At eleven thirty eight, the kitchen was dark except for the small light over the stove. I sat at the table in my robe with the tablet propped against the sugar bowl. The map on the screen showed a blue dot for my own phone, in my own kitchen, and nothing else. A clock ticked on the wall. A dog barked somewhere down Elm Street. I had a cup of decaf going cold in my hands and a flashlight in the pocket of my robe, and I told myself over and over that I was not afraid.
At eleven forty exactly, the screen chimed. A second dot appeared. It was not in my house. It was out on the street, a little north, at the edge of my driveway. A message popped up beneath it. Terry Moss account, logged in, device unknown. My breath stopped. I got up, very slowly, and went to the front window and moved the curtain one inch. Under the maple at the curb, a dark pickup sat with its lights off, the engine ticking as it cooled. Someone sat in the cab with the glow of a phone on his face.
I could have called the police. Brynn had begged me to. I held the phone in my hand with my thumb on the numbers. Then I looked at that old truck again, and I knew it. A dented tailgate and a toolbox with a red stripe. It belonged to Gordon, the younger brother of Terry, who lived in a trailer outside Box Elder and had come to the funeral in a suit that did not fit. He had hugged me and said nothing at all, as he always did. I put down the phone, and I tied the belt of my robe, and I went out on the porch.
I walked down the driveway in my slippers. The night was cold and clear, the stars as sharp as pins. When I got to the passenger window, I knocked on the glass with one knuckle. Gordon jumped so hard he hit his head on the roof. He rolled down the window. His face was wet. He was sixty four years old, a big shy man with a gray beard and enormous hands, and he looked at me like a boy who had been caught stealing apples. “Edna,” he said. “I am so sorry. I can explain.”
A man who cannot say I love you will sometimes say it with a map, a tool, or a truck parked all night at the edge of a driveway.
I told him to come in. He tried to refuse. I said it was thirty degrees and I was not going to have a grown man freezing in front of my house. He followed me inside like a man walking to the gallows. I put the kettle on. He sat at my kitchen table with his cap in his hands, and I sat across from him, and I said, “Gordon. Tell me everything.” He took a long time. Then he told me what his brother had never been able to say.
Six years ago, Terry had found me standing in the middle of the road in my nightgown at four in the morning, forty miles from home, in the rain. I had no memory of driving. I do not have it now. The doctor said it was a brief episode, a kind of sleepwalking from an old medication, and that it would probably not happen again. But Terry could not stand the thought of it. He never told me, because he knew I would be humiliated. He installed the app on my phone, quietly, so that if I ever wandered again, he could find me.
He had made Gordon promise. If Terry died first, someone had to watch the map. Someone had to check each night that I was home and safe. Gordon had driven forty miles every evening since July, parked at the curb, logged in, seen the blue dot in my house, and driven home. The app made him sign in again every few weeks, and those were the eleven you saw. He had not meant to scare me. “He told me to look after you,” Gordon said, and his voice broke. “I am not good at the other things. This was the only thing I knew how to do.”
I sat there with my hands around the cup and thought about it. There was a part of me that was furious. Six years I had been followed, in a way, without being asked. And there was another part that was weeping with the simple weight of it. He had done it in the worst way possible, secretly, in the dark. But he had done it because he lay awake worrying that I would be lost on a road. I looked at Gordon, this enormous man, trying to fold himself small in my kitchen chair. I decided that I could hold both feelings at once.
I told him what I needed. No more secrets. No more sitting in the dark. I took the tablet and, with Brynn on the phone through the speaker laughing and crying, we deleted the app from my phone for good. Then I said that if Gordon wished to check on me, he could knock. He could come to supper on Sunday, bring the big hands, and fix the loose step on the porch. Gordon said nothing for a moment. Then he took a napkin and wiped his eyes, and he said, “Edna, I would be honored.”
He has come every Sunday since. He fixed the step, and the gutter, and the leaky tap in the bathroom, and he sits at the table with Brynn while she does her chemistry homework. He still says very little. But he asks me now, every Sunday, how I am, out loud. And one evening last month, he looked across the dishes and said, “Terry would be glad.” I said he would. Then I stood at the window and looked at the dark street, and for the first time in a long while, I was not being watched by anyone.
