Where I End and You Begin (18 page)

With a sigh, I sink down to the top step and run a hand over my face. I am suddenly tired, as though all my hopes had been pinned on climbing higher, but now I am stuck here. The light of the gray day streams in through the window, falling across me, and I turn my face to it and close my eyes. I need to rest, just for a moment.

The sound of a camera wakes me, but I don’t open my eyes. The air is cold around me, almost icing on my eyelashes, and I want to stay asleep where it’s warm for just a bit longer.

Then the camera clicks again, and I have to wake up. I open my eyes and look down at Daniel, standing on the lower landing, his camera pointed up at me.

“You’re taking pictures of me?” I say, but when the camera comes down, I have to bite my tongue in order not to gasp.

An expression of shock is on his face, etched into every line. His full lips parted, his eyes wide, a faraway look about him, as though he has been staring into another world.

“You just...” he says. “You just looked beautiful.”

My stupid, traitorous heart leaps at the sound of the word in his mouth.

Beautiful.

He continues. “The light coming in from the window, the dust and cobwebs around you... and you were asleep. You looked like a doll someone had left on the steps...” He shakes his head. “You were beautiful.”

I don’t know what to say. “Thank you?”

He shakes his head. “No, don’t thank me. Thank
you.
That was...” He trails off, and then we are staring at each other, I on the steps above, and he on the landing below, and suddenly I see it. The broken window behind him, shining on his golden hair. His brown eyes, dark in a pale face. He is fading in the light, even as I watch him, blending in to the decay around us, a shocked statue of a man turned to stone by the strength of his revelation. I am Medusa. I am the face of a goddess of old, too beautiful to resist, too terrible to behold and yet live.

A gust of wind swoops through the window, lifting the hair from my face, and I close my eyes and breathe it in, feeling it burn through my throat, feeling it turn my insides to ice, numbing me through and through.

“Oh,” Daniel says. “Shit.”

The spell shatters. I open my eyes and look down at him. He is no longer staring at me, but up and up, at the snowflakes swirling in.

T
here are ghosts of winter. Ghosts of snow and starvation. I read a story about one, a long time ago, but I can hardly remember it because it scared me so badly that every time I heard its name afterward I would not listen.

Windigo. A creature of snow and ice, a lipless mouth, whose footprints are filled with blood. The windigo is a story from the first nations, the first people on this continent, back when ice still moved and heaved over the land, back when there were times that the winter lasted half a year or longer. A windigo is a man who, succumbing to starvation, has committed the sin of cannibalism, and so becomes a monster for his crime. A windigo will eat those it loved most in life. A windigo is always starving. A windigo devours people, unable to fill its belly.

This is terror—that our own drive to survive will lead us to the unforgivable. That we become mindless with need and in our quest to fulfill it we will destroy everyone around us.

This is horror—that one we loved and trusted will turn on us, and open their mouth, and swallow us whole.

T
he snow falls faster and harder than I’ve ever seen any snow fall before.

“A snowstorm,” Daniel says grimly once we step outside the old house. “We need to get back as soon as possible.”

“We got ice storms in Oklahoma,” I say. “Sometimes snow storms.”

“Boston got buried in snow all the time,” he tells me. “But there were snowplows and things to deal with it. Out here everyone goes a little crazy about it, and no one plows the highways. Not to mention I don’t have the right kind of tires...I need to get you back to the dorms right now.”

His voice is low and steady, but hidden inside it I detect a thin note of panic, and I follow him through the flying white flakes toward the car.

But snow, like fog, seems to do something strange to time. Stretch it out, make it huge or small, depending on where you are. It warps the space around you, and by the time we make it to the car there is already a half inch of snow on it.

Daniel swears. “I didn’t bring gloves,” he says. “That was stupid.”

“You couldn’t have known,” I tell him. I slip my coat sleeve over my hand and help him wipe away the snow on the windshield. My coat is a huge felt thing ten sizes too big that I got on sale for almost nothing, and it protects my hands, but Daniel is not so lucky. His sweatshirt is soaked through instantly, and his fingers bright red by the time he is done. There’s no time to waste, however, and we both jump into the car.

The engine is cold and takes a few heart-stopping seconds to turn over, but then it finally kicks on, and Daniel inches it around and around in a circle, until we are facing the opposite way. Unfortunately, the gravel road is almost impossible to see now, and the night is beginning to lower.

Daniel presses down on the gas and the back wheels spin on snow and ice and gravel. We both hold our breath as he eases up, then slowly bounces the car into some vague sort of forward momentum, but when he tries to go faster the wheels spin out again.

The tense quarter hour it takes to drive down the old road to the main highway is plenty of time for the snow to begin dumping down in buckets, filling up the roads, and when we are at last headed back toward the school, we have slowed to a crawl.

The car slips and slides against the snow, and there is no path forged by through traffic. Daniel is squinting into the dying light, the flakes flashing against his headlights. We manage about twenty miles an hour until the car starts to spin out, the back end losing traction, and we have to slow down. The snow picks up even more, until we can hardly see, and well after an hour we reach the outskirts of town and Daniel is ready to break from the stress.

White drifts change the landscape around us, smoothing it out, making it hard to find purchase.

“My apartment,” Daniel says suddenly.

I almost jump out of my skin. “What?” I say.

“My apartment. It’s near here.”

I remember, of course, that it’s closer to the edge of town than the college, but I’m not sure what to say, so I stay silent.

Daniel licks his lips. “I think we should go to my apartment and wait out the storm.”

I swallow. “Okay,” I say. “That’s probably a good idea.”

There is a tension in the air as I agree, something thick and soft, hard to hear through. But Daniel nods, and his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel relaxes.

“Okay,” he says, almost to himself, and inches the car forward.

It is dark by the time we reach his apartment building, the streetlights barely shining through the haze of snow falling down around them. The light of the city bounces off the clouds, bathing everything in an eerie glow.

When at last we are in a parking spot—or a place that might be a parking spot, it’s hard to tell—I’m exhausted from the tension. My back is a knot of stress, and when I open the car door to get out a gust of cold wind comes in, splattering me with snowflakes, like tiny splinters ripping through the air.

“Come on,” Daniel says. “We need to get inside.”

No shit,
I think, but I know he’s just trying to be helpful. I step out of his car and my feet sink into the fresh-fallen snow. And they keep sinking, until it’s halfway up my shins, soaking my blue jeans through and bathing me in ice. My teeth start to chatter immediately, and when Daniel rounds the car to take my hand, I cling to it gladly.

Together we struggle up the stairs to the third floor. It’s not much better up here, the old concrete building absorbing the cold like a sponge, and the open breezeways creating miniature wind tunnels. When Daniel at last opens his door, we stumble inside together, exhausted and shivering.

He shuts the door and locks it.

“Wow,” he says. “I...I didn’t expect that.”

I shake my head. “Me, either. What kind of autumn is it when you get a snowstorm in October?”

“It’s late October,” Daniel says, as if this makes it better.

“It’s
stupid
October,” I counter, and then my teeth begin to chatter in earnest.

Daniel rakes a hand through his hair as he watches me plop down in the middle of the floor and peel my shoes and soaked socks off. My feet are blocks of ice, and when I reach down to rub them they are so cold they startle even me.

“You need a hot shower,” Daniel says. “We can’t stay in these wet pants. I’ll run the wet stuff through the dryer, okay?”

I nod. That sounds good to me. A flamethrower aimed right at my face sounds good to me right now. Everything sounds good to me. I want to turn on the oven and sit in front of it, letting it bathe me in its heat, or stick my hands over the stove, letting the red-hot coils thaw my fingers out.

“Come on,” he says. He holds out a hand, and I take it. As though I weigh nothing at all, he pulls me to my feet, and I stand in the middle of his living room, shivering. He gestures that I follow him and I do, wrapping my arms around myself. He enters his bedroom.

My head is a jumble, I am a ball of nerves. Outside the wind picks up, throwing snow against the window so fiercely it sounds like rain. I slip through the door.

Daniel’s bedroom is like the rest of the house. Austere. But the queen-sized bed is, surprisingly, unmade. Soft gray sheets crumple under a black comforter, and there are far more pillows on it than one man needs. Nothing hangs on the walls... except for a set of holes above the bed. A vacancy left by the crucifix now relocated to the living room. An open grave.

“Here.”

I turn to see Daniel standing in the bathroom off to my right. The light is warm and yellow, spilling out into the cold, unilluminated bedroom.

His shoulders stiff, he invites me inside the bathroom, and, my heart picking up the pace, I follow.

There’s a tub on my left, and two sinks on my right, and directly in front of me is a narrow door leading to a small walk-in closet. Daniel disappears into the closet, then reappears as he turns on the light.

“I think I have some kind of pants you could wear,” he says. “If you don’t mind tripping over the cuffs.”

“I don’t mind,” I say, almost too quickly. “I wear men’s clothes all the time.”

He looks at me strangely. “You do?”

“They’re always cheaper.”

As though against his will, his mouth quirks. “Right. I sometimes forget what it was like to be a penniless undergrad.”

“Or a penniless anything,” I say.

He turns and begins to root around in the closet. “What do you mean?”

I shrug. “I’m pretty penniless regardless of my student status.”

He pauses and frowns. “You are?”

“Yeah. I mean, why do you think I don’t own a bowl?”

For a long moment Daniel watches me, and his face is shuttered. “I figured you spent that money on alcohol.”

I press my lips together. “Maybe. Everyone has needs.”

He doesn’t answer that, just pulls a set of towels and a pair of pajama bottoms out of the closet.

“Here,” he says, handing them to me, “take a quick shower and warm up. We’ll decide what to do when we’re warm.”

Then he leaves the bathroom.

I look at myself in the mirror, and suddenly I feel very much in my own skin, very much here and now. Thoughts of the future have flown away, and I am stuck in my body, on a path whose ending is unknown, but that has been laid out in front of me long before I ever stepped onto it.

I turn on the hot water and take off my clothes, letting them fall where they may, rebelling against the austerity of the bathroom. It looks like a hotel, as if no one lives here. It makes me think of the old Pharaoh tombs, full of things that would never be used.

I hop into the shower and let it warm me before hopping back out again. My naked body flashes at me from the mirror, all skin and fat and muscle and bone. Blood rushes under the skin. My mortality stares back at me. I put on the pajama pants Daniel gave me and have to cinch them in tight to keep them on my hips, and they fall far past my toes, but refuse to stay cuffed. In the end, I just step on them. I pull my sweatshirt back on and step out of the bathroom.

Daniel is sitting on the bed, reading a Bible.

Of course.

“Bathroom’s vacant,” I tell him. “I’m gonna go watch TV and raid your pantry.”

He just nods and I slip past him into the living room.

The light in the kitchen is on, harshly illuminating the room, reflecting in the glass of the windows, and I have to inch the door to the balcony open to see if the snow has let up.

It hasn’t.

I bite my lip and go stand in the middle of the living room, trying not to jump out of my skin when Daniel turns the shower on again. The water rushes through the pipes, a soothing, whooshing sound, and I force myself to sit down on the love seat instead of pace the floor. Because I don’t know what else to do, I pick up the remote and begin to flip through channels, looking for the local news.

Blizzard,
they are saying.
Stay indoors.

Well. That is not going to make Daniel very happy. Nor me, come to think of it. I look down at the loveseat and wonder just how uncomfortable it will be to spend the night on it.

I tuck my cold feet under myself and try not to think about the long night ahead. I don’t sleep well on loveseats. Couches, yes, but if my feet are constantly falling off the end of something or I’m forced into a corner, my body rebels and I can’t go under for longer than an hour or so. Which is one of the many reasons I like to slip out of the twin beds I usually fuck in and head home without saying sayonara. I’m just too tired to deal with anyone else upon waking.

In the bathroom the shower shuts off, and I stare resolutely at the television set, willing myself to not think of anything much except how brilliantly red the newscaster lady’s lips are. Someone really went all out on the lipstick for her. Or she’s a vampire. Vampires have ruddy lips, or so the old Slavic folklore says.

My stomach growls and I start at the sound. I frown down at my body—always demanding things like sleep and sustenance, which, as far as I’m concerned, are just wastes of time—but I heave myself off the loveseat anyway. I know it’s probably rude to help myself to Daniel’s larder, but seeing as how I’m probably going to be stuck here for a while I’ll be withdrawing from it sooner or later. I pad into the kitchen and open the pantry.

Not much. Bachelor chow. Peanut butter. Some bread. Cereal. Soups. An elderly can of peaches. And, strangely, marshmallow fluff. I smile and pull it out.

When Daniel finally emerges from his room, dressed in another pair of pajama pants and a sweatshirt, I am in the kitchen, smiling at him.

He is immediately wary, which makes me laugh, because even though we’ve only known each other for about two weeks, he already knows me so very well. “What did you do?” he asks.

I hold up two plates, upon which sit that heavenly combination of bread, peanut butter, and marshmallow fluff. “I made fluffernutters,” I say.

He raises his eyebrows. “Fluffernutters?”

I sigh. “Yes. Fluffernutters. Why else would you have a jar of marshmallow fluff in your pantry if you didn’t like fluffernutters?”

“For ice cream,” he says.

“Okay,” I concede, “that is also an acceptable application of marshmallow fluff. But here, you’ll love this. I’d eat these every day if I could.” In fact, I did eat them every day for at least two weeks back during my freshman year. Among the true joys of being on one’s own is the ability to eat whatever you want whenever you want. And I never got a stomachache like my mother always predicted.

I hand him a plate and he takes it, looking at the sandwich doubtfully. “Is this... healthy?” he asks me.

“No,” I tell him. “This is the sort of thing ten year old kids pack in their backpacks when they run away from home. You know, toothbrush, toothpaste, six pairs of underwear, and a couple of fluffernutters, in case you get hungry on the road.”

He picks up the sandwich, and then, with what I consider to be an admirable amount of faith, takes a bite.

I wait expectantly as he chews, and when he swallows I lean in for the verdict.

“That,” he says, “is actually pretty good. But it could use some milk.”

“I’m way ahead of you,” I tell him, and hand him a small tumbler of milk. There was only half a gallon in the refrigerator and I didn’t want to use too much of it. Just enough to wash down the sandwiches.

He takes it gratefully and throws back a mouthful. “So,” he says, his eyes flicking over to the still flashing television, “anything interesting on?”

“We’re stuck in the middle of a blizzard,” I say. “A freak blizzard the likes of which has not been seen since the state was founded blah blah blah or whatever. Lots of snow. Stay indoors.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I was afraid that would happen.”

“No worries,” I tell him. “I don’t eat much and I am quiet as a mouse.”

The look on his face could be politely termed incredulous. “Uh-huh.”

“I am. And I am an excellent houseguest. I will always watch what you want to watch on TV, I am somewhat consistent about putting my dishes away, and I’ll only use your toothbrush if I get your permission first.”

“Bianca,” Daniel says, “sometimes I can’t tell if you’re joking or if you’re serious.”