“Fine!” I yelled.

I got out and slammed the door. Jessica got out a moment later, but kept the door open.

“Will she be ok?”

“She’ll be fine,” I said. “We’ll all be the better for it.”

Jessica bent down to talk to Kelli. “Gonna be ok, Kell?”

Kelli rocked and whispered sullenly to herself for a moment or two. “Car,” she said finally.

“Let her cool off,” I said.

“Let’s all cool off,” said Jessica.

The individual in question, as the police later described him, was only remarkable, appearance-wise anyway, in his unremarkability. If he had looked explicitly homeless, or mentally ill, or some combination of both — wild-haired, pants on backward, filthy-bearded — Jessica and I might’ve reacted with less confusion. I was angry at myself, afterwards, for my muted instincts, the way my first thought was to assume the man had made some kind of innocent mistake. I was witnessing something wrong, something threatening and out of the ordinary, and my mind had gone immediately to an assumption of safety, of surely everything’s ok. Perhaps the gentleman is confused; perhaps he just needs help. My instincts, I realized, had failed me, and they had failed Kelli. They had simply over-leaped the possibility of real danger in order to scuttle to the side of reassurance. And what kind of instincts were those?

Leaving the building and walking toward the parking lot, we could see he was leaning on the hood of the car, bashing the windshield with the flats of his hands and yelling what sounded like “Eh? Eh?”

“Oh,” said Jessica. “Is that guy —?”

“Bitch?” I thought I heard the man say. I dismissed it in the next instant. Certainly he didn’t say bitch.

“That’s your car, isn’t it?” I said to Jessica. I knew full well it was Jessica’s car. The fact of the matter was, I didn’t accept what I was seeing. I didn’t trust what I was hearing. I was waiting for someone to come along and clear the matter up.

Jessica broke into a wobbly run before I did, clacking across the parking lot in her high heels.

Kelli has swallowed her tongue, a businesslike voice spoke up in my mind. It solemnly began to tick off numbered points. (1) You left her alone. (2) She swallowed her tongue. (3) The nice man can’t get into the car to assist her, much as he would like to, because (4) Kelli doesn’t know how to work the locks. And, (5) You will not get there in time to save her.

I started running as well.

“Hey!” Jessica was yelling.

“Do you need help?” I called. Because surely the man meant well and surely the right thing to do was to offer assistance.

“Fuck YOU!” yelled the man, ignoring Jessica and me. So he was yelling this at Kelli. He kicked the side of Jessica’s car. “Cunt!”

In the car, I could see Kelli rocking to save her life, eyes closed, hands jammed against her ears, lips moving rapidly.