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Andy no longer felt safe

Andy no longer felt safe

Andy’s wife Lucy died of breast cancer at the age of thirty-two. Andy had been working as a nurse at the university hospital and decided to care for her at home during the last weeks. He had taken an extended family leave, followed by a leave of absence that so far had lasted eight months. He had tried to resign, but his supervisor convinced him to take a full year of unpaid leave with benefits because good male nurses were hard to find.

Andy was the beneficiary of Lucy’s life insurance policy. It was the only thing that consoled her after she fell ill. The first thing she did, after a long cry in Andy’s arms, was to put the premiums on auto pay from a dedicated bank account that drew from her savings, which in turn was backed up by her father’s bank. Her savings account never had a chance to run dry.

After the news of Lucy’s illness, Andy asked to be transferred to oncology so he could be near the victims to whom he felt the closest. He would cry about his patients on his drive home every day, hoping to have run out of tears when Lucy’s turn came. He always had a smile for her in those last days that were so other-worldly.

Andy felt numb in the weeks after Lucy was gone, only releasing his grief when he saw an older gentleman struggling at an intersection, a child stomping on an insect, or crows picking at roadkill. And then, the thing with his legs started happening. And the earth hurtling into space. He had read all about centrifugal and centripetal forces: one pulled the Earth toward the sun, and the other toward Space (he couldn’t remember which was which), thus keeping it in its orbit. Andy no longer felt safe from the pull into oblivion.

Felix, and especially Natalie, had been so good to him, and Andy felt he was slowly recovering from his loss. They say it takes a year, the same amount of time the earth needs to revolve around the sun in a balance between those opposing forces. He, too, was hoping to regain balance.

When he got home from dinner, the apartment was dark. He went inside and sat on the living room couch. He reached for his phone to check his email, even though he suspected there wouldn’t be any messages and discovered that he had left his cellphone at Felix’s house. He remembered he had set it on the table of the porch and decided to go back for it.

Felix and Natalie’s house was only a couple of miles from his place in Collegetown. Andy preferred the more tightly knit fabric of the village center, but Felix had convinced Natalie to move to a “safer” neighborhood. To Andy, all that unstructured space in between the houses did not feel safe.

To avoid disturbing them, he didn’t pull into the driveway. He parked on the concrete gutter that was supposed to double as a sidewalk, two tires on the road, a couple of houses down. That’s when he saw the weird neighbor across the street pull into his driveway with his headlights off. The guy opened the door to the back seat and drew out a small person by the hand. The weird neighbor had not noticed anyone in the parked car. He jerked the child, who seemed to slump from sleepiness. Andy wondered why the weird neighbor hadn’t entered the garage. He watched and waited until they had gone inside, then crossed the lawn to his friends’ porch and retrieved his phone.

A light was on in Felix’s studio. He was probably working on his book. Upstairs, another light suggested that Natalie was reading in bed. This thought made Andy smile as he walked back to his car. Why wouldn’t Felix be upstairs with Natalie?

No lights were on in the weird neighbor’s house. In the moonlight, Andy could detect a slight movement of the blinds, a bundle of its thin slats moving subtly and in unison, in an upstairs window.

He stood still for a moment, wanting to look but trying not to. He didn’t want to raise suspicion about his suspicion. He could never understand why the characters in films would confront the antagonists, telling them they knew of their murderous deeds. Andy pretended to fumble in his pocket and started walking toward his car. He didn’t look back up to the window until he was behind the windshield. The bent slats dropped back into a straight line. Andy headed home.

Before sitting down on his couch again, Andy poured himself a glass of red wine. He checked his email and found a message linked to a survey about David Dill’s presentation. You had to go to his website and put in your information. Andy decided against it.

His mind went to the coziness of The Self Pub. All that red brick, and shelves of books. It was like an architectural womb. Beatrice was such a sweet woman, too. Helping writers. He wanted to go there tomorrow to learn more about her project. Andy didn’t have an unlimited amount of money, but enough to donate some equipment or software. He finished his wine, rinsed his glass, and went up to bed. On his way, he passed a framed photo of Lucy and lightly touched her face with his fingers.