The Woman at the Edge of Town

by Georgett Kaplan

  “We…weren’t like that. I was his student, so it was all patterns, rhythms. I knew he went home to someone, was someone’s father, but I could never picture it. He was only ever the taskmaster with me.”

  “Well. I guess that’s what he was like when he paid attention to someone.”

  “You don’t think he paid attention to you?”

  Now I’ve put my foot in it. “I guess that’s what my mom thinks more than what I think.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think you were his passion—his job,” Sarah corrected herself. “And we were his family.” She thrust a consoling hand at Nina. “Which isn’t your fault. You were younger than I am. You couldn’t tell him to go back home and read me a bedtime story.”

  “Did you need a bedtime story?” Nina finished off her wine and let the glass loll about in her loose grip a moment.

  Sarah bit her lip. “It’s rude of you to ask a question without answering mine.”

  “Oh, you mean the money.” Nina shrugged. “The government comes to me on occasion with word problems, I offer them solutions, they pay me for my efforts. And I’ve made some investments. It’s all boring, really. And anyway, you don’t have the security clearance.”

  “Was that a joke?”

  “Yes, it was, but you still don’t have security clearance. Anyway, now I’m…comfortable. I mostly spend my time on my own projects. I listen to stockbrokers telling me how rich I am, and I listen to philanthropists telling me how thankful they are, and I paint. Badly.”

  “Oh!” Sarah realized. “The house!”

  “Yes.” Nina blinked. “You think the house is badly painted?”

  “No, I just… It’s very artistic.”

  Nina smiled, nodded. “The ancestral home. They can make me live here, but they can’t make me keep it looking like a mortuary.”

  She sat back down. Sarah stared at her. The fire was in Nina’s eyes—when Nina looked at her, did she see the little pinpricks of flame in Sarah’s eyes too? The two of them reflecting back at each other, on and on, into infinity.

  “What do you mean, ‘they can make me live here’?”

  “Where else would I go?” Nina asked, pouring more wine for herself. “I suppose if I wanted to surf, I’d go to Hawaii. Or if I wanted to climb mountains, I’d go to the Rockies. But everything I want to do, I can do here, so…why leave?”

  “To get away from it all?”

  “Is that what happened when you went to college? Or did it follow you?”

  Sarah held up her glass. “I’m empty.”

  Nina topped her off. “Does being here remind you of your father? Is that why you stay?”

  “Is it why you do?”

  Nina grew quiet; from looking at her, Sarah would’ve believed even her heart was beating more silently. “I lost more than him in the crash.”

  “Of course,” Sarah said apologetically.

  “It was a long time ago,” Nina said, apologizing for making Sarah apologetic.

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “No—it wasn’t,” Nina agreed. “I guess I’ve never been much good at knowing when to change the subject.”

  Sarah took a quick sip of her drink. “What do you think of the new season of Making a Murderer?”

  “They made a new one?”

  “New season or new murderer?”

  They talked for what felt like hours—so long that Nina had to get up and throw more logs on the fire. Sarah felt…delved into, as if Nina was examining her piece by piece, layer by layer. She didn’t mind it. She’d never felt worthy of such attention before, but suddenly she, Sarah Kay, was fascinating and intriguing and important. Why else would a woman like Nina be so interested in her?

  Sarah cut herself off after the second glass of wine, content to play with the empty glass. Nina put on another record, this one by Portishead. Dummy. The music drifted into Sarah’s ears, soft and supple, as Nina went on a lengthy, impassioned digression about the band, like there was a reservoir inside her and some of the water was finally being called upon.

  The needle slipped again, turning the album into rickety scratching. Nina stopped herself, as close to abashed as Sarah had ever seen her, and looked at her Cartier watch. “Well. I think you’ve served your sentence for today.”

  Sarah stood, was suddenly dizzy, and tripped forward. She stopped herself against the fireplace, her forearm clanking against the mantel, the empty wineglass slipping from her fingers. It shattered on the hearth, sending glass shards slashing out into the carpet beyond.

  Sarah was still in her socks. “Oh, uh, shit,” she concluded.

  “Quite all right,” Nina said, standing alongside Sarah. “I have far more glasses than I have people to drink with anyway.”

  “I think if I…” Sarah lifted one foot, figuring that if she made as wide a step as possible, she could carry herself over all the shards. It wouldn’t be huge on dignity, but at least it would be small on stitches.

  Nina didn’t give her the chance; she simply seized Sarah, putting one hand on her shoulder and lowering her back until she could place her other arm under Sarah’s legs and lift her up, holding Sarah in both arms like…like a sack of flour. Yeah, a sack of flour in a wedding gown, maybe.

  Nina carried her away from the fireplace as if this were a perfectly natural thing to be doing, while Sarah tried not to make it any more awkward than it was—not that it felt awkward. It felt a lot of things, but not awkward.

  “I’m sorry about your glass,” she said, needing to say something, and that being the only something that presented itself.

  “As I said, it’s fine.”

  “I think you can put me down now. I don’t think the glass spread this far.”

  Nina looked at her. Then she bent her head down and sniffed Sarah’s hair. And all of a sudden, Sarah had no idea what she was feeling. It was as if every single thought she had was locked in a vault inside her, and she couldn’t open the lock in a million years.

  “You’re smelling a little rank,” Nina teased. “Maybe I should take you down to the river and give you a bath!”

  Sarah smiled, and Nina smiled back, showing teeth. When she set Sarah down, the tile floor felt as cold as ice beneath her feet, sobering her instantly.

  “I think the wine went to my head a bit,” Sarah said. “I’m not a big drinker.”

  “Of course not. You’re a petite drinker.”

  Sarah giggled.

  Nina watched her closely, then took her to the kitchen and fed her a cup of hot coffee before she was satisfied that Sarah was okay to drive.

  Her shoes were in the hallway, and Sarah sat down on the first step of the staircase to pull them on. With Nina standing there, over her, she felt something tingling between them—an awareness that just a few feet away, Nina was warm flesh and firm muscle, not just some…picture that couldn’t be touched.

  Her fingers were numb as she tied her shoelaces.

  “Look at that,” Nina said, staring at the transom window above the door. “The rain’s stopped.”

  Sarah’s knot fell apart, and she scrambled to retie the laces. “Guess I’ll be mowing next time.”

  “I could play a record for you,” Nina offered. “While you work. A little music always helps me when I paint.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t paint so well,” Sarah replied.

  “Hard to find a good subject.” Nina watched as Sarah tightened the knot into a tiny fist. When Sarah was done, she offered her hand. “Well, I had a very enjoyable girls’ night out. Even if we didn’t go anywhere.”

  Sarah let herself be pulled to her feet. Then, as if she’d dozed off and slept through hours of her own thinking, questioning doubt, she surged up and kissed Nina’s cheek. The skin was warm and soft, burning her lips, leaving a whiff of something sweet that Sarah couldn’t place as she rocked back on her heels and thought only of licking her lips, of biting them, of doing something that would stop them from tingling like they were…incomplete.
>
  Nina stared at her. Then, very gently, she bent to Sarah like a tree bowing under the wind and kissed her forehead. Sarah didn’t know what it was, but it felt like a dismissal, as if she should go, and with her hands stiffly fisted at her sides, she went out the front door and tried not to look back.

  Chapter 5

  Sarah lay on her bed, laptop straddling her chest, obsessively refreshing her Facebook page, watching updates slowly spool in. The trending section had Kanye West smiles at paparazzi as a lead story. Slow news day all around.

  She got a Skype call. Declined it. She didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to think. What she wanted was to leech away the memories in her head, all the confusing sensations that had felt so right and muddled everything. She wasn’t gay, wasn’t into girls—so why was she into Nina?

  She knew the feel of Nina’s flesh now. It invaded her thoughts, colonizing old memories. She’d never gone on spring break, but in another life, she could’ve told her mother she was going to Cancun and then just stayed at Nina’s place. Watching old movies and drinking wine. Maybe Nina could tell her how to kiss Tyrese. She always felt as if she was doing something wrong.

  She refreshed again, like a corpse’s death twitch. Her stopped-up timeline finally flowed: a new photo post, of Tyrese, kissing her. She clicked on it. She didn’t remember him taking that picture. Then Nina dropped out of her mind; she came awake in a plunge like you’d get on a roller coaster. It wasn’t her he was kissing. It was Beck.

  Reflexively, she pressed F5, trying to place the photo. Maybe it’d been before they were dating. No, no, he had the dreadlocks he’d started cultivating five months ago. They’d teased each other about it. He’d asked her if she wanted her own dreads.

  She got another Skype call, texts on her phone, then the sustained vibration of an honest-to-God call. She tossed the phone away from her, letting it hum into a pile of unfolded clothes. Her fingers were clumsy, numb, as she refreshed the page again, as if that would change what she was seeing. But she was fooling herself. There was no room for uncertainty, no need to double-check. He was cheating on her, with her best friend, and she’d had to find out about it from some gaffe—a pointless tech glitch had upended her world.

  She forced the laptop shut and it went into sleep mode, hard drive no longer whirring. The phone purred into the fabric, where it was nestled a second more, then went silent. It had gotten dark outside. She’d lain around for so long that the comfortable lighting of afternoon had turned into an eye-straining evening haze. Her phone started buzzing yet again. Suddenly, she couldn’t take it.

  Downstairs. The clay dish she’d made in elementary school holding the family keys. She drove, her car smelling perversely fresh after its recent repairs. It was raining again. Big fat gobs of rain spat down on the windshield, barely streaked away by the wipers before more came, plonking on the roof, hands clapping against the entire exterior of the Prius.

  Something stung her eyes. Tears. And just like that she was sobbing, deep, howling cries cutting their way out of her throat. She was hacking them up, vomiting them out.

  At the boathouse, she punched the code into the lock and went through untying the boat just as Mr. Shannon had showed her. Ingrained caution made her check her watch. 7:50. Fuck it. She could make it. Besides, how bad could the waters get? She wouldn’t come this far just to turn back now, with Nina right there on the other shore.

  Two convictions grew in her as the waves hit when she was halfway across. That she’d made a mistake, and that she couldn’t turn back. The waters were rougher than she was used to, lumpy like an old mattress, hard shocks of water hitting the bow and sloshing into the cabin with her. She just concentrated on pressing forward, even as bracingly cold water gathered at her heels and slapped against her body, penetrating deeper and harder than the rain could. She started shivering, caught a glimpse of frost-ridden exhale issuing out of her mouth.

  Something seemed to ram her—a hard wave making the motorboat twist to the side, nearly dumping her in the water, the boat almost vertical for what seemed like a small eternity before it settled down to the instability that passed for evenness. Then another burst from a broken wave, splattering her all over. She screamed and the rain screamed back, gales of it now, the river roaring, the rain coming down in volleys, and the sound of the motor small, pathetic.

  She wiped the rain out of her eyes, storm clearing, water smoothing, and saw the island rising in front of her. She killed the engine and skewed the wheel, but still ran ashore in a shuddering haul, the sandbank crushing down on her keel as she bludgeoned through it. Sarah pitched forward, hitting her head against the rim of the windshield—a sharply biting pain that blurred out everything else. She winced and cursed herself and thought for a second that she’d merely given herself a bitch of a headache before she touched her forehead and felt an alien warmth in the chill of the rain and river water. Blood.

  Cursing louder, she got herself down from the boat. It looked pretty soundly embedded in the shore, but she grabbed the rope anyway, binding it around an outcropping before pulling herself up the grassy embankment. It was steeper than she would’ve thought, and with the rain making everything slick and her fingers numb, she tumbled back down a few feet before she reached the top. Blood ran into her ears; there was a pounding pain inside her scalp. She redoubled her efforts, clawing her way up to firm footing. She was in luck. She could see the manor nearby, an upstairs window blazing away like a second moon. Pressing the heel of her hand into the bitter gash, she stumbled forward. Faster. Always faster.

  She got there with lungs burning and legs made of molten lead, but she felt as if she could keep running forever. Out of this goddamn town, away from crappy boyfriends and crappy friends and crappy mothers. Oxygen flooded into her body the moment she stopped. She felt lightheaded, as if she might just float away, if it weren’t for the thought of Nina tethering her.

  Sarah knocked at the door, but no one answered. Nina had to be there—she was a fucking hermit, after all. Sarah wanted to pound on the door, knock it down, throw herself through a window into the safe place. Tears burned in her eyes. Desperate, she used her key; the door swung open freely, and Sarah nearly fell inside. Quickly righting herself, she pushed the door closed behind her.

  Just being inside the manor was comforting. Everything was so stylish and sophisticated.

  “Nina!” she called. Her voice echoed back to her, all cracks and heartbreak. She fell silent, but Barnaby came scrabbling to find her, nails clicking on the tiles. He trailed after her as she looked for Nina, trying to comfort her, or maybe just hoping for snacks.

  The last room she checked was the bedroom. Nina wasn’t in any of the others, and Sarah half-expected to find her in there with a man, someone as charming and beautiful as she was. It was that kind of day.

  She tried the door. It swung open. Nina was in bed, propped up on pillows and reading a newspaper. She even had a fashionable pair of glasses on. And all that hid her from Sarah was a filmy nightgown.

  “Sarah?” Nina folded her newspaper up. “What are you doing here?” Her gaze moved to Sarah’s still-bleeding forehead. “Jesus, what happened?”

  It was more than Sarah could take. She was crying and sobbing and cursing, and all she could hear through her own grief was Nina’s voice.

  “Sarah, come here. Come here.”

  Like a master ordering around a dog, expecting to be obeyed. And yet Sarah felt her legs carrying her forward, betraying her to Nina; she madly thought Nina would slap her or hit her for her foolishness. Because she was a foolish, foolish little girl, thinking she could trust Beck, thinking Tyrese loved her. Thinking Nina could love her. She braced herself, but Nina opened her arms. Like a ship caught in a whirlpool, Sarah was sucked down. She felt herself hit Nina’s impenetrable exterior and be embedded in it, given all the protection of it, strong arms wrapping around her and holding her tight. Everything melted away until there was only the softness of Nina’s gown and the warmth of her sk
in. The tightness of her embrace.

  “You came across the river? At this time of night? You could’ve been killed, you little fool—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” Sarah kept repeating it over and over. She felt like she’d offended something, some great force, and all she wanted was for it to stop hurting her. “Sorry—sorry…”

  “Out of those wet clothes. Now. You’ll catch your death.” Nina gave her a last clenching squeeze, then sat her down on the bed. She hurried to get her dressing gown, a thick, woolly robe, and no sooner had Sarah removed the offending garments than Nina had her wrapped up in it. It soaked up the wetness on her skin, restoring her to something like warmth. “How’d you get that cut on your forehead? Did someone—” Nina’s voice flashed with rage.

  “No, no, I…kinda ran the boat aground. Hit my head on the windshield.”

  “Ah.” Nina opened a drawer in the dresser and brought out a first-aid kit. “I see you’re working your way through all the methods of transportation. I wouldn’t buy any plane tickets if I were you.”

  Sarah let out a shrill laugh.

  Nina shoved the kit into her arms. “You know what I’ll need?”

  “Iodine and bandages and sterile pads—”

  “Sutures,” Nina corrected. “It’s been a while since I’ve had to deal with any lacerations.”

  She was going to the fireplace now—Nina’s bedroom had a fireplace—taking logs from the holder, tossing them onto the andiron. “Newspaper,” Nina said firmly, and Sarah handed it to her. She wadded up sheaves of it, stuffing them under the andiron, then rose to grab a fireplace lighter from the mantelpiece, knelt again, lit the newspaper—and had the whole mess burning red and rosy in seconds.

  “Come,” Nina said now, gesturing Sarah over. Faithfully carrying the first-aid kit, Sarah joined her, kneeling by the warm, glowing fire.

  Nina took the kit, ripped a moist towelette free of its packaging, and efficiently cleaned the wound. “You’re lucky. It’s a very shallow cut. You could’ve concussed yourself. Here.” She shined a flashlight in Sarah’s face, moving it from eye to eye. “Look straight ahead.” Then she handed the light to Sarah, guiding her hand to direct it at the cut. Sarah held it there as Nina assessed the wound.