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It takes everything in me not to look back, not to run.
There is no end to the number of rules women are supposed to follow at night regarding their safety—be observant, stay off your phone, adjust your routine so you don’t always take the same route, wear comfortable shoes that you can run in and carry mace or a Swiss army knife. Or better yet, don’t walk alone at night, especially if you’ve been drinking, because alcohol lowers your awareness and your reaction time and makes you an easy target—and yet men can do any damn thing they’d like and it’s fine.
I move to the edge of the sidewalk to give this man more room to pass, but he doesn’t. He soldiers on at the same pace, following a hairbreadth behind me, so that my own pace changes and I walk somehow even faster, my shoulders squared, thinking he will touch me or worse, and I think about those women who were attacked in recent days and if the same thing happened to them in the moments before they were assaulted.
Not a second later, I think about Declan Roche. I picture his face.
I think about what I just saw on Nat’s phone: Declan can see your location.
What if he was watching Nat and me as we conspired in the entryway under the awning?
My throat tightens. I think of her beaten face and wonder to myself, if he could do that to Nat, to a woman he supposedly loves, what he could do to me, a complete stranger?
As my building draws near, fear gets the best of me and I spin around, saying, “What do you want from me? Get away.”
My hand shakes as I brandish the key like a knife.
I don’t know which of us is more surprised.
Luke, my friend from work, stands before me, frozen on the sidewalk. His eyes go wide and shock fills his face. He’s pulled back from my faux knife, which I lower, my heart hammering inside my chest.
“Meghan,” he says, reaching out a hand as my knees buckle and I stagger forward, grabbing a hold of his arm to catch myself. “Oh my God,” he says, his voice dripping with compassion and remorse. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I regain my balance and just barely get out, “It’s fine,” but the words are terse, breathless, anything but fine. I take a minute, and then I let go of his arm but still, my heart hammers inside of me and my eyes burn with tears, from fear, from relief, which I hold back, not wanting to cry in front of Luke because I don’t want to make him feel bad. It’s not his fault that I feel this way. As a man, he has no way of knowing how it feels to be a woman walking these streets alone at night.
“Are you okay?” he asks, shame and empathy in his eyes. “I didn’t know that was you.”
“Yes,” I say, but we both know that’s not true.
“Shit,” he says, taking me in. “I feel like such a jerk. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”
“It’s fine,” I say again, fighting to catch my breath, to get control of my voice so that it comes our less brusque. “I thought—” I start to say, but I stop myself, shaking my head, because I don’t want to put into words how I thought Luke was going to hurt me. I don’t want to make him feel more guilty than he already does, and saying it aloud somehow makes the possibility of it even more real. It could have happened. I could have been attacked just like that.
Luke’s breath is visible when he speaks. “I wasn’t looking where I was going. I was on my phone, texting Penelope,” he says, and I see the phone then in his hands, the glow from the screen bright as an incoming text arrives and I catch a glimpse of it upside down, feeling embarrassed for him. Fuck you, it says. He takes in the text, wincing, and then he moves his eyes to mine.
“What happened?”
“She’s pissed about something I’ve done. Again.”
I watch the wind move his hair and I ask, softening, “About what?”
Luke slides his phone into a pocket and says, “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. You’re upset.”
“Maya,” he says, explaining, “was scheduled to work the night shift last night, but there was a last-minute emergency with her mom.” Maya is another nurse at the hospital. I don’t know her well because she always works the night shift, but I know that her mom has dementia and that Maya takes care of her. “She had no one to cover for her, so I stayed until someone could come in. It took a couple hours.” As nurses, we’re supposed to call in sick three hours before our shift so there is time to find coverage, which makes sense on paper but that doesn’t mean last-minute emergencies don’t sometimes crop up.
For our patients’ safety, we’re also mandated to stay until we’ve completed the handoff to an incoming nurse, which means Luke would have had no choice but to stay until another nurse arrived. “Penelope got it in her head that I was late because I was with another woman. I can’t convince her otherwise.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it because I’ve been there myself, stuck at work when I had someone waiting for me or somewhere else to be. “I’m sure it’s just the hormones speaking. Lying around in bed all day alone would be unbearable.” Penelope is something like seven months along in her pregnancy. She’s been on bed rest a couple weeks and already it’s been hard.
“I know. It would be, especially in our little apartment. Did I ever tell you how I took her to see a house not too long ago, before the doctor put her on bed rest? A single family home in Roscoe Village.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I did. I thought I would surprise her. I thought it would make her happy. There’s no room in our apartment for all the things a baby needs. We’re bursting at the seams.”
“They’re so small and yet they require so much.”
