’s failures. I contemplated the disappointments one by one. I hated my job. I’d been forced out of a home I loved by a maniac. My husband had left me. My clothes kept shrinking. My sister thought I was a pathetic failure. I didn’t make enough money to support any type of decent lifestyle. I had to beg my separated husband to pay my utility bills. I had to take the stinky, decrepit bus everywhere because the state had deemed me a reckless menace. And in four lousy months I’d be a dreadful thirty years old.
When had my life gotten so horribly derailed? More disturbingly, why hadn’t I noticed and done something about it sooner? I should have been busy circulating my résumé instead of kicking office machines while praying for some big-shot executive to walk by and notice my management potential. I should have initiated sex with Brian more often instead of lying around waiting for him to figure out when I was feeling frisky. Then maybe he never would have left me. I should have been staging counterattacks against the threatening chemist instead of hiding out. I should have begun acquiring a taste for rice cakes years ago instead of waiting for someone to invent a calorie-free chocolate dessert.
What it came down to was I always expected someone to take notice and reward me for having the potential to be something better. But after twenty-nine years, that person had yet to enter my life. How humiliating to be a so-called liberated woman of the new millennium only to realize I’d been waiting for someone else to save me all this time.
I sat up straighter and wiped the tears from my cheeks. Well, no more. I refused to hide any longer. I made a vow right then and there to find out who was terrorizing me and stop him cold. After reading article after article in women’s magazines about strong females fighting for their right to escape barbaric third-world ritualistic surgery, to fly fighter planes, to expand insurance coverage to include birth control pills, to orgasm daily for an entire month, I should have been spurred into action much sooner. Saving myself from this scientist would be my first step toward a new, proactive lifestyle.
Tomorrow I’d break into Brian’s apartment and search for documents related to those reports. He had to have more information stashed somewhere. The lab reports couldn’t exist without some sort of glossary or English translation. That would be cruel. But barring the discovery of anything useful at Brian’s, I’d still read and understand the reports, even if I needed to pursue a post-baccalaureate in chemistry or sleep with a scientist to do it.
After that, I’d take some sick-and-tired time off from work to polish up my résumé and hunt for a new job. No, make that a new career. I’d land a respectable position at a fully paperless company.
I’d take charge of my love life too and not wait around like I had with Brian. In college I’d spotted him long before he noticed me, yet I’d waited weeks for him to ask for my phone number, all the while silently screaming, ‘Campus dial 2-5924, clueless bastard!’
When we finally began dating, I’d never once called him even though it took him upwards of one month to ring me. Instead, I hovered by the telephone for weeks at a time, playing games such as never eating a prime number of cookies per sitting in order to make it ring. I waited for him to initiate sex too, foolishly believing if I batted my eyelashes furiously enough he’d get the point and stop asking whether I’d lost a contact lens on the carpet.
I waited eight months after I knew I wanted to marry him for Brian to actually propose, when I’d snatched the ring from his hand and yelled “Finally!” After we married, I became no more assertive. He’d been the one who’d found our condo and commandeered the paperwork fiasco two years ago.
Once I landed a decent career, I’d locate a new boyfriend too. Preferably he’d be named Jeeves and own a yacht and a profitable business, but anyone who didn’t burp as a form of communication and could refrain from scratching his genitals during the initial introduction to my parents would do.
After finding a decent male, I’d do my best to keep him at least until my sexual peak ended. If he turned out to be a really decent man, I might even marry him. And I wouldn’t wait around for him to propose as I’d done with Brian. I’d be the one doing the asking this time.
I’d start managing my own finances too. While I searched through his place for documentation related to the lab reports, I’d also uncover where Brian hid his money and take my fair share. Then I’d invest it all in some ultra-profitable stock and retire rich. I was taking full responsibility for the outcome of my life beginning here and now.
I pushed my way out of the stall, swiping at my tear-stained cheeks. The changing-room attendant’s jaw fell open when she saw me.
“It wasn’t my size,” I told her, holding back another sob as I tossed the baby swatch onto the counter. I rushed past a group of women shoving each other near a bra display.
As I made my way out of the store, I could already feel the effects of my new proactive lifestyle taking hold. I felt invigorated. I felt as if I could fight any one of these shoppers for the last dirt-cheap undergarment. I felt as if nothing and nobody could stop me at this moment. I felt as though my life was finally getting back on track.
And I felt absolutely terrified.
