“No. The video didn’t pick it up. But it was a four door midsize sedan, very much like this. Black.”
“It’s a popular car,” I say.
Things go from bad to worse because the next thing I know, Nina has taken her phone out of her bag, and she is pulling up the neighbor’s video on her phone so that she can compare my car to the car in the video, which in all actuality, is the same car.
“Hey, Nina,” I say, stalling, “you didn’t see Lily inside the building when you were leaving, did you?” I need Lily to come. I need for us to get out of here because I don’t want my car to be here, for Nina to notice the overt similarities between them when she finds the video.
“No.”
“I wonder what’s taking her so long.”
“I can check if you want,” she says, but it’s absentminded, and she doesn’t mean now, she means after she finds what she’s looking for on her phone.
“Could you? I’d appreciate that. I don’t know what time the repair shop closes. I want to get this battery replaced tonight.”
“Sure,” she says, and then I stand helplessly by, watching as Nina sweeps at her phone, navigating to the video. She finds the video, and she holds her phone out for me to see. “See? Doesn’t it?”
I swallow hard. Reluctantly I take the phone from her hand. I look at the image.
Predictably I find myself looking at an image of my own car. It’s not a video, but a screenshot from the video, and it’s zoomed in on my car parked on the side of her street.
Nina was right; the quality is shoddy.
I pretend to show interest. “Jeez, you’re right,” I say, staring back to my car as if making the connection. “It is similar.”
Nina says, “I thought so too.” She regards me and I wonder what she sees, what she’s thinking. She takes the phone back from me and slips it into her purse. She’s practically morose when she says, “The police called me down to the station today. I think they think I’ve done something to Jake.”
I swallow again. My saliva is thick. My eyebrows pull together and I wonder what exactly Nina knows and if she knows it was Lily who told the police that she may have done something to Jake. “That’s ridiculous, Nina,” I say, my voice sedate. “Like what?”
Nina’s shoulders come up to her ears. “I don’t know.” Again, she focuses on me, and then she looks at my car, and then she looks back at me until I can hardly breathe. “Let me go see where Lily is,” she says, stepping past me.
“Thanks. I appreciate it,” I say. I watch as she walks across the parking lot for the school. I sink against my car. Nina doesn’t make it all the way to the school building. Before she can get there, the heavy glass doors open and Lily comes out. I watch them talk. They make their way across the parking lot together.
Later, as I leave the parking lot in Lily’s car, heading to the auto shop, my hands sweaty and shaking on the steering wheel, I play back the conversation again and again in my mind, fixating on the words Nina used and her facial expression as she said them.
The thing I can’t decide is if Nina was saying that she thinks my car resembles the one in the doorbell video, or if she was not-so-subtly suggesting itismy car in the video.
NINA
I’m sure I’ve seen Christian’s car at some point in my life, but this afternoon it was as if I was seeing it for the first time.
I took a picture of the car as I pulled past and out of the parking lot. He and Lily were busy giving hers a jump. I wasn’t entirely surreptitious about it, but I don’t think they noticed. Now I have the picture of his car and a screenshot from the doorbell video on my phone and I toggle back and forth between them at a stoplight, comparing the images. They look the same to me. They might be the same. The car in the video looks lighter, but that could be because the doorbell camera was adjusting to the light, and the sun that day was practically negligible. I disregard the color of the car, focusing on the shape of it instead, the sleekness and the length of it.
The car behind me honks. The light in front of me has turned green and I’m holding up traffic. I have to go, but still I take one last look at the image, and then I set my phone aside and glide through the intersection.
Why would Christian have been in my house?
At another red light, I reach again for my phone. I know I shouldn’t, that I should wait until I get home to look, but I can’t help myself. I need to know. I go to the image of that man who broke into my home. I have a screenshot of him too. It’s taken from a great distance and every time I zoom in, the man’s face and his body get more blurred. There are no discerning features. It’s impossible to see something like hair color or the graphics on a hat or shirt because the street is so wide and the distance is far too great for the camera to adequately capture. At best I can see the shape of his body, which is tall and lean like Christian’s. Something like this would never hold water in court, but it’s tenable to me.
I stare at the imperfect image. I think of Christian.
What I can’t understand is why Christian Scott would ever break into my home.
This time when the same car behind me honks, it lays on its horn. In my rearview mirror, I see a woman’s angry face silently berate me through her windshield. I coast into another intersection as she gets in the other lane and speeds around me.
I consider calling Officer Boone. I want to tell him what I’m thinking, and yet what I have feels groundless, like I’m grasping at straws. A day ago I didn’t know who the man or the car in the video were, and then today, not twenty-four hours after Officer Boone accused me of doing something to Jake, I do. Without proof or a motive, Officer Boone will think I’m making it up, to point the finger at someone else.
I consider that Iamgrasping at straws, that I’m so desperate for answers I’m jumping to conclusions about Christian. Christian had no reason to break into my home, though it dawns on me slowly as I drive toward my mother’s house that he could have, that it’s possible because Lily knew the passcode to my garage before I changed it. She’s watched my cat before. She’s been in my house when Jake and I weren’t home.