Page 2 of Letters From A Stalker

The first note slips through and my body knows before my mind catches on.

It’s never dramatic. That’s the worst part. The world doesn’t tilt, the sky doesn’t split open. Nobody looks up to realise that the air has changed. That something invisible is reaching from the radio and wrapping its fingers around my throat.

To everyone, it’s just a song. They are still doing exactly what they were doing up until this exact moment. Reading books, talking, sleeping, chewing… To them it’s just a song.

To me? The haunting guitar wail is an all too familiar ache.

Three seconds or maybe more. That’s how much I have before the cup in my hand feels too thin, too fragile, like losing my footing.

No.

The second note follows.

No, no, no.

My lungs go still. Not yet tight, just still, as if breathing will somehow make everything worse.

Please, no.

The song fills the narrow space between the seats, Phil’s voice gentle and cruel all at once, and I’m suddenly eight years old in the back of my father’s car, staring at him as he turns up the volume and sings off key, never once looking in the rearview mirror.

I’m twelve, standing in the dining room at two in the morning, my mother hiding in the adjacent pantry, going through his phone and muttering like a crazy person about the woman he’s been seeing, but he deleted the texts to hide the proof.

I’m nineteen and curled on my bedroom floor, locked in a fetal position as if that will protect me from going insane, my Nanna begging me to get up.

I’m twenty-three and already tired in a way nobody that young should be tired.

I am thirty, phone pressed to my ear, eyes fixated on my work screen, listening to a woman’s voice say “missing” like it’s a word that makes sense when attached to a man who has already been physically gone from my life for years at that point.

“Jules?”

Tessa’s voice comes from somewhere beside me, sounding like an echo through the beats of the song.

I try to answer. I know because I can feel my mouth moving but nothing comes out.

The song builds up to the sound of drums that sound like cracking thunder. My father loved this part. He used to hit his hand against the steering wheel, perfectly matching the beat, singing along and shaping his own words, his face looking happier and softer than it ever was when he would look at me. It was in those moments that he looked almost human. Almost happy to be a part of our family.

And that is the part that cuts the deepest. Not that he was cold or detached. Not that leaving was so easy for him. Not that he spent years choosing other women and their children over his wife, over his own daughter.

It was that in those moments I wanted him anyway. That in those moments I let myself believe that I had a father.

The coffee cup slips from my hand, or it feels like it does before Tessa’s fingers wrapping around my wrist.

“Hey. Look at me.”

I can’t. I can’t see from the tears that seem to burst all at once. If I look at her they will spill over and I don’t… I can’t….

If I do that, then I have to be here. And if I’m here, then it’s really my birthday and I’m stuck on the bus, listening to my dead father’s favorite song, exactly 3 years and three hundred and fifty days after the police asked me for a DNA sample because his body had been out there too long for a face to mean anything.

My chest locks. The first breath doesn’t come. Neither does the second.

I can feel my face distort before a sound claws up my throat, raw and desperate, and I bite the pad of my thumb before it can break loose. My teeth catch the side of my hand, hard enough to make my tears spill over. I bite harder, pain blooming bright and immediate, and I hold on to it. It makes more sense when I can feel it, when the pain has a location.

“Shit.” Tessa whispers and moves closer. “Okay. Okay, I’ve got you.”

She moves fast, shifting in front of me, positioning herself so that her body shields me from everyone’s curious eyes, angling her body between mine and the aisle. This is not the first time she’s seen me like this, she knows better than to hug me at this moment. Not this time. Not like this.

The woman with the cowboy book looks over. The loud chewing quiets.