Page 5

E very , Brynne is dead.

Whether by knife or rope or the single iteration in which Johnny surprised her in the bathroom and she slipped and cracked her head on the porcelain sink.

Johnny can’t recall those loops, but I hold them for us both.

In this version, tears gather in the corners of Johnny’s eyes, loosening the last clumps of Monday’s mascara as she gazes down at the lifeless body.

“Why did you do it?” Alice asks, staring down at the corpse.

Dim light from a hesitant sunrise filters through her platinum hair and falls meekly onto Brynne’s death-blanched cheek.

Brynne’s eyes, cast open, bulge in her broken skull, fixed and unseeing.

Johnny follows her phantom line of sight to a spot on the wall where the fissure that became an arrow pock has stretched to a chasm.

Inside the chasm, that iridescent void of nothing.

“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” Johnny says.

“I didn’t know.”

Alice crouches beside the corpse, brushing a crusty strand of curly hair off Brynne’s forehead.

“She told you about her nut allergy. I heard her.”

“I don’t remember using?—”

“You were jealous.” It’s a sharp shift, Alice’s eyes from Brynne to Johnny.

“You thought there was something between Brynne and I, and you couldn’t stand it.”

“I did not think there was?—”

“Hah!” Alice cries, rising to her feet.

“Liar.”

“And so what if you were seeing each other?” Johnny tries.

“I would never have…”

“Of course you would,” Alice says, advancing.

“You’ve always been jealous. Possessive. That’s your problem.” Her stiff fingers jab into Johnny’s shoulder.

I just love you , Johnny thinks, wanting all the fire in Alice.

I need you. There’s always someone or something between us.

Why can’t you need me in the same way?

Dappled light casts clustered shadows upon Alice’s neck and shoulders.

Not dappled light, Johnny realizes, but pinkish spots.

“It’s ugly, Johnny.”

“I already told you,” she says, “The oil was in the pan…” Hives?

Are those hives spreading across Alice's shoulders? “It was an accident. I never would’ve?—”

Alice digs her fingernails into the sides of her skull, making an exasperated sound, then paces a back-and-forth line. Behind her, a gentle shushing. The sound of water moving. Beyond the sliding glass door, a wave moves across the city street, carrying at its crest a shelf of ice. Alice’s pink marks darken to brown semi-circles, the surrounding skin yellowing like Johnny’s only ever seen in jaundiced newborns.

“This is why I had to go!” Alice’s black eyeliner drops down the inner corners of her eyes, on either side of the bridge of her nose. Her smile is one of bitter knowing, of having a worse fear confirmed. It’s joyless, predatory, and her pointed canines lengthen, reaching over her bottom lip.

Outside, water spills between the bars of the patio’s railing, flooding the porch. “Alice…” Johnny says, gaze locked on the rising water.

“You wonder why I had to fly 4,000 miles. Well, here’s why!” The spots darken to black, becoming more defined. “You think you love me, but you don’t. You want to own me. Control me. Love is not possession.”

“Alice.”

“You’re obsessed with me, Johnny. Obsessed .” This time the word is more growl than hiss. A foot of water swirls in alternating currents, lapping against the glass. “It’s sick, really. You’re sick. You know that, don’t you?”

“Alice!” Johnny screams it, pointing at the snow melt. The water advances impossibly fast, climbing the sliding door. Tops of waves splash through the borehole left by Lucy, and a patio chair is yanked into the current, hurled onto the flooded city street.

“Shit,” Alice says. “Lucy!” She crouches and calls through the opening, face pressed to shattered glass. “Lucy!”

She bellows against the yellow skyline. A rogue wave crests, rears up, pushes forward, gaining speed as it courses between buildings, through alleyways of steel. Windows fold like spun sugar in its wake; the billboard is consumed and swept under, and above the place it disappeared, at the tsunami’s bent neck, dark shapes break the roiling surface.

“Lucy!”

Tentacles flick and flail, water froths around the protrusions which wind in every direction, circling, dipping, and popping up again, kicking up spray as the behemoth rushes ever closer.

Alice steps away from the glass. “She always comes home.”

The ground vibrates. Walls rattle and the air hums a low note as the wall of seawater and melted snow stretches up and up and farther upward until it’s reached beyond view, until it spans all the height of nature’s gargantuan aspect.

Johnny braces for the impact, eyes locked on the shifting, fragmented shadow obscured by filthy blue. She has never felt so weak or small, so meaningless in the face of destructive power that is not hers. Power that does not care for her. Does not care . The wave is a wall, a monstrous wall, and within its bounds swims a creature beyond definition. A tear forms in the corner of Johnny’s eye. For the first time, she understands fragility. She comprehends the meaning of unstoppable.

Johnny is reduced to trembling atoms. Bones seem to chatter and clink together. Her blood is kinetic, nerves sparking with disabling electricity, her muscles useless, rigid, for all the microscopic scurry within. The sky, the earth, and all mankind’s tinkering is washed in utter black as the tsunami reaches high enough to snatch the sun.

It hits.

Johnny’s on her back. The force reduces the present to pain and a slippery brush. She does not hear sound. Sound implies a foundation of quiet on which to build. A flat basis upon which something stands in opposition and can be perceived as a singular, identifiable thing, an isolated entity with beginning, peak, and end, with definable edges and phonic qualities—an up, a down, a key, a rhythm: minor or major, harmonious or grating, a word or a feeling or a string of them. There is no sound , for nothing, nothing is left to Johnny but the ravenous, cosmic roar. Even the notion of existing without the deafening, carnivorous yowl is flattened to dust the instant the bellow is born.

The wail, the bawl, the yawp, the progeny of snow and wave and sun is the last sensory experience of what Johnny understands to be an ending. The ending. She loses control of her faculties, a coward rendered blind by the hulking figure of a screaming, unfeeling death. In the space of a blinking fraction, a thought slips through Johnny’s neurons and hits a synapse: We are going to die .

But Johnny is wrong.

The thought hangs there. It isn’t cut short. And Johnny realizes she’s squeezed her eyelids shut. When she opens them, just a squint, she makes out the furling and unfurling spindles of ’s Lucy, appendages too great in number, too fragmented in configuration to make sense of, before the creature slides into a widening gap in the drywall.

Alice presses her body against the sliding glass door, the space where Lucy bore a hole the day before. Those ten-by-eight-foot panels of glass are a porthole, the eye through which Johnny sees the underwater churn of a choppy sea. As if the city were an ocean, as if the apartment were a submersible, Johnny peers through the glass and into dark water, where a school of tuna dip and dart. Their silvery, flashing scales catch what little light they can, and the tuna move, the school bending and breathing into shapes as if thinking with a central mind. For a singular moment, the fish take odd positions. They seem to form a number, 0-112-358-1321. In a beat, they’re gone. The cosmic roar is replaced by a sandy quiet. Particles shush and rain gently onto rocks unseen. Bubbles, far-off, cascade and trickle and pop. A rocking, a tide, slants right then left in a cradling rhythm. Kelp spirals through the blue, caught in a deep current.

The weight of the water, the pressure of the sea flooding the streets of New York should obliterate the glass. They should . Alice’s body could not possibly create a watertight seal, even pressed there as it is, and even if it did, the slight woman should never be strong enough or gain enough leverage to hold her position against the might of a million liquid tons of force.

And yet, all is not as it should be. And yet, Alice stands there, holding back an ocean.

Johnny beholds something impossible, the bending of logic and the flexibility of physics. That Alice Leigh has never been obedient, is something Johnny knows. Not obedient to social nicety and not obedient to laws, neither human nor universal. What I would tell Johnny, if I could—What I would scream into her ringing ears if I could bridge the gap between us , is not something I came up with on my own. It’s something we heard. From someone else—Maya Angelou. I would say , Believe her, Johnny. Believe her as she shows you who she is.

Past the waifish figure of Alice, still pressed to the glass, a massive figure drifts through what once was a passage between buildings. It swims between the shattered windows of what had been the sixth-floor apartments, but is now no more than fodder for manmade reefs. A gray whale. It croons a melancholy song. Fins fanning in a slow-motion flip.

Johnny lies there. Looking. Two things are true at once, both incomprehensible, both plain as day: A whale moves through 10th Avenue; and Alice Leigh is immovable, in every sense of the word.

* * *

Alice asks for duct tape.

She’s still angry, and when Johnny grabs some from her bag and hands it over, her eyes are slitted with a feline glow. “This is your fault,” she says, tearing a strip with too-long, too-sharp teeth. Her back seals the hole, then she rolls, hooping her weight through her hips, and fastens strip by strip until the ocean is restrained by rippling slats of silver. Alice throws the roll of tape at Johnny, who catches it against her chest. “Brynne is dead.”

Brynne is dead. Johnny had almost forgotten about Brynne, but the corpse is sprawled on the floor between her feet and Alice’s, half her twisted body on the now seawater-soaked area rug.

“I think you should go,” Alice says, the last word rolling through a growl.

Johnny glances at the ocean outside. “Go? How?”

“Just go.”

The apartment is soggy with the scent of brine. A kelp strand sticks to Johnny’s calf. She glances at the door. Imagine Johnny, thinking of grabbing that brass knob, of walking out. Facing the unknown. Willing to drown. And she is willing to drown. But not without Alice.

“No,” Johnny says. “It wasn’t my fault she died, and I’m not going.”

“You’re not going,” Alice says. “You’re not going,” she says again, having never acquired a taste for the flavor of defiance. Her back rolls into a hunch, head dropping between her shoulders. Golden eyes stare into Johnny’s as Alice says, “I should’ve left you at the café. It was a mistake to try again.”

It was a mistake to try again. Laughter rolls from a deep, twisting place in Johnny’s chest. Once the first peal escapes, there’s no stopping it. The sound spirals out like an eruption, bringing with it a prickle at the back of Johnny’s nose and a stream of tears too long pushed down. “It’s you , Alice!” she cries. “The problem is you. Why can’t you love me in the way I love you? If you didn’t dangle yourself in front of Brynne, if you didn’t fly the fuck away when you felt me getting too close, I would have nothing to be jealous of. But you torture me! Torment me.”

“Get out!” Alice says. Her nails lengthen, curling into claws.

Johnny, still laughing, tears dripping off her chin, squares her shoulders with Alice’s. Now that the truth has started pouring out of her, she can’t stop it. “No. You want me sometimes, but never enough. Because you’re fucked up! You don’t love me? Sure. But only because you don’t love yourself.”

“Get out!” The words sink into a low register as the human shape of Alice distorts into a new form. Fur grows from every area of exposed skin, her clothing is torn off with the resizing of limbs, and when the transformation is complete, Johnny faces down Alice the jaguar, Alice the jungle cat.

Johnny thinks of the door. The cat’s tongue dips out between her jaws and flicks the air as the animal pants. Her rounded ears pin back, weight shifting toward her rear as if preparing to pounce. She would rather be something to Alice than her stranger. Even if all she can be is her prey. “I’m not gonna fucking go.”

The big cat, Alice, makes a soundless leap. Meaty, taloned paws connect with Johnny’s chest, knocking her easily to the tile floor. The smell of the wild, sweat and dirt and blood and fresh kills overwhelm her. There’s barely a moment of pain as the jaguar’s teeth glide through Johnny’s neck, just a strong tugging sensation as it tears out her trachea.

The cat pants, its body weight undulating with the pattern of breath. With the pattern of Johnny’s beating heart.

Johnny bleeds.

Her vision narrows to two, blurry porthole windows. Staring back at her are slitted, feline eyes. Warmth soaks Johnny’s hair, crawling up the back of her skull and oozing down the nape of her spine. Her fingertips numb. Then her hands, then her arms, then her torso. Jaguar Alice flexes whiskers. Her ears round and come to the top of her head. Johnny’s never studied big cats, knows almost nothing about them, but she swears it’s a look of pity. Maybe even a look of remorse. A sandpaper tongue rakes across Johnny’s cheek. Then again. It feels affectionate. Contrite.

I’m sorry, Johnny thinks to say, but her throat is in the belly of the beast, and even if her vocal cords were intact, Johnny dies before she can mouth the words.