Nevada Barr - The Rope

Days in the desert were grand, but nothing compared to the nights. Had the brass been amenable, and the poop visible, Jenny would have started her day at sunset. Anna Pigeon loved the dark—that, at least, Jenny learned the night of her sexual reconnaissance. Jenny supposed a theater person would have to. After the third glass of wine—and given Anna’s size, Jenny half expected her to pass out on the couch at any moment—Anna volunteered that one of the things she loved about theater was that during rehearsal or a performance, she knew precisely where she, and everyone else, belonged, knew what each person’s job was and where they would, or should, be at any given moment. Glen Canyon, she said, made her feel like she’d fallen out of bed and woken up on Mars. Evidently finding this a breach of her personal code of nothing personal, Anna had then bowed like an arthritic old earl and took herself off to bed.

“Shoot,” Jenny whispered, shaking her head. She was obsessing. Not just thinking about another woman, obsessing. Having done both, she knew the difference. A hollow creeping fog of addictive excitement was rising. The Adafaire Mason disaster had been years ago, but Jenny never forgot the symptoms: hyperawareness, overweening curiosity, and constant speculation about anything concerning, or any aspect of, the Subject. That was the court-appointed shrink’s list, anyway.

At the time she’d thought it absurd. Maybe these many years later those visits were paying off. Since she recognized the symptoms, theoretically, she could avert the disaster. Theoretically. She drained the beer. Anna was gone. Surely obsessing on a missing person couldn’t end badly.

“Hsst. Pinky,” she tried again, but the snake said nothing.

She managed an entire shower and had nearly completed brushing her teeth without once thinking of the Subject. Mostly, she managed it by worrying obsessively about the possibility her obsessive tendencies had returned, then excusing them due to the Subject’s departure for parts unknown.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa, let’s blame me, let’s blame me,” she sang to the tune of “Frère Jacques” as she knelt naked on the rug in front of the cabinet beneath the sink. Singing, she’d discovered, was the only effective measure one could take to shut out unwanted thoughts.

Over the course of the evening she’d swilled sufficient amounts of beer that if she didn’t find some aspirin and wash two or three down with a quart of water, she was sure to wake up in the middle of the night with a headache. Her hangovers were precocious things and could seldom wait till morning. She opened the cupboard door and started to reach in.

Anna Pigeon’s stuff was still there. Jenny’s belongings were neatly arrayed on the top shelf. Anna, as the late arrival, had been relegated to the bottom.

The unhealthy excitement built. This was a treasure trove for a woman who was obsessing. Anna is gone, she told herself. No harm, no foul. Getting comfortable, she crossed her legs, feet soles up on opposite thighs. Full lotus had been easy for her since she was teeny tiny.

The thrill was coursing through her, making her feel half scared, half excited; the way she felt when she met a new woman or nearly got run off the road by a Mack truck. Instead of leaning down and looking into the floor-level shelf, as she’d done when she’d first noticed it wasn’t cleared out, Jenny reached in blind, like a child putting its hand into a grab box at a county fair.

She knew it would serve her right if there was a nest of black widow spiders in the cupboard, but she didn’t stop. The first prize she grabbed and pulled into the light of the bathroom bulb was a blue plastic Secret solid deodorant dispenser. Jenny set it carefully to the side of the frayed bath mat that served as her bathroom rug. Next was a box of tampons, three-quarters full, then a bottle of Xanax, dental floss, a hairbrush with rubber bands secured around the plastic handle, a tube of ChapStick, a box of Q-tips, toothpaste, hand lotion, shampoo, crème rinse, nail clippers, birth control pills, and an emery board.

Jenny ran her hands over the aged wood of the shelf but found nothing else.

The Subject’s items were lined up like soldiers along the edge of the rug.

Tampons.

Xanax.

Hairbrush.

Birth control pills.

These were not things a woman forgot, not things she would leave behind.

Jenny’s illicit frisson of excitement took on a sharper edge.

The 747 landed without a bump. Anna stood in the aisle with the solid clot of humanity clutching bags to their chests or jostling to drag luggage down from the overhead bins so as not to spend a moment more than necessary on board.

The flight was a blur, as was the Martian landscape of Glen Canyon, and the beautiful deadly jar. All she knew or wanted to know was that she was free and safe and almost home.

The clot began to break up, people bleeding out of the plane’s hatch. Anna had no luggage, no purse, no glossy magazine. Her hands were empty, and she felt she flowed rather than shuffled as row after row of blue upholstered seats passed in her peripheral vision. The tube connecting the airplane to the terminal was round, jointed like the hose of a vacuum cleaner, and, like a vacuum, it hoovered Anna up. She was almost flying. Molly would be waiting for her.

The terminal lived up to its name. Anna felt the thud as she slammed into the waiting area and movement stopped. Platinum blond hair, cut fashionably short, jewel-tone suits, posture one salute shy of military, Molly always stood out in a crowd.

Anna’s eyes refused to find her.

Molly hadn’t come. The Jetway reversed its suction. Anna was being pulled backward toward the plane. Then she saw him, leaning against a wall with angular grace, silky hair curling at his collar, glasses crooked on his fine long nose.

“Zach!” she cried and started to run to him. From behind her came the sound of static, and her legs went numb. “Zach!” She was screaming now.

He looked into her eyes. With his forefingers he traced a heart on his chest and let it fall into his cupped palms. He blew it to her like a kiss, then turned and walked away.

Again she screamed his name, but the static was so loud it drowned her out. He didn’t look back.

Static. Scratching. A cry like that of a small animal being slaughtered.

Anna opened her eyes. She had broken her vow to stay awake. Crumpled, as if she’d collapsed midpace, she was on her side in the soft sand a yard from Kay’s grave. The only hint of light was a faint oblong, slightly less black, on the floor of the jar, moonlight sifting through hundreds of thousands of miles of outer space to the earth’s atmosphere, only to fall into inner space as dark as that from whence it had come.

Scratching.

Confused, Anna rolled onto her back. Her left arm fell from its resting place on her upthrust hip and sharpened her mind with a jolt of pain. Somebody was coming. Rocks were being moved, tiny pebbles, a stealthy coming, but erratic. Monster was coming. Anna tried to get to her feet, but the drug, like the dream, crippled her, and she floundered beetle-like on her back. Finally she made it to her knees. In the pose of a drunken penitent, she swayed and stared upward. If she tried to stand, she would fall. If she tried to struggle against whatever was coming, she’d lose. Thirst had undone her. Despite her promises, she had consumed more from the poisonous canteen than she should have. Unless it was in the second sandwich. It didn’t matter. The monster was coming and she was helpless.

He—it—had already manipulated her body, carved WHORE on her thigh and very possibly done things she refused to let herself imagine, but he hadn’t killed her.