The following evening Claire is back at work.
“Hey,” I say.
She looks at me. “Hey.”
“What happened yesterday?”
“I was sick.” A customer asks her where he can find a copy of Blue Velvet. Claire takes him to the film.
“Are you feeling better?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says and wanders off.
I catch up with her in the documentary section, where she begins to straighten out the videocassettes.
“Someone keeps calling me,” I say to her. “In the middle of the night, but they don’t say anything when I answer.”
“So?”
“It’s weird.”
A couple seconds pass before Claire says, “Maybe you should change your number.”
Claire steps out of Sal’s office. “Have a good night,” she says.
“Wait for me,” I say. “I’ll walk out with you.”
She turns to look at me. “I better wait alone this time.”
Ten minutes later I walk outside and find Claire sitting on the curb again. “He’s late again, huh?”
She glances at me but does not say anything. Her arms are clasped around her knees.
“Maybe he should invest in a watch,” I say.
She looks away.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for that to come out the way it did.”
“I don’t want him to see you standing with me,” she says. “Please, just go.”
I am tempted to stay, but I don’t know what this guy is capable of and so I concede. “See you tomorrow.”
2:52 A.M.
I’m awake and my thoughts drift to Claire. Is she in an abusive relationship? I wonder what they’re like at home, how they interact. Do they spend their time arguing like my neighbors? I picture Claire as a wallflower, absorbing all his faults.
I have trouble falling back asleep. I jot down my thoughts about Claire and her boyfriend in my journal. I turn on the TV. I watch thirty minutes of a documentary about Mike Tyson’s sudden rise in the boxing world. I swallow a second sleeping pill.
I hear a noise in the bathroom. I mute the television. I wait. The second sleeping pill is beginning to take its effect and I am scared to get up and look. Sometimes they make me hallucinate.
My eyes are slits and I don’t remember the remote control falling out of my hand.
Is someone there? I want to call out, but it’s like the words are frozen in my throat.
And then just as sleep embraces me, the door to my bathroom slowly closes.
In Sal’s office, there is a two-drawer metal filing cabinet where the employee files are kept. Through the one-way glass, I can see Sal in the front of the store, talking on the phone.
I pull open the top drawer and quickly search for Claire’s file. It’s filed alphabetically by last name and she is just after mine. I quickly jot down her phone number.
An hour before she is due into work, I call from the telephone at the front of the store, next to the registers. The number has been disconnected.
Claire is late for work and when she arrives, Sal chastises her.
“I know,” she says, and, “I’m sorry.”
“A call letting me know would have been nice,” Sal says.
Claire does not tell him that her line has been disconnected. She spends the rest of the night shelving the returns. There are a lot of them.
Later I watch her go into the restroom. She does not come out for what seems like an eternity, and when she does her eyes are moist and red.
“Ever feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders and you’d be better off dead?”
“Yes,” I say.
She barely utters a word for the remainder of the night.
The next day I notice that her hands are shaking as she punches in.
Sal is off today. We have a new Assistant Manager, who’s been transferred from another store. His name is Wade and he spends the majority of his time in Sal’s office, on the phone.
A uniformed police officer wanders into the store and begins to speak with Claire. They step outside. He is making notes on his pad.
When Claire walks back inside, she looks scared.