GABBY MCCURTRY PULLED INTO the narrow garage under her townhouse. The day she’d moved in, she tied plastic spoons to bright yellow yarn, suspended them from the ceiling as parking parameters.
She eased her car forward, nudged the dangling spoons, and peered into all corners. Once certain she was alone, she pushed the gearshift into park and tapped the remote control; the garage door rumbled and rolled closed.
The mortgage on her townhouse with a garage strained her finances. As risk manager for a small mortgage company, her salary didn’t cover it. Gabby justified the monthly debit from her inherited investments because what was more important than safety?
“Thank you, Gramma Celeste.” She directed her eyes skyward for the briefest moment, as if she believed such things.
The year before, she’d rented an apartment with an underground parking deck. Returning home from work on October 25th, she’d pulled into her usual space, between the stairwell and the over-friendly programmer Raj’s shiny Nissan.
A man yanked open her passenger door, jabbed a leather-handled hunting knife toward her throat, and grabbed her purse.
He wore a dark green hoodie, gloves, and sunglasses. She’d gagged on the smell of his aftershave. But, in hindsight, it couldn’t have been aftershave. He had scrubby, nondescript facial hair. It must have been cologne.
When she tried to describe his car-filling stench to the police officer, he’d said, “His appearance, ma’am. What’ll help us most is a physical description of the man who robbed you.”
She hadn’t been hurt, a detail the police, her sister, her mother had drawn to her attention. Repeatedly. He was never found.
Her sister, Adrienne, advised her to stop living in fear.
“A single woman living alone.” Her mother had pressed her lips together into a thin, colorless line. She’d shaken her head and gazed upward, because her mother did, in fact, believe in such things. “You’re thirty-six years old, for heaven’s sake. How many more childbearing years do you think you have?” Gabby hadn’t responded quickly enough. “Not many, so help me, Gabrielle. Not many more.”
Gabby had never felt alone until the following week when her two parakeets—Priscilla and Elvis—died, one after the other. The next day, outside of the communal trash bins, she’d frozen, unable to dispose of their silent, fragile bodies. Raj appeared, carrying his tied, white plastic garbage bag, and asked if she was okay.
“My birds died.” Elvis and Priscilla, wrapped in her favorite flowered tea towels, felt weightless. She flinched when Raj patted her shoulder.
He said, “I have a shovel. Would you like me to bury them?”
She wondered why someone living in an apartment with no yard owned a shovel. But she’d stood three feet away as he dug under a rhododendron. She’d waited for him to step back before she’d crouched down, laid her pets in clumps of red clay.
Once the garage had closed, Gabby exited and locked her highly rated sedan. Her car’s safety features and reliability topped nearly every list. She unlocked the two deadbolts on her townhouse door and, after switching on all lights, secured them behind her. At the top of the first set of steps, she set her purse on the kitchen counter, stopped, and sniffed.
Is that gas?
She checked and rechecked all four stove burners, the miniature faux-stone fireplace in the living room, and sniffed again. Perhaps she was only 50 percent sure she’d detected the sulfur smell added to natural gas so the unsuspecting would be alerted to a carbon monoxide leak, not be poisoned and die alone.
Gabby dragged her white metal stepladder from the hall closet, up to the second landing, and placed it beneath the CO detector. She climbed the ladder, but was afraid to touch the disc, because what if it went off? When she’d rented, and before she’d been robbed, she could call maintenance. Now she was on her own.
Her phone rang. She fumbled for it in her jacket pocket. Raj. He’d recently begun calling to “check in.” Eight days before, he’d asked her to join him for a walk around the lake. She’d wavered, then declined, citing hay fever.
He’d said, “I’ll call again next week. Maybe we could meet after work for a drink?” A drink, Gabby feared, might lead to dinner.
The ladder wobbled. Her right ankle rolled as she sent Raj’s call to voicemail. She pitched sideways, having mitigated the greater risk.
— HEATHER RUTHERFORD
Heather Rutherford’s work has appeared in over a dozen publications. She grew up in a small town called Endwell in upstate New York and escaped the cold to Richmond, Virginia, where she lives with her family and a Labrador Retriever named Scout Finch.