Love You to Death
The last Red Bull has gone warm in the cupholder. The carbonation died around sundown, and what's left tastes like a cough drop somebody else finished. Ruth swallows it anyway. She stands the can in the passenger footwell with the others and turns it until every pair of bulls points the same way.
The Camry sits in the far corner of your lot with its nose toward your building. You rent the corner unit on the third floor. Yours is the only window on the block with aluminum foil taped across it. Tonight is her fifth night watching it from this seat.
You signed the lease in May. Your corner looks across the lot and the street at her corner, third floor to third floor, and she took it for a sign. Since then she has watched you from her bedroom with the lights off and a pair of Nikon binoculars. Through them she has watched you fry onions at midnight and build flat-pack furniture. She has watched you sleep. The foil went up on the first of the five nights, the same day you stopped answering her. That night she climbed your fire escape at two by the Timex and put her eye to the gap where two sheets fail to meet. You were in bed. Your phone lit your cheekbones blue while your thumbs worked. Her own phone stayed dark in her back pocket the whole time she crouched there.
From her bedroom the foil is a flat silver blank. The tape has given up along the bottom edge, though. From down in the lot, that edge leaks a line of lamplight. The lot also gives her your lobby door and the foot of your fire escape.
She has had your building on graph paper since the week you moved in. The super, Gregorio, props the service door on the dumpster side with a cinder block every morning and smokes a Pall Mall down to the filter. The graph paper has him at 6:15 to 6:40. In June you wanted a cross breeze and pried the window latch loose with a flathead. The two brass keys on her ring are copies of yours. The hinges on your front door are her work. She did them during your gym hour with a rag in one hand and the WD-40 in the other, and she swung the door open and shut until it quit talking.
She wakes the Samsung and types.
Where are you?
Send. The timestamp sits under it like a sell-by date.
Miss you.
Send.
Call me.
Send.
The rearview mirror holds her building across the street. On the third floor, at the corner, her Pottery Barn lamp is on behind the curtains. She leaves it on when she goes out. Nobody should have to sit in the dark. Twice a day she crosses the street, and the driver's seat cools for as long as it takes two eggs to get scrambled and eaten.
A prescription bottle rides in the second cupholder. GUARDADO, DANIEL. ALPRAZOLAM 0.5 MG. TAKE ONE TABLET BY MOUTH AS NEEDED FOR ANXIETY. NO REFILLS. Most of the bottle went into the Brita in your fridge this afternoon, crushed between two spoons. Ruth shakes one of the last tablets into her palm, sets it on her tongue, and lets it go to chalk. As needed. She needs.
She checks the Timex. It is a men's Weekender with the leather creased at the hole Daniel wore it on. Ruth wears it past the last hole, in one she burned herself with a safety pin held over the stove. The hands say 12:40. In the parked car the watch goes tick, tick, tick. It is the loudest thing she owns. She can hear it through a pillow.
Your foil takes the sodium light off the lot and throws it back. The line of lamplight under it went out at midnight by the same hands. Nothing has moved since.
The black Moleskine on the passenger seat has lost the stretch in its elastic. She opens it at the dog-ear. Daniel wrote small and careful and kept every letter the same distance from the next.
February 14: Matched with someone. Ruth. Her whole bio is one line, where you go I will go. Song lyric? Ramen on Division. We talked for three hours and she never once looked at her phone. She ordered the same thing I did. Coincidence or compatibility? Either way. Either way.
She had that handwriting before she had him. In December she lifted a sock out of his gym bag while he ran intervals on a treadmill. She copied his letters off the gym sign-in sheet and the grocery lists in his recycling, and she spent six weeks filling a yellow legal pad with the same line, top of the page to the bottom, until his letters came out of her wrist without her. In February, Bumble introduced them. She kept the pad going every night after that until it filled in June. The pad under the driver's seat is all block capitals, because you print.
In April you sat on Daniel's side of the booth and ordered first. You ordered Daniel's bowl with Daniel's extra egg, and she took that for a sign too.
February 28: She has a key to my apartment. I didn't give her one. She says the landlord let her in. But she was standing in my kitchen making eggs when I woke up, and the eggs were perfect, and it felt rude to argue with my mouth full.
Ruth turns the page. The letters crowd each other here.
March 1: I told her I need space. She agreed. She was calm. She was so calm. But the door doesn't open from inside anymore. She changed the deadbolt while I slept. I can hear the TV in the living room. She's watching a cooking show. I can smell dinner.
March 2: My phone is gone. She won't let me leave. I can hear her on the other side of the door. Help. Someone. Please help.
He pressed so hard on the last "help" that the ballpoint went through to the next page.
The next page is Ruth's, in Daniel's letters.
March 3: Never mind. Misunderstanding. We talked it out. Everything's perfect now.
The entries run on for months in the same steady letters.
March 19: Ruth made the eggs again.
April 9: Ruth cut my hair.
May 30: I don't miss my phone.
A friend stapled flyers to the poles along Division on March 10 and put his number in tear-off tabs along the bottom. The detective got a postcard in those letters.
I'm fine. I needed a change. Please stop looking.
The case closed on April 1.
The sock is in a Ziploc beside the Moleskine. It is one white Gold Toe. The cotton gave up his smell a few weeks after she sealed the bag. She holds it anyway on the nights you don't answer. She presses the plastic to the bridge of her nose, breathes in nothing, and stays.
The copied keys turn like the originals. Ruth climbs your stairs with her Nikes in one hand and stands in her socks so close to your door she can smell the paint. She has her screen dimmed to its last notch.
She sends them one on top of the other.
Please call me.
Where are you?
Don't do this.
Through the door, your phone goes vrrrt, vrrrt, vrrrt across the nightstand. She knows that nightstand. It is the IKEA Malm she watched you build in May with a butter knife. The bottom drawer front went on backward.
Do you know what's really funny?
The rattling stops. The wood goes quiet against her ear.
You left the window unlocked.
Bedsprings. She gives you time to look at the window and the latch you broke. July in a studio with no AC runs down a man's spine, and she has watched it run down yours.
Still not gonna talk?
Fine. Let's play a game.
The rattling starts again and runs out of nightstand, crack, and the phone keeps buzzing on your hardwood like a bluebottle on its back. Under the noise Ruth turns your deadbolt.
Your front door opens without a sound. Ruth keeps the knob turned until the door is back in its frame, then lets the latch out a little at a time.
She sets her Nikes on your mat and squares them against your Vans.
She knows the room in the dark. Your bathroom is straight ahead, where the shower curtain stops short of the tub. Your closet holds black T-shirts on wire hangers and Levi's 511s folded over the rod. She turns left into the kitchenette and stops between the two-burner stove and the cast-iron skillet you never wash. A pass-through is cut in the wall there at counter height. From the dark on her side of it, she has the whole room.
The studio smells like you. Sandalwood deodorant, fried onion, warm sheets. Your window is up a hand's width behind the foil. Where the tape gave up along the bottom edge, the lot's light gets in and lies in a bar across the wall above your bed.
You sit on the bed with your back against that wall and your knees up. The sheet is at your waist. You hold the cracked phone in both hands and keep your face turned to the window.
Ruth wears black on entry nights. The kitchenette is dark, and you are watching the wrong side of the room. In her hoodie pocket she has a sleeve of white zip ties. In your fridge she has the Brita. The compressor kicks on at her back and hums.
I can see you.
The phone buzzes in your hands and pulls your eyes down. The screen lights the vein in your left temple. That vein comes up when you read menus and parking signs. You look at the window again, then the closet, then the bathroom door. The phone shakes.
You have two choices. Come to me. Or I'll come to you.
On the graph paper this message has a tree under it. On one branch you go for the window, and your legs fold at the sill. On one branch you go for the door, and you get as far as the mat. She did the branches where you beg in green highlighter.
She watches you read. The vein in your temple goes flat. Your chest fills once and stays full.
Then you smile.
You stand. You plant both feet on the hardwood. Your knees hold. You hold your arms out from your sides with the cracked phone in one hand and turn one slow circle, the way people turn for the wand at airport security. Your face passes through the bar of light and comes out still smiling. The circle ends with you facing the pass-through. Your eyes come to the dark where she stands, and they stay.
Ruth's free hand goes flat on your counter. The laminate is cool and a little greasy. The dish rack is at her knuckles. In the rack the Brita has been washed, turned upside down, and left to dry beside its filter.
On the graph paper the Brita is full.
You are close enough to talk to her. You type. The Samsung lights in her hand.
Funny thing, Ruth.
Three dots pulse on her screen.
Your bedroom light's still on.
The dots come back.
You should probably turn it off.
You walk to the window. You take the foil by one corner, and the tape lets go a strip at a time until both sheets come down crackling in your hand. You ball them up and step to one side.
Her building is right there, past the lot and the Camry and the street. Her floor. Her corner. The Pottery Barn lamp burns where she left it. She left the curtains shut, and the curtains are open.
A man stands in the lamp's circle.
He is thin through the shoulders and narrow at the hips, and he is standing up. His weight goes from his left hip to his right and back. She first watched that pendulum on February 14, in the line for a booth at the ramen place on Division. Then she sat across from him and held her chopsticks the way he held his and laughed when he laughed and learned the tick of his Timex Weekender.
She looks at the watch on her wrist.
She looks at the man in her window.
Daniel Guardado waves. His hand goes side to side like a windshield wiper on its lowest setting.
The Samsung leaves her hand and hits the tile, crack, and the screen splits corner to corner.
Ruth backs up until the fridge handle is in her spine. A takeout menu comes off its magnet and slides down the door. She crouches for the phone, stands, and types through the split.
How?
The answer lands before her thumb leaves the glass. It was typed and waiting.
I followed you home.
Been following for a while actually.
Across the street Daniel is still waving.
The Samsung buzzes with a photo of her bedroom closet in the white of a flash. The door is open, and somebody has shoved the winter coats to one end of the rod. In the space they covered is a wooden armchair from a dining set with two pale grooves worn into its arms. Cut zip ties curl on the seat. On the floor a plate has yellow dried along its rim and her good fork across it. Above it all run the shoeboxes. Each one has a man's name on the end in a different handwriting.
The second photo is her yellow legal pad lying open on her pillow. Daniel's letters fill it from the top line to the bottom.
I love you, Ruth. I love you to death.
I love you, Ruth. I love you to death.
I love you, Ruth. I love you to death.
The third photo loads in bands from the top down. Her kitchen ceiling. Her cabinets. Two foreheads. It is a selfie shot from below. Your arm is around Daniel's shoulders. Both of you are grinning. Daniel wears a gray crewneck with the package folds still squared across the chest. His skin hangs loose at the jaw, and his cheekbones throw shadows they never threw on Bumble. His eyes come through the cracked glass and find her against your fridge. He has one thumb up for the camera, and on that wrist is a Timex Weekender with a band so new the tail stands straight out past the keeper. It is the twin of the one ticking on Ruth's wrist. She unbuckled that one from him the night she walked him down his own stairs with his arm over her neck and his own prescription in his eggs, the way a girlfriend gets a drunk boyfriend home, and she has worn it every day since, through all the months he sat behind her winter coats with white plastic on his wrists while she lay on the other side of the closet door and filled a yellow page.
Found your collection, Ruth.
Found everything.
Found him.
You like games?
Across the street Daniel stops waving. He keeps one hand on her dresser like a ferry passenger on a rail and reaches for the lamp with the other. Her window goes black and gives back the orange of the lot lamps and the red of the Walgreens sign.
Ruth slides down the fridge until she is sitting on the tile with the takeout menu under one thigh. Her free hand finds a grout line and follows it.
The Samsung lights in her lap.
I love you, Ruth.
I love you to death.
Her thumb moves over the crack. It makes a word and takes it back, makes another, and takes that back too. She locks the screen, and the light goes.
The Timex is the loudest thing in your kitchen. She lays two fingers on the crystal. Each second knocks against them.
Across the street a door bangs. The sound comes in under your sash with the smell of cooling asphalt and the jasmine in the planter the last tenant left on your fire escape. At the window you turn your head toward it.
Ruth gets a thumbnail under the keeper. The buckle bites her wrist bone, catches in the hole she burned, and gives. The watch comes off into her palm, and where it sat her skin is white in a stripe the width of the band.
She lays the Timex face up on your tile.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
She gets one foot under her, and down by the dumpsters the cinder block drags across concrete.
