This evening I left the door ajar when I took the dogs downstairs for a quick trip outside. I do that fairly often–mostly when Nick’s home, but also sometimes when I know I’ll be back in under a minute. Of course, tonight Juliette made a new best friend on the way back inside, so it took a little longer, and when I got upstairs the door was much, much wider than I left it.
Which I know is because the bedroom window was also open and it does this wind-tunnel thing, but before I could convince myself of that I was off and searching. See, I read this horrible book one time where the scary psycho hid in the girl’s apartment for hours until she’d gotten home, made dinner, chatted on the phone, and fallen asleep, and ever since then I have a hard time taking an empty apartment at face value. So I checked the bedroom first, including the roomier half of Nick’s closet, then the WC, the bathroom (pulling back the shower curtain), around the furniture in the living room, and then finally doubled back to the kitchen, which was hooked shut and therefore an unlikely choice for a psycho murderer who had a window of only seconds, but not impossible. I ruled out the hall closet because there was simply no way to move the suitcases inside it in time or to have moved the giant cabinet back in front of the door once one was inside, fed the dogs, and went back to my typing.
Which is when it occurred to me that I haven’t actually done that little ritual in the entire time I’ve lived in France. I did it for the first time in Philadelphia, when the maintenance guy only locked the doorknob when he left, and it felt “off” to me that the deadbolt was open. I did it sometimes in New York, on rare occasions when my roommate had forgotten to lock up on the way out, or if something looked particularly out of place once I lived alone. And apparently the stunningly low violent-crime rate in France hasn’t made much of a dent in my paranoia after all.
Or so I thought.
It eventually occurred to me that this time was not, in fact, like those other times. On previous occasions I’d prowled my apartment with a kitchen knife in hand, or at least something large and heavy, or at least a cell phone.
This time, however, my plan was evidently that I would find the psycho killer, scream really loudly, and my ten-inch-tall Jack Russell terrier–who is, incidentally, limping today–would tear him limb from limb. Definitely, definitely a plan for a safer sort of world….