by Diane Strong
Who was he and why didn’t he ever try to find me? Or his granddaughter? The desire to run home and be close to her daughter washed over her like a cold wave.
She set off for her car with a new spring in her step fueled by the desire to get back home. The sky seemed to become even darker and the beauty of the day quietly bled away. As she reached the end of her fourth mile the drizzly snowfall thickened to the point that it obscured her vision. Just as she rounded the last curve in the road, a snowplow thundered out of nowhere. The sudden sound and image caused her to dive from the road and into the ditch. Megan’s heart beat hard like a book being slapped on a desk over and over. She climbed out of the ditch breathless and watched as the heavy plow scraped its way up the road as if she were never there.
Her nerves were exhausted. In the final mile of her run, images she’d have rather kept in the deep crevices of her mind tormented Megan. Thoughts of the past few months and her mother brought her to tears, shaking her momentum and making running difficult and uncomfortable. She worried about her own mortality, imagined Lyndsy being left without a mother, an orphan. The whole run left a heavy sadness on her and she wanted nothing more than to be with Lyndsy in the safety of their simple home.
Her car appeared bleak and abandoned as Megan crested the final hill. She pressed the stop button on her GPS as soon as the display read six miles and walked the remaining distance back to her car. The explosive boom of an oncoming train startled her and her mind raced back to a dark accident scene flooded with emergency lights. Then, in the next instant, her mind returned to Pokeberry Road.
Regaining her composure, she reached the car and paused at the trunk to run through her stretching routine as quickly as possible. Placing her hand on the car while she grabbed hold of her right ankle, she stretched her right quad, then switched legs to stretch the left.
Pulling off her gloves, Megan squatted slightly and reached her hand over the top of her front left tire expecting to find her keys. Unable to find them after a few seconds, she allowed her fingers to caress the treads all along the top of the tire, searching. She squatted deeper so her eyes could see the top of the tire; there were no keys.
The sharp ‘ding’ of a timer in the rooster-themed kitchen interrupted the familiar sound of the theme song filling the living room. Jenny wiped her hands on her red and white apron after tossing a dusty log into the fireplace, then danced to the overstuffed couch, picked up the remote control and flicked off the television. Humming the remainder of the theme song, she paced into the kitchen and snatched her potholder off the tidy kitchen table. The smell of Turkey wafted out of the oven as Jenny used a baster to suck up the juices and then squirt it back over the top of the bird. She shut the oven door and set the timer for two more hours.
“Well, darn-it.” Megan scolded herself. She must have overshot the tire when she initially stashed the keys. Maybe they’re on the ground, she thought. Megan scanned the ground around her tire but saw no sign of disturbed snow but it had been snowing so she wasn’t surprised. Maybe they fell toward the inside of the tire. Using her hands as feelers she groped around the tire under her car, and felt nothing but snow. She was getting impatient; his delay in her plans to get home was irritating her.
“Shit!” Megan fell to her knees and started a more aggressive search, bending her head under the fender and hunting desperately for any sign of the keys. Pulling her head out from under the car she crawled around the tire on hands and knees to inspect the front and sides. Feeling a twinge of panic she used her bare hands to break through the snow and rubbed her palms into the cold hard dirt below. With a wave of her arm, she cleared all the snow from around the tire but the keys were nowhere to be found. Now her irritation was raging.
Instinctively, Megan walked around her car, running her hands over the tops of the remaining three tires, knowing the entire time that she had not put them there but methodically checking anyway. After the final tire she stopped at the passenger side and put her hands on her hips, completely at a loss for what to do next. She peered into the passenger side window and spotted her cell phone on the seat, undisturbed in the locked vehicle.
The heat she felt from her run had started wearing off now and the shivers were setting in so she pulled her gloves back on along with her headband and neck warmer. Looking around for an answer, Megan decided she needed to go to a house and call Lyndsy so her daughter could come rescue her with the spare set of car keys. As best she could recall, the closest house was about a mile back up the road.
Just as Megan began to jog toward the nearest house, she stopped abruptly and stared at the abandoned trailer. It had smoke coming out of the chimney and the front walk was freshly shoveled. Thinking back she could have sworn it wasn’t shoveled when she set out on her run. Could someone really live there? Megan had mixed emotions, she felt relieved to have a closer house from which to get help but also uneasy about the appearance of the place.
With the chill starting to run deep in her bones and her knees wet from crawling on the ground, Megan decided to attempt knocking on the trailer door to see if they had a phone she could use. Out of habit she reached down and touched her mace through her tights in the inside pocket. Megan knew she could out-run any freak who might open the door and chase her, the mace served more as a security blanket or good luck charm than as a serious weapon.
Stepping up to the door she gathered the courage to knock. With feigned confidence she knocked heavily. The sound was hollow and soft from her gloved hand so she pulled it off and tucked it into her armpit then rapped harder with her dry bare knuckles. The sting awakened her senses.
Megan was unaware of the glove slipping from her armpit and falling to the ground next to her.
The small vent near Lyndsy’s lace-covered bed blew warm air, causing the pages of her unattended book to flap as if waving goodbye. Pictures of friends clung to a long dresser mirror, making the unoccupied room seem filled with life as Lyndsy walked out. “That would be so awful, Sarah, I can’t believe your mom made you wear that to the Christmas Eve party. If my mom made me wear a Christmas sweater I swear I would die!” Lyndsy paced around the house not really going anywhere. She stepped into the bathroom, balanced the phone on her shoulder, and examined a pimple in the cabinet mirror. “Take a picture, please! I have to have a picture.”
The door opened and a smiling man with sad eyes answered. Megan couldn’t help but think the man resembled Santa Clause with it being Christmas Eve. She felt her heart relax. It seemed clear she wasn’t in any danger and she internally scolded herself for being so judgmental. Just because he lived in an abandoned-looking, run-down place didn’t make him some sort of drug-dealing squatter. He was just old and alone.
“What can I do for you, young lady? Are you in some kind of trouble? Car won’t start?” His bushy eyebrows danced as he spoke, he seemed determined to help her, whatever the problem.
“I am so sorry to bother you, sir…”
“Oh, no. No bother. And don’t call me ‘sir.’ You’ll make me feel old. It’s Billy. My friends call me Billy.” He said, making eye contact and smiling beneath his beard. His shirt had drippings of his lunch down the front of it and a golf ball-sized hole in the shoulder exposing clammy white skin with sprouts of red hair.
“Okay. Well, I came here…to your street, to go for a run. See, I just parked my car over there.” Megan turned and pointed to her car. “I didn’t realize it was part of your property.”
“Oh that’s just fine, honey. You’re welcome to park there any time you need to. But you must be crazy to be running in this cold. What are you doing? Training for some sort a marathon race or something?”
“Um, well no. I just like to run. But anyway, I came back from my run and I can’t find my car keys. They must be buried in the snow. I need to make a phone call. Do you mind if I use your phone? It’s a local call.” Megan’s voice had an uncontrollable shiver as she spoke. The chill from her run had fully set in.
“Oh. Okay, I see. Well, come on
in. You don’t need to stand out in this cold. I’m losing my heat with this door open. Heat isn’t cheap these days. Come on in and I’ll grab the phone. Sit down. Sit down and make yourself at home.” The overly-accommodating man gestured toward a tattered recliner covered with cat hair, then left the room by way of the kitchen.
Megan remained standing near the door allowing her eyes to roam around the interior, taking in the clutter a little bit at a time. Newspapers fanned out across the floor along with empty frozen dinner trays. A cat licked the remains of a tuna can on the kitchen counter next to an empty carton of milk. She could smell bacon in the air. Balled-up blankets sat mounded up in a heap on one end of the couch as though the man used it for his bed. A stack of phonebooks going back more than a decade balanced atop each other in a steep pile next to a heat bellowing pot-bellied stove. Atop a coffee table stood a dainty lamp struggling to cast a glow on the single tattered chair next to it. She saw no sign of a Christmas tree or any decorations.
“Here it is. All I have is one of these prepaid cell phones anymore, I’m afraid. I don’t make too many calls. Not enough to justify a land-line anyway. You’re welcome
