Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

But she had stood back up triumphantly, her loose bun unraveling, her hair blowing wildly in the wind. She had managed to hold on to the wine bottle this whole time, and now she lifted it, draining the last of the liquid, the glass reflecting the moonlight. She threw it overboard, and the bottle landed in the water with a loud plunk . I heard it, but I couldn’t see it, because a cloud had moved in front of the moon. The night had gone pitch-black. The waves crashed and sloshed against the boat. Bile churned in my stomach. “See,” Stella said, her voice detached from her body in the darkness. “What I can’t stand the most is that—”

It happened in slow motion. Like a dream, or a nightmare. A swelling wave passed beneath. The clouds moved; the moon reemerged. The boat tilted at a steep angle, the bow raked up. For a moment it looked like Stella might, miraculously, keep her footing, her bare feet affixed gecko-like to the sloping surface.

But then the boat reached the apex of its tilt, and as it crashed down, it launched Stella into the air like a catapult. When she came back down, her head hit the edge of the bow with a sickening thunk. Even in that split second, I saw her body go limp. She had been knocked out cold, just before she rolled into the dark water.

There was a thick pool of blood visible against the boat’s white paint.

This was where instinct was supposed to kick in. A surge of adrenaline: haul her out of the water, stanch the bleeding, race back to shore. But there was nothing. No instinct, no urgency. Only the echo of the words she spoke moments earlier.

Leech. Suck-up. Fraud.

Why are you saying this?

Because it’s true.

Leaning over the edge of the boat, at first I saw nothing. Then, the bubbles breaking on the surface. Then a movement in the water. A thrash. A pale white arm reaching blindly for the surface, looking for something to grab hold of. A body fighting to stay alive.

Sometimes, standing on the platform and waiting for the subway in New York, I’d feel the strangest impulse. The sparkle of headlights in the tunnel, the stirring air. As the subway roared into the station, I felt the urge to jump. It wasn’t that I wanted to die. It was a kind of curiosity, testing the limits of personal freedom. What would it be like, to do the worst possible thing?

Well, what if you finally did heed that feeling? And not just for one brief moment. For another, and another, and another, until the moments stacked into measurable time. What if that impulse could be stretched from a point into a line? A black slash of finality. The fin of a conductor’s baton. A heartbeat flattening into silence.

The thrashing gradually slowed. The bubbles broke less frequently, and then not at all. The surface of the ocean continued to slosh against the boat.

All you do is interfere, she said.

This time, I did nothing.

“ARE YOU OKAY?” the woman at the motel said. “Do you want me to call someone?”

“I just need a room,” I said.

She squinted at my wet hair and red eyes and lumpy duffel bag. Then she stepped out from behind the front desk and peered through the window to the parking lot. “Are you sure he didn’t follow you, sweetheart?”

“What?” I said. Her knowing look made it clear she took my confusion for denial. The implication finally clicked. “Oh, no, it’s nothing like that. It’s just… I had a fight with my best friend. She lives down the road. She kicked me out.”

“Oh!” she said, visibly relieved. No shotgun vigil, no 9-1-1 on speed dial in case the abusive boyfriend showed up. “Well, you’ll make up with her. I’m sure of it.”

“I hope so.” I attempted a smile.

“Just one night?” she asked. “We’ll need a credit card for the deposit.”

She studied my card. “Violet Trapp,” she said. “What a lovely name. I had a cousin named Violet. You rarely hear that name these days.” She handed back the credit card, and placed the room key on the desk, but kept her hand atop it. She had the distinctive curiosity of a postmenopausal, small-town gossip. “Honey, I have to ask, what were you doing around here at this time of year, anyways?”

My initial plan was to keep the story as simple as possible, answers stripped of detail to prevent further questioning. But there was my credit card, logged in the computer. The careful way she had enunciated my name. The security camera aimed at the front desk. Sooner or later, someone would uncover this particular moment in time. I had to make it look real.

“Her grandparents have a place here,” I said. “We’re from New York. We were just up for the weekend. She had a stressful week. Actually, her boyfriend just dumped her.”

The woman frowned sympathetically. “And she took it out on you?”

“I guess so. She was in a terrible mood, and told me she didn’t want me hanging around anymore. She wanted to be alone. So I decided to leave.”

“Oh, honey, don’t take it personally. There’s nothing worse than a broken heart.”

A lump formed in my throat. “I’m sure you’re right,” I said.

“You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep,” the woman said. “Your room is at the end, nice and quiet. Far from the road.”

“Thanks,” I said. My stomach grumbled. “Is there anywhere to get something to eat?”

“Best you can do is the gas station across the way.” She nodded toward the road. “They have a 7-Eleven that’s open all night.”

I filled my arms with soda and chips and cellophaned pastries at the 7-Eleven, where the man behind the counter gave me the same appraising, sympathetic-but-skeptical look as the woman at the motel. “Don’t get many strangers at this time of night,” he said. But when I told him my story, it had a pleasing weight, a satisfying constancy. In the next twenty-four hours, I repeated it several times. To the taxi driver, who took me to the bus depot. The cashier selling the tickets. The person sitting across from me on the southbound bus. It was easy to remember, because it was so very close to the truth.

I was staying with a friend.

We had a fight, a bad one.

She wanted me to leave.

So here I am.

That’s where the story always ended: with me, standing in front of whomever I happened to be speaking to. Unspoken was the coda, which—for the time being—only I knew to be true: and that was the last time I ever saw Stella Bradley.

I’d never subscribed to the idea of prophecy, of instructions delivered with a psychic thunderbolt: Joan of Arc seeing visions in the garden, presidential candidates claiming that God told them to run. The idea of a higher voice—God, or call it whatever you like—cutting through the daily mental noise to show the way seemed implausible at best, and a ruthless lie at worst. Why does anyone decide to lead a military uprising, or run for president? Because they want power. But it’s unbecoming to state that so baldly. Anyone who said that God had spoken to them, I figured, was just looking for cover.

But on the boat that night, I understood how it might happen. After the thrashing stopped, my mind went perfectly quiet. Blank and still. And in that quiet, it was easy to listen to the one small voice that persisted. It was like driving through a desert with only static on the radio, and suddenly coming over a rise where the static gave way to a signal.

When people claimed to hear God speaking, this was what they really meant. The infinite branching possibilities of life had—for that moment, at least—been pruned away, leaving only one option. The path forward was clear and definite. At a pivotal moment, you knew exactly what to do. As I stood on the boat, the ocean slapping and sloshing against the hull, I experienced that feeling of profound relief. One might even call it ecstasy.