To Burn in a Bright Moon

Even though it’s dark, Catherine closes her eyes. There’s nothing she wants to see here, even if she could. She tries to think of something else, anything other than here.

A long time ago, before the worst thing happened, there was Donny Zimmerman’s picture in the newspaper. She would see it and think, Sad. She read all the articles, but now she doesn’t know which parts of the stories she remembers from what she read and what she heard later. She remembers his chocolate-frosting swoop of hair in his graduation photo, his high marks and loving parents who were both lawyers. He was on Secord High’s basketball team: a late-night practice, a walk to the car in an empty parking lot—that was how Dex got him. She knew even then, reading the news on her laptop, sitting on her pretty blue couch back in her real life, that he was the sort of boy she would’ve had a crush on in high school. He would’ve known about her crush but been polite and even friendly if they were assigned to the same group project, though he wouldn’t have ever asked her out. She knows Donny now, knows his fierce memory and love of cats and his jokes that are really just quotations from Monty Python sketches and not funny if you haven’t seen those sketches. She knows the quiet thump of his beating heart against her face when she’s resting against his chest so he can have the pillow, she knows his wide eyes straining to see out the tiny dirty window she cannot reach. She knows how he reacts to a pinch, a punch, a tender stroke along bruised ribs, the taste of apples. Catherine knows Donny Zimmerman in some ways better than she has ever known anyone.

And now he’s going to die in her arms.

She never thought of Donny Zimmerman as an obsession. Back in the past, among the jagged scraps of memory, Catherine used to watch the news reports about Donny’s disappearance—his parents’ faces tight and miserable, his teammates lighting candles for him in the parking lot before every game. She’d watch half brokenhearted, half distracted while she finished typing her tidy little literature reports, her neat school assignments. Watching the news, maybe too much news, innocent and warm in her pyjamas, with all the lights on while her husband played Mario World on mute in the living room, Catherine may have wondered what Donny was really like, not as a crush or a headline, but as a person. Maybe he liked coffee, hated the Ramones, wanted to go to Scotland someday. That sounded about right to her, from what she saw in the photos.

There were so many photos—each poster and news report seemed to have a new one. He was a young man with a yellow button-up shirt, huge teeth, and a slightly crooked nose beaming against the standard cloudy-blue-sky backdrop in a school picture-day photo. A second school portrait showed him with a slightly younger face, blue shirt, more muted smile. In another photo, Donny is crouched on a green carpet of grass, surrounded by soccer balls he is pulling out of a net bag—he looks up at the camera like he has been caught unawares. And there were many more—Donny in suits for dances, clipped out of basketball team photos, with thumbs up and tongue out by the pool. You could imagine an entire life in those photos—a tidy, perfect Facebook life, but still.

No, she had never thought of Donny Zimmerman as an obsession until she met him and realized how much she already knew about him. He was startled too—both that he had been in the news so much and that she had remembered it all. Donny was always real to Catherine.

She can’t keep the tenses straight—she was at home watching the news and she didn’t know him. And then she did. And now they are so close that even with her head full of another time, even though it is so dark in this room that she can barely see the outlines of his nose and ears when she opens her eyes, she knows how his face looks. She knows the firm pink curve of his lower lip and thinner double peak of his upper lip. She knows the crisp stubble that got fuzzier over time but never quite became a beard, though there are a few long patches on his chin and neck. He is so young, too young for a beard. She knows his bright eyes, the way they glitter in even the weakest light; though they are closed now, she can see them shine behind her own eyelids. She knows his breathing, the deep, shaky pattern of in and out these past few days. There are hiccups and pauses in the pattern now—more, she thinks, than before, though she has a hard time keeping track. She holds her breath until he starts again.

Catherine shifts back on the rug, trying to get the soft part of her forearm under his head. The way he’s lying now, the whole weight of his skull is on the knob of her wrist. He has lost so much weight since he was in those basketball-practice videos they showed on Live at Five, but the head is heavy no matter what. There is no such thing as skull fat. Dex should have come down with dinner by now, she thinks, because the light has disappeared. But that could be a storm dimming the window, or cloud cover. Maybe Dex has just put something on the other side of the bushes to block out the sun. He would deprive them of even that, if he thought of it.

When Catherine first staggered down the stairs into the basement, she could barely see Donny in the flickering fluorescent light. He was just a silhouette of thick, wavy hair standing in clumps and spikes—he was no one to her, neither friend nor enemy. Donny was skinny even then.

Ever since Dex grabbed her, Catherine had known what was happening to her. She had tried not to know, but Donny’s presence confirmed her terrifying theory. Taken. Kidnapped, and not for any ransom or reason. Just taken, to be kept.

When Dex beckoned her across the parking lot, dusk was falling and he just looked like a contractor in dusty steel-toed boots on his way home in an old van. He was sitting on the floor of the van, feet sticking out through the open back door. There was a map in his lap, a tube of Pringles beside him. He was a big guy, muscular and overalled, but he came off as placid and confused in the parking lot, just asking for directions to a building supply store in Turgrove. Why would he be so far off the highway, if he was heading for Turgrove, a distant suburb? She hadn’t questioned it, had been tired from her shift, eager to help and to catch the bus, and get to Grey, dinner with Evan and Angie, her evening, her life.

It wasn’t even late, or fully night, there were other cars moving around the parking lot. How did it happen? How did she allow it to happen? He waited for her to get close, then spent a few minutes asking dumb questions, getting east and west mixed up, making her lean over to see the map, before he hooked an arm behind her knees, and pressed his palm over her lips. There was something terrible in his hand, a rag that had been soaked in a gummy liquid, she couldn’t place the sweet rancid smell. But even before she passed out, she never screamed. Not even one little whimper until hours later. She doesn’t know why she didn’t scream.

She woke up in a shadowy garage, her legs bent awkwardly underneath her. Dex had opened the door to the van and was yanking her out by the armpits. She was slick with sweat and she could smell it from inside her open coat, thick and swampy, mixed in with the smell of dirt and motor oil. When Dex picked her up she tried to fight, but her limbs were just starting to respond. They fluttered limp and aimless. When he put her down, her legs were still weak and her face was wet with tears and drool and she wasn’t sure; anything could have happened in the van. He hadn’t struck her yet that she knew of, but what did she know; she didn’t even know how long she’d been unconscious.

There is a gap here—she remained conscious, she hasn’t forgotten, she just dances away from the memory, like fingers brushed against burnt skin. And then she’s pushed, staggering down the stairs into the basement. Dex had been holding her wrists in his giant hand and when he shoved her down the stairs she was startled to realize she was free, or at least unbound. She had been struggling so violently and was still so doped, she had somehow imagined in her panic that there were ropes or chains on her, not just Dex’s grip. She heard a sharp gasp, someone breathing at the other end of the room, a cough that sounded male. The first hit didn’t fell her, but the second made her reel and then the floor just seemed safer anyway, so firm and cold. She crouched; she cowered. She didn’t know Donny was weeping for her, pressed against the painted cement wall. She didn’t know he was waiting to comfort her, as soon as Dex turned the lock in the basement door.

Now they sit together in the dark and she knows him well enough to stroke his face while she holds his head in her lap. His skin is cool and tacky with the sort of thick sweat you get with a fever. Donny’s been dying for a couple days—there’s a wheeze in his chest that could be pneumonia or a punctured lung. Neither of them have any idea what the problem is. She leans down close to where his face looms pale—it must be evening, the light through the high, tiny barred basement window is fading. “Are you hot?”

He twists his head and she feels his hair grating on her thigh. He says something, but she doesn’t catch words.

“Not hot?”

There’s a long pause, then a whisper: “Cold.”

“Here, I’ll—” She’ll what, exactly? There aren’t a lot of options. If the overhead light were working, she could find the blanket, but so little of the twilight penetrates the basement that it’s a hopeless plan at this hour. It couldn’t have gone far, but if one of them was wrapped in it when they went to the toilet bucket in the far corner and then threw it off—it could take hours to find. Sometimes Donny can find it by feel, but Catherine always loses track of what sections of the floor she’s touched and has to start over. And Donny would be left alone while she searched. Instead, Catherine lowers her torso and squirms down to lie alongside Donny without letting go of him. She wants to be face to face: that way she can keep him warm, rest, and still feel him breathing, being alive.

Despite her careful manoeuvres, she accidentally drops his head sideways onto the floor. He lolls awkwardly and doesn’t whimper as his nose grinds into the cement. He is too silent. If he has died without her realizing, if she doesn’t get to say any kind of goodbye—that can’t happen. When she finally positions the length of her body beside him, she leans her face toward his to see if his eyes have opened.

Ever since the last fluorescent tube in the ceiling fixture blew out a day or two ago, they’ve only had the dirt-encrusted window for light. Some sun does come through, but just a glimmer, striped by the security bars and the branches of the hedge.

But now night is falling and it’s goddamn dark and Donny’s face is all jut and shadow, and she has trouble making out if his eyes are open even with her cheek pressed to his. Then he says, “Cat,” and she slumps with relief.

“Yeah, Don, I’m here. I’m here. What do you need?”

It could be a sigh, or just his usual raspy breathing. “I don’t know. No. I don’t feel good.”

Some of the shadows are bruises, she knows. Dex took Donny upstairs early in the week and she could hear the blows falling. When Dex comes downstairs empty-handed, that’s what happens—if he isn’t bringing them supplies, he’s wanting something, someone.

She can hear Donny’s voice again, softer now, just breath shaped into words. There are no other sounds in the house, not even the TV. It has been like this for a while, she can’t tell how long but longer than usual. Is Dex gone? Did he leave them? Could something have happened to him? When she strikes out against his chest or arms, he feels as solid and unbreakable as granite, but anyone could slip in the shower, bang his head, lapse into unconsciousness, drown in three inches of water, not be found for weeks in his sealed-up house. She knows there is no way out for her without Dex somehow allowing it. Even with Donny whispering against her face, she is still thinking about the ways out for her.

He is saying something rhythmic, not conversation but a chant. “ ‘Why, look you now…how unworthy a thing you make of…me! You would play upon me…you would seem to know my stops…you would pluck out the heart of my…mystery…’ ” He keeps pausing to wheeze and gasp, but Catherine knows he is reciting Hamlet again. He was not studying that when Dex took him—his grade twelve class had finished it the previous semester, but he’d memorized big chunks for the exam and it stuck with him. In return, Catherine offered him all the Julianna Ohlin poems she could remember from working on her essay for Professor Altaris’s poetry class. At first she tried to describe them—the bit about a stray dog finding half a doughnut in the grass, the sad moment when the truck tire crushes a tomato—there were lots of great little images that made Donny smile and nod, or at least gave them something to talk about for a while. She found she knew a lot of the poems off by heart—stanza after stanza of Ohlin’s work unspooling rhythmically from her mouth, sometimes catching her by surprise. She wasn’t sure she was getting the poems right. She had always found her memory to be more faulty than it seemed, convinced she’d gotten all the groceries when she was missing half. Had she invented some of the lines? They sounded right, so it didn’t really matter if they were hers or Julianna’s. Anything Donny and Catherine remember, think or imagine, they’ve said to each other so many times now that the stories and poems and lines and anecdotes belong to them both equally. Everything is shared.

She knows so much about him—the love of English class, the way his voice seems deeper when he sobs, every movie he can remember watching, how far he went with his first girlfriend. Only girlfriend, now, she realizes. “ ‘…you would sound me from…my lowest note to the top of my compass…’ ” The wheezing is getting worse, and his voice is fainter. She leans in and tries to shush him, tells him to rest, but he just keeps going: “ ‘…and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ…’ ” He is losing the tone, the appropriate cheerful rage that he usually brings to these lines. He has taught Catherine the whole play; he doesn’t seem to have any trouble explaining why characters acted the way they did. She imagines him sitting beside her in Professor Altaris’s class, nodding at the lectures, sharing notes on meter, discussing close readings, borrowing books. He was supposed to graduate this spring—he could be in classes with her at the university in the fall. Except they are locked in a basement and Donny is delirious.

“Donny.” He doesn’t pause. “Donny!” She shakes him gently and his face tightens in pain; even in the dim light she can see the harsh creases at the corners of his mouth.

“Hey, Cat. Hey.”

“How do you feel? How’s your…breathing?” She doesn’t even know what to ask.

“It hurts. I dunno. Did you call Kyla?”

She has to stop and think. She knows all the major characters in Donny’s life, former life, but she can’t imagine interacting with any of them. They are only characters to her, in the story Donny keeps telling. Kyla is his girlfriend. Yes. Catherine is so tired that it takes a long time for her to realize that Donny’s question makes no sense. If she could have called anyone, she would have called everyone, months ago. They would no longer be here if she could have called anyone, ever, even once.

“This one time, at school, I was supposed to meet Ky after…and walk home with her.”

“Yeah?” Suddenly he is speaking so easily, the words tumbling. This should be a good thing, but Catherine isn’t sure it is.

“ ’Cept I had this English quiz, right? And…for some reason I bombed it, just couldn’t answer one damn question. And it was on…Hamlet, and I love Hamlet…It was crazy, not knowing those answers—like having a stroke. And then, I handed in this—” his breath catches in his throat, a high-pitched hiccup.

Catherine loves Donny in the fierce way of love that has no other outlet. And because he has been so kind to her, ever since her first day in this place, giving her sections of his orange when she ate hers too fast. And because he is a sweet kid with an A average who never cheated on his girlfriend, and he doesn’t deserve to die in a basement with a stranger he has never seen in good light.

But most deeply, Catherine loves Donny because he keeps her from being alone.

Catherine has never been alone, not really. She met Grey when she was twenty. That year she was taking her third university class, English literature since the beginning of time, and working the dinner shift in a strip-mall restaurant on the edge of the city. She had a few good friends, plus her mom was always there, and then she had Grey too. They met in the emergency room after a slosh from the deep fryer scalded her left arm. Sitting in the basement, she struggles to focus on that incandescent moment when her eyes first met the man she would marry. At first, the whole memory is pain—a hot blur of it. But when she thinks for a while, and there’s nothing else for her to do but think, she begins to pull out the individual filaments, isolate the luminous moments within the pain.

That scalding felt exactly like the bone-deep fire she would’ve suspected, and even after all the Tylenol she had in her purse, her mind was just a blaring red veil. For a long time—she doesn’t know how long—she sat in the slick vinyl chair of St. Anne’s Hospital ER, clutching her arm wrapped in a dishcloth she was increasingly certain was not even clean. That’s the centrepiece of the memory: how her body felt perched in that uncomfortable chair with her healthy right arm reaching across her body to brace the pulsing pain of the left one. She has saved this description of the agony all these years because there was no space for it on the intake form.

The restaurant manager, not very interested in her injury but vaguely afraid of lawsuits, had sent another waitress with her to the hospital. Aimee bought Ringolos from the vending machine, and then ate them one by one off her pinky finger, sitting hip to hip with Catherine, staring straight ahead. Catherine was sweating under her hair, woozy from the pain, convinced microbes were invading her body from the thick beige cotton dishtowel, but she still would’ve liked a Ringolo. To have at least been offered a Ringolo. A burn victim should have privileges and, in the fuss, she’d left her bag at the restaurant. Finally she just asked.

“Hey, can I have a couple of those?”

Aimee stared at her as if she were something dripped on her dress. It wasn’t that nice a dress—the staff at Betty’s had leeway with what they wore, but Aimee always wore black shapeless things. Catherine shrugged. “I don’t have any change.”

Aimee tipped the bag toward Catherine, who gingerly unlocked her fingers from around the grimy towel and inserted one possibly also grimy finger slowly into the red foil bag, trying to slot her fingertip into a ring without being able to see them. Aimee rolled her eyes.

Walking past, a man said cheerfully, “Ringolos are the best!”

That was Grey, and she would find out within the hour not only his name but also that he had fallen from a low rock wall he’d been climbing for no real reason. His friend Evan had brought him in to have his arm set and, waiting in the chilly waiting room, Grey clutched his arm in the same cross-body hold as Catherine did. As he sat carefully across from her, he nodded at her arms. “Hey, we’re mirror twins.” But they weren’t really, because Grey’s shoulders hung loose, and he chatted with his translucently blond friend about the CP24 weather screen in the corner in a manner that did not suggest he felt the same pain pulses she did. He was older than her, she knew by the flash of skin on the back of his head, but he was bouncy with nervous energy, and he spoke just a bit too loudly, like a boy.

Aimee sucked barbecue-flavoured dust off her finger, then glanced at her watch. “Okay, I’m gonna go.”

Catherine crunched down on a thick potato-paste O. It was funny how the pain didn’t fade, or become more tolerable as the night went on. Her arm was still a hot throb, a mini-sun stuck under the filthy dishcloth. She chewed and swallowed. “Go?”

“Yeah, well, my shift was five to eleven, so Dave’s expecting me? And I gotta get my bus, right? Else I’ll be here all night?”

The pulse, the scald. What could she really ask of Aimee, who wouldn’t even share her snack foods without prompting? Make her miss the bus? In Iria, that really would waste the whole night. “See you, then.”

Aimee’s blond head loomed closer. “What did you say? You’re all slurry.”

“Just—just, good night.”

Catherine whispers whatever kind, sweet words come into her mind: quiet, calm, soft, relax, okay, love, space, good night, perfect, gentle, eventual, night. Then she recites one of the Ohlin poems she remembers, In the motherly darkness, in the tight warm quiet of night…. Professor Altaris said that poem was about secret anger, about hiding, and something that could not be said, but Catherine doesn’t see that at all. Even now, when she’s so angry for all that she’s lost, for Donny, for all the cuts and bruises on her back and thighs, the poem doesn’t seem angry to her—just comforting. She says it to Donny again, the part about the cat’s cool ears and the swampy smell of home, and then continues through every poem she can remember, giving him the sound of her voice, her words.

He twists to face her, muttering, “What happened to Julianna? Did she write another book?”

She often tells Donny facts about the poet too, things she remembered from Professor Altaris’s lecture or the biographical note in the back of her books. Catherine had done a lot of research for her paper, so she knew that Julianna had lived in the west end of Iria when she was a kid, that she’d gone to the same university as Catherine and maybe where Donny would go someday. Catherine struggles with how to talk about the husband, though—usually she just stops at that point, but tonight she is tired. Donny wants the stories to go somewhere good, for Julianna to be happy or at least successful, but she can’t give him that, even though she really wants to. Still he’s asking and she hasn’t eaten or had any water or even peed all day, and she can’t think of anything to do but answer.

“She had another book, but other people put that together from what they found in her notebooks after she died.”

“No. How old was she when she died?”

Shit. Donny is hurting too much. She wanted to tell him beautiful fairy tales, but she can’t lie—she never could. “She died when she was twenty-seven; everyone was pretty certain that her boyfriend murdered her, but it was never proven. He…drove his car off a bridge and killed himself, so it never came to court.”

Donny’s slender body goes limp against her. “Oh. That’s awful. She seemed—I thought she must have been a good person because the poems are so…kind. How could she have died so young?”

He’s thinking about whether they will survive down here, or for how much longer; certainly that’s what Catherine is thinking. She suspects he wants Julianna’s story to have a happy ending so that they will have one too. So she keeps trying to patch up the story, make it okay. Okay enough.

“She was a strong person, so she probably stayed a strong presence after she died. I mean, you know, sometimes you can feel the spirit of someone who has passed on, giving you strength or… ”

“You mean like a ghost?” Donny’s voice isn’t mocking, and Catherine finds that strange—despite his sweetness, he has a teenager’s sarcasm, usually. But he wants to believe.

“Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes a part of them stays with the people they cared about, don’t you think?” She hopes it’s true.

Catherine keeps murmuring, a long, slippery story about Julianna’s spirit drifting above the city where she died. Poems float into her head and she grabs whatever scraps she can and says them aloud, then goes back to her story.

For a while, she thinks the words are helping: first Donny stops his anxious periodic whispers, and then the tension in his back and shoulders seems to gradually slacken. Then his breathing slows. The hiccups and pauses resume. A cough. Another jagged pause. Three more breaths, then no more after that. His ribcage isn’t moving anymore.

She does not feel alone in the room, which is how she was expecting to know—so she doesn’t accept it yet. But she has been sobbing for a long time, so hard she’s gasping for air, crying in a way she hasn’t yet no matter how much Dex hurt her. Part of her thinks Donny might wake up in a moment, and another part is hollowed out, numb from the knowledge that he is gone. His body is not cold, though, not while she holds him close.

Leaves, mother, air. The one I love looking down into the moon on my face…

She is not fully awake, and the room is so dark that Donny is just moonlight and dust in her eyes. But he feels heavy against her chest and belly. She will tell herself later that she did all she could, that she held him when he died, and even though she did not feel the exact moment his life slipped away, it had to have been while she was holding him because when else would it have been?

When next she’s fully conscious, it’s darker, the moon is gone, and his weight on her is dull and cool. She knows for sure then, stops hoping, but it feels wrong to push him off, to struggle out from under. Wrong because it would hurt his feelings, feelings that he no longer has, make him feel stupid and rejected—he is sensitive that way. Was. But isn’t anymore.

She screams then, from how her brain bends under the complexity of what is not anymore, and having not eaten all day or seen the sun or her husband or been touched with mindless affection for so long. She screams and wails and beats against Donny’s silent chest. And then she sleeps again, or something like sleep. There are no more thoughts for a while.

Grey told his story quickly, a touch contritely, to the nurse at the desk, and Catherine tried to appear as if she wasn’t listening by watching the doors through which Aimee had disappeared. Catherine wasn’t particularly interested in what was wrong with Grey; she listened because the only other distraction was an infomercial for some kind of washcloth on the television above her head. Along with her purse, she’d left her book on Britomart and the Red Cross Knight back at the restaurant; otherwise she would have been reading. Grey was not fascinating to her until she loved him.

He eventually came back and sat across from her again, beside his friend, who had bought his own bag of Ringolos in the meantime. This was Evan, who stood up at their wedding in his brother’s suit, the cuffs slumping over his palms; who once pulled her to safety at the side of a pool after she bumped her head on the waterslide; who always invited her and Grey to Thanksgiving—she didn’t know anything about him then either. Evan offered some Ringolos to Grey, who shifted the weight of his limp arm carefully onto his thigh, which finally freed his other hand to grab a fistful. With half of them in his mouth, he inclined his head toward her and mumbled through crumbs, “You okay? I mean, obviously not, but okay enough? Even the nurses look worried about you. You don’t expect that from them.”

Catherine started to shrug, then felt a crinkling flutter of pain and stopped. “I’m okay, I think I’ll be okay.”

Evan nodded but remained focused on eating.

“I’m Grey. Fell off that cement wall in the park by the water. What happened to you?” Grey would never again be so forward.

Catherine was sick-dizzy. Heat seemed to press in on her throat, cutting off her air, bringing hot bile into her esophagus. She could feel sweat gloss her face. It had only been ten minutes since Aimee left, maybe fifteen—actually, she had no idea—but she was clearly in far worse shape now than she had been then.

“Burn,” she whispered.

Grey’s eyebrows shot up and beside him, his pale friend grimaced. “Burn?”

“I slipped. Oil…is slippery. It slipped, the chute, the round thing, it’s like a slide for the oil, it slipped, and the oil splashed on my—” She remembered seeing the shiny yellow oil touch her skin. There probably hadn’t been an actual sizzle, but in her mind it sounded like eggs in a pan.

“You have an oil burn, that’s what you’re saying?” Grey’s forehead furrowed. She didn’t know he was Grey yet, even though he’d told her his name. It hadn’t become synonymous with him yet. Back then he was just some guy, but the years of breakfasts and naps and birthdays since have overwritten those first memories—he was always Grey. He leaned toward her, his intact arm cradling the broken one so he couldn’t reach out to touch her. “You don’t sound very good.”

“I don’t even work in the kitchen!” Catherine said. “Aislinn was on fryers, she was supposed to do it, but the funnel slipped so I leaned down to try to grab it, to keep her from getting burned… ”

“Aislinn is the girl who was with you?” This was Evan, peering at her from under deep eyebrows. “Where did she go?”

“No, that was Aimee!” Catherine was disturbed to find herself almost wailing. She took a deep breath. “She had to get…the bus.” She trained her eyes firmly on the first guy, then the second, even as they seemed to be receding from her in the over-bright room. It was the one whose cradled forearm mirrored hers who returned the gaze. She remembers that even as she remembers little else from the rest of that evening, retreating into pain haze and fluorescent fuzz.

It has been dark down here for so long that Catherine can distinguish the tiniest threads of dawn penetrating the thinning branches of the hedge and the bars and her dirty window, the light slanting across the shit-brown rug allowing her to see—faintly, in silhouette—where she left the crumpled blanket when she got up at some point. She has no clock, and hasn’t kept track of days very well, but it seems like the light is taking longer to come each morning—the days are getting shorter. She was brought down here when spring was just on the horizon, and the cycle is turning again.

She watches the light grow stronger and more vertical until it is a diffused glow, beamless but striped with the shadows of security bars, lighting the room to reasonable brightness, so that she can see the numbers on the ancient TV dial, read again about Taylor Swift’s problems in her one issue of People. “I think my eyesight is getting stronger,” she tells Donny. “I swear I can see more these days with less light.” She nods, still gazing at the window.

Donny’s been gone for some time now. Dex hauled him away, flung over his shoulder like a drunk kid on prom night. Donny never went to prom. She keeps talking to him because she doesn’t want the basement to be silent, and because she can’t imagine another person there—her and Donny are the only ones who make sense in this room. She is still telling him stories about her childhood, the places she’s worked, the books she’s read. She is still reciting Julianna’s poetry to him, whatever lines come back to her. More and more do, appearing in her mind in the mornings as the light winks in. The more time she has to go over each poem, the less she feels she understands—the stanzas keep changing meanings, or their meanings to her. She imagines being back in Professor Altaris’s class, sitting quiet in a shiny plastic chair, listening and thinking and reading. Writing down titles she might get from the library, studying the bright blue PowerPoint slides on the screen. When she didn’t understand something, she would just raise her hand and ask a question. So breathtakingly easy.

Even at midmorning, when the basement gets the most light through the hedge, what she can’t see, not really, is herself. Catherine is convinced she’s getting paler, but without Donny, who can tell her what she looks like? Even if he didn’t say, she could tell by his face what he saw in hers: if he said, “Don’t worry,” she knew her eyes looked tense and darting; if he told her funny stories about pranks the guys on his basketball team played, her fear must have shown in her bitten lips. If he was silent but stroked her back, Donny was frightened of her rage. She’s sure Dex cannot see her face, has some way of not seeing her eyes and nose and soft cheeks—how else could he grind them into the gritty orange runner in the hallway upstairs, strike them with the side of a bathroom scale? When the bruises and scrapes on her face were fresh and gory, Donny would kiss them, soft dry lips, a gentle press, like her mother would when she was a little girl. She did the same for him. What else did they have?

At the Clinique counter, the white-coated makeup ladies assessed Catherine as “olive-complexioned,” which seemed to translate into dark-skinned, permanently tanned. But now that she has been indoors and away from the sun for so long she feels bleached to bone. She gets up and stands on tiptoe in the spot where Donny stopped being alive, the place she prefers to stay, but she can’t see out the window at all from across the room. The only place she can peer up and out through the security bars and thick glass and the tangled branches and dead leaves into the smudged and muddy sky is directly below the window. Walking across the room is a long journey, but she eventually gets there.

Dex’s basement is deep; he probably chose it with Donny and Catherine—or people like them—in mind. But still it is a basement, the ceiling looming not far above them. The windows were just shallow bands of glass striped with bars, but Donny could see out pretty well. He was taller than Catherine by a good six inches—a born basketball player. She would ask him for the weather report in the mornings when they woke up and he would stand at the tiny window, the sill level with his eyes, and tell her what he could see of the sky. It got more difficult as the summer wore on: Dex planted hedges and they leafed out fast. She suspected Donny made up a lot of it—the swooping crows, the glints of dandelions, a wandering raccoon—but she appreciated the stories, the sound of his voice, the reminder that the outside existed, that it could be seen.

Now the windowpane is cold to the touch and the leaves on the hedges have started to die. Has she ever really been out there? How could she ever manage it again? On certain hungry mornings, when Grey seems like a fairy tale her mother must have told her, she is convinced that her skin has gone too white and fragile for her to ever step outside again; so dark is the room that she would probably burn, even if only by the light of a bright moon. She thinks the time to go, if there was one, has come and gone.

When she woke up in the hospital, her was arm thick and stiff with gauze. The light spiked under her dry eyelids, and then Grey was there, on a bed across from hers. He was just sitting on the edge in his jeans and polo shirt, with his parallel arm in a cast, reading a copy of People with Jennifer Aniston on the cover, while Catherine was in a gown and tucked fully into her bed.

“Did you stay…did I faint or…Did you stay for me?” Her face was warm.

“Well.” He shrugged awkwardly, with only one shoulder. “It was too bad you were by yourself after your friend left, and you seemed so scared. Besides, it took them a while to fix me up, so I wasn’t waiting that long.”

She shook her head, hair grinding against the pillow—pathetic.

“You said you didn’t want to be on your own. No need to…I have time.”

She squirmed. “I said that? I don’t remember.”

He nodded, the half-shrug again. “It’s fine.”

Catherine felt clean and light and her arm didn’t hurt; they must have given her drugs. Grey was watching her closely. She said, “I’m sorry to keep you here so late.”

He smiled, but soft and worried, no teeth. “It isn’t late.” He glanced around. “You can’t tell because there’s no windows, but it’s not late—it’s early.”

She smiled, something in her veins making her slow and sweet.

“It’s morning, Catherine.” She jolted and saw Grey flinch in response. “The nurse told me your name. I’m Grey, by the way.”

“Grey. It’s morning. Today is morning. It’s now.”

Dex is in the basement, which is unusual. Lately, he just calls them up from the open door at the top of the stairs. Calls her. No we or us anymore. No plurals at all now. Dex bumps her against the wall, tries to draw her into one of his chase games, but he quickly gets frustrated—she’s tough to catch in the darkness, and she knows the room so very very well. She knows how to skirt the edge of the morning haze from the window and stay invisible, how to use the TV stand and the toilet bucket and the door frame to the old cold cellar to her advantage. She barely falters. He still gets his hands on her and slams her into a wall once or twice, mumbling about her being a bad bunny and running too fast on her long legs. She rarely listens to Dex anymore; he doesn’t make much sense and it drives her crazy trying to figure him out. She just scurries, both because he likes it and because she wants to. She’s tried going limp many times, but if Dex gets angry because she won’t play the game he wants, things get worse for her.

She hears Dex’s heavy boots stumble and a loud Oof as he hits the TV stand. He must have tripped over the blanket. He mutters the words Dumb cunt and slowly goes back up the stairs. Catherine and Donny could never agree if it was better or worse when Dex dropped the weird game of them being rabbits and they were all just humans again. There are bangs from above. When Dex comes back down, he brings something long and white, something metal that clanks, and a flashlight. The wide gold beam of brightness snaps the room into focus, paints it strange and electric—she doesn’t recognize what she is seeing. Is this where she has lived all this time, with these rusty pipes, this dirty rug, this sickly shade of peach paint? Is that where Donny told her about his first kiss, there on the brownish cement under the window? She used to know what the basement looked like, but the light blew out ages ago, or at least that’s how it feels. It didn’t seem so grim, so cement, so real. It was better in the dark.

Dex sets the metal thing down on the floor and steps up on it—a step-stool. Then he clenches the flashlight between shoulder and jowl and reaches above his head to unscrew one of the glass tubes from the ceiling. She forgot, during her weeks in the dark, that there was a way to make it light again. Now, she’s not sure she wants it to be. In the darkness, the room could be infinite. It’s only the light that reminds her she’s imprisoned. No, of course not. Of course she’s known all along.

“Here,” Dex says softly, without turning, but still she startles. He rarely speaks to her. Donny spoke to her. He was her friend and they spoke all the time, the way friends do. But Dex is speaking now. “Here, give me a hand—hold this.” What he thrusts at her is a frosted glass tube, gritty with dust in her palms and rattling. The glass is cool in her hands, the dirt dissolving in the sweat of her fingertips. He is going to make the room light, all the time, illuminating the space where she is imprisoned, the place where Donny stopped being. She doesn’t know if she can bear it.

Something pings onto the floor and he wobbles down toward the sound, the flashlight’s beam wobbling too. He gives up quickly and reaches back toward the ceiling, trying again to unscrew the second tube. The flashlight faces forward once more. She can see only the back of Dex’s head in silhouette. It doesn’t often occur to her that she hates him, because it is irrelevant but also because Dex is only pain, not a person. He is only the absence of everything else.

He hands her the second tube. These are weapons in her hands. Glass swords, not heavy but surely sharp if she broke them. Who does Dex imagine she is? Has he had her so long that he’s forgotten she isn’t his? Is she so weak and useless now that he assumes she can do nothing to him?

A hot white rains down on them: fluorescent light in the room where she lives and Donny doesn’t anymore. Dex has gotten one new tube in and is stooping to get the other out of its cardboard case. This is where she lives and Grey is somewhere else, in a clean, well-lit room aboveground, maybe longing for her. She longs for Grey and for the rooms he is probably in, their sunny living room with the picture window looking out onto the yard, the bright blue couch, narrow but comfortable, where she used to flop with her laptop, writing essays and reading the news and wondering where Donny was. Donny was here and now he is not here. And Grey is not here. And she has no one to protect but herself, burning in a false moonlight. When Donny couldn’t run, neither could Catherine. She had to stay still, had to be hugs and jokes and humanness for Donny because she was the only one he had. Now Donny is gone and Dex has inserted the second tube and the room is so bright and Dex is about to turn around and see Catherine’s face, her pale and only face, and then he’ll hurt her again because that’s all he does.

Before he turns, before he turns, before he turns, she is screaming inside her brain. She raises the glass swords behind her own head and then, with all her wavering strength, brings them down against his skull. But he spins around too fast, she sees his surprised eyes as she strikes, a baffled look of hurt feelings as well as shock. She doesn’t hit skull, she hits face and not as hard as she wanted. It’s all going wrong but the tubes explode with a tinkling boom, like balloons made of glass. Something dry and sour fills the air and Dex’s face is bloody, sprinkled with glass, his eyes scrunch shut. Did she get glass in his eyes? Horrified, she flinches, closes her own eyes before she realizes that to hurt him as much as possible is what she wants—and she strikes at him again, and again. Dex staggers, lurching down from the stool in a stride that is half fall, grasping for her, but finally pitches forward in a snowstorm of shining shattered glass, draping over the top of the TV. The light tubes have broken into stubs in her hands—she throws the shortest one away and grips the end of the other, which still has some length of glass to it. And Dex is moving and she wants him to stop but the tube is short now, she has to get so close. Closer and closer, closer than is safe to his grabbing hands and mouth to reach his soft, stubbled throat, but she punches and stabs at whatever vulnerable cords and arteries are there, unleashing rivers of bright red blood. There’s so much, so wet and slick. With every thrust she loses more glass off the end of her delicate weapon. Finally she can’t tell what is cut and what is simply pooled blood on his neck. She risks a push, the first and only time she’s touched Dex willingly, and he follows the weight of her hands, slumps whimpering to the floor. Her hands are sticky—the broken end of the fluorescent tube has cut her too and now his blood and her blood are blending everywhere, this terrible intimacy.

He stops making sounds. She can’t be sure if he’s breathing, but she won’t go closer to check. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to tell. She’s shaking so violently and the cuts on her hands are throbbing and the bright bright light in her eyes. The light tube is barely more than the metal cap at the end now, and she lets it fall from her hand. Catherine starts climbing the stairs toward the door, which maybe he left locked and maybe he didn’t. Dex never mattered, and he matters even less now.

Her hand is slick with sweat and blood, and it hurts when she grasps the doorknob, but she does not look down. It is hard to look anywhere, the room is so bright. The sun will be a far greater challenge.