A Woman Alone

by Nina Laurin

  “Yes, Cecelia?” asks the pleasant mechanical voice overhead.

  “Saya,” I say, overcome with relief and anger, “what on earth was that all about?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question, Cecelia.”

  “What were my last two requests, Saya?”

  “You asked to play some of your favorite music, Cecelia. You requested a coffee, Cecelia.”

  “I did not request any such things. And I don’t like this song.”

  “Very well. Would you like me to delete ‘Someone to Watch over Me’ from the favorites playlist?”

  “Yes,” I snap. Holding on to the edge of the counter, I get back on my feet. “Who requested this song? Who takes their coffee like this?” I nod accusingly at the cups on the counter.

  “Would you like to change the default settings?”

  “No, I would not like to change the default settings!”

  I’m flipping out at a machine. No, an AI. It’s not quite the same as a machine. What is happening to me? “Saya, for God’s sake, just tell me once and for all. Who’s Lydia?”

  There’s a silence. And in that split second, I almost believe it: that I’ve broken down her resistance, that she’s about to tell me everything, give me the answers I seek in that detached, slightly mechanical tone of hers.

  “Searching the internet for: Lydia. Please wait. The search returned 8,845,456 results. Would you like to refine the search terms?”

  “No,” I say, defeated. “Never mind.”

  “Very well, Cecelia.”

  “And please never make that coffee beverage again. Delete it. Delete it from your entire database if you can.”

  “All right, Cecelia.”

  Something tells me she’s full of shit.

  And then the doorbell rings.

  My heart leaps. For the briefest moment, I wonder whether I could just run and hide in the bedroom instead of answering.

  “Cecelia, Dorothea Miles is at the door,” Saya informs me in a pleasant voice a heartbeat later. “Would you like me to let her in?”

  Our neighbor. Of course. My next thought is, Oh God, what does she want?

  “Tell her I’ll be right at the door,” I say, and catch my breath. On my way to the front door, I pause in front of a mirror and take in the sight. I’m a mess. And this morning, when I dressed for my lunch with Anna, I thought I looked okay. Simple but put together. Well, my hair has frizzed out, the thin coat of mascara I’d swished onto my eyelashes has gathered in the folds under my eyes, and my shirt is pilling. I wipe under my eyes, smooth down the frizz with my palms as best as I can, and go answer.

  Dorothea is standing on the porch. And she’s fuming.

  “I’ve sent you messages,” she says without a hello. “And I’ve gotten no answer. So I suppose I have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

  “Excuse me?” For the umpteenth time today, I feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. Everyone seems to know what’s going on but me.

  “The noise,” she says. She folds her arms over her chest and sighs. “Look, I like jazz about as much as the next person but this? This is a bit too much even for me. It’s so loud that I can hear it—not just when I’m out in the yard but when I’m inside my house. Sound isolation my ass.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She glares. “The music! The same song, over and over and over. Playing nonstop all morning long. And now again.”

  “I haven’t gotten any messages,” I manage to say. “I’m having some…issues with my house’s AI.”

  “Issues,” she echoes, giving me a skeptical look. “So call IntelTech.”

  “I did. No one is in any hurry to fix it.” My own voice begins to betray irritation, everything that’s been bottled up over the last few days spilling through the cracks. And here she is, acting like I’m the one in the wrong.

  “All I’m saying is that I’ve never had a single issue.” Her gaze bores into me, making me even more uncomfortable. Good for you, then.

  But then I remember what Anna told me right before we parted ways.

  “Dorothea, listen. I’m really sorry. But something weird is happening.” I lower my voice through pure instinct, as though the house itself can overhear me. And it can, no matter how quietly I whisper. “With the house. Something is wrong. I think it might be trying to…harm…me.”

  Her face doesn’t soften. She keeps eyeing me, as if trying to decide what to make of my sudden confidences. Wondering whether she should dismiss me as crazy. People who play the same song over and over again at ear-splitting volume tend to be.

  “You of all people have to believe me,” I say in the same low voice.

  “And why is that?”

  I’m not exactly playing fair. I should not be inflicting this on her, and yet...

  “I talked to Anna Lindberg Finch. She told me. About the stalker.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I’ve never seen anyone’s face do such a complete transformation so fast. Dorothea’s eyebrows knit close, and her mouth tenses up, corners taking a sharp downward turn. Only her eyes remain pointy and intense but in a different way—the shift is almost imperceptible. But the anger in her turns to anguish in a split second.

  The next moment, she pushes past me. Before I can object, I feel her hand encircling my wrist. Her fingers are thin but strong, and I gasp with unexpected pain.

  “Shut the door behind you,” she mutters. Without waiting for me, she shuts it herself. We are now in the hallway, just the two of us. I’m not sure I feel safe. My heartbeat speeds up, my hands sweat. I wait for the house to register my distress and act but something tells me it won’t.

  “That twat,” Dorothy murmurs under her breath. “What did she blab to you?”

  “Nothing,” I say, at a loss. “She just said—”

  “We both go to Dr. Alice,” Dorothea interrupts. “I suppose you do too. Big deal. What I shouldn’t have done was start pouring my heart out to that blabbermouth in the waiting room.”

  I’m still processing when she adds, “And don’t look so superior. She blabs about you too, I bet.”

  “So it’s true?” I ask.

  “No. I just made it up to sound interesting.” Dorothea’s eyes glint with fury. “Yes, it’s true. It’s the twenty-first century after all, right? When you’re a journalist, with a certain level of online presence, these things happen. Especially if you happen to describe yourself as a feminist in your bio.”

  I’m starting to understand.

  “I figured, technology got me in this mess, technology will get me out,” she says with a shrug.

  “How did you find out about SmartBlock?”

  She gives me an incredulous look that’s verging on pity. “You really do live under a rock, don’t you? I didn’t find out about SmartBlock. IntelTech found me.

  “You’re going to google the hell out of it as soon as you hear my real name,” says Dorothea dismissively, “so I might as well save you fifteen minutes. Really, nothing extraordinary happened. I was dumb enough to cover a certain tech issue while also having a vagina. Not even that I was dumb, really. I just was used to it by then, you know? Internet trolls. Hateful comments. Rape and death threats all over my email and social media all day long.

  “And that time was no exception, except one of the trolls got his hands on my phone number and address somehow and posted it on the internet. I had to sleep on friends’ couches, and in hotels, you name it. Yet somehow he always tracked me down. I found dead animals on my doorstep, for fuck’s sake. I knew who he was all along but of course, what it took for the police to arrest him was him trying to strangle me.”

  I’m stricken, paralyzed before this onslaught.

  “Well, what can you do? I’m just a woman, alone, and there was no proof of wrongdoing. And the restraining order? It’s a joke.”

  I do not live under a rock. I live on Rosemary Road, next door to her, so by now, I’ve proven her wrong. I’m pretty sure of who she rea
lly is. “That’s awful” is all I can manage to say.

  Dorothea walks me to the door. “Listen, Cecelia, you seem reasonable. And now you know my story. So can we cut this short? I have things to do at home. Keep the music down, and we’re going to be best friends. Deal?”

  Part of me wants to ask her how she truly feels about all this. A journalist, a voice speaking truth to power, now shielded from the reality of the very people she’s meant to speak for behind a wall of money and fancy tech.

  I find myself nodding without really listening to what she’s saying. “They contacted us too,” I murmur.

  “Sorry?”

  “IntelTech. They contacted us too. They’d heard of me.”

  “So it sounds like you’re the winner in this situation,” she says with a finality that lets me know that she’s done talking to me. “Keep the noise down, please.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I say. “It really was the house.”

  “Too bad for me, I guess. I’m the one who’s stuck with another batshit-crazy neighbor.”

  And before I can answer, she shuts the door in my face.

  “Wait,” I say, finding my voice too late. “Dorothea! Wait!”

  Through the glass insert in the door I watch her as she walks too fast down the path and turns onto the sidewalk. Her phone is in her hand, and she taps angrily at the screen.

  “Saya, call Dorothea,” I snap. For a beat too long, no answer follows, and I’m starting to think that Saya is malfunctioning again when her calm mechanical voice speaks up.

  “I’m sorry, Cecelia. Dorothea has blocked you.”

  * * *

  In the evening, I stand by the window of the upstairs bedroom, long after Taryn has fallen asleep. I watch the other house, the one right behind ours, its forbidding geometrical shape looming there, dark. Save for a small light in one of the second-floor windows.

  “Cece?”

  I jump and spin around at the sound of Scott’s voice.

  “Oh, hey,” I say. “It’s you.”

  “Who did you think it was?” He comes up to me and puts his hands on my waist—the way he hasn’t done in some time. “Taryn is out like a light. Come downstairs. Let’s watch a movie.”

  “I think I’d rather just go to sleep. I’m dead tired. I had a long day.”

  “Mopping the floor and scrubbing toilets?” He’s mocking but not in a mean way. In a gentle, teasing way. It reminds me of the old Scott, from many years ago, back when I first fell in love with him.

  I feel an unexpected swell of tenderness, an urge to return the hug and then some, because Taryn is indeed fast asleep and there are other things we could do besides watch a movie. This takes me by surprise because I haven’t felt that physical longing for Scott in some time. In a long time. A lot longer than I care to admit.

  I always told myself this was normal—that desire wanes, that after so many years you can’t help but lose the chemistry. And trying for a baby without success for so long didn’t help. After more than a few groping sessions that fizzled out gracelessly, even Scott was forced to admit that it wore him down; the failure made him feel like less of a man. I rushed to reassure him but without too much fervor because the next logical step would be a doctor’s appointment and a simple little test that would cement it—the problem was him, and not me. I wasn’t sure his pride, or our marriage, could get past that.

  Taryn arrived just in the nick of time to save us. Unlike many, I have no trouble admitting this. I have no illusions about true love eternal, love that conquers all, and the rest. It is perhaps the healthier way to look at things, even if it’s not the most romantic. It certainly goes a long way toward keeping a relationship chugging along—to just accept that it’s never natural, it’s always work, and sometimes no amount of work is enough.

  I met Scott in my junior year of college. It was not love at first sight, not at all.

  I had just left my mother—and, I hoped, my past—securely behind, only to discover that what I left it all for was a tiny dorm room and tens of thousands of dollars of debt. The graphic design program turned out way harder than I ever thought or imagined, with so little time spent actually designing and many tedious hours hunched over a computer, poring over clunky software that refused to cooperate. My roommate popped prescription pills of dubious origin to pull all-nighters, and in order to at least cover basic expenses to avoid further getting into the red, I got my ass pinched on a nightly basis working as a busgirl at a campus bar.

  Still, I told myself that I liked this life. This was what I wanted—normalcy, the same experience all my peers were having. I was still learning the basics of freedom, not to mention the basics of putting on lipstick. Sadly, because of my inexperience on both counts, the prospect of making the smallest of decisions left me paralyzed with terror and doubt. But at least, as I got better in the lipstick department, I began to realize I was pretty. Guys in my classes kept furtively asking me to go “for coffee” after lectures, and some male teachers graded me with a little more lenience than I deserved.

  Not that I ever embodied that cliché of the pretty girl who doesn’t know it. I had a mirror and a healthy self-assessment. But my perception until then had been all-or-nothing. There were so many prettier girls all around me, solid tens to my seven and a half, and I sort of never figured there was still enough attention to go around for little old me.

  It turned out the opposite was true. The guys seemed to find the superhot girls intimidating and didn’t want to risk rejection. But someone like me was still hot enough to be appealing yet ordinary enough to at least appear accessible.

  And the attention was fun, I’m not going to lie. Guys I’ve always considered way out of my league suddenly circled me. So when a somewhat intoxicated junior who introduced himself as Scott tried to start a conversation with me after my shift, he was one of many, and I regret to say that he didn’t stand out favorably.

  Still, I bummed a cigarette off him, and we smoked out back by the emergency exit. An out-of-nowhere feeling of magnanimity kept me from ditching him and flying off to one of the many campus parties. We made small talk, and I saw plainly how hard he was trying to impress, which made me feel good in a way most girls understand all too well. But instead of the usual things guys try to dazzle with—connections, money, biceps—he kept playing all the wrong cards, at least so it seemed to the dumb twenty-one-year-old that I was. He was in business school, sure, but he was a scholarship student, and not because of athletics like several guys I’d flirted with that year but because of his high scores in math. I think he used the word prodigy, which isn’t exactly known to melt girls’ panties.

  Back then, long before he started his regular workout regimen during lunch hour, he had an earnest, chubby face that looked too young and that puppy-dog expression of the guy who never gets the girl and whose last resort is appealing to pity.

  I kept the charade going for way too long. Finally, the moment came: He told me sheepishly that his dorm was close by and asked if I would like to come smoke a joint. The way he said it, he tried to make it sound like smoking joints was a regular thing for him but the result was the opposite. And then I politely but inevitably turned him down, saying I had class in the morning even though it was a Thursday night and no one in their right mind took early-morning Friday classes. To his credit, he managed not to look crestfallen and said he’d come see me at the bar some other night.

  I was sure he wouldn’t. In fact, I left work and went to the party I had in mind all along and kind of forgot about that guy named Scott Holmes. The night was memorable for another reason altogether: I was 100 percent sure, in my infinite twenty-one-year-old-college-junior wisdom, that I’d met the great love of my life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Monday marks a return to the routine, although I’m now maniacally aware of every step. I get Taryn out of bed and dressed just minutes before the alarm is due to go off, and I make a point of cooking breakfast myself, to Scott’s surprise.


  “What’s gotten into you?” he teases. “Craving the simple life? Maybe for vacation this year, we can rent a nice little hut in an Amish village.”

  I contemplate, momentarily, telling him everything that I learned. But he’s about to leave for work, and although he’s covering it up with humor, I can see he’s impatient. He’d rather I let the machine make his coffee as usual. I start steaming milk and then Taryn starts to wail about something random so I turn my head at a crucial moment. The milk bubbles over, scalding my hand. Cursing, I turn on the tap but the water comes out at the exact too-hot temperature I preset it to. I have to yell for Saya to make it cold. Fail.

  “Is everything okay? Do you need ointment or something?” Scott asks but it sounds…automatic. When I shake my head no, he looks relieved. He gives me a peck on the cheek and then leans down to kiss the top of Taryn’s head.

  “Were you serious?” I ask, when he’s already in the doorway. “About a vacation.”

  “No Amish huts,” he chuckles. “I like it here.”

  “I didn’t mean go off the grid,” I say, doing my best to sound lighthearted. “But a vacation would be nice. Thailand, maybe.”

  Doubt flickers over his face. “Who would watch Taryn?”

  “We’d bring her with us,” I say, dumbfounded.

  And then he flinches. It only lasts for the shortest moment. “The flight would be hard for her. And I don’t see what fun it could be for a toddler in Thailand.”

  “She’d love it on the beach,” I say, although I already know I’ve lost the argument.

  “Yeah. The beach. Are we really those people who go to a country with an extraordinary culture and history and never leave the beach? What about the temples? The night markets? Bangkok?”

  “Why can’t she come with us too?”

  “She’ll be hot, bored, and hell on wheels. People who go to places like that with toddlers are only doing it for themselves, not the kids. I think it’s selfish.”