A Walk in the Night
Written March 2003
She’s out. It’s late, probably
past midnight. All Debra wanted was to get out.
It was raining. Debra imagined that people were looking
out of their houses and thinking her nuts. Maybe she was nuts. After all,
this was northern Virginia, not New York City. People didn’t go out at night.
All the walkers and bike riders retired at sunset, especially in the rain.
Debra wasn’t like that. She got into moods. She followed
her moods. If she got restless, she went outside. Sun or storm, dry or
wet, she wouldn’t stay cooped up at home if she wanted out.
Debra walked on. Up and down hills. Around bends. Virginia
sure was different from Florida. She had spent the last three years in a
new housing development in Ft. Lauderdale. There, all the sidewalks and even
the street were smooth. She could walk around bare-foot and not fear for her
feet. Bike rides at night were a common thing for her, and a lot of people
rode around at night. She was usually the only one out in the rain, but that
didn’t bother her. In Virginia, it wasn’t like that. There were no sidewalks
in the housing development she now lived in, nor were there any anywhere
else in town. The street was bumpy. It wasn’t all newly paved and deep black,
but a lighter shade and rockyish. She had to watch where she walked so she
didn’t cut her foot. People went inside at night, and not even the children
could be seen outside playing in the earlier hours of darkness.
She squinted to see ahead of her. There were no streetlights
on the road she was on. There only things that lit up the street in any
hour of night were house lights, and those were all off. She reached the
end of the housing development. Unlike in Florida, there was no fancy exit
leading to a big four-lane street. It was just one two-lane road meeting
another two-lane road, like any road in northern Virginia.
Debra turned right towards the town of Hamilton. What there
was of the town. This was another difference. In Florida, everything was
in town and within fifteen minutes away by car. You had your grocery stores,
your restaurants, and your movie stores. Your furniture stores, your bookstores,
and your local K-Mart were all there. And all was modern. Though Debra
had lived near Fort Lauderdale, her town of Davie had been known as one
of the few country towns left in South Florida. For being a country town,
though, things sure had been modern. A few buildings, like the daycare
center and the Salvation Army, were built in a more homey, old-fashioned
way, but most were just rectangular white concrete things.
Debra looked around her. She was walking through the center
of town. Boy, things were different here. Her town consisted of a few antique
stores, a fire station, a post office, a church, and a restaurant or two.
One could drive through town and not even know that she had been there.
Things weren’t modern, either. Things were built in a little old-fashioned
manner that Debra had to admit, she liked.
Debra must have been walking for thirty-five minutes or
so. She hit the restaurant that marked the road to the highway. People like
Debra’s father took that road to work each day, either in Leesburg or further
away in Sterling. Few people worked in Hamilton or the town to the left,
which had more than Debra’s town but not by too much. Purcellville had a
skating rink, restaurants, a grocery store, and independently owned and operated
businesses, such as Debra’s mother’s bookstore. The nearest big town was
Leesburg. It was there that people did there shopping and had their fun.
Leesburg was the next town over to Debra’s town, and it was the closest place
to go bowling or see a movie. It was also the only place around other than
Sterling that had the big chain stores—K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Ben Franklin,
Home Depot, and so on.
It was funny. In Florida, Davie was considered a small
town. It was just about the same size as Leesburg, though, and Leesburg
was considered large. Debra guessed it was just the difference between
the populated and the nonpopulated parts of the country.
Debra was getting tired. She headed back towards home.
She looked at the post office, where she often went with her parents to
ship off books. It was modernized and looked like all US postal offices.
It looked like a smaller, more condensed version of its Floridian cousins.
Debra passed Wayside Planet with its blackboard sign. Each
day it had some witty comment or political joke written on it. Today’s was,
“If I fear my neighbor, can I kill him?” The sign wasn’t all that there was
to Wayside Planet, though. Inside was a restaurant—a tiny restaurant that
seats six groups of people, but makes excellent food. If you got lucky, you
would find it open; the owners opened when they felt like it and held no
regular business hours. It was unlike the restaurants in Florida, which were
like all other restaurants. If you’ve been to one, you’ve been to them all,
there.
She entered her housing development. All was silent, and
all was dark. She realized that on her walk, not a single car had driven
by her. That was yet another difference. In Florida, you would be sure
to be passed by atleast one car in an hour no matter what time it was.
In Virginia, all was quiet. Not a plane had flown overhead, either. While
Davie was in the turn-around loop for Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International
Airport, the closest airport to Hamilton was Baltimore-Washington International
Airport. Debra couldn’t honestly say that she missed the planes overhead.
The sudden noise of the engines in the night had always scared her.
She was back on her street. She could see her house from
her position—uh oh. A light was on. She climbed up her hill of a driveway.
Her mother was waiting for her on the porch. “Debra, where have you been?”
she asked.