SPACE

by Penny Reid

  “If you still have time,” she said, giving me a smile that touched only her lips.

  At my approach she took a small step to the side, providing more space for me to enter. But once I was in, she surprised me by closing the door. My attention dropped to the handle as she moved further into the room. She hadn’t locked it.

  “Abram.”

  I lifted my eyes to hers and said, “Mona,” before considering the impulse.

  That made her swallow, revived the alluring blush she’d worn earlier. Her long lashes fluttered like I’d blown dust in them. I watched her, riveted. She seemed to be working hard to remain calm, but not like she’d been inside my room, not with a feral kind of panic.

  This was like before, outside of my door, when I’d caught her. She wasn’t freaked out, she was adorably agitated.

  My instinct was to put Mona at ease. This instinct surprised me. I was determined to be uncompromising in my distrust of and disinterest in her. That was the goal. Thus, I didn’t understand this instinct. Therefore, I said nothing. Instead taking advantage of the opportunity to look my fill.

  She shoved her hands in her pockets, drawing my eyes down to her hips. Mona DaVinci did not dress like her sister. All black, her clothes were somewhat baggy, loose, definitely not tight, leaving much to the imagination. Unashamed of my imagination, I licked my lips, wondering if she was still as fast of a swimmer now as she had been then.

  Yanking my mind back from maddening memories of a certain white bikini, I lifted my attention to her face, a move necessary for self-preservation. She wore no makeup that I could see, and her hair was pulled back into a long braid. It was longer than before, several inches longer, and made me think of shiny, thick rope.

  Mona dropped her gaze to the vicinity of the floor, but her voice was steady as she said, “There’s something you should know.”

  I stared at her, at this exquisite face, this face I’d dreamt of and hated and longed for, and knew at once what she was going to say. I felt it in the vibrations of tension coming from her body, the set of her jaw, the dazed but resolute look in her eyes. I felt it in the absence of sound, the stillness, how even the dust seemed to be suspended.

  I felt it in myself, how my muscles tightened, my breathing slowed, as though she still had that kind of power over me.

  So, I laughed.

  Mona’s gaze darted to mine, and I laughed harder at her obvious confusion, turning and finding a desk. I sat on the edge of it and faced her, clasping my hands together, one leg braced on the floor, the other dangling at the knee.

  The bitterness returned and was powerful motivation, like last night when she’d offered her hand and introduced herself, assuming I’d been too stupid to discover her lies. Well, she’d been right about one thing. I had been stupid.

  But I wasn’t stupid anymore.

  “I wonder,” I said without thinking, still laughing lightly, my concern for her well-being overshadowed by the sour memory of her duplicity. I gave myself fully over to the anger. “I’ve always wanted to know, did she tell you I loved you?”

  Mona flinched, her eyes bugging out of her head. “What?” she asked, the single word more breath than sound.

  “When you two talked about it, after you switched places?” I waved my index and middle finger in front of me. “Did she tell you that I loved you? She tell you about that?”

  She said nothing, her breaths coming faster, looking visibly stunned.

  I laughed again, more of a light chuckle this time. “Was that part of the plan? Or why switch places for the week? I’ve always wondered.”

  Like last night, Mona’s face was devoid of color. Staring at me, shell-shocked, eyes glassy.

  “Abram—”

  “You know, I thought I was crazy.” I had to cut her off. The way she said my name caused a pulse of heat to press outward against every inch of my skin and behind my eyes. I didn’t like it. “For a really long time, I thought I’d lost my mind. It was like . . .” Tearing my eyes from hers, I glanced over her head and finished my thought. “It was like, I woke up that morning and you—Lisa—were someone else. She broke my heart, but she did a good job of letting me down gently, everything considered.” Smiling with mock-ruefulness, I shook my head. “See? I even sound crazy now.”

  Mona made a soft sound of distress. I ignored it. I’d trusted this woman blindly, after knowing some version of her for six days. Just six days. I’d fallen stupid in love with a fictional person, and now here we were.

  “What I’m trying to say is: letting that Lisa go wasn’t hard. I couldn’t stand her voice. It was the same, but it wasn’t. It grated, nails on a chalkboard, everything was wrong. But I couldn’t stop thinking about my Lisa.” I stopped here to laugh lightly again.

  Moving just my eyes, I studied Mona DaVinci from my spot across the room. Anguish, sorrow, regret played in equal measure over her features. Her nose was red, and several tears had rolled down her cheeks. How much of it was real? Impossible to say. But it did succeed in wiping the smile from my face.

  Swallowing, she closed her eyes, but then she clenched her jaw and opened them again. Lifting her chin with a stubborn tilt, Mona affixed her stare to mine, looking dejected but also determined, giving me the impression she was forcing herself to meet my gaze. An inconvenient suspicion, that she was trying to accept my spiteful words as some kind of punishment, as a way to take responsibility for past mistakes, infuriated me, because it also made me respect her.

  It doesn’t matter. It’s too late now.

  “When did you find out?” she asked, her voice hoarse and quiet.

  “I suspected almost immediately, the month after you left, in fact. But, like I said, I thought I was crazy for a long time. But then, I saw your testimony in front of Congress this summer.” I paused here, my attention moving over her face, reprimanding myself again for taking so long to accept the truth. “You were wearing glasses, and your hair was pulled back, like it is now, but in a bun. You didn’t look like my Lisa, but your voice . . .”

  Mona cleared her throat, sniffed, and pressed her lips together, continuing to hold my glare with admirable self-possession given the fact that tears were still leaking out of her eyes.

  So beautiful.

  Faking it or not, even sorrowful, even pale and tear streaked, this woman was unbelievably beautiful to me. Ethereal beauty, not of this world, inhuman in its hold over me. There was something else about her, devastating gentleness and strength, ruinous sweetness and vulnerability despite the severity of her intelligence. Or maybe because of it?

  And a genuineness that was so convincing, despite everything I knew to be true, I believed it.

  I knew for a fact that she was a fucking liar . . . and yet I believed her to be genuine. How was that possible? How did that make any sense?

  Another pulsing wave of heat pushed me toward her, one that demanded action and urged me to go to her, grab her, and finally, finally fucking kiss her. I ignored it by telling myself that she wasn’t really the one I wanted. She wasn’t my Lisa.

  She’s not my anything.

  Instead, I pulled my bottom lip between my teeth and bit it. Lowering my eyes to my hands, I held the lip in place until the impulse dwindled and I could trust myself to speak.

  But when I did, I spoke to my palm because I didn’t trust myself to look at her. Not yet. “I thought it was just more of me being crazy, grasping at something that didn’t exist. But then, the next day, or maybe the day after, I caught an interview you gave on Fox News, or maybe CNN. You ended a sentence under your breath with, ‘And then the wolves came.’” Another sound of amusement escaped my throat, and I admitted softly, “And that’s when I accepted it.”

  She was quiet for several moments. I sensed she was looking at me, but I wasn’t ready to look at her. The urge to kiss her hadn’t yet fully passed. I waited for calm, for my heart to slow, for my chest to expand enough for me to breathe normally, but it—all of it—never happened.

  Sitting t
here, unable to look at this woman, this liar without craving the feel of her in my arms, I confronted the pitiful truth: I still wanted her. Or maybe, I still wanted the idea of what she represented.

  My muse. My inspiration. The desire in me to take care of her, and the hope that she’d take care of me in return hadn’t diminished. It lived in me, a constant corrupting companion, a foolish optimism that refused to yield. It was the reason my mind drifted to her before falling asleep, the reason she’d appeared in my dreams and was on my mind when I awoke. The reason all my songs were ultimately about her.

  But why? I shook my head, tracing the lines of one hand with the thumb of the other, asking myself for the millionth time, Why her?

  Six days. It had been nothing. We’d barely touched. We’d never kissed. Why did the idea of this woman feel so essential? I thought we’d clicked seamlessly into place. Together. Counterweights that balanced a scale. I’d given myself over to the idea fully, without reservation. And she had been a lie.

  “What do you want?” Mona asked softly, her voice steadier than before. “What can I do?”

  Again, I spoke without thinking, “I don’t want to be crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy. You’re right. I was . . . it was me. It is me.”

  No. It wasn’t you. It’s not you.

  I readied myself, and then lifted my chin to level her with a glare. Mona swallowed, but otherwise she didn’t move, and she didn’t look away. The tears had dried on her face, but her nose was still red, and her eyes were still glassy.

  God, how I wanted to touch her, to brush away her tears and whisper words of forgiveness. Without reservation. But I wouldn’t, because that would make me actually crazy.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was exhausted. What was the point of this? Why keep asking questions? Nothing could change the past.

  I’d fallen for the contradictions, the surprises, how she’d challenged my expectations. I’d felt the pull, the draw intrinsically, without searching for it, without giving it much thought. With “my Lisa,” I’d never had to force the wonder, and being soft hadn’t seemed so hard. But this person wasn’t her. All of it had been imagined.

  And yet, even knowing, I asked softly, “Why’d you do it?” Her reason didn’t matter, but I wanted to know.

  “She needed my help.”

  “Lisa? How so?”

  “She’d been arrested.”

  I blinked at that, the puzzle I’d thought was finished suddenly had another piece. “Lisa was arrested?”

  “Yes. She called from lock-up the night before I arrived. She asked me to help her, to be her, to take her place until she was released. She promised me it wouldn’t take more than a week.”

  “And you did it.” It wasn’t a question. Obviously, I already knew the answer.

  “She’s my sister.” Mona’s voice broke on the last word and she finally looked away, her eyes moving to some point over my shoulder, her lips forming a stubborn line.

  Unable to tear my eyes from those lips, I mentally filled in the rest of the story I hadn’t realized were blanks, and it all made so much more sense: Gabby’s hovering, the missing phone and wallet that “Lisa” didn’t care about picking up from the post office, how exhausted real Lisa had looked the morning after Mona left, why real Lisa hadn’t budged on telling me the truth. She’d been in jail.

  “Abram.”

  The pleading edge in Mona’s voice had me looking at her.

  “I wanted to tell you.”

  A shock of something unidentifiable, but that felt dangerous, had me standing and pacing to the large window. It was the furthest spot from her.

  I don’t need to think about this.

  This new information changed nothing. Mona had pretended to be someone else, and then she’d left. Lisa being in jail and Mona covering for her sister explained the initial lies, but it didn’t justify the rest of it, and it didn’t change the fact that the woman I’d fallen in love with didn’t actually exist.

  “Abram, I—”

  “Why’d you do it?” I turned to face her. My feet were carrying me across the room while her confused stare moved over me. Again, nothing she could say would make me forgive her, so I wasn’t sure why I asked the question.

  “Like I said, she needed my help.”

  “No. Not that. I’m not asking why you stepped in for your sister. I get that. What I want to know is . . .” I needed to stop advancing, but my feet had a mind of their own. Soon I was upon her, inches away, and this time she didn’t retreat. She lifted her chin to maintain eye contact and seemed to sway forward just as I asked, “Why did you pretend. With me?”

  Mona shook her head, her attention dropping for a split second to my mouth and then darting back to my eyes. “I didn’t.”

  “You did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You left.”

  “I promised Lisa I would protect her! You don’t know, you don’t know what it’s like to have parents who don’t care about you except as an extension of their reputation. I wasn’t going to be another person who let her down.”

  “I get that, Mona.” Her name came out sounding like an expletive. “That’s not what I’m asking. Why talk to me at all if you knew you were just going to leave.”

  “I tried to avoid—I didn’t—I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “No. I don’t know what I was—I didn’t think—”

  “Did you love me?”

  Mona snapped her mouth shut, a hint of what looked like terror playing behind her eyes. Her lips parted, and she took several gulping breaths, making me think she was preparing herself to say something difficult.

  I decided I didn’t want to hear the answer, whatever it was, and guessed, “You regret it.”

  “I do,” she agreed immediately.

  My eyelids lowered and I flexed my jaw once, twice, absorbing the blunt force of her honesty, not understanding why her response had hurt as badly as it did. “Okay.”

  “No. Not okay. That’s not what I—I mean, I do regret what happened. I regret so much, but I didn’t have a choice, did I? I couldn’t not—I couldn’t let Lisa down.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “Really?” She sounded both curious and disbelieving. “Really? You would’ve forgiven me for lying to you? You wouldn’t have told Leo, or my parents about Lisa? You would’ve lied too?”

  “Yes! You ask for forgiveness, I give it!” I answered honestly, because such was the idiocy of my devotion to this woman at the time. Blind. Senseless. Without reservation. “I thought I loved you. I was crazy about you. I wanted nothing but to make you happy.”

  New tears sprang where the old ones had dried and she pressed her lips together more firmly, working to subdue the unsteadiness of her chin.

  “I was an idiot,” I said.

  She flinched. And then she struggled to swallow, still wincing, like my latest words had a lasting, painful effect.

  I wasn’t finished. “I regret it. No one falls in love with another person in six days, that’s stupid. I was stupid and naïve, trusting. Soft.” I spat this last word, despising her for not understanding the importance of it.

  Mona reached out, as though she might touch me, so I backed away. She used the hand she’d lifted to cover her mouth, her eyes following me, turning as I walked to the door.

  I opened it, but I couldn’t leave without making one more thing perfectly clear. “Don’t worry, Mona. I have no more illusions. I’m not in love with you, because I never really was. I know now, you are no more that woman than your sister is.”

  8

  Introduction to Quantum Physics

  *Abram*

  “Has anyone actually seen Mona? Since she and her friend arrived?” Charlie spun a drumstick between his fingers, the movement absentminded as he shifted his eyes from me to Kaitlyn, to Ruthie, and then back to me.

  Ruthie shook her head and Kaitlyn reached for another of my lyric notebooks, setting it on
her lap. Sitting in the large room on the main floor, we were going through my old notebooks with the band, looking for lyrics to pair with her recent compositions. Since the partners/husbands/wives/significant others were delayed—including Kaitlyn’s fiancé Martin and Ruthie’s girlfriend Maxine—we’d decided to make the best of it.

  Or more correctly, I told everyone to meet me in the living room and so they did. I told them we were working on new music and so here we were. I told them to bring their instruments and so Charlie had drumsticks, Ruthie had her Martin D-28 acoustic, Kaitlyn sat at the piano and had a composition notebook on the music stand, and I’d brought a Fender Kingman acoustic bass and the lyric notebooks.

  “I haven’t seen Mona, unfortunately. But Leo said she’s not very social, so maybe she just needs time to warm up to us?” Kaitlyn shrugged and turned her attention to the book of my half-finished poetry, as if being antisocial explained Mona’s absence at every meal for the last few days, that she never left the third floor, went outside, or interacted with anyone in a house full of people.

  Antisocial didn’t quite cover it.

  I’d read Mona’s note, the one she’d left on my side table, the one where she’d asked me—if I had the time and inclination—to meet with her. It was impersonal and polite. It made me angry. I tore it up and tossed it into the big stone fireplace two days ago.

  I glanced at the large fire there now, unable to see any trace of the burnt letter. It looked like Melvin made a habit of cleaning out the ashes every day. Good riddance.

  “Damn.” Charlie frowned.

  “Why damn?” Ruthie strummed lightly on her guitar, trying to replicate a melody Kaitlyn had played earlier on the piano.

  “I kinda—you know.” He glanced between Kaitlyn and Ruthie. “I wanted to get to know her.”