He’s outside before I am, and by the time I’m walking out the door, he’s already standing near the fire, looking down at it.
“Are you Emma Roxy?” one of the firemen asks. The patch on his jacket says Jackson.
“Yeah,” I answer. “I called. This just happened—what—like 10 minutes ago?”
“Did you see anyone around here?” he asks.
“No,” I tell him. “I just came into the living room, saw the fire, and I called you.”
“Okay,” Jackson says. “The fire is obviously very well-controlled. We’re going to wait for the police to get here before we put it out. I hope that’s all right with you.”
“What is it, anyway?” I ask. “Is it just a bunch of sticks or what?”
“They’re pieces of wood arranged to form a sentence,” he says. “I really wouldn’t worry about it. Between us and the cops, we’ll get this taken care of for you.”
“Thanks,” I answer, looking past him. “What does it say?”
“I don’t think you need to see it,” he says.
“I’m not as delicate as all that,” I tell him, and walk past.
As I get close, Damian looks up and says, “We’re going to find her. She can’t keep doing stuff like this and not get caught.”
I look down.
The fire, while an aesthetic touch, makes the message rather difficult to read, but after about a minute, I see it pretty clearly.
“Hands off, bitch,” I read. “He loves me.”
It was the fact that she used punctuation which made the message so difficult to read through the fire.
Damian pops his lips.
“The way Jackson back there was acting,” I tell Damian, “I thought it was going to say, ‘I’m going to shoot you in the face around noon on Thursday’ or something.”
“Nobody has any common decency anymore,” he says. “The least a person can do when they’re threatening you is have the courtesy to be specific.”
I smile.
“You all right?” he asks. “I know this is kind of freaky shit.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of freaky shit,” I tell him. “But I don’t think it’s going to bring my life to a screeching halt, either, so I guess we just do what we have to do and hope she ends up caught sooner than later.”
“You’re taking a very enlightened approach to this whole thing,” Damian says, and in the background, a couple of police cruisers pull up.
“I’m past the point where I can even process any of this,” I tell him. “It’s a nice place.”
“I hope it sticks around,” he says, and that enlightened perspective must be starting to crack, because I’m already thinking of popping him in his stupid throat.
But I take a breath, and everything’s just the slightest bit better.
The police come over and we talk. I learn a lot more about the stalker hearing Damian talking to the policeman than he ever said to me.
Why didn’t I say I loved him earlier? We’re still not to the point where we can trust each other with the things in our lives that make us uncomfortable.
I know he was trying to protect me, that he didn’t want me to worry, but I’d take the communication over the illusion of security any day.
After the officer’s done with his questions, we all just kind of look at each other because we all know the same stupid truth: nobody knows who this woman is, and she’s probably going to keep this up until something big happens.