BY RACHEL FEDER
Editor’s Note: This is part of a serial novel, THE TURN, which will be published in installments at Luna Luna. This is Part 7. Read the rest here.
19.
I lock the bathroom door and draw a hot bath, hoping the water gushing through the old pipes doesn’t wake anybody. I peel off my pajamas, throw them in a pile on the floor, then push them up against the crack below the door, shivering.
In the mirror, I’m a mess. Between the scratches and bruising on my arm, the bruises on my belly and hip, and the skinny scab on my breast, I look like a lion tamer, not a live-in nanny.
It’s so impulsive. So fucking impulsive, I know, but I take a picture of my reflection in the mirror. I almost text it to Jack, but I stop myself.
Let him remember me the way he remembers me.
My breath catches in my throat as I ease into the bath, the water burning the scrapes, then making them tingle numb. What happened last night?
I remember sitting on the right side of the couch, Alison and Seb to my left, the dining room and the arched entryway to the kitchen to my right. Was I watching the election returns? I remember looking at my phone, but not what I was doing. Was there a light in the yard?
The part with Seb must have been a dream. That’s the part I’m sure of. First, Seb would never kiss me. Second, the dream kiss didn’t feel like a real kiss. Not warm and quivering human and whisper of someone else’s breath, but instead something fast and hard and hot and sharp, like the explosion of a feeling you can’t describe, physical but not in the way touch is usually physical.
I sink down into the water, close my eyes. Jack says I’m not safe. He calls this danger. My hands find the soft curves of my own flesh, tactile patterns over pain. It’s a language I cannot read, at least not yet. I close my eyes, head back against the cold porcelain.
I hear the front door open and close. I hear a car start.
20.
For days, we await the election results, Alison’s timbre timid, the television a muted dance of maps. She’s quieter than I’ve ever seen her, and Quinn goes into herself, too.
I haven’t seen Seb in days.
On Saturday, the man who wants to be in charge wins, and Alison is ecstatic, if a little weepy. She’s on the phone with her friends all day. “He won,” she says, “thank fuck.”
That evening she tells me Seb has left on a research trip.
“Really?” my brow furrows, my molars crunching into a hummus-dipped peapod.
She shrugs. “Yeah, it’s OK. He’s still in his pod from work and they’re just at one of their field sites. So no biggie for him. Just, you know,” her eyes go misty as she gazes out the kitchen window. Then she furrows her forehead, revealing a crease between her eyes. “The heck is that?”
Alison presses onto the deck, Thebes on her hip, and I follow. The neighbor’s house, empty and cavernous, gapes at us, surrounded by the refuse of renovation.
One of the upstairs windows of the empty house shivers with an eerie, orange glow. Then we feel a gust of wind, and the light goes out.
21.
The man in charge has not conceded. Onscreen, he stands in the rain with no umbrella.
My scratches scab with indecision.
I know I should tell somebody about the bruises. Jack. Alison. A doctor. Why do they feel like a secret?
It’s late but I can’t sleep. The air pricks my skin all over. I put on my softest sweatshirt, the one with the crags on the front. I pace the room, straightening up, tinkering with things.
I wish I were at Jack’s place, crackle of firewood, heady scent of ponderosa, his arms around me, his old Jeep that could take us anywhere.
I should write, but even Alison doesn’t seem to be writing much these days.
I hear the back door close, freezing me in place.
Hackles of the beast I was raise on my back. There’s somebody in the yard.
I can’t make anything out; it’s just a dark, roughly human shape. No light this time, moving away from me, and then it disappears.
Did it see me? I had the curtain wide open, the lamp on. Quickly, I move to turn out the light, but the figure is gone.
And then I see it. In the neighbor’s house, the one they’re renovating, behind the empty space where a tree was felled, and dismembered, and hauled away.
There’s a flickering orange light in the window.
I reach for my phone and text Jack as quickly as I can.
OK you win. When can we meet?