“Can I. . can I. . can I hold your hand?”
It was at least the dozenth time that night that Willa was relieved for the candlelight that masked her blushing, or so she hoped. “You want to?” she asked.
“I do. I do.”
She paused and pried a hand off the bottle and brought it toward him, hoping he did not notice the shaking. His hand, she noticed, was also shaking.
He took it.
He felt cold, clammy, hard, little.
She felt warm, sweaty, soft, abundant.
They sat like that for a minute, each enjoying the opposite effect of the other’s touch, each filled with unquiet panic, each thinking of Asiya.
“How did you get like this, Willa?” he eventually asked, shocked at his own words — the courage or whatever it was that made his thoughts immediately exist outside of him. Like the hand-holding, there it was, to his shock. Was there nothing he wouldn’t do?
There were some things he couldn’t.
He looked into her eyes, worried, seconds after he said it.
She closed them for a long pause.
When she opened them, they glistened in a way that he knew meant one thing: tears.
My God, he thought, I have made not one but two women cry tonight. Both women I like, even.
“Forgive me,” he said. “Let’s talk about something else. .”
She shook her head, and a few tears flung loose, like diamonds off a chain. “You are right to ask. It’s okay to, I mean. You’re not the first.”
He nodded, still ashamed.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “It’s a bad story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
He shrugged. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours. But only if you want to.”
She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath. “I do.”
Many minutes went by in silence, their hands still locked.
Zal started to see swirls in the darkness, the candlelit darkness. He worried the room was going to spiral around itself again. He looked at her and gently nudged her along. “Willa,” he said. “Once upon a time. .”
And it was a long bad story, even with Willa abbreviating its odds and ends. It was the worst he had ever heard.
Later, while he could not remember her saying it — could never re-create that setting, her weeping in the candlelight and saying all those awful, cataclysmic almost, words — he felt quite haunted by the actual story. Story, he thought, a strange thing, tales within their very tales, other lives in their lives. He didn’t want to accept it. In his head, it was just a story that he couldn’t accept as someone else’s reality; it might as well have been another nightmare-scape — his or hers, who cared, just downward-turning plot points, with the etiquette of weather, almost randomly generated for her.
He was amazed the memory was contained inside her, even in that enormous inside of hers, bigger than any outside could possibly hint at. How could anyone be big enough for that; how could that person find a way to smile?
The Story. When they had been young — very young; she did not say exactly how young — Asiya used to be in charge of babysitting her when their mother was out, usually with men, usually in bars. They were often alone, as Zachary had a best friend one house down, where he spent most of his time. Asiya eventually got bored with the responsibility and started acting in many ways like their mother, running loose through the city, with men, in bars, and worse, though who knew the extent of it. Eventually it was just Willa. This was before she was bedridden, before she was fat, even, when she was at most a slightly chubby girl, made of the same type of chub of normal little girls. She started liking being alone, talking to herself, playing with imaginary friends, making up story after story after story. She began to live in her imagination, almost solely. On one of these afternoons, when she was imagining being a princess in a tower, thin with long blond hair, so long that it spanned miles, across the hilltops and meadows of a magical little village on another planet — Zal wished this was the story, that the story ended there, capped with a final happily ever after, but no — the house was broken into. A man in dark clothing suddenly appeared, darting from room to room, knocking things over, packing things in dark suitcases, whispering things to himself that she did not understand, until finally he found her, sitting in a pile of Legos in her room. He told her he would kill her if she made a sound, that she was going with him and they were going to take a ride. So she cried, but silently. He threw her in the back of the van. It was dark. Time went by. When she was let out, they were in a cabin, and outside the one window there was just night and wilderness, nothing else, no sign of city. (“What did he look like?” Zal had interrupted, his body growing hot with fear and anger, wanting both to visualize the demon and to ID him, so he could punish Willa’s attacker forever, not knowing if the story ended with the law doing that or not. But she said she could not remember. All she knew was that he was old and there was some facial hair and that was it; time and perhaps sanity had rendered the man faceless.) And the story grew even blurrier — Zal did not know whether it was for his sake or if she couldn’t bear to utter it or if she simply had blocked it all. (“I couldn’t tell you so much about my life at that age, either,” he assured her.) But this is what she knew: he had hurt her again and again, she had been hurt in ways she had never imagined possible, over and over, until she began to do whatever the man said, until she began to never cry, until she began almost to accept him as her keeper, until she accepted that life, until she began to almost—“and I say this word and I know it’s so weird, don’t judge me,” she cried—love him. She found a purpose in all those weeks with him, a way to stay alive. It was the one thing she knew how to do at that age, a way that caught the man’s interest, that had him keep her just-so intact, that preserved her to this day: she told him stories. Every night before the man went to bed — and he had trouble going to bed, she recalled — she told him a part of one long, continuous story, each night saying she’d tell the rest tomorrow, to-be-continuing the thing for months, until the police finally broke in one night and found a naked little girl perched atop the stomach of the psychopath, telling stories as if she were a mythological fairy and he was the luckiest monster on earth.
“Don’t worry, Zal,” she said when she finished. “He died in prison.”
Zal could not say a word. He had only one question, which he asked her after many minutes of silence. “What was the story you told him?”
She smiled and shrugged at the familiar question. “That I can’t tell you. I really don’t remember. His face and the story: the only things missing. I wish the whole thing were missing, to tell you the truth.”
“I know what you mean,” he muttered.
“Zal, I do therapy. A therapist comes here.”
“I do therapy, too.”
“You do?!”
“I do.”
“I’m pretty much better,” she said, sniffling. “I’m not so afraid. But over the years, I stopped leaving the house. I stopped moving. I got very sad. I hated my body that that man had owned. I hated my story, all stories. I turned to the most simple things. And soon, before I knew it, I, well, got like this.”
Zal couldn’t raise his eyes to hers, with all those tears streaming down her cheeks over and over. He wished she could go back to being that dumbly smiling angel of the moments before. Now, on her birthday, to bring back all that, to make her cry like that! He wanted to disappear.
“Don’t feel bad for me,” she later whispered. “I’m better, I really am. It’s Asiya you should worry about — she’s never forgiven herself.”