Stewart and Jean (11 page)

Stewart had never told her he was just renting a couch—the way she knew was through Penny. Penny had made friends with a woman named Maggie who worked in Little Rock’s very last independent bookstore. It was in Hillcrest, where Penny liked to hang out, mulling through the frou-frou shops and corny little galleries. The women had been chatting about bookstores, and Maggie had said she had a friend working in a bookstore in New York, and Penny had said she had a friend up in New York, too, and within a few minutes Maggie had realized Penny was talking about Jean, and Penny had realized Maggie was talking about Stewart.

Immediately Maggie had gotten emotional. She’d poured forth to Penny everything she knew about Stewart’s living conditions and his strange, formless quest. She was scared to think what might happen to him, going crazy all alone up there.

Penny had immediately reported everything she’d learned over the phone to Jean. As she’d listened, Jean had wondered if Maggie had wished she could ask Jean to look after Stewart. That would have been ridiculous, of course. How much of what Maggie had told Penny had been intended to get back to Jean and evoke some sympathy? Not in a cynical way, necessarily. It did sound like the guy could use sympathy. Jean would be a bizarre candidate for giving it to him, but then again it didn’t sound like he really knew anyone else in town.

Now, Monday night, Jean was at her new home. It was quiet. Despite the commute, she still had some time before bed. She lounged in her chair, a book in her hand, listening to the silence of the house and the whoosh of traffic on the busy street many blocks away.

Not much furniture. If she stayed in this small house she’d have to fill it. The cutest piece was her nightstand table. She’d gone out shopping for one so as to have someplace to keep the gun, though when she’d found it, it had been so cute that she’d forgotten about its purpose.

She sat with the book dangling from her hand as night fell outside. She thought about pouring herself a glass of wine but couldn’t be bothered. She was feeling too lazy and cozy even to put the book down. Before long it would probably slip from her fingers and tumble to the floor.

Maybe, after all, it was nice to be someplace a little peaceful.

Idly she let her gaze crawl towards the window. What an exotic luxury, having a window so close to the ground, yet that didn’t open onto a busy noisy street. Instead it opened onto the quiet of her yard.

It was night and she had the light on inside, so it was hard to see out. But it looked to her like there was maybe something in the window.

Her book dropped and she scrambled out of her chair, hearing a strange little noise issue from her throat. There was a guy out there!

She backed up and braced her feet upon the floor and for some reason pointed down at it. “Who’s there?!” she demanded, and “Go away!”

There definitely was a human head in the gloom beyond her windowpane. Now it darted off. With horror Jean realized it had gone in the direction of her front door. She raced for it, flinging herself against it as the person outside pounded on it with his fist, so that she felt the shockwaves of it vibrate through her body. But the door was already locked, naturally.

“Go away!” she said again. Then she had a moment of crazy embarrassment: what if it was only someone knocking? What if she’d imagined the man outside, and was putting on the mental breakdown show for someone who’d brought cookies to welcome her to the neighborhood?

It wasn’t a regular knock, though. And now she heard Stewart’s voice, saying, “Let me in, I only want to have a conversation!,” even as he pounded on the door like what he only wanted was to beat her into a bag of jelly.

“Fuck you!” Jean was angry to hear how scared she sounded. She asked herself suddenly what she was doing leaning against the door like this, letting it vibrate her as that maniac outside hit it. She jumped up and backed away from it a few feet. Then she stood her ground and shouted, “Go away, I said!”

“Why should I?” he shouted through the door. “I only want to have a conversation!”

“Go away!”

“Just talk to me, you crybaby chickenshit!”

“I have a gun!” she yelled, startling herself by remembering it.

“So fucking shoot me with it!”

There was nothing else for it. Jean marched back to her bedroom. Because the house was still new to her, she opened the door to the hall closet first instead. That made for a nightmarishly disorienting second or two. She marched back to the front door, the cold gun hanging from her arm like it would drag her shoulder from its socket. “I’ve got this fucking gun right now to shoot you with it!”

“Good!”

At a loss, she stared at the door. The gun was impossibly heavy, like it was being acted upon by the gravity of some other, bigger planet. Jean raised it and pointed the barrel in the general direction of the door. Maybe he would eventually break it down, and then she would shoot him.

A wave of disgust, horror, and preemptive guilt washed through her. There were other options than that! She had a hard time even pointing the barrel at the area of the door she guessed he was behind.

That she should call 911 was a no-brainer. But it was so sad and pathetic, the notion of him being handcuffed and taken to jail, him with no friends to come and see him; the notion of his parents way down in Conway getting the call that their only living son was in jail, of their going to the Wal-Mart SuperCenter in the middle of the night to FedEx the bail money. If only she could simply find some way to make him go away.

She remembered her back door. Leaving him to continue his banging at the front of the house, she hurried to the back. She opened that door and leaned out into her yard, lit by the uncanny ambient street lights. She took a deep breath, but the words hitched to a stop in her throat; this was the first time she’d ever tried to scream in public, and she found herself with a strong inhibition against it. But she forced herself to suck in a second breath, then shout as loud as she could, “Help!”

The pounding on the front door stopped. She slammed and locked the back door again, in case he was running around to the back of the house to shut her up.

Jean stood well away from the back door, watching it like it might attack, her gun half-raised.

Nothing. No noise from the door. Nothing from the front, either. Maybe he was lurking, waiting for her to poke her head out so he could attack her. Again, the sensible thing was to call the police. Also the moral thing, if she really thought the alternative might be to blow Stewart’s brains out. The truth was that her blood was up and she didn’t want to be some fucking damsel. She was mad enough to want to fight this out, one-on-one.

She waited for some sign of him, till it was clear she would either have to call the police after all, or go look around outside to see if he was still there. She decided to do the stupid thing and go outside herself.

Gripping her gun, she went back to the front door, unlocked it, and then, when no one slammed themselves against it to force it open, she very slowly stuck her head out, bringing her gun hand out at the same time. She was squeezing the gun so tight, and her body was quivering with such tension, that it was just luck she didn’t inadvertently pull the trigger.

Stewart was out there in the middle of the road, stepping back and forth uncertainly. As she stuck her head out and looked at him, he stopped taking steps and shoved his hands into his pockets, as if he knew he looked like an idiot but there was nothing he could do about it anymore.

“What’re you doing out there, asshole?” she called.

“I took off running when you started yelling,” he called back. “But then you stopped. So I was waiting around to see if you were going to start up again.”

“Okay.”

Instead of standing still in the middle of the street, he was now walking towards her, hands still jammed in his pockets. He wasn’t hurrying; it looked almost like a stroll. Nevertheless: “I have a gun,” Jean warned.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, scornfully, as if the very idea were typical of her suspicious mind, and he hadn’t done anything to justify her alarm.

Just like your brother,
she considered saying; but she didn’t say it, and afterwards was glad she hadn’t.

Instead, she only said, “Whatever. If you move towards me fast, I’ll shoot you.”

He didn’t respond at all, just walked off the street across her yard, then sat on the end of her porch, a few feet away from where she hovered at the front door with the gun. His back was three-quarters to her. He took his hands from his pockets and began compulsively rubbing his palms on his jeans. Jean kept the gun almost but not quite pointed at him. She wondered if, assuming she did wind up shooting him, the fact that she’d let him sit on her porch first would compromise her legally.

They just stayed like that without speaking. Jean stared at Stewart, but he seemed unable to look at her.

“So what the fuck are you doing?” she finally demanded.

“What the fuck are
you
doing?”

“Sitting at home. Where I live. Which is miles and miles from where
you
live. So: what are you doing here?”

He didn’t answer. He gritted his teeth and scowled out into the night. After a moment, he said, “It’s weird that no one came when you yelled for help.”

Jean had been thinking the same thing. “I know,” she said. The two of them gazed at the sealed houses, many of which still had lights on inside, and they silently commiserated together over the inhumanity of her neighbors.

Jean pulled the conversation back to his invasion of her home: “So what are you doing here? I moved to Stroudsburg to get away from you, no offense.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

He told her how Charles had warned him that she was moving to Pennsylvania so that she could tell Stewart where she lived, and so that she’d be able to shoot him if and when he came looking for her. He had no reservations about letting her know that he’d gotten his info from Charles, who’d gotten it from Marissa (though Stewart didn’t remember her name, and just called her the redhead).

Jean listened with mounting outrage to the spin Marissa had put on her motives. “But you obviously didn’t believe them,” she said. “If you really thought the whole point of me moving out here was to kill you, you would have stayed away. Yet here you are.”

Stewart only smirked into the distance. Jean made a note to try to figure out what that smirk meant before letting him go. For now, she said, “How did you know where I was?”

“I trolled around on your Facebook page till I found your roommate’s name. Then I got her number from Information. I called her and said I was your cousin and that I needed your new mailing address so that we could have flowers delivered to you, and that I couldn’t ask you because it was supposed to be a surprise.”

“That fucking bitch. I explicitly asked her not to give out my new address.”

“No, I was really convincing. I told her we were sending the flowers for the fifteenth anniversary of some award you won in the seventh grade. It was so specific and weird, it had to be true.”

For a second Jean wondered how he knew exactly how long ago she’d been in the seventh grade. But of course he remembered her age relative to Kevin’s. He would have learned that at the time of the shooting. “I knew I shouldn’t have told her the address here,” she said.

Stewart stared straight ahead.

She sat there looking at his profile. Her gun hand had relaxed unconsciously. She was less wary now and to an observer would have simply seemed absorbed, as she tried to figure this guy out. She even sat on the porch as well, there in her doorway.

She said again, “But you must not have thought I moved up here and bought a gun for the sole purpose of luring you here and killing you. Because in that case you wouldn’t have come.”

At first Stewart didn’t say anything. There was only that smirk again.

After a few seconds he said, “If you’d shot me through that door when I wasn’t even breaking in, just because I was knocking hard, then everyone would know you were an overreacting fraidy-cat, just like I always said you were.”

“So, what? You’re willing to get yourself shot and killed, and set me up to do it, just to prove you were right and I was wrong? What good’ll it do you to be right, afterwards? You want to be dead that bad?”

Once more she thought he wasn’t going to answer, except that his smirk got deeper, like he might actually laugh. Finally he said, “Whatever.”

Jean started crying. “Kevin just really scared me that time, Stewart. He just really scared me.”

Stewart was crying, too. “He wasn’t going to hurt you.”

“I really think he was.” For some reason she had scooted closer to Stewart and was leaning towards him, like she was going to touch him.

“No,” he said. “No.” He rose to his feet. Jean kept her eyes on him, almost hungrily. Whereas she let the tears run freely down her face, he hid his with his hand, and tried to wipe them away as if he thought he could keep anyone from finding out about them. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “I just wish I’d....” He trailed off.

They were both there crying on her new suburban porch, her looking at him and him averting his eyes.

“I have to go,” he said, turning his body away from the house.

“Do you need a ride to the bus stop?” she said. It came out almost a wail. She didn’t even have a car. Maybe she was thinking of calling him a cab.

“No,” he said. “No, I should go. I wish I hadn’t come.” He left her yard and staggered down the road in the direction of the bus station. Was there even a night bus? Jean watched him go. Even after he was out of sight she sat a while and wept.

Charles called Marissa several times and left voice messages. He tried not to call
too
often, and if she’d never returned his calls he would have given up, albeit regretfully. But she did return them, with cheerful voice messages, or with texts in which she included lots of x’s and o’s, and in which she apologized for being so busy and promised they’d get together soon. So Charles held out hope. But he was savvy enough to know, as two weeks stretched into a third, that his chances were stretching thinner, too. Not a lot he could do about it. When entering or leaving the bookstore he kept an eye out, and it would have been nice to bump into her and start re-charming her. But it would be counter-productive if he started hovering outside the building, lying creepily in wait.