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, sprinting across the yard toward its one leafless tree.
Then the boy tripped. He fell first on his knees, then his
palms. He wailed.
The woman jogged over and knelt down next to him,
righting him, shaking her head, neither angry nor concerned. It wasn’t a bad fall. She reached her arms around
him and once again she brushed his bangs across his
forehead. The boy probably had learned that the longer
he wept, the longer his mother would hold him, and so
he kept crying. His mother rocked him—and was she
smiling? How long would she be able to comfort him
like this, her silly boy? I wondered what it was like to
be needed in this way, and to know it was a fleeting dependence. The autumn sky turned amber with the last
trace of light.
Suddenly from the open back door of the woman’s
car, the red ball fell out. It rolled all the way down the
driveway to the street. Neither the woman nor her son
appeared to notice. The breeze carried the ball down the
grade toward where I was parked. My first instinct was
to hop out and retrieve it and bring it back to the boy,
but then I would have revealed my position and possibly alarmed the woman if she put together how far I’d
followed her. Also I would have broken the second rule
of the game: no contact.
The red ball continued to roll down the middle of the
street, pushed on by the evening wind. Would the boy
ever find it? Would his mother notice it missing? Was
it lost for good? I would never know. I would never see
them again. The third rule of the game was never follow
the same stranger twice, and so I drove away.
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