She held open the door and I stepped through it and made my way to the Audi. I had just about reached it when I turned. She was watching from the door. There was considerable distance between us now and she had to shout.
“I said I didn’t want to get married and I meant it, but . . .”
“But what?” I shouted back.
“You’ll never find anyone better for you than I am, Rushmore McKenzie. Never.”
I lay in my bed a long time yearning for sleep that did not come. My brain was convulsed by too many thoughts and images that made me toss and turn and twist and continually flip my pillow to the cool side. The incident in the skyway. Do the right thing. Wasn’t that a Spike Lee film? The parking lot. There is nowhere you can run that I can’t follow. There is nowhere you can hide that I can’t find you. If that wasn’t a line from a movie, it should be. Jack and Lindsey Barrett, Donovan, Muehlenhaus, and the others. Nina. Maybe I didn’t want to get married, but what the hell! Who could sleep though noise like that?
Eventually, I gave it up and padded in bare feet down the stairs and into my kitchen. In the freezer compartment of my refrigerator I retrieved a half-filled bottle of Stolichnaya. I poured two fingers of the icy vodka into a short, squat glass and took a sip. It was so cold it made my teeth ache, only, Lordy, it went down nice. I returned the bottle and glanced about. The kitchen appliances on my counter gleamed in the moonlight that filtered through my windows—blender, espresso machine, bread maker, ice cream churn, microwave, pasta maker, George Foreman grill. My sno-cone, mini-donut, and popcorn machines were stored in boxes on my kitchen table—I reminded myself to take them to the Dunstons.
I took another sip of vodka and drifted to the breakfast nook. I sat at the end of the table, surrounded by eight windows arranged in a semicircle, each window with a view of my backyard. The pond had been frozen over since early December; the ducks that lived there had been gone since late September.
Nina.
The first year there had been seven ducks, Tracy and Hepburn and their five ducklings that I named Shelby, Bobby, Victoria, and Katie, after the Dunstons, and Maureen, after my mother. Victoria and Katie returned with their mates the next year and had nine ducklings between them that I named after an assortment of friends. Yet I had never named one after Nina.
Why not?
The phone rang before I could answer the question.
“There is nowhere you can run that I can’t follow,” a voice told me. “There is nowhere you can hide that I can’t find you.”
The voice startled me. The malice it conveyed was unmistakable and I had to remind myself that it was merely a voice on the phone. It can’t hurt you. Besides, I had heard it before.
I turned on the light to read the number in my caller I. D. attachment, but the field was empty.
“Did you hear me?” the voice asked.
“There’s nowhere I can run that you can’t follow, there’s nowhere I can hide that you can’t find me. Anything else?”
The voice hesitated as if it was unsure of itself. “John Barrett must not be allowed to run for the Senate,” it replied in a rush.
“Okay. Thanks for sharing.”
A moment later, the connection was severed, leaving me staring at the silent receiver.
This is what happens when you agree to do favors for old friends.
4
The difference between five below zero and five above is mostly in the mind. The odds that your car won’t start are just as slim at either temperature; the likelihood that your water pipes might burst is just as high; the danger of frostbite, of numbing death from exposure, is just as real. Yet there was something joyous in the fact that the Twin Cities had finally crept into positive digits. I could see it in the robust gait of pedestrians who no longer felt as anxious over the climate as they had the day before and I could hear it in the voices of the customers at the Dunn Brothers coffeehouse where I had stopped for a mocha. It made me glad to be about with a job to do and a heart for any fate, as the poet once wrote. I didn’t even mind that the early morning rush hour traffic had forced me to rein in the 225 horses beneath the hood of my Audi as I made my way to Merriam Park. For once the prevailing traffic laws seemed perfectly reasonable to me.