I stop for coffee and a donut, taking them to go. “Have a good one, Jenny,” the owner of the bakery says to me as I leave, and I think maybe she doesn’t have it wrong after all. Maybe she knows something I don’t know. Maybe I really am a Jenny, since I’m no longer Jessica Sloane.
I pedal past a police station. On the sidewalk before the brick building, I pause. I think about stepping inside, asking them to fingerprint me. Maybe they can look my prints up in their system and tell me who I am. But I’m not sure that’s how it works. I’m sure they’d need a reason to fingerprint me, and I’m not sure I have one to give. Not a good one anyway. Not one that wouldn’t raise red flags.
But then my mind drifts to the notion of DNA, one of those in-home kits that you mail away. Those that claim, with a simple swab of the cheek, to help you figure out your family tree, find distant relatives, discover unknown ethnicities. It’s just what I need. To figure out who I am.
I return to the coffee bar on Dearborn and sit there on the blue velvet sofa, waiting for the man from the garden. Hoping he’ll come today. I see orange everywhere I look. On a shirt, a shoelace, a flyer taped to a store window, in a flower bed. But none are the man.
I go to the garden, slipping back in between the honey locust trees and finding my way to Mom’s favorite spot. It’s empty, except for a bird, a little brown thing, a sparrow, pecking away in the dirt for food. I scare it away as I make my way to the edge of the raised bed, sitting on the marbled edge, my eyes circumspect but also tired. The twitch in my eye has yet to go away. If anything, it’s gotten worse. It twitches incessantly, only stopping when I dig the heels of my hands into it and press hard.
After an hour or two, I give up. I take the long way back to the carriage home because I’m in no hurry to return. I bike past the elementary school at the corner of Cornelia and Hoyne, a stately structure made almost entirely of red brick, four floors that are tall and thin and deep. Kids play outside, on a parking lot playground beside the school building. The flag is at half-staff; someone has died. The kids are rowdy, unruly, loud, like howler monkeys defending their territory. They scurry to the top of the jungle gym, laying claim to the swings and slides.
I round the corner at Cornelia. A bell rings, calling the kids inside from play. They’ll go home soon; it’s midafternoon. Once they’re gone, the world is suddenly silent. The trees stand tall and proud, the sun’s light getting scattered at random through their leaves, dusting the sidewalk.
As I near in on the greystone, I watch as, across the street from it, a little boy schlepps a bucket, waddling down to the sidewalk with his mother on his heels. He flips the bucket upside down and a stack of chalk falls to the concrete. It makes a racket. A single blue piece nearly rolls into the street but he stops it in time, running awkwardly after it. His mother asks him what he’s going to draw, waving her hand at me, calling out hello. He’s going to draw a hippopotamus.
Ms. Geissler is also outside. She’s bent at the waist, picking weeds from her flower bed, plucking and gathering them in her hands. She wears gaudy gardening gloves and, on her head, a wide-brimmed straw hat that keeps the sun from her skin.
I see her and feel a rush of anger well inside me. A rush of anger and unease, among other things. I think of Ms. Geissler there in the third-story window watching me at night. The third story, which is overrun with squirrels. The third story, where she claims she hasn’t been in months. I think of the eyes, of her eyes, pressed to the window like the eyes of an owl, big enough and bright enough to catch prey on even the darkest of nights.
But it’s more than that too, because I’m certain that someone has been in the carriage home when I wasn’t there. Only two people should have a key to that home, and it’s Ms. Geissler and me.
The carriage home is technically hers, but as far as I’m concerned, she shouldn’t be allowed to come and go without reasonable notice. Without letting me know in advance, twenty-four hours in my opinion. It’s one thing if the pipes had burst or sewage was overflowing from the toilet, but so far, that’s not the case.
I think of what Lily the apartment finder said about carriage homes not abiding by the same rules as prescribed in the city’s landlord-tenant ordinance. Living here, I wouldn’t be protected in the same way, she’d told me.
Did she mean I’d have a complete lack of privacy? That Ms. Geissler could enter my home without permission? Open and close my window shades? Stare in through the glass at me?
For some reason, I don’t think so.
At first I think I should keep going, that I should pedal right on by. But then I have second thoughts. I want to speak to her, because there’s something nefarious going on here—many nefarious things—and I want to know what it is.
I force down the kickstand of Old Faithful and stand, hands on my hips behind Ms. Geissler. As I do, words emerge. I don’t think them through.
“Why have you been watching me?” I ask.
Her smile is warm. “Jessie,” she says kindly, as if she didn’t hear my question or the tone of my voice at all. Instead she says that it’s nice to see me today. “How about this weather?” she asks, hands elevated, praising the sun and the sky for this glorious day.
And I’m thrown easily off track, thinking then only about the weather. Forgetting about the pair of eyes watching me at night. Forgetting the fear I felt at stepping inside the carriage home and finding the shades open wide.
I snap to. “Why have you been watching me?” I ask, and her face clouds over in confusion. Her eyebrows crease.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she declares.
“I saw you,” I assert, pointing a finger at the windows up above. The windows that are dark now, not a light on inside. They’re obscure, shadows only. The only thing that I can see is the outside world getting cast back at me. A reflection. “Standing up there,” I say. “Three nights in a row now,” I say, though the truth is that I’ve lost count. It could be three. It could be four or more. “You’ve been staring into the house, watching me. Spying on me. Why?” I demand. “Why are you watching me?”
The smile slips from her face. Or rather gets replaced with one that’s more pitying. Ruts form between her eyes, deep trenches in the skin. She pulls the hat from her head and a great big cluster of hair falls from her head, getting trapped in the straw brim. Like Mom’s used to do before she bit the bullet and shaved it all off. I see her and me standing together in the shower basin. Starting with an electric shaver first, and then a cheap, plastic disposable razor. Rubbing gobs of aloe vera on it when we were through.
“Well, aren’t you going to say something?” I ask when Ms. Geissler doesn’t say anything. I can’t stand to see her looking at me piteously, saying nothing. “You have no right,” I say, my eyes lost on the clump of hair that has fallen out of her scalp. She grabs a hold of it, plucks it from the hat and releases it to the wind. “No right,” I tell her, “to be spying on me.”
“Jessie,” Ms. Geissler says. Her voice bleeds of sympathy, empathy. Or darn good theatrics. I don’t know which, but whatever it is, I don’t like it one bit. “Jessie, dear,” she says again. “You’re still not sleeping, no?” she asks. I feel my knees become liquid. They soften. I want to say no, that I haven’t been sleeping. I want her to tell me to try warm milk. A spoonful of honey. To listen to music before I go to bed. Calming music. Lullabies. Not because I trust her; I don’t. But because I want someone to tell me about the music and the voices that come to life in the ductwork at night. About Jessica Sloane.