He still walks.
I want to lead with that, because I know the shape people expect and it isn’t this one. There is no chapter where Ray Vance stops going to the corner. He goes. Most nights, still, at 3:07, eleven minutes each way from the house on Corliss.
Colleen and I talked about it again in the summer and we arrived at the same place from different directions, which is that the walking was never the problem. The walking was the last thing holding the roof up. If you’d taken it off him in November you’d have had a man with nothing at all.
What’s changed is what else there is.
There’s Sunday. There’s a Tuesday thing now at the VFW that Colleen got him into and that he complains about constantly and has not missed since April. He answers the phone. He went to Indianapolis at Christmas for four days, which Colleen described to me afterwards in a voice I could hear her holding steady.
He walks and those things. That’s the difference. In November it was the walk and a house with the heating off.
The camera is still up. It is still crooked.
This has become a running joke of such long standing that it is now essentially load-bearing. He mentions it approximately every third visit. He has offered to fix it four times. Twice he has arrived with a spirit level in his coat pocket, quite openly, like a man carrying a weapon to a negotiation.
I won’t let him. I can’t fully explain why. Something about the fact that all nineteen of those clips are tilted eight degrees, and if he straightens it then everything after is level and everything before isn’t, and I don’t want the record to have a seam in it.
I did stop the notifications, permanently, and I did delete the spreadsheet, which I put off for a very long time and which took two seconds.
I kept the clips. All of them. They’re in a folder and I have not opened it since February of last year and I’m not going to, and I’m also not deleting it, and if you want to tell me that’s unresolved, it is. Some of it is just unresolved. That’s allowed.
Daniel and I are properly divorced now. It came through in the autumn.
I mention it because for about a year I told this story as though those two things were unconnected — the marriage over there, the man in the driveway over here — and that was never true and I think I knew it.
I bought that camera because I was alone in a house for the first time in my life and I was frightened of something I could not name, and I pointed it at the street because pointing it inwards was not an option. And what it caught was somebody else’s grief, standing under a streetlight forty feet from my door, at exactly the hour I was already awake.
We were both up at three in the morning. That’s the whole thing. He was outside and I was inside and we were both doing it alone in a two-hundred-yard radius, and we did that for nineteen nights before either of us knew.
I think about how ordinary that is. Not the crash, not the plaque — that part’s rare. But two people awake at three in the morning within shouting distance of each other, each assuming the street is empty. That’s every street. That’s most nights.
In June it was Delia’s birthday, and Ray asked me if I’d come.
We went at nine in the evening, which is not 3:07, and I noticed that and did not say so. Colleen drove over. Nate came, which he did not have to do and which I have not properly thanked him for.
The four of us stood at a utility pole on a corner in Ohio while a sixty-seven-year old man cleaned a small green plaque with a cloth he had brought for the purpose, and then he stepped back and he said, “That’s her,” to two people who had never met her, and Colleen said “Hi, sweetheart” to a pole, and I had to look at the road for a while.
Then we went back to my house and Ray told the forklift story to Nate, who had not heard it, and it is genuinely a very good story, and he tells it much better now than he did the first time.
A woman moved in three doors down in August and I saw a delivery box on her porch with a camera in it.
I thought about going over. I didn’t, because you can’t, because what am I going to say — if you see a man at the end of your driveway at three in the morning, it’s Ray, he’s fine. She’d think I was insane, and she’d be right to, and the whole point of what happened to me is that you cannot know that from the footage.
So instead I’ll put it here, which is not much use to her but might be to someone.
If there is a person standing outside your house at three in the morning, call the police, lock your door, and do not do what I did.
But afterwards — when it’s light, and you’re safe, and you’ve done all of that — consider that people do end up standing on dark streets, and that almost none of the reasons are the one you’re thinking of at three in the morning, and that the worst thing I found at the end of my driveway that November was a man with nowhere to put something.
The camera’s still crooked. He’s coming Sunday.