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.