by Nevada Barr
“I do miss the hash brown casseroles,” Jenny said neutrally. “Green salads with lo-cal dressing just aren’t the same. Why? Does their friendship bother you?”
He seemed to give the question serious thought. “I guess it does,” he said after a few seconds. “Don’t get me wrong, I like Anna well enough, but I think she’s a bad influence on Bethy. Since Anna’s been hanging around, Bethy is … it’s hard to put into words.”
Jenny crimped her lips together as if she held straight pins in her mouth. Had Regis been trying, she doubted he could have been more insulting. Anna was not “hanging around” Bethy. If anything, the opposite was true. As for his “liking Anna well enough,” the way he fawned over her put the lie to that. Jenny suspected the “bad influence” Anna exerted was the self-confidence Bethy had begun to exhibit on rare occasions.
Not trusting herself to speak, she said nothing. Flying to Anna’s defense would expose more about her than she cared to make public.
* * *
Jenny wasn’t rising to the bait. Regis could tell his disparagement of Anna upset her, yet she’d chosen to shut him out rather than side with him. Fear coiled through his insides, loosening everything in its path. What had started out as a fine adventure was now officially a horror show.
Ecru, he thought to himself and smiled sourly. His mother’s favorite color. After all these years he finally saw its charm. A period of bland nothing would be restful. Having discovered the darkness he’d long suspected all people carried within, he doubted he could go back to ecru anytime soon.
“I don’t like them spending so much time together,” he said, trying another tack.
“So you’ve said,” Jenny replied.
No softening there. Tough bitch.
“I don’t think it’s fair to you.” Regis pitched his voice to the tune of concerned empathy, no mean feat over the engine racket.
Jenny glanced at him sharply. He held her gaze until he was sure she knew he knew she was gay and infatuated with the woman from New York. That no one else noticed Jenny Gorman was gay and in love he put down to mass hypnosis. People believed what they wanted to believe and saw—or didn’t see—whatever they needed to in order to ratify their beliefs: angels, aliens, ghosts, the Virgin Mary, demons, the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, leprechauns, or Jesus’s face on a grilled cheese sandwich. Those who wanted to believe the earth was only six thousand years old did not see history, archaeology, paleontology, geology, or astronomy.
The Park Service did not see lesbians. The fact that Jenny was wearing her hair down more often, buying more expensive wine, shaving her legs with regularity, and sparkling every time her housemate appeared went unnoticed.
“What do you mean it’s not fair to me?” Jenny asked after a minute or so.
“Don’t play games,” Regis said coolly, keeping the smile from his lips. The hook was set. With luck it would prod her into a territorial mood and she’d insert herself between Anna and Bethy, keep them from spending their lieu days together.
A woman alone was easier to kill.
FORTY-FOUR
Despite mental gymnastics, Jenny couldn’t eradicate the seeds of uncertainty—jealousy—that Regis planted. For the remainder of the trip she didn’t see desert varnish or intricate sculptures of stone; she saw Anna and Bethy enacting all the boisterous joyous fantasy scenes in which Jenny would have liked to star.
The sort of betrayal Regis suggested, that his wife, for heaven’s sake, and Jenny’s housemate were supposedly laying the groundwork for, was not new to Jenny. Mostly she’d been named the betrayer. She never saw herself in that light. Where neither promises nor commitments were made, she felt no promises could be broken nor commitments go unmet. That’s what she told herself when the proverbial shoe had been laced to her own slender foot. Now that the shoe was on the other foot, it felt like a knife between the shoulder blades.
As she and Regis pulled into Dangling Rope she saw Jim, out of uniform, sipping a beer, and chatting up Libby Perez, this season’s lone female concessions worker. Libby was twenty years older than Jim and had the lush velvet beauty of a full-blown rose when the petals are loose and lazy and the reds grown deeper at their edges.
“Jim!” Jenny called before Regis had shut down the engine. “Do you know if Anna’s around?”
Afraid of seeing a smirk on Regis’s face, she didn’t look at him as she jumped ship.
“Is Anna up at housing?” she asked.
“Why? Something happen?” Despite the sandals, Dos Equis, and Libby, Jim came into law enforcement focus so quickly he almost shimmered badge-gold.
Jenny realized she sounded anxious. Damn Regis. Emotional balance was difficult enough to maintain without louts with hidden agendas tipping the scales.
“Regis is worried Ms. Pigeon has eloped with his wife,” she said and was rewarded by a look of annoyance as Regis came up beside her.
Jim laughed. “I think that’s the case,” he said easily. “As I was coming off duty, I passed them in the Zodiac. Bethy said they were headed for Lover’s Leap to do a couple hours in the slot.”
Lover’s Leap. Jenny was crushed. That was a place she’d been saving to show Anna.
“What do you say, Jenny? Shall we go surprise them?” Regis asked.
To her shame, she immediately said yes.
The boat ride to the little canyon with its here-today-and-gone-tomorrow beach was less than half an hour. Neither Jenny nor Regis spoke. Both seemed to have dropped the pretense that this was spur-of-the-moment fun.
The closer they got to their destination, the worse Jenny felt. In acquiescing, she had shown disrespect for Anna, herself, and their friendship. Even in the sanctity of her own mind, she didn’t call it a relationship. The societal connotations of that word were too fraught.
More than once she thought to tell Regis she’d changed her mind, that she needed to get back to the Rope, but a cruel aspect had shut down his face. He looked much as she imagined a soldier would before battle or a cowboy before he shot his crippled horse, so she’d said nothing.
Jenny knew Regis had maneuvered her into this so misery would have company. He wanted to break up Anna and Bethy’s outing and thought he could use Jenny as an ally or at least an excuse. Jenny didn’t picture him as the jealous husband, rushing out to catch his bisexual wife in flagrante delicto. More likely he didn’t like his wife monopolizing a woman he was interested in. Didn’t want them becoming friends, swapping notes.
The whole thing was sick. Jenny was sick of her part in the soap opera. “Regis!” she called over the engine noise. “This is a bad idea. We need to turn back.”
“We’re almost there,” he said determinedly. Less than a minute later, when he throttled back to turn the boat into the side canyon, Jenny tried again.
“Regis, take me back. The sun is nearly down. It will be too dark to make the climb up and back.”
“So we meet them halfway.”
He was set on making this particular mistake, and Jenny was along for the ride. She gave up.
Anna didn’t know she was in love with her, Jenny reasoned. Anna wouldn’t know that she’d agreed to “surprise” her and Bethy from base motives. No one would know except Regis and herself. That Regis now knew she was an easily manipulated lovesick fool didn’t much bother her.
That she was one did.
Regis nosed the speedboat in beside the Zodiac on the minuscule beach, nimbly walked over the pointed bow, and began tying up to the same deadwood to which the Zodiac was moored.
Before he finished, Bethy came stalking out of the opening in the sandstone. Suffused with blood, her face lent her the aspect of an exceedingly angry beet. Her hair, pulled back in a high ponytail, fifties cheerleader style, had partially escaped its rubber band and made inharmonious lumps on the side of her head.
“Bethy, is everything okay?” Regis asked cautiously at the same moment Jenny demanded, “Where’s Anna?”
“I want to go home,” Bethy said as she cl
ambered over the side of the speedboat. “She can take the Zodiac.” She turned cold eyes on Jenny and said, “You can wait for her, for all the good it will do you.” Bethy dug the key to the Zodiac out of her shorts pocket and was about to heave it over the bow onto the sand.
“I’ll take it,” Jenny said quickly, grabbed the key, and climbed awkwardly out of the boat.
“Regis, I want to go home now,” Bethy hissed at her husband.
“Anna—” he began.
“Now!”
Emotion left Regis’s face with the suddenness of a shade being drawn over a window. Without another word, he untied the boat, shoved it back from the sand, then leaped over the gunwale. In thirty seconds all that remained of the Candors was a wake lapping fiercely at the beach.
Key clutched in her hand, Jenny turned toward the neat vertical crack in the cliff.
“Anna?” she called timidly. Then, with rising panic, “Anna!”
Before Jenny could rush headlong into the slot, her housemate stepped from the dark of the crevice into the shadowless gray light of the evening. Her shoulders were slumped with weariness, a bruise was forming around her right eye, and a thin trail of blood from her nose had been smeared into a fan across her cheek.
“Jenny!” Anna said with a start.
“I came to surprise you,” Jenny said lamely.
“Everybody seems bent on surprising me today,” Anna said.
FORTY-FIVE
For the first time since Anna had arrived at Dangling Rope, she and Jenny spent the evening in the dim cool rattle of the swamp cooler’s realm. Anna was in no mood for social intercourse with their next-door neighbors. One on either side of the kitchen counter, she and Jenny sat on stools picking over the carcass of a frozen chicken-and-pineapple pizza.
“So she just hurled herself at you?” Jenny asked.
“I sat down next to her, prepared to be awed by natural beauty, and she went in for the kill. Our foreheads banged together and her chin hit me so hard it made my nose bleed. If we were still in high school, I swear our braces would have gotten locked. I haven’t been kissed like that since I was in fifth grade and George Cramer kissed me on a dare.”
“Is Bethy gay?” Jenny sounded more shocked than questioning.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Anna said. “If she is, she’s not very good at it.” Carrying her wine in the jelly glasses Jenny kept for that purpose, Anna slid off the stool and spread herself more comfortably on the couch, feet up on the scarred coffee table. The entire doomed affair was ridiculous. Anna doubted Bethy was now, or ever had been, homosexual. She dove in for the kiss with all the romance of somebody bobbing for apples.
“Regis was acting like he was afraid she was,” Jenny said. “He seemed jealous. That’s why we so conveniently turned up. Regis, checking on his wife.”
That surprised Anna. That he cared enough to be jealous of Bethy surprised her as much as the idea that he thought he might be married to a follower of Lesbos. Then, again, jealousy was not about caring, it was about fear of loss: loss of love, loss of power, or loss of security.
“So he thought Bethy took me out to the overlook for, well … for exactly what she did take me out to the overlook for?”
“To deflower you,” Jenny said wickedly.
“Compromise me,” Anna added.
“Take advantage of you.”
“Ruin me.” They laughed together easily. “If he thought Bethy was up to something, she had to have been dropping clues,” Anna said. “It’s not like anybody watching us together would get the wrong idea. Unless, of course, they were prurient bastards.”
“I don’t know,” Jenny said teasingly. “Pumping iron. Running bras and sweat.”
Anna scooped a none-too-clean sock up from the floor and flung it at her housemate.
Jenny snatched it out of the air and lofted it expertly into the wastepaper basket on the far side of the room. “What are you going to do?” Jenny asked. “Tell Regis he’s got nothing to worry about? Tell Bethy she’s straight?”
“Nothing,” Anna said. “I’m going to do exactly nothing. This is the sort of situation in which not taking any action whatsoever is the safest course. In fact, I’m going to pretend it never happened. Maybe that will let Bethy save face.”
“Maybe she’s been locked tight in the closet and this was her attempt to kick down the door,” Jenny suggested as she settled on the opposite end of the couch and propped her feet next to Anna’s. Between them was a triangle of sofa cushion fenced in by their legs, precisely the right size for a little skunk to safely play in.
“Wish Buddy was still here,” Anna sighed.
“Me, too,” Jenny replied.
They shared a moment of remembrance before Anna said, “I don’t think this was a closet thing. Have you ever felt one shred of heat from Bethy? I sure haven’t.”
“Me neither,” Jenny admitted.
“Sexual beings exude pheromones, esters, vibes,” Anna said. “If Bethy is gay, she is flying so far under the radar I doubt she’ll ever know why she cried more at the end of Thelma and Louise than her girlfriends did. Does she have girlfriends?”
Jenny thought about it for a moment. Anna waited. Whatever else Bethy had done today, she had certainly given her and Jenny endless grist for the gossip mill. It wasn’t often that anyone took Anna as off guard as she’d been at Lover’s Leap.
“No, now that you mention it,” Jenny said. “At least I don’t think so. I don’t know what her social life is like in Page, but on the lake it’s always been about Regis. Her first season she had a female housemate. They occasionally did things together—lift weights mostly, I think. They had different lieu days. After Regis started paying attention to her, that was that. No more time for the girlfriend. Regis loved his fast boat; Bethy loved fast boats. Regis loved to fly; Bethy loved to fly. I think she even soloed. If Regis had loved rolling in bat guano, you can bet that would have suddenly become Bethy’s favorite pastime.”
Holding a tangy swallow of wine in her mouth, Anna closed her eyes and returned to the unfortunately named Lover’s Leap. Bethy hadn’t reached for her, touched her, or taken her hand; she’d just gone for Anna’s lips like a pelican going for a fish.
When Anna had fallen off her end of the natural stone bench, half stunned and cursing, Bethy looked affronted. Propped up on her elbows, her nose hurting and her eyes watering, Anna’d asked, “What did you do that for?”
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” Bethy had said coldly.
“Not even close,” Anna replied.
With that, Bethy stood up, dusted off the seat of her shorts, and left Anna there in the dirt.
Anna swallowed the wine. “I had to hustle down after her so she wouldn’t putter off in the Zodiac and maroon me,” she said.
“She was probably mortified,” Jenny said, and Anna heard genuine sympathy in her voice. “God knows I would have been.”
“Me, too. I’d want to dye my hair, change my name, and leave town for a while. I don’t think it was a sex thing at all. I think she wants to be a part of something. Maybe a part of our friendship and she thought those were the dues she had to pay,” Anna mused.
“That’s about the saddest thing I ever heard,” Jenny said.
“I don’t think Bethy thinks about too much more than Bethy. That wouldn’t make for a particularly happy life.”
Jenny levered herself off the couch, crossed to the kitchen counter, and brought back the wine bottle. She held it up to Anna. Anna shook her head. The congenial beverage had a way of turning on her if she didn’t watch it. Having sat down, Jenny poured herself a generous amount, then took a long swallow. Elbows on knees, eyes on the scratched surface of the coffee table, she looked to be making a serious decision. Anna stayed quiet, letting her think.
At length, Jenny set her jelly glass on the table, faced Anna squarely, and said, “I’m gay.”
“A lot of people are,” Anna said and waited for her to get to her point.
&n
bsp; Jenny seemed to be waiting as well, her eyes on Anna’s face.
“And…” Anna offered to help her move past whatever had gotten her stuck.
Jenny relaxed. She shook her wild hair until it coiled Medusa-like in gravity-defying ways. Shrugging sheepishly, she said, “And you’re not.”
There was the barest hint of a question in Jenny’s tone. Anna considered her post-Zach sexuality for the first time. Many truths she held about herself and others—her ability to read people, her understanding of herself—had been uprooted as life repeatedly bulldozed its way through her preconceptions.
“I don’t think so,” she said finally, “but then I guess a lot depends on who you fall in love with.”
FORTY-SIX
A scream, cut off in its infancy, brought Jenny out of a sound sleep. In T-shirt and panties, she stumbled to the door and flipped on the light.
“Anna?”
“Here.” Anna’s bedroom light came on, backlighting her. She wore a lime green tank top and men’s plain white boxer shorts.
“You?” Jenny asked.
“No. Outside.” Anna trotted down the hall. Jenny ran after her. The scream concerned but didn’t frighten her. There was nothing to be afraid of at Dangling Rope other than sunburn and bad dreams. Three seasons before, she’d been awakened by just such a noise and had to ferry a seasonal interpreter with acute appendicitis to Bullfrog to be medevacked out. Banging through the screen door, she nearly bowled Anna over.
Without a word, Anna made room for her, and they waited in the hot darkness, listening.
“What time is it?” Anna whispered.
Jenny pushed one of the buttons on her diver’s watch, and the screen lit ghostly green. “Quarter to one,” she whispered back.
No lights showed in Jim’s duplex. The alien gray from a television screen glowed in Gil and Dennis’s place. The reception couldn’t be all that great. Jenny wondered why they bothered.
