Innis Harbor

by Patricia Evans Cox

  She’d had seventy calories that morning for breakfast, a hard-boiled egg on her way to the gym, and that night after her training appointment, she’d eat one ounce of baked chicken breast and exactly one-quarter cup of steamed broccoli.

  She knew what she had to do; no model with any real experience needed to be told how to uncover their bones. It wasn’t discussed, especially not with the press, but her only choice was to have the discipline to hit her numbers. She had to eat no more than three hundred calories in a day and burn thirty-five hundred in the gym. It wasn’t easy, but it was her job, and every other model she knew had done the same. She had two weeks to lose nine pounds, and Harvey would need to be able to see the hard lines of her bones before they’d let her step on that runway. The only good thing was that Skye was on a swim tour to several university meets. If she saw what Loch was doing, she’d raise hell, and Loch didn’t need that on top of everything else.

  The time she’d spent in Innis Harbor had started to seem like a dream. Amir had eventually stopped calling after a few weeks, begging her for the opportunity to explain. In her last call, she said she’d decided to give Loch space. There was a long pause, but when she spoke again, Loch could hear the tears in her voice.

  I miss you more with every breath, baby. She paused, and Loch heard her take a breath. Come back to me.

  Loch had listened to it twice, then slid down the wall to the floor. Her apartment turned dark around her as night fell, and she was still there the next morning when the sun rose through her windows in translucent, rose gold sheets. She felt as if someone had sliced the rope that connected her to an anchor she didn’t know she had.

  She kept waking up in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat from the same nightmare of being adrift on the black surface of the sea in a small wooden dinghy, the only light the undulating, silvered reflection of the moon on the dark water. Then a slowly spinning floodlight from a lighthouse illuminates three other boats, one by one. Her father in one, Samia in the next, and Amir in the third. Amir is calling to her, so she swims to her, but the water becomes harder and harder to move through, and she sinks slowly toward the bottom of the ocean, the wide beam of murky light from the lighthouse growing more and more faint as she sinks toward the darkness.

  Loch didn’t sleep the night before the show. She hadn’t eaten in four days and spent most of the day before in the sauna, sweating out any water weight possible before she had to weigh in. She felt she was right on the line of missing her goal, and she was due backstage at the House of Dior runway show to be weighed in with the other models in one hour. It didn’t matter that she’d tried or that her vision had started to go blurry or that her heart had been racing for no reason. The scale didn’t lie, and it was the only thing that mattered today.

  She showered, then put on some jeans and an Adidas jacket zipped up to her chin. She didn’t bother wearing anything underneath it; once they were backstage, the models were constantly naked or in various stages of undress. Any form of underwear ruined the line of the clothing and how it moved on the body, so everyone wore a skin tone thong at the very most, but often nothing at all. It was always the same, but even after all this time, sometimes the scene backstage at a show with the naked models holding glasses of champagne or racing from one outfit change to the next seemed surreal.

  Loch caught a cab outside her apartment building and gave the driver the address. He managed to get her across town and within a block of the venue, but the deafening Manhattan traffic prevented him from edging any closer. Loch pulled her beanie low on her head and slid on her sunglasses before she got out and walked, using the service entrance at the back of the building to avoid the paparazzi starting to gather outside at the gates.

  The show was getting closer to the start time, and the scene backstage was chaos. Someone from the agency recognized her and pushed her gently toward the hair and makeup area, and she sank down into one of the chairs and waited to be called for her weigh-in, her eyes suddenly too heavy to hold open.

  It felt as if the trial was dragging on forever. The prosecution called endless witnesses, trauma counselors describing the after-effects of rape, testimony from Charlotte’s friends and family describing the myriad ways she’d “changed” after the alleged assault, and law enforcement personnel doing their best to describe the scene they’d been called to.

  Finally, after what seemed like weeks, the prosecution rested. It was a Friday afternoon, and the atmosphere in the courtroom was so icy it seemed to splinter with every whisper. Amir hugged her mother goodbye after court and told her she’d be over that night for dinner.

  As Amir and Jason walked out into the glare of the sun, she stopped walking and turned to him.

  “Tell me the truth.” She bit the edge of her lip. “There’s no way we can turn this around at this point, is there?”

  Jason hesitated, watching the jury members as they filtered down the courthouse steps, squinting in the sun, and scattered.

  “I’m going to do my best, but the fact that you have a previous conviction coupled with what’s happened in the courtroom so far…” He paused, shrugging off his jacket and folding it over the briefcase in his hand. “I have to be honest. It doesn’t look good.”

  They continued walking until they reached the truck that Amir had borrowed from Chris when she’d realized her truck tires had been slashed. She got in and turned back to face Jason through the open window.

  Jason looked Amir in the eyes. “So, I need to tell you that I got a plea deal from the prosecutor today, which frankly, I’m surprised we got at all.”

  Amir gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles went white. “What is it?”

  “Seven years in prison, with eligibility for parole after three, but you’d have to register as a sex offender for the rest of your life.” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “At least think about it over the weekend. I’m not telling you to take the deal, but you’re facing over twenty years for statutory rape and aggravated assault as it stands now. The judge isn’t going to go easy on you with your previous conviction.” Jason looked over his shoulder and dropped his voice. “And I wouldn’t bet the farm on us coming out of this with an acquittal.”

  Amir started up the truck and slid on her sunglasses. “I don’t need to think about it. I’m not doing time for something that didn’t happen.”

  She started the truck, and Jason stepped back, watching her disappear around the corner toward the cliffs.

  Loch stepped onto the scale platform and closed her eyes while one of the model coordinators nudged the lever back and forth until it found a balance. When she opened her eyes, she had a hard time focusing on the tiny white numbers. The coordinator put a check by her name and looked up.

  “One hundred and nine pounds,” she said, already looking at the model behind her. “You’re good, step off.”

  An assistant handed Loch a bottle of water as she stepped off, and she drank half of it before Anika, a model from Poland she’d worked with in the past, pulled it away.

  “How long has it been since you drank anything?”

  Loch tried to remember, but the last few days had run together. “A day or two.”

  “Then don’t down that whole thing at once,” she said. “You’ll be sick.”

  Loch took it back and tried to sip slowly.

  “That’s better,” Anika said. “It’s Loch, right? I’ve never seen you have to weigh in.”

  “I’ve never had to weigh-in before a show, but I took some time off and didn’t make weight when I came back.” Loch lowered the bottle and wiped her mouth, glancing at the set dresser waving her over to the fitting station. “I had to lose it all in about five minutes to stay in the show.”

  “Yeah, Dior is big. I’m lucky to even be here,” Anika said in her clipped Slavic accent. “But eat something after, yeah? You don’t look like yourself.”

  Loch squeezed Anika’s sharp shoulder and edged through the increasingly frantic backstage crowd tow
ard the set dresser with short black hair and glasses. She was standing on a stool, models and stylists swirling around her, holding the red silk dress Loch needed for the first pass down the runway. Loch stepped into place, and as it dropped over her head and down her body, it bagged around the hips.

  “Fuck me,” she spat out in a British accent tinged with panic. “I don’t have the time to deal with this shit.” She dug in her tool belt for her straight pins. “And they’ve moved you up in the bloody lineup, so you go on in two minutes.”

  She pulled the long skirt up, turned it inside out, and pinned it underneath to wrap Loch’s hips more snugly. The dress was sheer sueded silk meant to flow around her body like water. It was cut to her waist and open in the front, so the sides fluttered open as she walked, revealing the ribs now more pronounced than her breasts. The second the dresser was satisfied, she pointed to the line forming at the back of the runway. She gave Loch’s shoulder a shove. “Go, go, go!”

  Loch ran to the line, where the runway assistant looked at her feet in panic. “Where the fuck are your heels?”

  “I don’t know,” Loch said. “They didn’t give me any.”

  “Then fuck it,” she said, marking Loch’s name off the clipboard in her hand. “Just go like that, and if anyone asks, we intended for you to walk the show barefoot.”

  She pushed her forward as Loch watched the models lined up in front of her climb the stage stairs and wait for their turn, shaking out their hands to keep them relaxed and dropping all expression from their faces. Loch stepped onto the bottom stair, trying to calm the heart that had started to flutter like a dying bird in the cage of her chest. She’d never let nerves affect her, but the chaos had started to rattle her.

  She shook her head to clear it and narrowed her focus as she took the final step up and watched the model in front of her start to walk. When she turned at the end of the runway, Loch stepped onto the stage and focused her gaze at the wall in the back of the room. An explosion of flashbulbs and incessant clicking of cameras seemed to intensify to a blinding level, then fade to black. The last thing Loch heard was slow motion silence shattered by the sharp crack of her head on the runway.

  “Welcome back.”

  Loch opened her eyes and closed them again quickly, listening to the beeps and clicks of the machines around her. Judging by the number of machines she was hooked up to, she was fairly sure that this was not a casual hospital visit.

  “How are you feeling?” Skye squeezed her hand and smoothed the hair out of her face. “It’s about time you decided to come back.”

  Loch looked toward the distant skyscrapers visible outside the hospital window, an angular backdrop against the bright orange sunrise. “Why am I here?”

  “Because you’re an idiot.” Skye smiled. “I don’t know what the hell you did while I was on that swim tour, but you fell and cracked your head open on the runway at the Dior show.”

  “I don’t even remember being there.”

  “Yeah,” Skye said, stepping back as a nurse came in to check her vitals. “That’s not surprising.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Long enough for them to do some tests and figure out you’ve starved yourself so long that your heart muscle has been compromised. You had a heart attack on the runway.”

  Loch looked at the nurse changing out the bag on her IV stand, who glanced at Skye and nodded.

  “When can I go home? I’ve got shows coming up that I’ve signed contracts for. I can’t just not show up.”

  Skye looked at the ceiling and shook her head, and when she looked again at Loch, there were tears in her eyes.

  “This bullshit stops now.” A tear rolled down her cheek, and she brushed it away with her sleeve. “The doctor said you’ve done so much damage already that if you don’t stop you’re in danger of your heart just giving out. You almost died out there.”

  “I know models have died of heart failure before, but they were way skinnier than me.”

  “No, they weren’t.” Skye took a deep breath and chose her words carefully. “I’m not saying you have an eating disorder. I’ve never thought that about you, and I don’t now, but this business has twisted your sense of what’s safe.” She paused. “The doctor said your BMI is fourteen. It’s supposed to be around twenty-three. And in case you don’t know what that means, it’s fucking dangerous. You’ve been in ICU since last night.”

  “I was in ICU?”

  “Yeah.” Skye pulled the scratchy white hospital blanket up to Loch’s shoulders. “They moved you to a regular room when your vitals evened out, but you’re in for a shitload of tests in the next day or two to figure out where to go from here.” She walked to the window and looked out into the hall. “Mom was on that trip to Napa Valley with her new boyfriend, but I called her this morning, so she’ll be here soon.”

  Loch looked at the ceiling and let out all the air in her lungs. One of the Parisian models died of heart failure after a show last year, but all everyone talked about afterward was how to get around the token monitoring standards that were put in place in the aftermath.

  Skye’s phone pinged, and she looked at Loch. “I’m going to grab some coffee. It’s been a long night. Can I get you anything while I’m down there?”

  Loch shook her head and looked back out the window.

  “And by ‘anything,’ I mean chocolate cake, pizza…maybe a burrito the size of your head?”

  Loch smiled for the first time. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Great,” Skye said, giving her a thumbs-up. “Burrito it is.”

  Skye squeezed Loch’s hand and went out the door. Loch was tired; she couldn’t remember ever being this tired or even how to keep her eyes open. When she finally opened them again, the room was flooded with sunlight, and there was someone sitting beside her bed.

  “Good morning, beautiful.”

  It was Amir. She looked worried, her face as creased as her clothes, like she’d been awake all night. Loch reached for her, and Amir held her without a word, then pulled away just enough to hold her face and kiss her gently, her tears falling on Loch’s cheeks.

  “How did you know?” Loch asked as Amir wiped a tear from her cheek with her thumb and kissed where it had been.

  “Skye called me last night, and I got the next flight out. What did the doctor say this morning?”

  “I haven’t seen him yet, but the nurses told me at some point that my vital signs are almost normal. I’m supposed to be seeing a cardiac specialist today, I think.”

  “Well, that’s something, I guess.” Amir’s brows pushed together, and Loch saw the stress lines on her face. “You nearly gave me a heart attack. I’ve never been so worried in my life.”

  Loch noticed the tie slung over the back of the chair Amir had been sitting in and her rumpled but obviously expensive dress shirt and pants. “Not that I don’t appreciate the effort,” she said, checking Amir out with the start of a smile. “But even in Manhattan, the dress code for most hospitals isn’t quite this formal.”

  “Ahh, cracking jokes again, are we?” Amir kissed her forehead and winked. “I’m so happy to see you that I’m going to let you have that one.”

  Loch scooted over in bed and nodded toward the space. Amir sat carefully beside her and pulled her into her arms, or at least as much as she could with all the monitors Loch was hooked up to.

  “So,” Loch said. “You still haven’t told me. What’s with the butch prom dress?”

  Amir laughed. “I was on my way home from court yesterday when I got the call from your sister. It took some string pulling, but the judge finally let me leave the state. I have to be back on Monday at nine a.m.

  Loch shook her head. Her memories of everything seemed to be splintered since she’d woken up. “Why were you at court?”

  Suddenly, it all came flooding back to Loch at once, the rape charges, the arrest, and the sudden crushing weight of the realization that the person she’d fallen in love with was not the woman sh
e appeared to be.

  She looked into Amir’s eyes. “I’m in love with you, so I need to know the truth, Amir. All of it, even if it’s ugly.”

  “I’m in love with you, too.” Amir traced Loch’s cheek with her thumb. “You’ve deserved to hear the truth about everything for a long time, and I’ll tell you everything if you’ll let me.”

  Skye suddenly threw open the hospital room door with her foot, balancing an enormous cinnamon roll and two giant coffees in her hands. A king-size Snickers bar dangled from her front pocket for just a moment before it plunged to the floor with a thud.

  “No…really.” She shifted the cinnamon roll toward her body to keep it from sliding off the plate. “You two just sit there and keep canoodling. I’ve obviously got this.” A second thud revealed the hidden packet of Skittles in her back pocket. Amir jumped up and grabbed the coffees, trying not to laugh, and set the cinnamon roll on a tray table beside Loch.

  “I love cinnamon rolls,” Loch said, swiping at some of the overflow frosting on the plate.

  “Exactly my plan.” Skye tossed the candy bar to Amir and tucked the Skittles back into her pocket. “And now that I see you’re in capable hands, I’m going down to the cafeteria to meet my girlfriend for lunch.”

  “Hold up.” Amir looked at Loch, wondering if she’d heard Skye wrong. “Girlfriend? How did that happen?”

  Skye shook her head and looked at them with a slightly puzzled expression. “For a couple of gold star lesbians, you both seem to be fuzzy on the concept of how this stuff actually works.” She smiled, leaning out the door and peering down the hall. “She’s here, so I’m off. And I want to know what the doctor said when I get back, so pay attention!”