The footprints changed the shape of the thing, and it took me about four days to understand how.
I had spent eleven nights with a very simple, very frightening story: a man is watching my house. Every element of that sentence had felt solid. And now one of the elements was wrong, because a man who stands with his feet together for nine minutes pointing away from your house is not watching your house.
But he was still standing at the end of my driveway at three in the morning, which did not become fine just because the geometry moved.
That’s the part people didn’t get when I told them. My friend Priya said, “Oh, well, so he’s not looking at you,” with actual relief, and I could not make her understand that the relief was not available to me, because the man was still there, and I still didn’t know why, and a reason I cannot see is not better than a reason I can.
My brother Nate drove down from Cleveland on the second weekend.
He is four years older and an electrician and constitutionally incapable of treating a problem as anything other than a fault to be traced, which is occasionally exactly what you need.
He watched about forty clips at my kitchen table on the laptop, at 1.5 speed, with a beer, and after the first hour he stopped talking and after the second he said, “Okay, so, some things.”
Nate’s list, which I still have, written on the back of an envelope:
He’s the same guy. Same coat, same build, same walk, all nineteen nights. Older — Nate thought sixties from the way he got moving after standing still.
He’s on foot. No car ever appears in the clips before or after, and he leaves walking. Nate’s point: whoever this is, he lives close enough to walk to my driveway at three in the morning in November.
He’s not casing the house. Nate was firm on this and it was the most calming thing anyone said to me in three months. Someone casing a house moves. They look at the side gate, they check for lights, they look at the neighbours, they walk past twice. This man arrives, stops, stands, and leaves. He never once looks at my windows.
And the timing is too good. Nineteen nights, all between 3:04 and 3:11. Nate said: people don’t do that. Even people with a habit don’t do that. That’s not a habit, that’s an appointment.
Then he said the thing that actually solved it, and neither of us noticed at the time.
He said, “What’s across the road?”
What’s across the road is nothing.
That’s what I told him, and it was true in the way that things you look at every day are true. Across the road from my driveway is the corner where our loop meets Hadley Road, and there’s a grass verge, and a utility pole, and the low brick wall of the Ferrises’ yard, and then the Ferrises’ house set back behind it.
Nate made me go out and stand where the footprints had been.
I want to describe this properly because it was the strangest fifteen minutes of the entire thing. It was about four in the afternoon, grey, cold. I stood at the end of my own driveway with my feet together, facing the way the prints had faced, and Nate stood on the porch and shouted “What can you see?”
And the answer was: the corner. The verge. The pole. The wall. A stop sign. Some tyre marks on the asphalt that have been there as long as I’ve lived here and that I had never once actually looked at.
I said, “Nothing. There’s literally nothing there.”
And Nate said, “Then he’s not looking at a thing. He’s looking at a place.”
I stopped sleeping properly after that, which I’d have thought was impossible given where I was starting from.
Because that reframing did something I could not undo. A man was coming to my driveway every night at three in the morning to stand and look at a piece of empty road, and there are not very many reasons a person does that, and I could think of one.
I did the thing everybody does now. I searched.
I searched the address, the intersection, “Hadley Road” and the town name, in about nine combinations, for two hours, and I got a zoning notice from 2011 and a church newsletter.
Then I searched the intersection with the word accident.
And I found it in eleven seconds, on the third page of a local paper’s website, from six years earlier, and I read the headline standing up in my kitchen at half past one in the morning with the laptop on the counter.
TEEN, 17, DIES IN SINGLE-VEHICLE CRASH ON HADLEY ROAD
There was a photograph. Not of the crash. Of a girl in a graduation gown holding a diploma and squinting into the sun, taken maybe three weeks before, and under it her name, and under that a sentence saying she was survived by her parents.
Her father’s name was Raymond Vance.
And I sat down on my kitchen floor, because I had spent nineteen nights building a man out of nothing, and I had built him wrong, and I was about to find out how wrong.