On the seventh day, he decided there was no sense to any of what he saw.
On Monday, he caught a glimpse of the girl, standing on the sidewalk outside his window, while just across the street a few people still streamed out of stores and waited for buses. She was not waiting for the bus. When it arrived, she did not get on it.
She’d moved into the apartment below his just a few days before. Her name began with a P. Peggy or Penny or Petra or Perry. He didn’t know her last name. He didn’t know how old she was, probably in college. She didn’t live with anyone. She appeared to be waiting for someone. After ten minutes, close to that, she rounded a corner and didn’t appear again for the rest of the night.
On Tuesday, she was out there again, only this time, in the rain. She stood across the street in what seemed to be a small pocket of the storm, no umbrella, but wearing an open black rain coat that came down to her knees. Several feet above her head, a neon sign blinked La dromat. The raindrops struck his window pane, and he tried to decipher a rhythm, letting the sound shift between two tones as time passed, a pattern developing. Now he began to think he could hear a melody, very soft, and he wasn’t sure if it was in his mind or if it was really out there. It could have been the woman who lived on the very bottom floor. Sometimes he could hear her playing her piano, pounding the keys, her feet stomping the pedals, working herself into a frenzy until it was all he heard. This was the same woman whose apartment always reeked of dead fish and something else. The odors would seep underneath the door and out into the hall, like exorcised spirits. If it weren’t for the music every evening, he’d think these smells could have been coming from her rotting corpse, that’s how little he saw of her. Not like Peggy or Penny or Petra or Perry who stood outside his window every single night but not for any particular reason, as far as he could tell.
He lied. It was not every night. On Wednesday, the girl was nowhere to be seen.
But on Thursday she was back, this time with a group of kids. They sat on the black metal bench across the street from him, the one with green vines snaking along its edges. He realized he’d come to expect her presence and here she was, back again. He still didn’t understand why. He was waiting for her to show him something. He wanted to know who or what she was waiting for.
Then came Friday. He watched as a red convertible raced through the neighborhood, barely stopping to let her in the passenger side. A man with dark hair like hers sat in the driver’s seat. The vehicle sat there by the side of the road for hours. He went to go to the bathroom, got a glass of water, turned on the TV, watched two programs before going back to the window. The car was still there.
Finally, about four hours later, the car pulled out and drove away.
Saturday it rained again but this time she wasn‘t there. Like on Wednesday, he waited up all night, but she didn’t show.
He had little hope for Sunday by this point. If a person isn’t there when you’ve come to expect them to be, just once, you can accept that. If it starts to happen more than once, you begin to lose your faith in them.
Sometimes he wondered what she would think if she observed him every night the way he observed her. Maybe she could catch his yellow outline in the bright light of his window. Maybe she knew he was there.
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