“No,” Jenny lied. “They could have fallen, or maybe the third kid—the one you said had dishwater blond hair and acne—killed them and rolled the bodies over the rim of the slot.” Jenny thought it more likely the third bad guy had done to his pals precisely what somebody—maybe the third bad guy himself—did to her and Anna; pulled up the rope so they couldn’t get out, so Anna couldn’t identify him.
After a moment Anna said, “I see a star.”
Jenny tilted her head back and looked up. Night was upon them. The dark at the bottom of the earth was absolute, the water beneath them invisible ink in midnight. In comparison, the slender scrap of sky was translucent and rich with life. The star was the brightest Jenny had ever seen.
“There is no ‘what next,’ is there?” Anna’s voice was soft beside her.
“I actually did have a plan,” Jenny defended herself, though there was no accusation in Anna’s tone. “You really can chimney up out of here at the end of the slot. Unless the rope has been taken or rotted, you can climb out. I hadn’t realized how late it was,” Jenny finished. “I think we’d be worse off trying it in the dark than we are here.”
“You could make it without me,” Anna said.
“No I couldn’t,” Jenny said.
“It’s stupid to stay here. Go for help. I’ll wait. I waited for days in a jar, didn’t I? And there I only had one corpse to keep me company.”
“You had Buddy. Besides, I don’t think I could make it. Trying that slot in the dark without protective gear, I’d end up getting slashed or impaled or wedged and die screaming in pain,” Jenny said honestly.
Anna didn’t reply to that. Instead, she rested her hand on Jenny’s thigh. Jenny took it, entwined her fingers with Anna’s. There wasn’t a lascivious twitch in all of Jenny Gorman’s many cells. When it came to dying, she found she wanted a friend more than a lover. She turned her face in Anna’s direction but could see nothing. The darkness in the slot had become an absolute. Without visual verification, Jenny had the sense they were wedged not a few feet above water level but over a chasm ten thousand feet deep.
Soon they must fall. Anna’s grip communicated the fatigue in her body. Jenny’s own thigh muscles were beginning to tremble the way they did before they cramped or failed.
Anna gasped.
“Slipped,” she explained.
Jenny drew Anna’s arm around her neck. “Move your right leg over mine and put your foot between mine. Stay strong. I can take some of your weight. We’ll keep each other warm.”
“Warm” was a metaphor for “brave.” The night hadn’t cooled much below ninety degrees, and the effort of keeping herself from sliding into the cold water had sweat running between Jenny’s breasts and down her back, making the canyon wall even more slippery.
Anna’s foot nudged hers. “I’m afraid to take it off the wall,” she said. “I’ll take us both down.”
“I’ve got you,” Jenny assured her.
“Your legs are shaking.” Anna didn’t sound alarmed so much as sympathetic. During all of this—the cold, the dead, the pain, the whole mess Jenny had gotten them into—Anna had not complained. Not once. Self-pity was a pool into which Jenny dove deep on occasion. Wee little Ms. Pigeon seemed to have none.
“How come you’re so brave?” Jenny asked; death and the dark making intimate communication possible, even necessary.
“I’m not,” Anna said quietly, her voice deeper than one might expect from so slight a source. “I’m afraid of everything; waking up, going to sleep, living alone, living with someone new. I’m afraid of whoever put me in the jar and cut me. I’m afraid of disappointing my sister. I guess the only thing I’m not afraid of is dying.”
“What made you so afraid of living?” Jenny asked. Her right calf was trying to cramp. Pushing her heel hard into the rock face, she drew her toes back as far as she dared and felt the cramp pull out.
“I killed my husband,” Anna said.
The words stuck in the slot like the echo of a thunderclap. Jenny jerked and the back of her head rapped against the sandstone.
“Like what?” she managed after a moment. “You shot him or knifed him? Like that kind of killed him?”
“No. Zach was coming down Ninth Avenue. I was coming home from D’Agostino’s. He saw me and started across. A cab hit him. He died a couple hours later.”
“And you think you killed him?”
Anna didn’t answer. Jenny took silence as an affirmative.
“A cab killed him. You get no credit for that. Us poor mortals live under the ‘shit happens’ rule of nature. Life doesn’t make sense. Unearned guilt is hubris, a claim to powers you don’t have. I understand the temptation. It’s less scary than admitting shit happens, because if shit does just
“Shit happens,” she repeated and closed her mouth.
For what seemed like an eternity Anna made no reply. Twice more the cramp twisted in Jenny’s calf. Twice more she pulled it out by stretching her toes. The soles of her feet and the small of her back were simultaneously numb and on fire. Her spine was a line of liquid agony from coccyx to skull. She could no longer tell where the quivering and twitching of her muscles left off and Anna’s began.
Finally her companion spoke.
“I did not kill Zach. He was hit by a cab.”
“There you go,” Jenny said.
“Thanks a heap,” Anna replied. “Now I am afraid to die.” With that she fell, and Jenny with her.
THIRTY-THREE
Anna expected to fall a long way. Forever. When she immediately struck the water it startled a squawk from her. Then she went under and there was no way to know up from down. Weight crashed onto her, plunging her deeper. Jenny. She must have dragged Jenny down when her feet slipped from the wall. Anna’s hip struck something solid, and she curled into a ball. She was afraid to try to swim. She might be swimming toward the bottom. A heel or an elbow struck her on the side of the head, not enough to stun, but enough to shock and hurt. Then a painful jerk and she realized she was being reeled in, like a fish on a line, her braid being the line.
“Breathe,” she heard Jenny command, and so she did.
“Thanks,” she gasped. “I didn’t know if I was still underwater or not.” She couldn’t see Jenny, or the walls, or the water. All that remained to let her know she was not blind, and was more or less right side up, was the single star allotted to this graveyard. Astronomy was not one of Anna’s strengths. Living in the city, working a night job, was not conducive to stargazing. Still, she knew stars moved across the sky at night and was surprised to see this one had yet to rotate from view. In her previous incarnation, Anna’s internal clock was trained to register time to the minute. How long the first act was, how many seconds for Juliet to change backstage, one minute of blackout, the length of time it took for the night-blind lead to fumble his way down the stairs. Reborn to die in a ditch, Anna’s internal clock insisted the star had come into view hours before and should have been halfway to setting by now.
“Anna! I asked if you were okay.” Jenny twitched the pigtail she held. Given the situation, to answer “daydreaming” didn’t seem a logical choice. That’s what Anna had been doing, and, being called back to reality, she realized why.
“This feels so good,” she said, then laughed at the relief and wonder in her voice. The water was heaven; it cooled her burning muscles, refreshed her parched skin, supported her weight. She felt as if she’d fallen from the gallows into loving arms.
“It does,” Jenny admitted.
Anna was grateful she didn’t say more. At this blissful moment she didn’t want to hear the rest of the story; how the cold would sap their body heat, extremities would cease to function, lethargy and disorientation would follow, and they would drown. For this moment, tragedy could wait, as it waited in the second act of
