Chumley stood that night in the arched stone doorway of the building across the street from Deirdre’s apartment. He was wearing a blue shirt, gray pants, and his clunky walking shoes. In the darkness, he was almost invisible in the shadowed doorway.
He didn’t know exactly what to expect from his vigil, but curiosity about Deirdre had driven him there. So far all it had netted him were a few glimpses of her as she passed her living room window, a traversing image that had entered his life and made him alternatingly ecstatic and uneasy.
Maybe he should leave, he thought. The night was warm and the air in the doorway was still. A swarm of gnats had found him and seemed to regard pestering him as the purpose of their brief lives, flitting about his eyes and nostrils, making him itch.
He was vigorously scratching an elbow when a motion across the street caught his eye.
Deirdre emerged not from the street door, but from the narrow walkway alongside the building. Chumley knew from helping her move that it led to a side entrance and the service elevator. She was wearing slacks, and what appeared to be a light sweater despite the heat. And she was pushing something.
Chumley glanced up and saw that her apartment’s windows had gone dark. He should have noticed earlier; he’d been distracted by the gnats.
As she moved quickly away from the building and passed beneath a streetlight, he saw that what she was pushing ahead of her on the sidewalk was a baby stroller.
She began rolling the empty stroller at a slower pace. Staying on the opposite side of the street, Chumley followed.
Near Columbus, she stopped in front of a small combination grocery store and deli. She glanced around, collapsed the small, portable stroller, then went inside.
Chumley took up position across the street from the deli and waited.
So she was going shopping, he figured, and used the stroller to carry her groceries. But why had she exited her apartment building from the side door and walked through the narrow, dark gangway? It was a place most women would avoid. And there had been, Chumley was sure, something definitely furtive about her manner.
Ten minutes later she pushed the stroller out onto the sidewalk. In its cloth seat sat a brown paper grocery sack with what appeared to be the leafy end of a cluster of celery stalks jutting up from one side at an angle.
Chumley walked a few steps toward the corner, then turned and began trailing her back along West Eighty-fifth Street toward her apartment. He watched her pause and bend forward from time to time, as if something about the groceries or stroller demanded her attention.
He took a chance and moved closer, to where he could look across the street at an angle that enabled him to see what was happening. She pushed the stroller another fifty feet, paused, then bent forward over it again, her grip still on its handles. Chumley saw with surprise that she was smiling, and she seemed to be talking. Yes, undeniably her lips were moving as if she were talking to whatever was in the paper sack.
His mood plunged. Surely there was an explanation. Maybe she had a reason, a puppy or some other sort of pet in the bag. Possibly a goldfish.
But he doubted that a store specializing in take-out food and groceries would sell any kind of fish not destined for the dinner plate.
Chumley was familiar enough with people who talked to imaginary companions, as was everyone living in New York, and passed them on the sidewalk almost every day. Schizophrenics who carried their own vocal agonies inside their heads, who should be receiving treatment instead of roaming or begging on the streets. But it shook Chumley to think that Deirdre might secretly be one of those people. He preferred to believe that if he asked her about tonight, she’d laugh and offer an easy explanation that hadn’t entered his mind.
When she reached her building, she rolled the stroller into the dark walkway without hesitation, as if confident that any waiting predator, and not she, would be in danger. Chumley wouldn’t have walked into that black maw with such resolution. He was impressed by her bravery.
He stood for a while waiting for her apartment lights to come back on. Then he saw her walking from the dark gangway. The stroller was gone and she was carrying the sack of groceries.
He watched her push open the glass doors and enter the building’s lobby.
The elevator door opened immediately when she pressed the Up button. She stepped inside, punched her floor button, then stood leaning against the elevator’s back wall, clutching her groceries to her breast and staring in the direction of the street.
Chumley was sure the bright lobby’s reflections on the glass doors would prevent her from seeing him out on the sidewalk, across the street and on the other side of a row of parked cars. He watched as the elevator door smoothly closed, cutting her from his view.
Her actions confused him, and made him even more uneasy about the irregularity in the files.
On the other hand, what had he actually seen? A woman pushing a baby stroller, then buying groceries and using the stroller to convey them to her apartment. It didn’t compute that she’d store the stroller someplace in the building’s basement, compact and portable as it was, and come and go via the service entrance. But then there was so much in life that didn’t compute if you really stopped to think about it.
She’d paused here and there on the sidewalk and done a little talking to herself, but was that a crime? And was talking to yourself even so unusual these days? Maybe what he was doing was technically a crime, stalking her. Only he knew his true motives, and they’d be difficult to describe to strangers in an official setting
Chumley considered dropping in unexpectedly on her for a visit, perhaps asking her about the walk with the stroller, about the files.
But he’d seen her sudden anger and didn’t want to provoke her again.
He stood in the shadows on West Eighty-fifth Street and stared for a while, puzzled. Her apartment lights came on again, but the living room drapes drew closed without him catching sight of her.
He slapped at the gnats, who’d patiently awaited his return, then he shrugged elaborately and walked away.
Molly pushed the empty stroller along West Eighty-fifth Street the next morning, after dropping off Michael at Small Business. Traffic was heavy, and the sidewalks were teeming with people on their way to Monday morning work.
There was a store nearby that had a coupon sale on Healy’s Cat Gourmet Meatloaf, the only brand Muffin would eat-in various flavors, of course. Molly needed some other groceries, so she thought this was a good morning to buy them, at the same time stocking up on cat food for the week and hoping Muffin wouldn’t suddenly decide to switch brands.
She was waiting for the traffic light to change at Columbus when she noticed a woman in a green dress entering a clothing store across the street.
Molly stiffened behind the stroller.
The woman had looked familiar.
So had the dress.
The light read WALK and the knot of people at the corner began to move. Molly sped up and shot out ahead of most of them, pushing the stroller so fast that the rhythmic squeal of one of its wheels was almost a steady scream.
She crossed to the other side of Columbus and hurried to the clothing shop she’d seen the woman in the green dress enter. The sign in its window boasted that it sold both men’s and women’s quality irregulars and seconds.
Molly peered through the window at the racks of clothes.
Damn it! Deirdre, or at least the woman Molly had seen enter the shop, was nowhere in sight.
Quickly she collapsed the stroller, lifted it by its light aluminum frame, and went inside. It was possible that the woman had exited the shop unseen while Molly was crossing the intersection, but Molly didn’t think so.
The shop’s interior was somewhat dim, and crowded with racks of clothing, but it took Molly only a few minutes to look around and conclude that she and an elderly woman in Plus Sizes were the only customers.
“Help you?” a blond sales clerk in her twenties asked.
“I’m looking for a friend I’m sure I saw come in here,” Molly said. “But now I don’t see her. Is anyone in the changing room?”
The girl shook her head. “No, ma’am.”
“Would you look, please?”
The girl stared at her for a few seconds, then walked away toward a curtained doorway at the back of the store.
Less than a minute later she returned. “There’s no one in any of the changing rooms, ma’am. Like I told you, no one.”
Molly thanked her and returned to the street and the warm morning sun.
No one.
Had she imagined she’d seen the woman? Seen the green dress that was like Molly’s dress or was Molly’s dress, and one of David’s favorites on her? Was she hallucinating these days?
She unfolded the stroller, locked its handle into place, and continued rolling it toward the grocery store.
Next I’ll be hearing voices, she thought.
A man walking past glanced uneasily at her, and she realized she’d unconsciously spoken.
Talking to myself now, she thought with some alarm.
Maybe that was the step before hearing voices.