by J. S. Bailey
The house pops and cracks as the temperature continues to plummet. It sounds almost as though the whole structure wants to cave in on top of you. Wouldn’t that be something? Man who fears the sting of bullets dies in rubble instead.
A drive-by shooting on a sunny day: that’s what happened, when it all came crashing down. Neither of you ever saw it coming. Who would?
You’d bought a ring. She didn’t know yet. You’d hoped to surprise her with it when the moment was right. That moment never came.
They didn’t catch the man who did it, and no one could determine a motive. You’re sure he’s still out there somewhere, cruising around for other victims to destroy.
You’ve wondered if it wasn’t a man at all, but the devil. Since you survived him once, he might come back for you. The devil does not take kindly to being cheated.
You thought you saw him again after you were finally able to leave the hospital. You’d been walking down the sidewalk toward the café where you and Emily first met, hoping to regain some semblance of a normal life, when a white car like the one the killer drove passed by going well below the speed limit.
You don’t remember fainting. You do remember waking to find concerned strangers peering down at you. They thought you were on drugs. They didn’t know what it was like to be you. They’d never been inside your head.
Every time you went out after that, panic claimed you like a snare. You broke into hysterics in line at the bank, outside the grocery store, while getting mail. People stared accusingly as if you were someone dangerous, someone not to be trusted.
The only way to save yourself the pain and embarrassment was to not go out at all.
So you didn’t, and you haven’t—not for many years.
Your parents used to come visit before they moved away. Your mother brought casseroles and your father arrived with beer, and the three of you would sit in the living room catching up, and talk would invariably turn to The Thing.
“Jeremy, if you’re not going anywhere, why do you bother getting all dressed up?” your father asked on a day you’d worn your favorite light blue button-up shirt and splashed on aftershave for added effect. You’d done your hair as usual, too, and thought you looked quite dashing.
You’d opened your mouth and closed it a few times before saying, “Because it’s what I do. I like it this way.”
The two of them stared at you in silence for several beats. “Because Emily liked it, you mean,” your mother said.
You admit it: Emily did like the way you preen yourself, but you were doing that long before she walked into your life.
“This isn’t healthy,” your mother went on. “Shutting yourself in like this. Emily wouldn’t want you to live this way.”
Your hands tightened into pale fists. “She would if she knew it made me happy.”
You’d decided then to put all thoughts of Emily aside. Better to forget her than to remember the pain.
Now, as you freeze inside the house that had been your refuge, you wonder if it was fair of you to stop thinking of her. Emily loved you and brought unfathomable joy to your life. It would have broken her heart to be forgotten.
Tears run down your cold cheeks. You blot them on your sleeve, then hug your arms tightly over your chest for warmth. You have a fireplace; maybe you can burn some old papers on the hearth to raise the temperature a few degrees.
Then you remember you don’t have any old papers. You boxed them all up a few months ago and had Gary take them to the curb with the recycling.
“Emily, what should I do?” you ask. Your breath sends up a plume in front of your face. “I don’t want to die.”
You press your face against the icy glass and look toward the remaining fallen tree. The crew that had been working is gone, the tree is still lying across the power lines, and the snow has deepened to an inch and is steadily rising.
The sky is growing darker. It will grow even colder soon. Too cold.
You hear the rumble of an engine outside. Headlights move up the street, and an SUV pulls into the driveway across from yours. The driver—an Indian man bundled in a bright red winter coat—hops out, opens the back, and hefts firewood into his arms. His wife climbs out of the passenger seat with four bags of groceries. Both disappear into the house.
An assortment of firewood remains in the back of the SUV. These two will be warmer than you tonight. They’re probably even going to cook dinner over their fire.
Your stomach reminds you of the vacancy inside. Suddenly Emily, your long-gone Emily, is standing beside you. She places a tender hand on your cheek and says, “You know what you have to do.”
Your mind rebels at the thought. You can’t do that.
But if you don’t, you’ll freeze to death.
A whimper escapes your throat as you place a trembling hand on the doorknob.
You’re thirty-six years old. Your life really isn’t that perfect. In fact, it’s been a disaster.
Remembering the sting of bullets and the ache of loss, you step outside into the swirling snow. Emily comes with you holding your hand. You suppose she’s always been there but you’ve just been too broken to admit it.
You cross the quiet street together and knock on your neighbor’s door.
ONE
SARAH TOWNSEND LEANED her head against the passenger window and watched the countryside fly by while her husband Lyle sat in silence behind the wheel. They were driving home from a family gathering—the kind that must be endured with smiles and good cheer while on the inside you’re withering from the constant exposure to small-talk and unruly children. Sarah felt she’d done quite well this time. She hadn’t even thought about having a meltdown at this event. Perhaps she was finally growing up.
I wonder what it would be like to live out here, Sarah thought as they passed a three-story farmhouse with cranberry siding and white trim. It was another hour’s drive to Cincinnati, where they lived in a quiet luxury condominium with a goldfish and two cats. Sarah wondered if she’d like living in the country. If only she could slip into someone else’s skin and live their life for a little while before moving onward, just to get a taste of something different.
Lyle swerved the car to avoid hitting a man walking along the narrow shoulder. “Damn pedestrians. They ought to put in sidewalks out here before someone gets killed.”
Smiling, Sarah shifted to get more comfortable. After a long dry spell, she’d just had the spark of an idea.
When at last she and Lyle got home, Sarah hurried into her private office, picked up a pen and a notebook, and began to write.
HE walks along the shoulder of the two-lane country road, one foot in front of the other, making no sound that can be heard above the susurrating breeze swaying grasses in the ditch or the patches of trees losing their green to autumn.
He cannot be seen, and he walks alone.
In fact, he has been alone for so long he can hardly remember any other existence than this one. There was love once, and warmth that lit up the coldest nights with its glow, but no more.
Somewhere, leaves burn, their scent both crisp and acrid. It triggers the half-remembered thought of a one-room cabin and an elderly woman with gnarled hands humming in a rocker, but then the thought is gone.
Eventually he comes upon a three-story house resplendent with lively red siding and white shutters and trim sitting to the right at the end of a long gravel driveway, its chimney spewing curls of smoke that waft away in the wind. A massive maple with a trunk so wide a grown man couldn’t reach his arms all the way around it drapes shadows over most of the front yard, where a red tricycle lies abandoned on its side.
The man, still unseen, detects movement in the house’s front window and halts where the driveway meets the road. A car whizzes by so closely behind him that his clothing ripples in the ensuing draft, so with haste he proceeds up the driveway and to the front door.
A fortyish woman strides past the window to his right. Stepping closer for a better look, he sees she is s
miling, maybe even laughing, and her eyes are the most beautiful things he has ever seen. He is so intrigued by the sight that he places a frail hand against the cool glass, yearning to reach out to her for the comfort he has desired for so long.
The room just beyond the window contains a square oak table and a painted burgundy cupboard with glass panes in the doors revealing stacks of plates and mugs. A boy and girl, both young, sit at the table with paper and crayons, and their mother has gone into the kitchen through an open doorway and is removing a casserole from the oven.
He thinks this would be the perfect place to live.
He thinks he will stay.
SARAH stared down at her notebook, wrinkling her nose. What in the world had she just written? It made about as much sense as a dream. At least she’d gotten the idea out of her head before it started cluttering up her thought processes.
She woke her computer and continued working on the novel she’d set aside the week before. She had deadlines to meet; it would not do to miss them.
“TODAY we’re going to discuss ‘The Lonely Walker’ by Sarah Townsend,” Miss Gomez said from the front of the classroom. “I trust you all had the chance to read it.”
There came a murmuring from among the twenty-five high school juniors who had shown up today, many of whom weren’t fully awake: the downside to first-period Honors English. Miss Gomez sighed. She’d been teaching this same class for six years, but this was the first time she’d ever assigned her students this story. There had to be a way to get them interested in this highly unusual piece of fiction.
She smoothed a wrinkle in her pencil skirt. “As many of you know,” she went on, “Sarah Townsend published dozens of novels over the years and grew up in the area. She still lives here, in fact, and just celebrated her ninetieth birthday.”
She smiled at her class. They gazed back at her with glassy eyes.
“Several years ago, Townsend published a short story she wrote between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-four,” Miss Gomez said. “The one you just read.”
This elicited no response, which surprised her. Normally at least a couple students were more forthcoming than this.
She stared at the students directly in front of her, who were so unresponsive they might have been in comas. “Should I assume that none of you completed your assignment? I can write up the whole bunch of you.”
Bree, a redhead sitting in the first row, stirred to life. “I thought it was weird,” she said. “Weird and sad.”
“Sarah Townsend must have been a lonely person,” Andrew added from behind Bree. “I thought the man walking down the road invisible must have represented her.”
“You think she felt unnoticed by her peers?” Miss Gomez asked, pleased that the students were finally perking up. Threaten them with discipline, and they’d do anything.
Andrew nodded, his face serious. He was one of her most diligent students this year but wasn’t big on talking. “She envied other people’s lives, hence the ‘lonely walker’ choosing to incorporate himself into the lives of strangers.”
Miss Gomez beamed. This was just the discussion she’d been hoping for.
TWO
SARAH FINISHED THE eighth draft of her second novel and sent it off to her editor in a cloud of elation. To celebrate, she and Lyle went out to dinner with their good friends Emma and Edward, who both worked for a local news station.
Again, Sarah’s nerves didn’t feel nearly as raw as they did when she went out in public. She was twenty-four now, and feeling better than ever.
“We’re so proud of you!” Emma said while they waited for their drinks to arrive. Everyone had ordered wine except for Emma, who had deviated from her routine by asking for ice water. “I can’t wait to read this one.”
“You’ll be waiting for a while yet.” Sarah grinned. “It still has to go through rounds and rounds of edits.”
“You always were such a perfectionist.”
Sarah shrugged. “I don’t see a problem. Do you?”
Instead of answering, Emma said, “We have some exciting news, too.” She and her husband exchanged a glance. “We’re expecting.”
“What? How? I mean, congrats,” Sarah blurted, feeling the heat rise in her face. Emma had been diagnosed with diminished ovarian reserve, so the chances of her conceiving a child were slim to none.
Emma and Edward laughed. “Embryo donation,” Emma said. “Our fertility clinic has a program. People who have embryos left over from their IVF treatments sometimes choose to donate them to duds like us.”
“It’s like adoption,” Edward said, “but the kids are so small you can’t see them without a microscope.”
Since their drinks hadn’t yet been brought to the table, Sarah lifted an invisible glass into the air. “To microscopic babies,” she said.
Emma mimed her action. “To successful novels.”
Sarah fell silent, and once again the wheels began to turn in her mind.
Outside the house, the man lets out a long sigh. His heart aches at the sight of these happy people. They don’t know what it means to walk through life without a friend.
A hunger so deep fills him that he feels he might die if he doesn’t find a way to satisfy it.
The next thing he knows, he passes through the wall and enters the house. The casserole cooling on the counter smells as divine as if it has been prepared by angels.
“Time to put up your artwork!” the mother says. She has golden hair and hazel eyes in contrast to her children, who both have olive skin tones and dark hair. He wonders where their father is and what he looks like since the children don’t resemble their mother at all.
The children gather up their crayons in a little metal pail and stack their drawings on a sideboard that matches the cupboard. Without being asked, they retrieve plates from the cupboard and set the table for three.
So no father, then. At least not one with an active role in their lives, unless he is out of town.
Still, everyone appears happy, on the outside, at least. The mother brings the casserole out to the table, and then a bowl of buttered corn, and the three of them begin to dine.
His hunger grows even more unbearable while he watches them, like his own insides desire to consume him.
I should leave, he thinks. I can’t stay here. I have no place in any of this.
But hunger has rooted him to the floor.
The woman sits in front of the cupboard. The overhead light casts a radiant glow over her hair. He reaches out a trembling finger and caresses one of her curls. I was like this, once. Alive.
The little boy tells his mother about his day at school, and the girl chimes in with an anecdote of her own, and the mother spoons more casserole onto her plate wearing a smile. They make no mention of an absent father—most curious.
He watches them with envy. Maybe I can be like this again.
He looks toward the window and the autumn scenery outside, then back to the woman.
With only the tiniest shred of regret, he slides inside of her and they become one.
“WHAT did that part even mean?” a skinny girl named Annie asked from the third row back. “Did the ghost want to have sex with her, or something?”
“I thought it had something to do with the old transgender controversy,” Andrew said. “In life the ‘lonely walker’ was a man, and in death he possessed a woman so he could become female.”
Several heads nodded in agreement.
THREE
WHILE CLEANING HER office one day, Sarah came across the notebook that housed her unfinished story. She’d forgotten it again, hadn’t she? And then it got buried under stacks of notes for her current novel. It had been what, six months since she first put pen to paper? Something like that.
Sarah opened her story to the first page and reread what she’d written. It was way more surreal than her other stories, which stuck to the realm of women’s fiction. And why had she picked present tense? She supposed it added to the surrealism of it all.<
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Sarah didn’t like leaving stories incomplete, no matter how unusual the subject matter. She pondered what she’d written for a few minutes before sitting down at the desk and diving back into her tale.
He learns many things once he has joined with the woman’s mind and body. Her name is Carrie, and the children are Jenny and Jason—twins who are not biologically hers, but grew within her nonetheless. He finds this sad. He knows what it is like to be unwanted. At least Carrie wanted them. Carrie seems like a good woman.
Years pass by, and the lonely walker stays with her for lack of anywhere better to go. The children grow into teenagers, then young adults, and then they go off into the world like leaves on the wind, leaving Carrie behind.
One evening Carrie stands at the dining room window with a hand pressed to the glass just as the lonely walker did so long ago now. Black emotions roil through her like storm clouds. I never knew they’d be so ungrateful, she thinks. I gave them life, and it’s made them hate me.
Carrie misses the days of crayons and drawings so much that it hurts like the stabbing of some cruel knife. She places a hand over her heart, which has been fluttering more and more these recent months. Her doctor has warned her about her waning health, advising weight loss and exercise. She hasn’t listened.
She rushes into the bathroom, flings open the medicine cabinet, and forages for a bottle of aspirin. Maybe this will help her. Maybe this will…
Carrie slumps to the floor and lies still. The bottle rolls across the linoleum with a lonely rattling sound and comes to a stop against the baseboard heater.
He withdraws from her lifeless body and gazes down at it in sorrow, then hears a timid knock at the front door. He takes one last look at the lonesome shell that was Carrie, who has been his companion for so many years, and glides away to see who has come to visit at such an inopportune time.