Snow covered the windshield so fast that the road showed only in flashes, between the wipers’ sweeps. The wind screamed, rattling the van. After a few hours behind the wheel Ann was ready to give up, but stopping was a death sentence.
I took a wrong turn.
A motel appeared out of the white like a developing photograph. She’d passed a few lifeless ones already, but this one had a faint glow in one window.
The light was a lifeline.
Ann parked the van beside the wall and sat a moment, gathering herself to meet the weather. When she got out, snow drove into her face and crawled under her clothes. She shivered and weaved her way to the entrance.
She tried the door, not expecting it to give. It did. She half-fell inside and struggled to close it behind her, then squinted into the darkness.
A flashlight’s beam swept across the counter to lie on the floor like a path, flickering once. “Welcome,” a woman’s voice said, unhurried. “Be my guest.”
Ann followed the light.
* * *
The woman sat on a sleeping bag rolled out on the floor, a blanket over her shoulders and a pack at her side, settled in like she’d done it before. She’d stood the flashlight upright with its beam aimed at the ceiling, and the light fell back so flat and gray that Ann could read nothing in her face.
“The rooms are all locked. So make yourself comfortable somehow.” The woman said it as though people drenched in snow broke into her place every day.
Ann slung her duffle down and knelt, her breath fogging in the cold. “That’s something I can fix, hopefully.”
“Do you have keys?” the woman asked.
“Nope.” She pulled off her beanie and plucked a hairpin from behind her ear. She’d once spent a few weeks helping a mechanic fix her van, and between oil changes he’d taught her to coax a cheap lock open with a bent wire and a thin screwdriver.
“Motels rarely have good locks,” Ann muttered, trying to bend the pin. “Hell, I thought I’d step out of the van and my fingers would stay frozen to the wheel.” In the end her fingers wouldn’t cooperate, and the hairpin clattered to the floor.
The woman sighed. “That’s something I can fix. Come here.” She leaned forward and took Ann’s hands in hers.
Ann’s fingers prickled with small shocks as they thawed. It was strange to hold hands with a woman she’d never met – and might never meet again – in the dark of an abandoned motel while the storm went on.
She should have been afraid: a stranger, the locked rooms, the dark; but she wasn’t. She hadn’t been afraid of much in a long time. The warmth coming back into her fingers was a real thing, and she held on to it.
They sat in silence.
In the poor light Ann caught only fragments of the woman’s features: a sharp, thin nose, short hair with its color lost to the gloom, dark eyes studying her back.
“Thank you. It’s much better now.” She took her hands back and continued to flex the hairpin she’d picked up off the floor.
The woman watched her. “I thought that was a movie thing, people picking locks with hairpins. Where’d you learn it?”
“A few tricks, here and there. Would you hold the flashlight for me?”
The lock was a joke and took only a little fiddling, but the hairpin jammed and snapped as Ann pulled it free – her last one. She turned to her accidental roommate. “Well, crap. Guess we’re sharing a room.”
“Anything’s better than the floor.”
They stepped inside. It had been a decent room once: a bed stripped to the mattress, two armchairs at a round table, a closet standing open with a couple of wire hangers still in it. A pale ring marked the table where someone’s glass had sat. Snow had climbed almost to the tops of the windows.
Her hair fell loose across her face with no pin to hold it now, and as she tucked it back behind her ear she decided that was a fair trade: one hairpin for four walls and a roof.
“Hey, not bad.” The woman dropped into a dusty armchair. “I’m Lily.”
“Ann. What is this place, anyway?”
“There’s a town nearby,” Lily said, pulling the blanket over her shoulders. “It used to draw people, and the motels along the road did well, but the recent hard winters forced most of them to close until summer. Like this one.” She glanced at Ann. “So you’re a traveler?”
“Living in a van.”
“Ah. So romantic.”
Ann wasn’t sure about the romantic part, but she let it stand.
Lily rose and crossed the room, leaving the blanket in the armchair. Her gait was light, almost a dancer’s, and Ann found herself watching.
“I’m a kind of traveler too. Driftwood.” Lily stopped and turned to her. “Something the sea’s done with.” A beat. “I’ve got a gas stove. Want some hot tea?”
“Sure… wait. Are you dying? Are you ill, or–”
“Hell no. Thirty, and not a thing wrong with me. It’s a long story.” She set the little stove on the table. “But I suppose it’d be nice to confess.”
* * *
“My great-grandmother was a strong, healthy woman until she died at forty. The doctors never figured out what killed her.” Lily told it, stealing glances at Ann over a steaming mug of black tea. “One day she just… ceased to live.”
It was the same all the way down, she said. The women in her family were prone to sudden death with no cause anyone could name: her grandmother at thirty-nine, her mother just shy of forty. None of them had ever reached forty-one.
A pattern. She caught herself believing it, and couldn’t have said why.
“So I guess I’m doomed.” Lily’s voice was steady. “Didn’t even know about it until my father told me, a year ago. It paralyzed me – knowing I’ve got less than ten years.”
“That’s an awful thing to say to your own daughter.”
“He was devastated after Mom died, and I was a living reminder of the woman he’d buried. One day he lost it and told me I’d go the same way.” Lily shrugged. “Every morning I’d wake up wondering if today was the day, and since then I’ve just… been waiting, you know?”
The flashlight flickered and died, and the dark dropped over the room, only the stove’s low ring of blue left.
“Crap.” Lily’s voice wavered. “Do you have a light?”
“Hang on.” Ann dug a storm lamp out of her duffle, lit it, and a steady light pushed the dark back. “No battery to die on us. That’s the trick.”
“Thank you.” Lily let out a quiet, unsteady laugh. “I’m still scared of the dark, even now. Which is funny. What’s left to be scared of? Nothing. And I still am.” A pause. “Where are you headed?”
“Wherever the road goes. I’m a wanderer.”
“They call Death a wanderer too, you know. An eternal kind.” Lily watched the flame, its small light moving in her eyes. “So you came for me.”
“No, I just got lost. If it weren’t for the weather I’d have driven straight past. For God’s sake, Lily, aren’t you sick of burying yourself alive?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it.” She leaned into the lamplight, close to Lily’s face. “Tomorrow I step outside and a sheet of ice comes off a roof and kills me where I stand. I’m already dead. I just don’t know the day. You could outlive me.” She breathed, steadying herself. “Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”
Lily stared at her, biting her lip. “Sorry,” she said at last, looking away. “It’s the dark. It makes me fragile. I’m just so tired of all of it.” The last of it was barely a whisper.
Poor girl.
Ann set down her mug, rose without a word, and came around behind Lily’s chair, folding her arms over her under the blanket, her chin coming to rest on Lily’s shoulder. Her hair smelled of frangipani and cinnamon.
The armchair’s back made it awkward. She didn’t care.
My God, she thought, far off, I haven’t held anyone since Vivienne. I buried myself with her – and for what?
I’m no better. I’ve been mourning too damn long.
It was good to be there like that. And under the good, something she’d thought was gone for years turned over and woke. Ann moved her fingers, found a button on Lily’s shirt, and traced its edge.
Poor girl. Two poor girls, fated together.
* * *
Lily shifted. “The storm’s stopped,” she whispered. “Le vent se lève… il faut tenter de vivre.” A small breath of a laugh. “There are stairs up to the roof. Want to see the stars?”
Something snagged in Ann’s mind as she drew back. “Lily, how did you even get in here? The front door was open when I came.”
“I’ve got a key to it. And the stairwell.” She tipped her head back to look up at Ann. “My aunt owned this place, before it closed. I still come through when I’m passing. The rooms got rekeyed years ago – I’d hardly have been sitting on the floor otherwise.” A pause. “Did I have to tell you right away?”
“Nah.” Ann shrugged. “Though if you’d had a key to the rooms, I might’ve been a little sore. That was my last hairpin.”
They took the lamp and went out, down the corridor to a door at the end; they climbed the narrow staircase and leaned their weight against the roof door, shouldering it through the snow banked on the far side until it gave.
The wind had dropped, and the cold had come up hard behind it, but the stars came out sharp against the black. They stood exhaling clouds of steam, looking up.
“How lucky you took the wrong turn,” Lily said quietly. “I’m not scared anymore.” A pause. “Kiss me.”
It wasn’t a question, and it wasn’t quite an order – somewhere between, and that undid her.
She has no power over me, Ann thought, turning to face her. A woman she’d known an hour, in a dead motel, half in love with her own death – and Ann wanted her anyway. Being already dead, it turned out, was its own kind of permission.
She looked into Lily’s dark eyes under the hard stars, and leaned in.
One kiss, and then another.
“Lily,” she managed, a minute later, short of breath. “Wait–”
Lily drew back, watching her. “What’s wrong?” Her voice had gone hoarse, and it nearly took the last of Ann’s composure with it.
“Our lips are going to freeze together,” Ann huffed. “Let’s go back to the room.”
They got down the stairs, holding the lamp, easing the door and still stealing kisses in between. Ann shut the door, set the lamp on the table and pulled a rolled blanket from her duffle.
“It’s soft,” Lily said, running a hand across it, glancing sideways at her.
Ann pulled her in, slid her fingers into her hair, and found her mouth again.
They undressed each other in the cold, Lily easing the sweater over Ann’s head, catching an earring in a knot and working it patiently loose. Then they hurried under the blanket, both shivering. They lay face to face in the half-light, the lamp’s flame the only moving thing in the room.
“What now?” Lily whispered, her arms coming around Ann’s neck. “I’ve never… you know. With a woman.” A small smile; a faint heat rising in her face.
For a beginner, she proved a quick study.
Ann had time to think exactly that, in one of the last clear moments before she was past speech, gripping her, trembling, then easing, then still.
They lay a long while after, tangled so completely that Ann couldn’t have said where she ended and Lily began. The after was the part she’d always loved most, and always lost too fast, except now it seemed to hold, the room gone quiet and stopped around them. The blanket was thin. She wasn’t cold.
I’m so alive now.
“Two women shut in a room while the world’s frozen outside. It’s very Room in Rome. So who are you?” Lily asked, eyes still closed.
“Who do you want me to be?”
A frown, eyes still shut. “That’s not an answer. If I’m doomed to fall for a woman, I want to know who she really is.”
“What if she doesn’t know herself?”
“Everyone has a backstory.”
“And if it disappoints you?”
Lily opened her eyes, the warm light catching in them. “I can’t think of one thing you could tell me that would,” she said. “You don’t eat infants.”
Ann laughed – a real one, the kind she hadn’t had in longer than she could remember. “No,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Not at all. Once, my name was Esther.”
Lily made a small sound, but didn’t move away an inch. “I figured you had your reasons for the other one.”
“The usual ones. Conservative Jewish family, a whole life laid out for me. And then a woman who walked straight across the map of it.” Ann was quiet a moment. “Vivienne. When it all came apart, she left – she was like me, made for the road. I went after her at twenty-one. Spent that first year certain I’d find her and we’d be happy, simple as that.”
“Do you still look for her?”
The shard came to Ann first, the piece of windshield, wedged above the dash of the van out in the snow. She’d pried it loose herself.
She had come around the bend and the car was already on its side, already burning. The bushes along the road had caught, black smoke going up into a paling sky.
Vivienne was right there, close enough to reach, and Ann reached her, and held what there was to hold.
There was so much blood. She had never known there could be so much blood.
“Not anymore,” Ann said. Her voice came level and far away. “I came there and she was already gone. I held her. It didn’t change anything.”
* * *
Despite the dawn, the room was still half-dark. The gas stove hissed, its blue flame licking the underside of the pot. Ann watched it and thought about nothing at all.
“Weather’s turned decent out there,” Lily said, coming in with a kettle full of snow. “Is it boiling yet?”
They made breakfast out of noodles and whatever the bags gave up: Lily put in dried tomatoes, Ann a couple of smoked sausages. Neither of them said much about the night.
“What now?” Lily asked.
“I’ll head back the way I came. Try to get out of the snow.” Ann turned her own mug in her hands.
“I’d go anywhere with you,” Lily said, without a smile. “If you’ll have me.”
“Why do you want to go with me?” Ann needed to hear her say it.
“Because I’m not afraid of the dark anymore. When you’re with me.”
Ann looked down into her mug. She knew what saying yes would cost: doing it all again, on purpose, with the year circled on the calendar this time. She’d watched one woman go out of the world already, and it had taken years off her to do it.
“Give me a minute,” she said. “Lift into town, at least. Let’s eat and get on the road.”
They packed and stepped outside. The sky was clear, not a cloud in it; nothing but the crunch of snow under their boots. At the door they stopped and looked at each other in the daylight.
Lily had hazel eyes with the green coming up in them, her hair dark in the daylight. She squinted into the brightness and gave an awkward smile.
“I imagined you about like this,” she said. “You need a pin, your hair’s in your face.” She dug a wide steel hairpin set with pink flowers out of her backpack and fixed Ann’s hair back with it. “There. Nice.”
“Thanks.” Ann looked away.
The van had sunk to the windows overnight; they shoveled the door clear. The engine turned over on the third try with a growl, and Ann swung the van around onto the road and waved Lily in.
The road ran on ahead of them, white and silent.
She kept her eyes forward, mostly. Now and then she couldn’t help a glance to the side, and every time, Lily was already looking back, and Ann gave her a small smile she had no words for.
The town showed itself slowly. The sign was packed solid with snow; she never knew which one it was. This was the place. She could let Lily out here, point her toward a bus, and drive on alone the way she’d come, the way she always did.
Ann pulled onto the shoulder and took the van out of gear.
Her minute was up.
Lily waited, saying nothing.
“Is there something you’ve always wanted to see?” Ann asked, and bit her lip.
“You know…” Lily turned it over. “I’ve never been to a farm. I’m a city girl.”
“Pretty seasoned traveler, for a city girl.” Ann put the van back in gear. “But all right. A farm. I’ve got an idea.”
“And you?” Lily asked, as the quiet, snowed-in town slid past the windows. “What do you dream of?”
“I’d like to see the ocean.”
“Then we’ll need a farm near the ocean.”
They looked at each other and laughed, and something in Ann came loose. She reached over and squeezed Lily’s fingers with her free hand.
They had so many places to be, and so many years to spend getting there.
* * *
The water showed itself a few days later, from the crest of a hill; a great sheet of it thrown out flat and glittering under a low sun, the far shore lost in haze. It was full dark by the time the road brought them down to it. They knocked at the first place showing a light, and the woman who answered – Mrs. Stevenson, widowed, with too much farm for one set of hands – took one look at the van and offered them the spare room for a few days in exchange for help with the fences. Ann was so worn from driving she slept without a single dream.
She woke to a sound she didn’t know, in a room she didn’t recognize, and for a moment couldn’t account for any of it. A low ceiling. A breeze working at a thin curtain, carrying smells she had no names for: salt, animal, something green. Lily was a warm weight along her side.
This is it, she thought, and rolled over to put her mouth to Lily’s ear. “Lily. Hey. There’s an ocean out there.”
“What time is it.” Lily didn’t open her eyes. “You’re restless. Okay.”
The house was quiet. Mrs. Stevenson was long since out among her own fences, so they let themselves out through the kitchen into a yard going gold in the early light.
“She gave me the rules last night, while you were dead to the world.” Lily took her hand and steered her toward a gap in the fences. “I’ve been studying. Rule one: respect the geese.”
The geese were massed behind the rail, and at the sight of the two of them they came apart into a riot of honking and beating wings.
“Rule two–” Lily stepped neatly around something in the grass. “You will, eventually, stand in muck. There’s no avoiding it. Best make your peace with it now.”
Ann couldn’t tell from Lily’s face how much of this was invented.
“Rule three. Horses bite.”
“That one I know.” Ann rubbed her forearm. “Do you like it here? Really?”
“I love it.” No hesitation at all. “Come on! The ocean won’t wait.”
And she was off down the path, her shirt snapping in the wind, and Ann went after her and lost. By the time she came down through the cliffs to the narrow shelf of stony beach, panting, Lily was already at the waterline, walking the edge of the foam.
“What took you?”
“I can’t run like you.” Ann got her breath back. “It’s fine. The ocean’s not going anywhere.”
“And me?”
Ann came up closer, caught the hem of her shirt, and reeled her in. “You planning to run off?” She kissed her, quick, and drew back far enough to watch her face.
Lily returned the look, unblinking, gone serious. “I’m not. But what is it you actually want, Ann?”
She’d known the answer a while now, even on the days it took her a moment to find. “I want the window I watch the ocean through to stay in one place. I’ve chased a dead woman up and down this country long enough.”
Lily was quiet a moment. “I’ve been pointed at one ending my whole life,” she said. “I’d like to stand still a while.”
The wind took whatever else there was to say. Ann had wanted to see the ocean since she was a girl, and here it was, wider than the wanting had ever been – and Lily’s hand was cold in hers.
The few days at Mrs. Stevenson’s became a few weeks; the fences always wanted another pair of hands, and Lily had taken to the geese, and Ann to the water. When at last they left, it was only to go looking in earnest for a place of their own. A farm near the ocean didn’t exist, or at least not the way they’d drawn it in the air that first morning in the van. What existed, after a season of looking up and down that coast, was a small house on the wrong side of a hill: a garden gone to seed, a chestnut tree, a leaning wooden fence, and a strip of grey water ten minutes down a path, or less, if you didn’t mind the cold.
It was close enough. They took it.
* * *
Ann drove the van around to the back and left it in the long grass, and after a while stopped thinking of it as a thing that ran. It had been her whole house for years; now it rusted quietly in the weeds, and she found she didn’t miss the road. She had a window that stayed in one place.
But a few times a year she’d slip out the back door without waking Lily, and go out to the van in the dark. She’d sit in the cold cab and hold the shard of windshield in her hand, smoothed long ago, so it couldn’t cut. Then she’d go back in, quiet, and lie down beside her.
The garden came back under Lily’s hands – Lily, who’d never been to a farm and now spent her mornings at war with the slugs over a row of tomatoes. Ann learned the water: where it lay flat at dawn, where the afternoon wind came from, which cold months turned it the color of slate and which the color of nothing at all. They put coffee on in a battered cezve every morning and drank it watching the tree, and the tree leafed out and went bare and leafed out again, and that was a year, and then it was several.
The first year in the house Ann still caught herself, some mornings, at the old arithmetic: Lily’s age set against her mother’s, her grandmother’s, in the way you press a bruise to learn whether it still hurts. Then the coffee would boil over, or Lily would call her out to see the water gone flat as glass, and the sum would go unfinished.
In time she stopped starting it. A circled year went by once before she noticed: by then it was weeks gone and didn’t seem worth the mention.
There was one afternoon she kept, though.
It was nothing – a Sunday, late spring, the water still cold enough to numb you to the ankle and no warmer past it. They’d gone down the path after lunch with no plan beyond the going; Lily walked with her shoes in one hand. The van sat up in the long grass behind them, catching the light, and neither of them looked at it.
Lily stooped at the tideline and came up with something, rubbed it on her shirt, and held it out on her palm: a lozenge of sea-glass, the green of an old bottle, tumbled by the water until not one edge of it was left.
“For your windowsill,” she said.
Ann took it. It was warm from Lily’s hand, smooth as a worry-stone, and she closed her fist around it and felt almost frighteningly happy.
“What?” Lily said, watching her face.
“Nothing.” She put the glass in her pocket. “Let’s keep walking.”
It went on the kitchen sill, the one that looked down the path to the water, and there it stayed. Years afterward she could still have told you the exact weight of it in her hand.
* * *
It came back on an ordinary morning, the way it had gone.
Lily was at the sink scrubbing the cezve, humming something with no tune to it; the sea-glass caught the light on the sill. Ann was turning the calendar to the new month when the date stopped her hand. She did the arithmetic she hadn’t touched in years – Lily’s age against her mother’s – and it came out even.
She hung the calendar straight. She set her mug down so it wouldn’t rattle.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Lily said, not turning around.
“Just tired.”
It was the first thing she had kept from her in ten years, and it cost her nothing, which was worse.
The winter came on. Lily met it as she met everything now: she repotted the herbs along the sill; she wrote letters to people she hadn’t spoken to in years, letters she didn’t seem to need answered. She never spoke about the date.
One evening Ann found her on the back step in her coat, watching the bare chestnut.
Lily took her hand without looking. “I’m not afraid, you know?” She said it the way you’d say it looked like rain.
Ann was afraid for both of them.
She took to going out at night, when Lily slept. The van still sat in the long grass where they’d left it. She’d climb into the cold cab and put her hand to the shard above the dash – and there it would all be again: the bend in the road, the fire, the blood, Vivienne close enough to touch and already gone. Then she’d go back in with cold hands and lie down beside the woman she’d been told would die.
The night the power went, it was March, a hard freeze, the anniversary of the day Lily’s mother hadn’t lived through. Ann had a plate in her hand. She heard it break on the floor before she felt it leave her fingers.
“Power’s out,” Lily said from the next room. “It’ll come back. It always does.”
But Ann was on the road again, and the bushes were burning, and her hands wouldn’t work, and the thing that takes people while you stand close enough to touch them was loose in the house and coming for the room where Lily sat saying it’ll come back in a voice with nothing in it to fear–
“Hey.” Lily, close now, in the black. “Where’d you go.”
“I can’t.” It came out of her in pieces. “I can’t do it again.” She didn’t need to see her hands to feel them shaking.
Lily’s closed over them. “The lamp’s in the drawer,” she said. “The old one. Needs nothing but a match.” She didn’t let go to say it.
They found it, and it caught on the first try as it always had, and put the same borrowed light into the dark that it had put into a dead motel a lifetime ago. Lily’s face rose out of the black, unafraid, the green showing in her eyes.
She kept hold of Ann’s hand. “Death is nothing to us,” she said. “That which is dissolved is without sensation. That which lacks sensation is nothing to us.” A pause. “You were so angry, the night you taught me that.”
“I was trying to get you off the floor.”
“I know.” She didn’t smile. “So get up off the floor.”
The freeze pressed on the black windows. The lamp held. Whatever was in the house with them was no nearer than it had ever been, and no further.
Lily did not die that March, nor that spring, nor in the year that followed, the year none of the women before her had been given. It was stranger than either of them had braced for: not the dread, but what came after it. Some mornings Ann found her stopped in a doorway, a woman holding days she’d never thought to plan for.
They never learned what it had been. Lily kept not dying, one ordinary morning at a time, out past the wall that none of her blood had crossed.
* * *
“I wish I’d died at forty,” Lily groaned into the pillow, both hands over her head. “Ohh.”
It was the morning after the party for her forty-first, and the party had been a good one, which was the trouble.
Ann laughed and then regretted it, taking hold of her head. “God. We really went all out.”
“Don’t. Don’t even say it.”
They made their way down to the kitchen.
Ann set the cezve on the stove and watched it heat, then looked out the window while she waited: the chestnut in the garden, the leaning fence, the piece of sea-glass on the sill, and past all of it the strip of water ten minutes down the path, bright in the sun. It was late May. The salt breeze came warm through the curtains, smelling of weed and low tide.
“I think we’ll do it again next year,” she said, lifting the cezve off the heat the moment before it climbed over the rim. “Every damn year.”
“Until we’re not.”
“Until we’re not.” Ann poured. “But that which is dissolved is without sensation. Right?”
Lily huffed a laugh and folded the omelette over in the pan, her own recipe, the stuffed one. “I’ve loved it since the first time you said it to me.” She slid the pan off the burner. “We should go back to that motel, if it’s still standing. I’d like to be your Medem’s heroine again.”
“You’ll always be my Medem’s heroine.” Ann set the cups down. “Can I tell you something?”
“Always.”
“I believed your story the moment you told it. I never could say why.” She put the cezve on the table between them. “I should have been frightened of you, maybe. Instead I just thought: then I’ll make every day of it count.”
Lily’s eyes went bright. “You did.”
They looked at each other, and the breeze moved the curtains, and there was nothing left that needed saying.
Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash
Originally, it was a magazine submission that got rejected. To be honest, I can’t remember how Epicureans came to me, but most likely it was an homage to Julio Medem’s movie, one that came a little further. Reading this, you can tell I’m a sucker for happy endings, but it is what it is, I guess.
Next flash story at 15th: Sky Stays Dark. There will be fireworks.
Thank you for reading.
Aldwin