He looks around the parking lot first to be sure no one is watching us. Ryan comes closer. He reaches for my shoulders and tentatively pulls me into him. I resist at first, but then I give in, finding comfort in his embrace. His arms wrap around me. He quiets my crying. “Shhhh,” he says. My own arms hang stiffly at my sides, but I lean into him, resting my head on his chest, knowing that I haven’t been this close to another man except Jake in years.
He runs a hand the length of my hair. It’s calming. “Talk to me, Nina. Tell me what’s wrong.”
I pull back, but we still stand close. The sun is behind Ryan. It’s bright. I tent a hand to my eyes as I say, “Jake left me,” feeling a sense of shame wash over me. Now that my mother saw Jake at our house the other day, I know definitively that he isn’t dead and he isn’t missing. He made a choice to leave. He doesn’t love me anymore. I went so far as to call the police this morning and tell them what I discovered. There was no point in them searching for Jake when they have truly missing people to try and find.
“What do you mean he left you?”
It isn’t that Ryan is confused. It’s that he finds it inconceivable that Jake would leave me, which I appreciate.
“We got into a fight a few days ago. These days, it seems we’re always getting into fights. I can’t do anything right. He left for work Monday morning and never came home. I thought something terrible had happened to him, but no. My mother saw him over the weekend and he’s fine. He just left me.” More than once, Jake has threatened to leave. He finally made good on his threat.
“Then he’s an idiot,” Ryan says, reaching for my elbow, his eyes holding mine for a long time.
Noise comes all of a sudden from the school building. I fall away from Ryan, pulling my arm back, turning to look. A cluster of teenage girls has stepped outside, giddy and happy and laughing. I feel my cheeks go red, hoping they didn’t see Ryan and me so close. I can only imagine what they’d say about catching Mrs. Hayes and Mr. Schroeder in an embrace. My eyes return to Ryan’s. He, too, was watching the girls. He looks back to me.
“I’m sorry you’re going through this, Nina,” he says.
I swallow. “How does it work anyway?” I ask, wiping my eyes on the back of a hand, eager to change the subject because I don’t want to talk about Jake anymore or our homelife.
“This?” he asks, holding up the tracking device.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know for sure,” he says, turning it over again in his hands, “but I think it’s a real-time GPS tracker, where someone can monitor your location from their own cell phone.”
I imagine a little map with some digital cartoon image of myself, giving real-time updates every time I get into my car to head to work or to the grocery store. I imagine someone watching from afar as a dotted line tracks my movements across town. Work. Errands. My mother’s doctor’s appointments. A cool wind sweeps across the parking lot and I shiver, hugging myself tighter as the tiny hairs on my arms and on the nape of my neck lift in the breeze. I wish I’d brought my jacket.
“You look cold,” he says, his eyes going to my arms, which are spread with goose bumps.
“I am. I have to go,” I say, suddenly remembering about my mother’s biopsy. I look at my watch. “Shit. I’m going to be late.”
Ryan seems reluctant to let me leave. “Do you want me to follow you? Make sure you get home okay?”
I appreciate his concern. There is a part of me that wants to say yes, to ask him to follow me home. This tracker has me on edge, for good reason. But it’s more than just this tracking device. It’s the anonymous and unsolicited flowers too. Did the same person who has been watching me also send the flowers? “No. I’m fine. Really. For all I know, this thing has been here for years,” I say, trying to make light of it, though that’s not possible because it was only about six months ago that Jake bought me the car.
“This is yours,” he says, handing me the GPS tracking device before he turns to walk around his car for the driver’s door. He pauses there on the other side of the car, gazing over the roof at me. “Are you going to be okay, Nina?” he asks.
I nod, but I’m scared to be in my car now, despite the fact that the tracking device has been removed. What if someone is still watching me somehow?
“I’ll be fine. Thank you again for your help.”
“I’d get rid of that by the way, if I was you,” he says, pointing at the device, before he opens his car door and gets inside. As I watch, he starts the engine and pulls away.
I hold the tracking device in my hands. I handle it with care as if it’s a bomb or a grenade, about to go off. I turn it over in my hands, feeling exposed even just holding it.
I walk over to the trash can before I leave, and drop the device in. It’s heavier than everything else in the can, upsetting it. The device sinks down low, getting buried beneath the rest of the trash.
It’s gone. But my mind can’t get rid of it so easily.
We’re ten minutes late to the appointment, which does nothing for my mother’s or my stress. The biopsy is a fine needle aspiration, which I’ve read is the easiest as biopsies go. There are far worse types. I ask her if she wants me to come into the room with her, but she goes in alone.
It doesn’t take long. After the biopsy, we go out for dinner, though we’re both too worked up to eat, for the same and for different reasons. She is thinking about the biopsy results. I am too, but I’m also thinking about Jake and about the device I found on my car. I can’t stop thinking about it.
We go for Mexican, which was once my mother’s favorite. From across the table, I can see that she is tired. We eat, or try to eat—it’s mostly a wasted effort—and then we go home.
“Don’t think about it,” I say to her as I drive, reaching for her hand. “Easier said than done, I know, but there’s no point in worrying about the results when we don’t even know if we have anything to worry about.”
The house is completely dark as I approach, so dark it’s hard to see. Both the outside and the inside lights are off. It was late afternoon when we left for the doctor’s appointment. The sun wasn’t anywhere close to setting. I didn’t even think to turn a light on, distracted and not thinking how dark it would be by the time we got back home. We were gone for hours and, in that time, the sun went down, night fell.