And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

by Gwendolyn Kiste

  Even in death, the tower protects the princess.

  ***

  It’s the end of January when my parents find out about Linnea. My father hauls me out of bed and wallops me in the mouth so hard my lip splits.

  “Is it true?” he asks, but it’s clear he’s already made up his mind.

  My mother wilts in the doorway, sniveling like a Freudian hysteric on a fainting couch.

  “See what you’ve done,” my father says and tightens his grip around me. “Haven’t you caused us enough problems without getting involved with one of those awful girls?”

  “Way to go, Mary,” Sam says as he saunters down the hallway. “I’m not watching this shit. I’m going out.”

  “Be safe,” our mother says as my father raises his hand to me again.

  I’m bruised and bandaged when Sam returns after midnight and climbs on top of me in my bed. He’s been drinking cheap gin, and I gag down the taste of rotten pine needles on his breath.

  He cups his hand over my mouth, so I won’t scream.

  “I bet you enjoyed what those boys did to you.” He digs his fingers deep into the flesh of my thighs. “Maybe you’ll enjoy it again too. Might set you right. Then you’d stay away from that girl.”Glistening teeth. Drool down his chin. Even my brother is a wolf.

  I flail once and strike Sam’s face. He coughs blood on my comforter, and I roll off the mattress and scramble for the door.

  My shoes in hand, I dash to the willow, the town dissolving around me as I run. Everything is smears of color—the high school, the diner, the alley I avoid behind the butcher shop.

  The forest. I need to reach the forest. It will protect me. I hold my breath until I’m concealed beneath the drooping fingers of the trees.

  It’s the middle of the night, but I’m not alone. Linnea’s here.

  And she’s outside of her tower.

  The world turns solid again, and I gape at her. “You can leave?”

  She fidgets next to her titanium sarcophagus. “Sure, I can.”

  A green note dangles from her fingers, and her cheeks redden. “I followed you once from school,” she says. “Saw you leave a message to the tree. Thought I’d write back.”

  “You lied to me,” I say.

  “No lying.” She sniffs in the bitter air. “I would have told you. If you’d asked.”

  I sigh, and my breath blossoms in a plume of mist around me. “Who else knows?”

  She shakes her head. “Nobody.”

  “Except me,” I say.

  “Except you.”

  She smiles, and I see her face, unadorned in the bare moonlight.

  My message was right. She is beautiful.

  I tell her about my parents and my brother, and she kisses the gash in my lips. This is our first kiss, the first one that counts, since at last I can run my fingers through her hair and rest my forehead against hers.

  “How long can you stay gone?” I ask.

  “Not sure,” she says. “Maybe forever.”

  Maybe forever.

  Maybe not forever.

  An hourglass flipped upside down, and time is slipping away.

  I take her hand, and we run. Through the trees and the streets and into the alley behind the butcher shop. I’m unafraid now, because Linnea’s here with me, and together, we’re impervious to pain.

  In this moment, she is all things, and her jagged pieces fit into the curves of my jagged pieces, and the two of us, these broken girls, are whole for the first time.

  She laughs, and I laugh, and this gray town overflowing with darkness laughs too.

  Linnea leads me into the diner, and we sit side by side in a corner booth, drinking coffee and giggling at the pink hats the waitresses wear.

  “You’d look quite fetching in one of those,” she says and traces her fingers along the slope of my neck.

  We kiss, and the waitress grunts at us to stop, but we don’t care. This night belongs to us.

  I ask Linnea how she can leave her tower.

  “Parents have tried to cut girls out before,” I say. “It never works.”

  “They take us out against our will.” She quaffs what remains of her lukewarm coffee, imprinting the white ceramic mug with a pink lipstick kiss. “It’s different if we leave voluntarily. The tower’s a second skin. It protects us if we want it.”

  I inspect her face. “And what if you don’t want it?”

  She smiles. “Then it doesn’t want us either.”

  Doesn’t want her. How could anything not want her?

  At dawn, the waitress kicks us out of the diner, and we return to the forest. Though the sun is piercing the edges of the trees, it’s colder than we left it. We shiver next to the willow, and I memorize Linnea’s silhouette, backlit by the crimson cast of the horizon.

  “I can’t go back home,” I say. “Why don’t we leave? Just you and me.”

  Linnea sighs, her gaze not meeting mine. “But where

  would we go? How would we get there? There’s nowhere else for us.”

  She climbs inside her tower, and the edifice closes around her, like blood oozing over wire stitches. If we entwined our bodies, we could both fit inside the tower. We could be together and never worry about the outside world again.

  But that’s not what Linnea wants.

  I swallow a ragged breath. “Why go back?”

  “This is where I live, Mary,” she says.

  Where she lives. And where do I live? With a mom and dad and brother who always devise new ways to hurt me.

  Rage, like a cancer, rises up my throat. I hate her. I hate how she can choose, and I can’t.

  “You have everything,” I say. “Safety when you want it. Freedom when you don’t. And here I am, with nothing.”

  “You have more than nothing,” Linnea whispers, her voice brittle in the night air. “You have me. I love you, Mary.”

  “Love?” I laugh once, a harsh laugh that ricochets off the sky. “As if love’s enough.”

  I turn and walk away, pretending.

  I pretend I don’t see the tears in her eyes.

  I pretend I don’t hear her calling my name.

  And most of all, I pretend I don’t love her too.

  ***

  We finish out twelfth grade, but we don’t talk again. No walks to the willow. No detours to the fence. Linnea’s less than a stranger to me now.

  My parents smile over the dinner table.

  “We’re glad that phase is over,” they say.

  “Over,” I echo.

  I lock my bedroom door at night, so Sam can’t get at me, and I count the days until I’m eighteen and can run from this place.

  On the last day of school, I’m emptying my locker when Linnea finds me.

  Her lithe fingers hold a note through the gap in her tower. “I put this in the tree nook,” she says, “but I guess you aren’t checking anymore.”

  After she vanishes down the hall, I unfold the green paper. It’s sweet-scented and inscribed with those perfect cursive letters.

  You win. We’ll go. Meet me at midnight.

  I scoff and shove the message in my bag. This is exactly what I want. Us against the universe. We could leave tonight and never look back.

  But I still ache from before, from her not protecting me when I needed her, and I want her to ache like me.

  So I’m an hour late to the willow. I assume she’ll wait forever.

  I’m wrong.

  Next to the tree, the tower’s there, but Linnea is gone.

  I pace the forest, my face sweat-caked in the cold spring night, and weep her name. She never answers. Tears clogging my throat, I grapple with the willow, desperate to uncover a final note, a clue to where she went.

  Linnea left nothing behind except the tower.

  I climb inside her empty shell as if I’ll find her hiding there, but all that remains is the ghost of distant orchids.

  ***

  The years collapse in on themselves like a crumpled ball of scrap pap
er destined for the wastebasket. I squander a decade working every dead-end job in this town, never straying far from the city limits, never willing to surrender the memory of her.

  I’m at the diner now, arrayed in a funny pink hat, serving customers at the same corner table where Linnea and I giggled a lifetime ago.

  Everybody’s forgotten about the girl in the titanium tower. They found her shell in the woods—where I left it, a souvenir too heavy to carry on my back. They launched no search. Nobody would know what to look for. Only I saw her face.

  A few tower princesses stuck around after graduation. I see them at the grocery store with their families or strolling past the diner at night.

  I wonder if they can leave their towers too.

  I wonder if it even matters.

  When I was young, I thought they got everything. I didn’t realize we were the same—us girls who were blamed and mocked and disregarded.

  My mother calls every day, leaving messages about my brother’s latest arrest or my father’s waning health, but I don’t answer. After all these years and all this damage, I have nothing to say.

  I shouldn’t stay in this town. It’s lonely and haunted. But this is my choice. To wait.

  And to hope.

  On my thirtieth birthday, I walk to the willow with one last note.

  I love you. I’ve always loved you. Please forgive me.

  The paper is yellowed and fragile as antique moth wings. These are the words I wrote the night Linnea vanished, but until today, I couldn’t return here. Not after how I failed her.

  The next morning, the ground is trampled, and the note is gone.

  Of course, it could have drifted away in the faintest of breezes. Or an ambitious magpie might have stolen it for a May nest.

  Or Linnea might have come back to reclaim what is—and always has been—hers.

  I tell myself she’ll come to me.

  On a night I’m closing at the diner, the scent of orchids will waft through the kitchen, and I’ll look to the swinging door and see that familiar outline.

  She’ll shimmy up to the counter and ask for a menu.

  I’ll give her one. I’ll give her anything she wants.

  She’ll request only coffee.

  Customers will wave at me, calling for their eggs over easy and their greasy hash browns, but I won’t see them.

  I’ll only see her face, a roadmap of where she’s been, etched in paths around eyes and lips. The moments we missed together. The moments we could still have.

  She’ll linger at the counter until the others leave, disgruntled, and we’re alone.

  I’ll flip the open sign to closed and lock the front door.

  “Hey, you,” she’ll say at last, and my cheeks will burn like wildfire.

  “Hey, me, what?” I’ll ask because I can’t think of anything clever.

  Then she’ll smile.

  And so will I.

  AND HER SMILE WILL UNTETHER THE UNIVERSE

  You discover her first film by accident. It’s the midnight movie on a Saturday night cable access program, and since it’s horror, you leave it on for background noise. She receives above-the-title billing along with a fancy “And Introducing” credit, written in neat cursive letters. You vaguely remember her name, though you don’t know why. She appears in four paltry scenes, and most of her screen time is spent screaming and fleeing the monster, a hulking Karloff imitator arrayed in green Ben Nye greasepaint caked too thick around his ears. A waste of her talent, perhaps, but she’s still mesmerizing.

  You don’t sleep that night. Instead you scour message boards and defunct film blogs for every piece of trivia about her. At the time of the film’s release, the press reviews from places like Variety said the same thing: “She’s a real star; a true discovery.”

  It’s strange to think of her that way—in present tense. She’s been dead almost half a century now, turned to ash a full ten years before you were born. There was no overlap between the two of you. She was in the world. Pause. Then you were in the world.

  But that’s the thing about films. To them, there is no past. There’s only the here and now. Celluloid might yellow, but the performers are always waiting for you.

  She’s always waiting.

  On the screen, she glows and glides and never seems fettered to the earth. It would be easy to call her beautiful, but you think that word is generic, too one-size-fits-all, and besides, her beauty isn’t what sticks with you. Her voice is what you remember most: low and clear and otherworldly, like she’s already speaking from beyond the grave, from somewhere far and near at the same time.

  This is the only film where she used that voice, which leads to suspicion among bored bloggers who write about obscure cinema.

  No way is that her real voice.

  She never sounded like that in her other movies or interviews.

  Totally dubbed. And badly dubbed too.

  This makes your guts burn, the way they deny her. She spent three months with a speech coach, singing scales and repeating tongue twisters like “red leather, yellow leather” until her mouth went numb, but these bloggers must not know that, they must not have researched her like you have. Or maybe they figure she was just a pretty face, and everybody knows pretty faces don’t understand a thing about hard work.

  Her first film isn’t a good film, but it’s one of her only films, so you buy a copy on eBay and watch it over and over. She made four movies in total—five if you include the grainy footage shot on Super 8 in her house that final night.

  You don’t want to watch that one. You don’t want to see what they do to her, those monsters hiding in plain sight.

  ***

  There are no monsters in her second film. It’s a psychedelic music movie featuring a band no one remembers with songs everyone would rather forget. Catchy little pop ditties that grate at the air and make you wish you didn’t have ears at all.

  She plays a groupie who’s in love with the lead singer, and her voice is indeed different, more high-pitched but never shrill, every word lilting and lovely as a cathedral bell at midnight. “Hypnotic” is how Panorama Magazine described her performance.

  As part of the film’s release, the studio produced a promotional album that included a few extra songs, as though one bad tune deserved another three. You don’t think much of this until your hipster film buff friends bring it up at brunch one Sunday.

  “You’ve never heard the urban legend?” they ask, and you roll your eyes, since you wouldn’t be asking if you had.

  In faux-hushed voices like kids at a Ouija board, they tell you that if you hit play on the film at the same time as you drop the needle on the vinyl, the two sync up, sort of like The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon, but not exactly.

  “This is way spookier,” they promise.

  You don’t believe them, but you agree to let them come over to your apartment, mostly because you can’t find the film on Netflix, and they already own a bootleg. They drink all your beer and start on the whiskey and vodka stored beneath your bathroom sink, but you don’t argue. Thanks to them, you’ll see her tonight.

  She doesn’t come in until halfway through the film. On the dusty turntable, the speakers crackle with a song titled “In a Devil’s Eye.” You suddenly can’t breathe.

  “Here it is,” your friends say, and you hush them, because this is a hallowed moment. She’s on screen, and it’s a close-up.

  With her eyes downcast, she steps forward, as if she’s walking toward you. Your heart tugs tight like a stone in your chest, as the sunlight hits her face just right. Her skin shimmers, a strange shift that doesn’t look confined to the screen. It looks like it’s happening somewhere in the middle, between where she is and where you are.

  She turns to you, and she flashes a ghost of a smile, a secret shared between the two of you.

  She sees you. You know she does.

  Then she looks away, and the moment is lost.

  And no matter how many times you rewind
it, she’ll only do it once.

  So pay attention.

  ***

  On the set of her third film, she met the love of her life, the man she would have married if she hadn’t been sliced up like prosciutto first. They were bohemian and boisterous, frequenting all the best parties and nightclubs of the era, the Studio 54s and Playboy Clubs and Annabel’s in Berkeley Square. He wore ascots, and she wore crinoline, and they were almost too fabulous for the camera to bear.

  They play a couple in this film, a Gothic story set in the English moors, and you can practically watch them fall in love on-screen. You scowl at him every time he gallops into the frame on his white stallion. You know from biographies that he cheated on her almost as soon as they met, and that he married another, less deceased ingénue only six months after she died.

  But you mostly hate him because she loved him, and she never loved you.

  When you watch this film, you’re by yourself. You pretend you don’t want to hear the snarky commentary of your too-clever friends or deal with them drinking all the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and eating all the takeout lo mein, but that’s not the real reason. The real reason is that you want to be alone with her.

  It’s ridiculous. It’s the truth.

  In the film, she plays a woebegone maiden, and her would-be husband is a brooding landowner, who harbors a secret too terrible to reveal until the climax. You expect it will be a wife in the attic, and of course, it is.

  By the last scene, you’re half asleep, trying not to doze because that would be rude. She’s a marvelous actress, after all, with her wistful looks and soft-spoken dialogue, but like the first two films, this one isn’t very good. In spite of yourself, your eyes blear out and then clear, and when you blink, she’s looking right at you again, just like during the last film, but this time, the moment doesn’t flicker away. Your stomach twists, and you sit up in your chair. She holds your stare, and you hold hers as you wet your lips and wait, breathless for what she’ll do next.

  Her hand unsteady, she reaches toward the screen and breaks the fourth wall. The whole apartment shakes, and your feet lift out from under you, the world spinning into darkness.

  When you open your eyes, you’re lying spread-eagled on the other side of the room. This neither surprises nor bothers you. If anything, it excites you. Nobody warned you about this. Is it another urban legend your hipster friends never mentioned, or was this meant for you alone?