A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

I thrust my keys into the ignition. I start the car. Before I can throw
it into Reverse, there’s a tap on my window. I scream, seeing only
blackness filling the glass. Someone is standing beside the car. I
can’t make out a face. I grab for the pepper spray. The only other
things I have to use are an ice scraper and my keys.
The figure squats down and there in the window is Jeanette, the
midwife.
I throw my hand to my heart. “Oh God,” I say, lowering the window
and forcing myself to smile, to relax, “you scared the shit out of me,
Jeanette.”
I take a deep breath. Jeanette is here in the parking garage with
me. No one will hurt me while Jeanette is here.
“Sorry!” she replies, still on a high from the birth. They can be
vitalizing sometimes, especially the ones like this that don’t take
twenty-four hours only to wind up in surgery. “I thought you saw me,”
Jeanette says. “I’ve been trailing you for a while. I called out for you.”
I tell her, “I didn’t hear you or I would have stopped.”
Then she gets a mischievous grin on her face and says to me,
“Zeppelin,” and we both laugh. “The kids will have a field day with
that.”
“I feel sorry for the poor boy,” I say. “He’ll grow up hating his
parents for it.”
“Whatever happened to Thomas and James?” Jeanette asks.
Jeanette is older than me. She’s more traditional.
“Come on, Jeanette,” I say. “Don’t you know that Thomas and
James have fallen out of rotation in recent years? These days it’s all
Jacobs and Noahs and Masons.”
“And apparently Zeppelins.”
“It’s an atrocity,” I say. We have a good laugh.
“It’s getting late,” Jeanette says. In just a few hours, the sun will
rise. “You better get home and try and sleep before your own babies
are up.”
We say our goodbyes. I watch as Jeanette makes her way to her
car parked farther down. Once she’s safely in, I spin out of the
parking garage, going fast. The relief washes over me when my car
finally reaches the street outside. On the street there are other cars,
building lights, streetlights. It’s still hours away from dawn, but the