The Stranger Game. Peter Gadol
1-7
THE FIRST TIME I FOLLOWED ANYONE WAS ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in late November, the sky still gray with ash some weeks after a wildfire to the north. I had gone out on a hike, hoping to clear my mind by scrambling up the narrow path of a dry canyon, which worked until I walked the down trail back to my car. As I was driving out of the park, I passed a picnic area where there was a party underway, a birthday celebration with a hacked-at piñata twirling off a low branch, smoke rising from blackened grills, balloons tethered to the benches. At the periphery, I noticed a little boy, himself a balloon in a red, round jacket and red, round pants. He didn’t seem to be the center of attention, so I didn’t think he was the birthday boy. He must have been about three. He was tossing an inflated ball, also red, back and forth to his parents, or not exactly to his parents. He launched the ball instead toward the road where I’d pulled over and parked. I hadn’t planned any of this, but then that was how the game was played, how it began, the first rule: choose your subjects at random.
The balloon boy picked up the ball and tried throwing it again, but he couldn’t seem to get it to either parent; it kept falling short. Why didn’t they stand closer? Why were they making it difficult for him, was this some kind of test? The boy began flapping his arms, exasperated, until mercifully his mother pulled him aside for a hot dog. The boy’s father accepted a beer from another man. Trying to persuade the boy to eat was apparently the wrong move because he shook his head from side to side, cranky right when the afternoon sun both cracked the clouds and began to fade.
The boy’s mother scooped him up in her arms, although it looked like he was getting heavy for her, and carried him to a bright green box of a car parked three spaces in front of mine. Did she notice me? No, why would she? There was nothing so peculiar about a forty-year-old woman sitting alone in a gray car idling in a city park. Although that afternoon I was full of longing, and who really knew what I was capable of doing.
The mother fit her boy into a car seat, strapped him in, and brushed his hair off his face. The boy’s father had followed them to the car but didn’t get in. The woman turned toward him to give him a quick, meaningful kiss, and I heard the man shout as he walked away that he’d call her later when he got home, which elicited an easy smile from the woman.
I revised my story. She was a single mother, right now only dating this man; she’d brought her son to a party the man had said the boy might enjoy. The woman and the man had been seeing each other for six months, and he was the first guy in a long while who she felt was good with her son, better than the boy’s actual father. I should have been rooting for them, for their happiness, but I wondered: If the woman and man wound up together permanently, would he be one of those guys who believed their marriage wouldn’t be complete until she gave him a child of his own? How would the woman’s son handle it? Would the challenge of a new sibling prepare him for all of the other uncertainties ahead, his body changing, the girls or the boys he’d want to take to his own picnics, the inevitable dramas of his own making? Would he continue wearing red jackets with red pants? Would he come into his body as an athlete, or would he excel at piano or math or debate, or all of the above—no, something else, but what?
These were the questions I was asking while trailing the green car out of the park and east along the boulevard, then south, skirting downtown. Traffic gave me cover, but it also meant I had to drive aggressively if I didn’t want to lose them. There was an unexpected pleasure in trying to remain unobserved while in pursuit.
Twenty minutes later, we ended up on the east side of the river heading into a part of the city I didn’t know well, and as traffic thinned, it had to be obvious I was behind them. Did the woman see me in her mirror? Did she call her boyfriend and chatter for the sake of it, keeping him on the line in case she needed to tell him a woman wearing dark glasses was following her home?
We were coasting through a newer development, the streets as flat as their map. When the woman turned into a driveway, I continued on and pulled over at the end of the block, five houses away. Now I watched them in my side-view mirror: the woman helped the boy out of the back seat, and she was trying to gather their things and order him into the house, but he was having none of it,