Whatever its name, I’m still not used to my cane and the balance it requires. Three years since we were first introduced and I still make rookie mistakes. Like not taking enough care to ensure the rubber stopper at the bottom doesn’t slip into a crack. Only last week, I careened face-first into the pavement right outside the courthouse.
Still, there are benefits. No one seems to bother a woman with a cane. If anything, people give me a wide berth because of it, as if I’m blind and they’re worried I might walk straight into them. Once someone even tried to give me money.
I carry on to my apartment. I never take the same route home twice in a week. That could mean getting off a different subway stop and then taking a bus, or walking a few blocks (despite the pain), or getting back on the subway, or taking a cab. It’s exhausting, constantly being on guard, thinking of the logistics for every journey home. But it’s safer that way.
Outside it’s as dark as ink and must be close to 1 a.m. And cold. Soon it will be fall. I don’t like fall. There are too many reminders in the fall. In the fall I lose my hair. Strands litter the shower floor, stick to the bathroom walls, my pillow, the collar of my black woolen coat. It comes away in my fingers and fills the teeth of my comb. Not clumps exactly, but enough to worry that I might be afflicted with some strange form of seasonal alopecia. Enough to be concerned that the bald patches might never grow back. But they always do. In spring the molting stops and my hair renews. Grayer and more wiry than before. But at least it grows back.
“You dropped like a stone.”
I think of myself lying there on the floor of the subway car, people staring at me, the Birkenstocks woman coveting my cane, the husband man helping me. At least there is still one kind soul in the world.
I reach the corner of 13th Street and 3rd Avenue and pause there. I can’t decide which route to take. Every route seems risky tonight. The episode on the train has really shaken me. Get a grip, I tell myself, so I choose left and skirt the empty basketball court and cross the road, then double back on the opposite side of the street and head east down 11th and into the alleyway. The alleyway is a narrow access path squeezed between two remodeled tenement buildings. It gives me the creeps but it’s well-lit and will bring me out onto the avenue and into the postage stamp playground where I can take cover near the hedgerow to study my apartment building from afar.
I reach the playground and pause at the hedge to look at the building. It’s a small eight-story walk-up, red-bricked with iron balconies and fire escape ladders, a former pencil factory converted into apartments back in the 1980s.
I scan the exterior and count four floors up. The new tenant in the floor below has put flowerpots and yucca plants on their balcony. I swear under my breath. Anyone could be hiding there and I wouldn’t know it. And from there, they would only need to unclip the fire ladder and climb to my balcony directly above. But there’s nothing I can do. People can’t stop making their homes look nice just because of me.
There’s a sudden movement to the left on the ledge outside the second-story apartment. I tense. Then I see the flick of a tail. It’s only the cat, the no-name cat that nobody seems to own. I’ve seen it before, leaping from one balcony to the next or launching itself from the fire exit ladders to the floors below or above, like some kind of crazy ninja feline. One day that thing’s going to slip and tumble headfirst right onto the pavement and its acrobat days will be over.
My eyes shift to my own apartment. The living room lights are on. I look at my watch. Just before two. The lights (two twenty-dollar floor lamps I bought on sale from Home Depot) are set on an automatic timer, and go on and off in pre-scheduled two-hour increments. A ruse so anyone outside would think there was someone home.
The windows are closed and both sets of venetian blinds are the way I left them this morning, hanging down at a precise midway point in the windowpanes, the slats open on a half-inch incline so the internal lights in the apartment shine through to the outside.
I wait there for at least twenty minutes, watching for movement inside the apartment. There’s nothing. No one is in there. I am safe.
I emerge from behind the hedgerow and cross the road and head for the building, all the while fighting the urge to return to my hiding place in the playground to check on the apartment again.
It’s not the first apartment I have lived in since the incident. There were four more prior to this one. On average I have shifted every six months. To stay ahead. To stay safe. When I have exhausted all the possible combinations of routes I can use to get to an apartment, I know I’m at risk of developing patterns and routines that could be detectable, so the only solution is to move again. Constantly shifting is exhausting and totally at odds with my nature to want to stay in one place. But I do it because there is no real alternative. I’d rather be a moving target than a sitting duck.
I reach the door to my building. It’s a push code button type of lock where you key in a combination, but I’m smart enough to know that although this door is meant to be the first line of defense, it’s really no defense at all. People can easily slip in behind someone else. Tenants can (and do) give out the code to friends and relatives. So I never trust it. The only real first line of defense is my own apartment door.
Before I key in the code, I glance over my shoulder to study the street. Empty. I slip inside and push the door firmly behind me until I hear the nib click back into place.
The stairwell is to my left. Empty and well-lit. Four flights of stairs are beyond my current capabilities, so I take the elevator instead. An old-fashioned Otis elevator with a scissor gate that no one else bothers to use. It stammers upward to my floor and I walk the six footsteps to my apartment door. I pause and listen as the elevator staggers back down to the ground floor. Someone is playing Xbox in one of the apartments above. A moan of a siren a few streets away.
I push my keys into the dead bolts in my door. There are two of them, state of the art, titanium models. I do not trust potentially corruptible tradesmen so I installed them myself, something I have become very good at from watching YouTube clips.
I unlock the door and stand on the threshold, listening. It’s more than listening really. Sensing is a more accurate description, using my gut to get a read on the energy in the apartment, to detect whether someone is in there, invading my territory, filling it up. Tonight there is nothing. But this does not mean I can relax. No way. Now the real work begins.
I’m bone tired and desperate for sleep. I have a full schedule at work tomorrow and need to be on my game. But there’s a detailed checking process I must follow before I can even think of going to bed. By now my Home Depot lights are off and I keep it that way. Leaving the front door open, I step inside. Back at the start of all this, after the incident and long stay at the hospital, when I first went to live on my own, when this process of checking began, I faced the dilemma of whether to leave the front door open while I checked the inside of the apartment. A dilemma because someone could sneak through the front door while I was deep in the apartment and carry out a blitz attack on me. But if I locked the door behind me before I checked the rest of the apartment and there was someone inside, it would mean I would be trapped in the apartment with them. That’s when I came to realize that a good checking strategy was as much about escape as it was about entry. So when I moved here three months ago, the first thing I did was carefully map out the escape routes. Should the worst occur I have three available options: