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She nods, though it’s brief. “Right.” She reaches for the glass of ice water again, lifting it into her hands, biding time, deciding whether to say more or to let the conversation drop. A man and a woman pass by beside her then, stealing her attention, and she waits—watching as they slip past, happy and laughing, him helping her into the sleeves of a long winter coat—before bringing the glass to her lips. She takes a sip and sets the glass down on the tabletop. Her eyes come to mine.
“He’s been cheating on me, with some younger woman, but that’s not the worst of it.” She pauses, gaining courage. “Declan is a lawyer, an associate at Tanner & Levine in the Loop. He’ll be up for partner in another couple years, which is a big deal—huge really—but it’s not without pressure and personal cost. It’s a seven-year track, which he’s been aspiring to since the day he started working at the firm, five years ago. It was a career change for him. Now he bills something like two thousand hours a year, which means twelve-hour days and weekends a couple times a month. He’s incredibly smart. Persuasive. A hard worker. He’s very good at what he does. But...” she says, swallowing hard, her eyes suddenly averting, shying away from mine. Her voice sinks low so that it’s hard to hear over the sound of music through the sound system, and by instinct I lean forward in my seat, watching her face, though she stares out the window as she confesses, “He can get mad sometimes. He—”
She stops what she’s saying midsentence. She goes silent, her mouth still formed around the word, not producing sound, the rest of her thoughts trapped somewhere in her throat. I watch as her posture straightens, as her spine lifts from the chair’s backrest. Her face changes too, the color whitening, blood draining, going blank.
“Nat? Is everything okay?” I ask as I follow her gaze to the corner window, where, on the other side, a dark form retreats.
On the glass is a small cloud of condensation as if from someone’s breath.
A chill rises up my spine as I watch the fog disappear. I look back to see Nat’s eyes blink hard, and when she swallows again, I watch the forced movement of it in her throat, like dislodging a rock. “I—I’m sorry,” she says. For one fleeting second, she breaks her gaze to glance at me and then her eyes go back to the window, which is empty now save for the onrush of pedestrians, bundled up in coats and hats, moving down the street. There’s a vibration to her voice when she says, “I completely forgot. A friend is sick. I promised her I’d drop off dinner tonight. She has the flu. I have to go.”
She takes her napkin from her lap. She tries to drop it on the table, though it misses by an inch and flutters to the ground just beside it. Standing up quickly, Nat reaches for the coat from the back of the chair, jabbing her arms into it though she’s anxious and so the movement isn’t fluid; it takes two or three times to find the armholes.
“Now?” I ask, looking at my watch, seeing that it’s already after eight o’clock.
“Yes,” she says, though it’s not lost on me how she’s still looking out the window and won’t meet my eye. “Well, I was supposed to be there an hour ago. She’ll be wondering where I am. If she’s even still awake.”
She digs in her bag and hands me a twenty, which I try to turn down but she won’t let me. “Please. Take it,” she says. “You were so kind to suggest this. I feel like a jerk for leaving so fast. But...”
“Your friend is sick. I understand. Please, go,” I say. “We can do this another time.”
She picks her way around tables and chairs for the main entrance, squeezing through chairs backed too closely together, disappearing somewhere I can’t see.
A few seconds later I watch out the window as she appears in the night, her hat on, a fur-trimmed hood pulled over it. She risks a glance down the street and then waits for a small group of people to catch up to her before merging with them, her head down, walking fast.
I leave the cash on the table. I follow her out into the night, letting the door drop from my hand, my eyes sweeping the street for signs of her or for the amorphous shape in the glass.
But they’re gone.
Just outside the restaurant, I send a quick text to Sienna to let her know I’m on my way, and then I put my phone in a coat pocket because I need to have my wits about me. It’s just after eight o’clock. The attacks those other nights happened right around this same time, and I’m on edge already, thinking about what Nat just said, or almost said—He can get mad sometimes. He—She never had a chance to finish what she was going to say before something on the other side of the window stole her attention. I fill in the blanks for myself.
He has a temper. He loses control. He hits me.
I think back to about four or five years ago, when I took care of a woman in the ICU who had suffered a brain hemorrhage as a result of domestic abuse. Her name was Anne, and her husband brought her in through emergency himself, claiming a misstep on the basement stairs, except that I could see how nervous she was, how she couldn’t look me in the eye, how she—like Nat—blamed herself for the supposed fall: I’m so clumsy. I’m such a klutz. My feet slipped right out from under me. I was going too fast. I’m so stupid. She was wearing socks and the basement steps, she said, were a gleaming hardwood. She slipped, her head somehow managing to ricochet off the wall before hitting the floor. She thought she was fine—just a bump on the head—until the blinding headaches began and she started to vomit. Her husband stood attentive by her side, doting on her, reluctant to leave the room even when we asked him to for an exam.
Alone, she was loath to say what happened at first, but as nurses, we’re trained to look for signs of violence, and I saw them. In time, with gentle prodding, she came clean, saying how he’d beaten her with a hockey stick while their two children—ages three and six—watched on, huddled together in the corner, crying hysterically, begging him to stop. That said, she didn’t want to get him in trouble. She loved him. She pleaded with me not to tell anyone, saying how he was sorry. He told her he’d never do it again and she believed him because she wanted so badly for that to be true.
I called the police, but there was only so much they could do because Anne didn’t press charges, and then after, I worried I’d made it worse because her husband knew she’d opened up to me about the abuse. Instead of pressing charges or leaving him, she and the children stayed and I read an article sometime in the last couple of years that made me physically sick: how he’d been arrested after finally succeeding in beating her to death.
I remember I was upset. I remember too, that Ben blamed her, the victim, because she hadn’t left when given the opportunity. She stayed and chose her fate. He said something glib like You can’t save them all, but I wondered for a long time after if I could have or should have done more, but what?
I put it out of my mind for now. I keep walking. The walk home is windy and cold, though the other night’s snow has melted, daytime temperatures surging past freezing only to fall again when the sun goes down. The streetlights are on. The shops and restaurants are open, the lights inside all ablaze, which comes as a comfort. On these busy streets, I don’t feel worried or scared.
But when I get to my little residential street, things change. The world around me becomes suddenly quiet and dark, and I start thinking about the women who were attacked in recent days, wondering if they were like me: cold and tired with aching feet, eager to be home, and if they let their guards down too soon, which is easy to do when home is within view.
I glance back over a shoulder to make sure I’m alone, and I am, as far as I can tell. The sound of my footsteps echoes down the street. I slip my hand into my bag, feeling blindly for my keys. I can’t find them at first and I get mad at myself for not taking them out of my bag back on Broadway, when there were people around. I should have thought ahead. I should have been more careful, more prepared. My search feels futile—Where the hell are my keys?—and I start to wonder if it’s possible they fell out of my bag at some point in the night, if they’re somewhere at work or on the restaurant floor.
Just as my anxiety kicks in, my fingers curl around the keys.
My walk home takes me past two boarded-up, derelict buildings and a somewhat skeevy parking lot before I get to Sienna and my apartment. The parking lot sits beneath the L tracks just adjacent to our building, and even in broad daylight is dark and dingy, the tracks overhead blocking the sun from getting in. The parking spots are owned by local residents, but some rent theirs out for cash on apps like SpotHero when they manage to find street parking for their own cars. It’s a nice side hustle, but it invites strangers into the neighborhood, which I don’t like.
I walk fast past it as the L soars by overhead, deafening me. I try not to dwell on the one car that sits idle in the parking lot with its headlights on.
I walk faster, jogging up the steps to Sienna and my building, slipping the key into the lock, letting myself into the foyer, where the wind makes its way in with me, rustling the pages of a newspaper that sits abandoned in the corner, behind the open door.
I press the door closed so I know I haven’t been followed in. I start climbing the steps to our apartment. When I’m between the first and second floors, I hear a man’s voice coming from higher up, which is where Sienna and I live. Ours is the only apartment on the third floor.
My heart rhythm hastens.
