by JoAnn Chaney
“Yeah, just a bit more up that way,” she said.
She almost fell once, because the rocks and weeds and dirt under their feet had become slippery in the rain, but caught hold of a branch at the last minute and steadied herself. It’d be a bad thing to get hurt here, out this far in the middle of nowhere, off the established trail. The main path looped down to a parking lot about a mile downhill, but it was a hard hike, and if she fell and hurt herself she’d be in for a wait before anyone could make it out this far into the park, even if Matt could call someone on his cell phone. They were breathing hard as they dug the toes of their boots into the earth and straggled up, using trees and shrubs to keep their balance, the rain pattering softly on the backs of their heads and running down onto their faces. The last time Marie had hiked this she’d had to come back down sitting on her ass—it was steep. Pine needles had drilled into her thighs and a rock managed to snag her pants and gouge her leg as she came down, and that night in the hotel room she’d stood on top of the closed toilet lid and examined herself in the bathroom mirror, laughed at the bruises and cuts and divots left in her thighs.
“We’re here,” Matt said, gasping when they finally made it to the top and the ground leveled out. He wasn’t in the best shape anymore—Matt went to the gym every morning, but he also liked a bowl of ice cream every night, and he liked to drink. Forty minutes at a slow walk on the treadmill wasn’t doing him much good, no matter what he thought. She watched him bent over, hands on his knees, greedily sucking down air, but from the corner of her eye. If he suddenly straightened up she didn’t want him to catch her watching. He’d be embarrassed and angry, like the time not too long before when she’d come into the bathroom and found him flexing in front of the mirror, turning and twisting to look at himself from every possible angle, pinching the extra fat that’d landed around his middle. She’d stood in silence, watching as he’d preened and frowned over his body, insecure and unhappy, and while a part of her was amused by it, she also felt a sort of mean satisfaction. She’d spent her entire life worrying over her looks—but that’s how women were trained to be, weren’t they? Concerned about their weight and wrinkles and the state of their hair, while men got off scot-free. Or maybe they didn’t, not completely.
She turned her back on Matt, let him catch his breath without her watching. She’d give him that much, at least. Took a dozen steps ahead, toward the edge of the cliff, and looked out. Her bum knee was giving her hell and her skin was beaded with sweat and rain, but the view was worth it. There were miles and miles of evergreens and mountains spread in every direction below them, and much farther on, so far and misty and blurred that you couldn’t be sure it was even real or if it was only imagination, was the rest of the world. That was what this climb was like—they’d scaled the entire world. The air was thin and clear up this high, and while everything in the distance seemed to be wrapped in gauze, everything up close was strangely sharp. Marie held up her hand, examined the skin stretched over her knuckles. She could see every freckle and sun spot, every pore and line, in minute detail. It was as if she were looking at herself through a microscope on maximum magnification. Maybe she was giddy—lack of oxygen and water, one or the other, maybe both—or maybe things were just coming into focus.
“Come back from the edge,” Matt said sharply. She looked at him over her shoulder. Did he want her back because he was worried about her safety, or was it because he liked to give orders? It was impossible to tell. He’d always been afraid of heights, but he also hated her to be ahead of him—both literally and figuratively. He’d taken enough of those personality tests for work over the years that he’d taken to classifying himself. He was bold, he was competitive, he was a leader. He liked to keep a step or two ahead of her both in life and when they walked, just the same as he did with everyone else. That’s how he’d always been.
“I’m fine,” she said, turning away. She crept up to the cliff’s lip, careful to keep the toes of her boots back from the crumbling rock edge. It was a sharp drop past there, 120 feet or so of open air, straight down to the river running below. A precipice, that was the right word for a narrow ledge like this. A word that somehow managed to sound sharp and dangerous. Over the last few years she’d started doing the crossword puzzle in the newspaper every day, and she’d gotten good at it.
Precipice: Noun.
1. A very steep or overhanging place.
2. A hazardous situation.
Behind her were the trees they’d pushed through, and ahead was the rock that jutted out like a pointing, accusing finger, and then air. She closed her eyes and leaned back, took a deep breath. Filled her lungs up with as much oxygen as they’d hold, until they felt ready to burst, then pursed her lips and exhaled through her mouth.
From this cliff it seemed like anything was possible.
“It’s like heaven up here,” Marie breathed. Matt heard her and pulled a face, looked away. He was still back in the safety of the trees. He couldn’t understand what she meant about heaven, of course—Hannah had been six when she’d said that same thing, and Matt had always been at work in those days, leaving her home with the girls. Hannah had said it about the play set they had installed in the backyard. She’d always climbed to the tower at the very top and sat alone, looking out over the neighborhood.
What do you do up here? Marie had asked once, finally climbing up there herself to see what was going on. It was so cramped she’d had to pull her legs up under her chin, but Hannah had been perfectly content. She’d smiled, Marie remembered, and closed her eyes against the cool evening breeze.
It’s like heaven up here, Mommy. Heaven.
CHAPTER FIVE
1995
Three sixteen in the morning.
She’d gotten to work, although she couldn’t remember how. It was like the drive hadn’t happened at all, as if the ten minutes had been completely wiped from her memory. It reminded her of the time she’d gotten drunk at a party and had woken up curled up on one of the old lawn chairs on her mother’s front porch—confused and cold and more than a little scared, not at all sure how she’d ended up at home. That’s exactly how she felt. Like she’d just woken up from a nightmare.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Matt coming down the steps out of the house, his hands flailing, and the way his fingers gripped the woman’s butt when he pulled her close. That one image, on constant replay in her head, over and over. Matt coming down the stairs and then his hand on that ass, sinking into the flesh like it was bread dough. Again and again. Hand and ass. Ass and hand.
“You okay?” Jesse asked as he slung his backpack over his shoulder, but she’d waved him away, told him she was fine, he should go home and go to bed. He had lines on the side of his face and she thought he’d probably fallen asleep on a stack of paperwork. He didn’t normally work this late. “You don’t look okay.”
“I’m just tired, that’s all.”
And she was tired, maybe more tired than she’d ever been. Anger has a way of draining a person’s energy, that’s something else her mother always said. Dieting and exercise were a waste of time, she claimed. It was anger that would drop the pounds, pure rage that would keep your thighs lean and your waist trim. And her mother said this from experience—she was thin as a whip and had spent her entire life in either a nonstop state of pissed-off or a drunken stupor. Sometimes both at the same time.
“Has Ms. Ruby called?” she asked, pushing away the textbook she’d brought in. Normally the night shift was a perfect time to study the diagrams and photos, and she had the first quiz of the semester coming up, but there was no way she’d be able to concentrate. Not tonight.
“Yeah, a little bit ago. Asked for you.” Jesse paused. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
Jesse didn’t look convinced, and if he’d been a different sort of man he might’ve stayed and tried to get Janice to talk, to tell him what was wrong. But Jesse never quite seemed to have gotten the hang of ta
lking to women—to anyone, really, even when they worked for him and he was giving out orders—so he just gave her a long look and left.
She sat at the desk after Jesse had left, tracing her finger along the front cover of her biology textbook. There was a sketch of the Vitruvian Man on the front, his arms and legs spread wide. According to Leonardo da Vinci, the ideal man was eight heads tall, but what about the not-so-ideal man? Wasn’t there some other way to sort men without whipping out a measuring tape, a reliable way to recognize a bad guy before you rented out a room at the rec center and promised to be strapped to them for the rest of your life, for-better-or-worse?
The water cooler in the corner burbled, startling her. Normally she liked this time of night, when the lights had been dimmed and the residents were all in bed and the TVs were off and the place smelled clean and the carpets still had vacuum lines in them, but tonight she just felt antsy and full of nerves. Like she was waiting for something to happen, but she didn’t know what.
Matt and that woman are probably done by now, she thought dismally. He’d climbed on top and done his business and now they were in bed together, naked, watching the ceiling fan spin lazily above their heads. There was a photo of Janice on Matt’s nightstand, smiling and looking straight into the camera, and she wondered if he turned it around when he was with this woman. She didn’t think so. Not very many things bothered Matt, and she doubted that her photo would get under his skin. He might even find it funny, that his wife was right there while he slipped it to that girl. She wouldn’t be surprised—Matt’s sense of humor had always been strange, nothing she ever understood. You just don’t get it, he’d always said, but he could never explain exactly what it was.
What are we going to do?
Routine, that’d get her mind off things. She stood up, went to the kitchen. The stainless steel counters were shining; the bulbs mounted on the ceiling threw down cold light. She took a plastic-wrapped loaf of white bread from the walk-in fridge, slipped two soft slices into the toaster although there were eight slots, then considered and put in two more. After two minutes the bread popped up again, toast now, golden brown on each side, and Janice scraped each piece with butter and sprinkled on cinnamon sugar.
Ass and hand, she thought. Couldn’t stop thinking it. It was like a chant in her head, a million voices all coming together to sing. Ass and hand! Hand and ass!
It wasn’t much of a walk to Ms. Ruby’s room with a dinner tray carrying plates of toast and two mugs of milk, to door number 217, up a short flight of stairs and down a hall, and when Janice got there she knocked softly. She had a key, of course, even though most of the residents kept their doors unlocked—she had a master key that would open up every room in the place, just in case there was an emergency, but she still knocked. Just because these people were living in a home was no reason not to be polite.
There was no answer.
“Ms. Ruby?” she called, leaning her forehead into the door and putting her mouth close to the jamb, careful not to let the plates and cups slide off the tray. “Are you awake? I have something for you.”
Nothing.
Janice started back toward the stairs. She was later than normal, Ms. Ruby had probably gone back to sleep, and it’d be best not to wake her this late. Or this early, if you preferred.
But that was unlikely, because Ruby had suffered from insomnia since her husband died ten years before, she’d tell Janice that a dozen times some nights. She always slept during the day, when everyone else was up and about, and she’d spend her nights up. Like a vampire, she’d said once, with some disgust. Of course, if I were a vampire, I’d hopefully be in bed with Tom Cruise right now. Then she’d laughed, hard enough that she’d ended up coughing and gasping for air.
After a moment Janice went back to Ruby’s door and tried the knob. It was unlocked, just as she’d expected. She went inside. This was one of the smaller apartments, just a living room and a separate bedroom, and it was stuffed full of furniture. Big, squashy chairs and doilies—like a hobbit hole, she’d always thought.
“Ruby?” Janice said, nudging the door shut behind her. “I have toast, if you’d like a piece.”
The old woman was in the living room, sitting in one of the armchairs in front of the television like she always did when she was waiting for Janice to show up, watching an infomercial about a folding ladder.
“There you are,” Janice said, setting the tray down on the coffee table and sitting down in the other armchair. The cushion wheezed beneath her. “I thought your heartburn might be acting up again, so I brought…”
She trailed off, at first not sure what was wrong, until she realized Ms. Ruby’s head was canted at a strange angle on her neck, that her eyes were glassy and gazing toward nothing. She’d died sitting in front of the TV, waiting for her toast and conversation.
Janice leaned forward, smoothed down one of Ruby’s white curls that’d become mussed. The old woman was cool to the touch, but her hair felt just as it always had. She’d never considered it, that the hair of the living and the hair of the dead would feel exactly the same.
Death was a natural part of life, that’s what the guy who’d interviewed her for the job had said. Not Jesse but someone else, a man she’d met once and never saw again. She’d heard the same thing in the biology classes she’d taken. If you were alive, you’d die. It was inevitable.
She finished smoothing the stray hair and sat back, taking one of Ruby’s hands into her own. The hand was small and thin, covered in age spots. Her palm and fingers were smooth as silk; the skin felt paper thin. Like the pages of a Bible. If she would’ve come into work on time Ruby wouldn’t have been alone during her final moments. Of course, if she’d come in, she wouldn’t have had the pleasure of watching her husband sink his hands roughly into another woman’s ass, and she wouldn’t now still be thinking of the gun in that drawer.
CHAPTER SIX
2018
“Are you ready?” Matt asked. They’d been waiting out the rain under the long arms of an evergreen, snacking on beef jerky and peanut butter crackers, passing a bottle of water back and forth between them. It had stormed hard for less than three minutes and then quickly petered out, and the clouds had rolled away, peeling back to reveal a soft blue sky that seemed to have been scrubbed clean by the moisture.
“Yes,” she said, holding open her pack so Matt could drop in his trash. It was an old habit from when the girls were little and she was constantly picking up after them, but old habits die hard. Matt had been ready to stuff the empty wrappers in his own pocket, but shrugged when he saw her offer the pack and tossed in the bits of plastic and paper.
“Take a picture first?” Matt asked, fishing his phone out of his pocket and holding it up.
“Sure.” Marie stood up and brushed her hands against her thighs. “Where do you want me to stand?”
Matt blinked, considered.
“Why not out there?” he asked. “With your back to the view?”
“Out by the edge?”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “It’ll make a good picture.”
“Okay.”
She came from under the trees, stopping near the edge and peering out over the cliff. Plenty of open air and trees and rock down there. And the river, of course—Three Forks, that’s what it was called—splashing and hissing as it churned its way under the cliff, moving faster and rougher than she’d ever seen before. But it was difficult to see just below where she was standing, because the cliff was formed like a tabletop—it stuck way out and then sloped back in, so it was impossible to see straight down. If you got on your hands and knees and stuck your head way over the side, you could see—but why would you want to do that?
“You okay?” Matt asked, and she turned slowly and looked at him. The ground was uneven under her shoes.
“It’s a long way to the top,” she said.
Matt smiled again.
“You mean to the bottom?” he asked, missing her reference to the AC/DC lyr
ics. And if that didn’t sum up their marriage, she guessed that nothing else would—the two of them had never spent much time on the same page. If any time at all.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a long way down.”
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
1995
Her shift was supposed to end at eight, when the sun was up and residents would be heading in to breakfast and their first doses of medication and vitamins, but she begged off as soon as the next girl came in, said her stomach was bothering her. She didn’t mention Ruby—if she had, she never would’ve been able to cut out early. The paperwork they had to submit after a resident’s death was thick as a phone book and would’ve kept her tied up for hours. So she left Ruby in her chair, her head stuck at that uncomfortable angle. Not that Ruby was as uncomfortable anymore. Nope, those days were past for her. No more late nights in front of the TV, no more toast and tea. In a way, Janice envied her.
It was only four in the morning when she turned onto their street, and everything was still dark and quiet except her own home, where nearly every window was lit up, although the blinds had all been pulled. She parked on the farthest end, near the corner, and walked the rest of the way, because she didn’t want anyone to know she was there. Anyone? No, it was a particular someone she didn’t want to alarm, and that was her husband. She wanted him to think she was still at work, that it was business as usual, he had nothing to worry about.
But did Matt have anything to worry about? That was the real question. Oh, she couldn’t stop thinking about that gun, and about her husband’s hand on that woman’s ass, but thinking about it didn’t mean anything was going to happen. She didn’t want to hurt Matt, but she sure as hell wanted to scare him and the little tart he’d let into their home. And then she’d leave, file for divorce. Start over.
But maybe that was all easier said than done.