by Stella Noir
“Where do you live?” he wants to know, his eyes fixating on me as if he was afraid I would run away.
I wrap my arms around myself again to ward off the cold. “Nowhere.”
He rolls his eyes and throws his arms up in a frustrated gesture so abrupt and dramatic that it causes me to take a step back.
“It’s true!” I add. “I have no home. I ended my lease. I slept in a motel for the past few days.”
He lowers his hands and buries them in his pants pockets. Looking at him with his thick jacket, the soft sweater and the sturdy boots, it reminds me once again of my inappropriate attire. All I’m wearing is my white summer dress, a favorite of mine when I still cared. It used to belong to Sonya.
I wanted to have as little on me as possible when I jumped, and this dress seemed perfect. As if she was with me, even in death.
However, I did not expect to spend a lot of time out in the cold with just this dress on. The dead don’t feel the cold, but I certainly do right now. When I came here, I was wearing a jacket and a scarf on top of the dress, but just like the shoes, those ended up on the bottom of the canyon.
We look at each other for a few moments, and I’m beginning to realize that he is just as stumped for an answer as I am. He turns around and looks down the street in the direction from which he came. My eyes follow his. There’s an expensive looking black car parked a couple hundred yards away at the side of the road. It must be his. I was sunk so deep in my suicidal contemplation that I didn’t hear the car drive up, which is why his sudden appearance next to me on the bridge startled me so much.
He’s still staring down the road, his eyes locked on the car, while my gaze wanders back to him. His face is tensed up and his teeth clenched, as if he is gnawing on what to do.
“There’s nowhere for you to go,” he whispers, “but down that canyon.”
It’s a statement, not a question. The self-evident tone of his voice causes the blood to pound loudly in my ears. Does he seriously intend to throw me down into the canyon?
He turns around to me. “Right?”
I’m too startled to reply. Instead, I stare up at him, locked in place by his intense eyes and the enormity of his statement.
“You know, I should just leave you here,” he continues. “Or help you complete your pathetic attempt.”
He pauses for a few moments, waiting for my reaction, but I’m not able to respond.
“But I can’t do that,” he concludes. “I fucking can’t.”
“I’m sorry, I–“
“Shut up,” he interrupts me. “You’ll come with me.”
I inhale audibly and my eyebrows draw upward as I gawk up at him in shock. “What?”
“You heard me,” he says, taking a step forward. I flinch away from him, but he grabs my upper arm and holds me back. His grip is tight enough to remind me that there’s nowhere for me to run.
“You’ll come with me,” he repeats. “Unless you come up with another place I can take you to.”
I shake my head. “No.”
He sighs and lets go of my arm. I observe him, my eyes wide, as he takes off his jacket and puts it around my shoulders. It smells like him. Husky and masculine. And it feels almost as comforting and safe as his hug.
“Wear that,” he says, sounding angry. “You must be freezing.”
He takes a step back, scanning me from head to toe, before he turns around and walks toward the car.
“Don’t you fucking dare jump with my jacket on,” I hear him yell as he walks away.
I put my arms through the jacket. Of course, it’s way too big for me and makes me feel like a toddler in comparison to its owner. My fingertips are barely visible when I let my arms hang down at the side of my body.
I don’t move, but watch him walk away from me with slow but confident steps.
He’s a scary man. Tall, strong, dark and obviously fucked up. Who else would talk to a suicidal person the way he did? He freaked me out by suggesting that he’d rape my dead body after it washes ashore. How can I trust a man like that?
On the other hand, what’s the worst he could do? Kill me?
A dark and twisted smile appears on my face as I set myself in motion to follow this creepy stranger to his car.
CHAPTER THREE
Kade
“What’s your name?”
She doesn’t answer me. We’ve been driving for almost fifteen minutes without speaking a single word, which she doesn’t seem to mind one bit.
She also doesn’t wear her seat belt. See if I care. If we end up in a crash and her dainty body is thrown through the windshield, we both would have one less problem to worry about.
She looks even smaller and more vulnerable wrapped in my jacket. I hate how much she makes my insides burn. She stirs something in me, a part that I prefer to keep locked away. This girl holds the key to it, and she doesn’t even know it.
She is trouble. I’m cursing myself for taking her with me, even though I know I had no choice. The thought of her rotting at the bottom of that canyon together with that asshole made me sick. Whatever she’s going through doesn’t justify this unthinkable way of ending everything.
I had to take her away from there. Not only because she doesn’t belong dead on the canyon floor, but also because I still claim that spot for myself. I don’t have the time to come up with an alternative. I don’t want to wait until this fucktard starts stinking and my car starts reeking of death.
“Answer me!” I bark at her.
She flinches - and my core growls with craving. It’s been too long since I fed those urges.
“Meadow,” she whispers. “My name is Meadow.”
I glance over at her in disbelief. “You fucking with me?”
She turns around, furrowing her eyebrows with the fury of a little girl. It’s so damn adorable. I have to pull myself together not to laugh at her.
“No! That’s my name. Meadow!” she insists.
“A meadow is a fucking grassland,” I tell her. “Not a name.”
“Fuck off,” she spits. I’d get mad at her, but the pouting face that comes along with those annoyingly sassy words more than makes up for her bad behavior.
“Never heard anyone with that name before, is all,” I say. “And you better not be lying to me.”
“I’m not lying,” she says, still pouting. “My mother was a hippie.”
The way she spits those words out makes it very obvious that she doesn’t think too highly of her mother.
“What’s your name?” she wants to know.
“You can call me Kade,” I reply, without looking at her.
She turns around to face me, but I keep my eyes focused straight ahead.
“Is that what everybody else calls you?” she asks. “Is that your name?”
For the most part, yes. Kade is all she needs to know.
“Yes,” I say, nodding.
“You better not be lying to me,” she parrots me.
“What’s up with that sass?” I ask. “You’re quite chipper for a girl who wanted to make this her last day on earth.”
I cast her a quick glimpse, raising one of my eyebrows. She averts my eyes and lowers her gaze down into her lap, where she helplessly fiddles with her fingers.
“Well, I’m still here,” she says, a hint of reproach in her voice. “Might as well try to make the best of it.”
“Not the worst idea,” I agree. “And what does that entail?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t even know where we’re going right now.”
“Like I said, if there’s any place I could bring y—”
“There isn’t,” she interrupts me.
Damn. For a moment there, I was hoping that she’d come up with something. Or that she’s been lying to me all along and all that nonsense about not having a home was just a bunch of bullshit.
It would make everything so much easier if I could just drop her off somewhere, get her out of my car, out of feeling responsible for her.
“Are you sure?” I probe. “No friends, no family? There must be—”
“There isn’t!” she yells. “I have nobody!”
I let go of the steering wheel for a second to lift my hands in defense. “All right, all right.”
“Look, if you want to get rid of me, just let me out of the car right here,” she suggests. “You don’t have to do this. If you tell me to get out of the car, I will. Just tell me to—”
“Shut up!” I yell at her. “I can’t and I won’t. We’re still in the middle of fucking nowhere!”
The city is still too far away for me to justify kicking her out of my car. So much goddamn time. This is so not what I had in mind when I got into the car this morning.
“Where are we going?” she asks. “Your home?”
“No,” I retort. “A place where you can stay. Sleep, rest. Sort your messed up thoughts and come up with a plan or something.”
She continues to rest her eyes in her lap. “But where? What city?” Her voice is soft.
I thought that would have been obvious by the direction we’re heading, but she obviously didn’t pay enough attention to figure that one out.
“Albany,” I say.
“Oh,” she straightens herself, attentively looking at me. “Out of state, then.”
“Yes,” I say, nodding. “So, am I correct to assume that’s not where you’re from?”
She shakes her head. “I’ve never been.”
“Where’s home for you?”
“No—”
“Where did you have your lease, smart ass?”
I won’t let her continue that self-pity dance, and she better get used to answering my questions, like a normal person.
“Pittsburgh,” she says. “That’s where I lived.”
I nod, unsure how to reply to that. I’ve never been to Pittsburgh, nor have I ever had any interest in going there. Hell, I didn’t even want to return to this area in the first place. Nothing good has happened since my return, and I’m beginning to think that I’ve made a major mistake by coming back to my hometown.
“Why are you helping me?” she asks in a weak voice, looking ahead out the windshield to the street, as if she was talking to the vast nothingness passing by in front of us.
“If I wanted to help you, I would’ve thrown you down from that bridge,” I lie.
“And then fuck my dead body,” she adds, her voice so bland that it almost freaks me out.
“Unlikely,” I say, trying to sound equally clinical. “I prefer warm bodies. A racing pulse, blushing cheeks, and a throbbing pussy.”
I expect her to become exasperated with me and my brazen words, but she just tenses up, inhaling audibly as she lowers her eyes in an embarrassed yet coy manner. I bet her cheeks are blushing crimson red.
She grabs the hem of her white sundress and pulls it down to cover her knees, as if she was trying to hide the pale skin of her thighs from my view.
“Are you planning to rape me?” she asks in a choking voice.
“If you’re worried about that, why did you get into my car?” I ask her.
She lets out a soft puff. I glance over to see her smiling.
“Good point,” she says.
“Thought so,” I return. “However, I can reassure you, I’m not a rapist. That’s pathetic. I don’t have to force women to have sex with me.”
I add a little pause for emphasize, before she turns her head to look at me and our eyes meet.
“They come on their own will,” I wink at her.
This time, I can clearly see her blushing. It suits her, painting a sign of life on her cheeks that I haven’t seen even once since I first laid eyes on her. She almost looks like a different person now. Her long hair is still ruffled from the wind, falling down in long, messy waves and framing her petite shoulders. She’s beautiful, there’s no doubt about that.
What on earth could be so horrible as to bring a girl like to her to want to end her life? And at the same destination I chose to get rid of that disgusting scumbag?
“Why?” I pose the question out loud. “What made you walk up to that bridge with the intention to jump?”
She reciprocates my gaze with wide eyes, looking as if she didn’t know the answer herself. She shakes her head.
“Don’t you think there must be more than one reason for a person to consider death?” she snorts.
“Maybe,” I agree, shrugging my shoulders. “But we still have about an hour to kill. Not enough time to tell the story?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Sure.”
“What were you doing at that bridge?” she asks back, looking at me with an unexpectedly sassy grin.
I arch my eyebrows, shaking my head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough,” she says, turning away from me to look outside the window on her side of the car.
We revert to awkward silence for the next few minutes, until I decide to turn on the radio. I don’t care what kind of music she likes to listen to, but I don’t hear her protest when I turn on my usual station that plays mostly alternative rock.
Ironically, the songs of Nirvana accompany us, as we reach the borders of the city where I grew up. Happy memories from my childhood are few and far between, so I don’t find myself overwhelmed by pleasant nostalgia every time I return to this city.
What pleasant memories there were are exclusive to one neighborhood, one street, and one small and rundown apartment in the middle of town. And that’s where we are headed.
“So, you said you’re not taking me to your home,” Meadow says next to me. It’s the first thing she has said since we stopped our conversation more than forty minutes ago. I think she may have fallen asleep in between. I was too deep in my own thoughts to pay a lot of attention to her, but for a while there, her head was resting against the window next to her, and her entire body seemed to be a lot more relaxed than before.
“Where exactly are you taking me then?” she asks. “Some kind of institution?”
She’s sitting upright, looking at me with alarmed eyes. The idea of bringing her to a clinic or some kind of social service never crossed my mind, and from the looks of it, she just stumbled upon that idea herself. And she doesn’t like it.
“No,” I say. “I’m taking you to a place where you can get some rest and—”
“You’ve said that before,” she interrupts. “Be more specific.”
I don’t take orders from little girls, but I understand how annoying vague answers to clear questions can be, so I decide to give her a straight-up answer for once.
“Arbor Hill,” I reply. “I have an apartment there.”
She casts me a wary look. “You have an apartment, but you don’t live there?”
I nod. “Correct.”
“Are you rich or something?”
She wouldn’t ask that question if she knew anything about Arbor Hill. It’s not the kind of neighborhood where rich people would choose to buy property. It’s the exact opposite of a desirable neighborhood.
It’s where I grew up and spent most of my early life, and it’s a part of me that I was desperate to leave behind a few years ago. Maybe a little too desperate.
“No, I’m not rich,” I say, even though that’s a lie. While the apartment in Arbor Hill is no proof of wealth, I can honestly say that I’ve done well for myself after leaving this town. I wanted to leave all of this behind, but as it turned out, there were some parts that couldn’t be put to rest. Some part of me will always be the little boy from the ghetto — and that’s the part that brought me here. The part that is responsible for the dead body in my trunk.
“Why do you own an apartment that you don’t live in?” she asks.
I grit my teeth. “Long story.”
Meadow turns her head to look at me, trying to catch my gaze, but I avert her and keep my eyes focused straight ahead on the street.
“A story you don’t want to talk about,” she presum
es.
“Correct.”
We’re crossing the Hudson River and closing in on Arbor Hill. Meadow is silent again, attentively studying the streets we’re passing through. This area used to be a lot worse when I grew up here. It was as bad of a neighborhood as one could imagine, but things have gotten better in recent years.
This recent improvement is the only reason I allowed my mother to continue living here after I left.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for that.
Meadow’s eyes are glued to the houses in the historic district that we’re passing through. Some of them have been renovated recently and look a lot more inviting than they did when I was a teenager.
“Lovely,” she comments, and I don’t know if she’s being sarcastic or honest.
“Don’t get too excited,” I say. “There’s no princess tower awaiting you.”
“Good,” she says. “Because I’m no princess.”
Touché, young girl.
I park the car in front of a brick apartment building that is not nearly as impressive as the rows of historic houses we passed by earlier.
I’m glad to get out of the car for now, and to get her away from it as well. I don’t want to imagine her reaction if she knew that she’s been riding with a corpse for more than an hour and a half.
She follows me out of the car like an obedient puppy, wrapping my jacket around herself and casting shy looks to the left and right. There are not many white girls around this area, so she’ll definitely draw some attention with her ash blond hair and pale skin if she dares to wander off by herself.
Looking at her now, I doubt that she’s interested in any excursions, though. An unsettling thought takes hold of me as I unlock the downstairs door while she’s standing right behind me, seeking protection.
I might be stuck with her for longer than I expected when I decided to bring her with me. I still can’t explain why I did it. It felt right at the time, and it still does. If only I knew what this will lead to, what’s going through her head. Seeing into the future — who wouldn’t want to be able to do that?
“No elevator,” I announce, as we step into the dark hallway.
I hear her naked feet pattering along behind me on the concrete floor as she follows me up the stairs.