Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

She shoves the laptop across the rug, leans over and snaps it shut. Did Luke shoot these? Are they only found footage, as the folder name might suggest? He loves that stuff. Please, the latter, but there’s nothing useful in the file information. She’s got the beginnings of a headache, but even after this last horrible video, even after those feet, she has a stubborn, vivid urge to lie down in that hole and pick out the stars caught between branches. The oaks would drop leaves curling in on themselves in death, and she’d watch them spiral briefly toward her. It wouldn’t be a grave. Her thoughts are not that lost. It only seems like it might be a closeness she could feel to him.

She won’t cry, doesn’t know if she can. She has an interview in seven hours, a steady job she needs on top of the unsteady session work, unless she sells the house. But this place is her only lifeline now, and she searches for angry thoughts to keep her here: have the locks changed tomorrow, move her music stuff in here. Get the exorcism underway. She knows better. The third video’s filename is bed , it sinks in and tugs at her but she has no space for any more. Not the aching panic that would bring, surely, seeing whose bed and what was done on it.

At the window she stares out at the masked trees, outriders of the greater woods that stretch away toward the mountains. Her mountains. She imagines again some part of her approaching the sunken hole, wherever it is. Imagines Luke appearing above her, his face hidden behind the camera. She’s learned to look around it.

Ada’s heard the word codependent , she knows what it means, started reading a book about it. It’s under the bed now, the bookmark in chapter two mocking her like a tongue. Gram would tell her she’s being a foolish child, didn’t she raise her better? But Gram and her impossible love have been gone a long time.

The trouble is, Ada’s never been alone. From the moment Ada’s parents died when she was three, there was always Gram. There was never any rest from her.

And there was always Luke, after. She’d only taken her first hesitant steps into the world when she met him in a produce aisle. He showed her the world wasn’t out to get her. He showed her how, in fact, the world seemed hardly to care. She learned she could be the only one in a room, or by herself in a car, and still be held by the one who loves her. It still surprises her, sometimes, that there are so many little things like these, things wider and deeper than she could understand for a long time, if she even understands them now.

The thought of figuring out how to do this makes her lightheaded. She leans her forehead against the window, sighs an oblong fog onto the glass. The word LEAVE blooms in it, in reverse, and she’d recognize Luke’s handwriting anywhere. She breathes all around the word but there’s nothing more. One final exhale, then she smears the E and the A into a circle and smiles at LOVE.

“Here’s what you do,” Regan tells Ada over the noise of the bar, “be an alcoholic until you get this job or you puke the last of your ex up, whichever comes second.”

Ada shakes her head. She’s never had the stomach for alcohol. “Dangerous when I’m a five-three lightweight,” she says.

Regan throws back the last of her second bourbon. She does everything this way, with quick ease. Ada’s known her for so long, even though it’s only been three years. It’s what your first friend feels like. Regan’s taller, full of the real world, with hair she can actually style and real cleavage, the jackpot of a white girl’s proportions — a long list of needless, absurd comparisons Ada still measures herself against. And now Regan’s staring her down. “Have you talked to him?”

Ada hasn’t, and she’s trying not to talk about him, though she’s worried sick. Four weeks and three days. She’s tried to put everything but her own elusive music out of her mind, but all she’s done is listen for that strange cello note in everything, the idling engine of her car, the refrigerator’s hum. It reminds her of what music directors have said about her own playing — too intense for us, Mrs. Blount, we’re sorry. The interview at Haywood — where she hopes to step foot inside a college for the first time, if only as an admissions clerk — went well, she’s letting herself think. Luke’s deleted his Facebook and Twitter accounts. She wants to respect his space, hasn’t broken down and left him a voicemail in days, and the easiest way to keep that going is to stay away from his things, his office. The rest of those videos.

“No,” she says. “Can we just — what is it?”

Regan never bites her lip like this unless it’s a new guy or a secret. “Nothing. You’ve only had the one drink.”

“I don’t want it, really. Six years, Regan. I met him when I was twenty. I’d never met any body.” She’s doing it, taking her finger out of the dam, watching the cracks spider. “What do you do with six years?”

“You lived them. That’s what they were for. They got you closer.” Regan laces her fingers through Ada’s and squeezes too hard. “Now you file them away on the L shelf and start thinking about yourself. For yourself. The A shelf, just Ada, and screw the rest of the alphabet.”

“I just—” Ada wonders if the dam will break now and what sad clichés will spill out “—I don’t want to be some uneducated musician who has to file papers because violist isn’t a real job. Most people don’t think it’s a real instrument, even.” She breathes, she says, “But I don’t want any next phase, either. I want last year, and the year before that. There’s never been anybody but him. I want him to call. I want him to want a baby. I wish I smoked.”

“Well, honey,” Regan says, “you live in Asheville. You can busk on the street or you can move to a city with at least four skyscrapers, where they have people who listen to dead-white-guy music. Playing on kids’ records every few months is cool, the ASO’s nice to shoot for, but I don’t see this stuff taking you to great heights.”

Regan can’t feel the smallness of Ada’s world. The thought of leaving her home, the air and the mountains, is terrifying, unthinkable. And her marriage is at least half that idea of home.

She starts to explain, even thinks she’ll bring up finding herself under a bed sheet, losing pieces of time, but something drifts close behind her. Ada looks up to see Ms. Hursh, her neighbor from across the street, grinning down at her. “Ms. Hursh?” Ada says. She’s a nice enough lady, mid-fifties, but they’ve shared only waves and maybe a hundred words in Ada’s three years on Pinewood Trail. She seems even less a bar type than Ada does. But the woman just stands and grins for several long seconds — Ada has time to glance at Regan, whose face scrunches up, then back — before she winks and shuffles away.

“Okay, that was weird,” Regan says, but she’s distracted, biting her lip again.

“Never mind that,” Ada says, “spill it, what’s the big secret?”

“It’s nothing. Cheryl saw him the other day, that’s all.”

“Luke? She saw Luke.” And to skip right to it: “Who was he with?”

“Some girl, I don’t know. Cheryl only said she was tall, almost freakish tall. And white.” She catches the waiter’s attention, points down at her glass. “Look, Ada, don’t do the ‘other woman’ hang-up. Think of how long he’s been gone. Without so much as a phone call. Think of what he did that last night.”

“He’d never done that before, not all the way like that. I don’t even know why he left, Regan. Can you see that? I think he got obsessed with some cult or something. I don’t care how long it’s been. I’m worried about him.”