Under My Skin. Lisa Unger
tourists, shoppers flitting between Sephora and Armani Exchange, H&M, Victoria’s Secret; traffic a stuttering wave of sound and motion. But it’s all distant white noise as I move toward where I’m sure I saw him disappear. I press myself against the building and then spring into the doorway that’s set back from the building wall.
There’s no one there. How can that be?
I reach and pull on the handle of the large black metal double door between Aldo and Zara. But it’s locked tight. Suddenly seized by anger, I find myself pounding on it.
“I saw you,” I yell. “I know you’re following me.”
The door stays locked, and no one comes. I get a few sideways glances, but what’s one more shouting crazy person on a city street?
I pound on the door again, the metal cool, the sound reverberating.
What is it? A delivery entrance? I stand back to look at it; it’s the armored entry to a keep, a demon hiding inside. Pure rage rises, a tidal wave. I don’t even try to hold it back, let it wash over me, take me away. I get to pounding again. Not just knocking, but channeling all my anger, all my frustration into that metal, barely even noticing that I’m hurting myself, that the door doesn’t budge, that no one comes.
And that’s how Detective Grayson finds me, violently banging on the door, yelling.
“Hey, hey,” he says, coming up from behind. I feel his hands on my shoulders, turn and shake him off hard. He steps back, hands up.
“Take it easy, Poppy.”
He’s illegally parked his unmarked Dodge Charger right beside us, traffic flowing around it, honking and annoyed at yet one more pointless obstacle to traffic flow.
“He disappeared through here,” I tell him. I’m breathless, sweating from the heat, the effort, the fear. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, brow creased with concern.
“Okay,” he says putting strong hands on my shoulders. “Take a breath.”
I do that, feel some calm returning now that he’s here.
The door swings open then, and an impossibly young, svelte woman in a black shift dress and thigh-high boots stands before us. She looks back and forth between us, blankly annoyed.
Grayson flashes his shield.
“We’re pursuing a suspect,” he says. His tone is comfortingly official, validating. There was someone there. There was. “Did someone come in through this entrance in the last ten minutes?”
She shakes her head and her long black hair shimmers.
“No,” she says. “I’m the manager here and this is the service entrance. There’s a bell?” She points to it meaningfully. “You ring and someone comes to open it. But there haven’t been any deliveries this afternoon.”
“I saw someone come in here,” I say, more sharply than I mean to. She blinks glittery eyelids to express her displeasure. Her eyebrows are shaped into high arches; a hoop sparkles in her nose.
“No,” she says as though she’s never been more certain of anything in her life. “Not this door.”
“Mind if we have a look around?” asks Grayson easily. She regards him uncertainly, then steps aside. We both walk into the storage area—boxes, racks crushed with clothes, standing steam irons, gift-wrapping station, no menacing strange men in hoods. Adrenaline, the power of rage, abandons me, leaving me feeling foolish, hot with shame, shaky now. Did I really see him come in here?
Grayson’s standing by the door. “Where does this go?”
“Back to the shop,” she says. “There’s a fire exit through the break room on the other side of the store, but an alarm sounds if you push through it.”
“There’s no other exit from this storeroom?”
“Well, just out back, to the alley behind the buildings, where we dump the trash.”
Grayson follows her and I trail behind. The dim alley reeks of rotting garbage; fire escapes track up the surrounding buildings giving way to a stingy square of sky up above.
“The street gate is locked,” she says. “Only the super has the key. Want me to get him?”
Detective Grayson looks at me and I shake my head.
“I’m sorry.” My voice is a rasp. “I was sure I saw him come in here.”
There’s that look again from the detective. I know it well—worried confusion. What’s wrong with Poppy?
On the street: “Are you okay?” He rests a steadying hand again on my shoulder. “You seem—”
“What?” I ask. “Crazy, unstable, a wreck?”
“Let’s go with—unsettled.”
His comforting grin settles me a bit. For a second, I flash on my father, how good he was at talking me through spirals of emotion, bouts of worry. Oh, you’re too sensitive, my mother would sniff. You better get a thicker skin. But not my dad; he always knew what to say. Okay, just breathe. Let’s break this down. What’s really going on?
“Let me give you a lift home,” says Detective Grayson when I don’t say anything else. I can’t prove what I saw, so there’s no point in trying.
We climb into the Charger, plain and white on the outside but high-tech within, a buzzing radio, mounted laptop, all manner of blinking lights on panels. The button for the siren is a tantalizing shiny red, and I fight the urge to press it.
“Maybe he ducked into a different doorway,” he offers as we snake up Fifth.
“Maybe.”
I’d have sworn it was that doorway. But obviously not, and that’s the hard part. Because what we see, what we think we see, what we remember, isn’t always reliable. In fact, it rarely is. Like for months after Jack died, he was everywhere. I’d see a tall man with a lion’s mane of hair and my heart would lurch with joy and hope, crashing into despair milliseconds later. Or I’d imagine him so vividly walking into the room that I almost saw him. Or like those lost days of my “break.” I lived those days, went places, saw people, did things, but the more I press in, trying to remember, the deeper and darker that space becomes.
The eye, the memory—they’re the trickiest liars. Only the camera lens captures the truth, and just for a moment. Because that’s what the truth is: a ghost. Here and gone. As Grayson drives, I scroll through the pictures on my phone again and find that grainy image of my shadow stalker.
Who are you?
Who was I during those lost days?
Layla spent two days looking for me, visiting all the places we frequented together with a picture of me until finally I came stumbling into her lobby, apparently wearing the red dress from my dream. Did I know that detail? Had she told me at one point what I was wearing, what I looked like, and I just filed it away? Or was my dream, as she suggested, an actual memory?
“I’m going to hang around awhile,” Detective Grayson says as he pulls in front of my building. “Out here, in my car. I have some calls to make, emails to answer. I can do it here for a while, just, you know—in case. Why don’t you get some rest?”
Part of me wants to tell him that I’m grateful. Thankful that he hasn’t given up, doesn’t urge me to let it go and move on, that he still cares about what happened to Jack, what happens to me. But a bigger part of me is not grateful. How urgently I wish we’d never met, that I had no reason to know Detective Grayson. I leave the car without a word.
* * *
I tap over the limestone floors of my lobby, breezing past the day doorman, who is on the phone but offers a friendly wave. In the elevator I text Ben and tell him to cancel my appointments and calls for the