by Leah Raeder
I was in love with my best friend. Hopelessly, completely in love.
No more hiding. No more denying and downplaying it. Fuck what other people thought. I didn’t care how we looked, how they’d label us. I only cared what she felt. If two people could make each other smile and laugh and forget all the pain and darkness in the world for a moment, why should we feel ashamed of it?
Why had I been so scared of this, of being happy with her?
As payment for the comics I pulled her into a boutique to try on random things and demand her opinion. Ellis loathed clothes shopping. But she sat enrapt in the changing room, her pulse swelling in her throat. Only her eyes moved, locked on me. Finally she followed me into a stall and pushed me up against the door. My clothes piled on the floor. In the mirror across from us I watched a redheaded boy fuck me. One hand covered my mouth, muffling my gasps.
Dane met us across the channel. We bought soft pretzels from a street vendor, walked along the harbor taking pics. Joke porny group selfies for Frankie and sweet ones for ourselves. When Dane snapped pics I kissed Ellis unhesitatingly, then looked him in the eyes. Some part of me wanted to see something there—a flash of resentment, regret. Any clue. But he only looked happy for us.
Before he left, Dane kissed my cheek and murmured, “Now I get why you turned me down. You and her were meant to be.”
“You big sap,” I said, but something bright brimmed inside me, uncontainable.
Ellis and I stayed to watch the sunset. In its own way Boston is haunted—not with silence and loneliness like Maine, but with history. Blood soaked deep into the soil, cannonballs sunk low in the muck. We’d fought here bitterly for independence. I could still sense the bared teeth, tattered sails, the fiery arcs of flung torches. That fight was still in us, in our roots. And I wondered if it was still in me.
If you’re really an artist, I thought, you’ll find a way to make art however you can, like Bukowski said. With half your body gone. With soot and a cave wall. With your own blood.
Something settled heavily in my chest, like a book closing.
I thought of Blue somewhere out there in the lights twinkling across the harbor. Alone in a hotel room, watching the tiny people below. So far away from it, the warmth of skin and breath. From everything real.
Then Ellis took my hand, our fingers dovetailing, and all I thought of was her.
We watched the light fade behind the city and drove back through the black night, home.
—WINTER—
—12—
Snow fell on the beach, coating shells and the stony shore in fine white felt. All the colors softened as if too much water had mixed in. In winter Chebeague Island seemed even more isolated, a snowflake adrift in the great green-black abyss of the Atlantic.
I slid the box up the boat ramp with my toe, carving a trail through the snow. Ellis had told me she could carry them all. I wouldn’t allow it. As if I’d let her show me up.
But as soon as I’d left her line of sight, I’d bitched out.
Most of her stuff was already on the yacht. Frankie let us borrow it to move Ellis back to Portland. Too cold in winter to stay in the cabin. Plus, there was us. Me and her.
Some of my stuff was on the yacht, too.
I hadn’t told Frankie yet that I planned to retire from camming. Didn’t want to leave her in the lurch. I wanted to come to her with a new business plan, and seed money.
And I was almost ready.
Back at the cabin I found Ellis sitting on the bare floor with her laptop, typing rapidly, frowning.
“Are you raging at someone who just pwned you?”
“It’s Frankie,” she muttered.
“Frankie pwned you?”
“Stop saying ‘pwned,’ dork. She’s worried about the site.”
Last month they’d discovered a bug in the cam site code. Ellis had worked round-the-clock to patch it, but repercussions kept echoing. A change here meant a cascading series of changes there, there, and there. She stayed up late, tapping away in the blue screenglow, code flying across the void. Sometimes I curled up and watched her work, wondering if my creative process was as cryptic and arcane to her. An entire universe unfolding inside her head, invisible to me.
Sometimes it reminded me too much of him, and I had to leave the house and walk along the shore, clear my mind. Ellis would find me there and fall in step, silent. She’d take my hand. And everything would be okay.
For a while.
I asked once if she could analyze Blue’s IP logs. Maybe he’d been careless. All it took was one time, one rash log-in attempt from an insecure location, and I’d know. Peaks meant Max, Boston meant Dane. I even skulked at my old coffee shop, swathed in a scarf and beanie, watching Curtis. If I could just look him in the eyes, look at his hands. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to his hands?
Blue never contacted me after Boston. I’d emailed him, messaged him on various sites. The emails bounced. The messages didn’t deliver.
User does not exist.
As if he’d never been real.
“No,” Ellis had said to my request. “That’s a breach of privacy. Frankie could fire me for it.” Her voice wavered. “I thought you let him go, Vada. I thought it was us now.”
“It is, baby.” I put my arms around her, my lips to her ear. “It’s just closure. I hate not knowing why it happened.”
“We don’t always get closure. Sometimes we have to make our own.”
So I tried. Very hard.
And I was almost there.
“We’re pretty much done,” I said, kicking Ellis’s boot. “Couple more boxes and the mattress. No thanks to you.”
“You’re the reason there are so many boxes to begin with.”
“Can’t help it. I enjoy humiliating you with gifts.”
“I don’t think that’s the spirit behind gift-giving.”
“Let me give you the gift of silence,” I said, setting her laptop aside and tackling her to the floor.
I kissed her, my whole body lighting up when we touched, my skin glowing like a paper lantern. Crazy, how wild she still drove me. As if we’d started all over again with limerence and lust. As if she were someone new. I cupped her face and gave her my patented Cheshire grin.
Ellis laughed. “Will you—”
I kissed her again, slower, running my tongue between her lips till she opened her mouth. Pulled back to make a flicker of eye contact, heat filling my head, then wrapped my tongue around hers. We were still in our coats. No fire in the hearth, the cold breathing through the wood. Her mouth scalded me. I kept kissing her deeper, trying to reach the point where we shared one breath, one set of lungs, one everything. She broke away.
“We have to—”
I kissed her again. She stopped trying to speak and used her mouth for more important things. Like me.
Somehow we managed to climb to the loft bed before all our clothes came off. By then Ellis was in control, kissing my breasts and throat and making me feel that weightless submission that came when I lay on my back in the water, palms upturned, mouth open to the sky. We burrowed under the bright white quilt and she put her face between my legs, painting me with her tongue. After, I reciprocated, our hands clasped, crumpling the quilt like crepe paper. It wasn’t always rough and intense. More often now it was this tenderness, touching each other as if something fragile hung between us and we both wanted to protect it, keep it from shattering. I thought of those broken bowls glued back together with gold, more beautiful once they’d been broken. When she came I kissed her softly, adoringly, amazed that this was mine, this beautiful person, that letting go of my fear could feel like this.
You can fall in love again with someone you’re already in love with. It’s like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.
We lay side by side, tangled in a spell of blankets and warm skin.
&nb
sp; “Estoy tan feliz,” I murmured.
“Me too.” Ellis smiled, one side of her mouth higher than the other. Every time she did that a little bird zigzagged madly inside my rib cage. “I wish time would stop right here.”
“It does, you know.” I spun a finger in her hair. “When someone makes a sketch, a song, a poem, it stops. The moment repeats forever inside that piece of art.”
“Then draw us.”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I’m a big old scaredy-cat.”
My hand fell. Ellis caught it, raised it to her cheek.
“You’ve already done the bravest thing. You told me what you’ve been holding back.”
But I hadn’t.
Then she kissed me, and for a while I forgot all my fears. There was only color and texture. White sheets folding around us like camellia petals, bare arms intertwined, red hair and near-black spread across the pillow. Like that Toulouse-Lautrec painting of the two girls in bed. A perfect moment.
Ellis nestled her head under my chin, and I said, “It’s almost been a year.”
We both brooded about it lately, a somberness lodged in our bones, weighing heavier the closer we got to the anniversary. Less than a week to go now.
“I wonder what Ryan would’ve done with this year,” I said. “It’s not right, that I’m here and he’s not.”
“Don’t say that.”
I traced a finger over the low ceiling, raw pine. The same thing they’d made his coffin from. Inside lay the urn holding his ashes. There was something perturbing about the cremation, as if Max couldn’t bear for the body to exist a moment longer than necessary. “I wonder what he really wanted to be. Marine. Musician. Photographer.”
“Maybe he just wanted to be himself.”
“That’s sad. Not even having that before you die.”
I felt her tense against me, and kissed the top of her head. If I could shield her from every homophobic asshole out there—the kind who beat up gay kids at school dances, the kind who told their child to pray the gay away—I would.
Maybe it was enough to hold her hand in public.
Maybe if Ryan had had someone like that, he’d still be here.
“It could’ve gone the other way,” I said. “It could’ve been us in the water and Ryan lying awake right now, wondering who we were. All of this is so ephemeral.” I stretched out my right hand and candlelight cast witchy shadows from my fingers. I brushed Ellis’s hair out of her eyes. “You don’t even realize all the things you can lose.”
“You won’t lose me. I promise.”
In my head I wrote the dialogue we didn’t speak.
No matter what I tell you?
No matter what.
“Ellis.”
“Vada.”
Could she feel the craziness happening in my heart right now? Fuck.
“I don’t ever want to lose you again. I don’t ever want to wake up without you at my side.”
It took a second for her to process it. She twisted around to look up at me.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I want to look at your stupid freckles forever, okay?”
I was light-headed, blood pressure dropping from the words I’d just let loose into the universe. Her face was a mix of shock and wonder. Then she threw her arms around my neck so vehemently I actually did start to black out a bit.
“Baby, you’re choking me. Not in a good way.”
She pulled back, covered my mouth and face with kisses, and I gave up trying to breathe and let it happen. In my head I sketched her: hair in wild thistles around that elfin face, eyes lit up like I’d never seen before. Like the kid in her must have looked right after her first kiss, or when she aced a test and got the highest grade in the class. Like she’d just been given the whole world.
* * *
All that remained was the bed. Ellis was carrying the last box to the boat as I paced through the empty cabin, remembering. Paint still splattered all over the wood, a furious rainbow. We’d dragged the couch back to the beach house. An empty rectangle outlined where it had sat, and I knelt there, tracing the hollow.
My weight tilted a floorboard. Something white flashed beneath it.
Weird.
I leaned harder and the board corner rose. Below was a letter.
Mail that must have fallen, gotten trapped. I pulled it up with a nail. Torn envelope.
From the Office of the Medical Examiner. To Ellis Carraway.
Wait, what?
I’d let her complete the request form because she was better at that stuff—my lefty handwriting was shit, and I’d just end up doodling on it anyway. But we’d listed me as the recipient.
I pulled out the sheets inside.
Autopsy report: Ryan Francis Vandermeer.
What the actual fuck?
Footsteps on the log stairs.
On instinct I slid the report back into the envelope and dropped it beneath the floorboard. Ellis walked in as I stood.
“Hey,” I said, too brightly.
“Hey yourself. Brandt’s on the next ferry.”
Her cousin had a legit boating license. We figured it’d be good to bring him along. Plus I needed some bonding time with him, since we’d all be living together soon.
I said nothing, staring at her face, my mind turning over and over.
Ellis moved closer. “You okay?”
“Just spacey. Having sex in the middle of moving day was probably not our best idea.”
She blushed and lowered her eyes. Which gave me the chance to move from the hot spot.
I tried to process this, to phrase a conversation starter. Ellis, why? Even if it had fallen there, been mislaid, it was open. She’d read it. Never mentioned it to me.
Before I could begin, my phone buzzed. A text, from the last person I expected.
I need you.
I stood there staring at the screen.
“Who is it?” Ellis said.
“Max.”
She frowned. “What does he want?”
“To see me.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know.” I pocketed it before she could look. “Didn’t sound serious, but who knows with him. Can you and Brandt handle the yacht?”
“Sure.” Ellis touched my arm. “I should go with you, though.”
“It’s fine.”
“Vada.” She cupped my face and peered into it. So observant, so sensitive. Sometimes she seemed to know what I felt before I did. “What’s wrong?”
I realized what she must be thinking: All that talk about forever. Cold feet, second thoughts.
“Nothing, promise,” I said, and kissed her before she could ask more, and though my mind was going a million miles an hour a part of me surrendered to her, lost itself, my heart giving a flutter like a startled bird. I kissed her till the jittery energy in my body became focused and intense, then made myself stop. “I’ll take the ferry. See you tonight at my place?”
Ellis nodded, flushed and breathless and so winsome I could almost forget, for a moment, that she’d hidden something from me. Something she knew I wanted, desperately.
Because why would she do that? To spare me? But she was the one who’d been reluctant to look, not me.
What had she seen?
“Love you,” I said, smiling, as I walked out the door.
* * *
Snow fell on the ferry ride, the sky growing cottony and thick. By the time we docked I could barely see my hand before my face. I knew the path by memory, up the hills into the knotted heart of the island where tree roots reached centuries deep, clutching at rock that had been thrown here by glaciers. In Maine, like in Kahlo, the world was stripped close to the nerve.
It was dark when I reached the house. Snow-dark, light reflecting off the dull pearl underbellies of clouds. I scrambled up the porch and banged on the door, shaking powder from my coat.
“Max?”
No answer. But it was unlocked.
; I went in cautiously, still calling for him.
The house smelled of leaves and dust, the peppery tang of ice. Lights off. Far cry from the last time I was here.
I walked past the bathroom twice before I came back, slower, peering into the shadows.
“Max?”
He sat in the tub, boots braced on the wall. Glass glinted, moved in an arc. He was drinking.
I found a candle and lit it on the stove, brought it to him.
This time I saw the gun.
It sat on the rim of the tub, dark blue steel shining softly. All the light seemed drawn to it as if it were hungry.
“What are you doing?” I said, sitting on the toilet lid.
I smelled him from here. Whiskey and a musk of sweat and sandalwood, like he’d been working in the woods. His hair was tangled. Fine stubble covered his jaw.
An empty bottle of Jim Beam lay in the tub with him, a half-filled one on the floor.
“Max, how long have you been drinking?”
He finally looked at me. Glazed eyes. “How long have you been lying?”
My spine went cold. “What?”
He drained the glass, reached for the bottle.
I snatched it away. “What the hell’s going on? Why’d you text me?”
“I’m lonely.”
His voice creaked like old wood. His head tipped forward, hair falling in his face. Even with how drunk and surly he was, I felt a wild urge to touch him.
No person should feel this alone.
I lowered myself to the floor. Gingerly, watching him, I pushed the gun away, lifted his hand to the tub ledge and laid mine over it.
I didn’t have to ask about the booze. Anniversary week.
“You should get out of Maine,” I said. “Go somewhere else, till it’s over.”
“It’s never over.”
“Why do you have the gun?” My hand tightened. “If I have to sit here on suicide watch, I will.”
“Don’t worry. Too much of a coward to do it that way.” He laughed, unpleasantly. “I like to touch it.”
His talisman.
In a box in my room were three hand-carved wooden figures. Sometimes, while Ellis was away, or sleeping, I touched the box. Sometimes I opened it and touched them.
