by Mina McShady
“That…sucks,” said Bryony, fairly sure that anything else she’d said would have been equally inadequate.
But Jennifer didn’t notice Bryony’s word choice at all because she was preoccupied with thoughts of Nasty’s condition. Just explaining it out loud to Bryony had made her friend’s illness—and its consequences—seem uncomfortably immediate. She wondered if she had been denying the extent of Nasty’s peril and need for weeks, even months. Nasty had, after all, set her own drapes on fire just days ago. Maybe, she thought, that was more than an inconvenient accident. Maybe it was a sign that Nasty should no longer be living alone, no matter what she said.
And what about Nasty’s family? In all the time Jennifer had known Nasty, she thought they’d talked about everything—the chilly reserve of Jennifer’s moneyed family, the antics of Nasty’s long line of boyfriends, Jennifer’s predilection for stable, serial monogamy—but they’d never really talked about Nasty’s parents, or where she’d come from, or if she had any brothers or sisters. It really was, she decided, a serious, even an unforgivable oversight.
“Is this it on the right?” asked Bryony, still driving at a crawl behind the red car man.
“Yes, it is.”
“Man, you were right about that yard. It’s totally gone back to nature.”
Bryony pulled into Nasty’s driveway and stopped the car. Although she wanted to scream obscenities at Bald Guy in the red car, she restrained herself, choosing instead to open the trunk as Jennifer had instructed. Once Bryony had both boxes of groceries balanced in her arms, she and Jennifer went to Nasty’s front door and rang the doorbell.
“Jennifer,” said Eli, opening the door. “What are you doing here?”
“Well,” she said, “I forgot all about Nasty’s groceries and you don’t have a cell phone, so I drove to the Organic Food Store. Which was pretty ugly, with my cast and all. Bryony, Goddess bless her, used her break to help me drive out here and drop off Nasty’s food.”
Eli ushered the girls in, leading them to the kitchen where Bryony deposited the boxes on the floor.
“Fuck, those were heavy!”
“You know, Jennifer, I don’t think Nasty’s eating anymore. I don’t know that much about, like, cancer, but the not eating isn’t, I think, a good sign.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Jennifer, sighing. “I guess I’ve been in denial. So, where is Nasty?”
“She’s on the couch in the living room. I gave her a shot of morphine, just like you always do,” said Eli, proud that he had gotten through that transaction. Now Nasty was lying on the couch, apparently asleep and free from pain.
“I never give her shots,” replied Jennifer as she headed for the living room.
Nestled on the overstuffed couch amidst piles of clutter, Nasty looked especially tiny. Jennifer knelt down beside her and gently shook her shoulder. When Nasty didn’t respond, Jennifer shook her a little harder and called her name. When there was still no response, she brought her ear to Nasty’s chest to listen for breathing and a heartbeat. She heard neither.
“Oh my God,” she cried. “I think she’s dead!”
-Helen Kale-
Sue Dawson’s house looked like it had been designed by an alternate-universe Martha Stewart—a hippie control freak born in, and deeply ambivalent about, the state of Texas. The front yard was sectioned into miniature herb gardens, each marked with a small ceramic sign that indicated the formal species name of its constituent plants and their potential uses in alternative medicine. Helen studied these signs, which were illuminated by small standing lamps, as she trudged up the intentionally rough-hewn stone staircase that led from Sue’s narrow driveway to her front door. In fact, she paid so much attention to the meticulously kept herbs that she slipped and fell.
Falling forward, Helen instinctively reached her hands toward the ground, dropping the plate of nachos she'd bought at the Organic Food Store. Its clear plastic wrapping could not stop the onslaught of gravity. Tortilla chips and refried beans tumbled off the tray and into delicate herbal sanctuaries like an invading army. Cupfuls of confetti-grated jack cheese scattered in all directions. Helen groaned. Not only was she going to appear at the meeting empty handed like, but she was also going to have to clean up this mess, which didn’t look so bad in the dark, but would almost certainly resemble the aftermath of a bad fraternity party by sunrise.
As she extracted chips, jalapenos, and blobs of beans from a small forest of basil, Helen worried about facing her hostess, whom she distrusted despite—or, perhaps, because of—the fact that she was so ostentatiously nice. She could hear Sue drawling, “Oh honey, don’t you worry about it, we care about you, not some store-bought nachos,” in a warmly insincere voice, and later gossiping with Bob, speculating if she’d fallen because she was distraught or merely drunk. Sure, Helen had been in regular touch with Sue since she and Carol had staged their “intervention,” barging into her house and her post-Eli grief, and she had no concrete reason to suspect that Sue was anything more than the good Samaritan she claimed to be. But something still bothered her.
Arriving at the top of the staircase, now holding a plate full of dirty nachos and a wadded up ball of saran wrap, Helen pushed open a surprisingly solid screened door to enter Sue’s self-consciously simple, redwood-accented porch. She was immediately struck by a fresh, piney smell, a scent that she associated both with the wilderness and fresh new money. A giant bong stood beside the door, doubling as an umbrella stand, and a long bench made from unfinished wood hung stolidly from thick iron chains. It was covered by an old quilt, painstakingly pieced together from swatches taken from both Texas and United States flags. The floor was immaculate.
Helen had hoped to find some grainy sand or a clump of hair, some imperfection that could blur the crystalline awareness that her own house, despite triage from Sue and Carol, was still a jumbled mess. Disappointed by Sue’s apparent commitment to cleanliness and attention to detail, she slumped under the weight of her perceived inadequacy and sank onto the hanging bench, placing her tray of garbage onto the floor. Sitting quietly on the softly lit porch and listening to the cheerful murmur of voices from inside the house, Helen thought about just leaving.
It would be so easy, she thought. The Death March meeting could easily proceed without her. She had only been peripherally involved in race preparations, confining her interest to the handful of specific issues that could direct affect Eli, such as guidelines for the affixation of sponsors’ logos to running shorts and the growing list of banned substances that she had diligently kept from his diet. Nobody would miss her, except for those people who had wanted to smugly observe Helen's debut as a woman who had just got dumped.
Her only difficulty was summoning the energy to leave the bench, now that she was sitting there. Because she’d run 7 miles after work to dissipate the nervous energy that continued to plague her, she was genuinely physically tired. In addition, she’d spent an entire day pretending to work, which was both mentally and physically exhausting. Weary across all dimensions, Helen was easy prey for entropy, which suggested she forget everything and just stretch out on the bench where she sat for a nice, long nap.
Fighting the imperative to remain at rest, Helen tried to call upon the hate that had so energized her just a short hour ago. She remembered how she’d played her radio on the drive over to Sue’s house, listening to aggressive metal music and surrendering her mind to a torrent of revenge fantasies. At first, she’d imagined Eli leaving Jennifer boldly and deliberately. His black, wing-like brows knitted together with barely concealed contempt as he gave a long, cruel speech about how Jennifer wasn’t nearly as sexy, solicitous, or smart as his ex-girlfriend Helen. Jennifer cried and hopped after him on her one good foot, but Eli would have none of it.
Later she’d envisioned Jennifer and Eli, running together in the woods, wearing weary yet caffeinated expressions that indicated they had just left a Death March checkpoint where they’d been weighed, watered, and stuffed with Coke a
nd plain M&Ms. But then, before their satisfied and confident appearance could cause Helen to choke with righteous anger, the mountain lion from all the trailhead warning signs appeared. Powerful and tawny, he exploded from behind a bush and landed on Jennifer’s back, delivering a loud, crunch of a killing bite and pressing her into the ground.
Revisiting these images of revenge gave Jennifer a warm glow. She was ready to leave the porch and abandon the Death March meeting when she heard a click and smelled faint echoes of a heavily floral perfume.
“Helen, I am soooo glad you could make it,” said Sue, looking at Helen’s plate of ruined nachos with a wry smile.
-Jennifer Champion-
Paramedics were shouting and banging on Nasty’s chest hard enough to crush her ribs. Bryony, excited by her sudden proximity to death, was intently watching them, leaning onto the balls of her feet like a macabre ballerina. At the same time, Officers Jim and Rosie—the policemen she remembered from her fateful collision with Eli’s ex-girlfriend—were conducting a low-key interrogation of Eli in the kitchen. They were torn between their admiration of Eli the dogged Death Champion, and the unfamiliar excitement of a potential homicide in sleepy summertime Crawford’s Notch.
Jennifer sat on a low footstool, attempting to stay out of the way of the loud, jibbering insanity she’d unleashed when she’d called 911. When she’d looked at Nasty’s utterly empty face and began to realize that she might be really and truly dead, her brain began to shut down. A panicked voice emanating from the darkest reaches for her reptilian brain had chanted, “It’s too much,” over and over and over again. After listening to Eli and Bryony discussing if they should try CPR and then arguing whether the breathing or the chest compressions came first, Jennifer had used her crutches to lurch surprisingly quickly into the kitchen, where she found a phone.
“Hello, Emergency. How can I help you?” chirped a sweetly officious voice.
“My friend is dead, I think.”
“Can you tell me where you are?”
“Um, I don’t know,” said Jennifer, frantically trying to recall Nasty’s address.
“That’s O.K., just stay on the phone. Can you tell me what happened?”
“Nas—, er, Anastasia has terminal lung cancer, and she’s not doing real well. I sent my boyfr—, er, this guy I know to check in on her. Then I, um, realized I forgot all about Anastasia’s groceries and Eli, the guy, doesn’t have a cell phone. So I went to get groceries—my foot is broken, it was really hard to drive—and got this girl, Bryony, to drive me to Anastasia’s house. When I got there, er, here, she was just lying there, not breathing. Eli said he gave her some kind of shot. Morphine or something…”
Jennifer dropped the phone as soon as she heard the paramedics banging on the door. She had expected a sort of dignified quiet professionalism from the emergency personnel, a delicacy wrought from daily experience with matters of life and death. But instead they were hard, brash, and overexcited. Their frequent exposure to bloody and terrifying circumstances hadn’t led to a finer, more tempered emotional response at all, but rather to thick exoskeletons.
The police had sauntered in later, with ruddy cheeks and a strangely hyped-up manner.
“Hello, ma’am,” said Jim in a tight formal voice despite the fact that he’d consoled at the scene of the accident just a few weeks before.
“Hi,” said Jennifer absently. “Um, come in.”
“The EMS operator tells us you’re saying your boyfriend gave your friend, Anastasia Falcon, an injection of something. Is that true?”
“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s just someone who’s staying with me for a few days. You see, we just met a few—”
“Ma’am,” he said, cutting her off, “did he give Anastasia an injection or not?”
“Yes, well, that’s what he told me, but—”
Before Jennifer could say anything else, the two cops had pushed by her and commandeered both Eli and Nasty’s kitchen. From where she was sitting she could hear low rumblings of conversation between Eli and the two cops, which provided the bass backdrop for the paramedics’ brash enthusiasm. What bothered her more than anything else was that the situation had escalated so quickly. Now it was out of control, out of her control. But, she asked herself, isn’t that what I wanted?
-Eli Hawthorne-
“Can you tell me again what happened?” asked Officer Jim in a gruff voice that contrasted with his movie star, facial features.
Eli licked his lips. He had been talking non-stop for almost an hour, and his mouth was uncomfortably dry. He still could not quite believe that Nasty was actually dead. Of course, it wasn’t his fault. She had tricked him into giving her a lethal dosage of morphine. He had already explained this to the cops, and he didn’t understand why he had to keep repeating himself. All he wanted to do was to go “home” and have a drink, although he wasn’t sure if he really wanted to be around Jennifer while she was absolutely crushed by grief. He had, after all, just killed her friend.
“Do you want some water?” asked Officer Rosen, also known as Rosie. His soft, rounded face registered an earnest regard for Eli’s well being.
“Um, yeah, sure,” said Eli, as Officer Jim cleared his throat and scowled.
Rosie filled a glass covered by greasy fingerprints with lukewarm tap water and passed it to Eli with a nod. Eli downed the whole thing in one long gulp. He’d had no idea how thirsty he’d been.
“We’re waiting,” said Officer Jim, bouncing his knee with impatience.
-felis concolor-
Hunger is the predator’s default setting. Although he’d gorged on a young stag just days ago, the predator’s belly was empty again. Leaving the bones of his latest kill, the predator stalked through the twilight, looking for victims. On the forest floor, he found strange-looking thing that didn’t appear to animal spoor, and they gave off a strangely empty yet meaty scent. With the native curiosity of kind, the predator stretched out his neck and delicately sniffed the flimsy, leaf-like wrappers. Being a carnivore, he knew the wrappers had once been in contact with meat.
After taking a generous whiff of the wrappers, he raised his head and began sniffing the air, searching for a trail. He found nothing. He pawed at the wrappers and they made the sound of a rabbit scurrying into its burrow. He twitched and pounced, twitched and pounced. Finally, growing bored, he continued on his way.
-Helen Kale-
As she walked through Sue’s kitchen and cavernous living room, Helen could hear the volume of whispered conversation ebb and flow around her. Knots of people, clustered around plates of food and overstuffed chairs, would begin excitedly murmuring when Helen entered their line of sight. The talk would rapidly accelerate, reaching a flurried crescendo as Helen approached. And then, when she would come within 4 or 5 feet of the interlocutors, all conversation would cease, to be replaced with cheerful cries of “Hi, Helen. How are you?”
Looking around, Helen realized that she was one of the youngest people in the room. The Death March planning committee tended to attract the aged and the lame, men and women resigned to a program of sensible, moderate living, something which emphatically does not include a cartilage-tearing, bone-grinding, kidney-pounding 100-mile run through the woods. As Helen fixed herself a plate of seedless grapes, crackers, and cheese, and tried to ignore the whispering that surrounded her, someone tapped her on the shoulder.
“So how are you holding up?”
Helen inwardly groaned. It was Bob Robertson, and he was grinning from ear to ear, as though he was hoping to see Helen dissolve into tears.
“Fine,” she said, testing the word in her mouth and finding it wholesome. “I’m doing fine.”
“Oh you don’t have to lie for me, Hellie. You’ve got to be miserable, just miserable,” said Bob, his face still animated by an antic, Cheshire cat smile.
“Oh no, not really.”
Helen smiled so hard she thought her face would break. She hadn’t thought much about Bob since that awful day. Jen
nifer and Eli loomed much larger in her imagination. But now, for the first time, she wondered if Bob had insisted on her coming over on purpose, to feed his insatiable desire to be the older, wiser center of a breathless, gossipy storm.
“So,” she asked, “it must be tough trying to get along without a car.”
“What do you mean?” asked Bob.
“Oh, never mind,” said Helen. “I’ve got to get some more of this cheese. It’s wonderful!”
Stuffing a cracker into her mouth, Helen backed off and headed for the kitchen. Bob had lied about his car trouble so that she would drive over to his house and walk in on Eli and Jennifer. She was less shocked than she thought she’d be. But she was far, far angrier.
-Jennifer Champion-
Jennifer sat in her darkened apartment, stroking Wretch, who struggled to get away. She’d been there, staring, since Officer Jim had dropped her off an hour ago. It was so different from when he’d given her a ride to Bob Robertson’s party after her collision with Helen’s car. Letting his chiseled face harden into granite, he stared out the window and asked her leading questions about Eli. She had remained silent.