The Rope

THIRTY-SIX

A sound, a shift of the light, or the pressure of another mind awakened Anna. Someone was in the room. When she’d been with Zach she had slept the sleep of the innocent—or the dead. Sirens, subway trains, shrieking couples in the next-door apartment: Nothing woke her. Being able to sleep through anything had been a standing joke. “Was there war?” “Yes, you must have slept through it.” “Thanksgiving Day parade?” “Slept through it.”

In her new incarnation, if a tree fell in the forest, and there was no one there to hear it, it woke her. If God saw every little sparrow that fell, the thump of their tiny bodies on the earth woke her.

Jenny had risen early. Though she’d tried to be quiet, it woke Anna. The shower, the toilet flushing, the screen door opening and closing, woke her. Someone alien was in the room. It woke her.

On her side, covers thrown off, knees pulled up, arms hugging the pillow, Anna lay with her face to the wall, her back to the door. Another thing she would move to the category of things she used to do.

“Who is in here?” she asked without moving. Rolling over in the tangle of tossed covers would expose her soft white underbelly. A foot shifted on the dingy worn carpet. Quick as a cat, Anna sat up, back against the wall, hands up to ward off a blow.

Bethy was standing next to the bed, leaning over slightly as if she’d been interrupted in the act of kissing a child good night. She was dressed for work in NPS uniform shorts and short-sleeved shirt. Fabric pulled across her breasts, and the tailored shirt gapped between the buttons. Her face was one no child should see before going to sleep, suffused with blood and anger.

“What do you want?” Anna asked.

“Stay. Away. From. My. Husband.” She made each word separate and distinct, like commands to a bad dog.

“I don’t have designs on Regis,” Anna said truthfully. As alarming as this woman-scorned apparition was, it simply could not compete with the closet full of horrors Anna’d accrued since leaving New York for Page, Arizona. She felt no fear, merely confusion and annoyance.

“Oh. Right. You’re queer now. I forgot.” Bethy’s voice dipped and rose in a parody of high-school-girl sarcasm. “This is Jenny’s room, isn’t it? You’re one of those lesbo dykes like Jenny Gorman. A carpet sweeper.”

Anna was growing more annoyed but no less confused.

“A carpet sweeper?” she asked. Then it came to her. In her desire to wound, Bethy thought she’d pulled out all the stops. “Carpet muncher,” Anna said. Bethy’s mouth formed a little o. Giggles bubbled through Anna’s lips, then full-blown laughter, the kind that brings tears and skips along the slippery slopes of hysteria. Hilarity was not soothing to her caller, and the more upset Bethy grew, the more Anna’s control slipped away.

When Bethy’s face began to look like a tomato about to burst, Anna laughed so hard her stomach hurt. Sitting up straight was more than she could manage. Literally doubled over with laughter, she fell off of the bed. This was funnier still. Fear that she could not stop laughing, not ever, that she would die laughing, finally sobered her. Gasping and hiccuping, she pulled herself up and leaned her back against Jenny’s bed.

Bethy was gone.

“What in the hell was that about?” Anna whispered. The habit of talking to herself aloud had been born of isolation and fear while in the jar. In the real world it was a habit she was going to have to break. People would think she was insane. Worse, people might hear what she was thinking when she preferred to keep her thoughts to herself.

* * *

Having showered and washed her hair, Anna returned to her own room. This was where she would sleep tonight. Without hypothermia demanding body heat, she would sleep alone as she had every night since Zach died.

Wrapped in a towel, on the edge of the bed, she sat and stared at the open bottom drawer of her dresser. She missed Buddy. Zach was gone. Molly was two thousand miles away. Anna guessed she was like a lot of people in the world, just one baby skunk away from lonely.

For a cowardly moment she wondered if Jenny would let her sleep with her a few more nights. It was reassuring to hear another person breathing when one woke up in the creepy hours between midnight and 4:00 A.M.

Would Bethy’s accusations hurt Jenny? Were there still people in the world whose best friend wasn’t gay? Not in the theater. Homophobia might live on in the hinterlands. Anna infinitely preferred to be thought gay than to be known a coward. Compromising Jenny Gorman to save herself a few bad nights would be the act of a craven.

Given Bethy’s preposterous rage—and Anna’s less than soothing reaction—she was undoubtedly broadcasting to anyone who would listen that her neighbors were carpet sweepers.

Carpet sweepers. Giggles started to rise in a frothy tide. Anna quashed them. The line between mentally stable and not had been worn too thin to take chances. Of course, with Bethy “outing” them, there was no point in worrying whether hiding out in Jenny’s room a few more nights would damage their reputations.

She examined the wounds on her thigh. The cuts had been deep, and those first days she’d had no way of cleaning them. It was pure luck—or the sterility of the desert air—that they hadn’t gotten infected.

The night she staggered back to Dangling Rope in Kay’s cutoffs, Jenny had cleaned the cuts and used butterfly bandages to pull the edges closed. They looked to be healing okay. The scabs were mostly off, and, though the wounds were still dark red, there was no proud flesh. She’d been using Jenny’s vitamin E oil. Maybe it was helping, maybe not. There was no way to tell, lacking anything with which to compare the progress. WHORE was still clear and angry. One day it would fade to thin white lines. If Anna were fortunate, there might even come a time it could be seen only with her mind and not her eyes. Until then—or until she grew a skin as thick as that of an armadillo—she would eschew bikinis.

Dressing herself in her green uniform shorts—summer weight and feeling like there was not a single natural fiber in their makeup—and the gray NPS shirt, Anna replayed her wake-up call.

Bethy thought she was after her husband. Twice Regis had rescued Anna; was that what set Bethy off? After Regis saved her from the jar, Anna occasionally felt he was either looking after her or watching her, depending on her mood. It wouldn’t be unusual if he was concerned for her well-being. Saving someone’s life could up one’s interest in that individual. The Chinese went so far as to say it made one responsible for the life saved.

Regis was Johnny-on-the-spot at her interviews with law enforcement. Boredom? Wanting to get out of the office? Gathering information he could barter for stardom at the next cocktail party? Or whatever passed for a cocktail party in Rangerland. A potluck, probably.

Bethy must have seen this as romantic interest. Anna was older than she was, older than Regis by a few years, but Anna was thin and Bethy was not. Sometimes that was enough.

Anna threaded the cordovan-colored belt through the belt loops of her shorts and buckled the brass buckle. There was such a thing as too thin, and she was it. Two Dangling Dogs with chips for lunch, she told herself.

Grabbing her ball cap, the traditional NPS Stetson being impractical on a boat, she shoved thoughts of Bethy’s morning speech from her mind. A life observing great drama, both on- and offstage, had taught her that there was no way out of an imagined love triangle. If it was a comedy, all was revealed in act three; if a tragedy, everybody died in act four. Trying to talk to Bethy or Regis would only prolong the action.

Anna had consumed a minimum of six hundred calories in hot dogs and chips, and was nearly to the bottom of her sixteen-ounce Pepsi, when Jenny finally made it back to the marina to collect her.

She rejoiced at the sight of the woman and the boat. Though a night’s rest hadn’t cleared out the fatigue of a long day’s work followed by treading water in the cold, Anna was anxious to be put to work, the harder the better.

THIRTY-SEVEN