“Please. Come on, sis.”
I turned. “I’m tired.”
“You just want to get all over Jerry.”
“No. I’m tired. This guy is stressing me out. I don’t know if I should be afraid or not. He hasn’t done anything aggressive, just weird. And I don’t feel I have enough to call the police, but I feel anxious all the time.”
“Of course you should be afraid.”
“That’s not very helpful. I’m trying not to overreact…” I thought of the man asking about me at work. But something about Tanya trying to make me more frightened than I was, caused me to push in the opposite direction, even though I didn’t believe it. I was scared.
“Some guy is lurking outside your house and chasing you when you go running? Being afraid is not over-reacting.” Her voice grew shrill. She stood and walked past me. “I’m getting more wine.”
I followed her to the kitchen and watched her uncork a somewhat expensive bottle of wine. She poured half a glass and held the bottle toward me. “Are you sure?”
“What’s going on with you?” I asked.
She clutched the bottle while she took a swallow of wine. Her eyes filled with tears and spilled over, taking her eyeliner with them. “It’s scary. I’m scared for you.”
“Thank you. But it seems like you’re…I don’t know, you seem more scared than I am.” I laughed. “How is that possible?”
“Maybe I have a lot of feelings for my big sister. Maybe I’m—“
“Where did all this come from?”
“Okay. Okay.” She put down the wineglass and the bottle. She patted her fingertips on the skin under her eyes and wiped at her cheeks.
“Okay, what?”
“Give me a minute.” She took a deep breath. She lifted the glass to her lips and took several small sips. “Can we go sit down?”
I picked up the bottle, inserted the cork, and put the bottle in the fridge.
“You’re not bringing that with us?”
“No.” I filled a glass with water and followed her to the living room. We sat beside each other on the couch, half-facing each other, half-facing the window, the darkness looking in on us.
“Something happened when Jake and I broke up.” She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. She opened them, took a sip of wine, and placed her glass on the table. “His best friend had just…he was in Afghanistan most of the time Jake and I were together.”
I nodded.
“Right before we broke up, he had just come home, and it was really important to Jake that I was nice to him. Jake said Dave had been through a lot, and he was fragile. A weird way to describe a special forces officer, but that’s what he said.”
I tucked one leg under the other and waited.
“I was super friendly to him, always tried to make him feel welcome. When Jake dumped me, Dave called me the very next day and asked me out to dinner. I told him I wasn’t interested. He didn’t like that. Not at all. And he started following me, showing up outside my house. He’s been stalking me for three months.” She started crying. “It’s awful. I thought I’d be safe here, but he found me. I don’t even know how.”
I put my hand on her knee. “It sounds terrible. But he’s been following me, not you. Why would he do that? It doesn’t make sense.”
“How should I know? Maybe he thinks I’ll go with him to protect you? I don’t know. But I saw him when you came back from running. When you turned up the driveway, he stopped for a minute, then ran off down the street.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before now?”
“I thought you wouldn’t find out. I thought…I don’t know what I thought. But I knew if I told you about him before I came, you would never have let me stay here, and I had to get out of California. I had to find a place to hide that—“
“You don’t think very well of me if you assumed I wouldn’t let you stay under those conditions.”
“I couldn’t risk it. Honestly, this wasn’t about you at all, but about me being desperate. And now…now! It didn’t do any good.” She began crying.
“Why would he go into Fresh Barons and ask about me?’
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I just know it’s him. He said I was a tease, and I made him think I really cared about him and I shouldn’t just get away with that. He hates women who send mixed messages, and he couldn’t believe women still pulled that in the twenty-first century. He said I shouldn’t just get away with humiliating him like that.” Her lips trembled.
“How did you humiliate him?”
“By making him look like a fool, for thinking I cared about him.” Her voice broke. She took a long breath. “He was so angry. And when I tried to explain that he’d misinterpreted simple friendliness, he tried to smack me. Luckily, I ducked.”
“That’s terrible!”
“It was.”
“We need to call the police.”
“No!” Tanya stood suddenly, bumping the table with the side of her leg. The wineglass wobbled, and wine splashed up the sides. She grabbed it and took a long swallow.
“You better go slowly with that wine because you’re not getting anymore.”
“You’re not my mother, Alexis. I need to relax. You have no clue how stressful this has been. I’ve been scared twenty-four-seven…for months.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“I did. They came to my apartment—three times—and they said no one was out there. It’s like Dave had a sixth sense when I would call the cops. Or maybe he saw them coming. After Afghanistan, his training, and all that—he’s really good at tracking people and also at slipping away
