I remember very little about that afternoon. I put on shoes and found they were the wrong ones for the weather but by that point I had already left the flat. I hailed a cab and did not ask about the price. The Centre was somewhere outside the city, a few minutes from the coast, but I couldn’t tell you where exactly, or how big it was or even what it looked like. I remember only a car park, tumbleweeded through with crisp packets the way all car parks are, and a sickish lurch at the base of my ribs—perversely bridal with anticipation—and then Leah, suddenly present as though she had manifested, nothing on her but the clothes she wore, no bag, no nothing, as though they had bundled her out in a hurry. I remember this: the way she stood and looked at me, half raised her arms, and then dropped them, as though uncertain of her welcome, and the way I ran toward her anyway, the bright reality of her, and felt such wide white blinding love and relief that all other memories from that day disappeared.
* * *
Some twenty minutes after I call her, Juna is outside in a dark green Volvo; an ichthys decal in the back window above a sticker reading WOULD YOU FOLLOW JESUS THIS CLOSE? “My sister’s car,” she explains, when she catches me looking. “Don’t have the energy to scrape the fuckers off.”
She is wrapped up in a moleskin coat over what appear to be pajamas. She looks at me frankly—a stickiness of bed still clinging to her edges—and I find that I badly want to call Carmen or Sam or anyone at all who isn’t the stranger in front of me now.
“So where are we going?” she asks in an even tone, as though the two of us are simply deciding where we might go for lunch. I tell her to follow me upstairs.
My neighbor’s television can be heard from the communal stairwell, two reality stars from a show I don’t remember the name of gossiping like ghosts in the walls. Climbing the stairs behind me, Juna raises her eyebrows. “Bit late for it,” she says, and I appreciate this. It is because of this, I think, that I choose not to warn her, pushing open the bathroom door without first turning to say, OK, so I know you won’t believe this but. Her reaction appears to justify this instinct—she appraises Leah in the bathtub, looks at me, eyes the towels I have piled, sopping wet, in the sink. “OK,” she says, “so I guess we’ll need water.”
We fill several plastic bottles from the tap, take out the washing-up bowls I keep under the sink and fill them, too, mixing salt into each before ferrying them down to the Volvo. We place the washing-up bowls in the footwells behind the front seats and stack the bottles in the passenger seat before returning to the flat. “I can help you,” Juna says, “if you want me to,” but I ask her instead to go into my wardrobe and pack up whatever look like appropriate clothes for a trip. When she’s out of the room, I pull Leah up out of the water as gently as I can, trying to ignore the rattling protest of her breath as she surfaces, the way her hand clenches down and then releases, the terrible softness of her body, like a plastic bag overfilled with water. I wrap her up in the saltwater-soaked towels, two around her torso and another at her legs, mermaiding her thighs together, twisting two damp cloths around her wrists where the pulse beats fast and fluid. I leave her face until last, lift her up and look at her, at the traces of a person I still recognize, and then Juna calls from the other room and I think to myself OK and then I take the white flannel from the edge of the sink and I press it over her face.
I feel very little as I do this. I think I am going to take care of you and then I think about Leah, Saturday mornings, going through our electric bill or our gas or water bill because she knew it was something I hated to do, and then I think nothing at all.
In the car, I stretch her out across the backseat, hold her head in my lap, and listen to the shiver of her breathing through the salt-wet flannel. Every so often, I will take this flannel away from her, dip it in one of the basins of water at my feet, and return it to her face again. I give Juna directions and imagine our upstairs neighbors waking up in the morning somehow knowing that their television now only plays to an absence below. The night is dark and Juna drives us into it and I feel vaguely doomed, vaguely certain of an ending I can’t see.
LEAH
Miri said this to me once: Every horror movie ends the way you know it will. If you’re watching a movie about werewolves, you can be almost certain your hero will become one by the end. If you’re watching a movie about vampires, same thing. Ghosts, too, I think, if the hero wasn’t already a ghost to begin with. I thought about this a little, at the end of things. I pressed my hands into the glass and knew the thing I’d always known: that we were in the ocean and that we couldn’t be alone.