The house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, the last of a chain of McMansions modeled after Mediterranean villas. The yard is treeless, the live oaks Rose remembers covering this area in her childhood cleared to facilitate rapid construction. Bared and vulnerable to the morning sun, the pink stucco house looks vulnerable, sunburned. If Rose had the money, she would have done things differently, something she thinks about often. Left the trees. Built a little hedge of azaleas. Maybe even a gazebo in the front yard. Nothing too flashy, just a nice, shady place to kick back on a warm summer afternoon.
Before Rose can ring the bell, the door opens. Cecilia stands in the doorway in a long silk nightgown and a scarlet wig styled in a pageboy.
“You’re here,” she says. “That’s good.” A heart-shaped birthmark sinks into the crease of her smile. Rose has never seen her close up in person. She didn’t expect her to be so striking.
Cecilia turns her back to Rose and begins walking through the vaulted foyer. “We’ll talk in my bedroom so I can lie down,” she says over her shoulder. “I assume you know where it is.”
In fact, Rose has only been inside the house once. Cecilia was in the hospital at the time, and Baxter responded, as he usually does when Cecilia suffers a setback, by getting radiantly soused at dinner. Rose had to drive him home and help him into bed, where they’d made love gravely. After he passed out, she’d wandered around the silent house, studying the photos of Baxter and Cecilia in Paris, Rome, Bangkok, reading the little notes they scattered around the house for each other. (You are the soul of my world. I love you like pina coladas on the beach at sunset. Remember the corn maze in Kansas?) Overwhelmed, Rose hid in the master bedroom for almost an hour, rummaging through drawers, looking for something — pimple cream, yeast infection medicine — anything to make Cecilia seem base and ordinary, because strangely, the sicker Cecilia gets, the more ethereal she becomes to Baxter.
“Come here.” Cecilia pats the velvet bedspread as she sits. “If you stand, it would only be polite for me to stand, and to be frank, I don’t think I’m able.”
Rose sits on the bed; the bells on her Christmas sweater jingle stupidly. Cecilia’s flank is so close that the heat is perceptible. She smells of lavender and vanilla. Rose discreetly sniffs her own wrist: dishwashing detergent and fingernail polish remover.
“I thought you’d be blonder,” Cecilia says. She moves as if she’s going to touch Rose’s hair, then seems to reconsider, her hand lingering in midair. “From what Baxter said about you, I mean. Although your shade is quite nice.”
“Why am I here?” Rose blurts out. When Cecilia called the night before and asked Rose to come over, Rose had been too shocked to question her, too nervous to mumble anything other than yes. She’d assumed that Cecilia wanted to ask about the affair, but after thinking about it, she couldn’t imagine that there was anything that Baxter wouldn’t tell his wife himself.
“I don’t know,” Cecilia says. “Why are you here? Why are any of us here, that’s the real question, huh?” She tosses her skeletal arms into the air and tilts her head back as if addressing the gods. Then she stares at Rose, deadly serious, waiting for an answer. Tiny red veins pop against the white of her eyeballs; her pupils are dilated, so large Rose feels as if she could dive into them. Cecilia is extraordinarily high.
“You asked me to come,” Rose says. “I thought you might have something important to tell me. Something about Baxter.” Three weeks ago, he’d sent flowers to Rose’s work with a note about how special her heart was and how she’d go far in the world. She hasn’t heard from him since.
“I did, didn’t I?” Cecilia says softly. She stares out the bay window. Two neighborhood girls, out of school for Christmas break, are poking something with a stick in the drainage ditch. There is not a cloud in the sky. “It’s a beautiful day,” she says finally. “Too hot for December, but beautiful all the same. When Baxter and I were first married, he surprised me with a snow machine at Christmas. He set it up right at the front door so some would blow in the living room. My family’s been down here forever. I’d never seen more than a powdering of snow.” She turns to Rose. “That was a nice thing for him to do, I suppose, although I had to clean up the carpet.”
“I hate cold,” Rose says. “It’s, well, it’s cold.”
Cecilia laughs as if this is the funniest thing she’s ever heard. She slaps Rose’s thigh, then wags her finger like Rose is a mischievous girl who just tried to outsmart an adult, and suddenly, Rose is tired. She couldn’t sleep after Cecilia’s phone call last night. And she’s running late. Today’s her company Christmas party. A Toyota dealership, where Rose processes orders for parts. (And what do you do? men ask her at bars on the occasional nights she goes out, looking for something better. Parts, she says, trying to sound cryptically funny and sexy, I do parts.)
“Well you know I approve of you tremendously,” Cecilia says. “I’m grateful Baxter has had someone to talk to through all of this. It’s been quite the ordeal.”
“Baxter said you didn’t mind,” Rose says. She studies her tennis shoes, which she’d decorated in sequined Christmas trees. It had seemed clever at the time, an idea she got out of some ladies’ magazine, but now, the misshapen trees horrify her. “I didn’t believe him at first.”
Baxter admitted that Cecilia found out about the affair, although he wouldn’t mention how, last Christmas. They were supposed to exchange gifts that evening, toast to the end of the year, the beginning of the new. Instead, they sat on opposite ends of the sofa and opened their gifts guiltily. Something had shifted. Rose felt strange about Cecilia knowing, as if she and Baxter had been set up by a doting aunt. When Baxter began offering little tidbits of advice from Cecilia — how maybe Rose should go back to school for her bachelor’s, or how she shouldn’t let her mother ride her so hard — Rose told him she wasn’t a pet project and threatened to leave him. But by then, it was too late. She already loved him in that mysterious way most love — not quite able to explain the why.
“It’s all very French, don’t you think?” Cecilia grins. “My people are Scotch-Irish, but maybe I have a Parisian soul. I’ve been told that before, you know.”
“I’m a Danish,” Rose says, then realizes that she’s just announced she’s a pastry.
“Enough of Baxter,” Cecilia says with a sweep of her arm. She lays herself lengthwise on the bed, a mound of satin-covered pillows supporting her, the bottoms of her feet pressed firmly against Rose’s thigh. She wiggles her toes, the nails painted bright blue, the color a teenager would choose. “I’m sure two intelligent women can find something more interesting to talk about than a man. This is the age of feminism, you know.” She laughs. Balls her hand and punches the air. “Girrrrrrrl power. Or whatever nonsense the kids say these days.”
“I need to go,” Rose says. She points to the dancing elves on her sweater. “It’s the company Christmas party–”
“How old are you?” Cecilia says. “Twenty-nine, thirty?”
“Thirty-two.” It sounds strange, the number. Rose sometimes forgets how old she is. She can still remember the junior college boys who hung around her high school some afternoons asking her age, her teasing voice when she responded Sixteen. That was half a lifetime ago, and if pressed, Rose is not sure if she could account for most of it.
“Well that’s young,” Cecilia says. “You don’t think it is now, but you will. I’m fifty-six. When you’re young, you never think you’ll be fifty, then one day, you just are. Which is fine. But this you never expect.” Cecilia reaches under her pillow, pulls out what looks like a fanny pack and throws it onto Rose’s lap. “My friendly travel-size chemo. Goes anywhere you go. When it comes to this, you start thinking and doing things you never considered. Desperate things. But, then again, I’m sure you never thought you’d be single in your thirties and having an affair with a married man. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Part Two
“Sweet Cecilia,” Baxter had said that first night he and Rose had met at happy hour at a local bar. Over martinis he’d explained his wife’s sickness, the deterioration of her body and their sex life. He wore a navy tie with different colored golfing tees, his graying hair thick and slicked over his crown. He was neither handsome or unattractive. Love at first sight, Rose would tell him later, because he liked hearing such things.
What she fell for was his love story with Cecilia. It seems pathetic now. But in the moment she had finally felt important, like her existence was essential to something bigger, and it no longer mattered that she’d never finished her nursing degree, or that she hadn’t lost the fifteen pounds she’s been meaning to lose for years now, or that she was over thirty and didn’t have a husband to send off to work or kids to pack school lunches for, because Baxter told her he needed her, and she’d believed him.
They had sex in the alley behind the bar. Afterwards, Baxter said “Thank you,” very politely. It took Rose only the three hours they spent in the bar to convince herself that their affair was acceptable.
“I’ve been reading about alternatives lately.” Cecilia kicks the fanny pack of chemo in Rose’s lap to get her attention. “Alternatives to this.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rose says. “I know it must be–”
“Enough of the pity party,” Cecilia snaps. She opens the bedside drawer, which is filled with prescription bottles and syringes, the only messy space in the fastidiously neat room, and produces a crumpled business card and hands it to Rose. On the corner, there are two hands folded in prayer sprouting little angel wings.
“A contact reflex analyst and psychic. He reads the body’s energy fields and reflexes. Very powerful people spend great amounts of money for his time.” Cecilia takes the card from Rose and cups in solemnly in her hand. “And he’s agreed to see me. He’s agreed to see me today.”
“I have to go,” Rose repeats, but already she feels as if any control she had over the situation is slipping. Outside, the neighborhood girls shriek at each other; one has what the other one wants.
“Limited,” Cecilia says. “If I had to think of a word to describe Baxter, that’s the one. Can’t think outside of the B-O-X.” She draws an imaginary box in the air with her index finger. “Don’t get me wrong. He’s a good man. Just limited in his reach.”
“Perhaps,” Rose whispers, feeling slightly disloyal.
“So you’ll help me?” Cecilia says. Color rises high in her cheeks. Her hands jerk in little twitches. Rose cannot tell if she is excited or angry.
“Baxter refuses to take me. He insists I’m trying to kill myself with such nonsense. I can’t drive anymore because of the seizures, and I would prefer that no one find out. Besides, it would give us a chance to get to know each other.” She looks at Rose, hard. “Don’t you think we should know each other?”
Rose thinks of the last time she saw Baxter. He had mentioned the week before that Cecilia was a drama major in college when they met, how he went to drama club parties just to get a glimpse of her. He’d spoken about her so wistfully that Rose spent the next two days reading from her high school Shakespeare text in front of the mirror. How should I your true love know from another one? By his cockle hat and staff and his sandal shoon. She read for him on their next date, but the lines sounded funny in her country accent, even worse when she’d tried to hide it, and she didn’t know what half of it meant. He’d stared at her blankly for an embarrassingly long moment, then made an excuse about forgetting something that he needed to do and left.
“And let’s be honest, dear,” Cecilia says when Rose doesn’t answer. “It’s the least you could do, considering.”
Part Three
Cecilia stares out the window of Rose’s Toyota, laconic and distant. They are a half an hour outside of Montgomery, Cecilia’s Gucci bag pitching across the backseat. Cecilia has changed into a navy silk pants suit, the tufts of her cream blouse blossoming at her neck, her lips subdued in frosty pink lipstick. Her outfit costs more than Rose makes in a month.
Rose took the meandering back roads because Cecilia insisted they experience the scenery. If this was to be her last road trip, she wanted to see something besides nondescript highway with exits to cookie cutter strip malls. Near the Georgia border, Cecilia cracks her window and makes a game of counting the number of doublewides wrapped in icicle-shaped Christmas lights.
“They’re not kidding around with this Christmas stuff, are they,” she says. “It’s like a ludicrous competition in redneckness. God knows the amount of money they spend.”
Rose thinks of the small trailer she lives in, how she spent an entire weekend outlining it in Christmas lights and rigging a life-size illuminated Frosty that teetered on the stamp-sized patch of grass she calls her front yard. And then Baxter sent the note and the flowers, and she got drunker than drunk and ripped it all down, figuring why bother?
They hit another tiny town, one of a dozen along the way, as identical in their poverty as strip malls: red-brick false-front buildings, rotted, defunct gas stations, graffitied video stores, the doors long since closed — the carrion left behind when Wal-Mart and the Applebee’s moved close to town and the mills left for Mexico.
At a stoplight, they pull up alongside a blonde teenage girl with a nose ring the size of a washer shoving Hardees’ hash browns into her mouth. Her souped-up Honda Prelude — gleaming silver rims, a yellow fireball blazing down the side — palpitates with rap music: Everywhere I look, everywhere I go, I see the same ho. Don’t get mad. I’m only being real.
Cecilia leans over Rose, scrutinizes the girl, then shakes her head, her wig slipping to one side. “What’s with country girls these days?” she says, her breath sour on Rose’s cheek. “They all want to be ghetto whores.” She mouths to the girl: “What’s your problem? You should be in school.”
The girl flashes a bellicose smile, flips them the finger, then allows her mouth to gape open, a plug of half-chewed potatoes bouncing on her darting tongue.
“You’re going to get us shot,” Rose says, shoving Cecilia back into her seat. “You can’t do that kind of shit out here.” She looks back at the girl, shrugs apologetically, twirls her finger at her temple to indicate that Cecilia is nuts, which she decides is true enough. But the girl’s fumbling with her CD player; she doesn’t even see Rose.
“The world’s going to hell in a handbasket,” Cecilia says. She flexes her hands the way a man does when considering a fight. “But that’s the beauty of dying. You can let everyone know just that, and what’s the worst thing that could happen? Huh? Shoot me? Stab me? Well bring it on, I say. Do me the favor.”
Without a pause, Cecilia calmly opens the passenger door and vomits neatly onto the street. Then she fishes in her handbag, takes out several bottles of pills, pours a wad into her hand and swallows them dry.
“Drive,” she says, pointing to the light to indicate that it’s turned green.
The address on the business card is for a mom-and-pop motel attached to a liquor store on the outskirts of Macon. Behind the motel is a small trailer, presumably the owner’s, with dead ferns hanging from the porch overhang.
“Hand me that card,” Rose says. “We must have read it wrong.”
“This is the place,” Cecilia says softly, and Rose can hear genuine fear in her voice. “Mr. Meekle owns the motel. We’re supposed to get a room, and he’ll meet us there at two.”
A mangy, plucked looking cat leaps onto the hood of the car, stretches languidly, then plops into a curl.
Cecilia lifts her wig as if tipping a hat. Tufts a gray hair lurch from her scalp in clumps like Spanish moss. “We must have the same stylist,” she says. Her eyes dare Rose to show pity.
“I think you look great,” Rose says, because she does. Even ill, Cecilia is one of the best-looking women her age that Rose has ever seen.
What Rose doesn’t say: No master healer frequented by wealthy, satisfied client would live in such a hovel. The front-desk clerk, a fleshy woman in a Christmas sweater identical to Rose’s, watches a soap opera from a lazy chair wedged behind the counter. Behind her is a cross-stitched sign: God Is Here.
On the TV, a couple struggles in an agitated embrace. The clerk is entranced; even after Cecilia rings the service bell twice, the woman doesn’t budge until a commercial flickers onto the screen.
“Nice sweater,” the woman says to Rose. “You got the earrings, too. I told my daughter I should get the earrings, but she said to wait for the after-Thanksgiving sales, and when I went back, they were gone. Ain’t that always the way of it? Y’all got a credit card? I’ll need to run it in case you make long-distance calls or use the pay-per-view.”
The clerk moves slowly, as if underwater, and it takes her a full minute to walk to the other side of the counter to run Cecilia’s credit card. When she shuffles back, she hands the card to Cecilia, looks her up and down, then pats her tenderly on the hand. “Don’t you worry. You’ve come to a holy place.”
“Praise Jesus,” Cecilia says flatly.
Their hotel room is clean, but that’s all that can be said for it. A tiny card table in the corner, two mismatched chairs, a double bed in a faded floral spread, a wooden-veneer dresser with an old TV, shag carpet the rusty red of dried blood. It smells of cheap air freshener and cigarettes.
Cecilia immediately whips out Lysol from her bag, begins spraying down the bed, the table, the bathroom. She yanks the bedspread off, folds it neatly, and shoves it on a chair. Then she picks up the TV remote between her thumb and index finger and drops it into the wastebasket. “The dirtiest thing in the room,” she says, pumping her tongue against her cheek, the same gesture the car salesmen at the dealership use to indicate that a fuckable woman is on the lot. “Men hold it and God knows what else while they’re watching their nasty movies.”
This is not the Cecilia that Baxter described on the many nights he wept over her: the woman who could make a stunning centerpiece out of tree twigs and pinecones, the woman who could speak three languages fluently, the woman who once fired the gardener for urinating on the back lawn.
Cecilia heads to the bathroom sink, begins splashing water onto her face. “What did you think of that receptionist nut?” she yells over the water. “This is a holy place. Has she been inside one of these rooms?” When she emerges from the bathroom, her lips are coated in fresh pink lipstick, her cheeks smeared with too much rouge. “I need a drink,” she announces, and before Rose can mention that maybe a drink is not such a good idea, Cecilia is out the door.
Rose thinks of turning on the TV, but she’s too lazy to walk to the trashcan to get the remote. Instead, she lays back on the bed, thinking she should call her boss to tell him she is missing work, which should be obvious by now. Kids have written on the ceiling. Apparently, Johnny B. wuz here, Connie luvs Eric, and April L. sux big dick!!!, which Rose thinks is supposed to be a compliment. She’s half asleep when Cecilia returns, a bottle of wine under each arm.
“You need a cup?” she says. “Or do you just drink it straight from the bottle?” Before Rose can react, Cecilia pulls a fancy corkscrew from her suit pocket, which she must have brought from home for just this occasion. She whips the cork from the bottle in record speed and fills two flimsy hotel cups.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be drinking on all that medication,” Rose says.
“Probably not.” Cecilia says. She finishes the wine in a long swallow, pours herself another.
Rose picks up the phone book from the bedside table, flips the pages nervously, then puts it back down. There’s a photo of an expensive sailboat on the cover, which doesn’t make much sense. The ocean is hours away.
“Do you sail?” Cecilia asks. “Baxter loves it. I mainly drink martinis and suntan, which I guess I could do anywhere, but a sailboat works, too. The sea makes you feel small. In a good way.”
“My sailboat’s in the shop,” Rose says, and instead of taking offense, Cecilia lifts her glass to Rose, says “Touche. I can see why Baxter enjoys your company. I bet you keep him on his toes.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Rose says. “I mean, I don’t think I want to be here.”
“Then pretend,” Cecilia says. She walks to the window and pulls up the shades, the brilliant mid-day sun garish.
“There’s a squirrel that plays outside my window at home,” Cecilia says. “I’ve decided he’s male because of the way he holds his tail, fluffed out and stiff. Sometimes I talk to him, about any little thing. Something I read in the paper. A funny joke I heard. For the most part he’s been good company. He keeps his mouth shut.”
“Maybe you should take a nap,” Rose says. Cecilia is leaning heavily against the window frame, and if she passes out, Rose isn’t sure she could get her on the bed. “Why don’t you drink some water?”
“The other day he finally talked back,” Cecilia says. “You know what he said? He said, ‘I’ll be here long after you’re gone, and I’m just a fucking squirrel.’ I told him that wasn’t a nice thing to say.”
“You’re drunk,” Rose says, which is starting to sound like a good idea.
“Believe me,” Cecilia says, “I need to get a lot drunker.”
Outside, the parking lot is completely empty, not a car in sight. A billboard in neon green advertises The Bunny Hole, a gentleman’s club.
“Who knew such a place existed,” Cecilia says, allowing the shades to fall.
Part Four
Rose is awakened by a soft rapping, and by the time she opens her eyes and sits up, Cecilia is wobbling at the door beside a wizened man wearing blue-jean overalls and a Braves cap. His face is blank and stoic, a look Rose associates with country farmers who have plenty of land and little money. He seems to be close to a hundred.
“You the one?” he says to Cecilia, who nods yes, closing the door behind him.
He tips his cap, offers his hand, palm up. In spite of his age, his hand is steady. “Might as well get the unpleasant part over and done with.” Cecilia snatches her handbag off the bed, fumbles with her wallet, then places a stack of bills in his hand. He shoves the bills into the front pocket of his overalls.
In comparison to the front-desk clerk, Mr. Meekle is absolutely agile. He glides straight to the closet and hauls out a small wooden platform, which he places in front of the dresser.
He looks at Rose, says, “You can stay, but not a peep out of you. I need absolute quiet to connect.” He roles up the sleeves to his flannel shirt, revealing arms covered in purplish bruises and cuts, the ancient, scabrous arms of the old. Immediately, the mood in the room is somber.
“So your body rebels against you,” Mr. Meekle says to Cecilia.
“Yes,” Cecilia sighs.
“Did you bring your current medication?”
Cecilia nods, then pulls seven or so bottles from her purse, lines them up neatly on the dresser, and steps unevenly onto the crude wooden platform.
Mr. Meekle tells her to relax, then allows his hands to tremble over her body like a divining rod, never touching, just humming across skin. They stop on her belly.
“Here,” he says.
“Yes.”
He lingers there for a long time, his hands pulsating in odd, tiny jerks, then moves them down her legs, than back up, past her belly, stopping over the crown of her skull, Cecilia’s body careening to and fro from booze or the power of his hands.
“And here,” he says.
“Yes,” Cecilia whispers. “There, too.”
Mr. Meekle grabs one of Cecilia’s prescription bottles, places it in her right hand and tells her he’s going to test her. He lifts her left arm until it extends straight from her body as if she were about to salute. How much Neurontin does this body need? he asks aloud. This is so the body can hear, he explains. He tugs her arm in a short, curt movement, her entire frame caving in toward him as he counts each pull, “one, two, three,” until her arm hangs at her side. “That means take three of these,” he says, taking the bottle from her and replacing it with another.
The whole process takes almost two hours. Both Mr. Meekle and Cecilia hang limp at the end, as if they’ve endured a bout of lovemaking. Sweat pours down his face, drops catching on the tip of his hawkish nose. Cecilia is wide-eyed and silent, her beauty stark.
Rose watches all of this from her perch on the bed, fascinated and embarrassed at the same time. She’s never been witness to such peculiar despair.
“Is there hope?” Cecilia asks.
Mr. Meekle plucks a handkerchief from his pocket, dabs at his forehead, then proceeds to tell Cecilia a tale about a local woman a few years back, a savagely sick woman with months of dying ahead of her, who had the good sense to know when to throw in the towel. She gathered her family around her, said her goodbyes, then prayed herself straight to heaven on her own terms. The onlookers claimed to see her spirit gather itself above her, leaving the terrible failing body, and ascending up up up. Rose envisions a woman lying in her bed, her family grieving and praying around her, then swoosh, the shadow of her flies into the heavens, waving the whole way like from a pageant float.
“She took control of the situation,” he says. “Sometimes, release is the only healing left. Do you understand what I’m saying?” He pull a zip-lock bag filled with dark green leaves from his pocket, says that it’s potent, to be careful of how much she uses, then slaps it in on the dresser, telling her to make a tea out of it for pain. Then he’s gone.
Part Five
“Quack,” Cecilia says when Mr. Meekle leaves, but Rose can tell that she’s deeply shaken. “Ascension and release. I didn’t need to pay someone to tell me how to die. Everyone figures that out.” Her eyes are strangely bright, almost iridescent. She picks up the bag of medicine he left, turns it over in her palm, then throws it back on the dresser.
She walks to the table, pours herself a glass of wine. “Just think,” she says, “if we were friends, and on our last trip together, this would be cocktail hour, and we would be sipping drinks, coddling our nostalgia, but happy.”
“It’s that late? My boss is going to kill me.” This is Rose’s fifth job in three years, and she needs not to lose it, but she can’t seem to muster the concern to care. It’s not like she’s a doctor or a teacher, where her presence or absence matters. She processes parts, and if she’s fired, there will be another girl working tomorrow who can do the job just as well.
“Forget the dealership,” Cecilia says as if reading Rose’s mind. “You can do better.”
“I’m planning on it,” Rose says. “I just need to save a bit more for school. Besides, my job’s not so bad. I’ve had worse.”
Ceclia considers this for a moment, sucking on the soft petal of her bottom lip. “Did you ever hear of the story,” she says, “about the Persian servant who stumbled upon Death, who threatened him? He begged his master for the fastest horse so he could make it to Tehran by nightfall. Later that day, the master met Death, and he asked why Death had threatened his servant. ‘I did not threaten him,’ Death said. ‘I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Tehran.’ It’s about avoiding death or fate, but I think it can be about avoiding life as well.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rose says. And suddenly, she’s angry. Aside from falling in love with the wrong man, what had she done to piss off God so royally?
“I’m hungry,” Cecilia says, her mood shifting from bleak to chipper so fast Rose wonders if she should fear for her own safety. “I’m never hungry. Do you think there’s anything to eat around here?”
Rose gives Cecilia a half-eaten bag of Cheetos she has in her purse, and Cecilia begins shoving them in her mouth like a girl at a slumber party, crumbs spilling down her bodice. “These are delicious,” she says. “I haven’t food like this in ages.”
Cecilia climbs onto the bed next to Rose, leans back on the overstuffed pillow, intermittently stuffing Cheetos in her mouth and taking long swigs of wine. Sanguine rivulets dribble down her chin. She doesn’t bother to wipe them away.
“We can go now,” Rose says. “Baxter must be home. He’ll be worried. We could make it back by ten if we take the highway. At least we should call.” Rose wondered what she would say. I have your wife.
“I saw you that night,” Cecilia says, her mouth full of Cheetos. Rose’s heart drops to her stomach. “The night Baxter dumped you. I saw you outside my window.”
It only happened once. Rose just wanted to understand why, to see what was so special about Cecilia that made Baxter choose her when he was never asked to make the choice.
She’d parked a mile away so no one would see her car and walked, tripping through yards and ditches. Orange lights from suburban homes spilled onto dead grass; silhouettes of wives in kitchens preparing dinners slurred past Rose like a flipbook. She’d huddled under Cecilia’s bay window, her knees scraping against the stucco house, and watched as Cecilia stood emotionless in front of her full-length mirror in the same nightgown she wore this morning. A smiling Baxter walked into the room, passing the window to reach Cecilia, so close that Rose could have touched him if not for the glass. It was very much like an elegant movie with the sound turned off.
At the time, Rose understood that something terrible had gone wrong in her life to bring her to this moment, but she wasn’t yet willing to name it. If she did — name it — she would have had to give Baxter up. And if she gave Baxter up, what would she have?
“No one should feel that alone,” Cecilia says. She smoothes Rose’s bangs out of her eyes with her finger. “That’s one of the reasons I brought you here. I wanted you to know that I think that. And I wanted to make peace with things. So know that I forgive you.”
“No,” Rose says. “You don’t.”
“You’re right.” Cecilia hand is hot on Rose’s cheek. “I don’t. But it has nothing to do with Baxter.”
Outside the winter sun is setting; it filters through the blinds in long, honeyed beams.
“I didn’t use to be this way,” Cecilia says. “It’s hard to remember anymore, but surely I was different. That makes it better, thinking of the me before as separate from the me now.”
Cecilia crunches the empty Cheetos bag into a ball, pitches it at the trashcan and misses. “I’m hot,” she announces, struggling to sit up. “I’m always hot. It’s either the medication or menopause, but either way, it’s killing me.”
Cecilia tries to extricate her arms from her suit coat, but the sleeve catches on her elbow. When Rose tries to help, she brushes her away. Cecilia fumbles with the buttons of her blouse, smearing orange Cheetos seasoning on the cream silk. Finally, she sits half-naked on the bed. Empty skin puddles below her elbows. Her breasts are small and flaccid in her beige bra. And because she is healthy and young but aware that this will not always be the case, Rose cannot help but stare, cannot help but think, So this is what we all become.
“I’m going to die,” Cecilia says.
“We all are,” Rose says.
“Maybe today. Maybe I’m going to die today.”
“I don’t think it will be today.”
“Perhaps I want it to be today. Today is a good a day as any.”
Without warning, Rose finds herself crying. She thinks that maybe Cecilia’s story about avoiding Death or fate makes sense. That maybe we’re all avoiding the life we’re living while waiting for our real lives to begin.
Cecilia slides her hand, all bones, into Rose’s. They rest like this for a while, their feet grazing in awkward intimacy.
“Rose,” Cecilia says after a long while. “What’s your greatest fear?”
“Is this one of those games?” Rose says. She’s reminded of lazy afternoons with her girlfriends when they sprawled out on her Strawberry Shortcake quilt and took quizzes that would reveal what their inner animal is or which celebrity they would date if they lived in the same world as the beautiful people on the slick pages of the magazines. At the time, she didn’t understand that these are the moments that linger, that string together to create a past. “Like I tell you what I would name a horse, and you dissect my psyche?”
“Mine’s that maybe I’m right,” Cecilia says softly. “That maybe there is nothing else other than this.”
“We should go home,” Rose says, but neither of them move to leave. When twilight shrouds the room and Rose can no longer see the particulars of Cecilia’s face, can no longer be sure if she hears her breath or the soft sighs of the hotel heater, she reaches for Cecilia’s chest and feels the faint thump of her unfortunate heart.
“I’m still here,” Cecilia whispers. For now, this is enough.
