Willa & Hesper Page 3

  “Are you excited to meet her?” Hesper asked, winded on the landing between the third and fourth flight of stairs. My knees were mildly, hopefully imperceptibly, shaking as we moved toward the top. It was the type of building where residents kept their well-polished oxfords outside their front doors, perched on sprightly welcome mats.

  I imagined a guest of honor in a garish, metallic throne. “Of course.”

  On the fifth floor, Hesper tried each key on the ring before the door opened. I followed her hesitantly down a narrow, pale hallway into a large, wide room. A girl with dark blue, pixie-cut hair and a small gold nose ring glittering between her nostrils crouched in front of a cream-colored mannequin, pinning a hem. She was swarmed by swaths of fabric—an ocean of patterns, obsequiously floral fabric, peach and lilac-colored flowers clustered around leafy spurts of green, splotches of jewel tones, stiff lavender felt.

  It’s her beautiful, talented girlfriend, I thought. Making another mystical, strange outfit for Hesper to experience the world in. Her own Technicolor dreamcoat.

  The nose-ringed fabric-hemmer said, “Are you really wearing that? It’s hideous.”

  “You’re the one who made it.”

  “As an experiment, Lemon. Not as evening wear.”

  “Lemon?” I asked. What a perfect nickname for Hesper.

  “I’m Ada,” said Ada, leaning over her many cloths to shake my hand. “Sister of this caped creature.”

  I smiled with my lips tightly pinched together. The girlfriend assumption felt inordinately creepy. Ada continued to criticize her own garment on Hesper’s small body, and Hesper argued in an escalating, delighted defense, especially of the cape’s wayward strings. I averted my eyes from their affection. Even though the relationship had been clarified, I still housed a prickle of competitiveness with Ada, the kind that only children feel when they witness interactions of love between siblings.

  Two other mannequins loomed in the corner of the living room against a large, obtrusive sofa. I stared at their plastic torsos, swanlike necks. The places where their hands and feet would be. Lumpless hourglasses, as smooth as china. I looked at the things that they were missing.

  “The kitchen’s on the other side of the apartment,” Hesper informed me.

  “What?”

  Hesper reached for me, gripping each of my shoulders with a smooth hand, leading us out of the living room and into the narrow hallway. It was like a kindergarten chain of students, marching out to the playground for recess. At first, the contact between Hesper’s fingertips and my cotton-covered shoulders was a beguiling jolt. But her touch was so gentle, and in the dimness of the corridor, with Hesper’s breath collecting in the hollows of my ear, the jolt soured into a rolling, unshakeable sensation. The presence of another body, so close to hers—but imperceptible, distanced. Without the ability to see Hesper, the voluminous ivory skirt, the floppy, Thousand Island–colored hair, she could be anyone. She tightened her grasp on my bones.

  “Before you came to the diner,” I began, my voice tremulous.

  I felt the rays of Hesper smiling, and then the wobble that remained post-smile.

  Hesper stopped walking toward the kitchen. We stood, motionless, with Hesper’s fingers kneaded into my shoulders. I knew that I should continue, but saying it out loud would have been like parting my lips and conjuring up the dusty gumball instead of the consonants and vowels that make up language. I listened to the hum of Ada’s sewing machine.

  “It wasn’t like a real assault,” I said finally. “It was…small. Assault Junior.”

  “Assault Junior,” Hesper said, quiet. “A.J.”

  “Right.”

  “What happened?”

  “He followed me. And then.”

  “And then,” Hesper repeated.

  “You don’t have to let go of my shoulders.”

  “Okay,” Hesper said, returning to her original position.

  “He had me pinned to this tree. I could feel it rubbing against me.”

  Hesper was waiting for me to continue, but I wasn’t sure that I could.

  “He just touched me, he didn’t…It wasn’t very…thorough. He didn’t get…” But I didn’t want to say the words inside me. “Invasive,” I finished, finally. But he could have, I thought.

  “God, Willa. Are you okay?”

  Her touch felt delicate now.

  “I thought I would feel better if I said it, but it didn’t work,” I said, throaty.

  “Do you want to tell anyone? The police?”

  “I just want to tell you,” I said. “They don’t do anything anyway.”

  A silence unfurled between us.

  “I shouldn’t have nicknamed it,” Hesper said.

  “No, I liked it. Thank you.”

  “Do you want to talk more?” Hesper asked, in a tone of gentleness that dismantled something I was trying very hard to contain.

  “No. I want to meet the thing that’s in the kitchen.”

  Hesper led me into the kitchen. I bent to peer inside a cardboard box, at the tailed clumps of animal, curled with their pink triangular ears plastered tight against their heads. They looked frighteningly new and fragile, as though missing a layer—raw, skinned. I swallowed. Mother Cat stood, slinking, her torso swollen against the box. Hesper was speaking, identifying the names of each claimed-for kitten. I watched Mother Cat’s eyes glistening greenly, her graceful, acerbic movements as she suddenly jumped from the box and bounded across the tiled floor, the sound of her claws clattering dramatically.

  “What’s going on with you?” Hesper clucked, intrigued.

  We followed Mother Cat, who was taking steady, deliberate steps across the room. I crouched on the floor, knees heavy and spread, approaching Mother Cat, who swept furiously with her sharp nails at something underneath the refrigerator.

  “There must be something under there,” Hesper said, straining to see what Mother Cat was hunting. But I saw only dark, empty space in the tiny curtain of black between the bottom of the refrigerator and the clean, Swiffered floor tiles.

  My leg muscles started to ache, the pain of stillness and balance, but I didn’t change positions. My thighs trembled with effort. Hot sweat formed in the space beneath my breasts. Mother Cat swiped her paw relentlessly underneath the machine, concentrated. I forgot that I was in Hesper’s sister’s apartment; I forgot Hesper’s iPhone in her back pocket, the chrysalis of comfort that I’d found in images of Times Square; I forgot Hesper. I forgot the boy. I forgot the texture of the tree that he pressed me into. The notes that were playing into my ears, the bruises that had formed underneath my clothes. Transfixed, I watched Mother Cat tuck her head underneath the refrigerator, lunging at the unseen. She bared her teeth.

  2.

  I hadn’t remembered falling asleep on the sofa, and I hadn’t remembered Willa falling asleep on the floor of Ada’s living room, either. In the morning, my eyes blurry with sudden awakeness, I took it in fragments: the sprawl of her dark curls against one of the ivory, fuzzy pillows that belonged on the futon; an exposed ankle, pale, bent like a wishbone. Tibby was circling Willa’s head, her little paws menacingly stalking the space surrounding the wooden coffee table with its fashionably gold-painted legs.

  I cranked myself from supine to upright, and without meaning to, I moaned. I moaned because the comedown from the Molly was so terrible already and I’d been awake for three Mississippis, tops. My eyes felt leaky. Ada’s living room, dappled with midmorning light through her bird-covered curtains, was an obstacle course of mannequins with hastily pinned fabrics, and I knew if I tried to stand and grabbed at any of those creations, I would rip them apart.

  Then: Willa. She slept in the shape of a comma. Even in the haze of my depression, with its weight in the space underneath my sternum and the feeling that all of my life had been hopeless, forever, and I had just realized it right now, that all of life was a hospital waiting room where someone else was in the only bathroom and it smelled of bleach and individual apple juice
s in plastic cups, even through that, I noticed Willa, how her hair looked like that of a mermaid, how her body looked so soft, so curveful, underneath her shirt. I saw the space between the bottom of her T-shirt and the top of her leggings and I wanted to lay my head there and use it as a pillow.

  I lifted Tibby into my arms and she first lovingly and then combatively nibbled my pinky. She stared at me with judgy, glowing green eyes, squirming, until I dropped her. Not on Willa, but near enough that she woke up to the clatter of Tibby bolting back underneath the sofa. Any sense of tranquility, scalded. The sound of Tibby, scurrying out of sight and then down the hallway, had the cringeworthy effect of radio static, stretching into my headache and elongating it like taffy.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to drop her so close to your face.”

  Willa sat up. Creases from the pillow’s texture, and from the blanket she’d been using as a bed, covered her in a verdant linear pattern. She smiled warily, in a way that made me think she ached from the uncomfortable sleeping place, and I wished I could remember the conversation that led to us sleeping here in the first place. She made a visor with her hand. “When I was in sixth grade, I woke up to my friend’s cat licking my nose, and it scared me so much that I screamed.”

  “Tibby’s not licking anyone’s nose. She’s a killer.”

  Willa blinked. “She hasn’t…brought you any conquests?”

  “Ada probably wouldn’t tell me about that. She’s squeamish.” And probably awake, eavesdropping on this conversation and ready to heavily reprimand me for crashing here without asking. Never mind Willa. My shoulders bunched together, caving up to my ears. I thought about lying down next to her, there on the floor. There was no reason to think things would improve from here. I didn’t even know what day it was.

  “I feel awful,” I announced. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to be…good company.”

  A smile crested over Willa’s face. She had a dimple. It was the kind of dimple that looked etched in with a knife, not one of those flimsy dimples that came and went. “My mom uses that phrase when she thinks I’ve brought up an unpleasant topic. She says, ‘Willa, you’re not being very good company.’”

  “What kind of unpleasant topic?”

  “Oh, you know. Like whether your cat’s brought any dead mice to you as treasure.”

  In spite of myself, I smiled. “Have you ever done Molly?” I asked. She hadn’t. “It’s the most miserable hangover you can have. Seriously, there have been studies. It can plunge you into a clinical depression. But the good part,” I said, trying to remember: the exuberance, the light, the love I felt for everything in that diner, especially the aluminum siding and the salty broth of chicken soup. “The good part is unbeatable. What’s the happiest you’ve ever been?”

  Willa looked at the ceiling as she thought. As soon as I noticed, I knew I would never not notice that again, and the knowledge that I knew her thinking face felt strangely satisfying.

  “When I was four, on my first day of preschool, my dad came to pick me up as a surprise. He worked all the time when I was that young, so it was really rare for me to see him before I went to bed, much less for him to pick me up at school. Anyway, he hoisted me up on his shoulders and we walked all the way home like that, but midway through the walk, he gave me a peppermint pattie. I couldn’t believe it. I never got to eat candy during the day.”

  I waited for the story to continue, but it didn’t. “That’s the happiest ever?” I asked. “He gave you a peppermint pattie?”

  “I saved the wrapper, even.”

  I laughed, harder than I meant to. “You have the lowest expectations I’ve ever heard.”

  “Thanks,” Willa said, a blush creeping down to her neck. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  I looked at the bunched-up blanket, the scanty space that Willa had curled herself into, and a cascade of guilt whirled through me. “I’m sorry that you had to sleep on the floor like a vagabond. I wasn’t thinking…super clearly, when I brought us back here. My sister’s probably going to hang me out to dry for this whole…adventure.”

  “She went to the co-op,” Willa said. “She left a note, and like, forty vitamins.”

  “You were up, earlier?”

  Willa shrugged. “I didn’t sleep well.”

  My gaze settled on a bruise, purpling onto Willa’s skin. It was shaped like a thumb. The vestige of her Assault Junior. Willa saw me see it and her entire body changed, her posture pulled into a straight line. The spine alignment of a ballerina, ready for a performance. Without thinking, I reached for it, and she flinched.

  The moment when I should have asked if she was okay, or if she wanted to talk, passed in glacial slow motion. But what if she said yes? What then? I was ill-equipped for other people’s traumas. My go-to move was the forearm pat, and without that, I didn’t know what I would do. In some ways, around Willa, I felt as if we’d been orbiting each other for years—when, from across our classroom table, I watched her start to smile at something she shouldn’t be smiling at, and watched that smile poorly compress back into the architecture of her face. But then, moments like this emerged, and I realized I didn’t know her very well at all. Not concretely.

  “You should take the vitamins,” Willa said. “Before you feel worse.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I found my way to the kitchen. “Do you want any orange juice?”

  “Only if it’s incredibly pulpy, or not pulpy at all.”

  I checked the pulp factor. “You’re in luck. You’re going to be choking on these vesicles. There’s no turning back.” The violence of my quippiness hung between us like a blackout curtain. “Sorry. I—”

  “Perfect,” Willa rebounded, bouncing into the kitchen. I couldn’t tell if I was moving at 100 percent sluggishness or Willa was an Energizer Bunny in the morning, but she broke out two coffee mugs and poured the juice and drank it down before I weebled my way to Ada’s kitchen table, where there was just enough room for two cups and nothing else, between the microwave, a vase of browning dahlias, and a lazy Susan crowded with packets of gourmet mayonnaise. Willa shook out a vitamin from each bottle that Ada prescribed. “Open,” and I unlocked my jaw.

  “I meant your hand,” she said, laughing a little.

  “Right, right.”

  “So after you replenish your serotonin levels,” she read from Ada’s note, “and have some vitamins A, C, and E, we should go for a walk and look at trees? What’s forest bathing?” She’d Googled it before I had a chance to formulate an answer. The pills chalked down my throat. “So it’s not just looking, but…smelling trees lowers your stress hormones? That’s bananas.”

  “That’s why everybody’s happier in Northern California. It smells like eucalyptus.” The last pill, the important one, tasted like fake “mixed berry” and I felt my nose wrinkle up my forehead.

  Willa glanced up from her phone. “Were you happier in Northern California?” she asked.

  I thought of my new apartment, on Claremont and La Salle, with my roommate Kate, who’d said less than five words to me since we’d moved in three weeks ago and how she’d taken over the living room with her kinesiology flash cards mounted to a bulletin board as tall as I was. I couldn’t open my closet door and the bedroom door at the same time, and how we were both too afraid to kill the cockroaches so we just trapped them underneath salad bowls but now we’d run out of salad bowls and it was impossible to walk from the kitchen to the bathroom in a straight line. I thought of how I’d wanted to live with Ada, but Mom had insisted that student housing would be better, would help me make friends.

  “Nope,” I said, which was true.

  * * *

  WE ASCENDED THE HILLY block between Ada’s street and Prospect Park, covering basic details: Willa’s hometown in New Jersey, my parents’ status as divorced with a side of maybe-they’ll-get-back-together-someday, the beautiful architecture of Park Slope’s brownstones and occasional flickering gas lamp. At the entrance near Grand Army Plaza, flowe
ry urns adorned with slithering snakes guarded the stone perimeter. The sun shone cavalierly on my bare shoulders while dutiful runners with French bulldogs weaved past us on the main path.

  “I’ve never been here,” Willa admitted. “Prospect Park always seems really far away.”

  “I’ve only spent time in Brooklyn,” I said. “When I visited, I stayed with Ada. Manhattan is like this weird collage of places I’ve seen in movies. This, here, is what I think of when I think of New York.”

  “Did you always want to move here?” Willa asked. “Or did it just happen for the MFA?”

  I didn’t want to tell her the truth, which was that I’d followed Ada here because I had no real plans of my own; that I’d taken exactly one creative writing class and the professor was so sleep-deprived with her new baby that everyone had gotten an A that semester; that I’d only applied to Columbia because Ada told me it was a big program that didn’t need the GRE, so I had a pretty good shot with the two stories I’d written in my life, both of which I’d worked on for over a year. After Northwestern, I hated the idea of moving back into my mom’s house in Marin, becoming the focus of her twitchy, postwork attention day after day. I was an adult. I was skittering toward becoming an adult. And I’d been good at school. I came close to deadlines but didn’t miss them; I knew when to emphatically nod and keep eye contact with professors so they knew I was listening. It was more about playing a part than having talent. But I liked the idea of Willa thinking that this was some kind of writerly destiny and not a series of surreptitious mistakes.

  “Yeah,” I said blandly. “And, you know, I missed my sister.”

  “Who wouldn’t? The vitamin provider,” Willa said.

  “What about you?” I asked, trying to talk over the sound of Ada’s future lecture in my head. “Did you always want to end up in the city?”