by Ann Bauer
Then I felt her tongue, small and slightly rough, lapping at my lower lip. Startled, I jerked away from her and smacked my back flat against the passenger door. “I didn’t mean to kiss you!” I said, before I’d had a chance to think.
Madeline glanced down, her head bowed for a moment as if in prayer. But when she raised it, her gaze was scornful and amused. “We’ve had too much to drink, both of us. I probably shouldn’t even be driving. Go.” She put her hand on the stick shift and said it again. “Go. I need to get home to bed.”
I seriously considered putting my hand on hers, unbuckling both our seatbelts and drawing her close. I wanted to. My ache for a woman went deep into my bones, and so far in my life, Madeline was the one I knew best. But she looked, sitting there bundled and flinty behind the vast windshield, like a woman who might burst into flames.
“Good night, Madeline.” Gathering every bit of courage I possessed, I reached out with one bare hand to touch her cheek, and she allowed this, though she continued to stare straight ahead.
“Good night,” she said to her own reflection. “Get some sleep, Gabe. Good work today.”
This confused me, as I had not performed much of a function. It was a mostly passive role I fulfilled at board meetings and “creative brainstorms.” But then I remembered this was exactly what she and Isaac had said to each of their colleagues—Scott and Joy and of course Abel, whom I liked immensely—as they left the room. In fact I believed I’d heard Isaac and Madeline say it to each other, like passing unction.
“You, too,” was my ridiculous response.
With that, I opened the door and stepped out onto the damp, chilly street.
The next morning, sky and air blended in a shroud of gray. I walked to Starbucks for coffee, my one planned outing of the day. And within that shop I watched couples with fat babies in strollers, happy despite the weather pressing in from outside. A woman raised her left hand, causing that unmistakable spark of gold and diamonds to catch the light. I might have married them, this very couple. How many times had I stood by while some stranger worked a ring onto the finger of a woman I had made his wife?
Also in the coffee shop that morning was an older man with reading glasses on a chain. He worked a laptop diligently while the woman across from him at the table sipped from her cup and knitted and smiled at him whenever he looked up.
I lingered, reluctant to leave the circle of this place. And I watched as a woman came in, younger than I by at least a dozen years. She was furtive and pale, dressed in a new but ill-fitting coat and a jaunty triangular hat, her long wheat-colored hair spilling out underneath and down nearly to her waist. I watched as she ordered, counting out four worn dollar bills for the cashier.
She took her coffee to a corner where she wedged herself into the least comfortable cranny behind a table—it was the only seat open but I knew instantly that she also desired it. Nooks and angles suited her. She was accustomed to being cramped and out of the way.
I watched from the safety of my book. She blew on her coffee and looked around with a strange lack of curiosity. There was something very out of place about her. Or rather, I thought, it was out of time. She seemed to be traveling without electronics: no laptop or tablet or smartphone. Around us, there were only people talking to their companions or madly pushing buttons—in many cases, both. Even the knitting woman had pulled out a device that she pecked at with an intensity that caused folds to form on her brow.
With neither companions nor gadget, the girl was like a visitor from some deep country. Not unlike me. I felt an irrational kinship with her that grew in my imagination as I watched.
We did not speak, though I sensed she knew I was observing her. Halfway through her giant cup of coffee—I was looking so intently, I could measure her progress—she stood, hat in one hand, walked to the trash can and dropped the cup in. Then she turned and left as if something had made her angry. She took no more than three steps before disappearing into the fog.
What impelled me to return the following day was not the girl, but fear. This was not my pattern. Typically, I would visit Starbucks on Saturday and work at Brooks Books on Sunday, drinking watery Folger’s from the ancient Mr. Coffee in the backroom. But as if he were in collusion with Madeline to make me receptive to any random moneymaking scheme, Oren had announced earlier in the week that we would no longer be open on Sundays; business was very slow, bringing in less than the $95 or so it took to pay me for the day. He’d apologized in his gallant way for the short notice, and I told him it was fine, though I knew Sunday would arrive like a monster’s gaping maw.
It had been one of the chief benefits of the job, aside from surrounding me with books—that I would be safely tucked inside, serving a purpose, when the church bells began to ring. When this Sunday morning arrived, even warmer—almost muggy—but with a pelting rain, I rose, showered, and dressed, found my umbrella, and headed out.
I was nearing the intersection where the Starbucks sat, just over the threshold of where our neighborhood started to “improve,” when someone fell in step with me. It was the woman from the morning before, her boat hat gone, a slick green raincoat covering her from her head to her knees. “Do you mind?” she asked ducking under my umbrella with me and peeling the hood from her hair.
“Of course,” I said, moving over as much as was possible under the shelter of a small umbrella from the drugstore discount rack.
“I saw you yesterday,” she said. “You kept staring at me, and I thought maybe I knew you from somewhere. I almost went over to talk to you then, but I decided that was insane. Some random guy in a coffee shop. You could have been a serial rapist for all I knew.”
“Could still be,” I said.
She nodded gravely. Up close, her face was lightly freckled and free of makeup. With her long shining hair, she looked like those women in documentaries about the sixties: wholesome yet untamed. In the distance, the ringing of the bells began.
“I should be there,” she said, pointing in the direction of the sound.
“Church?” I asked, and she nodded. How many people, I wondered, thought exactly the same thing when they heard those bells?
We came to the door of Starbucks and I pushed it open over her head. Inside, the noise was crushing: people laughing and milk being frothed. We stood in line together, and to anyone who had been watching it would have looked as if we were together, another happy couple out for their morning coffee. It felt good, false as it was. Despite the rain and the echo of the bells, I played at being lighter, less serious—the ordinary man I might have become, if not for Aidan. Out for coffee with my girl on a lazy Sunday—that’s what I imagined the world saw.
“What do you want?” I asked when it was our turn and she ordered her coffee, exactly the same as yesterday, a fact that I tucked away. We went to a table together and sat. “I’m Gabriel,” I said, and she answered, “Jem.”
What was I intending? Certainly nothing sexual. She was too young for me, first, and a sort of eccentric that bordered on vulnerable. So I wasn’t trying to charm Jem—only pretending, just for an hour, to have a normal life. But I do recall that she tucked in close at my side, the way a woman does with her husband or brother, and this made me feel protective. The wet rain suit still hung around her shoulders, and for the second day in a row I watched her remove the lid of her coffee and blow.
“It’s a baptism,” she said finally. “I was going to be the godmother. But last night, my friend disowned me and kicked me out of her house. I think she called her sister instead.”
I trust I did not give away the dull pain that started in my chest and traveled down, all the way to my legs. But in that moment, my sense of belonging ebbed away. Jem was just like the others; she only wanted to use me to confess. If I waited she would launch into her tale of guilt. And, sure enough, by the count of three she did.
She was raised in Pennsylvania, or Ohio—she mentioned both; I gleaned the difference was small. There was a friendship during high sc
hool with a girl much prettier and more successful than Jem herself. I pictured what this would mean at seventeen in a rugged steel mining town: a girl with Egyptian eye makeup and tight white T-shirts who belonged to the dance line that sometimes precedes football games. In their senior year, the other girl—name of Stacy, not surprisingly—became involved with an unlikely boy.
“He was more my type, you know?” Jem asked, stirring her undrunk coffee with a wooden stick, though she’d added nothing to it. “He was nerdy and skinny, obsessed with dolphins and whales.”
The boy wanted to be a marine biologist and had been accepted to a university in Oregon where the study of ocean life was, in Jem’s words, “an actual thing.” But it made no sense: Stacy and Jared, which was the boy’s name. Jem would quiz Stacy when they were alone together, and her friend could never pinpoint precisely what she liked about him. She had no great love for sea animals and would be entirely unsuited to Oregon.
“Stacy was the kind of person who assumed that a woman who wore hiking boots must be a lesbian,” Jem explained.
Graduation was looming. Jem had dated a couple of boys from their high school, but they all paled next to Jared, whose bedroom (which she had visited once with Stacy) was painted a dark blue color and papered with images of shining orcas and narwhals the size of small ships. Being there made Jem feel genuinely happy, for the first time in her memory. It was like living under the surface of the water. She ached to lie on Jared’s extra-long twin bed.
Her recitation was unhurried and so vivid I could picture every scene. Jem still sat in her green coat. My coffee was mostly gone.
“Stacy didn’t deserve him. She didn’t love him.” Jem held me with her frank green eyes.
“But you did.” It was the first time I’d spoken since we sat down.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. The truth is, he never for one minute noticed me. Even though it would have made perfect sense! I was one of those girls who got A’s in science and liked listening to Collective Soul in the dark. But Stacy …” She shook her head. “She got drunk one night and said some things about him when he wasn’t around. About how, um, weird he was. Like she was dating him as an experiment. Just to prove she could.”
“So …” She paused. For a very long time.
“So?” I asked. “At this point, all you’ve given me is the plot to a bad Molly Ringwald film.”
“Try Gaslight.” She gulped down three hits of cold coffee so her cup was more or less at the half-full point she’d left it the day before. “Hey,” she said, rising. “It’s not raining any more. You want to walk?”
This is how we ended up leaving together, Jem and I, walking in the direction that came naturally to me, which was south and east toward the building where I lived. After a block or so she took my arm, tucking her hand in the crook of my elbow, and I let her. My umbrella swung from my other hand.
“What’s your story?” she asked, startling me, making me remember with a jolt my last encounter with Madeline. That kiss. Were women always so difficult to predict?
“Wait. You were in the middle of telling me about gaslighting someone.”
“Yeah, that can wait.” Jem hugged my arm to her like we were old friends, and I let her. “I can’t tell my life story to a total stranger. This is a two-way street, buster. You have to give to get.”
“All right, what do you want to know?”
“Where did you grow up?” she asked.
“Boston.”
“How old are you?”
I considered subtracting a few years but didn’t. “Forty-two.”
“What do you do for a living?”
I slowed, and she tugged at me a little before adjusting. “Well, that’s kind of a hard question to answer …”
“Does that mean you’re unemployed?”
“Not exactly.” We’d come to a dilapidated park, one of the few in my area. The only bench was occupied by a sleeping man covered in a tarp, so I led her to the slide where I took off my coat and spread it on the wide chute children sailed down. I sat, leaving her room, and Jem plopped down at my side like the little sister I’d never had.
“I used to be a priest,” I said.
“For real?” She was looking up at me, her face dancing with delight.
“It was very real,” I said. “These days, I work in a bookstore, which is a little less real. And I’m kind of doing this other crazy business thing that’s completely, well … I don’t know yet.”
“Wow.” She thought for a moment. Then she said, “I’m an interventional radiologist.”
This struck me as completely unbelievable, but given that I’d just told her I was an ex-priest turned entrepreneur, I didn’t feel I had much room to judge. “Where?” I asked.
“Cleveland Clinic,” she said. “I’m older than I look.”
“Why did you become a doctor?” I still couldn’t tell if she was making up all of this. Maybe she was trying for some reason to gaslight me.
“Like I said, I was good at biology, chemistry, all that stuff. I got a full ride to Oberlin, ended up in pre-med. You know. OSU Med School was the next logical step. But when I got there, and we started doing patient rotations, it was pretty clear I don’t, ah, do well with people.”
I tapped her leg, which would have seemed forward had it not been touching mine. “Yes, you’re very standoffish,” I told her. I was relieved when she laughed.
“Sick people. People who need comforting. I’m not great at that. But I’m very good with instruments, very careful and precise. I love figuring out which specific treatments to use for a particular disease. So I went into a field where I could help people without having to hold their hands.” She gazed into the distance then said softly, “Most of my patients have cancer.” And I believed her. “Is that why you became a priest, to help people?”
“No,” I said before even considering her question. “I became a priest because I was a drug addict, and when I got into trouble, it seemed like the only way out other than prison.”
“Mmm. I can see that.” She sat very still, her head against my shoulder. The wet sand gave off a fresh, nearly edible smell. We were silent, looking out at the sodden park.
“And then … I turned out to be good at the comforting people part.”
“I could tell that, too,” she said, nodding her head against my shoulder, edging even closer. “I could tell that yesterday when I didn’t even talk to you.”
“So.” I was beginning to worry about what this arrangement on the slide might mean to Jem. She was lovely but girlish, and whatever attraction I might feel was accompanied by a strong aversion—my own personal ban on priests and young people, plus the shame I still felt over Laura Larimar. “What about Stacy?” I asked, desperate to distract her—and myself.
“Well, we’d watched Gaslight in Film Appreciation, junior year. And I just decided, one day, to do that. It was kind of like, she was experimenting with Jared so I experimented with her.”
“And how did you accomplish this?”
I cocked my head and looked down, just in time to see a ghost of a smile cross Jem’s face. “So first, I stole things from her. It was easy; we were together all the time. I took her keys, her school ID—which we needed for graduation—makeup, underwear, one shoe of a pair. This went on for, like, two weeks.”
“And?”
“She was pretty … unsettled. Also, she got into a lot of trouble, you know, with her mom. And the school. But it didn’t really affect her relationship with Jared. He kept being really nice to her, and she let him. So I …” She swallowed. “I mean, I was already in. I’d started. So I just went for it.”
“Meaning?”
“We were in the same AP English class, Jared and I. So I suggested that we study together, and I started leaving the things I’d taken from Stacy’s house, one by one. I’d excuse myself to go to the bathroom and stick her favorite bra into his sock drawer. Or put her ID under his desk. Then I started doing slightly sick—well, sic
k-er—things: like I’d leave an old piece of sandwich under his bed with something of hers. An earring or a book she’d been reading. It was lucky I was smart. I basically had no time to study I was so busy stealing stuff from Stacy and planting it.”
“And no one suspected it was you? I mean, it seems obvious. Doesn’t it?”
“You had to know me at the time.” She blushed, her freckles reddening first. “I was that weird kid in high school. So quiet, most people didn’t even notice me. I was always good. Always. It’s what I was known for. When you really think about it …” She paused as if she were doing just that. “It’s like I was madder because they didn’t suspect me. That only made me try harder to drive them both crazy. And it took a while, but it worked.
“Stacy had lost so many school library books, she was on probation. Those, I just threw away so she couldn’t get them back from Jared and return them. But at the same time, he was thinking there was something really wrong with her. Because he kept running across random things in his room.” Jem paused. My hard-on had passed, which relieved me greatly.
“They probably would have broken up all on their own,” she went on. “But in April or so, Stacy lost it and accused him of messing with her; then she spent about two weeks just ‘resting’ at home. She was seeing a therapist who had her on Prozac, which I told myself she probably needed anyway. I brought her schoolwork to her every night. Her mother used to give me pie and tell me what a good friend I was.”
“Stacy’s the one whose baby was baptized this morning?” I said.
“Yes.” Jem gazed, puzzled, at her knees. “I get that I’m not a ‘conventional’ person. I live alone, except for my guinea pig, Lou. I’m a good doctor, I think. But being Stacy’s friend has always been the most normal thing about me, so when she asked if I’d come here and be the godmother to her baby, I just booked a ticket. Then, when I saw her new house and her husband, who actually kind of resembles Jared—so maybe she really did like him—I remembered that whole bizarre spring of our senior year. And I had to tell her. I mean, she had to know that if I was going to become the ‘spiritual adviser’ to her child.”
