“What do you mean him?”
“Him. The investor.”
“I thought you had to go through a broker in Seattle. I admit I was curious. I looked into it.”
“I did. I did it all through a licensed broker I found online. But it wasn’t the broker. It was him. It was the guy who bought my policy. Matthew Campbell. That’s who contacted me.”
Barry came to the table and sat down. He was uncharacteristically silent as she scooped food onto his plate. After a time, he said, “I’m a bit concerned here, Anni. I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t think that’s the usual way of going about things. May I see that letter?”
“To be honest, Barry, I really don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“You know Annika, I was a lawyer for many years and if this person is contacting you now... I’m actually very worried here. If you want me to do anything, I could take a look . . .” The mischief in him was gone now and he was fatherly, lawyerly.
She shook her head. “No. The last thing I need right now is some kind of legal battle. I’ve had enough of courts with the divorce. No one ever wins by it.”
“I could just . . .”
“No, Barry. Please. I did it. I signed the contract. I took the money. I’ll deal with it.” She drank her wine. Her face had begun to burn.
He was not letting up. “It is a big deal though. You said yourself, at Marion’s, that you were upset and you have quite a legitimate reason to be. I don’t think you’re appreciating the seriousness of this.”
“Well I shouldn’t have brought it up then.”
They ate in silence for a moment. Their knives scraped on the plates.
Finally, he said, “You know Velma was right. These people are vultures and I hope for your sake, Anni, that you don’t take any of this personally.”
She put down her fork and looked at him. A cold chill ran through her. “It is though. It is personal.”
“It’s some asshole trying to make a quick buck that’s what it is.” He was angry now. He shook his head. There was wine on his lips.
“It can’t be more personal. It’s my policy. My life. I went into that office on my own volition and signed a contract, knowing full well what it meant. That’s how it is, Barry. I took that money. Me. Annika.” She made a fist and held it against her chest where the cancer had been.
“No, no, no. Okay. No,” His voice was almost pleading, begging. “You can’t look at it like that. I don’t want you to look at it that way. Think about it. It’s not even a thing. It’s an event that may or may not happen for a very long time, its possibilities, speculation. It’s part of a very complicated, corrupt system.”
Annika poured another glass of wine. Her hands were shaking worse than his and she was overcome with an almost violent urge to show him, to make him understand. “My mother used to have envelopes and she’d divide the money into it. The coins and the bills. The money was real. It was allocated for specific things. For flour. For milk. For eggs. And we got that money from the market. We got it for beef. For alfalfa. For hay.” She ground the words in, blunt and short as if to bludgeon him with their realness. “And I don’t care what you say, it’s not really complicated at all. Everything is connected to something real.”
He winced as if each word caused him physical pain, then they sat there with the empty plates and the wine bottle dead between them. The cottage smelled like red. “Not everyone is out to get you, you know,” he said after what seemed a long time. She looked away. “Not everyone has some twisted ulterior motive.”
She stood up. Her chair scraped on the floor. She went and put another log on the fire and crouched before it, watching cities burn and crumble in the grate. His voice from behind her continued on. “I worry about you, you know. Here you are, this beautiful intelligent woman and you hold everyone away at arm’s length.”
She closed her eyes. Not this, she thought. Barry, don’t do this. She stood and came back to the table and began clearing the plates. She tried to keep a lightness in her voice. “What are you talking about, arm’s length? I go to Healing Journeys and spill my guts don’t I? I’m involved in the community here; I have people over for dinner; I host the jam night. I don’t know what you’re talking about, arm’s length. I’m right in the thick of it.” She began to run the water.
“Ha! You’re baking cinnamon buns and going to therapy like it’s a fucking penance. Living like a monk out here on the point . . .”
They’d drunk too much she thought, that was all it was, he was drunk and getting wound up.
“What I’m talking about is connection. Friendship. Trust,” he said.
“Well, we’re friends aren’t we Barry?” she asked, though her words came out strangled. Don’t, she thought, please don’t. She put on the coffee. They would sober up. It would be fine.
“Friends let friends help one another,” he said darkly and she ignored it.
“And Healing Journeys,” she added brightly, “Healing Journeys is all about connection.”
“Healing Journeys is bullshit. You know it. I know it.”
She sat back down as the coffee started to drip. She felt rattled. His accusations seemed to be coming out of nowhere.
“I mean, do you ever do anything just for fun, Anni?” he implored.
“What is this? An intervention?”
“What do you even like to do? I’ve known you for six months now and I still don’t know what you do for fun.”
“Barry stop.”
“And what about men? Dating? You’re still a young woman. Don’t you ever miss having that in your life?”
She stood up again to hide the burning in her face. She was angry now, that he should come here, acting like a friend . . . She got out the mugs. “How would it be fair though? To go out and date someone when I’ve got what amounts to a time bomb inside me. It could come back now. It could come back any day.”
“Jesus Christ Annika, no one’s trading in futures anymore. I’m talking about having a good time. About just being with another person. About love.”
She set down the mugs and scraped the plates into the garbage. “Everyone wants something, Barry,” she said evenly but her anger showed through.
“Jesus, I’m not talking about that! I’m not talking about me! Did you think? You did! No, no, I’m talking about enjoying yourself every once in a while. A nice evening? A smile?” He tried to catch her eye but she wouldn’t look at him. “Okay, now we’re going to have a lesson in male-female relations,” he said. He rubbed his palms together then got up and went over to the small stack of CD’s and the portable player she’d bought at the thrift store as she stood at the counter wrapping the roast beef in tinfoil.
“Ah ha!” she heard him say but ignored it. She opened the fridge and the whiteness glared at her. Butter. Milk. Eggs. The barest necessities. What do you do for fun, Anni? Do you do anything for fun? She shut it quickly.
Music filled the room and then Leonard Cohen’s low and rasping voice: “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin . . .” She turned and there he was with his arms spread theatrically, inviting her to dance.
“No.”
“Oh but yes.”
“Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove,” he sang along. “Dance me to the end of love.”
“I’m not.”
“But you are. You are.” He was off balance and if she didn’t grab him he was going to fall, he was going to tip right over and fall on his stupid hopeful face and even though she was angry she wouldn’t let that happen. She would never let that happen to him. She took his hand and was drawn into his embrace and they began to lurch about the cottage. She held herself upright so as not to press too tight against him.
“Let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone,” he whispered in her ear.
“Barry,” she scolded.
<
br /> He leaned his head close until they were almost cheek to cheek. She could feel the heat of his skin, smell his aftershave. A man’s smell. No. no. no, she thought as memories came unbidden. There was such a thing as too much loneliness, she knew, and she was close now, dangerously close to that threshold where thoughts no longer matter, where want becomes a tidal wave, a torrent. There was that weakness in her legs, that thickening of the air that happens just before. She’d let it build up; she’d let there be too much and now here it came all at once, rushing, flocking to his touch the way it flocks to a simple kindness, all the loneliness of a lifetime rushing to a touch, rushing all at once to be relieved. She was afraid that she would not be able control it, that she would do now whatever he asked of her and that he would ask and he seemed to grow stronger for her weakness and she remembered how she’d felt this way before, in the off season, one winter when she’d been lonelier than usual and a man named Hamish had smiled her way and how the decision that hadn’t been a decision at all but a falling down, a helpless tumbling in a tidal wave of loneliness, had swept her to a cold, grey city away from the things she’d loved most.
“You know, Anni,” Barry said casually, “You act like I’m some snot-nosed kid asking you to the prom and that’s sweet but it’s not like that. I’m not looking for anything from you. Cinderella’s over for me and do you want to know something?”
Her knees, almost buckling. The warmth of hands on her back. The torrents of loneliness rushing. “What?”
“It’s a goddamn relief.” He laughed in her ear. “Now will you just relax. It’s just a dance. I’m not going to grab your ass . . . Unless, of course, you want me to . . .”
She groaned.
“What’s that? Did you want me to?”
“No!” It came out as a kind of squeal, a flirtatious squeal that was strange to her own ears. They danced and she felt herself lean closer, melting towards him. Her head grew heavy and it dipped forward and she snapped it back and he whispered, “Just let it, let it,” and she rested her head on his shoulder, and a voice inside screamed don’t don’t don’t and there was the loneliness, rushing to be relieved. Then the music ended and he let her go and said, “Taa daa!”
“Taa daa?”
“That’s it, that’s all. You can relax now. That’s all I was after, a dance with a pretty lady. Now was that so bad?”
She felt shaken, confused, torn up inside by the awful secret that she might have said yes if he’d asked her to go upstairs. She didn’t know that she would have said. “I’m sorry, Barry. I didn’t mean to imply . . .”
“Stop. Just stop being sorry. You’re lovely. I’m your friend. People can be friends, you know.”
She served the coffee with shaking hands and they talked for a while then he stood to leave. “I’ll see you later tonight, then?” he asked.
She felt a panic at the thought of him leaving, at being alone again even for a short while. “Yes. You’ll see me.”
“See you soon. Thanks for the grub. Delicious as usual.”
“Goodbye, Barry.”
“Goodbye, Annika.”
She watched him go, dancing from flagstone to flagstone, his shaking all but gone now. Then the fog consumed him.
She sat alone in the cottage staring at her bare, yellow walls. She touched her cheek where it had brushed against his and then she sat for some time.
She went upstairs and took out her tin of old things. She took off the cover and took out the silver earrings Hamish had given her when they were first married and held them up to her ears. The cool silver against her warm, golden skin gave her face a dramatic symmetry; Hamish’s mother once said she looked like a queen, though it wasn’t quite a compliment. Now, she fingered the matching bracelet, clasped it round her wrist and put the earrings in. She had to push a bit to break through the skin that had grown over the holes in her ears. She dabbed the blood with her forefinger, then brushed the tangles from her hair and stared at herself in the mirror.
She was smaller than before, having lost the muscle she’d built up in her traps and shoulders to the illness. The smallness made her hair look bigger, her eyes larger, her cheekbones sharper. There was something spare and essential about her face and she thought she’d never looked so much like herself before, never so . . . she shook her head and took the earrings out. It was stupid. It was jam night. It was Saltery Bay. And yet . . . other women did it, didn’t they? They wore jewelry? Fussed over their appearance? It didn’t have to mean anything. She put the earrings back in. The torn skin burned. Why not? Why shouldn’t she? She put on her best sweater and was on her way.
She walked out onto the gravel road, feeling her way in the dark. The town down the hill was an orange smear in the fog and the air was wet and cold on her skin. She walked now whenever she could. It made her feel alive.
She’d got the idea for a Jam night in a marketing book about small business. Most of the book had been simple common-sense advice but there’d been a few good ideas. One was to host social events as a way of advertising, a way to get your name out there, and she’d thought that an open-mike night would go over well with so many healing types keen to bare their souls. She’d been right. People absolutely loved it. It was as if the town had been waiting for it, bursting with creativity and hidden talent that only needed an opportunity to express itself.
When she got to town, the streets were quiet. After September the tourists left and now it was only the locals: hippies and the fishermen and retirees. She turned down a side road, then stopped to admire her own storefront.
Twisted Anni’s.
A piece of bleached driftwood with white Christmas lights wrapped around it hung above the door. The hand painted letters had come out more angular than she’d meant them to, but it was all a work in progress. She’d meant for ‘twisted’ to refer to her cinnamon rolls but the fishermen in town had all taken to calling her Twisted Anni. Here comes Twisted Anni, they’d say and she liked it. Twisted Anni! they’d yell when they saw her across the street, as if she were some kind of rock star and it was so ridiculous, so absurd, it made her giggle. Twisted Anni. What would they say in Rose Prairie if they ever knew?
The door was unlocked and she let herself in. Meg, one of the local girls she’d hired was already there, helping to set up. Thin and pretty with a medusa of blonde dreadlocks twisted on top her head, Meg was one of these confident young people who spoke in a low, world-weary voice as if she knew the dark truth of the world and was only humoring you with small talk. She looked up from the fridge which she was filling with beer and exclaimed, “Look at you, Annika! You look beautiful. What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion. I’m just . . . I thought I’d try to look civilized for once.”
Meg raised her eyebrows knowingly but said nothing.
Annika went around the room with a bucket of tea lights, placing a few on each table, then lighting them. The café, a plain rectangular room with hardwood floors, looked magical with all the twinkling lights and she felt a warm flush of pride as she looked around. It was a fairly basic operation but she’d taken great pains to make it nice. On Sasha’s advice, she’d kept her menu simple: coffee, tea, a few baked goods, but people liked her bread and rolls and she was able to stay afloat. It was all she’d really hoped for, to make enough money to be able to stay. She went behind the counter, then dragged the mic and amp from the storage closet while Meg went back and forth with cases of beer. Annika put out little plastic glasses for wine, then, after surveying the room, she opened the till and turned the card in the door to open.
Slowly, people began to show up and she smiled and greeted each of them at the door, taking the names for the open mic. Barry arrived with Marion and Susan who were both done up in their pewter jewelry and long, flowing cotton capes. They gushed and flitted about when they saw her and Barry pointed to her ears and said, “You’re gorgeous!” There was nothing a
wkward about him after their dance and she felt a pang of loneliness as she watched him escort Marion and Susan, one on each arm, showering them with his trembling attention, then she checked herself. It was stupid. She was glad he was happy. She didn’t want him that way.
Then Sasha and her partner Cosmo arrived, two short, luminescent elves with wide, earnest faces and bright white teeth. Cosmo trained therapy animals and the two of them had a dream of running their own hospice one day. They gave Annika long meaningful hugs and Sasha kissed her on the forehead and said she looked well.
The small room was rapidly filling up: there was a group of Meg’s friends and Greg, another hire, and his friends and a skulking teen named Liam who came by himself although his mother was there also with Kat and Velma; there were the Goldsteins and the monkey lady and several people she’d seen but didn’t know, and then Helmut arrived with two lean, wolfish men who were visiting. Helmut and his friends sat at a different table from Marion who kept glancing over at them and whispering urgently in Susan’s ear.
At nine, Annika helped Liam, who was first on the list, set up. He grunted a few words into the mic then blasted them all with epic riffs on his guitar, his thin sallow face a mask of utter seriousness, sweat beading on his feathery upper lip, his greasy hair pulled back in a red bandana. She stood behind the till and smiled to herself as she watched the audience do their best not to cringe, his mother and her friends being wide-eyed and open-faced and impossible to shock. After it was over, they showered him with attention and he took their praise like dirty money: his mouth twisting into a smile; his skin aflame with the shame of it.
Next up was Kat who wrote poetry. It took her some time to get her bulk up to the front. She leaned on her cane and looked grey and mottled and unhealthy until she began to speak and the light came on in her face. She had a beautiful face, really, like a sad, youthful woman looking out the round porthole of a sinking ship.
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