Follow Me(37)

I began having trouble sleeping in my apartment. Every time I put my head on my pillow, I heard phantom footsteps and faint scratches outside my window. I hung thicker curtains to shield myself from the prying eyes I assumed were out there, but then realized the opacity went both ways—no one could see in, but I couldn’t see out. If someone was truly out there, I might not know—and so I began routinely leaving the curtains slightly cracked.

I was already on edge, and then I started having nightmares about Rosalind. I dreamed of being stuck inside her tiny doll world, hurtling toward an unpleasant but inevitable end. One of the dioramas in particular haunted me: Rosalind, blinded by a silky sleeping mask, tucked snugly beneath a fluffy comforter while her future murderer stood outside her window, his face obscured by a balaclava and his gloved hand wrapped around a miniature hatchet.

I like the one where the guy’s outside the girl’s window with a hatchet. I shuddered as I remembered the words of that dead-eyed creep I’d caught in the Rosalind exhibit on the first day. It had been weeks, and I was still turning corners in the museum and finding him there. I wanted to demand who the hell he was and why didn’t he ever seem to have a life to get to, but I didn’t want to cause issues at work. I wanted that promotion, and there was no way I was going to allow him ruin it for me.

Don’t let it get to you, I chastised myself. My situation was wholly dissimilar to Rosalind’s, or Colette’s before her. So some guy who lacked social skills hung around a free museum too much. That didn’t make him a stalker. I didn’t have a stalker; at most, I had a random Peeping Tom who, as far as I knew, had never come back and probably didn’t even own a hatchet.

But still I struggled to get a good night’s rest. I had talked in my sleep since childhood—something that had made me a peculiarity at middle school slumber parties—and suddenly I began talking so loudly I woke myself. In the small hours of the morning, I would shoot bolt upright in bed, looking wildly around for the source of the voice that had awakened me, only to find the room empty. It had only taken a few nights of that before I downloaded an app called Luna Listen, which proclaimed, “Set yourself free from insomnia!” It would do this by tracking my sleep and recording irregular noises. The idea was that a person could use it to figure out what was disrupting their sleep, be it a snoring partner, a barking dog, or their own relentless tossing and turning. In my case, I was the only thing disrupting my sleep—when I woke up petrified with fear, I only had to listen to the most recent recording to reassure myself that the loud voice shouting I’m scared! or sometimes Go away! was only me.

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I RESOLVED TO move out of that apartment soon. Leanne could change all the locks she wanted, and that basement unit would still be vulnerable to her grandson or any other miscreant skulking through that alley. Every day over lunch, I scrolled through apartment listings on Craigslist and trolled the Zillow app. I was in a hurry to leave, but I didn’t want to be in such a hurry I found myself in a similar—or worse—situation, and I didn’t want to let moving distract me from work.

Cat said I could stay in her guest room as long as I wanted, but there was an unfamiliar edge to her voice. If I didn’t know better, I might think Cat was annoyed with me. I was sure, though, that Cat was just stressed about that trial thing she had going on at work. Still, staying with Cat while she was in that kind of mood seemed unappealing, and so I declined her invitation and called Nick instead. Nick cut an imposing figure; he could intimidate my unwelcome visitor, should he return, much more successfully than I could, with or without a bottle of cheap wine.

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HAVING NICK OVER eased my paranoia, but I hated needing him. The damsel in distress was my least favorite trope, and I disliked embodying it. I tried to keep Nick on the back burner and to find other, healthier ways to distract myself from worries about the alley: I voraciously sampled exercise classes, testing a new Reformer or spin class every day; I spent hours on my Instagram presence, editing photos, crafting Stories, and working on the preset filter collection I hoped to soon launch; and I even FaceTimed my sister, Maggie, something I usually avoided because her kids seized her phone and started spinning it around in their chubby hands, leaving me dizzy.

And I threw myself into my job. Two months in, I still felt like I was learning the ropes, although I grew more confident every day. After all, who had so impressed Irina Venn she’d created a special video for the museum? This girl. I knew the next several weeks would be demanding: The Life and Death of Rosalind Rose was opening later that month, and there was an exclusive member preview before that. Just that afternoon, I had been working on a posting schedule when Ayala had hovered over my shoulder, her breath sharp with the scent of bitter coffee, and had reminded me how important it was for the Rosalind exhibit to succeed. I was determined not to let her down—and to snag the promotion she was dangling.

But between my uneasiness in my apartment and the pressure with work, I began to feel like I was dragging. I was getting a late afternoon coffee—my third of the day—in the Hirshhorn’s sleek lobby with my colleague Lena, a Margot Tenenbaum clone who worked in public engagement, when she pointed out the dark circles under my eyes.

“I would bite someone’s head off if they told me I looked tired,” she said. “And you’re well within your rights to do so to me. But, honestly, Audrey, are you okay?”

“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” I confessed. “I think the Rosalind exhibit is getting to me. And, you know, that thing with the guy outside my window didn’t help matters.”