hope; I had sort of given up. Without recognizing it, the way I started watching her, what I longed to comprehend, changed. I wanted to understand what made her who she was. I wanted to understand what made her who she wasn’t.
These became my darkest days, for my actions, with every recollection, were more fixated. During the period she lived in Lawrenceburg, I watched her three times before she was relocated. In Farmington, I visited her three more times. In Columbia, I watched her nineteen times.
The one thing that improved: I became a master of lurking. Gone were the poorly planned purchases of necessities (water, cigarettes). I became deft at staking her out, never again made the mistake of allowing her to see me as I did at the gas station in Kentucky. I learned to always watch the bathroom first. I learned the feds aren’t tailing her day after day. She existed more in a file on a computer than she did in Kentucky, in Wisconsin, in the vast rural unknown. I began slipping in and slipping out without leaving so much as a fingerprint.
I started to absorb everything about her, making mental notes of the food she ate (coffee over tea, espressos over lattes) and restaurants she frequented (unknown independents over the chains). The subtleties of her actions painted an impressionist image I could hang in the corridor of my mind, the colors and brushstrokes chosen from my observances: that while shopping for clothes, when she would hold a dress or blouse up to her body, the color was almost always blue or dark green or black, and that after she would leave the store I would step in a moment later and read the size on the tag to be a six or an eight or an occasional ten; that even though she lived closer to Baltimore than DC, she read the Washington Post instead of the Baltimore Sun; that she liked to spend time in card stores even though I never witnessed her purchase a single card; that she sped up at yellow lights instead of braking; that she always crossed her legs at the knees and not the ankles.
The closest I ever got to her in Columbia: We shared time together in a Best Buy; she was in CDs, I was in computers. She browsed the music for an hour before making her way to one of the registers with a half dozen CDs. I grabbed some wrapped wire from the rack in front of me—still have no idea what a CAT 5 cable is—and made my way toward the same register, timed it so I would be arriving as she was departing.
The teenaged clerk swiped my cable over the barcode reader. “Twenty-seven twenty-nine.”
I widened my eyes. “Really? For a few feet of wire?” He shrugged, noshed on a wad of gum, looked annoyed when I handed him cash instead of a credit card.
“Listen,” I said, “the girl who just went through here, you remember any of the discs she bought? She’s a friend of mine and her birthday’s coming up and I don’t want to get her something she just purchased.”
The clerk stared at me, slowed his chomping. “Aimee Mann. Iron and Wine. I don’t know, some others. Death Cab for Cutie, I think. That kind of stuff.”
I repeated the names as I watched her walk beyond the sliding door of the store. “Aimee Mann, Iron and Wine, Death Cab for Cutie. Thanks.”
I tailed her to the parking lot; I stayed behind the sliding doors, watched her get into a Toyota Camry. Her hair was longer and darker than I’d ever seen it, though still short by most standards, and it helped give dimension and shape to her face, a modest shift to a more defined beauty, like a girl exiting adolescence and embracing womanhood. Before she put the key in the ignition, she glanced at herself in the rearview and did that thing—the simultaneous tuck of hair behind her ears—then gently wiped the edge of her bottom lip with her thumb. And as she started her car, pulled out, and drove away, I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.
Once she was out of view, I tossed the useless computer cable into the trash and walked right back inside the store, proceeded to the music section, repeating the clerk’s list under my breath: Mann, Iron, Death, Mann, Iron, Death. I grabbed a copy of each available disc from those artists