Linda? What did you do to her?”
Surely it was someone else who shouted the brave words. The man froze in the act of rummaging inside the cab. He straightened and spun around, the bat ready. Sarah’s knees weakened and she grabbed the top rail of her fence to keep from sagging. The man who glared at her was in his late teens. The unlaced work boots looked too big for him, as did the bulky canvas jacket he wore. His hair was unkempt and his spotty beard an accident. He scanned the street in all directions. His eyes swept right past her and her growling dog without a pause as he looked for witnesses. She saw his chest rise and fall; his muscles were bunched in readiness.
She stared at him, waiting for the confrontation. Should have grabbed the phone. Should have dialed 911 from inside the house. Stupid old woman. They’ll find me dead in the yard and never know what happened.
But he didn’t advance. His shoulders slowly lowered. She remained standing where she was but he didn’t even look at her. Not worth his attention. He turned back to the cab of the truck and leaned in.
“Sarge. Come, boy. Come.” She moved quietly away from the fence. The dog remained where he was, tail up, legs stiff, intent on the intruder in his street. The sun must have wandered behind a thicker bank of clouds. The day grayed and the fog thickened until she could scarcely see the fence. “Sarge!” she called more urgently. In response to the worry in her voice, his growl deepened.
In the street, the thief stepped back from the truck, a canvas tool tote in his hands. He rummaged in it and a wrench fell. It rang metallic on the pavement and Sarge suddenly bayed. On his back, short, stiff hair stood up in a bristle. Out in the street, the man spun and stared directly at the dog. He knit his brows, leaning forward and peering. The fat beagle bayed again, and as the man lifted his bat, Sarge sprang forward, snarling.
The fence didn’t stop him.
Sarah stared as Sarge vanished into the rolling fog and then reappeared in the street outside her fence, baying. The man stooped, picked up a chunk of the rotten branch, and threw it at Sarge. She didn’t think it hit him, but the beagle yelped and dodged. “Leave my dog alone!” she shouted at him. “I’ve called the cops! They’re on the way!”
He kept his eyes on the dog. Sarge bayed again, noisily proclaiming his territory. The thief snatched a wrench from the tool pouch and threw it. This time she heard a meaty thunk as it hit her dog, and Sarge’s yipping as he fled was that of an injured dog. “Sarge! Sarge, come back! You bastard! You bastard, leave my dog alone!” For the man was pursuing him, bat held ready.
Sarah ran into the house, grabbed her phone, dialed it, and ran outside again. Ringing, ringing … “Sarge!” she shouted, fumbled the catch on the gate, and ran out into an empty street.
Empty.
No truck. No fallen branches or dead leaves. A mist under the greenbelt trees at the end of the street vanished as the sun broke through the overcast. She stood in a tidy urban neighborhood of mowed lawns and swept sidewalks. No shattered windshield, no shabby thief. Hastily, she pushed the “off” button on her phone. No beagle. “Sarge!” she called, her voice breaking on his name. But he was gone, just as gone as everything else she had glimpsed.
The phone in her hand rang.
Her voice shook as she assured 911 that everything was all right, that she had dropped the phone and accidentally pushed buttons as she picked it up. No, no one needed to come by, she was fine.
She sat at her kitchen table, stared at the street, and cried for two hours. Cried for her mind that was slipping away, cried for Sarge being gone, cried for a life spinning out of her control. Cried for being alone in a foreign world. She took the assisted living brochures out of the recycling bin, read them, and wept over the Alzheimer’s wing with alarms on the doors. “Anything but this, God,” she begged Him, and then thought of the sleeping pills the doctor had offered when Russ had died. She’d never filled the prescription. She looked for it in her purse. It wasn’t there.
She went upstairs and opened the drawer and looked in at the handgun. She remembered Russ showing her how the catch worked, and how she had loaded the magazine with ammunition. They’d gone plinking at tin cans in a gravel pit. Years ago. But the gun was still there, and when she worked the catch, the magazine dropped into her hand. There was an amber plastic box of ammunition next to it, surprisingly heavy. Fifty rounds. She looked at it and thought of Russ and how gone he was.
Then she put it back, got her basket, and went to pick Maureen’s apples. She and Hugh weren’t home, probably up at the Seattle hospital. Sarah filled her basket with heavy apples and lugged it home, planning what she would make. Jars of applesauce, jars of apple rings spiced and reddened with Red Hots candy. Empty jars waited, glass shoulder to shoulder, next to the enamel canner and the old pressure cooker. She stood in the kitchen, staring up at them and then at the apples on the counter. Put them in jars for whom? Who could trust anything she canned? She should drag them all down and donate them.
She shut the cupboard. Done and over. Canning was as done and over as dancing or embroidery or sex. No use mooning over it.
She washed and polished half a dozen apples, put them in a pretty basket with a late dahlia, and went to visit Richard. She left the basket at the desk with a thank-you note for the nurses and went in with the cup of coffee. She gave him sips of it and told him everything, about the fog and Linda disappearing and the man with her backpack. He watched her face and listened to the story she couldn’t tell anyone else. A shadow of life came back into his face as he offered a brother’s best advice. “Shoot the son of a bitch.” He shook his head, coughed, and added, “Poor old dog. But at least he probably went fast, eh? Better than a slow death.” He gestured around him with a bony, age-spotted hand. “Better than this, Sal. Better than this.”
She stayed an extra hour with him that day. Then she rode the bus home and went directly to bed. When she woke up at 2 a.m., she swept the floor and cleaned the bathroom and baked herself a lonely apple in the oven. The cinnamon-apple-brown-sugar smell made her weep. She ate it with tears on her cheeks.
That was the day she became completely unhooked from time. Without Sarge asking her to get up at six and feed him, what did it matter what time she got up, or when she cooked or ate or raked leaves? The newspaper would always wait for her, Safeway never closed, and she never knew which days would show her a pleasant fall afternoon in a quiet neighborhood and which ones would reveal a foggy world of derelict houses and rusting cars. Why not shop for groceries at one in the morning, or read the day’s news at eight o’clock at night while eating a microwaved dinner? Time didn’t matter anymore.
That, she decided, was the secret of it. She wondered if it happened to all old people, once they realized that time no longer applied to them. She began to deliberately go out into the yard on the foggy days to stare by choice into that dismal other world. Three days after Sarge had vanished, she saw a ragged little girl shaking the lower branches of an overgrown apple tree, hoping that the last wormy apples would fall for her. Nothing fell, but she kept trying. Sarah went back into the house and brought out the basket of apples from Maureen’s tree. She stood in her backyard and pitched them over the fence, one at a time. She threw them underhand, just as she had used to pitch softballs for her children. The first three simply vanished in the fog. Then, as the mist thickened, one thunked to the weedy brown lawn by the child. The girl jumped on the apple, believing she had shaken it down herself. Sarah lobbed half a dozen more fat red apples, sprayed and watered and ripe. With each succeeding apple, the child’s delight grew. She sat down under the tree, hunched her legs to her chest for warmth, and hungrily ate apple after apple. Sarah bit into an apple herself and ate it while she watched. When she was finished, it became a game for Sarah, to stand ready to lob an apple when the child shook the tree. When the girl couldn’t eat any
