Jukebox

by Gina Noelle Daggett

  Snow was still falling when they went to bed. The weather person said it would last all night, turning into an ice storm by morning, locking down the city. Things were going to get worse before they got better. Opposite one another in bed, they were gentler now.

  “I just want to start our life together,” Alex said. “I love you.

  And I’m ready. And I can’t understand how you’re not.”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” Harper said. “I just need more time.”

  The words saddened her as much as they did Alex, for she didn’t fully understand her resistance either.

  “More time for what?”

  Harper had no answer.

  “What were you running after tonight?” Alex asked.

  Harper pulled the covers over her head.

  “And right now, what are you running away from?”

  Silence.

  “Goodnight,” Harper finally whispered, and drifted off to sleep.

  In the deep end of the pool, Harper is holding on with everything she has.

  She is dangling from the diving board, both arms above her head, waiting for Grace.

  Abrupt desert gusts roll across the yard, singeing the bougainvillea blooming along the wide perimeter fence. It is half past midnight, maybe later.

  From the house, Grace saunters down the hand-cut lawn which

  starts at the back door and rolls like a green carpet to the pool’s edge.

  Harper watches carefully.

  There are no words. Only fierce eye contact as Grace moves closer.

  Through the outdoor speakers, hidden deep within the wild lilac, Lakme’s “Flower Duet” plays like a serenade.

  As Grace steps into the water, Harper readjusts her grip.

  Like a python, Grace glides through the water with ease until suddenly, slick and ellusive, she takes a breath and disappears.

  Harper searches the water around her, but the darkness and the pool’s pebbled bottom make it difficult to see.

  A bubble, a few feet away, breaks as Grace resurfaces.

  “Come here,” Grace says, her skin sparkling blue in the evening light, her blond curls suspended like reeds in a lake. Water splashes as Grace approaches, slowly snaking her arms around Harper’s midsection; she stops just inches from her face.

  “Kiss me,” she says.

  Heaven is in this moment, Harper thinks, as Grace brings their bodies together.

  The moon, full and crisp above, sinks behind Camelback Mountain as Harper’s fingers give way, plunging them as one into the water.

  It is unstoppable, the force between them.

  As Grace pulls Harper to the pool’s edge, the scene is captured in frames in her mind.

  Harper braces herself as Grace pins her to the wall.

  With her eyes closed, Harper can feel Grace’s hot breath against her cheek before their lips come together.

  A deep, wet kiss follows.

  Harper trembles—they both do—as Grace gently, then forcefully, shoves her knee between Harper’s legs.

  Harper shot up into a sitting position. She was out of breath, sweaty, her heart too big for the space between her ribs and spine.

  “God,” she whispered, before falling down next to Alex in bed. In their quiet darkness, Harper tried to will herself back

  into the moonlight, back into Grace’s arms, back into the dream she’d had before, always ending when Grace gets her to shallow water.

  Outside, snowflakes were still falling. The wall of Alex’s bedroom, painted in gold light by an outdoor lamppost, was a movie screen of winter bliss. Shadowed snow flurries floated down the high ceilings into her closet and onto her dresser.

  With a sigh, Harper lifted her arm and inspected her new tattoo, a small Cornicello horn on the inside of her wrist, her third since leaving home. It was a nod to her Italian heritage and supposed to ward off evil. Of them all, this ink was the most visible to the world; the others were covered, hidden, like so many other things. As she examined it, Harper could hear Nonna rolling over in her grave.

  In a sleepy daze, Harper went to the kitchen and fired up the teapot. She twisted her thick hair into a bun and fumbled for her glasses, square, designer frames folded near the phone. Standing in her robe with her arms crossed, she waited for the whistle while she looked around Alex’s kitchen, illuminated by a dull light coming from the refrigerator’s ice maker. She rubbed her eyes and thought about her bottle of Valium in Alex’s medicine cabinet, untouched for over a year. A fresh tea bag was already on the stove, so was a clean mug. Considering the night’s events, she’d anticipated this late-night intermission. Serenity, the tea was called, a blend of herbs to help with insomnia. She’d try the tea first, and then the drugs.

  It was that kind of night.

  With her favorite chipped coffee cup, Harper stood at the floor to ceiling sash windows and sipped her tea. The storm had worked up into a near blizzard, the wind blowing sideways.

  Snow, like pieces of sand, tinked against the glass as if they were living in a violently shaken snow globe.

  Had it really been Grace? Harper wondered with a heavy exhale of breath.

  Could she really be in Oregon?

  “Missing You”

  John Waite

  2007

  Tucked into a refurbished industrial building in downtown Portland, Bluehour was a trendy spot where people went to be seen. It was also a restaurant and lounge where locals flocked to celebrate a promotion at work, a birthday, an anniversary, anything really.

  On this particular night, Harper and Alex, along with Sabrina and Juliet, were toasting for two reasons. First, the recent purchase of their new home, a 1917 bungalow in the Hawthorne neighborhood. Harper had bought it—she had some cash she needed to invest for tax reasons—but Alex would help with the upkeep and live there as if it were hers too. Second, Alex’s new album and the kick off of her twenty-city tour, part of which Harper would join on the road.

  “To Alex,” Juliet said, “may you sell out every show.”

  “Salud!” Sabrina said.

  The four of them, sitting at an intimate, candlelit table near the kitchen, tapped their glasses.

  “And to us,” Alex said. “To Harper and I moving into together. Finally! We unpacked our last box yesterday.”

  “Hear, hear!” the table roared.

  While Alex’s tour was a big deal, the new house was really something to celebrate. After keeping separate places for so long, Harper had decided she was finally ready to move in with Alex.

  They’d been together for almost four years—almost four years and almost together—and she’d finally conceded.

  Even though the house Harper bought for them had great curb appeal, the old craftsman needed work. Before they moved in, they’d added a bathroom and renovated the basement into a darkroom for Harper.

  By this time, Harper had been living in the Pacific Northwest for over a decade. After graduating from U of A—about eight months after Grace threw her out—Harper had decided a change would do her good. She had her sights on the University of Washington’s MFA program, which she was accepted into the following year.

  There were many torturous nights when she was single, and days which seemed to go on forever. Like the loneliness, the abandoned phone calls came in bursts, dialing Grace’s number without hitting send. On one particularly dark Sunday night, when there was nothing on TV, one call had gotten through.

  Harper set herself back, her therapist said, after she heard Grace’s voice on her voice mail greeting.

  Even suffering souls can push on, Harper’s counselor said. So, somehow, with the passage of time, a new puppy and thousands of dollars spent, Harper managed to move on.

  And then came Alex. They met in Seattle right before Harper’s thirtieth birthday when they were both living in Capitol Hill; Harper, closing in on her master’s degree and Alex, performing at local bars, working on her singing career.

  They got together before Alex was a big star, befor
e she signed with ChaCha Girl and sold over 100,000 albums. She was no one back then, back when they first saw each other across the bar on a rainy Seattle night. Alex was getting a bottle of water before her show and Harper was buried in the New York Times, smoking a French cigarette.

  When they first made eye contact, Harper looked away.

  Butch women weren’t her thing; she was a femme on a femme

  diet. Then something brought her back. A scent, an energy, an aching loneliness. Some said Alex looked like Annie Lennox, others Sharon Stone. Harper thought she was an amalgam of strength, beauty and gentleness with a voice that puts girls in a trance.

  She was a lover like no other, Harper thought.

  Except one.

  Their relationship had had more downs than ups. Many of the ups: trips they took together each year, especially those to Australia. For weeks, they’d hop from one small beach town to the next, where no one knew them, where there was no connection to home.

  During their courtship, on a whim, they’d taken off to the Gold Coast to spend their very first Christmas together, a bold move to travel internationally after only knowing each other two months. It could’ve been a disaster. It was anything but. The risk was, Harper thought, perhaps the reason it worked out.

  It was in Byron Bay in Queensland where Alex and Harper first slept together. Harper cried right before she climaxed, so did Alex, but they were crying for different reasons. They’d waited awhile because Harper hadn’t been ready.

  Not long into their relationship, together, they moved to Portland. Alex wanted to be closer to her friends Juliet and Sabrina, and Harper wanted to be closer to her parents, semi-retired on the Oregon coast. So much of Harper’s life had been spent too far away from them. That, too, she’d been working out in therapy.

  As Alex’s career blossomed, she spent more and more time on the road. Her being away so much made it hard to keep their romantic roller coaster on the incline. They both complained to their couples counselor of feeling disconnected, but neither was willing to let go.

  “I can’t stand the lonely nights,” Harper cried.

  “I can’t stand knowing you’re alone,” Alex said, but Harper knew it was more than that. She’d seen girls’ names and numbers wadded up in Alex’s jeans, and when she was on the road for extended periods of time, it was almost more than Harper could handle. But still, they pushed on and right around their second

  anniversary, they’d decided to open up their relationship.

  The rules were clear: One-night stands only, no romance, no emotions, only sex. They knew better, but it was all they could do at the time. “It’s impossible for lesbians not to get emotionally involved,” their friends warned. “We’re nesters. We’re romance whores. We’re programmed that way,” they claimed.

  They were all correct, and both women knew it, but they gave it a go anyway.

  In the end, after even more tumult, they recommitted to each other. They were done screwing around, ready to settle down, and Harper, despite having a successful photography business, decided to join Alex on the road more often. It was a sacrifice she was willing to make.

  For them. For their future.

  On this particular night at Bluehour, Alex and Harper were in a good, solid place. It was one of the ups. So were Juliet and Sabrina, so it seemed, holding hands at the table as they discussed their impending commitment ceremony.

  “We’re having trouble with the seating chart,” Juliet complained. “We can’t figure out who to sit Sue Stevens next to.

  She is such a chatterbox.”

  “That reminds me. You’ll never believe who I ran into at the market yesterday,” Alex said, reaching for the cheese knife.

  “Jane Sipperly,” Juliet guessed. Alex laughed. This was a joke, apparently, one Sabrina and Harper didn’t get. They smiled at each other awkwardly.

  “Even better,” Alex said. “Jody Stone.”

  “You’re kidding,” Juliet gasped.

  This name didn’t mean anything to Harper either, though Sabrina was in on this one. Harper looked at the entrée menu, still with an ear in the conversation.

  “She cut all her hair off,” Alex continued. “It looked like she did it herself.”

  “Shut up.”

  “And, get this. What was left was bright pink.”

  “What?”

  “Pink.” Alex shook her head. “I can’t believe I dated her.”

  “Me neither,” Juliet said, eating the last prosciutto-wrapped scallop.

  Harper was suddenly focused on what they were saying. Just the summer before, Harper had her stylist put some color in her own hair. Two ribbons of blue on either side of her face. She wondered now, hearing what they had to say about this hapless dyke getting groceries, what they’d all said behind her own back.“Speaking of blasts from the past,” Alex said. “Did I tell you I saw Brooke in LA last time I played House of Blues?”

  “Ohhhhh God.”

  The three of them, again, all knew this name.

  “Sometimes I wonder what kind of crack we were smoking back then.”

  “Seriously,” Sabrina said, “I dated Brooke too. At UCLA.”

  “Really?” Alex asked, shocked. “Then we’ve all slept with Brooke?”

  They got a huge kick out of this and laughed wildly.

  “Lesbians,” Alex said.

  During a lull in conversation, Harper studied Juliet’s and Sabrina’s engagement rings, which were almost identical, the same princess cut stone and gleaming tapered baguettes. The two of them, who were slowly morphing into one another, were also dressed similarly. Simple black tank tops, denim bottom half—

  Juliet in a skirt, Sabrina in peg-leg pants. “This is what happens to lesbians,” Alex had once said. “It’s called enmeshment.”

  Juliet pulled Harper into the conversation, asking her a question it seemed she’d pondered before this night.

  “Harp, tell us about some of your exes. Surely you have a freak show lurking in the shadows. A Jody Stone? A stalking story or two?”

  Harper paused. She’d faced this question from others and once before from Alex when they first started dating.

  “You know”—Harper thought for a moment—“most of them were just forgettable women in college.” She stopped again.

  “Nothing freaky. No stalkers.”

  0

  “Was there anyone serious?” Juliet asked. Alex shot Juliet a look, probably kicked her under the table. “I know you dated that professor of yours for a while, right?”

  “No! Ruthie and I have never been more than friends.”

  “Well surely you’ve been in love before Alex.”

  The three of them stared at Harper as she swirled the wine in her glass.

  “Not really.”

  “Again”

  Janet Jackson

  Mid-tour, Alex came home for a few nights before one final West Coast stop in Seattle. After Seattle, she’d have two weeks off before hitting the road again for almost a month, touring the Midwest and the Eastern seaboard.

  The morning of her show, Harper awoke to Alex tossing a jar of Carmex into the air while humming her hit single. Even at home, Alex never slept well before a big concert. Nerves always got the best of her. Over her song, Harper could hear rain smacking the window and the recycling truck picking up the neighbor’s bottles.

  “How are you feeling?” Harper asked.

  “All right.” Alex opened the yellow tin and covered her lips.

  “The Paramount is such a big venue. I can’t believe it sold out.”

  Harper rolled over and rested her head on Alex’s stomach.

  “You’re going to be great.”

  “I hope so.”

  “What time is the bus leaving?”

  “Ten.”

  “What time are you heading out?” Alex asked. “You’ll be there by the time I go on?”

  “Of course,” Harper said. “I’ve got some work to do on

  the montage, so I’ll
be on the road by three or four.” Harper was putting together a photo montage for Sabrina and Juliet’s reception.

  Alex frowned. “I’m still really sorry about the other night. I didn’t mean to be so pushy.”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Harper said. “Even though I was playing, I shouldn’t have been such a smart-ass.”

  The two had gotten into a heated argument on the phone several nights before about their own commitment ceremony.

  Or lack thereof. It was something Alex had been hinting at for months and something Harper, no surprise, wasn’t ready for.

  After Alex asked about it for the twentieth time, Harper joked on the phone: “You just finally convinced me to move in with you. Now you want to get married?”

  Alex didn’t think it was funny.

  Harper spent the morning in the darkroom. Shortly after they’d moved to Portland, Harper opened a small gallery in Old Town where she sold her own prints, along with much of her parents’ National Geographic work.

  Picture by picture, Harper sorted through negatives in the basement for Juliet and Sabrina’s long-awaited walk down the aisle. They’d been together for fifteen years. An eternity, Harper thought.

  As she waited for the first photograph to develop, a sharp sliver of light cut through the old windowpane sealed shut with black paint. Examining the leak of daylight, the swirls of dust where its blade sliced the darkness—the things she unknowingly ingested—Harper’s eyes burned; she’d been in the dark too long.The negatives were old, some over twenty years—Juliet and Alex had been lovers in college—but Harper tried to steal moments from them anyway.

  Bolted to the beams above her head, a dull, tangerine light glowed from the ceiling, casting her fuzzy outline into the vinegary developer. Harper closed her eyes and inhaled—the smells, the process took her back to childhood.

  With her weight on one leg, Harper watched the image come to life. And although it was overexposed, she could make