“He ran off,” she says. “They’re looking for him.”
The cop is waiting for Claire when she gets off work. He is in his cruiser. She gets into the passenger seat and I watch them pull out of the parking lot.
Three days later, Claire informs me that her boyfriend has been arrested. He is caught hiding in a closet in his mother’s house in Lindenhurst. She will have to testify against him in court.
I ask her how things are going with the officer.
She shrugs and says, “They’re going.”
Claire tells me that he finally left his wife, and that they have since moved in together into a tiny studio apartment across town, with tiled flooring and a view of the park.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“Ted,” she says.
Ted has twin boys, age five.
A grin tips one corner of her mouth. “You want to hear something funny? He told me that he’s in love.”
I want to say things like, This is sudden or, Sure feels like it’s moving fast, or Are you happy, but I don’t.
“Crazy, right?” she says and shakes her head in disbelief.
Claire has not shown up for work in over a week. She has never updated her contact information, so there is no way to get in touch with her. Sal has written her off, especially since it is company policy to consider it job abandonment after three days.
Another week. Three weeks, four.
No word from Claire. It is like she never existed. It’s funny how you get to know certain people you work with, and then one day, they are gone and their faces begin to fade away.
Two months, three months, four.
Sal hires a new girl. Her name is Samantha. She is fifty-seven years old and originally from North Dakota. “The older ones are more responsible,” Sal says.
Maybe, I think. Maybe not.
A friend of mine says I’ll be able to rent a room at his house for half of what I am currently paying for my apartment. That’s the good news. The bad news is I have five months remaining on my existing lease. “Break it,” he suggests. When I inquire about getting out of my lease early, the leasing agent tells me I’d still be responsible for all five months, plus I would lose my security deposit. They are so nice when you are contemplating renting, I think to myself, but so nasty on the way out.
I make plans to ditch the place in the middle of the night.
On the way home from work, a cop flips their lights on and pulls me over. I wait forever for the officer to get out of his vehicle, and when he does, I notice it is Ted.
“Hey,” I say.
“License and registration, please,” he says.
“Remember me? I used to work with Claire.”
“License and registration,” he says again.
I hand them to him. He uses a small flashlight to inspect the documents.
My stomach is in knots. “How’s Claire?”
He glances at me, then at my paperwork and then back at me. “I wouldn’t know,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“Claire left me.”
“When?”
“Two and a half weeks after we moved in,” Ted says. “I don’t know where she went. Stay right here.”
I watch him return to his vehicle. I wait as he checks my identification. I still am not sure why he pulled me over.
When he finally makes his way back to me I say, “Did I do something wrong?”
He passes me my license and registration. “When you changed lanes back there, you failed to use your directional signal.”
Really, because I think that I did. I always utilize my directional signal. Something tells me he is making this up. I am already having difficulty paying my auto insurance; a ticket would be the equivalent of a stake in my heart.
“By the way, those burn marks?” he says. “On her arm?”
Burn marks? Then I remember he is referring to Claire’s scars, the ones made by Billy and his cigarettes.
“Yeah,” I say.
“She did those to herself.”
What is he talking about? How could she have possibly done that to herself? No one burns themselves with cigarettes.
“Are you sure...?”
“She’s ain’t all there,” he says. “The girl’s got issues.” He tears the ticket from its pad. “You have thirty days to pay. The address is on the back where you can send in your payment, or you can go down directly to the clerk’s office and pay it there.”
Ted heads back to his cruiser. I toss the ticket onto the passenger seat. I wait for him to leave and then I pull back onto the street.
4:21 A.M.
I have not been able to go back to sleep since the sound of the neighbors fighting again woke me. I eat a dish of ice cream and jot down a few lines in my journal. They are mostly about my earlier encounter with Ted. I could not, for the life of me, get out of my mind the things he said about Claire. Is it true? Had she burnt herself? Could she have been making those lies up about Billy? It’s possible. What if Billy had been the victim all along? Wouldn’t that be something?
And then it occurs to me that perhaps Ted’s got it all wrong and he is bitter, and the only way he can feel better about the entire thing, is if he spouts awful things about her. That’s possible too.
The telephone rings.
Once, twice, three times.
“Hello?”
No answer.
“Claire?”