GANDALF SIMON

Gandalf grabbed her jacket and scarf from the coat tree and called to Jess. “I’m going out to walk.”

“It’s cold,” Jess said. “Take your warm gloves.”

Gandalf wrapped a scarf around her neck and pulled on her gloves. She was grateful that Jess had stopped objecting to her nighttime walks, especially now. Their neighborhood had always been safe, probably was still safe even with the unsolved mystery of Iris’s disappearance.

Gandalf loved walking alone in the dark through the quiet neighborhood that had grown up on the site of the old hospital. She could stride without thinking, up and down the half-dozen streets mostly named after former city mayors. Such an odd concept, turning a failed healing enterprise into ordinary homes. Sometimes she thought it was creepy and disrespectful. Other times it felt perfectly reasonable to recycle grief and regret into the commonplace pleasures of domestic life.

Walking past Number Five, Gandalf watched their new next-door neighbors through the open curtains. The man paced the living room, jiggling a red-faced infant in his arms. The woman stood on a stool in the kitchen area, arranging items on the top shelf of the cupboard. For the hundredth time, she wondered what would have happened if she had managed to convince Jess years ago that they should foster a child, maybe even adopt. No, life was probably better this way. Definitely simpler.

She couldn’t see anything in Number Six. They always had the shades drawn tight. What did they have to hide, that odd couple with the alliterative A names?

Turning into the newer section of the neighborhood, she returned the wave of a woman walking her dachshund, spiffy in an iridescent green doggy sweater that sparkled under the streetlight, but she didn’t slow down. There were a surprising number of people walking dogs at this hour. Maybe she should get a dog to keep her company on these walks and while Jess was at work. Certainly easier than a foster child.

Her nighttime walking never varied. The same streets in the same order. A consistent repeated pattern. That was the soothing nature of it. Her footsteps led her brain down the well-known sidewalks, and the motion calmed her synapses. They lulled her thoughts into a soft place where nightmares were banished, and exhaustion could often blossom unto slumber. She hummed tunelessly, not aware of any true melody, a gentle accompaniment to her footsteps. It usually took an hour for the walking to bring her to a place of calm.

Leaving the row of attached townhouses, she followed the curved driveway in front of the Haskell Building and turned right along the parking lot and loading dock. Haskell was where the last patients lived in the final years before the state hospital was closed, but it now housed state offices and agencies. It was her least favorite part of the neighborhood walk, and she always hurried past the building, ugly and solemn in its brick face and harsh lines.

Some nights, more rarely now, the bars on the Haskell windows sucked her mind back to her own incarceration, and she had to relive those four horrible days in fast forward—being kidnapped at the airport, the small plane to Hurricane Island, the interrogations, the cold and humiliation, her escape and eventual rescue. She had been touched by evil and somehow managed to survive it, but not without consequences. Those ugly nights she walked faster, expelling old ghosts with long strides and swinging arms. Those nights she walked for hours.

Lately though, she looked at the building with curiosity rather than fear. There were years after she escaped from Hurricane Island when she worried that she would end up someplace like this hospital, albeit probably a more privileged version. When she and Jess first moved to town, Gandalf read every book in the Forbes Library about the state hospital. She read about the lack of evidence-based treatments. About the women who were committed because their husbands were tired of them, the people with admitting diagnoses of masturbation or hysteria, the homosexuals locked up to protect society from their contagion.

If she’d been born a century earlier, she easily could have ended up on the other side of those barred windows.

When a shape moved on the loading dock, briefly visible against the garage door, Gandalf stopped walking. She rarely interrupted the therapeutic forward motion of her walking, but she had never seen anyone here before. The dog walkers mostly kept to the streets, maybe because the nighttime woods were home to bears and deer, foxes and skunks, ticks and poison ivy. The shadow must have seen her too because it stopped and slunk back, disappearing into the dark behind a dumpster.

Gandalf resumed walking but stopped again when she heard sobbing from the direction of the building. From the shadow on the dock? She should keep walking, or she’d never fall asleep. But when she got home and told Jess about it, Jess would ask, “How could you just walk by? Didn’t you check to make sure someone wasn’t hurt?”

Reluctantly, she walked toward the dock. “Hello,” she called out, hoping hard that no one would answer. “Are you okay?”